I don’t think that only 10% of software dev is innovation. To me innovation also means the technical innovation that you go through with architecture and other design (such as security). There is the obvious advantage of having the ‘plumbing code’ done offshore. But Its a balance. To answer your question, I don’t think that it lessens the opportunities for developers, in fact, I think it broadens the opportunities.

I have found that my local devs have learnt a lot from their offshore counterparts, they have shared experiences and learned a lot from each other. Which has made for better quality and experienced code.

In my last company, when we took the decision to offshore, there was the same old reaction of people fearing of loosing their jobs. That just wasn’t the case, in fact we got more on. We had different problems to solve and we could focus our local devs to work on things such as innovation and architecture whilst the offshore guys worked on some of the plumbing and what I was calling fringe apps components such as plugins.

I don’t know or care what actors or musicians in other countries think about Hollywood or Hip Hop.

I don’t know what you think is narrow-minded in my comments. I’m looking for some insight from someone with expertise in offshoring to plan my career path several years in the future. I don’t plan to end up like one of the laid off steel workers in the 1980s when Japan and Korea took over steel production.

I hope that’s not too narrow-minded for you.

@Dean Schulze

I think you need leave your narrow minded thinking.

Do actors from other countries complain when “Hollywood” rakes in most of the box office collections?

Do (traditional) Musicians from other countries complain when crappy (2pac and Biggie are still awesome) Hip Hop albums out their records.

When was the last time you stood up against McDonalds and Wallmart when they started up in other countries and ran the local mama-papa shops out of business? ( I know you face this in the US, I see a lot of posters of “Buy Local” around)

Regarding innovation, I’d say no more than 10% of software development requires any real innovation, if even that much. What the vast majority of software projects need is just good design and good code (which is surprisingly hard to get).

If most non-innovative development is offshored, that doesn’t leave much left.

What I’d really like to hear from someone like yourself who is in the forefront of offshoring is what do you think career prospects are going to be like for US software developers in 5 – 10 years?

@Dean Shulze
An interesting conundrum Besides the obvious comment of “I would support my kids with whatever they chose to do”, I don’t believe the offshore teams have killed local development. I can feel a whole new blog post in regards to this, but one of the points I would highlight is ‘innovation’. Your ODCs are very unlikely to innovate, you still need locally motivated bright minds to do that.