Coding going the way of manufacturing

Denis Hoffman, chief strategy officer for RSA, said that the business of software coding was being shipped overseas at the same rate as the manufacturing industry shifted east. But he said that offshoring work was not the answer so much as offshoring work within a company.

"You get more done, with a better work ethic, when you work outside the United States and Europe," he said.

"But we don’t outsource, we offshore – we own all the coding companies. It's the only way to make sure you get the best labour."

He said that the best engineers want to work on projects from inception to final product and find those jobs in offshore companies. Meanwhile, those western companies that try to outsource the boring coding and keep the most interesting stuff for its own programmers were doomed to failure.

"No good engineer is going to be happy just doing testing. That's why the third-rate engineers go to the outsourcing companies."

He said that while a lot of software design work is done in the company headquarters in Massachusetts the actual coding is done overseas, such as in the eight storey office the company has set up in Bangalore. The company hires local talent only, describing using expatriates as "too transient".

RSA has always had to do much of its work overseas, ever since the United States decided encryption was a military technology. Now none of the company's security product coding is done in the US.

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