Category Archives: job market

Who Said Manager Jobs Are Safe?

There is an interesting article called IT workers pushed to the limits. This is probably true. The article also talks about outsourcing and cost cutting by management as one of the reasons to heat up the temperature in the IT rooms between the engineers and managers.

First, many manager jobs are also getting outsourced. If all the engineers are in a different country, what value would the first line managers add sitting on the other side of the globe? Next, if all the first line managers are on the other side of the globe what is the point in having the second line manager on the other side of the globe? This can be extended all the way up to the CEO, no doubt. With the CEOs salaries increasing at such obscene proportions, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the most successful companies of the future happen to be in other countries. Well, that’s probably going to take a long time or may never happen for various other reasons, but the main point here is that the very manager who may have fired/outsourced an engineering job should think twice on how long his/her job is safe.

BTW, if you are thinking that I am just speculating, take a look at the top software companies and the rate at which they have been expanding their development centers in other countries. Friends tell me that these days their companies have managers from other countries managing employees and even managers within the US! Yes, corporate America is doing it and just like every manager reached that stage or a bit higher by optimizing their budget, CEOs are also doing the same thing, pleasing their board and share holders and outsourcing or opening up R&D centers in cheaper countries.

While this is generally true for large companies as they can afford to have their own centers in other countries, these days it’s common with startups as well. I have had the pleasure of interviewing candidates for CTO position for a friend and some of them talked about how they can provide low cost development options which ranged from using Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure to having a development centers in other countries and creating a global organizations. Well, with the venture capital moving towards < $10 million and in some cases even < 1 $million (am I seeing a parallel between the VC funding and notebook/laptop prices? :)), it shouldn’t come off as a surprise that part of the CXOs for startups could be coming from another country.

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