> ...and loved to say our jobs were going to India.
They weren't wrong, though; they just omitted delimiting that assertion.
Back in those dark ages, mainframe jobs were still considered by career "experts" the "adult in the room" jobs of programming. It is hard to convey to people who never studied that era or grew up in that era just how much microprocessor-based computers were considered "not real computing" in vast swathes of the industry. The proprietary Unixes thrived under that lay perception, as a "serious business" microprocessor-based computers market segment.
And the mainframe jobs did by and large up and wholesale decamped to India from large chunks of the mainframe account base. Those career experts were right in a way.
Just not quite the way they thought. The scope they thought in was too absolute because they lacked the technical (and business, and financial...) perspective and context to understand why the same wouldn't happen to quite the same extent to sectors outside mainframes, nor of the explosion of re-invention of the wheel of many mainframe tech stacks that would drive the industry forward even to this day and beyond, along with the rapid recombination of new ideas.
They weren't wrong, though; they just omitted delimiting that assertion.
Back in those dark ages, mainframe jobs were still considered by career "experts" the "adult in the room" jobs of programming. It is hard to convey to people who never studied that era or grew up in that era just how much microprocessor-based computers were considered "not real computing" in vast swathes of the industry. The proprietary Unixes thrived under that lay perception, as a "serious business" microprocessor-based computers market segment.
And the mainframe jobs did by and large up and wholesale decamped to India from large chunks of the mainframe account base. Those career experts were right in a way.
Just not quite the way they thought. The scope they thought in was too absolute because they lacked the technical (and business, and financial...) perspective and context to understand why the same wouldn't happen to quite the same extent to sectors outside mainframes, nor of the explosion of re-invention of the wheel of many mainframe tech stacks that would drive the industry forward even to this day and beyond, along with the rapid recombination of new ideas.