Indian CEO Says Most US Tech Grads "Unemployable" 1144
theodp writes "When questioned about his firm's US hiring, Information Week reports that Vineet Nayar, the CEO of the Indian outsourcing giant HCL Technologies, showed he can stereotype with the best of them, telling an audience in NYC that most American tech grads are 'unemployable.' Explaining that Americans are far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology, the HCL chief added that most Americans are just too expensive to train. HCL, which was reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft last April, gets a personal thumbs-up from Steve Ballmer for 'walking the extra mile.' Ballmer was busy last week pitching more H-1B visas as the cure for America's job ills at The National Summit."
Move Microsoft to India (Score:2, Insightful)
If Americans are unemployable.... (Score:5, Insightful)
enjoy capitalism (Score:1, Insightful)
The entire cause for these outsourcing problems is capitalism. The endless drive to increase the bottom line means that businesses no longer concern themselves with ethics or morality. They cross borders to find the cheapest labor possible. They find out how to deliver the bare minimum for the maximum possible return.
These are all tenets of modern business.
They take for granted their endless supply of customers. The simple way to deal with this is to boycott companies who outsource.
Let management, sales, and any representative know that you don't like a company who won't hire US workers. Write your congresspeople to let them know that Americans jobs are more important to you than corporate profits.
There has to be a balance. When corporate entities decide profit is more important than people, whatever side of the counter they're on, they need to be dealt with the American way; with your wallets. Vote with your wallets. Let them know we don't like their way of doing business. Though they'll probably lobby congress to pass laws to force you to do business with them, and they'll sue anyone who uses the competitor. Welcome to the new American century.
HCL Ha Ha (Score:5, Insightful)
I know there is going to be a lot of flak directed at HCL.
But unfortunately HCL is not the only monkey around.
I live in India, and have a lot of friends working in such companies (Infosys, Wipro, HCL, TCS etc., etc.,)
These service companies have lot of PR support due to feeding poor kids meals blah blah (you get the philantrophy angle, right?)
However beneath the facade lurks pure evil.
Firstly these are service companies. they bill clients by the hour. Which then brings us to their processes and employees.
Innovation and smart working is discouraged, and the training given is "how to bill maximum hours" and "how to fool the client into believing you are working".
So these drones are taught how not to work smartly, how not to do more with less time. you get tonnes of reports tones of meaningless slides to fool the clients, who are anyways willing to get fooled.
But kid yourself not, same is the case with US based service companies also, but with service companies a smaller percentage in US(except in Law area), things don't seem obvious.
But Indian IT has become a service economy with drones. Drones who are dumb "copy paste" coders.
I am in a product company, and often we get software engineers with 10 years of "coding" experience who do not know how to use regular expressions. Infact in their job, they would do a manual search and replace, because they can bill more hours to client.
Such practices actually make hiring intelligent engineers bad, They want drones.
Till few years back, when product companies were unheard of in India, many people migrated off-shore. Nowadays the drain has stemmed, but with lots of money coming in, even good engineers are flocking to this circus, and the whole place is a mess.
Now why do Amercian comanies like to get screwed? Well the managers there can justify their paychecks more readily if tonnes of drone like reports and jargon filled meaningless data is thrown around in board meetings.
your PHBs love these drones. They work for 14 hours a day at half the cost. OTOH, an intelligent enginner will work for 4 hours finish the work, and charge double. How will they boast that they have a cheap engineer working for 14 hours a day?
Now Microsoft loves these companies very much. Because they promote windows, and in their advertisements, boast about better performance and all that BS. The public here trusts these guys. Wow CEO used to clean his own toilet. Woweee!
They go to these fund raisers, do hoop haa about poor kids, give a few hundred dollars to a charity, and they are the ambassadors of good will.
The dark side is brushed under the carpet.
Whats not told is that number of hours each employee spends at his/her desk is counted. Every time you go in your wing, your clock starts ticking.
Every time you go out, clock stops.
Companies like Accenture India division make employees sign on bonds that they are willing to work 12 hours a day. Its all a circus, and the American PHBs love their circus animals.
Who suffers. Grads in the US, and engineers like us who have so limited options in India. Moreover our reputation suffers. We are clubbed "Indian engineers are not intelligent".
On the plus side product companies are growing, but on the downside most of these have these drones who cannot unlearn what the service industry taught them?
Ever wonder why India does not have companies like Intel, Lenovo, Huawai emerging, but only subsidiaries and service drones?
Well I just gave you your answer.
It works both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
There was a time America used to peddle stuff all over the world and insist on free trade. Now Third world countries are peddling their labor and insisting on free trade. Karma, what goes around, comes around!
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether you agree with the outcome or not, foreign labor has helped to reduce the price of many of the goods and services that westerners rely on every day. India has allowed us to save $0.05, $5, $50, maybe $500 on a consumer goods at the cost of our manufacturing base.
The reason your typical Dell computer costs $400 is because they can ship part of the costs of support out to India. The same is true of big-box retailers like Walmart selling t-shirts and teapots cranked out in Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian factories for substantially less than local boutiques like American Apparel that sell US-made goods. Part of what you're paying for is branding, distribution chain inefficiency, fashion, etc. but it's important not to discount the labor cost--no matter how small--because that's all part of the race to the bottom.
If you don't like outsourced IT for any reason--"I don't like China's stance on Tibet" is as good a reason as "I find their accent makes resolving a problem over the telephone difficult"--then don't buy from companies that use it. You'll probably have to pay more for it, but nobody said having principles and sticking to them wouldn't require some sacrifices. Chances are good you'll find it's not as expensive as you think and a lot of times you'll end up with a better product/service because of it.
The masses have spoken: saving a few bucks is worth it. If you don't like it--vote with your dollars and encourage your friends and family to do the same. Arguing for government regulation so that american workers don't' have to be competitive is ridiculous. Screaming nonsense like "India hasn't done a damned thing for the USA" is rediculous when you consider the role workers in developing nations play in producing the products that fuel every aspect of our lives.
Hahaha, Six Sigma *snort* (Score:1, Insightful)
His complaint about American college grads is that they aren't trained in bullshit corporate feel-good busywork initiatives like Six Sigma? I take his rejection as a compliment. While his robotically obedient employees are busily documenting their processes, American college grads will be inventing the technology they'll be adopting 5 years from now.
Re:Move Microsoft to India (Score:3, Insightful)
The US created these industries without massive immigration
We must be thinking about two separate versions of 'the US' because the one I know today consists of 99.9% people with migration background.
Personally, I think the man is right. In light of what Indians are willing to do for less money, of course Americans are unemployable. Vice versa you could also say that Americans are just not willing to be enslaved the way Indians are. So his whole statement becomes rather relative, doesn't it?
The Problem is that we keep being willing to receive our support from Indians and other foreign countries. Since EMEA support from HP moved to Sofia, I literally HATE to call them up. Not because those people are unwilling to help or rude about it. No, they are perfectly fine people. But the fact remains that there's a language barrier between us. The whole process has become that much more bureaucratic and time-consuming.
It's funny, though (not haha-funny but rather innat sad-funny) how even HP Switzerland is powerless against HP America's management. They are shaking their heads just as much as we are.
Another funny thing, IMO, is that somehow, back then when they still had their own techies and didn't outsource them all for worse pay and more hours, their bottom line actually looked better, didn't it? Isn't HP struggling much more today than it was around 1990? Now, I'm not implying that correlation equals causation, but one should think that point through, I think.
Americans are unemployable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ORLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
The last code delivered by Infosys was functional... but had to be ripped back out of production.
The next bit of code didn't follow any of our published standards. It took several days to fix the obvious problems, then it got booted out of testing for a week's corrections.
They used to be a lot better back in 2003.
The biggest problem right now is that they won't say "no" to management about anything. Insanely crazy schedules-- "Sure, we can meet that". Grossly abbreviated testing... "Okay- we can mitigate that risk".
I think most of the super sharp guys are now management there. The actual coders are now getting down to low experience yes men/women who are not as clever and rush things without following standards.
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
My observations. (Score:5, Insightful)
On one level, that may be true. There are a lot of people who think that College is supposed to be the same as a tech school. They go to college expecting to be trained for a specific career. Some colleges have begun to oblige and are acting like the trade schools that some students (and parents) expect them to be.
If you've only been trained in retreading tires, you don't know how to mount a new tire on the rim and balance it. When the CS requirements of some schools consist of "MS Office" in three different sections, how in the fuck do they expect their grads to know anything?
Now, on the other hand there are plents of schools who are giving real and complete tech educations. These people are constantly getting screwed by employers who give up after interviewing a few of the other kind of student.
