Back in the days that I was in college doing a module on translation technology, one of our lecturers talked about a concept of the “green dream”, particularly with respect to translators; how being connected to data communications service would make it possible for you/anyone to export translation services to anywhere in the world because printing stuff would no longer be necessary; you could just email it. I should note that this predates the time when 56K modems were de rigueur and every house had a Gateway computer.
Anyway, for reasons which I won’t go into, a lot of interesting blog thingies are turning up in my life. Blogs about being a freelance webdesigner, freelance writer, freelance programmer. All those good things. The latest of them is this one. To be honest, I haven’t looked too much into the idea of freelance programming distributed although I know a few people who do it from Ireland for customers that are a a few thousand miles and timezones away. It’s a nice set up in some respects if you can get it; albeit not without its disadvantages. Most people I know want home to be separate from work.
One of the points made by a commenter to the piece above related to the fact that the original writer liked the global possibilities offered by distributed programming, but the project itself wanted to hire people who were located in New York. Only. Which, given that the piece is lauding distribution across five states is odd enough. Someone else was unhappy at the thought that programming work for US companies could be distributed outside the US via this sort of distribution.
On balance, while I can understand the frame of mind that creates that concern, the other way of looking at it is if you’re in the US, you can fight for the right to work from the US for customers elsewhere, like Europe, for example. As in, you can offer competition, not suffer it.
It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I consider things like 1) infrastructure in Dublin and 2) property prices in Dublin and 3) current job opportunities.
We have a government who apparently are interested in the whole knowledge economy thing. We have a way of doing things in Ireland that leans to the centralisation. We have a management mindset as well that doesn’t always recognise the benefits of distributed working areas.
If we are to get this right, we need to change the way we think about work and how we value it. We have all sorts of tools that could allow us to distribute work around the country, not just in incubator locations in Dublin and Dundalk for example. One of the key benefits of the construction boom was that it removed the necessity for internal migration for a while. It was not a sustainable way of doing it; but we could turn the entire country into a development island if we were forward thinking enough about it. And we could take some high quality development and design work into the country. According to Dublin City Council, the creative industry is worth a few billion to the city and to support it they have set up an organisation to foster it and new entrants. It’s called Creative D and it also provides links to the same industry elsewhere.
A key requirement for this is obviously comms infrastructure. UPC are getting there slowly. Eircom are 10,000 miles behind. I’m stating this on the grounds that I’ve just ordered 30Mb broadband from upc and will be cancelling 8Mb from eircom. But we need to reassess the education system also.
In a way, I think there’s a social tendency to fear change upfront. Our education system while it works, does not work well enough. And our way of approaching it is too regimented. It lacks imagination. We generalise education too far – up to about age 12. We are not effectively teaching numeracy or communications skills. And we don’t value work creatively. A lot of working in Ireland – not just in Ireland as it happens – is perception over reality. Working to the clock and less to the job. All this needs to be adjusted if we distribute a lot of work that could generate export credit and benefit the trade balance country wide.
The original Celtic Tiger – I hate that term – happened because we invested in a future that offered some potential. We killed it when we refused to face the economic reality of an economy that was growing on consumer spending and property driven credit. We are going to have to face some imagination again. Identify a different way of doing business and working it. And this time, instead of going for the quick buck, go for the long buck.
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