What happened to bobbification and outsourcing?

[vetran]

That was nothing to do with outsourcing.

That was a bursting Internet bubble.

Far more people coming to the UK than in 2003, and yet longterm unemployment is approx. 2% and the contractor market is booming with high rates and high salaries.

So the pie is obviously growing very fast and everyone seems to be living happily ever after.

Considering I and 30 others were replaced by ICTs and I then met up or corresponded with about 20 other people who had the same situation making 50 people I knew it had happened to in 6 - 12 months.The 30 people I worked with had nothing to do with Dot coms, the contracts I then went for in Telecom were all hiring ICTs.

In fact 2 of my other clients were heavily involved in the internet and they were doing fine.

Obviously your suggestions are ill informed. I'm glad you were lucky enough to avoid the direct impact, I'm glad for you.

[Zero Liability]

"contractor market is booming with high rates and high salaries" . You got any evidence of that? Yep there sure is a demand for some skills bu booming? Really?

Depends on how you define "booming" but according to this, it looks positive.

[GlenSausio]

Never been bobbed.

My view on contracting is stick to hard, niche stuff- but also maintain a generic skill set in case you have to pull the pin on gigging.

Niche and hard = very few bobs. And high rates. Downside is you gotta be willing to move country to keep working

Generic skill set - I can always slot back in if I need to. I have low risk in that regard

Eg. Work on .NET forex trading systems (I don't)

It's stuff like BPM and integration work (ESB) that gets bobbed. And rightly so. Don't kid yourself that because you are getting a high rate, that a young cheap guy couldnt replace you- have that chat to yourself. I have- my stuff needs years and years of pain to master. No bob will take that risk

[BlasterBates]

Considering I and 30 others were replaced by ICTs and I then met up or corresponded with about 20 other people who had the same situation making 50 people I knew it had happened to in 6 - 12 months.The 30 people I worked with had nothing to do with Dot coms, the contracts I then went for in Telecom were all hiring ICTs.

In fact 2 of my other clients were heavily involved in the internet and they were doing fine.

Obviously your suggestions are ill informed. I'm glad you were lucky enough to avoid the direct impact, I'm glad for you.

Well there was a Telecom bust

Another Telecom Network BUST? 2000 All Over Again? Optical Network Market Analysis and Equipment Forecast

So outsourcing or not, all these Telecom companies drastically cut their budgets. In other words it was inevitable that a lot of contractors would be cut.

Trade restrictions, a sort of "closed shop" for highly paid contractors, who sit there comfortably in their long term contracts with "contract security" is not going to work.

The fact that you can work as a highly paid contractor at all is down to globalisation the free markets and the fact that companies can access investment in global markets.

I also have experienced budget cuts and competition from outsourcers, ie. I too was laid off when you were and was replaced by a cheaper resource, but I thrive on the competition and the opportunities that are created.

Contractors need to get off their arses, get on their bikes and look for work, not sit their like moaning minnies blaming others.

[DimPrawn]

I think it is rather naive to think the huge number of onshore and offshore IT outsourcing has not had a dramatic effect on contract and perm jobs and pay.

Where I work it is pretty much all now onshore Indian ICT workers and offshore Indian support staff. 10 years ago there, everything was done by UK contractors and permies, they have all been "let go". There is almost zero demand for UK IT workers there now. They have over 70,000 employees so it's no small operation.

The Indian outsourcing companies have taken over development, business processes, testing, support, consultancy, DBA everything top to bottom.

I think there's less than 10 IT contractors there now, sorting out all the tulip the IT outsourcers produce. It's a very busy and frustrating process.

Without the ICT and govt support for offshoring, there would be hundreds of IT positions there, if not 1000's.

[BlasterBates]

Well there's no doubt that the market has changed but if outsourcing had a detrimental effect we wouldn't be seeing the most bouyant contractor market in 16 years:

http://inoh.org/contractor-market-buoyant-16-years/

If there were thousands of open positions that couldn't be filled companies would have to take their operations else where. The fact is the global IT market has grown substantially. Sure there are bad examples but I do recall the IT crises of yesteryear. A stastistic (and this is before outsourcing) was that 70% of projects fail.

