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Dot-Com Work Culture Making a Comeback?
jeebus writes "This week a Deloitte study has shown that high on the agenda of CEOs around the world is the shortage of tech talent. Is a shortage of talented geeks in the market seeing a return of the dot-com culture with foosball tables, beanbags, and inflated salaries used to entice talented workers? Welcome to Web 2.0 work culture, the future of yesterday. 'Global recruitment companies were telling prospecting employees that they were no longer going to be employed just because they were a technical guru. They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom. Fast forward to Web 2.0 and while workplaces aren't as cheesy with their decor as they were were in the late '90s, and developers aren't getting paid $100K for being HTML and JavaScript jockeys, geeks just aren't chuffed with corporate culture.'"
I'm an excellent slacker... err superstar geek programmer.
yea cant wait for DotComBurst 2.0
It's going to come up, so let me save you all some time:
From The English to American Dictionary
I really haven't seen any hard evidence that all that many 'web jockeys' were getting some $100k salary, unless they lived in the valley, where cost of living is so bad that 100k is practically minimum wage unless you take the bus 2 hours to work. Does anyone have any stats to back up what the average dot-com era 'web jockey' salary was compared with today?
stuff |
You see this kind of thing happen whenever demand for IT professionals goes up because of the common perception that IT people are 'geeks/nerds' who are willing to take compensation in the form of casual wear and beanbag chairs instead of in salary... Given that the company is interested in its own bottom line, which is cheaper, a pinball machine or giving everyone a raise?
Thank God Sony gave me this great job developing games for the PS3.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I worked at a DOT BURSTER in 2000, in big wide open space in the burbs, and they had free pizza every Fridays, everyone could wear jeans, I could roll in more or less whenever I wanted, and we all had potentially millions of dollars in soon to be worthless stock options. When hired they asked me if I wanted Linux, or Windows, or both. All of our servers were named after Transformers.
Now, I have a little cubicle, a company issued notebook running Windows XP, and no stock options. All of our servers are named based on an established IBM numbering system. I get to work from home a bit more but that's only because I commute 4 hours a day.
Sure, this gig pays more, but the work environment is not nearly the same. There's no heady optimism about the future, and that, really, when you think about it, the collapse of the dot net boom and worse, the later ruling about expensing stock options, and then the war, this decade has been utterly depressing.
This is my sig.
Having to wear nicer (read: more expensive) clothing is a cost, both in terms of purchasing clothes and the time it takes to put them on and iron them (it takes more time to button up a shirt and tie a tie than to toss on a T-shirt). Plus, it's more comfortable. It's probably worth 1-2% of my salary to avoid wearing such things. (Of course, it's a personal preference- it's probably worth 10-20% for my boss, who's picky about such things, and ~0.5% to another coworker, who doesn't mind dressing up, but still sees a slight advantage to not doing so).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Goodbye, pants!
I've been working in IT since just after the bubble burst (I graduated in CompSci mid-2003 and joined a corporate graduate scheme at a time when you were grateful for any IT job at all) and to be honest the corporations can keep their bean-bags, I'd just like my salary to be brought in line with those who survived the crash and are still on incredibly inflated salaries.
Here in London, a web expert (read: someone who knows a bit of HTML/CSS/Javascript and has been working in IT since around 2000) can easily be on £60k-£70k, which equates to $120k-$140k, as a result of being in the right place at the right time during the last boom. Someone just starting out in the profession with the same skills would have been lucky to get £25k after a couple of years experience until recently. The recent Web 2.0 boom and a shortage of people with the right skills means that the salary gap is now closing, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
Then there will be a corresponding increase in salaries to attract good employees... Which strangely hasn't happened, so it can't be much of a shortage.
Deleted
"They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom."
IT was never exempt from communication, as IT is all ABOUT communication. Learning to dress usually means adhering to an arbitarily strict dress code that interferes with the nature of IT work to begin with. Ever try to set up a work station while wearing a suit and tie or something similar? You end up fighting your clothes more than the probelm at hand.
