Customer Reviews

My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job (Pragmatic Programmers)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Forget about the spectre of "offshoring" for a second: this book is about what you need to do to be a better software professional. On the flip side, this book can also be used as a guide on how to _hire_ good programmers. Each chapter is about 2 to 3 pages long and presents anecdotal information about how to make yourself a better programmer _and_ business person.

I would say that most of his advice really falls into one of these categories: constantly improve yourself, constantly seek to improve others, and be knowledgeable of your business and customers.

There are valuable tidbits in here that are common sense to some, but I am amazed with how many people I know that don't follow them. Even if they are all common sense this book helps these ideas crystallize in your psyche. Here are some of my favorites:

#7 Don't base your career on one technology: for example Java, Lotus Notes, etc.

#8 Be the worst. Surrounding yourself with really good people is a lot better way to learn than being the best. I agree with this.

#9 Love it or leave it. The people I like to work with the most are the people with passion for what they do. They are the ones that are constantly seeking to do things the right way. They are the ones who are innovating.

The reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 is that towards the end I thought the last several chapters were kind of fluffy and didn't provide any concrete advise. But overall, I think this book is very good.

Chad Fowler has written a gem of a book that is full of wisdom, and is deeply insightful in a way that only someone with Chad's experience (of working with a fortune 5 company in the U.S. and in India) could have.

Written with compassion and empathy for it's intended audience, the book conveys a very important message -- that it's not about Americans beating Indians out of jobs or Indians beating Americans. It's about building things of value and making software developers better.

I believe this book is going to be of as much value to the leaders of organizations that hire software developers across the globe as it will be to the employees of those organizations and will provide benefits to readers in unexpected ways. It provides a blueprint for continuous learning and self- improvement as well as a way to motivate oneself to always aspire to reach higher and achieve more and enjoy the journey along the way!

This is a must-read book that has already found a permanent place on my bookshelf as it will in the bookshelves of all the others whom I plan to gift copies to.

I HIGHLY recommend it.

Chad Fowler shares his India outsourcing experience and insight and he provides simple truths about the importance of anticipating and adapting to change. Lessons learned in this book can be applied to any field, not just technology. The world is changing faster and faster and to stay on top means learning how to be champions of change, not resistors.

Fowler offers readers excellent advice on how not to be left behind. Fifty-two ways to save your job, as the title suggests. None of us can afford to be complacent in our current successes, knowledge, or skillsets. Complacency breeds arrogance and laziness. These are very simple truths. The people who take the time to learn new things and adapt to changing business environments more quickly are the ones who are going to come out on top. Right now, we're seeing the tide shift and those diligent people in India are reaping the rewards of their hard work.

Outsourcing or off-shoring...whatever you want to call it, it is not going away. And it is not the dirty word it was a couple of years ago. Outsourcing is old news! The epiphanies of "The World is Flat" is old news! Companies who have not yet shifted some of their operation to India or China or Western Europe are likely feeling a little panicked. And I think they rightfully concerned. As companies continue to expand outsourcing to India (Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Siebel, et al), for any of us to keep our jobs, we need to continue to find new and BETTER ways to be provide value. For some, it means learning new technical and/or language skills. For others, it means changing careers altogether. Adapt, adapt, adapt.

This book was excellent--it's well written, it's timely, and frankly, I found it very reassuring. I recommend "My Job Went to India" in particular to my fellow American friends and coworkers who run the gamut from being concerned to downright paranoid (whether they'll admit it aloud or not) about the prospect of "**INSERT COUNTRY NAME HERE** (India) taking precious jobs away from **INSERT NATIONALITY HERE** (Americans).

If I can digress for just a moment, I want to tell you how I found this book. I stumbled across it in Barns & Noble--one of those mega stores with the multiple floors and separate coffee and lunch stands. You know, the ones that are the size of a mini mall? I went there to pick up some programming books. I decided I needed to brush up my programming skills and I was trying to determine the best way to get started and what language to focus on first. The store's tech selections were overwhelming. I was in the store for three hours pouring over books. The more I searched and read, the more lost and frustrated I felt. And, if I'm being honest, the more stupid and ill-prepared I felt. I picked up Foweler's book because the title caught my eye just as I was about to leave. I read the cover and laughed (okay, snorted) so loud the person next to me took a couple of steps away from me, out of concern that I was crazy or possessed. Or both. The book struck a chord because the company I had just left has begun recently outsourcing to India and many of the employees I knew are feeling a bit confused, frustrated, and some are outright disgusted. As if the strategy somehow implied the company had sold its soul. Which, of course, simply isn't true.