Lastly you have the tech executives who want nothing more than to lower costs. They want the cheapest labor, and nothing else. They are pushing to raise the H1B caps. They are pushing for outsourcing. It has nothing to do with the quality of US grads. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that they want to pay people less money. If I spend 6 years in college and have a Master's degree, you can kiss my ass with your $35k offer. The guys right off the boat from Bombay will be willing to take that sort of job. They don't have $50-200k in student loans to pay back. It's basic economics. What this glut is doing is providing a greater supply of labor in order to drive down prices.
If you're the only plumber in your town, you can charge pretty much whatever you want. No one else has the skills, knowledge or tools to do that work. What happens if overnight four more plumbers come to town? Instead of being able to charge $75 per hour, you may have to cut back to $50. What happens if ten more plumbers come to town? You'll suddenly find yourself working for minimum wage. That's what certain executive-types are trying to do to technology.
LK
Unemployable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps Mr. Nayar should stop beating around the bush and just state the reasons why he thinks Americans are unemployable:
Americans enjoy running water.
Americans don't want to live in a small mud hut with their whole extended family.
Americans don't want to work 80 hours a week on slave wages with no overtime.
Americans have a higher cost of living in regards to just about everything.
Americans usually need cars to function in American society.
Americans want to have 72"+ LED backlit LCD TVs.
Managers don't get bonuses for hiring Americans.
I personally think that every job should have a wage that a person can live off of, "unskilled" or "skilled". If you want to see something funny, hand a CEO a floor buffer and watch him fumble about with it.
Re:enjoy capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the problem with corporations is the same as the problem with copyright.
Both were created for the public good- not for the private good.
The primary stakeholders in each has lost sight of the fact that their special privileges were created for the public good.
When it gets bad enough, those rights can be taken back.
Pay peanuts (Score:4, Insightful)
...get code monkeys.
I wonder what he earnt this year? I would say that a rich overpaid CEO complaining that people won't accept a sub-standard wage are the epitome of hypocrisy and greed. I'm surprised he's not whining that good slaves are hard to find.
What a crock of shit (Score:5, Insightful)
In the long run these companies are going to learn the hard way that paying an out sourced developer who has a 3 month class in C will get you nowhere near a developer with a CS degree in terms of quality, functionality, and efficiency.
Re:If Americans are unemployable.... (Score:5, Insightful)
when I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense even to the Indian staff that's stateside?
Umm.. because it's written by programmers? :)
Seriously, this is standard no matter what the nationality.
Re:enjoy capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Vote with your wallets
This will never work. Just like businesses, most people care about their bottom line. Any Midwestern autoworker would sign under your post, and yet look at their spending habits outside of buying (heavily discounted) American cars. I bet they don't think twice about buying the cheapest jeans or kitchenware made in china while shopping at some mega retailer.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Insightful)
India has not done a damned thing for the USA
Uh, except for all the coding and tech support they're doing for us. Yeah, this kind of crap hurts when you hear it from this class of a guy that may very well control your future employment options, to at least some degree. But, I'd say their coding has done plenty for the USA... just ask the managers who have outsourced there. You don't like that comment? Does it enrage you? Well, then that's an emotional reaction and I'd say it's misleading you.
:)
/. libertarian audience gets all antsy for government protection with regards to outsourcing. Should individuals take care of themselves and should society have as much freedom as possible or not? Ultimately, in 20 years, I think we're going to have a partner in India that we will be very happy to have, particularly with the rise of China. We'll also have such a depreciated dollar, and the Indian talent will be relatively scarce, we will reach a parity, and all boats will rise.
Economies are prosperous when they're efficient. They're efficient when the most work gets done with the least amount of cost. If going to India makes tech more efficient, the USA as a whole prospers. Does this hurt our feelings as geeks? Yes... hell yes. But you know what? I think I'm a better value than an Indian employee, and I think I can prove it (and I think I am proving it, along with many other IT folks here). Every single country that has shut itself to trade has suffered.. every.. single.. one. Why should we be any different - we obey the laws of macro-economics in this country!
I find it a little too convenient when the
Re:It works both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
You didn't "got stupid", it's just that your industry had grown so much that the internal market alone could not sustain further industrial growth.
Re:India: The skrypt kiddies of programming (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you hire the leftovers? Really, you think that you can just get better quality by spending less? Really?
Here's the deal: Manager X tells their boss that they can save the company millions of dollars by sacking US IT staff and sending the work to India.
When the software comes back from the Indian sweat-shop it's a steaming pile of sacred cow shit, but by that time Manager X has got big brownie points, a big bonus and a promotion and doesn't have to deal with it. Now the problem is dumped in the hands of Manager Y and the few US IT staff who are still left at the company.
This is just another example of the perverse incentives in Western business which gave us delights such as the credit crash, where bankers could make multi-million dollar bonuses by lending billions to people who never had any chance of paying the money back... of course they wouldn't have to repay their bonuses when the loans went bad, and the government would bail out the banks anyway.
Ownership (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ORLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
This is part of the problem with the kind of short term "thinking" that a lot of the MBAs who decide to outsource a lot of this stuff engage in. They don't realize and/or don't care that paying 1/3 of what it would cost to write it here is actually more expensive in both "money cost" and missed opportunity (which is often the *really* big price that causes a lot of companies to go under) when you have to do it several times over before you get something close to usable.
Instead, they tend to see things more like this: "I cut our expenses by x%. I want a bonus. Now let me find another place to work before this decision catches up with me."
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:anecdotal, but (Score:2, Insightful)
It depends who you deal with of course; but yes, generally I've found outsourced teams have no real innovation, you need to specify everything point by point, they don't want to go off on their own and solve problems.
However that's nothing compared to the "I deserve a good job and large salary" attitude endemic in US graduates. If anything their attitudes are worse because very few (of the ones I've dealt with) are taught to think for themselves either, but worse, they actually believe they know it all. Most US (and UK) degrees suck - they teach outmoded practices, bad design skills and very little that is useful, but the graduates believe that they know the right way and don't listen and don't want to learn.
Slashdot posters (or stack overflow posters, or any other real technical forum) are a rarity, we're generally here to learn, to discuss, and we don't mind too much about hanging our ignorance out for others to correct. Those are the people you want to employ, regardless of where they come from - but the US education system does not produce those, it produces people with unrealistic expectations and people who believe they no longer need to learn.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the thing--- it hasn't.
Drugs-- $5.00 here, $0.10 there .50 at the local markets-- but $2.49 full copyrighted retail).
DVD's-- $19.99 here, $2.49 there (and in reality about
Clothing-- $1 or less there--- $19.99 here.
There is *no* reason the clothes, drugs, movies, songs, etc. etc. should have that extreme of a price difference.
In a normal capitalistic society, we would be allowed to buy the 10 cent pills there and import them here and resell them for 20 cents.
We have all this dvd regionalized shit, and protected trade zones, and other restrictions on free trade.
Our declining wages would not matter so much if we really were getting the benefits of free trade.
But the wealth here is literally being pumped out of the country- and the jobs too.
Name an "Indian" project that went well (Score:4, Insightful)
"master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology"
Ha!
I myself have worked for large outfits and many in my family work for large outfits. My experience and that of my loved ones is that working with Indian companies is a guarantee for disaster. Recently my sister witnessed a $50 million project being trashed. The problem is that Indian IT companies usually limit themselves to implementing exactly what you specify. Or, if you ask for an analysis, they let a bloated system emerge. Unless you work for a CMMI level 4 company this attitude is next to useless.
People that master "tech process and methodology" wind up being slaves to "quality". Quality as in "meticulously following the procedures." As more than 90% of businesses don't really have quality in place -or at best, have some quality shroud- this means that de facto they are slaves to the next management level. Very convenient once you are the manager.
The problem is that higher management and share holders don't understand that this is common practice. They only see that Indians cost 10 times less than European/US people. If you need 20 times more people to do the work, cost double. The bureaucracy of 20 times more people cripples your organization.
Man, I've seen a team of 10-15 people writing 'make' files for package generation. And particularly crappy 'make' files at that. Had to wait hours to have them running a 'make pkg' command and returning me the generated package. For Christ's sake! This is something you think about and implement on a rainy afternoon and which takes 1 minute to run each time afterwards.
Sure they are unemployable (Score:3, Insightful)
At least at the rates you'd pay to someone in India. Ya know, it's kinda hard to survive on 500 bucks a month here...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean apart from make you clothes, farm you food and produce other goods at rates so cheap no American would be willing to do it?
If you cut off free trade with India and China expect a massive cost of living increase in the US to the point some of the poorer people in society wont even be able to afford clothes or feed their families. Expect massive toxic tips all across the US as you can no longer dump all your shit in other countries too.
I understand you'd be angry at the article, the guy is a fucking idiot and talking out his arse but his comments are rather irrelevant to free trade in general.
