It doesn't take hours to find everything, but try finding content on WPF (as an example). I think this heralds the beginning of the end of google being useful. WPF has had so many releases, and has changed so much, and has been SO extensively covered by blogs and other sources, that the odds of finding any current or useful WPF info through google is (in my experience thus far) at least 10:1 against.

It isn't the hours of reading - it is the trying the tidbit from site X only to find it is 6 months old, then rewriting your code according to site Y, but finding out it is 5 months old, etc. By the time you finally get to site Z42 that has the current tidbit, you're burned out...

True, but what are the odds that the dozens of blog authors are going to go back and delete all their old WPF posts when WPF comes out?

Certainly over time (after WPF is released) there'll be more and more valid content, and eventually the outdated stuff will become the minority - but it will still be there, and still be indexed, and still show up in search engines.

The problem is compounded by the recent trend by vendors (especially Microsoft) to be more "open" and to do regular alpha/beta releases of their products, often every couple months, for a long period of time before release. This, coupled with the blogsphere, leads to the indexing engines becoming full of old stuff.

Yes, eventually the old stuff will flush itself out - but we don't know how long that'll take. WPF is really the first major many-pre-release product to come out with the blogsphere in full swing. My guess is that it will take many months, if not over a year, for valid content to flush out the old stuff.

So during the first year of a release, when it is most critical for most people to get quality content, they'll be sifting through google, finding more old than new - and not being able to differentiate without trying and finding that the blog content is useless.

Having just updated my site to use CSS (which is not new, nor beta), I can tell you that I spent untold hours sifting through a lot of really shitty content on the web. The only way I found a couple good sites is thanks to comments on MY blog - google never did point me to the sites that had the great content...

I don't deny the value of google, nor am I over-eager to pay to get content.

But that worries me, because there's a truism: you get what you pay for.

Collectively, on the web and on TV, people are choosing to pay for less and less. In the case of TV the result is reality TV, because it is the only thing that can be produced cheaply enough to work when more and more people Tivo past all the commercials.

On the web, in our industry, it means that magazines, book publishers (and thus authors) and speakers have fewer and fewer venues where there's any profit. It could be the case that we're looking at a future where the only content available is produced by vendors (Microsoft will fund books for their purposes) and by individuals willing to donate their time for free, in the hopes of getting that promotion or being able to job-hop.

And maybe that's OK - I don't know. For me it is not OK, because I'm sure I wouldn't write as much if I did it for free. I'd rather spend that time with my kids. But objectively maybe even that is OK - would it really matter if all the established authors/speakers faded away?

Some have already - Don Box, Chris Sells and others adapted to this new world order by joining a vendor. What speaking and writing they do is in the service of their employer, not themselves, and that's probably OK too. Thus far I've personally resisted following that path, because I prefer to retain a relatively independent voice. I can still say that I prefer log4net, and feel good about it :)

Others have adapted by moving up the food chain. Neither business people nor IT management google like we do, and there's money to be made in talking with pictures - focusing on architectural concepts and avoiding code. In fact there's a lot MORE money there because those are the people with the checkbook. Again, I've personally resisted following that path, because I love the technology. Sure, I like fluffy architecture, concept and theory - but only if I can apply it too...

Maybe I want the impossible - to make a living writing and speaking about technology. Certainly this has been possible for a long time, but it may be that the developer community will decide that, as a collective, there's no sense paying for such a service when people will do it as a sideline for free. And who can argue against that?

If I could get quality TV without paying for it I'd love it. But I'm part of a group that makes amateur movies, and I can tell you that you get what you pay for. While we have fun, our stuff is pretty sketchy... And reality TV is a total waste of time - oy!

So I _do_ get my TV, but I pay for it - buying DVD collections of the shows that I actually care about.

I just hope that enough developers have a similar perspective, and are willing to pay for professional content through some venue. Since magazines and books aren't the venue, the question remains: what is? Or should we all just join a vendor or move into fluffy architecture-land?

Brian,

The problem with starting down that road, is that you have no idea where any of us came from. If you want to compare "I came from nothing" stories I'll most likely match or exceed you in that history. I graduated from college in the Reagan-era recession and spent quite a long time doing data entry for temp agencies until I found a programming job that didn't pay enough to meet my bills. But I took it anyway, because I wanted to program.

So unless you've been stranded on the freeway while trying to get your paycheck to the bank so you could deposit it to have enough money to buy more gas so you could get to work the next morning, I think you need to chill out a bit...

