by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @01:08AM (#28417403)
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.
See? Bringing in people and giving them jobs does help local unemployment.
let us not forget that microsoft let go about 5000 workers to reduce costs, so your analogy then becomes similar to
You have 40 employed people and ten unemployed.. the employer then fires 30 of those and replaces them with foreign imports that are cheaper, now of the sample group instead of having 20% unemployed you have 50%
you then have the same number of jobs, but with more people to share them around between.
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.
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
Yeah, because unemployment is "the problem" - not getting the damned job done so that something of value gets created and sold so that wealth can actually get produced, salaries, taxes, and bills paid, and economies improved, right?
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!
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".
I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @05:44AM (#28419305)
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!
You are in luck. As fate has it, I am straight out of college student, looking for work as a programmer.
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
No worries, I will give answers instead of blank stares, though blank stares may last 10-15 seconds as I parse questions. My language of choice to answer questions is Ruby. Let's look at some answers that you claim Master's graduates have trouble with.
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
def string_replace(str, find, replace="")
pos = Regexp.new(Regexp.quote(find)) =~ str
if pos.nil?
return nil
end
ret = str[0...pos] + replace + str[(pos + find.length)..-1]
return ret end
This function returns a string with find changed to replace, first instance only. A nil is returned is the target string is not found, and removes the target string if a replacement string is not provided. For instance:
def string_replace("I like blue.", "blue", "red")
would return:
"I like red."
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
arr.map{|num| num=num+5}
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
UPDATE tblname SET col = col + 5
4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.
You pretty much answered this one yourself. In any case, for an example, SELECT firstname, lastname FROM people WHERE age >= 21 would get the names of people who can drink (in America)
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
x = 5 str = "I have " + x.to_s + " children."
These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".
I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? How *does* one get a Masters Degree in Information Science without being able to answer basic questions like this?
About me, I am a college graduate from a well-known university with a Bachelor's in Computer Science from the College of Engineering with a 3.5+ GPA. Since you don't correlate degrees with talent, I won't bore you with the details. However, if you are willing to take a chance, I am willing to demonstrate my abilities and prove that I can do what you need, so take a chance on a random guy from Slashdot.
No Slashdot account, but I can reached at hire.random.guy.from.slashdot@gmail.com (Registered just for this purpose.)
unfortunately, it seems that if/. *had* outsourced their coding this silly javascript nonsense we're seeing would be fixed.... eventually, and for lots of money, after a process consultant had submitted the change request forms and the technical lead had decided that a complete rewrite using.net was the only way to solve the problem.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @03:33AM (#28418393)
Use NoScript. It loads me a nice reasonable rendition of slashdot without all the bullshit. Slashdot is actually the reason I started using the plugin. I don't know what the fuck Slashdot coders are doing that is so script intensive on a fucking news/forum site since Google docs and Gmail which uses tons upon tons of Javascript runs reasonably while what should be a simple site of html,css, and a conservative amount of javascript feels like I am loading 72 instances of Eclipse on a 486. Get your shit together slashdot.
Try going to your Help page, and under "Classic Index", check the box that says "Use Classic Index". There are other boxes there too e.g. "Simple Design".
Interestingly enough, changing my preferences (and saving them) to simple view, low-bandwidth, no icons did ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.
Same garbage all over my screen.
I am thoroughly convinced this is a Phishing site and all of our passwords are now being used to pound our Karma into the mud so NewYorkCountryLawyer looks even better then he already did.
Agreed. I used to read Slashdot 10 years ago on 233 MHz Sparc 5 workstations, running SlowArseis and it was perfectly reasonable. Now it keeps beachballing my MacBookPro, which is ten times faster on clock speed alone, never mind it can do a lot more in a cycle, has faster bus, RAM and hard disk.
I would've thought Slashdot of all places wouldn't succumb to the gleeful bloat which has rendered spectacular advances in hardware almost irrelevant to the end user experience.
To be honest, I think most bloat is a ploy by programmers to keep themselves 'useful' after the point when most work has been done and the sensible strategy would be to reduce programming staff.