Re:HCL Ha Ha (Score:2, Insightful)
You make a good point - these companies are incredibly bad for India's technical reputation, earned or not. Two of my best team members are Indians - extremely talented software engineers with knowledge of the business end of it to boot. Both born and educated in India, but now naturalized US citizens. However, after repeated (unwilling, forced by management) experience with outsourcing development work and getting back nothing but crap for our money, any time I hear "Indian contractor" I just cringe, knowing how much effort it's going to take to clean up the mess. I've never had an offshore code project in India go well - one came back tolerable, but that's about the best I can say. Some of the rest wouldn't even compile, and those that did were unmaintainable gibberish or so damn buggy we could never put them in production. All got rewritten as soon as my group had a spare few weeks. We literally - as we told management in the beginning - took a month to build some of this stuff, while it took us some 9 months to outsource it while consuming resources off my team to do it (management, spec writing, review, etc.). Yet the management goons haven't yet learned, and they keep trying to send crap overseas.
Re:#1: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been to India twice this year (for a total of 10 weeks) to work with HCL engineers. They are definitely not poor and live very good lives. A substantial number of them have been to the U.S. on work visas (they love wallmart) and when I asked which country they prefer they all like India better. Which flabbergasts me because in Chennai even the natives don't drink the tap water. But home is home.
Any society has class stratification. It is the lowest class that determines the cost of many basic goods. My impression is that India's massive underclass keeps the cost of living down, which allows the next higher class to also live cheaply.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason the typical Dell computer costs $400 is because they have forced parts manufacturers to produce stuff to their specifications and not the other way around.
The reason that the support that comes with a Dell computer costs roughly $0 is because it is (surprise) worth roughly $0.
The masses have spoken, but who gives a shit? The masses are dumb. Why should foreign trade policy be based on what the infamously short sighted "Average" American wants? That's dumb
Re:Huh? HCL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost of free trade will be playing out over the next few years, but was started years ago.
It is really about a race to the bottom via who will work for less, and who will work sweatshop
hours for ppl that run the companies that make idiotic decisions like they did during the DOT COM daze.
These new to the game ppl in India will also suffer once the US companies have canned all the
US workers who WERE the #1 customers of these US companies.
They will see what a tangled web has been woven, much like the tangled
threads of the international finance thieves that sent trillions into oblivion.
Customers with no job tend to spend less, holy cow who would have thought !
The US was the largest economy in the world, but then it sold out most of it textiles
and manufacturing jobs to 3rd world countries like India.
Companies in India do not follow our labor laws, but yet they are attached to US companies
as proxies and do work for customers within the US, so that is a loophole.
If India had to pay the same licenses, fees, taxes, ad naseum that US corps did
things would be a bit different.
With an unlevel playing field these talking heads can spout their rhetoric, but once
it all comes falling down due to 100's of trillions in derivatives tanking then his
high and mighty attitude will have to descend down to the mere mortal's world.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/derivatives-are-the-new-ticking-time-bomb [marketwatch.com]
Buffett warned of this 7 years ago, and other sane folks tried bu have been
ignored by the same empty suits that make statements like this bozo in India.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
- 0 0 1 0 1 1 1
----------------
= 1 0 1 0 1 1 1
or
t t f t t t f
- t f t t t
----------------
= t f t f t t t
... by your argument trinary uses logical catagories true, false, and maybe
... and sometimes notates them using the symbols '0', '1', and '2', which coincidentally are also the symbols conventionally used to represent numbers zero, one, and two.
.. by the time we reach the decimal system we have true false, possibly, maybe, and all variants there between.
Please. let's use correct terminology. Boolean logic deals with true/false which happens to adapt well to a binary numerical based system. But Boolean logic and binary number systems are different things.
Re:Americans are unemployable... (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, try again.
I'm married and have been for three years now.
My coworker, who gets the same pay I do, is also married - and he has children.
Again, if you have a lifestyle that fits your BUDGET then you can live pretty well in the US. I have a garden and I drive a fuel efficient car. I didn't spend foolishly and pile a lot of debt on to credit cards.
You know all those "fly over" states that Californians make fun of? Some of them aren't nice places to live, don't have outrageous property taxes, or gang problems.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree absolutely, it is awful.
It sucks cpu killing my laptop battery life and is also unusable now on my iPhone.
It seems the only way to 'turn it off' is to use a text based browser...
It certainly means that I visit less and less.
Re:India: The skrypt kiddies of programming (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that all the GOOD INDIAN PROGRAMMERS CAME TO AMERICA TO MAKE BETTER MONEY.
You've pretty much nailed it, and it doesn't just apply to Indian programmers.
Why get paid chump change (even if it's a lot by local standards) when you can go right to the source of the cash and earn the same rates as people do there? So long as you're good enough...
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, what? You're looking for basic coding and DB, but asking for candidates with a Master's in Information Science?
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders. There will be probably a few, but it's going to take a lot of effort to find them.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Drugs-- $5.00 here, $0.10 there
In a normal capitalistic society, we would be allowed to buy the 10 cent pills there and import them here and resell them for 20 cents.
But the wealth here is literally being pumped out of the country- and the jobs too.
Sure! Do you really think that the $5.00 for your medicine is sent to the exporting company in india? Rubbish! In fact, in your scenario there will be at most 8 cent sent to india for the pills while $4.92 go into the pockets of your local pharma company.
Which will pay low wages to the few americans still on their balance sheet and move the remaining money to the managers. So the wealth is not pumped outside the country - it is just moved to the wealthy.
In real capitalism that won't be a problem since you could go and open up your own pharma company and sell the pills for 30 cents, pay 15 cents to the producer in india and still have a nice margin. BUT: Neither germany (where I live) nor the U.S. is implementing capitalism. There are just too many rules to stop new contenders from entering the market. And if a big company fails, the government will keep the dead body fresh by pumping the worker's money into it.
Re:#1: (Score:3, Insightful)
do you know what #1 and #2 are? facts
no, they're theories. at best. or maybe just assertions.
Re:What a crock of shit (Score:5, Insightful)
For some companies, the reason for outsourcing is that in the end, GOOD coders are rare, and BAD coders are plenty. That's true in the US as it is overseas. Why pay top dollar for bad code in the US when you can get similarly bad code by outsourcing for much cheaper? Many US companies offer fairly competitive starting salaries, at least twice as much as the 35k or 40k reported here for other software houses, often more, if they can find those GOOD coders here locally. It is simply that GOOD coders are in fact rare, and many companies recognize that. So I can see why they might as well just outsource since the quality isn't going to be much better by recruiting an army of (expensive) BAD coders locally.
Re:Huh? HCL? (Score:2, Insightful)
I work for a large tech company that employees a lot of HCL employees in addition to our own staff there is nothing in my experience that sets them above their counterparts elsewhere in any way whatsoever. They do the job, though with what seems like less interest. They put in just the hours required. They seem to be competent. That's about it. The only complaint the CEO from HCL has is that he couldn't employ Americans because they won't work for a shit salary, because the cost of living in America and the cost of Tuition in America makes it so that by the time an American graduates, they have as much debt due to their education as an entire team of HCL employees will even ever make in their entire lives, combined.
Their greatest contribution has simply been to let us fire lots fo competant people in our company over our many rounds of layoffs and replace them with cheaper contracted labor 12k miles away.
Programming by rote (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience with the majority (and yes there are exceptions) of Indian IT workers is that they have little or no creativity or the ability/willingness to question obviously bad design. Yes they get the work done but at what overall cost to the business.
For example, the IT of an Airline was outsourced to an Indian company. We had to get a firewall rule added so that passenger details could be sent to Homeland Security. It took over 3 months for their supposedly expert network managers to get the rule added even though they had been supplied with detailed instructions on how to do it.
When asked why it had taken so long, the answer given was 'We have no one here who has done that sort of configuration before'. This was coming from a company that boasted how many Cisco certified people they had.
On the other hand, there are exceptions and most of those (IMHO) are people who have been trained outside India and have thus broken the mould so to speak. Many of these can think creatively and add real value to projects. Ironically, these Indians have a very low opinion of companies such as HCL etc to properly run western IT departments.
I'm posting as an AC as I'm currently working in an IT Dept that is about to be outsourced to and Indian Company. I'd like to keep my job as long as possible.
Re:India: The skrypt kiddies of programming (Score:5, Insightful)
The tragedy doesn't end there. Manager Y gets a lot of heat to get the (allegedly finished) product out the door. His few remaining IT staff (who are usually the cheapest, not the best, of the original staff since they should only have to make a few "adaptions") try to puzzle together what the outsourced programmers created (or rather, they try to find out what the hell the code is doing and compare it to what it should do. Usually it doesn't really match), and the product gets postponed because the IT people have to rewrite some portions. The more different outsourced groups worked on the product, the more has to be rewritten, interfaces for the defined interfaces have to be created (because 'definition' seems to be a very variable thing in outsourceland. I guess it's translated to something akin to 'guideline' or 'noncommittal recommendation').
In short, they work their collective asses off to pretty much reimplement the tool. In the end, they will have created the software anew and dump the sacred cow doo.
