Offshoring means Western IT industry is "dying"
Robert posted a rhetorical question on my blog yesterday. It's a good one too - check it out: "Why don't we just accept it: IT, in the West at least, is a dying industry. It's not glamorous, it's not sexy and it's not desirable. In case anyone thinks I'm overreacting, how many of the staff at Computing would recommend IT to their own children. This is not a rhetorical question, by the way: I really do want to know."
Actually, it's not a rhetorical question - as I previously stated - and I apologise. So, in an attempt to find an answer to Robert's poser, I turned (literally, to my left) and asked Computing editor Bryan Glick for his thoughts: "There's still lots of interesting jobs in the UK IT industry," he said. "But I wouldn't recommend a career as a code cutter - not unless you want to go and work in India."
And there's the rub, I guess. Grunt work - for want of a more glamorous term - is being shifted all round the globe. Take Romania, for example, which along with other Eastern European countries is becoming an outsourcing hub for Western European financial services firms and customer support:
- Consultant McKinsey says outsourcing to Eastern Europe trebled over the past three years to hit $2bn
- Outsourcing is also predicted to grow faster than anywhere else during the next four years (30 per cent compared to 25 per cent in other regions), according to analyst Gartner
Growth continues unabated too. Today, outsourcing provider WNS opened a new delivery centre in Bucharest that will provide multi-lingual services in French, German, Italian and Spanish for a range of users. So much for UK IT, eh?
But I guess we're still king of the senior technology position - right? Not according to the aforementioned Robert, who suggests IT leadership jobs are also at a premium:
"I'm in my mid-forties. In any of the professions, such as law or medicine, my career would now be approaching its peak. Unfortunately, I'm in IT, so that just makes me old and past it. However, my escape strategy is in place: I'm back at university, studying with a plan to Do Something Else."
Good luck with the Do Something Else, mate.
Further reading
- UK firms love offshoring - what about the staff?
- 2008 - The year of multisourcing and offshoring
- The end of computer science?
- Is studying computer science a waste of time?
- Don't study IT if you want to be a CIO
- The adventures of a technology career
Want to subscribe to this blog? Click here for the options
I would have to agree with Bryan, but also note that as IT sits in a supporting role for most business it is often that case that the best support can only be provided locally. Just as you cannot get someone in another country to pack your shopping bags, IT that requires any form of continuous feedback loop or creativity is going to be best done local... but it's certainly true that easily-defined chunks of "grunt" work can be more cheaply done overseas...
Posted by: Mark Kobayashi-Hillary | Wednesday, 16 January 2008 at 01:13 PM
Mark - Have to agree with Bryan?? You are so charitable... But yeah, the continuous feedback loop should provide some kind of protectiveness for UK IT professionals. I guess it's about finding a shield and making sure you have the right bag of technology and management skills.
Posted by: Mark Samuels | Thursday, 17 January 2008 at 12:56 PM
The bigger picture is that many white collar jobs are going to go offshore. An entire division of a bank near me was recently moved offshore.
It would seem the end result would be the entire company or just a few in management / sales / marketing would be left; then again I hear of marketing research being offshored.
Time to be a plumber or nurse.
Posted by: jim | Thursday, 07 February 2008 at 10:26 PM