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Well, Indian offshore companies have been training many COBOL guys since Y2K. These days, most of the SAP related jobs are outsourced to India. How can one expe

Well, Indian offshore companies have been training many COBOL guys since Y2K. These days, most of the SAP related jobs are outsourced to India. How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master COBOL now? How about salaries?

toyg 8y ago
> How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master <insert any language here> FTFY. No programming language requires proximity. The only jobs you can expect to never be offshored are in (literal) plumbing. This said, anything involved with Very Big Companies is probably more at risk, because it makes more sense for them to move entire departments offshore just to save a few percentage points on aggregate costs (actual productivity be damned). So I expect this will soon happen to the likes of Salesforce, if it's not already. AWS is definitely already happening. Also anything getting too mainstream, because then it makes sense for outsourcers to invest in training high numbers of people. I expect the market to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers, now that it's making real inroads in the enterprise space (with bigdata etc).
- paganel 8y ago
  > AWS is definitely already happening. Can confirm, I live in the capital city of an Eastern European country and I've been approached by a AWS recruiter a couple of months ago, she told me they were about to open a big new office in here. I think they were quite desperate to get their share of hirings because they had approached me even though there was no mention on my LinkedIn profile of C++ or Java, which was a major part of the job requirements. > I expect the market to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers, Fortunately or not there aren't that many Python programmers out here to speak of (I'm talking about Eastern Europe, maybe things in India and South-East Asia are different). I should know, because I've been programming Python for a living for 13 years now and the market for Python programmers isn't a large one. Yeah, I did ok, as in there are small shops that pay decent money for Python programmers, and from time to time there's even a big outsourcing company desperate to hire Python programmers because a new foreign client has arrived with a Python project on their doorsteps, but more often than not Python is still looked as a "scripting language" and as a "programming language for non-important and non-enterprisey stuff". Just recently a friend of mine that used to work for a major outsourcer based in this area (they have big Western clients, you probably interact with some of their code each day) told me that their company puts people like Python programmers that they intend to hire on a special list (and probably Ruby programmers, too), as in they're not seen as long-term employees, more like project-based (see the part above about Python projects coming from foreign clients), as the focus is mostly on Java and probably some C# and C++, but mostly Java.
kamaal 8y ago
>>Well, Indian offshore companies have been training many COBOL guys since Y2K. COBOL in Indian offshore companies is often a shorthand for Mainframe experience. And many people do Java on Mainframes along with COBOL. >>These days, most of the SAP related jobs are outsourced to India. Been happening since more than a decade. You could point to any random tech, and some one in an big IT offshore firm will be working on it. >>How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master COBOL now? What fate? Until a while ago, mainframe skills were one of the most important ones in the industry. >>How about salaries? If you work for somebody through a third party contracting firm, your salary is going to be low. Not just if you do COBOL, but any tech.

toyg 8y ago

> How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master <insert any language here> FTFY. No programming language requires proximity. The only jobs you can expect to never be offshored are in (literal) plumbing. This said, anything involved with Very Big Companies is probably more at risk, because it makes more sense for them to move entire departments offshore just to save a few percentage points on aggregate costs (actual productivity be damned). So I expect this will soon happen to the likes of Salesforce, if it's not already. AWS is definitely already happening. Also anything getting too mainstream, because then it makes sense for outsourcers to invest in training high numbers of people. I expect the market to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers, now that it's making real inroads in the enterprise space (with bigdata etc).

paganel 8y ago
> AWS is definitely already happening. Can confirm, I live in the capital city of an Eastern European country and I've been approached by a AWS recruiter a couple of months ago, she told me they were about to open a big new office in here. I think they were quite desperate to get their share of hirings because they had approached me even though there was no mention on my LinkedIn profile of C++ or Java, which was a major part of the job requirements. > I expect the market to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers, Fortunately or not there aren't that many Python programmers out here to speak of (I'm talking about Eastern Europe, maybe things in India and South-East Asia are different). I should know, because I've been programming Python for a living for 13 years now and the market for Python programmers isn't a large one. Yeah, I did ok, as in there are small shops that pay decent money for Python programmers, and from time to time there's even a big outsourcing company desperate to hire Python programmers because a new foreign client has arrived with a Python project on their doorsteps, but more often than not Python is still looked as a "scripting language" and as a "programming language for non-important and non-enterprisey stuff". Just recently a friend of mine that used to work for a major outsourcer based in this area (they have big Western clients, you probably interact with some of their code each day) told me that their company puts people like Python programmers that they intend to hire on a special list (and probably Ruby programmers, too), as in they're not seen as long-term employees, more like project-based (see the part above about Python projects coming from foreign clients), as the focus is mostly on Java and probably some C# and C++, but mostly Java.

kamaal 8y ago

>>Well, Indian offshore companies have been training many COBOL guys since Y2K. COBOL in Indian offshore companies is often a shorthand for Mainframe experience. And many people do Java on Mainframes along with COBOL. >>These days, most of the SAP related jobs are outsourced to India. Been happening since more than a decade. You could point to any random tech, and some one in an big IT offshore firm will be working on it. >>How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master COBOL now? What fate? Until a while ago, mainframe skills were one of the most important ones in the industry. >>How about salaries? If you work for somebody through a third party contracting firm, your salary is going to be low. Not just if you do COBOL, but any tech.