Manager Y gets fired because he way overspent (after all, he only got about 10% of the budget he needed to reimplement the software, but that wasn't planned), the programmers get yelled at for saving the project (which surely boosts their motivation ... their motivation to check for other jobs, at least) and Manager X gets to hire a new Manager Y and IT team, which will, in turn, face the same fate.
But hey, it's cheaper!
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have 10 people and none of them have jobs, you have 100% unemployment. If you then bring in 90 people with jobs and keep the 10 people with no jobs, you have 100 people and only 10% unemployment.
OK, you made me laugh. But ...
Theoretically you should get an even lower UE rate. You see those 90 people with jobs will need someone to serve them burgers when they go McDonalds. If 3 of the original 10 unemployed get jobs serving the needs of those 90, leaving you with a 7% UE rate, and, more importantly, with a lower number of unemployed people. That, at least in theory, is how bringing in skilled labour is meant to reduce unemployment.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been having a tough time finding a reasonably qualified programmer from straight out of college. I'm not looking for senior database developers, just people who can solve basic logic skills and... write software!
So how does one "solve basic logic skills" then? What's "solving a skill" supposed to mean anyway?
How *does* one get a Masters Degree in Information Science without being able to answer basic questions like this? Supposedly, the job I'm offering is why they went to school, but they aren't even qualified to begin. So what did they do for 6 years?
If you are hiring a welder, he'd better know how to weld. If you hire a doctor, he'd better have a good working knowledge of medicine.
Why can't we expect to hire fresh programmers who know how to... program?
While I agree that anyone with a university title for computer science should at least have some basic ability in actually writing code, I think you misunderstand what computer science is all about. It is simply not intended as vocational training for programmers. Of course, a student with any sense at all would make sure he is at least employable outside academia, but the point of a computer science study is not to become a programmer.
Re:Huh? HCL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:1, Insightful)
I've been sitting here contemplating the same thing for a few weeks. It's become especially bad since the last upgrade of Opera (no, not the beta), to the point where I may visit Slasdot two or three times a week, compared to before when I spent most of my workday here. Seriously, trying to use the scrollwheel of the mouse makes things hang for an absolute minimum of fifteen seconds. Unless things start to improve dramatically, I probably will stop visiting Slashdot altogether, and I don't think I'm the only one.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:4, Insightful)
_Nothing_ works when it's in the form of an Idea. Socialism as an Idea doesn't work. Libertarianism as an Idea doesn't work. I find the "we should privatize all the roads" Libertarians tiresome and insipid, but find myself agreeing more with general Libertarian principle than with Liberalism, Progressivism, Neoconism, etc... But people like to try to get themselves under an umbrella. "I'm Republican and a neocon, therefore anything Obama does I must hate, no matter how trivial or whether I would have cheered if Dubya had done the same thing".
The correct Libertarian approach isn't an idealistic one, but a societal "greedy" one. We shouldn't have 100% open trade because of some ideal. We should determine what policies will be in our best interests and will protect the rights of US citizens, everything else is secondary.
Re:It works both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
The USA was protectionist from its founding in the late 18th century all the way through the end of World War II. Then we got stupid.
I'd like to point out that until WWII and the devastation of the global economy apart from the US, your protectionism wasn't making you rich. The reason for America's current wealth was the dropping of that protectionism when you had a clear economic advantage over the rest of the world, most of which was quite literally in ruins.
Re:I'll guess I'll complain on Slashdot again (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you're doing something wrong. I'm sorry for this, but I can't stand people who blame job markets for being unemployed. There's *always* work, so long as you know where to look.
If you have a CMU degree, developing software at home *casually* for 20 years is hardly an endorsement. I could say that same thing and I'm only 30. Being unemployed for 6 out of 7 years is also very, very bad. I'd think twice about even touching you for *any* job if I found that out. Hell, working in MacD's would have looked better - I've recommended IT staff for employment even though they've been working at supermarkets, etc. lately because I *know* it's a tough market and they need to take what they can get. It also makes me wonder what the hell you *have* been doing for those years, if you weren't working. Maybe you travelled, maybe you lived off your savings, maybe you started your own business, maybe you did other things, but hell - 6 entire years of unemployment is a bad place to start from. You think you're going to land an MS job with that on your record (not that I've ever seen the big deal with MS jobs, to be honest)?
And I've found jobs online and offline - the best ones are normally online but I've landed some lovely places offline too, usually by word-of-mouth (90% of my clients over the last nine years have been by word-of-mouth). And I don't mean "keyboard shuffler" jobs. I make a good living providing IT management to schools (state and private, primary, secondary, college, already supported for IT or not) in London - hardly an "easy" job to land, especially for a kid straight out of university, especially for one with *NO* work experience when they started, especially for nine years of full employment in a row (seven self-employed but often working for only a handful of clients on a regular basis) and *especially* when I was actually hired to work on critical IT systems in preference to the existing, "free", borough services provided to those schools & colleges. It's a matter of persistence and having something to show. Getting an interview and getting a job are vastly different things - the interview is HARD to get, the job shouldn't be if you've got to interview.
Something about your post suggests to me that you have FAR too high an expectation based on the fact that you have a skill that you have rarely demonstrated in a work environment, but mostly "at home" on toy projects. I can program in C, Z80 and x86 assembly. I can manage SQL databases. I've made my own toy operating systems. I can build and manage networks. None of that matters, even though I use it as part of my job. I'd love to have a job doing certain parts of that, but it's just not possible to fill my hours with the tasks I enjoy the most. I have dozens of those sorts of qualifications, projects, etc. too, they appear on my CV, but equally I have a full history of employment in a relevant sector. Recession? Stop blaming external factors for your expectations. England is in one of it's worst ever "recessions"... at the height of it, I left one job to seek out another because I wasn't enjoying it. I have a house with substantial mortgage, a wife who earns her share and (at the time) a newborn child. I competed for the new role against 50-year experienced IT managers, in a London borough, and walked into the job - not because I was cheap, not because I was perceived as being easily led, but because my history spoke for itself even though my employers understood 0.1% of what was on my CV.
I don't think "no one wanted to hire"... I think "no one wanted to hire YOU". I'd probably bin your CV if you have a six year unexplained gap in it and your biggest project was an MMORPG (I'm sorry, but it's a game... unless I'm a game developer, I *will* just ignore that project as nothing more than a hobby). I'd be worried that you can't find a job online (I view submissions from skilled IT people who submit on paper with suspicion if they could have filed online) - that's where the *best* IT jobs are... they are shor
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is not the available candidates, it is your approach to trying to fill the position. Please, hear me out (as this is something I've run into myself, more or less).
First, if you're looking for someone with specific skills, you are intrinsically expecting them to have experience with those things. Like most things in life, you can not gain experience or knowledge in something without doing it, first. If you are looking for entry-level candidates, you are looking for intellectual aptitude, a foundational skill-set indicative of the ability to learn, and a broad but shallow understanding of many different topics. If you want someone who has a more topical understanding than just the basics, but not someone more skilled than "entry level" (say, intermediate or experienced) then you are looking for someone with a PhD.
We're not (necessarily) talking about incompetent students, here. A student who was (say) a tech while going through school is going to put the things on his resume which relate to his academic preferences and strengths. There isn't all that much which can be covered in a semester.
Also, consider that something known is not always easily conveyed in a foreign format. It's damn hard to orally convey a lot of the things I type on a daily basis (and the logic/process is sometimes also difficult to convey: the "speech" part of my brain is somewhat disconnected from the part which performs the work, it would seem). I imagine I'm not alone in this, at all. (Likewise, pen + paper isn't the same thing, especially if your experience is very environmentally confined or "mostly academic".)
Now, granted, I do not know your hiring process or requirements, but I can see such a scenario play out in such a fashion (and have seen it a number of times). IT is complex; there are a lot of things to look at, and unless you're already locked into a sub-field, the amount of things you can (and might have to) study to land a job to start a career in a sub-field is intimidatingly large. Not everyone has the opportunity to grow in their field "organically", and it's very difficult to hit a moving target (ie land a job) when the market is tight.
I've seen a lot of job postings, and been to a couple job interviews with questions like you describe. Sometimes they're looking for an introductory position and don't realize it. Sometimes (as I suspect the case is with you) they're trying to pull an experienced or intermediate-level developer or systems person in at entry-level wages.
I think the difference between a US college graduate IT person and an Indian worker is probably that the Indian worker's schooling has been more highly tailored towards job postings and the fact that he very well may have "abandoned all hope" (at all) for a number of years while he underwent his schooling. Sure, you'll get a programmer that way, I imagine. There's also a good chance he's fairly interesting and knows where to get the good curry. Maybe doing that is the "productive" and "financially conscious" thing to do - or whatever the going phrase is these days for selling your country (and countryman) short to the benefit of your company.