And that isn't the point here anyway. Not to me.

And also please consider this: how many authors/speakers are having this dialog in public? Pretty much none. Why? Because it doesn't generate any love. So why am I doing it? Beats the hell out of me - it would be a LOT simpler to just shut my mouth and do what I need to do. But, like you, I believe in open dialog. I think (hope) there's something to be learned here - both by me and by others.

The world IS changing. Some parts of our industry are getting hit first (writing and speaking among them), but this change WILL impact everyone eventually. You might consider those of us who are getting hit now to be the canaries in the cage...

We live in a vaguely capitalistic society - that's the nature of the world economy. And if professional authors and speakers don't offer value worth buying, then so be it. Similarly, if US developers don't offer enough value over low-cost outsourcing suppliers, then so be it. We'll just all be out of work, and we'll need to find other work that DOES have value. Alternately we'll end up like the steel workers from the 80's...

But I sense you are in this for the passion, just like me. And so I doubt you'd be happy doing anything else, and so you'll fight tooth and nail to avoid having your job outsourced - because the end result is that you couldn't program (other than as a hobby) and you'd live out a sad and bitter life. I know that's my case...

(Have you ever played the "what else would I do" game? Where you try to figure out what you'd do if you weren't programming? I do it quite often, and I never have an answer. There isn't another job out there that I want to do, where I think I'd get the satisfaction I get from what I do today.)

So for me, at least, it is even harder. Because I _love_ the technology. And I _love_ writing and speaking. So I'll fight tooth and nail to find ways to maintain my standard of living, put my kids through college and still be able to write and speak about technology.

Perhaps Paul's experiment isn't the right approach. But my guess is that he'll do quite well selling to the "9 to 5" crowd or whatever. They outnumber the passion-based developers by a huge ratio, and they often have better access to corporate funds.

Personally, I plan to experiment along a different line. I like the book model, but don't like the cost and time structure. Can I really justify updating my books for .NET 3.0? Can I really justify asking everyone to spend another $60 just a year after the .NET 2.0 books came out?

I don't think so. I don't think that's fair at all. And yet I am doing a lot of work, and putting in a lot of time, around getting my content (CSLA .NET, sample app, etc.) up to speed for .NET 3.0. There's no way I can justify spending that much time and effort for free.

This is the quandary I'm in anyway. And there are many possible solutions - the question is which is best overall.

I need to at least match what I would have made from going down the book route (because I really could do a .NET 3.0 version of my books). On a per-hour basis that's laughable, so honestly I'd rather find a more lucrative approach.

I could also do some sort of subscription thing, where I close off part of my web site or blog to paid subscribers. But that doesn’t fit with my world view. The content on my web site is for support of the books and CSLA .NET. The content on my blog is my editorial space. And neither of them are “professional” content imo.

So what I’m considering doing is writing “chapters”, and hiring editors and reviewers to work with me to make the content professional. And then selling those chapters on a per-unit basis.

At present my thinking is that for .NET 3.0, I may come out with a 3 chapter “mini-book”. Very much along the lines of my existing books, but more like a sequel – focused on WPF/WCF/WF. At $5/chapter the consumer cost is the same as if I did this in true book form, but you don’t need to repurchase the 12 existing chapters that are largely unaffected by .NET 3.0.

Will this experiment work? Beats me. But I hope so, because the book alternative doesn’t sit well with me – and I think wouldn’t sit well with all the people who’ve bought the existing 2005 books. And the other alternative is to take CSLA .NET commercial, and I’m not real sure I want to do that either – not in small part because I really do believe in the idea of community.

No offense taken Brian :) I fully understand getting passionate about ideas!

Yes, as I've said before, I think we are the canaries in the cage, and others will feel these same effects. Probably not everyone, but we can already see it affecting accounting, tax prep and even some financial analyst jobs. Any job that is primarily information-based is in trouble.

And to Dan's point, music is certainly another - and TV might follow as well.

The economists tell us that as these "expendable" jobs move away from us, that we'll all be able to find other jobs that can't move. But the only jobs that can't move are non-information-based. Things like construction, flipping burgers, road work, etc.

Even management or executives aren't really safe. Both these roles are almost entirely information-based, and so in the long run it would be a lot more cost-effective for shareholders to have a CEO that makes 15% of a US CEO. Of course the REAL rules at that level are entirely different - having more to do with buddy networks than with economics - so the idea of an outsourced CEO is probably just a dream... :)

My point is that the idea of all the information-related jobs moving away is not fun - because it means that the thing for which many of us have ultimate passion would not be a viable job.