If Americans are unemployable then why are they the ones paying the Indians to do the job?
The money is coming from somewhere, and to make others do the work for you takes some brains.
What this guy doesn't answer is why is it that 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?
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?
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...
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.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @01:21AM (#28417489)
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.
CEO of Indian outsourcing company says Indians are better workers than Americans. In other news, CEO of GM says that GM is a better company than Toyota.
If only we could have those 2-week programming courses you give your Indian programmers before you let them loose on mission-critical projects, imagine what great programmers we could be!
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.
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.
I'm currently working at a major US tech company and litterly every program I have inherited from some out sourcing group is utter crap. I'm talking about EVERY variable is a global variable, one source file for a 5000 line program, no makefile just a line at the top which says compile with gcc blah blah blah, and the list goes on. The reason for out sourcing is not skill its cost. Why pay an American programmer who knows what hes doing when you can out source it and get a program which barely works and when bugs arise blame something/someone else.
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.
I'm currently working at a major US tech company, and have worked at 2 other major US tech companies prior to this, and in every case except one, the source code I have inherited from some in-house coder is utter crap. Magically, every one of these in-house coders has an "Western" name, one was Canadian, the rest American. I'm talking about single source files for thousands of lines of code, 10+ classes (many unrelated to each other), functions written by copy-pasting the internal code of other deprecated methods, so that even if the deprecated methods are removed, the code lives on disguised under a different name. These guys couldn't even just call the deprecated methods, they had to copy-paste the internal implementation so that the ugliness of their work wouldn't be easily apparent. I've inherited code where the nuts and bolts were wrong, e.g. wrong numerical integration routines, incorrect convergence on non-linear curve fits, etc. were just wrong, but it would have been painstaking and laborious to figure that out and verify the results, so of course, those in-house coders just skipped that part. In another company, these in-house coders developed, over 2 years, a solution to synchronize databases, which required data transfer to the tune of 16x the total size (in bytes) of the database - involving a lot of unnecessary XML conversions, and it too had a lot of copy-pasted code. So strangely, some of what the HCL CEO has said is true, as much as I hate to admit it.
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.
The biz lobbyists first claimed that not enough US citizens were going into the field. Now it's that we are "too lazy for the details", not quantity? Which is it? Outsourcing and H1B's were never sold as a way to replace "C" Americans with "A" 3rd-worlders. Did they lie to Congress and voters?
Supposedly, the Indians coming to the States are the smartest. I find them to be no better than American educated and trained workers. IIT is not a breeding ground for great talent, rather superior attitudes. No different than the Ivy League in the United States. I have worked with plenty of Indian talent in Silicon Valley, and managed many as well. It depends on the person; where you go to school, or if you go to school, is irrelevant.
The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list.
> 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.
Until a couple of years ago, I worked for a major US IT firm, in Storage, and went to Bangalore to train new 2nd-level support guys on our mid-range products. The guys themselves were generally OK, since they weren't new to the industry, though there were some odd gaps in basic storage knowledge, such as SCSI protocols. Not something you'd expect to find in a person who'd allegedly done 2nd level support at another company, one that specialized in storage!
In general, though, I wasn't training new graduates from the likes of IIIT-B, but I met a few and had discussions with their managers. What I learned was that these young people were under immense pressure to succeed in IT, with the hopes and expectations of whole extended families riding on their backs. IT is the ticket out of the slums, and families make enormous sacrifices to get their kids in to the industry in the first place. In college, I was told, there's also massive pressure to score high marks, and the process is more biased towards rote learning and cramming for exams. Not totally, of course - that would be impossible - but the point is that, like the Indian education system in general, it's tighter and more authoritarian in terms of curriculum, and the schools themselves were under govt. pressure to deliver high numbers of graduates.
