Consider what has increased productivity more, email or instant messaging. While email has done away w/ paper memos and snail mail, I would argue that it has decreased productivity because it is so effective. Now we get information overload with the shear ease of getting added to the CC line. The greatest abuse of a company’s time is employees trying to wade through their inbox. Over the past five-years we have progressed to this information overload. Remember the days when getting an email was so infrequent that it was possible to still get a “You got mail.” sound byte or a pop-up. I know I did away w/ those mail indicators years ago.

Now consider the benefits of getting instant information via the telephone call. It was targeted at one individual who could actually help, and there was not the delay of an employee getting to an email in the inbox ocean. Instant messaging improved on the idea of the telephone by increasing the number of conversations that could happen simultaneously, while also saving time on looking up a number and dialing. I know that instant messaging has reduced the number of telephone calls I receive to virtually zero, and allowed me to get targeted questions w/o bothering other people on the CC list. While instant messaging still has drawback of chatty friends, in a pure business environment, it is the greatest productivity innovation in the past 30 years.

Every time I fly back to Michigan to visit family, I get asked about all the programming jobs being moved over to India. I do see it happening at IBM where more, and more jobs are being moved to India and China.

My response every time is the same. If you are a good programmer, you will always have a job, regardless of what gets moved to India. Good programmers are hard to find whether it’s in the US or in India. And at the risk of angering anyone in India, I do not believe that there is a high level of quality code coming from India. That is not to say that India will not develop their programming skills, but today I much rather have code from the US.

To be honest, it does not really bother me that corporations are moving jobs to save money. This is the type of capitalism that made our country. Would it not be hypocritical to naysay it now?

Putting aside the humanistic views, moving programmers overseas is not that different from corporations moving manufacturing to China to reduce cost. What is the difference between high volume, low quality code and high volume, low quality parts?