Moving Up the Food Chain

I just finished reading this article about the jobless recovery. It's full of depressing quotes like these:

• There is still compelling evidence of a fundamental breakdown in the time-honored relationship between aggregate demand and employment.
• The bulk of the so-called hiring turnaround since August has been concentrated in either the contingent workforce (temps) or in those industry groupings that are least exposed to global competition.
• Jobs have continued to decline in manufacturing, the information sector (i.e., telecom, publishing, data processing, and broadcasting), wholesale distribution, and finance and insurance.
• Private sector payrolls are currently 7.4 million workers below the level that would have been implied 24 months into the average hiring-led recovery of the past.
• [Employers are] substituting longer work hours for hiring and then relying increasingly on low-wage outsourcing and temps to do the incremental staffing once existing workers hit physical limits.

I was discussing this article with some coworkers, when I had an idea.

Until now, I had assumed that the most obvious way to save my job, were it to become threatened, would be to take on my boss's job: engineering manager. I would be moving up the food chain, as it were. But I couldn't quiet the voice in the back of my head asking, "whom do you intend to manage if all the engineers are gone?" It seems likely that the manager would get outsourced the same as the engineers themselves.

So then, assume that the entire engineering department is outsourced. Someone's still got to tell them what to do, right? Someone has to come up with the ideas for all the new features, prioritize them, write requirements specifications, and so on. And who's that? Why, product management!

I had been assuming that moving up the food chain meant moving up the chain of authority. But it really means moving laterally, into the group of "people who program the programmers". Merely moving up the chain of command is like responding to the loss of farming jobs by starting your own farm, when you should have been opening a bakery.