The global competitions in high-tech products and services and becoming stronger than ever. Many tasks, such as engineering and manufacturing, which were originally done mostly in western countries are now being out-sourced to the east. Transportation is cheap enough that the cost to ship goods from overseas to western consumers can still be more economic than producing them domestically. High-tech business in western countries are at risk.
A Whole New Mind
I am reading a book called “A Whole New Mind” from Daniel H. Pink, who argues that right-brain thinking, or the abilities to solve problems in a holistic, artistic, and humanized perspectives, rather than solely focusing on the technical, logical thinking and analytical skill, may provide insights to such question.
Technical skills are becoming easier to replace than ever. Because of their advancement of higher education, manufacturing experience and design quality, India and China are becoming the logical choices for companies that are trying to lower their product research and development cost in order to remain competitive in the global market. Characteristics of the western engineers, such as accuracy, reliability and attention in details, can now be achievable from their Asian counterparts. Also since the cost to hire these Asian engineers is low, the companies afford more of them.
Secondly, computer power, network speed and technology are advancing in breath-taking speed. Many tasks considered uneconomic and inefficient today will become cheap to achieve in the next year. We can almost reliably expect technology breakthroughs to happen in an annual basis if not shorter, which will make your craziest business ideas today to come true very soon. In other words, the importance to optimize your software and product engineering is diminishing. You can use many easy to learn, high-level scripting tools, without worrying about the computer resources overhead, and still create very usable products.
Therefore, we cannot compete just at the engineering level anymore. Instead of engineering isolated hardware and software products, we should offer holistic solutions that cater the whole customer experience. When designing a solution, we have to think about the big picture, the context, graphical presentation, interactive technology, customer support, future development and maintenance, community management, and many more. The tasks should not be divided and assigned to individuals who work in their own silos and not communicating with each other. Everybody should participate and contribute their ideas. Better yet, those who can master the usage of both their left brain (technical, analytical, engineer’s mind) and the right brain (creative, artistic, empathetic, contextual mind) will be successful.
I am not planning to be a software developer for life. What I want to be is an “artistic geek”, or “technical designer”. Seems oxymoron?
No related posts.