And corporate ideals aren't exactly something that I feel good about taking part in. Corporate ideals, for the most part, are trying to figure out how to save the company millions while keeping your mouth shut about anything shady the higher ups are doing. If we went by what people do rather than say, most corporate ideals could be summarized as 'looking for the golden parachute' or 'going to the company picnic to weasel my way into a promotion'.
There's a good reason the dot com companies didn't adhere to most of these. One, if you're working with an open minded crew, dress code doesn't matter aside from a few very basic rules. Two, ideals mean NOTHING if they aren't followed. You can bitch about how its all for the workers all you want, but when you give yourself a nice fat bonus over your workers, all of that just went out the window.
I call it breaking tradition. Tradition is you sit down, shut up, and do your job and whatever else they can trick you into doing. You're to dress up like good little sheeple and make sure not to look any of the higher ups in the eye.
IT people by nature are used to being different. They're used to thinking for themselves, because its probably the only reason they've survived into the IT field far enough to be employed for it. We aren't used to keeping our mouths closed while being treated like shit, or putting on four layers of expensive clothes just to dirty them up by rewiring the networking cabinet.
I wish it could be a wakeup call for all jobs that don't deal with customers/clients face-to-face. Just because the person processing your invoices is wearing a suit and tie doesn't mean he isn't forwarding your account information to his shady cousin. Nor does it mean he isn't talking smack about his co-workers or fantasizing about the new girl down in Advertising. All it means is he's wearing a suit beacuse someone made a policy saying that he had to.
It doesn't even look better than business-casual.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
the blue collar workers nowadays. In the old days it were only coal miners, poor factory workers. But nowadays its the IT too. Not very high pay, long working hours. Very seperate sitting place, never included in most normal activities. Always stick together, etc etc.
I think going into IT was the worst decision I could have ever made.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
The reason there is a shortage is that those who were burned the first time wont go back and those that haven't been burned yet have been forewarned by those that have. Very few outside the upper echelons of the .com companies of the 90's saw any real benefit from the .com era the vast majority got hosed. Empty promises, foosball and free juice worked the first time but I can't see many falling for it again. Everyone I worked with in my two experiences with the .com era have moved out of the corporate world and are either with small companies or working as consultants, a few have left the field entirely.
I recently received a call from the Recruiter that hired me on to my last corporate job. I was told the company I was laid off from was looking to hire me back. I told me the whole dog and pony show was starting back up, that the culture had changed and this time would be different and this time it wouldn't be a complete waste of five years of my life. I thought about it for five seconds and told her that I would just as soon bathe in hot lava than go back. She sounded a little upset, and proceeded to tell me that so far she was 0-12 in trying to lure back the folks I worked with. Guess I wasn't alone.
If there's one thing that bothered me about the dot-com culture, it was all the wasted money on crap like foosball tables. I don't like corporate culture either, but for god's sake people have some perspective and MODERATE! Here are some plain truths that few people want to admit to:
1. Someone who actually knows what they're doing when it comes to computers is not a business person or an executive. A lot of people who dream about jobs in the technology sector always imagine that it somehow leads to the top of the glass tower and a corner office. It doesn't and it shouldn't. If you want that and you have middling to poor technical skills, then you're not cut out for technology. Instead you should go straight for that MBA now. Sure, there's the very rare and occasional individual who is very good with computers and also has business acumen, but you really have to look far and wide to find these strange hybrids. Most business people just aren't that good at computers other than using Office, maybe some SQL and that's about it. (This is not meant to insult anyone BTW)
2. A good software developer writes applications that are meant to be run as binaries. Sorry web folks, you're not software developers. At the very best, you are WEB application developers. At worst, you're still coding static HTML pages and trying to get that six figure job. Yes, web developers are necessary. Yes, web developers are quite talented. But web developers are rarely well versed in C or C++. However, many web developers have a leg up on software developers in the visual department though. Not always, but more often than not.