Re:I find most Indians incompetent (Score:5, Insightful)
> The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list. ...trust a story about outsourcing to get the racist bastards to come crawling about the woodwork.
Stupid mods, "Troll" != "Disagree" (Score:4, Insightful)
This post and its associated rating (currently 50% Troll) is a prime example of how /.'s moderators have really gone downhill. The text of the post is both relevant and spot-on, rather more insightful than otherwise, and in no way is it seeking to get a rise out of the readership by misleading obstinacy. Sure, it's cynical as hell, but then again, the current situation in the US would seem to warrant precisely such an attitude.
It seems the mods need more education about what "Troll" really means -- for starters, "Troll" != "Disagree", and "Troll" != "Do not like".
Methinks this kind of modding behaviour is the /. equivalent of griefers. Meh.
Cheers,
Re:Americans are unemployable... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
You obviously do not grasp the the logic of a university education. The focus has been on theory and research not on actually professional trade skills, no specialisation at all outside of medicine of course. What you need to do is pursue people coming out of technical and further education colleges with qualifications in your areas of employment needs, you will find that technical and further education institution do specifically target their course and students and specific jobs.
So rummage around the net, find the technical schools teaching the courses, actual subjects, that you want your potential employees to have and contact them direct for students interested in employment.
Seriously don't expect university graduates to be able to do any professional job well, engineering, architecture or software coding, all the graduates will require years of training to become anything approaching useful.
You might think it is weird but at the end of the day how many thousands of different types of degrees do you want, how tightly specialised does a graduate and of course how many specialist (they have to be specifically trained and have gained considerable experience) lecturers will you require.
Technical colleges cheat a bit as they can ignore large segments of the employment market and focus their education on high demand areas within the local region and they often directly employ from and into local industry and businesses.
Re:My observations. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree that anyone with a university title for computer science should at least have some basic ability in actually writing code, I think you misunderstand what computer science is all about. It is simply not intended as vocational training for programmers. Of course, a student with any sense at all would make sure he is at least employable outside academia, but the point of a computer science study is not to become a programmer.
Let's face it Programming is what the majority of computer science graduated end up doing after they get their degree. I have been handed people with fresh BS and MS degrees who seem to have zero concept of even the most fundamental aspects of software design and development.
Things like:
These guys are excellently prepared for becoming academics but the schools they came from don't seem to be very concerned with giving them the basic skills they need to get a job outside of academia. When they don't even have a couple of proper courses about, say, web-app and web-service programming. It is almost as much effort to train some of these university graduates up as it is to pick a person off the street who is self educated in basic programming, or even has no clue of it at all and train him/her up. Another thing is that some of the more business oriented of these schools are starting to turn out grads that have been taught nothing but "industry standard" (read Microsoft) OS'es/programming languages/tools. Nobody is doing a young computer graduate any favors by teaching him/her only MS or only *nix etc. They have to have a basic grasp of both. Walk into any telecommunications company and you will quickly find out that Microsoft products are not an "industry standard", "DirectX" is not the universal de facto standard for game programming, "OpenGL" is not dying, a huge number of software gets written for other platforms than PCs and server systems, the list goes on... The best people to hire are usually complete nerds because they alone tend to have the kind of basic grasp of software development that is needed because they acquire it in their spare time. Mind you it is definitely a plus if these nerds have a degree. There is, however, a surprising number of people with computer related degrees applying for developer jobs who simply seem to have a very limited clue about how to develop software. Unfortunately comp-sci seems to have become a popular choice for people intending to become programmers. Perhaps we should split comp-sci into two paths? One for people intending to get a job in academia and one for those destined for the commercial job market?
Re:I'll guess I'll complain on Slashdot again (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd probably bin your CV if you have a six year unexplained gap in it and your biggest project was an MMORPG (I'm sorry, but it's a game... unless I'm a game developer, I *will* just ignore that project as nothing more than a hobby).
It's a Catch-22; here you moan at the guy for not having a job and on the other hand, you agree that you'd throw his resume in the trashbin just like all the other H.R. people who aren't willing to give him a chance (... As soon as you found out his lack of payed experience over the past 6 years. Believe me, it's going to come up during the interview at some point.)
I've been there. Getting rejected over and over for C.S. interviews is a soul-crushing experience, and eventually you can reach a point where you give up and make a career out of fast food, postal service, or some other job that gives you zero technical experience. A few years of that and the perceived weakness only gets worse.
Thankfully, I managed to scrape together enough freelance web and java work on the side that someone was willing to give me a tech support job. Then I wrote some programs that made my boss's life easier and got promoted once they found out my "hidden talents."
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd object to "all". While it is quite possible less common in other fields, I know lots of CS and SoftEng graduates who got a university education precisely because they wanted to add a strong theoretical background to the technical skills they could acquire on their own.
At risk of trolling: code monkeys get trained, developers learn.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
Even architects have to know the basics. Or their fancy designs would fall over.
Sounds like the state of software engineering :)
I think software development is a phenomenally complex field. And not one we have a hope of teaching well. There are many different roles required to get working products out the door, all with overlapping requirements and responsibilities. Yet there is so much demand that we don't *get* to specialize much.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as a fair price. The sooner you accept this, the faster you will understand economics. It is an empirical "science", not a value judgement. In practice, however -- in the real world -- retail margins are around 100% in developed countries (broad generalization) but 10-20% in developing countries, as a result of the low rents and low wages paid to retail employees. With similar differences, but smaller amounts, at the wholesale level, one would expect retail prices on many things to be less than half of their developed country equivalent, just on this one factor.
I don't know if anyone said that, but if he/she did you're both wrong. Prices are based on the idea of maximizing profits, which in cases like drugs and IP is equivalent to maximzing revenue. If there is little transfer between two markets, then this is achieved by charging the price where you would lose total revenue (sales * price) if the price went up or down even a little bit. Millionaires might pay more than the unemployed for, e.g. jewellery, just as you suggest. I suspect they pay less, not more, for cable TV due to an externality: the unemployed watch more TV.
But you're right that is in effect a subsidy, but it's not an explicit or deliberate one, as far as I can see. It's a logical result of maximizing revenue.
No, prices are dependent on the particular conditions of each market. That's all. They certainly are not "absolute truths" -- if that makes them "relative" then I'm comfortable with that term.
It does, for consumers in both countries. Google "comparative advantage" for the how and why, if you really want to know.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you'll get a programmer that way, I imagine. There's also a good chance he's fairly interesting and knows where to get the good curry. Maybe doing that is the "productive" and "financially conscious" thing to do - or whatever the going phrase is these days for selling your country (and countryman) short to the benefit of your company.
You know, I enjoyed most of your post, but found this section really lacking.
You seem to be suggesting that you should hire the inferior person, if he's a native of the country you happen to be born in (or are a current resident of), over the superior person who is not a member of the same group.
How is this reasonable? If you do this, then you're just short-changing your company, and putting everyone's paychecks at risk. Thats one of the things that people who havent run a business dont get. The pressure and obligation to keep the business solvent and growing so that everyone gets to keep their jobs and keep getting paid, is quite intense.
Hiring inferior (but American) staffers over superior (but foreign) folks doesnt help anyone, least of all your countrymen. It just creates another marginal business that probably wont last, and will then drive up the unemployment rate.
You pick the best people you can afford, and you ignore things like nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual preference (assuming the person can fit in with the group). And thats it.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, your comment here is very close to the mark.
I think part of the problem isnt the education, its the culture. If all you do growing up is watch MTV Cribs and dream about being Bill Gates or Larry Ellison (God help you if so), then you arent very suitable for spending the first 5-10 years out of college being taught how to be an 'average' programmer.
Re:Americans are unemployable... (Score:2, Insightful)
Breeding is not a requirement. If people can't afford to, then they shouldn't do it.
Re:Huh? HCL? (Score:1, Insightful)
This should never have been modded up.
Let me put it in a different way:
What the CEO actually means is that American employees arent willing to: 1. Work 8 hours in an 8-hour day, they want 1.5 hours for lunch and want to spend 2-3 hours per day reading slashdot and the web. 2. Be willing to accept that they dont know everything there is to know, and they arent the best developer thats ever been invented, and actually learn from people who are much, much better at this than they are. 3. Understand that in a real business, not all the work is 'fun' and not all products released are perfectly coded. Sometimes you have to make compromises for valid business reasons, so that we can all keep getting paid.
In short, a great deal of American workers are: 1. Lazy, 2. Arrogant, and 3. Unrealistic and Ignorant.
Not all mind, you but many. At least with alot of foreign workers, they're actually willing to put their heads down, and learn and actually work hard, and get things done, and be part of the business, and not just think that their little corner of the universe is more important than everyone else's.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to source globally and produce wherever it's cheapest. They don't want us to source globally and buy wherever it's cheapest. They want your wages to be competitive with foreigners. They don't want their prices to compete with products sold abroad. It's not a two-way street.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that "free trade" should mean that the price in market A cannot be more than the price in market B plus costs for transportation to and sale in market A. Any person or company should be free to fly to india, buy 5000 copies of the latest DVD, fly back, and sell those DVD's for any price he or she likes. That *is* free trade.