I don’t think this is quite like the steelworkers from a few decades ago. OK, I’m sure a few steelworkers had passion for steel, but I’m equally sure that the vast majority got into that work because it was just work with a good paycheck. When steelwork collapsed the problem wasn’t that people LOVED their work, it was that they loved where they lived. They didn’t want to physically move, and so you had all those depressed towns.

But for us it really is that we LOVE the work. That we can’t imagine wanting to do anything else. That if we can’t program computers, we’d have to live like the rest of humanity – holding some job for the money it makes, and actually _living_ only when we’re not at work. Many of my friends are in this situation – working at day jobs (even good, well-paying ones), but doing so only because you gotta have a job to survive. Their _real_ life starts when work stops.

Now I fully realize that we, today, are the anomaly. That the idea of your job and hobby being one and the same has always been extremely rare. But this doesn’t mean that we should quietly give up this life, only to fade into the slow soul-death that is the normal workplace.

Nor do I think Mike’s #3 is a done deal. For a couple reasons.

First, though the interim is painful, the fact is that there’s an equalizing effect in terms of costs. India is slowly getting more expensive, and China will follow. In “The Lexus and the Olive Tree’, Friedman discusses this effect – how globalization will help the poorer countries of the world. What he refuses to acknowledge (but which I believe) is that, at least in the short term, this will depress and harm the US and Europe.

But the point is that people won’t work for cheap forever. You can see it today, as Indian workers scramble to get physically to the US – because they _know_ they are being exploited in India. They’ll accept that for a while, because it is better than what they had before, but I find it hard to believe they’ll accept the exploitation long-term.

Second, and more importantly, our industry has suffered from a serious stagnation in terms of innovation over the past couple decades, or at least 15 years. I’ve talked about this elsewhere (such as my recent css blog post); every time we get productive with a set of technology, we abandon it in favor of something where a text editor is the best tool available. What’s with that?!?

As soon as VB/Powerbuilder/Delphi got _really_ productive, we invented the web and started programming in notepad. We did this rather than tackling the one remaining issue facing client/server: deployment. Was this a net gain? What would life look like if we’d just solved the deployment issues for VB/Powerbuilder apps and kept that productivity?

ASP.NET 2.0 is close to VB3 levels of productivity. So after about 10 years of work, the web has us back to where we were in 1993. And this is progress?

Worse, the web is undergoing yet another revolution – css, AJAX and soon WPF/e. And don’t even get me started on WPF, because it is yet another example of “starting over with notepad”…

The point being that NONE of these “innovations” in the UI space, and nothing about RMI, Remoting or WCF, offer any productivity benefits. Oh sure, they are neat in their own ways, but they don’t offer even a multiplier effect in terms of productivity, much less an order of magnitude…

And that’s what we need – ideally an order of magnitude productivity gain.

Because the fact is that we _do_ have something to offer by being local vs remote. My brother runs a dev team that exists in the US, France, India and Japan. They do 24 hour development. And the overhead costs are HUGE, because the team is never awake at the same times, except for bi-monthly conference calls that rotate across the 24 hour clock so everyone has to be awake at 3 AM for a meeting a couple times a year (everyone gets screwed equally).

If we cut development costs by an order of magnitude (10x or more), then the decision process changes (from the business perspective). By being local, we offer the service of being in the same timezone, the same culture, speaking the same language – including body language as well as voice.

You can’t discount those last two. My brother has some amazing stories about culture differences, and how managing the Indian team is entirely different from managing the Japanese team. To ask each group to do work requires different sentence structures that match their cultural expectations. And of course both are different from what you’d find in the US. He lost over a month’s time by asking the Japanese team to do work by using US phrasing, and they nodded and said “yes”. But it turns out they were saying “yes I heard you”, not “yes we’ll do it”, and so they did no work…

My point is that there is _tremendous_ benefit to the business if local people do the work. But only if the overall cost is close.

The counter-argument here is that if we build tools that give a 10x productivity boost, that just makes outsourcing _more_ attractive. But that’s not true.

I think it is just like distributed computing. There’s an overhead cost to making a cross-network call, then there’s the work cost of actually doing the desired task. If you send two numbers over the network to be added, the overhead cost is WAY higher than the work cost, and so going across the network is silly. But in other cases the work cost is higher than the overhead, and so distributing the work makes sense.

