SD West 2004, Thursday (evening) Update
Tonight's keynote was given by Bob Cringely and was on the politics of standards. He had some interesting observations on how and why standards are created and some of the motivations (and back stabbing) that takes place. In the end, he advocates the EITF model over things like the IEEE model since it tends to progress faster and gets bad ideas out of the system quickly (fast failure). During the Q&A part of the talk, he opened the floor up to any questions, not just related to his talk. Of course, the discussion went immediately to offshoring of tech jobs. He had some interesting perspectives:
- Venture capitalists are sitting on a ton of money (tens of billions of $) that could be used to re-start the tech industry, but they are afraid to gamble on anything other than a "sure thing". Problem is that there is no sure thing in the tech world.
- Standardization, like ISO9001, made it possible to move manufacturing anywhere in the world and still be confident that the items produced will be of the needed quality. If you have two ISO9001 compliant plants, one in the U.S. and one in China, with the only difference being cost, well, might as well go with China. The problem is that this model doesn't work very well with software development. First, there are little to no software quality standards. Second, manufacturing is an electro-mechanical process; it's easy to pack up machines and move them anywhere. Software, on the other hand, is a cognitive process, so it's more difficult to move development to a different group of people and get the same results.
- There are some cultural issues to be resolved. In other cultures, workers are expected to be "yes men". This can result in problems being hidden until late in the development process, affecting cost, delivery time, and quality.
- For some things, you've just got to be there in the customer's face.
- With having some faceless person do the work, you get no product/idea ownership. If you're some guy being contracted to do development for a company across the world, then you probably won't be interested in going the extra mile to make the result earth-shattering. I mean, hey, it's just another job in a long stream of jobs. Of course, if the drive and initiative to invent new things also moves overseas, well then we're in really big trouble.
- He predicts that we will start to see some spectacular software disasters.
2:04:12 PM 
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