Outsourcing And The Future Of I.T.

By Daniel Miessler on April 29th, 2006: Tagged as AI | Hacking | Programming

“In any case, I don’t think outsourcing per se is much of a threat. I bet much of the time it’s just a symptom of using a language that’s not abstract enough. In effect you’re using the programmers in India or wherever as human compilers.” — Paul Graham

If I’m reading this right, he’s saying exactly what my friends and I have been talking about for a couple of years now. Essentially, before too long, the idea is going to be what’s valuable — not the ability to implement it.

This is a major development in any field, really, and it certainly is in information technology. What it means is that like 75% of the IT work force is going to made obsolete. I’m making up those numbers, obviously, but it’ll be a lot.

Think about how many IT workers you know. How many are creating things vs. implementing them and doing common, repetitive tasks. Being in information security I am in the upper crust of standard IT workers, but the vast majority of my time is still spent implementing and doing common things. This will all be going away before too long, though.

The only thing that’s going to be useful, really, is hacking. Anything other than hacking is simply implementation of said creativity, and that’s going to get increasingly easy as languages improve and/or AI becomes more powerful.

As AI does get more…intelligent, it’ll essentially be every hacker’s familiar — sitting there ready to help implement whatever cool idea the hacker comes up with. Either that or the languages/IDEs will be so advanced (using AI, no doubt) that ideas will be written (spoken?) by the creator in pseudo-code, at which point the program itself will do the work necessary to make the idea usable to a computer.

Anyway, more ramblings from me. Let me know what you guys think…

  • http://rraut1.livejournal.com/ Rajesh

    Corporations have been creating common, repetitive tasks long before the computer was inventive (see your local American automobile manufacturing plant for a living musuem to this mentality.) The common, repetitive tasks of the future may be different but they will always be around. The real reason corporations are outsourcing is that there is a shortage of programmers in the developed world. The labor cost may be lower in India but the infrastructure sucks. Throw in high telecom charges and back-up electricity costs and developement in India isn’t really very much cheaper than hiring another warm body just out of college. The truth is writing code is one of those jobs Americans don’t want to do. Hacking is fun and interesting but rarely useful. Startups may do some hacking but you can’t build any sort of industry based on 99% of the effort being thrown away.

  • http://rraut1.livejournal.com Rajesh

    Corporations have been creating common, repetitive tasks long before the computer was inventive (see your local American automobile manufacturing plant for a living musuem to this mentality.) The common, repetitive tasks of the future may be different but they will always be around. The real reason corporations are outsourcing is that there is a shortage of programmers in the developed world. The labor cost may be lower in India but the infrastructure sucks. Throw in high telecom charges and back-up electricity costs and developement in India isn’t really very much cheaper than hiring another warm body just out of college. The truth is writing code is one of those jobs Americans don’t want to do. Hacking is fun and interesting but rarely useful. Startups may do some hacking but you can’t build any sort of industry based on 99% of the effort being thrown away.

  • http://dmiessler.com/ Daniel

    I think you are missing the defenition of hacking that I’m using. In this case, hacking = creating, i.e. coming up with new ideas. This is as opposed to implementing something that someone else came up with.

    Take, for example, Del.icio.us. It’s an idea. Someone came up with it where it wasn’t there before. Now, who actually codes it isn’t so important. It’s only slightly important now because it’s not trivial to do so. But once it is, it’ll be much less valuable (obviously).

    As such, the only commodity will be those who can come up with new ideas — not those that can implement them.

    Realize, though, I’m talking about a long time in the future — not in like 2008 or something.

    Thoughts?

  • http://dmiessler.com Daniel

    I think you are missing the defenition of hacking that I’m using. In this case, hacking = creating, i.e. coming up with new ideas. This is as opposed to implementing something that someone else came up with.

    Take, for example, Del.icio.us. It’s an idea. Someone came up with it where it wasn’t there before. Now, who actually codes it isn’t so important. It’s only slightly important now because it’s not trivial to do so. But once it is, it’ll be much less valuable (obviously).

    As such, the only commodity will be those who can come up with new ideas — not those that can implement them.

    Realize, though, I’m talking about a long time in the future — not in like 2008 or something.

    Thoughts?

  • Tim

    Just wanted to say it’s nice to see the old Daniel Miessler theme up that I’ve come to love.

    But my reason for this post is to commend you on your use of the word “hacking”. A lot of people think of hacking as a negative thing, when the true spirit of the word is quite positive.

  • Tim

    Just wanted to say it’s nice to see the old Daniel Miessler theme up that I’ve come to love.

    But my reason for this post is to commend you on your use of the word “hacking”. A lot of people think of hacking as a negative thing, when the true spirit of the word is quite positive.

  • Tim

    hmmm… don’t know what I was talking about in that last comment. Here at home, it shows the new theme. Guess my browser at work has a cached .css or something.

  • Tim

    hmmm… don’t know what I was talking about in that last comment. Here at home, it shows the new theme. Guess my browser at work has a cached .css or something.


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