3. Everything I said about the web developers above? It all applies in reverse to the software developers. As always, there are some exceptions, but they are rare. Software developers should typically not try to write web applications. At best, you'll wind up re-inventing something some other web developer has already done that's ten times better. At worst, you'll wind up with some ugly monstrosity of a web page that isn't user friendly and while the backend might be super efficient, it won't actually do a lot. Stick to software development, it's a different creature altogether. If you are dead set on becoming a web developer, then try REALLY hard NOT to bring much of what you know about UI design (which tends to be little) to the web app side. Remember that the web is primarily a visual medium, including the text. It has to look at least as good as it works.
4. Microsoft based developers are totally different animal. A lot of you are quite talented within your own realm and can whip up some fantastic stuff much faster than your Java and Unix based C using counterparts in terms of look and feel and reusable objects. (The only possible exception being the QT/KDE folks in Unix land) And the subsets of development apply to you as well. There are those of you who develop web apps and those of you who develop applications for use on the desktop. Once again, it's a rare person who can cross those boundaries and do well on both sides. So stick to your side of the development space, unless you want to make a major career change and can actually let go of what you know and take on a totally different mindset.
5. IT computer and network admins are also not executive or "office" positions. A lot of people seem to think that working in IT means a clean office, and you get to wear suits or at the very least business casual. You're wrong. Computer and network admins tend to be the grunts who crawl under desks in a lot of small to medium sized businesses. If you happen to be lucky enough to work in a large or global business, then it's possible that your position will be considered close to but not quite "suit"-ish. Again, if that's what you want, you're better off focusing on the MBA with a minor in CS.
But the bottom line here is that people who really know what they're doing with computers are rarely business people. They are rarely cut out to function within c
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I am not an IT person but an electrical engineer and all I can say is why would you care about beanbags and pinball machines? It is more about the attitude of the people you are working with as well as the company. I would rather work hard, enjoy my work and come off with some sense of achievement than dick around all day.
I dunno... we had Deloitte consultants come in before, and the one girl was really hot. I don't know why they were here or what they did but I don't think it matters.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
And when you start costing 30x as much, suddenly you'll be able to out-do 35 of them, right?
... or, hell, even just where's your one big project? Anything? I mean, if you're worth 20 of them, surely you have something to show for all that enormous skill?
One thing I've learned is that when someone starts saying they're better than programmers from (insert country here,) they're just trying to tell me either that they've never worked with programmers from that country, or that they have wildly inflated notions of self worth. I'm curious: given that among 20 programmers you'll have two or three successfully completed large projects, where are your fourty to sixty?
When you have some numbers to back up that you're actually worth 20 of them, let us know; until then, it's hollow dishonest bragging. The only people you're impressing are other people like you.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Lets face it, many of the IT people were burned during the dot com bust (I still think it was the Y2K bust more than dot com's) We have grown and learned from our mistakes. Many of us have learned how business works, where things can go wrong, and just how the system works. Now it is our turn ;)
I know I have a list.
#1) Do not take options in place of pay.
#2) Do not accept the 50% of your salary now and 50% based on a bonus when the company is profitable.
#3) Do not accept titles in place of raises. Titles are useless.
#4) Make sure the company has a business plan, funding, and a clear way to become profitable.
#5) If something smells funny in accounting, RUN!!! ( If we pay you 45% of your pay as an employee, 40% as a 1099 contractor, 10% in stock options, and 5% in cash, you get to keep more of your money. Or my favorite your pay is $93,000 and your first check comes in and the math only comes up to $85,000. When you ask you find that it is $93,000 - ($1788*3 weeks vacation) - ($1788x 1 week sick leave) In other words, they are not paying for your vacation or time off but offered it when you were hired. )
#6) Do not work more than 55 hours a week unless they are paying overtime.
#7) Document EVERYTHING! Every offer they make needs to be in writing, every promise, everything.
