joanna bujes wrote: >
You're saying that writing a program or creating a software product in three different countries is no different than creating a pre-fabricated house in three different countries: the roof in the US, the window frames in China, and the walls in India. I think though that fitting a pre-fabricated house together is not the same as getting a dozen application components to work together. You can say that the whole point of API's is to allow just that to happen, but from what I notice, it's just not that easy.
i did somewhat miss the distinction you draw. nonetheless, i am not sure i am wrong. do you feel that software interfaces are inherently more difficult to engineer and manage? in some cases, this complexity is willful... take the current obsession with XML and building layers and layers on top of it. to some extent all of this is because some of this application layer work still suffers from the hubris of the late-90s tech boom. they still have a bunch of underqualified people running around selling pie-in-the-sky end-to-end CRM, ERP, what-have-you systems. ultimately though, i think it will indeed break down to well-defined APIs and implementations that a few people here can put together. a lot of that has happened for hardware, hasn't it? complex processors, PCBs, peripherals are built in different regions and integrated for a multitude of higher-order systems.
But, I am happy for you that if push comes to shove, you will be able to go back and be able to work and live.
come on now. its not about your job against my job, and i am not trying to defend "indian programmers" or some such identity group. if i do go back, i hope i will be more empowered to participate in the real world, rather than have to sit in a cube and write uninspiring software.
--ravi
