theReformed

Food for thought, something I would like to get feedback on, enviromental detachment from prosecuted activity. What do I mean by this? With the advent of technologies that we have today, it is becoming increasingly more standard/popular to telecommute taskings than to jointly, in communion, attack a project as a sole group of integrated professionals. Where does this lead us? Is everyone to become a 'freelance'… anything? Can a whole-team concept be effectively transmitted and sustained across wires, electrical circuits, fiber optics, microwaves and light energy for any extended period of time? Does this shift us into the next step in evolution of the wired/connected generation? Do the consequences gain as dramatic an impact when business decisions are corrupted, poorly executed or erroneous? The truths are, in my opinion, self-evident. Today's corporations alone farm out what is estimated at close to 35-40%+ of their workload to bolster their ROI (Return On Investment - you'll probably see me use this alot in my blog entries, so best to get used to the term). You see Dell vigorously integrating a callcenter in the Far East to sustain operations, cut overhead and multiply their dollar - but it is costing them customers in the process. IBM has sent thousands of project materials to Thailand, Japan, removing localized jobs in favor of bulk processing/production, but are being hammered by export restrictions. The US military/DoD significantly employs a contractor workforce that might just potentially grow to rival the amount of full-fledges government workers/service members there are, and in the case of the Predator drones, effectively deal calculated and precision devastation with the most minimal of collateral damage to a world terror network in a process/system that is a near-life mimic simulation relative to a video game you could and play on your XBox 360 at home! However, my question is, where is the net worth in not just the profits, but in the people? IS the workforce more cohesive in this pattern of development and evolution? Should we begin to expect that those of us that might incidentally have a job in the next 20 years, will be working those from the comfort of our car, on the beach or in our living room? Mind you, telecommuniting to work isn't a new concept, but it has never been as consuming as it is either, today, and was generally restricted to the most specialized of talented individuals over the past decade. This behaviour, surely, will feed the lackadaisical attitude that is being/has been fostered in our Generation MTVer, Xers and Yers. Isn't the workforce what defines the work ethics, trends and substance of what is truly meant to be a symmetrical, multi-faceted, communial, marketable and lastly profitable device? This is business — and significantly, it seems to me that our society is ever-so-furvently seeking ways to integrate laziness and idleness into the development process of their end-product/service. In some ways, this is also a "good" thing. We could take, for example, the fact that man has subtly produced this same effect in their code! How you say? I believe we've all heard of libraries, or a set of pre-defined functions that can be called to reduce the amount of overhead code to be compiled, benefitting runtime performance and substantially enabling modularization to the point where in some web applications alone, so see maybe 20 lines of code and a dozen libraries being called. We're always looking for a way to sidestep the work, it's built into human nature.