Christopher Duncan >> A lot of it comes from the previous sentence. In this day and age where corporations are greedy and workers feel oppressed and taken advantage of, we all tend to forget about the critical interdependent relationship that exists between the customer, the company, and the employees. Your competitors want to take your customers away from you. If they succeed, your company loses revenue. No revenue, no paycheck. Throughout human history, the most prosperous people were those who lived in the most prosperous nations. Rich and powerful empires have more wealth to share than poor and struggling ones.

"Workers need to realize that they really should care about the health and profitability of the company..."

Consequently, workers need to realize that they really should care about the health and profitability of the company, because it’s in their personal self interest to do so. In a similar vein, companies need to realize that without the people, the ones who do the real work in the real world, they have no empire to begin with. When both sides learn to unite and take care of each other instead of building iron curtains, you have the makings of a powerful competitor in the marketplace, one that can dominate the territory by offering superior products and services to their customers. When this happens, it starts an upward cycle where everyone, the customer, the employees & managers, and the company as an entity all enjoy a better and better experience.

IndicThreads >> With the growth of software development outsourcing, things have changed a lot for software professionals in the developed world as well as professionals in the developing world, to whom things get outsourced. Any suggestions that can help both parties come to terms with this change and manage it better.

Christopher Duncan >> Those in the developing world are currently enjoying a prosperous time, albeit at the expense of the developed world. Their greatest risk is what befell many people here. It’s easy to start making a ton of money and assume that it will always be so. As individuals and as companies, they need to always be prepared for the next bump in the road. No path is ever free of potholes, and if you’re not ready for things to change, you’ll have a pretty rough time of it when they do.

"It’s easy to start making a ton of money and assume that it will always be so..."

The developers losing their jobs to cheap labor in other countries are going to have to make changes if they want to improve the situation. I’ll speak to a common problem in America, perhaps it exists in other developed countries as well. We have a real problem here with an ever growing and ingrained sense of entitlement, and programmers are not exempt from this. I hear a lot of people complaining about how it’s not fair, it’s not right, and companies owe it to their employees to not ship jobs overseas. It’s a moral and emotional argument, and it’s just plain stupid.

"In the real world, money talks, and companies listen..."

A company exists for one and only one reason – to make money. They owe no one but their stockholders. If you want idealism, go dig out your parents’ Flower Power t-shirts from the 60s and stage a sit-in. Out here in the real world, money talks, and companies listen. If you want to keep these jobs in the good old U.S. of A. (or whatever country you happen to code in), you’re going to have to show your management what’s in it for them. Why should they pay you $50 an hour when they can hire someone in China or Russia for $5? Having known people in the outsourcing business, I can assure you these numbers are real.

"You’re going to have to show your management what’s in it for them..."

You want ten times the money? Fine, I’m all for that. Now, how do you offer ten times the value? Sit down and make a detailed list of all areas of the development process where you and your local compatriots offer better quality, better productivity, higher dependability, greater security, and every other finite and specific value you can think of that will translate to the company’s bottom line. Now you’ve got something to work with. Along the lines of what I teach in Unite the Tribes, you have to then be able to sell your agenda to the people who can make the decisions, which means you’re going to have to acquire some people skills. Effective communications and better interpersonal interaction, by the way, is a productivity skill that you can sell, and it’s an edge you have over someone who doesn’t know your culture or speaks your native language poorly.

I’d like to digress briefly on this to illustrate a point. In my years of teaching sales, I commonly heard the complaint that people couldn’t make sales because the competition was cheaper. It’s the first sign of a weak or lazy salesperson. I consistently took companies who were priced higher than the competition and outsold everyone else in the field. Cheaper is not always better. Rightly or wrongly, people associate price with quality. That’s an angle even if it’s not true. If you can back it up with the simple statement that you get what you pay for and show how, over the long haul, it’s more profitable to pay more today and reap greater profits down the road, you’ve got a winning proposition. I’ll tell programmers what I told all my clients’ employees. Price doesn’t sell. Products don’t sell. Salespeople sell, and a good salesperson can sell anything.

"Cheaper is not always better. Rightly or wrongly, people associate price with quality..."

What’s that you say, you don’t want to be a salesman, you just wanna code? No problem. Hope you don’t mind doing it for $5 an hour. The bottom line is that if you want to keep your high paying jobs in your country, you’re going to have to come up with a good presentation on why it’s more profitable in the long run to pay more for you than less for someone else. And I hate to be unsympathetic, but for any programmer who wants to sit on their hands instead and just complain about how unfair life is, all I can say is that McDonalds is hiring, and it’ll soon be better money than you’ll make coding if you’re not willing to expand your skills.