I spent 10 years working at GE before I left for SF and the startup world. I was a software engineer at a time when GE was shipping software engineering jobs to India to cut costs. The GE vision for software engineering was that of an assembly line, staffed by large quantities of low wage employees.
GE outsourced the majority of its technical jobs to offshore firms. I remember hearing a statistic that for every 1 GE employee in the technology department there were 4 offshore consultants. The role of GE employees in the technology department shifted from a technical skill-set to a managerial skill-set. Many of my co-workers had degrees in finance and marketing, and had never written a line of code in their life. The lack of technical expertise within the organization created what I would call a culture of fear, where people feared the software they managed because they didn't understand it.
The official term for offshore software engineers was GDC. I have no clue what the acronym stood for, but over time it certainly become a derogatory term. I remember being mocked by my co-workers for writing code and being nicknamed a GDC (as in, why would you do the work we pay people pennies to do). It was almost like a caste system within the company, where these GDC employees were low paid and looked down upon by many.
The offshore model certainly was ineffective and the result of employee discontent, however, the practice was continued and mandated at the executive level. Then the economy crashed. GE decided it was finally time to bring jobs back to the US and hire software engineers. Why? Because they were able to take hundreds of millions in federal tax subsidies from US tax payers. (As an aside, someone mentioned GE moving its HQ to Boston to be closer to engineering talent. Taxes are still the main driver here)
GE soon began hiring US software engineers at a number of designated centers where they were segregated from the rest of the company. The interesting thing is that culturally these employees were largely treated like their GDC predecessors. The perception of software engineers being low-wage assembly line employees was, in my opinion, just too engrained into the company culture.
So when GE describes this transformation to a software company, I believe the most important aspect of this transformation will be changing the company culture and employee attitudes toward software engineers. They will need to undo a decade long effort to turn engineering into an assembly line.
"GE soon began hiring US software engineers at a number of designated centers where they were segregated from the rest of the company."
That still seems to be the plan: "The San Ramon complex, home to GE Digital, now employs 1,400 people. The buildings are designed to suit the free-range working ways of software developers: open-plan floors, bench seating, whiteboards, couches for impromptu meetings, balconies overlooking the grounds and kitchen areas with snacks." There are pictures on the GE Digital site. What you don't see are workbenches with electrical products hooked up to computers. They're not doing embedded software.
This has an impact on product design. The GE Digital site says: "One million terabytes per day … that’s how much data Predix will process by 2020." They're thinking "big data", where all this stuff is shipped to the "cloud" for later analysis. The alternative would be digesting it near the source and only sending in the interesting stuff. They're going to collect gigabytes of "Bearing 22 temp 18 C", which is only important if the value is out of normal range or shows a trend.
The alternative would be some smartphone-sized device which listens to the data from your turbine or jet engine and finds the good stuff. But that wouldn't justify expensive cloud services, fees, meetings, etc. Even if it did exactly the same thing, GE couldn't collect huge fees for a smartphone-sized analysis device.
This explains the awkward "I just got a cool software engineering job at GE" commercials that have been airing on TV. I was wondering who they were targeting with these ads. It sounds like they might be targeting their own employees.
I think the experience that you describe is quite typical for lots of the enterprises that have started with pure mechanical or electrical products and at some point of time needed to incorporate software. For lots of them software engineering is a third class citizen that is not understood, trivialized and outsourced.
I know lots of examples from the automotive industry that sound exactly like that, and I'm sure it's not that different in other industries.
However most of these companies are slowly getting to the point where they understand that software is crucial for the future and that it's a major (and not a very minor) component. But it might still take some time until they can offer a good working atmosphere for software engineers.
you also see excessive standardization and commoditization of software in these industries... institutionalize incrementalist thinking that slows progress and eventually makes all the participants vulnerable to outside disruption.
I don't know if it was your division or not but if you were working on ifix software for hmis I can see why this approach didn't work well. Absolute trash software. Not that rockwell's offerings are any better.
GE outsourced the majority of its technical jobs to offshore firms. I remember hearing a statistic that for every 1 GE employee in the technology department there were 4 offshore consultants. The role of GE employees in the technology department shifted from a technical skill-set to a managerial skill-set. Many of my co-workers had degrees in finance and marketing, and had never written a line of code in their life. The lack of technical expertise within the organization created what I would call a culture of fear, where people feared the software they managed because they didn't understand it.
The official term for offshore software engineers was GDC. I have no clue what the acronym stood for, but over time it certainly become a derogatory term. I remember being mocked by my co-workers for writing code and being nicknamed a GDC (as in, why would you do the work we pay people pennies to do). It was almost like a caste system within the company, where these GDC employees were low paid and looked down upon by many.
The offshore model certainly was ineffective and the result of employee discontent, however, the practice was continued and mandated at the executive level. Then the economy crashed. GE decided it was finally time to bring jobs back to the US and hire software engineers. Why? Because they were able to take hundreds of millions in federal tax subsidies from US tax payers. (As an aside, someone mentioned GE moving its HQ to Boston to be closer to engineering talent. Taxes are still the main driver here)
GE soon began hiring US software engineers at a number of designated centers where they were segregated from the rest of the company. The interesting thing is that culturally these employees were largely treated like their GDC predecessors. The perception of software engineers being low-wage assembly line employees was, in my opinion, just too engrained into the company culture.
So when GE describes this transformation to a software company, I believe the most important aspect of this transformation will be changing the company culture and employee attitudes toward software engineers. They will need to undo a decade long effort to turn engineering into an assembly line.