Companies, especially if they sell a non-commodity (ie there is no competitor with the exact same product; compare bricks to dvds), love segmenting markets so they can maximize their profit. Offering student discounts is a prime example of this: students have less expandable income, so the optimal price for them (ie the intersection of supply and demand curves) is lower than for non-students [ignoring the 'hook 'em while they're young' argument]. Market segmentation is always good for the company selling goods, and can be bad for the consumer on the wrong end of the segmentation.
Free trade *should* limit the ability of companies to segment markets based on geography just as anti-discrimination practices *should* limit their ability to segment based on race, gender, religion etc, which are also good proxies of income (eg http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/005647.html [census.gov]; blacks earn (median) 30k, hispanics 34k, whites 49k and asians 58k). Just imagine having separate prices for black people and white people!
By granting companies the sole right to distribute something and enforce that right using the courts, international treaties, customs, and DRM, we are allowing them to operate as if free trade does not apply to them.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I find most Indians incompetent (Score:4, Insightful)
I also happen to agree with the sentiments of the GP. Personally I find the top coders that I deal with are from Europe (especially Eastern Europe), China, South Africa and Australia. Bottom of the pile is the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) - technically they are fine but culturally there seems to be an aversion to thinking for themselves although I suspect that's the fault of the management culture there and the legacy of the caste system. The next to bottom I find to be American programmers - they tend to be pretty low on the technical scale (my suspicion being that the US education system is not very good) and are terrified of doing anything on their own initiative or anything slightly innovative (which manifests itself as apparent laziness as the common response seems to be to avoid any communication on the subject - not returning e-mails or calls). I have come to the conclusion this is due to a) fear of being sacked due to not having employment rights, b) fear of being sued as the culture is so litigious, c) fear of stepping on someone's patent, causing their employer to have to fork out money and leading back to point (a).
Of course this is anecdotal and only represents what I personally have experienced.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
About as much as KFC has to do with chickens.
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
He's looking for someone to do a relatively simple DB-related job. He's asking a few questions that should be dead simple for anyone who's only so much as worked through tutorials in a few related subjects. It ain't rocket science.
You talk about "foreign formats," about not expecting academics to have practical experience, you talk about "tailored toward job postings"... but those are all hand-waving and pretty feeble excuses for not having a clue of basic concepts of the job they're applying for. No employer should be obligated to hire morons unless it's to do with Affirmative Action. If they can't handle this kind of stuff they should submit their application to MacDonalds.
I find it hard to believe it's so hard to get a hold of people with such basic skills. But if it's true, the educational system is deeply flawed and we need fixes, not excuses.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
You're looking at the wrong degree, IS is a managerial degree not a technical degree. Just like a Management degree, IS gives very very little information about the person's actual skill set. A Management degree says "he likes money and people". An IS degree says "he likes money, people and computers".
You must remember, all "people management" degrees are fundamentally about managing unqualified and/or stupid people. So you hire an MIS for say managing the computing needs of an office with very little computing needs, managing the software installation part of an assembly of line for kiosks, or thousands of similar jobs requiring only minimal computer skills. Your MIS guy's resume saying "oracle" means he's used some basic qui query engine in class. Well, obviously that's quite valuable if you want him managing a call center. Not so much if you want him programming.
A qualified programmer will have a degree in science, engineering, mathematics, or occasionally some "interesting" major, and ideally list a slew programming languages. For example, if you see a guy with a degree in Music Theory, Economics, or French that knows C, Java, and Ruby, well I promise you that guy can learn SQL infinitely faster than your MIS.
I mean, business gets all excited about these business oriented degrees we academics sell, but mostly these degrees say `` This person lacked the initiative, confidence, and curiosity to pursue real academic interests. We recommend using them to manage people without collage degrees. ''
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll refine this slightly, good IS majors are also qualified for tricky installations themselves. So your IS guy might be able to download and configure Asterisk, letting people test it out. But your MIS will never be qualified as a programmer.
Re:I'll guess I'll complain on Slashdot again (Score:2, Insightful)
Lack of paid experience isn't the issue - I had zero experience in my job at first and walked into several VERY well-respected, high-level jobs with an awful lot of responsibility (wanna take the rap when the network that holds every exam result of every child, and their emergency medical information, etc. goes down? I've been responsible for that since the day I left uni and got my first client of my self-employment and never had a serious issue). Six YEARS of unemployment at ANYTHING is the issue. This is my point - hell, you could VOLUNTEER and still have something more IT-relevant than doing nothing at all. Do tech support for a charity, or recondition old PC's, etc.
Freelance work, volunteering, hell just being able to say that you did SOMETHING other than write games (see my other post) in a back bedroom. Employers will pretty much ignore anything in terms of experience that didn't a) happen under a former employer (not related) or b) happen to make you a ton of money by doing it for a living. Everything else is just showing you *can* work. Go work at a hardware store, ffs (Yes, I've been there, done that too, to make up the slack periods of work - I've also been a website designer, freelance tech support, worked in an office typing up documents while working as IT Manager inside the same week!). He obviously HAD spare time (he wrote an MMORPG), but it's six wasted years in the eyes of an employer (unless, as I stated, he is applying to games companies).
Catch-22 is only relevant if you get reasons for rejection from your potential employers (almost all of them will give one if pressed). Was he refused because he had no experience, because he had no IT experience, because he had no relevant IT experience, or because they saw a 6-year gap on his CV that his explanations couldn't cover? You can't trust *his* opinion alone. It could be because his CV was written in crayon for all we know. My guess is that the gap was the problem, or that his knowledge was percieved as too out-of-date. You can fight that by showing how you learned new things quickly and applied them quickly in an actual *employment* (or, not quite as good but still relevant, volunteer role). I have zero professional certifications, just my degree and earlier qualifications - but I learn damn fast and make sure potential employers know it.
Nobody is *entitled* to a job (in fact, I can name half a dozen people who shouldn't have the jobs they've got!). Hence, when a bad CV comes in the door, it WILL get binned. You can spruce up your CV (either in reality by actually doing things to put on it, by clever wording, or by outright lying - I've *never* lied on a CV), or you can continue to get ignored. The more your CV is ignored, the more it will continue to be ignored in the future if you don't improve it (a bad CV, a bad CV with one year's unemployment, etc.). I've been there too... my last bout of job hunting consisted of 1000 cherry-picked jobs from jobsites, 200 applications (10% on paper) and a handful of interviews - I had a job to fall back on but my job hunting was no easier - in fact, if I hadn't had the job to fall back on, I *would* have had to take the first thing that popped up. Fortunately, I rarely have to job-hunt because my relevant, up-to-date, experience speaks for itself - and the fact that I can provide a dozen references that I've worked for in the past year.
Working in non-IT jobs does NOT make the CV worse, it merely stops it improving. However not working *at all* makes the CV worse. And working in *anything* IT-based keeps the CV at the same level but relevant (helpdesk, tech support, hell - putting an ad in the paper as The PC Man).
I would not *touch* an employee who has a six year gap on their CV without an explanation (actually INSIDE the CV / covering letter). But one who had an explanation ("2003-2009: Travelled across six continents"), no gap because they were volunteering / keeping themselves busy / running a business / who had a line that said "Various other paid employment" for the gap, no problem at all.
Re:Huh? HCL? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know where you're working. Such poor work habits have only been the case in one environment I've ever seen, out of many my own job history and the many partners I've worked with, where the manager had frightened and alienated all the staff and they were all job hunting. (All 5 of those engineers resigned within one week of each other: it was frightening to see as a corporate partner, but I gave 2 of them recommendations because they were _good_ at dealing with that mess beyond what I would have tolerated.) One of the reasons those engineers balked was because not only was the product "not perfect" it was demonstrably broken due to the excess "features" added by the manager that were not part of the core requirements, and it simply would not work.
American workers are more willing to question authority. It drives authority nuts, and I've had it happen with international scenarios, where I struggled to be allowed to speak directly with the actual engineers so we could resolve the confusion about the most effective approach. We also loathe the telephone tag of sending our question to a call center or a manager, who rewrite and re-interpret it, then having them talk to a technician, who re-interprets it, and eventually gets to an engineer who wonders why we want to gogo-fratz with the banana puddijng, but does their best to send back an answer. We Americans try to sneak past those layers of management and bureaucracy to find the person who actually knows, and trade notes. (I do, anyway, and try to send them my patches.)
Re:I find most Indians incompetent (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, making sweeping statements about people based on their ethnicity or color of their skin *is* racist, no matter how you dress it up.
