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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."
Learning the Chinese language isn't enough.
You have to learn the culture too.
The good news is that being white is a free status booster.
The bad news is that being dark skinned means the exact opposite.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
My wife and I were unemployed about a year and a half ago and we decided to take several very decent classes on 21st century job hunting presented by our state job service. The thing is, it was mandatory networking/extroversion to introduce yourself in some detail each time. I'd say probably 1 in 20 was just back from teaching English on the Mainland (2), Taiwan (1) or Thailand (1). Who'da thunk, because how often are you free to survey a room full of the unemployed?
Note, however, that they were _back_ from those jobs looking for something else so that should hint that Asia wasn't paradise.
if he was a real go getter i could see him in a junior role or an assistant manager at most, but really in a firm that big he can't possibly have enough background. it's not a judgement on his skill, it's just that 25 years isn't nearly enough time to experience all that he needs to. I work for a billion dollar company, i'm older than he is and i've only just pushed my way into managing a small team of 6. not for lack of skill - i'm well respected in the company for my work - but because there is so much more to learn.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I, for one, wish to welcome our new Chinese overlords. :)
I just got done taking a first-term conversational Mandarin course. It was super interesting. I've been to China and wouldn't mind going and living there a while. I can understand why an adventurous soul would take this opportunity.
:-)
Still, is it really our goal to have all technical work done overseas, with us just pulling the strings? Where's the fun in that? I know why CEOs like it ($$$). But do the vast majority of us who _aren't_ CEOs like it?
This is a classic short-term vs long-term issue. When the US is left without the ability to produce anything of value (i.e., pretty soon), where will all the money come from to pay for goods (including code) and services produced overseas? We can't be the world's CEO - they won't go for it, and they shouldn't. Our value in the value chain is going to diminish. This isn't xenophobia, really. This is just me wanting our country to have something left to do when the music stops.
Pretty soon, we'll have a bunch of offices here, and nothing left to make but coffee.
Guess I'll keep learning Mandarin
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
This has always amazed me. I've worked in the field for two decades, and it is not often that I find somebody worth 100k. In fact, in my market 70k is the norm, and you'd better know your crap dead to rights on your technology of choice.
In addition, the Chinese need to let their currency float. That would kill about 25% of their advantage right there. Now only if we had a president with balls looking out for the middle class...
I know.. doesn't exist.
Anyway, since they seem to have a problem making cough syrup or dog food ingredients without poisoning it (or even toys without lead), it really makes me wonder what's in the code.
I've got a few buddies, most of whom are electrical engineering DROPOUTS who are recoding and repairing multiple projects that were previously "outsourced" for big bucks at Fortune 50 companies.
Hmmm? Even though I think this is some attempt to get a +5 funny mod.... That still doesn't explain why it needs 1 Gig to run anything other then Home Basic, while Ubuntu (8.04) with more advanced 3D effects, more applications, and more drivers, ran just fine on my old Intel M 1.5 GHZ CPU, cheap Intel graphic card and 512 MB of RAM with 3-D effects, and Xubuntu (8.04) runs just fine on my desktop from 2002 that hasn't been upgraded.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm located in South America (AR) and i charge $150 (in our local currency, which is pesos) an hour for my work.
For other companies living in the same country as me that's an outrageous amount of money, but for an offshore company with a currency worth 3 times more (or 5 times, if it pays in euros) is very cheap.
That the currency is favorable for us, third-world countries, is not our fault, nor it demonstrates a lack of "expertise" nor "quality" in our fields.
Oh, and one more thing. I've been programming for 9 long years but i have never earned a degree but when i work with engineers or computer scientists from my country or others that are less experienced they usually don't know what they are doing very well. They usually have a lot of problems understanding that theory is VERY different from practice.
But i have to tell you though, even i agree that it's a very dumb thing to do to put a 25 year old as an IT Manager.
Undesirable jobs that 'white people' don't want to do - e.g. janitorial work, low-paying service jobs, monotonous jobs like security guard, or hard jobs like construction (hours in the sun, hours in the rain, etc.).
As a white American I've had two of the types of jobs you list, maybe three. I worked in house keeping, janitorial, and I've worked in construction. Specifically working with concrete and masonry. And I got the construction job through a day labor pool I worked at.