I hate to say this, but I met a few "graduates" who were simply not "graduate material", in terms of basic intelligence, curiosity, enthusiasm, or ability to absorb new concepts. Other graduates I met have great careers ahead of them, but I came away with the impression that "graduate" over there is a bit (again, not totally!) like "MCSE" in other countries: a statement of the exams you have passed, not a wider measure of your ability to function in a complex, ever-changing IT world. The problem with "cramming" is that while it might get you through an exam, the knowledge is not integrated and retained as well as it should be. I'm seeing this myself, now that I'm getting to go to university as a mature student (Engineering), where some subjects would IMHO be better assessed by e.g. thesis, not exam.
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.
When it comes to shipping out labor, everyone seems to miss the big picture.
What is the purpose of a nation? To benefit and protect the citizens therein (at least that's what is sold to the citizens). Everyone has to be a member of a nation whether they want to or not, and most nations only allow you to be a citizen of their nation and no other. So people are effectively trapped within one system. As of yet there is no such thing as a global citizen.
So a nation's goal is not to server the world, but to serve its citizens. If it can serve both the world and its citizens simultaneously, that is great. But if it has to choose between one or the other, then it must serve its citizens first.
Originally in the US corporations were limited entities that were only allowed to exist for public benefit and only for a limited duration until their objective was reached. But that changed over time, and now corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the US. Corporations in the US benefit from many things, including physical production, access to the US market, subsidies, government contracts, tax breaks, tariffs, and many other benefits from being registered as a US corporation.
One must remember that a nation and its government is there to serve the betterment of its citizens, and not corporations. If it benefits a corporation to outsource to another country, but not the citizens, why do it? The nation has no obligation to benefit the corporation unless it also benefits citizens. In fact that's why US corporations are given all the advantages they get - in the end it benefits the citizens.
But once the public is being injured by the current regulations governing international business, it's time to change the laws. Why benefit a tiny proportion of the US population consisting of high-level execs as well as foreign nationals at the expense of the vast majority of the US population through regulation?
If a company wants to be "global" and hire foreign workers at the expense of US citizens, I have no problem with that. But they must lose the benefits of a being a registered US corporation. They must truly go international, meaning no tax breaks, no subsidies, no being on the advantageous side of tariffs, etc..
There is *no* reason the clothes, drugs, movies, songs, etc. etc. should have that extreme of a price difference.
Just because you haven't been able to think of the reason doesn't mean there isn't one.
To take the example of a DVD, only considering America and India. A film has a fixed cost of say $100 million to recoup from DVD sales, and each individual DVD has a cost of say $0.20 to produce and sell. If the DVD seller only sold at $19.99 in both countries then sales in India would be negligible, meaning that sales in America will need to cover the entire cost of both making the film and pressing the DVDs.
If they sold DVDs at $2.50 everywhere then the margin would be insufficient to cover their costs.
What you are ignoring is that the by selling the DVD in India at $2.50 the company knows it wont cover all the overhead costs, but it will cover some of them. If Indian sales generate $5 million then it lowers the amount they need to charge in America to make a profit by $5 million. If films etc weren't sold at a lower price in countries with lower wages then they would have higher prices in the countries where they are sold in order to cover the lost revenue.
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.
So right now, I compete with someone who makes 1/10th of what I do-- in part because I'm subsidizing research on his health care and his movies and entertainment.
By your logic, billionaires should pay 2 million bucks for the same shirt that you and I buy for 20 bucks. Cable TV should cost a billionaire 100k a month.
Prices are not relative-- it's only because of gross sellouts and artificially protected regions that such *extreme* price differences are maintained.
Within the U.S. competition brings down prices rapidly-- but between the U.S. and India, it doesn't.
The fair price is 10 cents in both places.
Under real free trade, you couldn't prevent it.
Prices are not relative under real capitalism.
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.
So right now, I compete with someone who makes 1/10th of what I do-- in part because I'm subsidizing research on his health care and his movies and entertainment.
By your logic, billionaires should pay 2 million bucks for the same shirt that you and I buy for 20 bucks.
Cable TV should cost a billionaire 100k a month.
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.
Prices are not relative-- it's only because of gross sellouts and artificially protected regions that such *extreme* price differences are maintained.