Oh, and instead of making sweeping statements about "the legacy of the caste system" (a system which has been illegal in India for 50+ years, and certainly one about whose complexities we know very little), maybe you ought to consider that many Indians in the US are H1-Bs and are effectively indentured employees ... the last thing they need to do is to rock the boat, and it's simply the smart thing to do for them to get along with their bosses.
In short, people have rational reasons for behaving the way they do. But you'd need to get over the color of their skin and their accent to see that.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk about missing the point...
The point is that such disparity should be exploitable. The parent poster DOESN'T CARE why there is an order of magnitude price difference. If it does exist, he wants to exploit it.
That disparity could not exist in a free market. Since it does, the market IS being controlled, and the people being screwed are the ones on the "high side".
Got it now? You ended up making his point for him.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's face it Programming is what the majority of computer science graduated end up doing after they get their degree. I have been handed people with fresh BS and MS degrees who seem to have zero concept of even the most fundamental aspects of software design and development.
Things like:
I've been programming professionally for 17 years, most of it in C++, and even I haven't heard of a god class. I can make a guess, but it would just be a guess.
Have you considered that you may be mistaken regarding how commonly used that term is?
Re:#1: (Score:3, Insightful)
A highly motivated worker who will go on and on for 14 hours a day breaking stone with a hammer will still under-produce the not so motivated one which uses a jackhammer for 2h and lazies about for the rest of the day.
In Software Engineering, skill and experience are the jackhammer while the hammer stands for little skill and experience.
The truth is that motivation and hard-work alone do not make up for lack of skill and/or experience in intellectual pursuits.
The problem with the IT work outsourced to India is that nowadays:
- The increase in numbers of IT "professionals" has been achieved by bringing into IT people which are not at all gifted for it.
- The really good IT techies have been promoted to management because they are so much above the average and demand higher salaries.
I look at the highly-motivate and little experienced me of 12 years ago and I see how much work I did for how little results (even though I was one of the gifted types, so I produced 4x - 10x more results than the average). I can only begin to imagine how exceptionally unproductive somebody which is neither gifted (came into IT 'cause of the big salaries) nor experienced (doesn't stay in the technical side for long if any good) can be.
Re:Americans are unemployable... (Score:2, Insightful)
Breeding is not a requirement. If people can't afford to, then they shouldn't do it.
i agree that having a child that you are unable to support is irresponsible, but a society where only the rich are permitted to breed isn't such a great solution
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to be suggesting that you should hire the inferior person, if he's a native of the country you happen to be born in (or are a current resident of), over the superior person who is not a member of the same group. How is this reasonable?
It doesn't look reasonable from a little-picture bottom-line view, but in the big picture it's not only reasonable but important. This is why Congress limits foreign workers. Of the two workers, the local is likely to spend more domestically, will pay more taxes over his or her career, may serve on a jury, is many times more likely to do volunteer work, and is infinitely more likely to defend the nation in times of crisis. Nations prefer local workers because local workers prefer their nations.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:1, Insightful)
Further ...
When the 7 run out of unemployment benefits, they no longer exist. The government has no idea what their status is. This means the "official" unemployment rate goes down to 0%.
When the 90 become American Citizens, they are immediately fired for being lazy, incompetent, and unwilling, and another 900 brought in to keep the unemployment rate at 10%.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
Hindus don't eat beef. Muslims do. Sikhs? Maybe.
Re:I find most Indians incompetent (Score:3, Insightful)
You need to get over your racism tunnel vision. There was nothing in the parent's or my comment that was racist. Do you look at every statement and see racism? Maybe you need some therapy.
maybe you ought to consider that many Indians in the US are H1-Bs and are effectively indentured employees
And many are residents.
Re:I'll guess I'll complain on Slashdot again (Score:4, Insightful)
"It lasts, right now, for 1.25 years. Do the math."
Erm... 1.25 years of unemployment on a CV (and I don't know the rules but in most places you ARE allowed to do volunteer work and sometimes a small amount of actual work and still claim). Followed by the following thoughts in a potential employer's head:
"He was on benefits for over a year."
"He didn't do anything else in that time."
"If I employ him, there's nothing to stop him leaving in 3/6/9 months, whatever the cut-off point is, and then going back on full benefits for another year."
"Maybe he's using me to 'refresh' his benefits."
"I'm not going to get the best work out of him, and he's been idle for at least a year, and then he'll probably leave or get himself sacked."
"Why should I employ him?"
Unless you can answer that last question, there's nothing in it for an employer. It's harsh, yes, but true. Especially true as you get older... if you're going to employ a 40-year-old over a 30-year-old, they better have 10 years of experience to draw on! If they can't show that, you might as well employ the 30-year-old (who will want less money) and train him.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:2, Insightful)
Indian hypocrisy is palpable (Score:5, Insightful)
If an American called Indians unemployable, that American would labeled a bigot. But Indians say that sort of thing about Americans all the time. According to India, and a lot of US companies: all the smart people in the world come from countries where people earn as little as $1 a day.
If anybody in the US suggests that visa limits not be raised, India screams and cries about US racism and xenophobia. But, what percentage of Americans work for WiPro? My understanding is that India is not all accepting of immigrants from Bangladesh. And how can India's caste system not be consider one of the earth's most extreme form of bigotry? I might add, the US has a well earned reputation of being lavishly generous in matters of immigration.
India constantly warns the US about the horrors of a "brain drain" that would be
caused by the US not allowing unlimited guest workers from India. But why is
India not worried about the Indian "brain drain" caused by the "best and
brightest" leaving India. We might also want to give some thought to the US
"brain drain" that is being caused by the US "best and brightest" avoiding STEM
jobs, because the job prospects for Americans is so dismal.
Azim Premji, who owns 79% of WiPro, recently wrote an article that warned that "US protectionism will be counter-productive"
"If we get into protectionism, then the West is going to get a wave of protectionism in response, and that is going to turn back the clock 20 years," Premji told The Sunday Times.
"And it will be America and Europe that suffer," he said because they will be excluded from the only growth markets left, in Asia, Africa and China. You are not going to grow at 10 per cent trading in London, are you," he asked.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/ITeS/US-protectionism-will-be-counter-productive-Azim-Premji/articleshow/4683155.cms [indiatimes.com]
Ever hear the expression: "what is good for the goose, is good for the gander?"
India is one of the most protectionist nations on earth, and they have been for
a long time. If India wants to consider guest workers part of trade agreements,
then when does India make good for the three million Indians already living in
the USA? Or does India consider "protectionism" a one-way thing?
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:...News at 11. (Score:2, Insightful)
"CEO of GM says that GM is a better company than Toyota."
Really? All I've ever heard Obama say is how shitty GM is. It's the only thing he and I agree on.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
Even architects have to know the basics. Or their fancy designs would fall over. There's a reason you make engineering students build bridges out of spaghetti. The same computer students should know how to build a DB out of a flat file.
Right, but not too many people try to hire engineers for their spaghetti-gluing skills.
Re:Programming by rote (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this nation worth saving? It can't produce a programmer that can write a "SELECT" statement in 5 years of computer science training! Ill informed graduates need a serious lesson in "real life" and need to return to their collage with this results and protest.
I had six years of computer science, taught simple SQL to students as a TA, and now years later I look up SQL commands. It's just not worth remembering when I've got examples in my own code or online, and I use it so rarely.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:2, Insightful)
There are a number of goods about working locally.
Firstly the purpose of a company is to achieve a wider social good, that of increasing economic activity. In the last 2 years we have seen that the old retoric of "shareholder value" is nonsense, as wider society has moved in not to bail out shareholders or bond holders, but instead to bail out the institution of a company. Many people don't like this development, but you cannot argue that it hasn't happened. The driving reason for this is political reality, the collaspe of these insitutions is politically unacceptable, and this is because of their true function in our society.
Secondly working with local people produces a persistent economic resource for reuse, your company may not continue to work with these guys directly, but it is likely that your local suppliers will.
Thirdly there is a nasty fact of begger my neighbour that importing people from elsewhere implies. There are swathes of southern africa which struggle with no doctors or nurses, these places have trained these workers, but they have then been imported to western europe. This is very unfair for the local people who have invested in their training and support and now are stripped of the outcome. We should invest in our own skilled workers and leave other peoples where they are!
And this is what it really comes down to; it is in the interest of the ruling class to destroy coherent communities and to denegrate and undermine the working class in all countries. While they are barefoot and ignorant they can be controlled. Where they are skilled and wealthy they need to be moved and exploited.
Look around at your friends, how many of them are in the same town or village they grew up in and doing well? Most of my friends have moved away to get work, most of them have very little in the way of a social life or social network; we are dependent on the state and on economic means to support ourselves when things go wrong. My friends who have remained at home are relatively impoverished. These are choices that we should not have to make, and the system that is advocated by the OP is what drives us to have to choose between the one and the other.
Which market then? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, prices are dependent on the particular conditions of each market. That's all. They certainly are not "absolute truths" -- if that makes them "relative" then I'm comfortable with that term.
