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25 Years Old and an Offshore IT Manager
dcblogs writes "The Chinese outsourcing market, at $1.7 billion last year, is growing at 38% a year, according to research by the Everest Group. This is creating opportunities for Westerners who want to go to China, learn the language, and help these Chinese offshore companies reach overseas markets. There are job opportunities for people with management experience or who are young and willing to gamble. Here's the story of one 25-year-old who started learning Mandarin on his plane ride over to China, three years ago, and is now an international development manager for an IT offshoring firm."
look at Vista, it is one of the main highlights of this, it eats up RAM very quickly
Not this again. Vista does eat up RAM for application cache. This means it is effectively using the RAM you spent money on. Once the RAM is needed for more important things Vista will release whatever is required. Why have RAM if your OS doesn't use it?
At the end of the day you get what you pay for, cheap but cheerful
you pay cheap you get cheap
I have some experience myself working with offshore teams (Indian instead of Chinese) half of the team of which I'm a part is offshore. Also we have to deal with other technical teams on a regular basis which are also part onshore / part offshore (in a support capacity not programming) Our role is sort mini-project management (low paid work, which is a cross between project management and a call center, usually for the preparation of quotes for individual PC's / Servers etc, but we typically end up getting involved with things far above our station on a regular basis
Part of the problem can be the language barrier you see you'll usually get individuals with skills in communication (such as call center staff who need to have good English) or individuals with skills in a technical role (such as server Support) But it can be quite hard to find someone who has skills in both areas (technical and can speak English fairly well) this is quite rare. This puts added pressure on the onshore staff that are still remaining to compensate, especially when it comes down to someone who is speaking very fast in a heavy accent, trying to describe some technical problem about Active Directory in half English. This leaves the on-shore guys trying to do double the work they did originally with the missing staff (some of the on-shore staff have already left at our place simply because of the added pressure) The best you can do to get around this is to use something like MS Communicator, or some form of IM which at least cuts out the heavy accent
Another problem is that part of the mentality within these offshore areas is to do exactly what your told to do.
in some ways this is good, in others bad.
Somewhat similar to a machine type mentality, "we follow the process exactly as it's written with no room for flexibility"
you can of course tell them to do something different, but this again still takes time to act as interpreter from an onshore perspective
again this puts added pressure on the remaining onshore teams to compensate when something unexpected comes along which they can't deal with
The above point also leads in some cases to a lack of technical vetting, and experience with the way things such as email accounts are configured within the company. The onshore staff who usually know what they're doing can usually pick up on something when someone asks them to setup something that doesn't smell quite right but for offshore individuals this isn't always the case, who usually take the approach, do it anyway fix it later
One example of this was a test distribution list that was setup recently on the email system, with the number of people working within the company (we're talking above several thousand here, we have several companies tied into the same network via domains) you need to be careful about allowing these sorts of lists to feed into higher level lists that include everyone everywhere. (usually if you do have such a list, it's setup in such a way so that only certain individuals can send to it) Needles to say a new "test" distribution list was created by one of the offshore team, at which point some moronic project manager decided to send a "test" email which then went to everyone's mailbox at the same time This however was not the problem, the problem was when several users decided to hit "Reply-All" which of course sent the reply to all users everywhere and these replies where then replied to with messages such as "should I be on this list?" The end result was that the outlook servers ground to a complete and utter halt, with the sheer volume of crap flying around on the system
Meanwhile once the two onshore employees that had been replaced heard about this, they basically laughed they're asses off
One last final comment, another trick they do here over in the UK is to bring the offshore guys onshore, but then still pay them the going cheap r
Not so easy with the points-based immigration system. Just being able to "do IT" won't get you the visa, unfortunately, and the Oz government is much stricter on foreign applicants now...
--- Nick, hard at work
But if you think about it that may be the correct behaviour for best performance. I agree Windows memory management is terrible, and often seems to do stupid things, but I think that the case for optimal performance is a little more complex than you mention.
An (horrific and oversimplified) example: I run a simulation with a very large dataset (in the order of hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of data), but it's in the background/not all the data is required at once. In the meantime I open and close firefox a few times. Now in your ideal, as much of my simulation data would remain in memory as possible, and firefox would be left out of the cache. However that won't lead to the optimum performance since firefox will be reloaded from disk each time which will be slower. In fact assuming all my RAM is used up by the simulation data, then some of it will have to page out to load firefox. It makes more sense to keep the firefox object code in RAM even after it has closed since it will respond faster if it is used again, and the simulation data was paged out anyway because there was not enough RAM, so no matter what it will have to be reloaded. It is admittedly a gamble, but I can see the case for paging out data that is incredibly rarely used in favour of having more memory available for a performance enhancing cache. This same behaviour is used on Linux and no doubt other systems.
That said I do agree that Windows seems to cling too much to its application cache, if you have several applications consuming very large amounts of memory and CPU time it seems that Windows is incapable of distributing the resources well. I have used Solaris systems that have had 6 or 7 simulations, each with gigabytes of data running simultaneously on a four processor machine. I only noticed that there was this much load when I went to run a simulation myself and it was quite slow. The responsiveness of other applications and the user interface was barely affected, something which I'd attribute to an operating system that does the right thing with memory and processor allocation.