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.
Within the U.S. competition brings down prices rapidly-- but between the U.S. and India, it doesn't.
It does, for consumers in both countries. Google "comparative advantage" for the how and why, if you really want to know.
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.
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/. 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.
So far in the last 12 months I've had three side projects that projects that were outsourced but for whatever reason such a mess was made of them that the clients have brought them to us to fix at a higher than normal rate.
My employer's now collaborating with an "reverse" outsourcing mob who've set themselves up to help people bring their failing outsourced projects back and are getting a fair bit of work through it.
To be honest, the quality of code I'm seeing is easily the worst I've ever seen and that includes half-assed open source projects. Whether that's because it's just "sweatshop code" as one client put it or they are attempting to write super advanced AI code generators and using them to generate the code...and failing miserably, I don't know. But it's terrible. From the complete lack of imagination and forward thinking in design, right down to the god awful highly inconsistently cased variable names.
Remember this is *three* different projects from three different Indian companies theoretically written by three different sets of programmers. The code all looks and feels the same, which leads me to believe there's something going on industry wide over there. What that is I have no idea but they need to fix it quick smart as the industry as a whole is getting a bit of a reputation.
What I do know is people are willing to pay much more once they've tried outsourcing and failed.
Those that don't go out of business in the mean time that is.
(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee).
I'm living in the Philippines, I can answer the crappy code part. While many might like to think of us as being a 'third world' kind of country, we are more of a follower of first world trends in disguise, we do it by building cheap look-a-likes and selling at a price our market can accommodate. We don't really fit the glove of this whole "X World" thing.
That said, Why: It's simple. We are what we are because our ethos is "Near enough really is absolutely good enough, anything better is a waste of money, effort, and time". An analogy: You want a straight and level sidewalk? Damn, that's going to cost you extra. And you want it free of obstructions like telegraph poles, open drains, plus all the little lines that we refuse to step on? You want wheelchair access too? And you want it to actually be 'finished'? Well, for that kind of crazy desire, your price has now reached exactly the same as what you would pay in first world USA or anywhere else in the world for the same quality stretch of sidewalk.
Americans want stuff done on the cheap. Guess what - you actually do get what you pay for! (I know, who'd have though!)
Uhm, the guys who invented the transistor, and setup a bunch of well-known semiconductor companies, the traitorous eight [wikipedia.org], how many were born outside the USA? Of the rest, how many were born to immigrants to the USA?
(The answers: "at least 3" for the first, and "at least 1" for the second).
It's hilarious that a nation whose success was built on waves of immigration can spawn people so ignorant of the contributions of immigrants. The rest of the 1st world doesn't mind though - we'll be glad to take the USAs spot as patron of the world's best & brightest - please do stop your H1-B programme.
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.
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."
What that CEO actually means is that American employees aren't willing to
1. Put in 4-6 extra hours every day
2. Lower coding standards (use 's' as variable names, enormous methods, no refactoring, cutting corners)
3. Be mindless enough to follow a team lead's decisions without proactive thinking or questioning.
Which is why they'd never fit in at HCL.
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
outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Funny)
Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Funny)
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.
See? Bringing in people and giving them jobs does help local unemployment.
dom
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Informative)
let us not forget that microsoft let go about 5000 workers to reduce costs, so your analogy then becomes similar to
You have 40 employed people and ten unemployed.. the employer then fires 30 of those and replaces them with foreign imports that are cheaper, now of the sample group instead of having 20% unemployed you have 50%
you then have the same number of jobs, but with more people to share them around between.
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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.
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Funny)
If those 90 people are forbidden from eating cows by their religion, the original 10 are still screwed. McDonald's won't be hiring.
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Interesting)
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
Yeah, because unemployment is "the problem" - not getting the damned job done so that something of value gets created and sold so that wealth can actually get produced, salaries, taxes, and bills paid, and economies improved, right?
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!
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".
I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? 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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Funny)
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!
You are in luck. As fate has it, I am straight out of college student, looking for work as a programmer.
