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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Usually, I get the joke.

I don’t always think it’s funny, but at least I get it. Not always, though — in a recent column I reported on the antics of a certain “Dr. Richard Paley, teacher of Divinity and Theobiology, Fellowship University,” who exposed all of us in IT as Darwinians, atheists and pagans. As a number of readers were kind enough to explain, “Dr. Paley” is a satire. In my defense, The Register reported the story as fact, a Hoaxbusters search came up empty, and I did find it hilarious. I just didn’t realize it was supposed to be.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection appears in this column on a regular basis. This isn’t because “Survival Guide” is related to “Survival of the Fittest.” The latter phrase, never used by Darwin himself, comes from Herbert Spencer’s ludicrous theory of “Social Darwinism” — ludicrous because it considered fitness to be absolute, justifying hereditary aristocracy as the consequence of natural superiority.

In Darwinian theory, fitness is contextual, measuring how well a heritable trait fits specific conditions. That’s a concept you can take to the bank when managing your career: Success comes from how well you adapt to circumstances. There are no panaceas, which means we can all ignore the 90% or so of all business pundits who sell “the answer” without first hearing the question.

This same philosophy can help you plot a course for your IT organization. I’ve read various authorities expound on the proper role of IT in business. Some call for strategic partnership, some consider IT’s proper role to be a service provider, while yet others think we’re an “information utility.” If they understood modern evolutionary theory, they’d spend less time advocating one or another as the right answer, and more assessing which circumstances each of these very different models is best suited to.

Evolutionary theory applies to all situations in which entities compete, which means we in business can benefit from a century and a half of scientific research. To take just one example:

The estimable Richard Dawkins has argued that natural selection is a competition among genes, not whole organisms — that an organism is just a gene’s way of succeeding. This insight simplifies the apparently mystifying behavior of companies that self-destruct while creating “shareholder value.” Substitute gene for shareholder and organism for company and everything suddenly makes sense –plenty of bodies are designed to die in order to help their genes succeed.

The lesson for you: Shareholder value and your own best interests don’t necessarily coincide. Plan accordingly.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Of all the requests for advice I receive, the hardest come from college graduates or career changers wanting to know how to break into IT, and from older programmers who want to write code until they retire but can’t even get an interview. They’ve been sold on the idea that proficiency with computers practically guarantees employment. Now, nobody wants ’em.

I’d love to offer hope and great advice. Regrettably, the best advice I have is this: Find a different field of endeavor. Unless you’re in the top rank, there’s little future for you in IT.

The supply of programmers exceeds demand, and that drives down prices — your wages. That’s because the genie of globalization is out of the bottle, and it’s going to stay out of the bottle at least until the Internet closes up shop.

Twenty years ago, the same thing happened to factory jobs. U.S. factory workers were unionized, which simply meant that instead of keeping jobs and accepting lower wages, their jobs went away altogether as the factories relocated to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Now it’s our turn: Indian and Asian programmers work as hard as or harder than their American counterparts, and for lower wages.

It’s easy to blame greedy CEOs for this mess, but employers aren’t just being greedy when they shift these jobs to foreign workers. If they don’t and their competitors do, they have to charge more for the same products and services. Not exactly a formula for success, and when business shifts to the competitors, the jobs do too — overseas anyway.

Nor would changing the H1b program — or even eliminating it altogether — help. Whether foreign programmers come here or programming jobs go there, the result is the same except for which country collects the income tax. Foreign programmers produce code just as good as that coded by American programmers. For less. Are you willing to compete?

Is this a good thing? Not for the average U.S. citizen, I imagine, although it will help keep prices down when we’re shopping.

Not every IT job will move overseas, of course. Much of management will remain, as will jobs where proximity, linguistic ability, and cultural familiarity are important, like network administration, systems analysis, user interface design, help desk, and project management. Nor will all programming jobs will move overseas either. Plenty of U.S. factories remain open, too. But the trend is clear, and it means an increasing number of American programmers will be competing for a decreasing number of jobs.

So if you still want a programming career, here’s the best advice I have:

Expect to work harder, for less.

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