I was working on my article (“What CIOs should know about outsourcing”) and found a white paper written by some clerk from Human Resources.
Christina Savich teaches that computer programming skills do not bring any value to corporations, can be easily obtained and disposed. She defines commodity skills as follows:
“A nice telephone voice, typing, riveting, and even highly technical skills, like air conditioner maintenance, or computer programming are commodity skills. They are generic capabilities, equally valuable to all companies, and increasingly easy to obtain.”I do not what to reproduce
the entire article here, but I have a feeling that Christina’s message is that computer programmers can be bought by dozens (or by weight) when needed, easily disposed when not needed and re-purchased again.
Based on her another statement, marketing professionals are more important to the business:
”There are also, individuals comprising a company's workforce, that the customers care about as individuals, and that are difficult to replace, like the inspired marketing professionals, and then there are individuals, that have a great impact on the product, like the talented graphic artist, but are anonymous to the customer and easy to replace.”
Some managers call their developers "resources". Do they even treat them as people ? I've heard one of the managers said the following phrase, "A father of one of my resources died so this resource will not be available for a week". Could it get any worse? Actually it could, for example, "An ancestor of one of my resources died so this resource temporarily will not perform its functions".
IMHO, articles like this one cause serious damage to the perception of computer programming skills. Basically Christina treats computer programmers like dirt. I wonder what’s your take on Christina's article? Did I get her message correctly (English is my second language)?
links: digg this del.icio.us technorati
Interesting "gem" to say the least. In a world where many a corporation is
thought of as "entity" with a mind and vision of its own as opposed to a
community of hardworking people albeit with varying tasks but working
towards a similar goal, it is not hard for me to understand how such a
paper got written.
