I have officially become an active cog in the great "offshoring" machine.
My employers were rather late in the game. It wasn't until 2001 or 2002 that our board of directors decided to join the stampede and set up a development center in Bangalore. All the trendy corporations were doing it.
The executive staff announced with a grand flourish that they were going to be shifting application development to India. For some reason, this seriously alienated all the remaining domestic apps engineers.
Meanwhile, the execs also built a fire under the documentation team, which at that point consisted of an amazingly talented writer and me. They made sensible, rational noises about overseas developers needing to know how to build applications against our platform and the best, most efficient way of conveying that information was to encapsulate all the necessary knowledge into documentation. Finally, after years of false starts and projects doomed to failure for lack of resources, we had all the big cheeses telling us that this was the top priority of the whole company. We planned extensively. We got all the engineers and their managers to "buy in".
You already know how it all ended. The big push to India stalled as folks learned that it was a bit more difficult than parking your BMW across less than two parking spaces. The execs spent the next couple of releases trying to coax code from seriously pissed and betrayed developers. Oh, and they laid off my coworker.
What a titanic clusterfuck, eh?
I've been managing as best I can for the past year or so. For some reason, the quality and quantity of the documentation have dipped a bit. I will admit that freely. I may consider myself a decent tech writer, but I'm not good/dedicated/friggin' stupid enough to try to replace a six-writer team by myself.
It's been an interesting exercise. I've learned tools and technologies that I wouldn't have otherwise. Not having anyone to fall back on has forced me to learn a lot of cool stuff very quickly.
The second big push to India has been fairly successful. Instead of documenting everything, the company has spent tens of thousands of dollars to fly key personnel to Bangalore for months at a time to train the Indian employees. According to a confidential source, some months have seen the travel budget exceed the payroll for the entire Bangalore development team. Despite this insanity, work is getting down and releases are being released.
Now there's a looming wave of sales. Even the execs I work with can read their impending doom on the shimmering, cresting wall of opportunity. I've approached our CTO, our head of HR, and the woman I report to over the last few months to sound out the possibility of hiring another writer. They've all made agreeing noises, but there just hasn't been any budget. I've insisted that it doesn't take much budget to hire a tech-writing student from the local community college. As long as we didn't bring on someone who has been dropped on their head recently, anyone with a modicum of interest in tech writing and a paycheck would do. I have a mountain of work that could be done by even a larval tech writer after a wee bit of training and a minimum of oversight.
Finally, after months of staring down the inevitable, the woman I report to announces that I'm going to be a manager of an entire team again. The catch is that the team is going to be in Bangalore.
My first thoughts ran along the lines of "Holy shit!"
I felt as though I'd just dodged a bullet while somebody walked over my grave.
As I choked on the clichés, I surfed for info on Indian tech writers. What I found was at once depressing and heartening.
The most depressing bit: an Indian tech writer with 4-7 years of experience pulls down an average of $8,000 a year. That princely sum would cover property taxes and two of my mortgage payments.
The most heartening things I could find: Headhunters are very frustrated by the lack of qualified writers and most of the web sites I came across, even the professional ones, had lots of fundamental errors.
After stewing for a weekend (one reason for the late Cant last week), I finally had a chance to have a nice long chat with the woman I report to. She makes it sound like I'll have quite a bit of control over the endeavor, deciding the reqs, interviewing the prospects, choosing the projects, and managing the writers. Luckily, my expectations and requirements are low, so I'm hoping the lack of qualified writers won't be too much of an issue.
So I still have a job for now. The spectre of offshoring has been whittling away at our confidence for a while. Even the most cocksure, talented, job-hopping engineers I knew during the bubble inflation years are starting to send out lay-off announcement/networking emails that sound desperate. I'm glad I'll be able to pay my mortgage and feed my family for a few more months, but I'm sad that I can't give the same opportunity to a domestic college grad that I was given. Sure, it can be argued that I'm doing the same for the Indian counterpart who is no less a human being and is just as deserving, but I still feel like a corporate stooge.
Pakeha