When I first decided I wanted to work as a programmer, I gave serious consideration to a trend that I wanted to make damn sure I could avoid as long as possible: outsourcing. One day, you have on the job experience, you may have even been a highly skilled and experienced worker, and the next your lifeblood becomes immediately unprofitable. Years of work and practice could vanish practically overnight.

While I think this race to the bottom for cheapest labor possible will eventually flatten out, I didn’t want to be stepping into a career where I would be starting at day zero of my experience at 40 or 50. I may think differently when I’m older.

I asked web developers I knew if they were concerned about being outsourced and largely, everyone seemed pretty confident they weren’t. There’s some obvious disadvantages to working with an outsourced programmer. Trying to coordinate communications across 12 or 13 time zones is a pain in the ass–nobody wants to be on a conference call at 5am or at night when they could be spending time with their family. Language barriers are always difficult to navigate and key elements about your project can fall through the cracks because of a miscommunication. Any money you save in hourly rates is lost to hours of productivity thrown down the drain.

While programming always feels like a very international industry, face to face business is still extremely important. In my opinion, I see a lot more get accomplished in a well organized meeting over some coffee than trying to keep tabs on an e-mail chain. It’s also good to look people in the eye when talking about deadlines. It’s also a lot easier to tell if someone is BS when you can see their face.

But interestingly enough, the reason why I’m most confident about not being outsourced is a simple fact I realized after beginning a job working with an incredible French programmer: programming is in English.

Look at this piece of Javascript, it doesn’t matter if you know JS or not:

$('.menu-item').hover(function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
$('.menu-hover', this).stop(true).animate({
top: '0px'
}, function(e) {
$(this).animate({
backgroundColor: 'white'
}, 'fast');

});

programmer and I still think it will be a tremendous skill to have in 2022. Whatever the world looks like then the web will be inevitably ubiquitous.