Book Review: My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job

by Richard Mateosian

My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job

Chad Fowler
Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh NC, 2005, 196pp, ISBN 0-9766940,
www.pragmaticprogrammer.com , $19.95

(Editor's note: A version of this review first appeared in the
Jan/Feb 2006 issue of IEEE Micro, C 2006 IEEE.)

This book was written for programmers by a programmer, but much of what it says applies equally to technical communicators.

Chad Fowler is a programmer who has lived and worked in both India and
America as an employee of large multinational companies. Like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), Fowler says that the way for U S workers to contend with a global marketplace in information technology is to take steps, individually and as a country, to make themselves more competitive. This book focuses on the steps that workers can take individually.

Incidentally, Ed Miracle, the painter who created the original cover art
(dropped in later editions because of a copyright dispute) for Tom
Friedman's The World Is Flat, has just brought out another delightful
lithograph called Intelligent Design. It is subtle and should not offend
people on either side of that controversy. You can order it from
www.miraclesart.com .

Fowler does not bash Indian workers. He admires their hard work and
determination. Friedman, delighting in a pun and a cultural statement,
offers approaches to make you untouchable. Fowler does not have Friedman's global view, but he is far more knowledgable than Friedman about the everyday realities of working in the information technology industry. Like Friedman, he knows that American workers cannot compete solely on price. He offers 52 short but detailed ideas about how to compete globally.

While Fowler's book is informed by his experiences in India and America,
much of his advice would have been just as valid twenty years ago. The boom in information technology leading up to 2000 made it easy for American workers to ignore the fundamentals and still do well. This book calls for a return to fundamentals. Fowler wants you to view your career as an exercise in creating and selling a product. To be successful at this you must choose your marketplace, then invest in, build, and market your product.

The first 41 of Fowler's 52 ways to save your job tie directly to these four
tasks. The remainder are along the lines of Stephen Covey's seventh habit in The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (Simon & Schuster, 1989): sharpen the saw. That is, they help you keep your edge.

Fowler recognizes that collaboration is a key competency for anyone who
wishes to compete in the global marketplace. He berates the fears that make some American workers reluctant to share their wisdom with their Indian counterparts. Companies that have such internal distrust between their American and Indian teams are less effective, and ultimately less
successful, than companies in which the teams work together.

Fowler's 52 essays are down to earth and uncompromising. You can't make
things better if you don't assess the current state of affairs honestly.
Most essays conclude with a list of ways to act on what you learned. These
are small but important tasks. You can accomplish them in a reasonable
length of time, and they take you outside the daily routine that can lead to
long term decline.

For example, in one of his essays Fowler points out that even if you are on
the bleeding edge of the current wave, you're probably behind on the next
one. The action item at the end of that essay calls for you to carve out two
hours each week to research new technologies and start to develop skills in
them.

Another example is an essay in which Fowler points to the open source
movement as a model for solving many of the collaboration problems that
arise within multinational teams. The action item at the end of that essay
is to get involved in an open source project to help you learn how to
collaborate.

Fowler calls The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
(Addison-Wesley, 1999) a catalyst for his career. The current book follows
that excellent model in providing a pragmatic approach to dealing with
globalization. You should read it.