Potato I have

Greg Gretsch highlights the brain drain (from Silicon Valley in this article at AlwaysOn) aspect of offshoring tech work, not just the building of know-how elsewhere, but the picking-up and going-home of the considerable numbers of foreigners who came here for educations and/or good tech work.

But which know-how? Americans and others who are actively offshoring activities will of course be learning lots about how and when to offshore, what are the “crown jewels,” what is higher up the value chain for deep-skill workers. Will that be interesting work? Will it be the kind of advantage that tech has been for some decades now?

What will draw back all those people who will have gone home?

Cringely goes into more detail why he thinks offshoring is a bad idea, here’s my summary of the article:

• post-war brain drain from UK->US; no more auto industry there
• small numbers but sensitive, because big work done by small teams
• stakeholder prob: US gov’t, state gov’ts, employees don’t want it. Investors and
  top management do, and they have extremely short time perspectives
• multinationals effect on local tax revenue
• maybe we will reinvent, as did Silicon Valley? But that was a confluence of labor and
  capital, and the labor is leaving

Kevin Clary asks Spolsky if he will be offshoring any of hisdevelopment. He replies:

We will not be “offshoring” our software development because you don’t outsource your core competency. I’m not a software broker, I’m a software developer

There’s a very long comment thread. Other items that caught my attention:

• separating design and coding activities
• market pays for value add; virtual company a joke
• executives prefer docile offshore to strong-opinioned in-house IT who wants change a lot
  software viewed as cost-center or profit-center
• UI complexity and shrinkwrap vs. backend business apps (shrinkwrap easier to offshore)

My own offshoring experience has been mixed, but there have been some positive surprises, and I definitely have seen it “work” in some sense. But in those situations, I couldn’t say that software was considered a “core competency.”