1. Coming from poorer, less-educated countries, immigrants appreciate the value of a dollar. They don't take for granted that there will be food on the table, good working conditions, and a roof over their heads. They work for it because they know what it's like to go without it
Though not all many of those people I worked with through the labor pool were homeless. Some slept under bridges, some in tents in the woods, and some in a vehicle.
2. They know the value of hard work. Poorer Americans in particular are always looking for the 'quick fix', because they've been deluded into believing in the 'American Dream' - dream long enough and good things will come out of nowhere. They don't try to raise themselves up, because they expect someone else to do it for them.
Though not all, some of those I met at the labor pools were some of the hardest working people I met. I first went to a labor pool, temp agency, as a student in college. I don't know of any student, except a few disabled students, who worked as hard as some of those at the labor pool.
FalconShould there be a Law?
My whole office got shut down and what we were doing for the past 10 years moved offshore to Taiwan. Spending a week teaching QA stuff was, interesting to say the least. I did it. Just took multiple explanations to do it. It will be interesting to see what the next version of the product is going to be now that development is roughly 100% offshored. When I left the company, some know-how about the app left with me. Didn't feel like documenting it since it would take forever to explain.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
My experience has been that these guys perform unbelievably poorly, mostly because of their ignorance of the region and lack of language skills. East Asia is NOT the US, or even Europe. There are cultural differences, and then there are differences. The most markedly schism is between the Chinese and Japanese.
Trying to manage the reigon as if it was the same as anyplace else is a recipe for disaster, but these young managers never figure that out until its too late.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
They don't tell you about the petite young chinese girls that think the west and it's men are superior and are also in the midst of a sexual revolution and think Sex And The City is a documentary guide for your professional females. No it's all about developing the career.
Funny thing is that when I was 17 I was looking after the master elements for P&O's corporate identity, and many many more. Whizz kid you see. The company MD was 65, we'd chat it all over before the team started, he'd give it the old grey whistle test when we'd finished, and that would be that. When it came to a tech argument, and he decided to get his hands dirty, it all got very, very, very messy. He'd call the wrong shot. By the time I was 18 he knew not to argue. I had blue hair, and shredded combat trousers, and the clients loved it, especially to see me rip away at 3 9600s simultaneously... while feeding the drum scanner and outputting films on the imagesetter.
Tech moves so fast that the youth have as much experience with the tech as anybody else.
Show me the über mid 50s ruby on rails developer. Show me the pwning 60 year old python guru. And also, while you're at it, show me the 70 year old Photoshop zen master.
Trust me, the baldheads are dangerous. They think that they have... relevant experience.
These fucking baldheads tried to tell me that this cutting edge site I built for the creative industries... on behalf of the UK government... wouldn't work properly. But it did. They claimed that it wouldn't work on a single one of their machines. It worked on every single one in my building. I ran around checking. So I took a cab to see what on earth they were whining about, and refusing to sign off. They were telling stories of blank screens covered in code.
It turns out that they were running Windows NT4... Flash4... and splutter shock horror... IE5!!. Their IT manager (some youth) had left... 5 years ago. And hadn't handed over the admin passwords. So no updates for 5 years. This was 2007. They should have fired him anyway, but whatever.
We're talking 40 to 50 dell boxes, all crawling away on NT4. A whole office of them. How on earth they got the project is beyond me. They probably had a powerpoint presentation with nice meaty straplines like "creative" in it, followed by a "money goes up" graph.
They refused to believe that they were literally in the lowest 100th of a percent of online users. They're below mobile phones. It worked on my old blackberry for lord's sake. I showed them that. Did they believe me? No. some 26 year old with 12 years fulltime industry experience couldn't possibly know things they didn't. My explanation that most of the people surfing the site would at least be running windows XP fell on deaf ears. "Jargon" they huffed and puffed.
I fired them. You can't fire a client! Oh yes you can.
End point: years mean little in IT. Or a lot. In 2 years everything can, and will, change. The high level looks low level by next year. Assembler? You serious? Sorry, I'm a graphics guy, I'm sure that if you're making a PS3 game you'll need to use some until they get the devkit right. But you know what I mean.
