Wednesday June 16, 2004

Somewhat of a disclaimer here. I am in sales (albeit technical). I am not paid to write or design software although I had been in the past. That being said, you will be hard-pressed to find a day when I haven't had NetBeans up and running until late at night. I will always have some developer in me. A second disclaimer: Offshoring/outsourcing, I'm not really differentiating in this blog.

There is a lot of talk about outsourcing these days. I read some of the trade rags on it. I listen to developers online, and I have even joined a discussion on it a while back in my local Java Users Group. There are understandable concerns about jobs leaving the states and going abroad. If you live in the states that is. If you live outside the states, you are salivating at the opportunity. There was some discussion about unionizing (IMHO, if you want to send jobs overseas even faster, just start a software developer union). There was some talk about how we have superior developers here. Show me accountable data. Even if it were true, perhaps overseas labor is simply "good enough." There were arguments about time zone pains, code quality differences, language barriers, you name it. Some employers obviously feel those negatives do not overcome the benefit of cost reduction. Lets face it, the .COM boom spoiled us.

Now for the open source tie in. Open source obviously has an impact on software product vendors. It commoditizes much of their value proposition. How do product vendors respond? Well, some do not and go out of business. Some focus on simply creating better products. Some change their business model. New business models are being created that 10 years ago wouldn't have made sense to us. Look at JBoss, MySQL and Red hat. Build a service or product around open source technology. Look at Sun with the Java Enterprise System. Integrated, integrateable and predictable with an optional per-employee pricing model. We are all trying to differentiate ourselves and to *not* become commoditized.

Lets face it. Software development to a degree is becoming a commoditized skill. Or at least "coding" is. Yeah, many of us went to college and got a degree. But "skilled" labor isn't defined by a degree, its defined by the market. I think software developers in the states have to learn from how open source affected product vendors. Writing code isn't going to cut it anymore. Software developers in the states have to continue to invest in differentiation. Acquire project management skills. Move up the technical ladder to leverage your college degrees. Become application designers and architects. Do not rest on your laurels.

As developers we tend to get stuck on technical details. We tend to forget the biggest differentiation of all: Know your customer. That I have learned by being in sales