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
No worries, I will give answers instead of blank stares, though blank stares may last 10-15 seconds as I parse questions. My language of choice to answer questions is Ruby. Let's look at some answers that you claim Master's graduates have trouble with.
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
def string_replace(str, find, replace="")
pos = Regexp.new(Regexp.quote(find)) =~ str
if pos.nil?
return nil
end
ret = str[0...pos] + replace + str[(pos + find.length)..-1]
return ret
end
This function returns a string with find changed to replace, first instance only. A nil is returned is the target string is not found, and removes the target string if a replacement string is not provided. For instance:
def string_replace("I like blue.", "blue", "red")
would return:
"I like red."
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
arr.map{|num| num=num+5}
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
UPDATE tblname SET col = col + 5
4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.
You pretty much answered this one yourself. In any case, for an example,
SELECT firstname, lastname FROM people WHERE age >= 21
would get the names of people who can drink (in America)
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
x = 5
str = "I have " + x.to_s + " children."
These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".
I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? How *does* one get a Masters Degree in Information Science without being able to answer basic questions like this?
About me, I am a college graduate from a well-known university with a Bachelor's in Computer Science from the College of Engineering with a 3.5+ GPA. Since you don't correlate degrees with talent, I won't bore you with the details. However, if you are willing to take a chance, I am willing to demonstrate my abilities and prove that I can do what you need, so take a chance on a random guy from Slashdot.
No Slashdot account, but I can reached at hire.random.guy.from.slashdot@gmail.com (Registered just for this purpose.)
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Funny)
unfortunately, it seems that if /. *had* outsourced their coding this silly javascript nonsense we're seeing would be fixed.... eventually, and for lots of money, after a process consultant had submitted the change request forms and the technical lead had decided that a complete rewrite using .net was the only way to solve the problem.
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Interesting)
Use NoScript. It loads me a nice reasonable rendition of slashdot without all the bullshit. Slashdot is actually the reason I started using the plugin. I don't know what the fuck Slashdot coders are doing that is so script intensive on a fucking news/forum site since Google docs and Gmail which uses tons upon tons of Javascript runs reasonably while what should be a simple site of html,css, and a conservative amount of javascript feels like I am loading 72 instances of Eclipse on a 486. Get your shit together slashdot.
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Informative)
Try going to your Help page, and under "Classic Index", check the box that says "Use Classic Index". There are other boxes there too e.g. "Simple Design".
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Funny)
Interestingly enough, changing my preferences (and saving them) to simple view, low-bandwidth, no icons did ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.
Same garbage all over my screen.
I am thoroughly convinced this is a Phishing site and all of our passwords are now being used to pound our Karma into the mud so NewYorkCountryLawyer looks even better then he already did.
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. I used to read Slashdot 10 years ago on 233 MHz Sparc 5 workstations, running SlowArseis and it was perfectly reasonable. Now it keeps beachballing my MacBookPro, which is ten times faster on clock speed alone, never mind it can do a lot more in a cycle, has faster bus, RAM and hard disk.
I would've thought Slashdot of all places wouldn't succumb to the gleeful bloat which has rendered spectacular advances in hardware almost irrelevant to the end user experience.
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Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score:5, Insightful)
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If Americans are unemployable.... (Score:5, Insightful)
India: The skrypt kiddies of programming (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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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...
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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!
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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.
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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.
...News at 11. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, we yanks are such dolts! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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: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.
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Contradiction from the Right (Score:5, Interesting)
The biz lobbyists first claimed that not enough US citizens were going into the field. Now it's that we are "too lazy for the details", not quantity? Which is it? Outsourcing and H1B's were never sold as a way to replace "C" Americans with "A" 3rd-worlders. Did they lie to Congress and voters?
I find most Indians incompetent (Score:5, Interesting)
Supposedly, the Indians coming to the States are the smartest. I find them to be no better than American educated and trained workers. IIT is not a breeding ground for great talent, rather superior attitudes. No different than the Ivy League in the United States. I have worked with plenty of Indian talent in Silicon Valley, and managed many as well. It depends on the person; where you go to school, or if you go to school, is irrelevant.
