Nothing new here. I find that the companies where this is most pronounced are the ones where management doesn't trust the employees and institutes all kinds of rules and systems to make sure the employees aren't "getting away" with anything. The employees then have the attitude that management is only giving them what they absolutely have to. So that's exactly what they give back. If programmers are the worst offenders it's probably just because they can afford to be (as the article infers).

If companies encouraged their programmers to innovate, trusted them to work hard, gave them incentives to make the company successful, and provided lots of training, I think you'd see productivity go way up. You may still need to send your most straightforward projects overseas. There just aren't enough talented programmers here to do everything.


>At the risk of getting majorly yelled at here - I see the point of the story - and probably agree from an overall industry view.
>
>I came up through "small business" - from a few employees to maybe twenty or thirty. When I went out contracting at some BIG (to remain unnamed) companies for awhile - I was flat out ASTOUNDED at the levels of non-performance that were not only accepted - but seemed to be the norm. And it wasn't just programmers - it was almost everybody! ... although the programmers may have been some of the worst. Tasks that I wouldn't have allowed a week to program in my own company were routinely spread across months (plural) - After a couple weeks (at my first job at one of these companies) I actually had to slow down - massively - because I was getting ahead of the pace the Proj Mgr had set and was handing specs out at - not to mention the "peer pressure" from both in-house programmers and other contractors not to "show off" - when I wasn't - I was just working along normally.
>
>Glad to be back working on my own again ,, although at a little less of a pace than I did 10 years, 40 lbs., 3 kids, and one blown knee ago! :-)
>
>Just an observation.
>
>Ken
>
>>Hmmmm.....IMHO, it's because what we're calling a "programmer" now and what we used to call one and what the Europeans call one are two different things. Some so-called programmers nowadays wouldn't have been given the job to sweep the floor in the IT shops of old.
>>
>>Our standards are declining, therefore, productivity declines.
>>
>>>http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/15/slacker.idg/