Book Review: My Job Went To India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book)
[ Posted by Urban Hafner ]
by Chad Fowler
As the title might suggest this book is about offshoring of IT jobs. Though the offshoring is just the linchpin to tell you that your job is not as save as it used to be and that you actually have to do something to keep it.
It’s divided into 6 parts (the text in italics are my additions):
- Part I – Choosing Your Market (realize that you have to do something)
- Part II – Investing in Your Product (what to learn and how)
- Part III – Executing (do something)
- Part IV – Marketing … Not Just for Suits (marketing yourself)
- Part V – Maintaining Your Knowledge (don’t get too comfortable)
- Part VI – If You Can’t Beat ‘Em (you can’t hold offshoring up, so embrace it)
Each part is further subdivided resulting in 52 chapters. Each chapter is two or three pages long and talks about a specific topic. When applicable the chapters end with a small section about what you can do about this specific issue.
This style makes the book remarkably like the Pragmatic Programmer, which is not so surprising when you think about that the authors of the Pragmatic Programmers are the publishers of this book. Just like it the book gives you little snippets of knowledge that you can work on separately and that put together can have a huge impact. Also like the Pragmatic Programmer you have to revisit many of the chapters more than once to actually achieve what’s described therein.
So if your are ambitious about your job and want to keep it, get this book and start investing in your career. Or one day someone else might come around who has done it.