The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list.
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.
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The Bangalore Pressure Cooker (Score:5, Interesting)
Until a couple of years ago, I worked for a major US IT firm, in Storage, and went to Bangalore to train new 2nd-level support guys on our mid-range products. The guys themselves were generally OK, since they weren't new to the industry, though there were some odd gaps in basic storage knowledge, such as SCSI protocols. Not something you'd expect to find in a person who'd allegedly done 2nd level support at another company, one that specialized in storage!
In general, though, I wasn't training new graduates from the likes of IIIT-B, but I met a few and had discussions with their managers. What I learned was that these young people were under immense pressure to succeed in IT, with the hopes and expectations of whole extended families riding on their backs. IT is the ticket out of the slums, and families make enormous sacrifices to get their kids in to the industry in the first place. In college, I was told, there's also massive pressure to score high marks, and the process is more biased towards rote learning and cramming for exams. Not totally, of course - that would be impossible - but the point is that, like the Indian education system in general, it's tighter and more authoritarian in terms of curriculum, and the schools themselves were under govt. pressure to deliver high numbers of graduates.
I hate to say this, but I met a few "graduates" who were simply not "graduate material", in terms of basic intelligence, curiosity, enthusiasm, or ability to absorb new concepts. Other graduates I met have great careers ahead of them, but I came away with the impression that "graduate" over there is a bit (again, not totally!) like "MCSE" in other countries: a statement of the exams you have passed, not a wider measure of your ability to function in a complex, ever-changing IT world. The problem with "cramming" is that while it might get you through an exam, the knowledge is not integrated and retained as well as it should be. I'm seeing this myself, now that I'm getting to go to university as a mature student (Engineering), where some subjects would IMHO be better assessed by e.g. thesis, not exam.
Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Funny)
India has not done a damned thing for the USA
It would be hard to neatly express the USA's $11,400,000,000,000 debt without the zero. Invented in India.
OOOH BURN!
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Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Interesting)
When it comes to shipping out labor, everyone seems to miss the big picture.
What is the purpose of a nation? To benefit and protect the citizens therein (at least that's what is sold to the citizens). Everyone has to be a member of a nation whether they want to or not, and most nations only allow you to be a citizen of their nation and no other. So people are effectively trapped within one system. As of yet there is no such thing as a global citizen.
So a nation's goal is not to server the world, but to serve its citizens. If it can serve both the world and its citizens simultaneously, that is great. But if it has to choose between one or the other, then it must serve its citizens first.
Originally in the US corporations were limited entities that were only allowed to exist for public benefit and only for a limited duration until their objective was reached. But that changed over time, and now corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the US. Corporations in the US benefit from many things, including physical production, access to the US market, subsidies, government contracts, tax breaks, tariffs, and many other benefits from being registered as a US corporation.
One must remember that a nation and its government is there to serve the betterment of its citizens, and not corporations. If it benefits a corporation to outsource to another country, but not the citizens, why do it? The nation has no obligation to benefit the corporation unless it also benefits citizens. In fact that's why US corporations are given all the advantages they get - in the end it benefits the citizens.
But once the public is being injured by the current regulations governing international business, it's time to change the laws. Why benefit a tiny proportion of the US population consisting of high-level execs as well as foreign nationals at the expense of the vast majority of the US population through regulation?
If a company wants to be "global" and hire foreign workers at the expense of US citizens, I have no problem with that. But they must lose the benefits of a being a registered US corporation. They must truly go international, meaning no tax breaks, no subsidies, no being on the advantageous side of tariffs, etc..
It's really simple.
LS
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Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because you haven't been able to think of the reason doesn't mean there isn't one.
To take the example of a DVD, only considering America and India. A film has a fixed cost of say $100 million to recoup from DVD sales, and each individual DVD has a cost of say $0.20 to produce and sell. If the DVD seller only sold at $19.99 in both countries then sales in India would be negligible, meaning that sales in America will need to cover the entire cost of both making the film and pressing the DVDs.