#8) If you want it, negotiate it when being hired!
Any one want to add to this list?
What I wear is the least of my [and my employers] worries. I show up, work a mostly honest full day, and get results. All that matters. How I'm dressed, how many free sodas are in the fridge, etc, shouldn't matter.
:-)
And honestly, there is nothing wrong with perks at the office. You spend 1/3rd of your day there, might as well be a place you feel comfortable and can relax when need to.
Wish my office had an air hockey table
tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
and developers aren't getting paid $100K for being HTML and JavaScript jockeys
Yes, now they're being paid $100K for being HTML and CSS and JavaScript jockeys. What a huge difference.
I hope the author recognizes the differences between a taxi cab driver and F1 driver. Because HTML/JS has low entry bar doesn't mean you can pay 50 bucks to a random college kid and have Google maps with draggable/adaptable routes in a week.
Is paid for in cash.
Deleted
The idea of someone being "good" with HTML is hilariously outdated.
I disagree. Someone truly skilled at XHTML/CSS can make a lot of money even today. I know multiple people who are doing just that. Faster rendering, easier maintainability, and protection from vendor lock-in are very compelling reasons for having a skilled XHTML/CSS developer do the work. It's not programming, but it can be extremely important. Just ask one of the many Fortune 500 companies that are still hamstrung by reliance on WYSIWYG tools that generate table-driven layouts and spaghetti code.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
i wonder why web 2.0 hype comes up in every piece of crap about IT.
let me tell you what i see that creates the talented tech shortage - internet is a freeing medium - it has given much opportunity to anyone.
almost all programmers, developers, techies go set up their own small, even home-based shops and work from there for themselves, after getting screwed in a corporate environment for 5-10 years and getting fed up with it. the newcomers are just taking the example of their older peers, and directly going to self-employment after short stints.
and also theres the booming internet business - everyone is wanting some internet store, some tailored cms, some web presence and stuff. it is on the increase, and even in l.a.m.p. scene where there are many 3rd world country located developers doing work for $3 hourly rates, the tech supply can barely meet the demand. more developers coming into the scene, yet more work is coming. so its not 'web 2.0' or whatever crap that is involved in making web pages more widgety and doohickeyish - its a silent, people's boom in business in contrast to company/startup boom of the 90s, which was more traditional business than the small business boom that is on the net nowadays.
no sir, the reason thats creating the shortage is in internet business is booming, and what is booming is small businesses. small businesses do not put any restraints on the contracted or full time developers they work with or employ. hence people are escaping the clutches of stuffing, stressful corporate structure and setting up their shops.
and this is going to be like this increasingly, unless the corporations understand the need to reform and change the corporate philosophy to a more human oriented one rather than a "man in black suits" / "welcome to the world of career bitches" one.
Read radical news here
He actually just hires 20 Indian Programmers to do the work for him.
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
In college I worked for a company who did 10 hour days, Monday/Tuesday, Wednesday off, and then Thursday/Friday. It was pure heaven. It makes life into short little two day weeks. Tuesday night becomes like a Friday since you don't have to work the next day, and then you get a weekday to either wear off what you did the night before or get errands and stuff done during the week when things are less busy. Then Thursday/Friday and the normal weekend. The only two days that kind of suck then are Monday and Thursday.
Absolutely the best work schedule ever, plus it cuts down on commuting since you are missing the standard rush hours, and since you are already at work the extra hour or two is no big deal when the reward is a full day off. I could care less about fluffy crap and I don't need to be treated like a superstar or anything, just let me work smarter and have an equal amount of time for my real life.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
As a learned poster pointed out, it's cheaper to offer beanbag chairs and free soft drinks than it is to compensate people well, but it seems compensation is also rising somewhat. The real issue here is that quality minds detest the narrow appearance-based logic of corporate culture, and they're always cutting out toward the frontier. The same thing is true of writers, of space pioneers, and inventors as it is of computer geeks. When too many people get into the room, the job at hand becomes a secondary function to how it appears to others.
