Should Programmers Be Protected With "Code Tariffs"?

Date: Thursday, March 20, 2003 3:38 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

This article deserves some serious thought, because if legislation
doesn't do something to stop the outsourcing of jobs, programmers will
become extinct in the USA. The issue of H-1B or L-1 aren't discussed,
and that's a serious over site. Tariffs won't work if a nonimmigrant
workers can go back and forth, and carry the software across borders.
Tariffs also won't help American programmers is nonimmigrants continue
to displace them.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,922627,00.asp

Should Programmers Be Protected With "Code Tariffs"?

March 7, 2003
By: Mark Hachman

In 1992, Edward Yourdon wrote "The Decline and Fall of The American
Programmer," describing the inevitability that software programming
jobs would begin heading overseas, following heavy manufacturing.

I began thinking about this while trying to chase down a tip I'd
received that Dell Computer had actually brought back most of its
tier-one tech support the guys that pick up the phone if you see smoke
rising from your Dimension inside its headquarters in Round Rock,
Texas. Previously, the firm outsourced most tech support calls to a
firm in India.

That tip failed to pan out, unfortunately; all I received for my
troubles was a rather snippy "no comment" a full day after I had left a
message on Dell's press line.

But you don't have to cruise the Slashdot forums much to see that
tech-support staffers aren't the only ones worried about jobs moving
overseas. Not only has the dot-bomb implosion put talented database
programmers, PERL wizards, and Linux jockeys out of work, but the
companies that do employ them are taking an even harder look at the
bottom line.

My personal view is that tech support is rather specialized work. If
you consider all of the people around the world who work with and
maintain PCs, then only a certain fraction of them will speak English
well enough to help out an American customer. Likewise, only a fraction
of all the programmers around the world speak English. But chances are
they all can program in C.

Really, what difference is there between a programmer in New Delhi and
one in New York? Chances are they'll both speak with accents; chances
are they'll work odd hours. A good outsourcing firm will hire project
managers that will be able to coordinate with and provide updates to
the client. Geographies shouldn't limit an employer's pool of available
programming talent.

That said, do we need to protect the American programmer? And how would
we do such a thing? Is the time ripe for "code tariffs"?

I don't know. But I do know that America doesn't actually "create" much
any more. We do a fabulous job of developing and protecting ideas,
especially trademarking concepts that may have been ripped from popular
folklore. (Yes, this means you, Disney.) We train lawyers to protect
those ideas.

Americans have been terrific at developing processes the assembly
line, just-in-time manufacturing, pizza delivery while trying to
wring more and more productivity from the labor that goes into these
processes. Southern California agriculture depends on low-paid, migrant
workers, and illegals that sneak across the border.

What would a programmer and Che Guevara talk about, I wonder? It might
be an interesting conversation.

And, for the programmer's sake, this conversation must take place soon.

Tariffs For Code

Tariffs protect unions, or organizations. And code isn't tied down to a
particular swatch of land. Steel, cars, and agricultural products are
subject to tariffs because American firms and their employees both
suffer when they can't compete with lower-priced imports. However, the
difference between "domestic" and "foreign" products diminishes when
code can be sent across the globe in microseconds.

Programmers, on the contrary, tend to be loners. They post to bulletin
boards, not billboards. And without a political movement, very little
will get done.

At some point, however, politicians may wake up to the fact that
outsourcing is worth roughly hundreds of billions of dollars,
worldwide; IT outsourcing is worth some fraction of that. This isn't an
H1B question; if a foreign national sneaks across the border and starts
coding SQL databases, chances are he'll still be trying to pay rent in
an American apartment. Jobs are being lost to people living in other
countries.

(Incidentally, I would have loved to cite an economic paper on the
subject, but a search of economic papers turned up nothing. Scholars,
get cracking! As far as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT) agreement is concerned, software programs are treated as
literary works in terms of copyright.)

One of the more immediate problems is that a tariff must be applied to
a measurable good in this case, code. That's a challenging problem in
and of itself. Today, it's almost impossible to prove that any raw text
is original without searching for a selected string of words in a
search engine. But let's suppose it could be done. Applying a tariff on
a per-character or per-byte basis might be possible, and would
encourage tighter code.

The insubstantial nature of code also poses another problem,
enforcement. Customs officials can hold goods at major ports. It
doesn't seem all that practical to force coders to publish a hard copy
of their work for U.S. inspection, when you think of all of the ways
information can be transmitted within the U.S.You think our borders are
porous? How about our cyberborders? The ".us" suffix isn't that much of
a deterrent. And the notion of a national firewall scares me.

I'm also not sure that this type of protectionism would be welcomed by
employers. Although I haven't viewed a typical outsourcing contract, I
assume that a typical U.S. firm buys the rights to the code as well as
the coding expertise. In this sense, tariffs would work against the
free market, and U.S. software contracts would have to be restructured.

But that might be the price to pay to protect programmers. The
solution? I see only one: pervasive digital rights management, IT's
answer to the nuclear age. Imagine an internationally-authorized
import-export code wrapper, wrapped around a file routed through a U.S.
Customs server on its way to a U.S. firm. While the contents of the
data package would remain encrypted, the server could audit the data
and apply the appropriate duty.

I admit that the system could easily be bypassed in a number of obvious
ways: embedding code on temporary web pages, bypassing restrictions
using peer-to-peer technology, even mailing a physical DVD-ROM. Perhaps
government code audits need to be added to the mix. Perhaps the
programmers need to step up themselves and start coding their own life
preservers.

But keep in mind that that model could be applied to other industries,
too. I suspect the RIAA would happily embrace the American programmer
if it meant solving the digital piracy problem.

So, to all the programmers out there is the American programming
profession in danger of becoming the 21st-century equivalent of burger
flipping? Is state-sanctioned DRM the answer? Is this the Pandora's box
you would want opened?

Copyright (c) 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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