If they sold DVDs at $2.50 everywhere then the margin would be insufficient to cover their costs.
What you are ignoring is that the by selling the DVD in India at $2.50 the company knows it wont cover all the overhead costs, but it will cover some of them. If Indian sales generate $5 million then it lowers the amount they need to charge in America to make a profit by $5 million. If films etc weren't sold at a lower price in countries with lower wages then they would have higher prices in the countries where they are sold in order to cover the lost revenue.
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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.
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Re:Where's India's domestic economy? (Score:5, Interesting)
The fair price is 10 cents in both places.
Under real free trade, you couldn't prevent it.
Prices are not relative under real capitalism.
So right now, I compete with someone who makes 1/10th of what I do-- in part because I'm subsidizing research on his health care and his movies and entertainment.
By your logic, billionaires should pay 2 million bucks for the same shirt that you and I buy for 20 bucks.
Cable TV should cost a billionaire 100k a month.
Prices are not relative-- it's only because of gross sellouts and artificially protected regions that such *extreme* price differences are maintained.
Within the U.S. competition brings down prices rapidly-- but between the U.S. and India, it doesn't.
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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.
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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
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Re:Move Microsoft to India (Score:5, Interesting)
I posted this before and I'll post it again.
So far in the last 12 months I've had three side projects that projects that were outsourced but for whatever reason such a mess was made of them that the clients have brought them to us to fix at a higher than normal rate.
My employer's now collaborating with an "reverse" outsourcing mob who've set themselves up to help people bring their failing outsourced projects back and are getting a fair bit of work through it.
To be honest, the quality of code I'm seeing is easily the worst I've ever seen and that includes half-assed open source projects. Whether that's because it's just "sweatshop code" as one client put it or they are attempting to write super advanced AI code generators and using them to generate the code...and failing miserably, I don't know. But it's terrible. From the complete lack of imagination and forward thinking in design, right down to the god awful highly inconsistently cased variable names.
Remember this is *three* different projects from three different Indian companies theoretically written by three different sets of programmers. The code all looks and feels the same, which leads me to believe there's something going on industry wide over there. What that is I have no idea but they need to fix it quick smart as the industry as a whole is getting a bit of a reputation.
What I do know is people are willing to pay much more once they've tried outsourcing and failed.
Those that don't go out of business in the mean time that is.
(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee).
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Re:Move Microsoft to India (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm living in the Philippines, I can answer the crappy code part. While many might like to think of us as being a 'third world' kind of country, we are more of a follower of first world trends in disguise, we do it by building cheap look-a-likes and selling at a price our market can accommodate. We don't really fit the glove of this whole "X World" thing.
That said, Why: It's simple. We are what we are because our ethos is "Near enough really is absolutely good enough, anything better is a waste of money, effort, and time". An analogy: You want a straight and level sidewalk? Damn, that's going to cost you extra. And you want it free of obstructions like telegraph poles, open drains, plus all the little lines that we refuse to step on? You want wheelchair access too? And you want it to actually be 'finished'? Well, for that kind of crazy desire, your price has now reached exactly the same as what you would pay in first world USA or anywhere else in the world for the same quality stretch of sidewalk.
Americans want stuff done on the cheap. Guess what - you actually do get what you pay for! (I know, who'd have though!)
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Re:Move Microsoft to India (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhm, the guys who invented the transistor, and setup a bunch of well-known semiconductor companies, the traitorous eight [wikipedia.org], how many were born outside the USA? Of the rest, how many were born to immigrants to the USA?
(The answers: "at least 3" for the first, and "at least 1" for the second).
It's hilarious that a nation whose success was built on waves of immigration can spawn people so ignorant of the contributions of immigrants. The rest of the 1st world doesn't mind though - we'll be glad to take the USAs spot as patron of the world's best & brightest - please do stop your H1-B programme.
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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.
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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."
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Re:Huh? HCL? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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