If geeks are smart, they'll channel FOSS ideology into corporate culture as a right and a demand. We want:
Right now, the corporates are hoping to buy us off with a bolt of fabric and a foosball table. Who's going to step up and articulate what all creative minds really want, which is a chance to work on interesting projects for the good of humanity, with all the fear, uncertainty, doubt and boring ties left behind?
technical writing / development
Having mainly worked part-time since the dot-com crash in order to look after my kids I recently started to think about returning to proper employment (Ive been consulting/freelancing mainly) on the 3 days a week that I now dont have responsibility for my children. You'd think that in 2007 a good proportion of employers would have worked out that family friendly working conditions (flexitime, part-time, telework) would be the key to getting and keeping skilled (20 years IT experience, 1st class honours degree) employees. However (from cwjobs) :-
- 11,607 jobs listed in London.
- 9 Jobs listed as part-time.
- 0 Jobs listed as offering flexitime.
- 3 Jobs listed as job-share.
- 0 Jobs listed as offering teleworking.
If pizzas and pool tables ARE making a comeback due to skill shortages; I'd suggest the skill shortage actually lies with HR who are unable to recognise the benifits they need to offer to get us "more mature" employees back into the marketplace.
I will take the onshore guy who claims he can be 20x productive over 20 offshore resources any day of the week because, if he is passionate about technology and has the confidence to make that statement, which could be quickly determined, he is probably right. You probably come from the school of thought that a new resource can only add productivity to a project. In your line of thinking, even if they are not very good, they will at least marginally increase productivity. In reality, most developers are net negative to project productivity and the median developer falls below zero.
It's not that offshore people are inherently inferior. It's that most offshore technical resources have little or no interest in technology. They simply want to make money. This is not bad in and of itself. However, like their onshore counterparts who are driven solely by the same interest, their technical skills are generally quite poor. As a result, hiring a scatter shot of 20 offshore programmers and incurring the managerial overhead will generally result in less overall project productivity than where you started, especially when you consider long term costs.
I don't know about most geeks, but I don't care to compete on foosball -- I'm a loner (now a Defender box, that's another story).
I've been working from my home for three years now for a software firm 600 miles away... and I'm not just a code-hacker (in fact, I'm supposed to start weaning myself from coding all together), I'm a product manager and direct the product management group and set strategy for the company.
First off, dress code: the HQ office is reasonably casual (although they've had an anti-jeans-and-sneaks backlash lately, it doesn't get enforced), but hey it's 10:30AM and I'm wearing my bathrobe. If there wasn't a nice cool breeze and I want the windows open, I might not be wearing that (don't want to scare the neighbors).
Second, commute: I haven't calculated the carbon footprint change, but I'm sure driving less than I did three years ago. I'm sleeping later than I did at the previous job, and spending more time with my family.
Third, health: No flickering flourescents, no cube noise, I've had fewer headaches and I'm more productive. I've managed to not gain weight even with a pantry full of gourmet food downstairs. I'm also getting mid-day exercise and don't care if I come back needing a shower -- there's one right over there!
Yeah, I miss out on picnics and friday pizza (somebody's got to get on that Wonkavision stuff, or at least a pizza-capable fax -- no wait, that must be what Domino's uses already, I could skip that)
Design for Use, not Construction!
Yup, that what it seems like. They have already taken the state for about 200-300 million dollars and produced a bug riddled and clumsy interface that is not ready for use. I have been asked to help consult on making it usable...but then starting over is not an option :(
I know I am ranting here, but this story goes much deeper than it appears...politics, money and kickbacks are certainly part of the issue.
Having worked at companies in/dedicated to/related to IT ranging from 60 employees to over 7,000 employees, I just have to firmly say that the size of the company is completely irrelevant in what sort of environment you're getting.