At any rate, I read the first page and thought, yeah, this looks like it might be an interesting read some day, and I then flipped over to the page where Fowler starts talking about what the experience in India taught him, how the unfamiliar and strange had become totally familiar to him, how he changed his perspective, and how India became his new norm and how his return to the USA was a complete shock to his system.

It was this section that made me sit up and take notice and it's what ultimately sold me on the book. It's like a trusted friend revealing a buried or forgotten truth. Fowler's words rang true to me. I read the whole thing in one sitting.

What I appreciated most about his writing is that it is not radical technobable rantings of a professed expert. The writing is not arrogant and for the most part, it's written in simple terms. I got the sense he's just a guy who wants share his experience and the lessons learned to save us programmers and programmer wannabees (like me) the trouble and offer suggestions that might reassure us of the future. So much of what he says are just simple truths that deep down I already knew were true. And he writes it in such a way that the book could be relevant to all tech workers, not just programmers.

So read it. I tell you, it's freaking brilliant and you will probably feel better about your future. I certainly do.

Cheers!

I think this book suffers from a poorly chosen title. It makes it seem much more of a niche book than it is.
"Take Charge of Your Career" would have been a better title. This book is for those of us who really want to be in this sector and are looking for what the right moves are. It is too easy to end up working in an IT job that you floated into rather than worked towards or deliberately chose.

The last line of the book says it best:

"Satisfaction, like our career choices, is something that should be sought after and *decided* upon *with intention*.

This is a great compliment to The Pragmatic Programmer. That book presents short, sweet descriptions of successful habits for a programmer to follow while practicing their craft. My Job Went To India arms a programmer with habits and practices that will help enhance their career.

I love books with short chapters, and this one has fifty-two of them. They read quickly and many end with exercises to apply the practice or skill recently discovered.

Much of what a programmer must do to advance his craft these days is more closely related to business than software. Many programmers, myself included, are somewhat intimidated by the need to learn these skills. Fowler breaks it down and make this subject matter far easier to approach.

The essence of this book is tons and tons of experience distilled into words. Sure, you could learn all of this stuff over a decade in the industry, but you might have some frightening, tight times in between. I feel like My Job Went To India has given me a leg up by focusing the topic of managing a programmer's career into fun-to-read, easily digestible chunks that are all highly actionable.

'My Job Went To India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book)' is a examination of the trend of the past decade or so of how jobs are traveling across the Atlantic Ocean at an artery-spurting pace. You might hear all the propaganda and assume that the good ol' United States is still #1 on this planet, but the simple facts are that the 2 countries that each have 1 billion+ people (India & China) are the future of this planet, and there is a reason why.

Not only are Indian software professionals much cheaper to hire, costing American companies much less rupees than dollars, Indians have one thing in mass majority that the USA used to have.

They are HUNGRY.

India can only sit back and laugh as their country excels while the United States just sits back on their laurels, always assuming that they will at the top of the food chain, for little reason than they just are MEANT to be there.

This book is a nice examination of this trend, and while it is very discouraging at times, it tries to help the reader by pushing the main point that in order to save your job and your career, you always have to adapt and learn. If you find yourself on the street one day (and usually it's a shock to most people who do), make sure that you are prepared and you can strike back at the market that put you on the street by having the skill set and determination to overcome any challenge put in front of you.

This is an entertaining and important book that should be read (and followed) by all software developers who need to stay on the cutting edge of this competitive market.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I bought this book with only a quick scan at the book store for some reading material during a recent flight to Florida. During my quick scan I mistakenly thought the author was going to explain why outsourcing doesn't work for most company IT projects, which had been a fruitless crusade of mine with a couple of my recent clients where I witnessed mission-critical projects go out to India on a promise of a 70% project cost reduction - surely to the project's demise. But Fowler didn't get into that losing battle - he accepts outsourcing as a fact of IT.

