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.