Just to take a case in point, the company I work for used to an internet company just serving the local market. It now employs an army of Eastern European contractors working in Romania, but they've now expanded their office. That is because for every outsourcer they take on one local. So far from decimating the local operation it's helped it to grow. There is an indirect effect which causes this boom, is that countries like India or countries in Eastern Europe are growing very fast and generating a boom in global demand that feeds into demand in UK and other Western European countries.

So the market grows, the companies grow and they need even more people.

This is not just my opinion, this is what you learn if you study Economics, and we see it happening.

No harm in being positive about this

[tomtomagain]

IT Departments have always been about continuous change.

They have moved steadily from being the "Creator of IT" to "Consumers of IT services". Very different roles, very different cultures and skills requirements.

This change has shifted the balance of the workforce from the highly technical, highly obstructive in-house "geeks" of the late 80's and early 90's ( actually we weren't highly obstructive, just over-worked ) to the current model of out-sourced "Service Providers" ( Wipro, Infosys et al ) supported by a large group of in-house "IT Managers", supplemented by a few contract technical experts.

Has this resulted in more unemployment? Not sure. My team of 40 developers got bobbed in 2005. They all had jobs within 3 months and I don't think any have had significant periods of unemployment since then.


..... but IT Change has not stopped. Change is on-going, with the "consumerization of IT" ( using Dropbox & Facebook at work ), BYOD.

And most importantly the beginnings of the large-scale up-take of SAAS, PAAS & IAAS.

In-house IT department will change radically over the next 5 years. And the biggest losers will be the Indian Outsourcing companies. They have got significant market problems to overcome.


My prediction of the "Future IT" department looks like this. A small team of "contract managers" maintaining the contracts for a large number of SAAS applications. Complemented by small groups of in-house, business saavy, technical developer/analysts embedded within business units comfortably speaking both "tech and businesses" building applications that actually give the organisation a competitive edge.

[GlenSausio]

My prediction of the "Future IT" department looks like this. A small team of "contract managers" maintaining the contracts for a large number of SAAS applications. Complemented by small groups of in-house, business saavy, technical developer/analysts embedded within business units comfortably speaking both "tech and businesses" building applications that actually give the organisation a competitive edge.

Yep, business savvy analyst programmers. That's what you want.

All the other parasites will move along: architects, BAs, testers, etc, etc.

I would like to see some kind of professional license become mandatory, like traders need.

[vetran]

OK so we have established that many IT resources paying significant amounts of tax were displaced by ICTs paying little or no tax in UK.

Many of the contractors have moved on to other jobs but wages have been depressed because lots of ICTs applied for citizenship or have looked for sponsorship for jobs.

The wholesale suppliers of these cheap resources have displaced UK businesses as major suppliers and many of the suppliers have structured their business to avoid UK tax and costs.

The number of UK nationals taking IT at degree has fallen dramatically because wages are depressed and the future looks uncertain.

A lot of innovation and training has moved away from the UK as many entry level jobs have been offshored,

I struggle to see how all of this is an advantage to the UK.

Now spreading business across the world was something that could have been done without displacing UK workers .

25 years ago I was training people to install UK sold phone systems across the world.

20 years ago I was going round the world installing niche telecom software because we were world leaders. It was a small company founded in someone's kitchen in Kent. We employed a number of great guys of many nationalities but they paid tax in the UK on a decent wage.

The key thing about both of these situations is that the UK were selling these systems and services and the people developing them were UK higher rate tax payers.

Now we are buying software from the US written in India and supported in Outer Mongolia. The UK should have a big piece of that pie (and more importantly the employment & tax that comes with it) but we gave it away.

[BlasterBates]

If you develop all your software in the UK, then it becomes too expensive and you can't compete, and you go out of business.

In the end this Telecom Software has to be sold globally against the competition who are doing the same thing.

In any case you can't stop companies buying software, in the same way you can't stop retailers importing cheap shirts from China, or force energy companies to buy expensive coal from UK pits, which are uneconomic.