Slashdot Mirror
Competing to Work for Microsoft
theodp writes "Addressing 5,000 developers in Bangalore, Bill Gates announced the Code4Bill contest, a nationwide talent hunt which will begin in January and last eight months. Twenty finalists will receive internships with Microsoft India before one Superhero is selected to join Mr. Gates's own team."
I saw this movie once...
That's interesting. What are they going to do to the second one that's voted off the team?
this reminds me of Mr. Trump. Just dont know how!
I don't get it. If you're the best out of 5000 coders, why would you want to work for any company, let alone Microsoft? Seriously. If you're that good, go out there and start your own company and in ten years people will compete to work with you. You'll get to make all the decisions, do everything "the right way", etc. All of the risk, all of the reward.
Does the winner or loser of this competition get to code for Bill? :-)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
If I lived in India, I think just for fun I would participate in this contest, and then when I win (because I am of course the best dev in the world), I will tell Balmer "I am sorry but actually I think I am gonna work for Google. Bye ! Oh BTW, nice chair you have there. Have a nice day !".
Compete to sell your soul huh? Sounds good, Where do I sign up?
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Sounds like the final push to get Vista out the door is on! Winner gets to stay on as scapegoat for any problems encountered.
then tell Bill "No Thanks"
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Twenty finalists will receive internships with Microsoft India before one Superhero is selected to join Mr. Gates's own team.
It sounds like Bill Gates has watched just a bit too many episodes of The Apprentice.
Oh, and if perchance you don't which game this is, check it out!
basiCreations
Mr. Gates is something of a celebrity in India, where technology outsourcing has provided well-paid jobs and changed the fortunes of thousands of middle-class Indians.
I wonder if all of these programmers in India are even slightly concerned that he ditched out on the (I'm assuming here) more expensive U.S. programmers to hire "more cost effective" employees in India?
They might want to think about what happens when ex-Soviet free states reaches a technology level that either surpasses India, or become cheap enough labor wise to be worth the loss of quality. I honestly don't see a lack of qualified programmers here in the U.S. for Microsoft to hire. And I hate seeing companies that have no reason to expand their profit margins start outsourcing just for the sake of making that extra buck.
hi mom!
Addressing 5,000 developers in Bangalore, Bill Gates announced the Code4Bill contest
As opposed to the "Code4Food" contest that they've been participating in?
If I was a poor middle class Indian geek I don't think I would mind interning with microshaft for a year. Would you? It certainly wouldn't hurt to have "winner of the Code4Bill" contest on your resume. But, give me a break, can't he come up with a better name for this contest? It sounds both egotsitical and condescending to me.
So why doesn't he have such a program in the United States? Funny, though, I've never seen the American - or Canadian, or British version - of the Code4Bill contest. Guess expensive developers aren't really wanted at Microsoft.
How are we supposed to motivate college students to enter computer science when the (sadly) premier computer software maker stages competitions to find the very same programmers who may well replace American workers. What bloody hypocrisy Gates has to complain about the state of American CS while at the same time doing his damn best to destroy it.
Bill can recruit programmers from anywhere he wants. But he can try to find the best here, too.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
I ate lunch with Donald Trump, I knew Donald Trump, Donald Trump was a client of mine. Mr. Gates, you are no Donald Trump.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Superhero-The Developer's Song
Draw your own conclusion ;-)
Kde India Announcement
Help fight continental drift.
Wouldn't it be cool if whoever won this contest turned down the job offer?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/ It sucked.
Hey, you 5,000 developers, why don't you do a bunch of Microsoft Windows coding and propoganda for us* (for free) and we in turn will employ a handfull of you for all your combined effort. Now get started!
* all entries and innovation become the property of Microsoft.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I am a software engineer in Bangalore, and honestly I find this "contest" a bit condescending. I mean, why should I jump through hoops to work at Microsft? If I wanted to work at a large company, I can apply to Oracle, Sun, IBM, Yahoo or Google (all of whom have development centres in Bangalore).
The only situation where I can imagine myself competing against 5000 developers for a single job would be if I was fanatical about the organisation (e.g., Google), and I certainly don't feel that way about MS.
From TFA:
"I want to be like him. I am a huge admirer," said 24-year old Naveen Rao, a development engineer with the outsourcing company Aditi Technologies.
Well, for starters, you need to drop out of an elite college just before you would have been thrown out for skipping classes. If you've already earned a college degree, forget everything you've learned. Get the point here? Next, since you're mom is rich and has big business connections through charity work, use those connections to steal someone elses product (a crappy OS simular to CPM) and pass it off as yours to a big dumb company with deep pockets.
Are you getting the point now? After a few years of screwing the company you sold the product to, cut a deal with them to make a better product. Screw them over again by stealing yet another product by hijacking a product team working nearby that's been cancled (perhaps its a GUI on top of VMS by a guy named Cavid Duttler). Use this stolen product team to plow the compnay that gave you the big start (don't worry, your mom's friend moved on long ago).
Is it starting to sink in yet? From there, you just keep going with whatever makes you money and screws hard working programmers over. Hijack a web browser from some poor startup (make sure they rhyme with "eyeglass").
