The New Assembly Line

Data warehouse IT experts abound at the Bay Area office of the Bank I work in. Traditionally they have been organized in teams of several people supporting a business application. Many have deep knowledge of the complex application programs in their area; often they are Bank systems veterans of 10+ years. The work is challenging and interesting as they shepherd technical projects from initial problem statements through design, coding, testing, and finally, implementation.

A major reorganization hit our office this week (excluding me, I report to another department). The whole group was moved to the Consumer Bank, which is heavy into outsourcing. This was no simple reorg - it was also a functional reorganization. The programmers were given functional assignments: initiative work (new projects); production support; or testing.

Gone is the challenge of having project responsibility from start to finish. Instead, production support people will only do break/fix support; testing people will only write testing scripts for the offshore testers; initiative people will take projects through the initial stages, but not do any testing. It's the Henry Ford assembly line model for the computer field.

It's also a recipe for taking the joy out of work. I know another programmer that was reorganized into the production support model a couple months ago. Although a Java expert and someone that knows his application backwards and forwards, he's not allowed to make any new enhancements. His job is restricted to fixing anything that breaks. Well, Web applications can be fairly well behaved, so he mostly sits around trying to figure out things to do.

I suspect though this won't last long. Production support and testing - these roles will not support California salaries. India will soon be here to put them out of their misery. Realigning by functional role merely prepares the calves for the slaughter.

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