The same is true here. If the work cost can become cheap enough, then the overhead cost of using remote resources will outweigh the work cost. At that point it becomes more cost effective to use a local (if more expensive) resource and avoid the overhead.

So I really do think there’s an answer, even in the near-term. And that is to achieve a productivity gain that is at least an order of magnitude.

Unfortunately it is _very_ clear that this isn’t coming from major vendors. Microsoft is building new technologies to do the same stuff we already do. And they are nice technologies, but there’s no order of magnitude in them (except maybe with software factories, DSLs and related concepts). IBM is all Java-happy – and there’s no order of magnitude to be found anywhere in the Java world either… Maybe Ruby on Rails is going the right direction, but I don’t know enough about it to say for sure.

Oh, and then there’s SOA – but that’s another one of those “back to notepad” technologies, so it doesn’t help – and probably hurts…

Not that getting this kind of productivity boost is easy. But it is necessary, and is (I think) the only way we (in the US/Europe) are going to be able to continue to do what we love.

Yes, I'm also a Thomas Friedman reader (I don't know if I'll say fan). I find his analysis thoughtful and easy to read. But I think he is overly optimistic, portraying the rise of the non-US economies as only a positive for the US worker...

I do think globalization will, in the long run, have a net positive effect on the economies of the world. But it is not at all clear to me that there will be a positive effect for US (or many European) people. Sure, the CEO types will rake in the cash, but nearly everyone beneath them is likely to be hurt by this shift in economic reality.

The industrial revolution is often held up as an example of where old jobs were destroyed, but the net result was positive - even for those who were displaced. The same is held for the information revolution, where industrial jobs were lost, but retraining allowed people to move to information work.

And that may all be true, but there's a key difference now. In both these previous revolutions, the job opportunities remained within a given geographic area. That area was local (for farming) and became somewhat regional (for industry). It then became national (for information). And now this new revolution (whatever it is called) expands the boundary to the global level.

So a farmer could send their kids to work in sweat shops in a city. The sweat shop worker could send their kids to work in a cube in a skyscraper. But it is far from clear where the kids of the cube workers will go...

The thing is, when the changes remain (relatively) localized, the new type of jobs help fuel the economy - in a way that affects normal people. Factory workers supported their farm-based predecessors. Info workers supported their industrial predecessors. All of them supported the surrounding retail and service workers.

But when the jobs move to another country, none of these side-effects occur. The offshore workers don't support the previous "generation" in the US. And neither they, nor the previous "generation" supports the retail or service workers in the US. So the end result, as I see it, is that wealth flows out of the US without any positive influence for most of us.

An economist would disagree. They'd point out that a lot of wealth DOES flow back into the US. Companies make more money with cheaper labor. But I am not a company, nor are most of you reading this. So what do we gain? Well, I imagine that if we start doing yard work for CEOs we'll do OK, or if you are in retail or a service job in close proximity to a number of CEOs you'll do OK. But if only the CEOs make money off this inbound flow of wealth then we have a problem...

And yet I remain optimistic. I guess primarily because I buy into the theory that the core of being an American is to adapt. To fight through difficulty, and to make necessary changes to win. These changes aren't always pleasant - look at the Oregon Trail, or the civil rights movements - but we've always had the will to take the hard road when necessary.

The hard road for our industry might actually be to adopt software factories. To adopt true productivity advances. To give up the micro-management of C# and VB and Java in favor of higher level abstractions.

The "horizontal" work, in my view, is work that requires good communication skill, good undestanding of local cultural realities.

The true COST of software is overhead. And that overhead is primarily design, development and testing. The analysis is not overhead - that is pure business, and it requires high levels of interactivity which have proven very hard to do remotely.

But think about a world in which you don't design software - the design is pre-determined by your tools. You don't really develop (as we understand it today), as much as assembly higher level "blocks" together to accomplish the goal. Was there multithreading? N-tier? Who cares. Worrying about that is overhead and will cost you your job. Unit testing is a thing of the past, because the units are pre-built. You just do integration testing to ensure the flow of your blocks are correct and away you go.

I'm not sure I like that future. But I can honestly say I like it a lot better than I like the idea of changing careers to work in construction, or becoming some CEOs lawn care specialist so he can pay me with all the money he made by sending my job overseas...