Through all of this, if you want to go after something, just throw money at it and duplicate features other companies have done the hard work for. By version 3 you'll figure it out more or less. If not, you can just spend them out of the market.
Truth is, if you want to be like Bill Gates, all you don't need any technical tallent. And, if you admire Bill Gates, you have a serious lack of ethics.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
I mean, why hire all those people here in the US of A, and help the economy just a little bit, when you can support a foreign economy and pay 1/10th (that's probably an exaggeration) the amount while your at it.
Typical of way too many companies here in the US, they'd rather save money and make the bottom line look better, than actually support their own economy. It's not like the bigwigs have to worry about budgets or anything...
[/soapbox]
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
"it's like competing in the special olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded"
NOTE: the above is a *joke*. If you do not have a sense of humor, please ignore this comment and move on.
Sounds more like The Apprentice (reality TV show). This will be interesting how geeks backstab eachother for a seat next to the very "one" they loath.
Life is not for the lazy.
1. Whoever makes the first blue screen, wins!
2. Flying chairs screensavers earn a second place.
3. the third place, Assistant programmer, will be awarded to the one who makes a program whose clippy assistant says "Developers Developers Developers!" repeatedly.
4. Everyone in the country will be accepted to participate.
4b. Except in Nebraska!
So on Bill Gates team you get the privledge of getting coffee for the richest man in the world. Ah, status.
Give me that guy's code, and I'll find at least a dozen things in it that are pretty much fireable offenses in any reasonably disciplined dev org. During my time at Microsoft (5+ years), I've known no less than 50 Indian SDEs (MSFT jargon for software developer). Only two of them could write what I'd call "good code". One of these two was a freakin' genius, but I digress. I don't know if it's cultural or not, but it seems that Indians are predisposed to writing horribly convoluted, unmaintainable cut&paste garbage (sorry, I can't call _this_ "code"). For most of them, if it works _somehow_ means it's good enough. If it were up to me, half of these folks (not just Indian, of course) would be gone and the rest would be scared of checking in atrocities they check in right now for others to rewrite later.
And the thing is, the culture at MSFT is such that you can't just email into dev team alias and say "this is crap, and this needs to be rewritten". You'd "hurt people's feelings", which will affect your yearly review, pushing it towards (or below) 3.5 grade, for which you get bonus and stock grant that may or may not cover the cost of living. So folks just shut up and suffer.
Actually, I think Vista will be pretty interesting to watch. It is now mandatory in many (if not all) teams at MSFT to outsource at least something across all disciplines. They outsource mostly Test, but since you have to outsource Dev and PM, too, some of Dev and PM work gets done in IDC (India Development Center). Generally, whatever comes from there ends up being rewritten by non-Indian devs in Redmond, on their own time, because you aren't going to tell your (most likely Indian) manager that the code that came from IDC fucking sucks. As pressure goes up in the ship cycle, folks in Redmond have less and less time to rewrite IDC garbage, so it gets checked in (and shipped) as-is. So I fully expect Vista to be a fuckup of gigantic proportions, until at least SP1.
The sad part is, people will buy it anyway.
BTW, this is not a racist or anti-outsourcing rant. Test folks in China did (and no doubt still do) a stellar job. I'm just puzzled that Indians fuck up so badly time after time. If you guys are reading this, you've got to realize that sooner or later it will become clear to the higher ups that company money is better spent in China, despite pretty shitty English that Chinese folks speak.
If they are focusing at coding, then they are missing the big picture.
Nobody would argue that coding is important, and that you'd like to have good individuals to code applications.
But if you look at Microsoft's products, and compare them to Apple, what are the differences? Coding?
No, the differences are:
* a focus on integration of the hardware and software subsystem
* a focus on ease of use, not quality or rapidity of coding
* a focus on agility of teams. How many versions of Apple's OS have come out since the last Windows update?
I don't see a "coding contest" making a big difference. And it's not like Microsoft is running out of cash and has to shave costs by getting cheaper coders. They're doing it because they aren't growing enough. Cutting staff costs is treating the symptom. The actual disease is bloated code, not much creativity, integration, or elegance in their products. Coding contests aren't going to solve that.
Nope, that's a part of "code4sony". Get yer facts straight :)
-- Linux user #369862
But in Soviet Russia, Bill codes for you!
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
And, if you admire Bill Gates, you have a serious lack of ethics.
Though I will not include Bill Gates in the list of 'truly evil', some of the role models Indians consider are people of totally dubious background.
About 10-12 years back there was stock market crash in India engineered by loopholes-in-the-system+backdoor-deals by a rogue trader - Harshad Mehta.
I have seen many reports/articles/interviews where he was admired for his money making skills and quotes like 'I want to be like Harshad Mehta' with all the sincerity. For the last two/three decades there are very few socio-cultural icons in the subcontinent...the people who can be role models.
Tat Tvam Asi
Willy Wanker and the Software Factory. What bad things could happen to the 19 people who don't win?
So Code4Bill is meant to throw attention away from open source? And the 20 lucky winners get to work for Microsoft for a year for free?
Crazy world. If these 20 are so smart, why aren't they starting up their own companies to provide open source to schools and wi fi to villages?
Or are these at least _paid_ internships?
They're
obviously
being
paid
by
the
line.
Ian Ameline