I've been at a 'big' company with 6k employees that was extremely casual--jeans, t-shirts, even for senior management. I've been at a 60 man outfit that actually had a mandatory shirt and tie requirement for people who did IT drudge work. They even sent someone HOME one day for not being up to dress code snuff. I kid you not. The point is that the size doesn't matter; only the desired tone and ideals pushed down from management matter.
In other words, if you work for dick heads, you'll have a shitty, miserable atmosphere. Work for nice and caring people, you'll have a nice, caring, and happy atmosphere. In twelves years of IT employment, that's the most important lesson I've learned: dickheadism is bad.
I will definitely concur with your observations, from my work both with "offshore" Indian teams and "near-shore" Puerto Rican teams. The median developer on the team can definitely be counter-productive, so it takes a couple of miracle-workers to bring the mean developer positive and make things crawl along on the positive side of zero.
I will also concur that a great indicator of a highly-positive developer is a developer who is really interested in technology. It's not a litmus test, but it's a cumulative benefit. I always ask other folks if they code things in their spare time. In many cases, it's really easy to see the folks who will not benefit the team-- they have no imagination or creative urges to solve problems, they simply took the courses with a paycheck in mind.
However, I won't quite go so far as to say that this is a truism or even anything more than a stereotype with some "truthiness" to it. I have found some very determined, even dogged, worker-bee personalities who couldn't solve their way out of a paper bag if given a sharp sashimi knife. There are a LOT of this personality available in the workforce, and it's these types of workers that the average manager tends to hire for those offshore/nearshore teams. There is a way to get value from them: don't have them solve the problems. Demonstrate to them how to cut a paper bag with a sashimi knife, and then point them at the seven thousand paper bags that need cutting. If you can organize them in such a way as to not require too much problem-solving, they'll execute your job requirements deep into the night while you're at home with the kids.
In short, an outsourcing services team isn't for solving problems, it's for executing plans. If you have a local resource who behaves this way, see how you can make them part of the outsourcing services team, instead of the core team. If you have a great problem-solver in the remote team, ask your Legal department how you can poach them.
[
yea cant wait for DotComBurst 2.0
Not like the big one of '99. There's not enough in the geek production pipeline this time and talent in formerly developing markets are managing to stay employed right where they are. IT was so out of favor as a career choice five years ago that some colleges started scaling back their IT programs. Not only a fall off in production but many schools scrapped their production capacity.
Even if they could get their IT programs back online tomorrow and overcome the still persistent perception that IT is a career where your job will be outsourced, it would still be five years before capacity caught up with demand.
In fact, in the short term, the geek world may be flush with opportunity. The hot growth markets are overseas. They started vacuuming up some of the excess of world IT talent, which I believe is what contributed to the sudden shortage here.
I still remember stuffy managers looking at a proposal and snuffing that they could outsource the development for half the cost. Fast forward a couple years...got a call from a tech company in town this am offering to contract all the hours I can spare them at a premium rate. Who's laughing now, Mr. Poopy Pants?
Okay, you're right, we shouldn't use this as an opportunity to be petty and say things like NA-NA-NA-NANAAAAAAAAAA!!! Or NEENER, NEENER, NEENER. We must be adults about this when dealing with the LOOOOOOOO-HOO-HOOOOSSSSERRRSSSSS!!!!!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Yep. You nailed it.
It wasn't the culture that brought these places down, it was the spending. I *was* a project manager during 1997-2001 and I, personally, had hundreds of $100/head dinners during that time. I flew (mostly) first class to client locations (Chicago, LA, San Fran, NYC, Houston) and I stayed at some great hotels (W, Hiltons, Marriotts, Sheratons, etc). I just got lucky on my project assignments being in great cities but that's another story. Since I was in Dallas, we had plenty of 4-star and 5-star restaurants and we definitely used them! Del Friscos, The Mansion on Turtle Creek, 3 forks, etc.
