Strategy and Tactics – Page 146 – IS Survivor Publishing

The re-regulation of business (first appeared in InfoWorld)

By: Bob Lewis|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated: August 19, 2002

Marilyn vos Savant, the professional genius, proved that the egg came first. Heritable mutations happen only in sperm and ova, she reasoned, so something that was almost a chicken laid a true chicken egg. Makes sense to me.

As we sit in the rubble of Enron, ImClone, Worldcom, Tyco, AOL, and other, as-yet-undiscovered or unpublicized corporate implosions, it’s worthwhile to wonder which is the egg: The lack of accountability resulting from more than two decades of business deregulation, or the corrupt perspective of the corporate elite who acquired the resulting additional power.

Lord Acton notwithstanding, I think the corruption came first. It’s the egg, and it smells rotten.

Government regulation is what allows businesses to act ethically. Without regulation, those businesses that resort to any tactic to win have the advantage over those that restrict their behavior to conventional codes of ethics. Consequently, ethical CEOs should welcome government regulation, not fight it. It levels the proverbial playing field. The goal of an ethical CEO would be efficient regulation, not deregulation.

For more than two decades we’ve been subjected to unrelenting propaganda from the BIG/GAS (Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid) contingent decrying any and all regulation as a fundamentally bad idea. Regulation, we’ve been assured, prevents American businesses from being competitive in world markets, harms productivity, and hampers profitability.

What bunk. The additional profitability stemming from deregulation turned out to be the result of an increased ability to cook the books. And if deregulation has made American business more competitive, it’s hard to find the evidence — trade deficits are at record levels — but it certainly has made it less accountable to anyone.

Business will be re-regulated. Current abuses are too simply too flagrant. The question is how; the probable answer is badly. The business community no longer has the credibility to be part of the process, which leaves it to Congress and executive-branch agencies to design the regulations. Their goal will be minimizing any chance of new abuses, unfettered by considerations of how hard or easy it will be to comply.

Every new regulation will result in reporting requirements, every reporting requirement will require new information technology, and nobody is going to care how hard it is to build.

Which means CIOs and CTOs will be reaching for the Excedrin.

Assuming, of course, that new regulation hasn’t turned Excedrin into a prescription drug.

IT rust belt (first appeared in InfoWorld)

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.