But while reading this book on the plane I encountered something much more valuable than the pro's and con's of outsourcing. I deeply felt a renewed interest in my profession as a software developer.

Fowler is obviously a balanced and experienced IT professional and he seems to have mastered the ability to find value and reward in his work which he expresses very well. His writing made me remember why I got into this profession nearly twenty years ago. I like his Act On It! sections because he gave some very good advice about how to dig for the gold in my IT career. I question why I didn't think of (or act on) those action items myself.

This is one of those rare books that, from under tons of technical books, emerges as one that addresses the human side of the IT profession. Despite off-shore code factories turning my passion into a cheap commodity, to which the CIO can't say no, I now have some solid ideas about how to re-capture the creative spirit of my work.

There are only two things I wish; that I had had access to Fowler's wisdom years ago and that my flight to Florida was longer. Otherwise, Bravo and Thanks!

American programmers would do well to study this book. Indeed, any programmer anywhere in the world might do likewise. Fowler offers sage advice on how to manage your career. Perhaps the most cogent item is not to stick to a narrow focus on the pure programming aspects. Instead, you should cultivate an expertise in the business domain. This gives you valuable context about a coding task that you might be assigned, or one that you might develop on your own initiative.

The latter is also stressed by Fowler. Instead of passively being a drone, which is what most people are, ask yourself if you truly desire to be a programmer. If so, then this can motivate you into producing excellent programs.

And always try to scout out new programming languages and ideas to learn. The different aspects of each language are valuable different slants at looking at a problem and devising a solution.

Like a lot of the other reviewers, I agreed with the contents of this book. The contents are well-organized and presented, and all of the points are hard to argue with. However, some caution is in order.

This book is only tangentially about outsourcing. The title of the book implies this book is how one can thward the challenge of outsourcing. Now, the contents of the book are an ably-crafted, well-written set of tips on how to increase one's effectiveness as a programmer, which I would have no hesitation of recommending to programmers of just a few years' experience. So one might guess that the thrust of the book is: "If you are an able enough programmer, both from a technical and the business sense, you need not feel threatened by outsourcing." Unfortunately, the author didn't address this connection, at least not strongly enough to make an impression on me. And I bought the book because I wanted characterization specifically of outsourcing as a job threat, rather than just another force in a tighter labor market.

In short, if you are an entry-level, or even intermediate-level programmer this book has a lot to recommend it. However, I have to dock this book by a point because it really do what it says it sets out to do. Had it been titled "How to improve your programming in 52 steps" I would've given it 4 or 5 starts. But as an old hand, I also wouldn't have bought it either.

Loosing a job may not be war but it still leaves its casualties. We are all too familiar with corporations finding a low-wage country and shifting all transferable jobs there.

Fortunately there exists a silver lining and thankfully the book does a good job of revealing it, albeit indirectly. If your present situation doesn't mirror the book's title, now is the chance to heed to its timely advice.

Depending on where you are in your software development career, you may have already discovered some of the lessons on your own. The remainder too, you would learn on your own but it may be too late by then. This book could be the one to provide you with a fresh perspective on your chosen field of work.

Its not so much about jobs shifting to India as it is about striving to become a remarkable software developer. Maybe the book's title was just to catch attention. There a lot of avenues the book did well on:

1. Short chapters with contrived aphorisms that actually help in retaining more after you are done with the book.

2. As the author spent about 18 months working in India, he imparts first-hand information of what the low-wage countries are doing right and wrong. For instance, they are not on the bleeding edge cause they likely to play it safe and stick to proven technologies. In author's own words, you may compete and win in ability rather than wages.

3. How we may be squandering our lead by getting stuck in a pattern and not making use of available resources. And how we in the west take infrastructure for granted. Some who have lost jobs may come to believe offshore developers are not playing on a level playing field. Obviously the west enjoyed an advantage for a long time but the field is being leveled as of now.

4. Most importantly, solid advice on career advancement - make yourself known by contributing to open source projects, find a mentor, be a mentor, decouple your career from one technology or a language or a toolset, respect cultural difference, and rediscover enthusiasm.

Caveat is some parts of the book become too preachy but thats a minor annoyance.