Grey hairs in IT, well, count the grey at google, and you will find the baldspots in surprisingly small quanitities. And do google manage their IT OK? Sure they do. They didn't even finish college. Nor did I. I actually never started.
I wouldn't confuse China with some third world country, either. Sure, there's plenty of hooky dodginess available there. You should see some of the idiots charging £10,000 for a website in London.
Loads of Chinese, you see. Loads of 'em. Some of them are the best in the world. Some of them suck.
So here we are, it's a brave new world, a digital one. Few really know their onions. Most of them are quite young, and aren't given the respect they deserve.
So they buzz off to some company that will take them seriously.
Hmm... good point, actually. I was over in Europe a couple of years ago and I actually copped a bit of hostility from Londoners because they had so many Aussies job-hunting there, and yet our government won't let them work here for more than 3 months or so. It's easy to forget when you're one of the privileged few how cranky our government can be towards foreigners. :/
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
by this, I mean computers were my childhood toys. I consider myself to be part of a generation which was first born in the mid 1970s, and is now prevalent. Those who played with computers as toys as children, rather than those who learned it formally as an extension of mathematics around secondary school.
Different breed. I tell you, we are.
I am an American who currently lives in China and can assure you, while there are success stories, and certainly fortunes are being made here, the idea that Americans can pop on over to China and be masters of the universe is a red herring at best.
Some reasons that it is not all you might think it is:
1) The salaries are often lower. Much lower. It used to be that multinationals paid Western wages for work in China, but that is not always true today. You'll be told that the standard of living is lower, so that makes up for it, but even though you can live like a king in many areas for $10,000 / year, you aren't going to be saving much for retirement at that level.
2) The salaries are not necessarily going up for Westerners. A lot of foreigners are drawn by the oft-repeated story of the boom economy in China. As a result, there is downward pressure on salaries for Westerners in many sectors with companies offering less to people who they perceive as having a desire to live in China. When I was talking to a friend who has been here for some time about working in China, he said if you express a desire to work in China, they'll offer you Chinese wages.
3) There is a very real glass ceiling.
- Few foreigners really learn the language. It takes about 3-4 times as long to learn Chinese as another European language, and that's if you're really trying. Most foreigners come to China thinking they'll learn the language by osmosis and ultimately return home several years later knowing how to give directions to a cab driver and not much else.
- Moreover, the cultures are vastly different, and it's difficult to establish the kinds of quality relationships that you need to progress in business. And certain concepts such as honesty and integrity are very different here, resulting in many foreigners under the impression that they are establishing sound business relationships and friendships getting screwed in the end.
- There is still a very nationalistic "us versus them" kind of attitude among Chinese nationals, and this bias makes it difficult for a foreigner to be treated as an equal, even if they speak Chinese, in terms of promotion and opportunities for advancement.
While there are certainly opportunities here in China, I would recommend anyone thinking of making a career move to China doing extra due diligence before they dive in.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
I was the Sr. Linux Systems Engineer for the #1 grape juice company. They atempted outsourcincing to India. I was asked to "help the remote team". I looked for a new job somewhere else and left. Last I heard projects sent to India were not ndone to spec and had to be redone. Eventually projects outsourced ended up costing the company more than in house. Evenelutally all the infrastructure and Oracle RAC work came back in house. last I hear the CIO responsible for starting the outsourcing stepped down.. actually I heard he was shown the door.
moral of the story. a 90k in house systems engineer is more cost effective than an oversease outsourced employee costing 13k a year that take attempts to get the job done right. The additional monetary lost is money the business looses by waiting so long for a project to complete successfully.
a company that exists in America whose success rests mainly on the largess of the infrastructure that *MY* tax dollars maintain; then yeah, I do feel Americans are entitled to jobs from that company. Many large corporations in the US rely on major tax breaks from the gov. This means that my taxes make up the difference. In short while you may think I am not entitled to *jobs* , I don't think someone in India is entitled to *my tax dollars*, because to some extent this is what happens when a company outsources. Think about that next time you trot out the argument that "Americans are entitled". Given that our taxes help drive and maintain many of the economic giants in our country can you blame us if we would like to keep the jobs that those companies generate?