Seems to me a problem is that big corps get to pick and choose which markets they want to play in, and then artificially restrict the general public from doing the same.
So, you put your production lines in a company where labour laws are virtually non-existent, and production is cheap. Then, you outsource your IT etc divisions to another country where wages are equally low. Then you add DRM and regionalization, or other restrictions so that local citizens can only by the product you sell in the local market which is 10-100x the price.
So there is no *market*. There are many markets, and a global market, but corps artificially get to pick-and-choose which ones they play in while restricting almost everyone else from doing so.
Re:anecdotal, but (Score:4, Insightful)
I recall reading somewhere that in a basic programming concepts class, during the time when everyone was hopping on the comp sci bandwagon for easy money, there will be about half the people who come out of it simply unable to grasp such simple concepts as control structures and variables in any meaningful way -- no matter how good the instruction. The problem as I've come to see it is in India, your actual aptitude for programming isn't really relevant to whether you get into the training. I don't know why this is, because in theory this is tested for ahead of time.
The difference I see is that in the US, most people without such aptitude will change their majors. In India, it's no deterrent -- this is often the only way out of abject poverty and so they will understandably fight tooth and nail to complete their training and enter the workforce. This in turn heavily weights the available pool of developers in the direction of "incompetent".
It's not that the people of India are as a whole any less likely to have the ability to succeed in computer-related careers than anywhere else in the world population -- but desperation drives a disproportionately large percentage of unqualified people into this career path.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:2, Insightful)
How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
I see this sort of thing a lot here in the US. A question that any idiot can answer in 5 seconds with a manual or google. (There's only so many possibilities for the keyword and syntax in SQL.)
Somehow a priori memorization defines our abilities.
Yet the important questions, the ones that make the difference between someone with an advanced degree and someone educated at community college night classes, are never considered.
Even the most basic stuff, like why does quicksort run faster than bubblesort when sorting 100,000 integers. (If you don't think this matters, wait until they do a cartesian join between large tables.)
Or how do you design, write, test, and verify a 500,000 line program?
Or what is the proper way to mutex a multi-threaded program?
But no... Somehow it's all "Have you got N years of experience with our tools while just graduating from college and willing to take this junior introductory-level job."
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
let us not forget that microsoft let go about 5000 workers to reduce costs
It's not a great comparison. It's normal and healthy for a corporation to trim the fat. The American automotive industry is a great example of what happens when you don't get rid of workers and assets after they become redundant and/or unnecessary.
If Microsoft legitimately can't find talented workers, I suppose there's nothing wrong with employing a handful of foreigners. The total number of H1-B visas isn't terribly high in the grand scheme of things (limited to 65,000 per year, maximum stay of 3 years; 6 if a renewal is approved)
Microsoft employs approximately 89,000 people, and received 3,517 H1-Bs in 2006.
Also don't forget that there are plenty of American citizens working abroad. I can't find a great source for data on this, but Google turned up an article from 2005, claiming that there were approximately 4 million American expatriates at the time.
H1-B visa holders also tend to be highly educated by the very nature of the program. I fully support the notion of attracting the best and brightest minds to my country. It might make me less competitive in the job market, but will almost certainly be good for the country as a whole.
Perhaps the biggest injustice of the system is the manner in which foreign graduate students are treated. We award a huge number of advanced Ph.D positions (often government funded) to foreign students, and force them to return home after they've received their degree! Not only are we depriving American citizens from educational opportunities, but we're also essentially educating other countries' workers for free.
Re:India: The skrypt kiddies of programming (Score:2, Insightful)
I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense Amen. I won't say that all the programmers in India suck, because that would be an inaccurate stereotype. However, I will say that The worst code I have ever seen from American programmers I have worked with was better than the best code that came back from Indian outsourced groups. I suspect that all the GOOD INDIAN PROGRAMMERS CAME TO AMERICA TO MAKE BETTER MONEY. Why would you hire the leftovers? Really, you think that you can just get better quality by spending less? Really?
+1
The (very few, that is) Good Developers came to USA, and the ones that you get outsourcing are the very bottom of the barrel.
The quality of their work is AT LEAST substandard, simply because they have no passion for the job.
Plus, when they say they assign your project N developers, they aren't really N.
So, at the very end, between bad quality of the work, and cheating about staffing, you end paying more than employing US developers (or bringing the good ones in US).
Oh, and, there's also the fact that the managers in US that are assigned to oversee outsourced projects, get really burned very quickly.
Are you insane? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be an idiot, the original post was absolutely 100% racist. Let's read it carefully:
"The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list."
He clearly has stated that he shows preference to people of a specific ethnicity over others. That's textbook racism. It's not crosses burning on your lawn or racial slurs racism, but it is racism.
What the original poster has done has clearly described that they do not judge each Indian or American applicant on their own merits, and gives preference to Chinese and Europeans by "moving them to the top of the interview list." It may turn out that he hires more Europeans and Chinese over Americans and Indians, but their country of origin should have no bearing on his choice of qualified employees. Only their work experience and the answers they have to questions pertaining to the job should be relevant in an interview.
Besides, if he overlooks that one star programmer from India or the US just because of his prejudice, then he's doing a disservice both to the himself as well as the prospect.
We may be a litigious society that's lost a lot of it's motivation for working hard, but I'm an American myself and if you had treated me that way and you had interviewed me for a US position, I would show you just how hard working and litigious I personally could be. Thank goodness such treatment is against the law in the US.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
It gets better - my job was sent to India - and from what I was told they hired 12 people (in India) to replace 2 people in the USA (me and a co-worker).
Re:Huh? HCL? (Score:3, Insightful)
This CEO ended up into a cultural clash. The kind of one Japanese bosses experienced while opening branches in the US and in Europe during the 80's. They thought for years the Japanese way was the best and their local workers should adapt themselves to their way of working. Things weren't working as expected. They thought those western guys were lazy, Discipline was the key and respect to the hierarchy was the key. . They finally understood that those guys were simply working differently.
Most innovations in the computing industry happen in the US...The biggest (by far) computing companies are Americans...And yet he claims that US tech grads are unemployable...It looks like there is a "big" flaw in his logic. (I'm not American BTW).
If I was the main shareholder of his company, I would sack him. He should remain an engineer not a manager and certainly not an entrepreneur.
The only rule in the business world is to adapt yourself.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, given the nature of some of the procedural complications involved with using offshore resources located in different time zones and the amount of follow-up work which is sometimes involved, the actual costs of using such resources are often considerably greater than initially presented, and sometimes end up being greater than they would have been were the original two native US resources simply left in place.
There ain't no free lunch, and cheaper front-end labor costs are only part of the picture.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:1, Insightful)
If the foreign hires are so much better than why is India unable to produce it's own operating system or even any of its own applications anyone uses? Americans invented IT. I don't know where you get the idea that Americans are inferior. We've had a decade of cheap imported labor and it's destroyed the U.S. economy. Funny, but back in 1998 when the economy was booming the IT sector was 98% white American males. If these imported Indian workers are so great then where is the Indian operating system. You are simply one of those stupid MBA-type business managers who have been duped into believing that foreign hires are better at software. They're terrible at it. There are MILLIONS of super-talented American developers right under your nose but you don't want to pay the going rate. Fine. Keep hiring stupid college grads and incompetent foreigners who have never created anything in their lives - and keep on whining about how you can't find good people.
Re:Move Microsoft to India (Score:3, Insightful)
H1B visa holders can only stay in America a short time and many of them do "drone" work for insane work hours. They could be brilliant or dull but the fact is that our companies are using them as disposable employees.
We should trash that program and setup a longer term immigration program where they have to choose leaving, becoming a citizen, or becoming a permanent alien resident. Then they would have more of a chance to contribute and a chance of receiving a fair wage.
Re:Indian hypocrisy is palpable (Score:2, Insightful)
If we get into protectionism, then the West is going to get a wave of protectionism in response, and that is going to turn back the clock 20 years," Premji told The Sunday Times.
If this is true, let's get going and turn the damn clock back already. I'd love to have another crack at the wages good American CS/IT jobs were paying back then! :)
On a serious note, many in this discussion have pointed out that the US economy became strongest during our own periods of protectionism. It probably wouldn't be considered politically correct by many, but it makes me think that if it worked before, why not give it another shot?
I would not be worried for a second if every other nation wanted to do the same. After all, the purpose of a nation is to look out for your own citizens.
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not the guy who was (presumably) hiring, but let me comment nonetheless.
1) String replacement. No need to get overcomplicated - use String#sub [ruby-doc.org].
2) Update an array. Your assignment to "num" there is meaningless. For one thing, you're assigning to a local (lambda argument) which is going to be immediately discarded afterwards. For another, if you're trying to mutate the array in-place, then you should be using Array#map!, not Array#map. And if you're trying to make a new array with values, then you do not need the assignment at all.