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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!
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 !".
Because not every great coder is a great business man. In this day, you have to have some very smart (financially and fiscally) people on your side as well. Besides, after winning this thing you could go do your internship and then quit a year later. The "fame" from the contest will likely provide some sort of venture capital which would hopefully make it easier to start the business anyway.
Plus, think of all the chicks you'd get...
Sounds like the final push to get Vista out the door is on! Winner gets to stay on as scapegoat for any problems encountered.
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!
Think of all the chicks you'd get...
That didn't take long at all.
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 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.
"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.
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!
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.
But in Soviet Russia, Bill codes for you!
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