Having recently retired, I suspect I’m a bit older than most of the people here. I began my career in the early 80’s as an entry level developer at a large com

Having recently retired, I suspect I’m a bit older than most of the people here. I began my career in the early 80’s as an entry level developer at a large company. Eventually, I chased the money into management. In those days, we tended to hire talented, motivated individuals. As time went on and the Internet became more prevalent, everyone who had ever built a family website in FrontPage was marketing themselves as programmers. As the Internet matured, the diversity of technologies proliferated. Now senior management was telling those of us in the middle ranks to hire specific skill sets, e.g. Rails. The problem was such resources tended to be scarce and expensive. And even graduates of boot camps and weekend warriors who had crunched through a couple of Dietel & Dietel or OReilly books thought they should be paid $100k+, regardless of experience or the local market. Enter the off shore providers: Infosys, Cognizant, et al. They offered senior management what they sought - specific skill sets at bargain basement prices. And senior management at many commercial firms went all in on the offshore/outsourced model. Disney is one of the most egregious examples. Up until the last two years of my career which were spent working at a startup, I was in management at a large Fortune 100 company. This company spent 9 figures, never delivered a product, and eventually sold off the division. At one point, we had 100’s of offshore developers. In the startup, we dealt with the same issues. Senior managers often read literature targeted to their level, i.e. marketing. Hence, micro services and the cloud were the big thing when I retired. At our startup, neither was necessary for the market size and scale that we were targeting. We hired a younger architect who had the lingo nailed and told the CIO what he wanted to hear. Finally, they bought me out and I retired. They still haven’t brought the product to market, now 18 months after my departure. So, at least here in the States, we have an expectations problem and a lack of engineering discipline. Is the technology proposal appropriate to the opportunity/problem? Often, it’s not and the failures are costly and all too frequent. Retirement looks better each day.