Now that I have your attention ....
Actually, my job did NOT go to India. I am still happily employed by Elastic Path Software. The company and I are both doing quite well, thank you very much.
The title is actually the name of a book I read recently, "My job went to India : and all I got was this lousy book. (52 ways to save your job)"
It is old news that I.T. jobs have been steadily outsourced to off-shore development centers, India being one of the biggest. As North-American developers, what does our future hold? Do we have a future? How can we compete with the lower-cost alternatives from a developing country?
This book offers some excellent observations and practical advice from the perspective of an American geek who spent a year in India to set up and staff a development center there.
This book is organized into 52 chapters, each a vocational tip. The overall theme is that our skills are like a product that we are selling to our employers. As a product, we need to know the market conditions such as the supply and demand for our product, and to constantly look out for signs of change and opportunities. What are our unique selling propositions that our Indian developers could not match?
I was captivated by the insights that the author had on the Indian I.T. industry, and its workers, especially in the early chapters. The later chapters I found to be street-smart common sense that is applicable to any I.T. career whether it is under outsourcing pressure or not.
You won't find in this book the answer to questions such as "Which specific programming language should I be learning?" or "Which operating system should I be mastering?". However, it will offer some general but practical principles. Say, if you have 10 hours of "play time" a week, how do you decide what to learn?
Simply put, this book offers some really good vocational advice for geeks.