In all of that time, I can't remember a single instance of anyone questioning how much money was being spent. As long as (some) money kept coming in the door, this cycle continued until - duh - the company went out of business. It was no shock to ANYONE who saw the actual books and what we were spending. It was truly astounding (ie: $1300 of wine in one meal at the Mansion on TC, 8 ppl attending, not including food)
I will never understand, no matter how hard you try, why someone would spend $50K to go win a project that would make $15K in profit. It's kinda like selling dollar bills for $0.95 and making it up on volume...
So yea - poor management is the reason most of these companies failed. And by poor management, I really mean "just plain old bad business decisions". There is a reason 80% of startups fail. It's not because the market can not handle the supply, rather, it is usually because of a fatal business decision made early on. And the #1 culprit is: over spending.
I am one of those types, as well. After being in IT for a while (CS, UT-Austin), I finally decided that getting my MBA was the way to have the most flexibility in my career. I have coded, I have team lead, I have project managed, and I have program managed -- all things near and dear to the IT world.
But as I have said before, IT is one of those jobs that has all of the responsibility and none of the authority. This makes it a crappy career path unless you are absolutely 100% devoted to IT and computers -- and if you are one of those people, you are probably not all that concerned with getting to the top of the food chain anyway. Just for fun, go out and google how many CIO's become CEO's vs. other C-level offices. You will find that CIO is an exceptionally bad way to "get to the top".
Simply put, IT is just a bad career path if you want to eventually come up through the ranks and have an executive position of somekind. Most companies only have a few, if any, executive level IT jobs. And even if you were to get one of those, you would - once again - be the low man on the totem pole (compared to CFO, CEO, Chief of HR, etc), fighting for ever-decreasing resources so your division can get it's work done.
I finally said screw it and went into an entirely different industry. I am still in a technical industry (so it's interesting) and that was the best decision I might have ever made in my life. I make more money. I work less. And I have lots of free time to do stuff on computers that I actually want to do.
It's a hard pill to swallow but the truth of the matter is that business just doesn't value IT all that much. Certainly not as much as it is truly worth. Maybe that will change in the future but for most companies, IT is a means to an end only -- and it is treated as such.
5. PROFIT!
This is why so few coders ever get rich...
With the cost of living (COL) increases, unless s/w developers are making 140K+, the dotcom culture IS NOT coming back. My raise this year was actually less than the COL in my area -- and I work the usual 50+. Those were the days...
Yeah. And you know what that means? Virtually nothing, even if we choose to believe you. There are literally dozens of reasons that people on Team 1 might have a different production rate than Team 2, and it turns out that only some of them are about the engineers on that team. Bad specifications, bad communications, poor requirements documentation, poor access to the customer, and any number of other similar issues can affect teams extremely differently. Even being in a different building is enough to take these problems out of control in a way that would make naive programmers on the unaffected team think they were a whole lot better than they actually were.
On top of that, your manager obviously isn't very good; if he or she was, you wouldn't still be working with that particular group of offshores. I bring this up because the vast bulk of the problems an engineering team goes through are actually about the manager, and offshoring just makes those kinds of problems more difficult. There isn't a doubt in my mind that the productivity problems at the other end of the chain are about the manager in question.
But, back to what I was saying to you: one group of people is not enough experience for you to claim superproductivity. You don't have the knowledge. It could as easily be that the particular group of Indians in question are retarded, or more likely, that your manager is, and that it's killing the Indians' ability to work.
Frankly, when you say "I'm 20x the average programmer," the only people who believe you are other people like you. There are a bunch of phrases in business that tip their hat to this effect. The most telling in my opinion is "proximity breeds success; success breeds success." What that's about is that if you spend time with people, you'll end up achieving at their level.
There's a reason there's nobody onsite who's as productive as you are, and it's not because you're above average. It's that nobody who's above average wants to be dragged down to your level by your company.
Get a better employer, and you'll see your own productivity go up. Maybe then you'll get it.
StoneCypher is Full of BS