I’ve been making comments about this for a while: Parallels between IT and construction.
He doesn’t mention what I’ve noticed, though, which is the trend toward outsourcing. Years ago you had professional carpenters who knew the process of building a home inside and out. Then people thought it would be more cost effective to hire less skilled people to do specific tasks.
For example, you’d have a wall crew that would raise the basic structure, then a roof crew would put up the rafters. Once their task was done they’d go on to the next job. Less skilled workers, but they would be well trained; what could go wrong?
Everything.
A lot of houses built now are crap, plain crap. There has been something of a trend in recent years toward getting skilled carpenters to oversee the entire process. Why? Because the specialization didn’t work too well, at least in the home market, and at least in this area (southeast United States).
So corporations are going to save money by outsourcing? Ok, go for it. There will certainly be costs to programmers in the short term, and in software quality in the short term. That is, of course, if the trend really does go as it did in the home construction market. Let’s face it: programmers are considered little more than unskilled labor, just as carpenters are. (I’m not talking of how we are talked about but how we are treated).
And so we shall see what happens.