One of the main questions I want to answer in this blog is how the American IT programmer will find his role and maintain his leadership in the global economy. It's an important question to answer because I am an American programmer. I need to figure out how I can stay in the game and continue to provide for my family especially as I approach age 40.
I have already seen many of my colleagues fall below the bar doing commodity programming that can easily be spec'd out and handed to Indians, Chinese, or yes, Filipinos. Others do a lot more than they think but do not represent themselves well politically or by way of documentation.
One of the ideas that I came up with and is a widely accepted maxim is that the United States was built on the backs of immigrants. These immigrants were placed in a country and given movies and bed time stories and history lessons that told them that no matter where they started, either they or their children had a chance to raise their station in life. As a first generation American born in New York, this notion is very strong for me. In fact, I married a woman who grew up in the Philippines whose first plane trip was the day after our wedding. I have seen my own fortunes and happiness grow on the back of her love and support.
What separates us for Chinese, Indians, and Filipinos? The country we live in. I count among my friends many Chinese and Indian 0th and 1st generation Americans as my friends. Also, I have been to the Philippines and if you add up all the time I spent there, it would be more almost be 1 year of my life. I've observed how it is although through American eyes. I think the next annecdote best summarizes the idea that I want to convey. I posed to my cousin Tellie that I thought that one day I might move to the Philippines and try to start a tech company. She replied, "Don't come here. You would be bored." Over the years, I've come to elaborate this coversation to mean....You can come in here with your big ideas and your American energy but you will be discouraged and frustrated on your every turn towards the goal of progress. You will hire workers who are not as passionate as you. How can they be, they grew up here in a land of limited resourses. You will run into jealous people. There is a crab mentaility where you try to rise up out of the bucket and the other crabs pull you back in. If people discover you have money, they will kidnap your children. You will be overwhelmed by people coming to you for a job whether or not they are even remotely qualified. The culture will assimilate you into it. You will not assimilate the culture into your way of thinking. You will find there is nothing you can do. YOU WILL BE BORED.
In a third world nation such as the Philippines, the infrastructure is poor. When I go to my relatives house, it's a big deal if there is a room with air conditioning. A hot shower is a big deal. It's usually powered by a small portable water heater that heats the water in real time as it flows out. Heck, water pressure is sometimes a big deal. There are no traffic rules or safety standards for vehicles. Cars as small as a little SUV that can fit 8-10 people are prized. There's no notion of health insurance. People die in the Philippines for reasons that would never happen in the U.S. Many of my cousins chose computers or veterinary medicine as their field of study but could not find a job waiting for them at the end. Two of my cousins became health inspectors for the town. Cousin Jerek told me a disheartening story about his job being threathened if he didn't take money to pass substandard food facilties. Another cousin who studied computers ended up as a pharmaceutical representative (Med Rep). He did well pushing drugs to different hospitals. He pulled my other cousin into it as well. Tax money to the government lines the pockets of corrupt politicians instead of going into improving the countries infrastructure. Sure, it happens in the U.S. too but I believe we have more checks and balances against it.
My parent's countrymen however, are a proud people and place value on education. Where I don't believe I could go there overnight and shock the world, I do believe I can go in there and groom my nephews and nieces and over time build a beach front. I'd like to start a tech business through them and run it remotely in the next 4 years. I am already planting the seeds. I'd like to retire in the Philippines once my children are grown. My money will go a lot further there.
As American's, we need to take in this type of information. We need to process it in our American way and package it thus, "We can help these people." We can show them how to build businesses, infrastructure, culture that will make them like Americans in the 90s. I mean by this is that they have all our old computers and our old COBOL jobs and by golly, they speak English well enough to do our customer support. We can feed them enough money through these means that they can improve themselves. We hope they won't leapfrog us overnight and become more like American's of this century.You know what, they won't be able to do that until their infrastructure can support it. When it comes to that, I'm not worried about the Philippines. However, I read stories in Wired all the time about the infrastructure that China is building. They've got a big job though because they've got to build a superior infrastructure to the U.S. because it needs to support a billion+ people.
More than anything, it's a question of strategy, positioning, and gaining a state of wisdom faster than anyone around you. To get to this state of wisdom, you must dig deep into an understanding of how the world works. You then build personal systems to develop yourself in a mold that is favorable to the world. Together, you build national systems that do the same. You're financial viability is a good measure as to how accurate your hypothesis on how the world works is. I hope stories like this get people to thinking and that together, we can come up with answers that work for us and our country.
