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My Job Went To India
Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.
My Job Went To India (and All I Got was This Lousy Book)
author
Chad Fowler
pages
185
publisher
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
rating
8
reviewer
Josh Skillings
ISBN
0-9766940-1-8
summary
Offers 52 ways you can keep your software engineering job, or grow yourself into an even better job.
Chad encourages the you to think of your career as life cycle of a product, and as such divides the 52 tips into the four areas of "Choosing Your Market", "Invest in your Product", "Execute", and "Market", and then two extra groups called, "Maintaining Your Edge", and "If you Can't Beat 'Em". This grouping works surprisingly well and provides an overarching context that makes sense. Many of the tips have specific calls to action at the end, which are useful if you don't already have ideas on how to apply the tip.
For example, under "Choosing Your Market", tip #7 "Don't Put Your Eggs In Someone Else's Basket", Chad encourages you to refrain from learning vendor-specific technologies that can disappear with the vendor, and then calls you to action by suggesting you write a small project in a technology that competes with the technology you are used to using. This will help you understand why the technology exists to start with and what opens your horizons for what might be coming next.
Under the section "Investing in your Product", tip #14 called "Practice, Practice, Practice", Chad offers suggestions on how software engineers can get even better by specific kinds of focused practice. The action items at the end of the section suggests practicing "Code Katas" katas similar to martial artists, but instead in code and in different languages.
With 52 tips, this book has a lot of tips, a tip for every week of the year, but you should expect to spend much longer than a week on most of them. A few of the tips you are probably doing already, but many of them you aren't. Some of the tips are fairly straight forward and easy to put in to practice. You could spend your entire life attempting and never achieve some of the other tips, such as tip #39, "Release Your Code." The ultimate goal of this tip is to be able to say in a job interview, "Oh, are you running Nifty++? I can help you with that- I wrote it." Chances are this scenario won't ever happen to you, but by working towards this goal in the ways the book outlines, you will definitely become a better, more valuable software engineer. Many of the tips will make you a better person in general, regardless of your career, such as tip #28, "Learn How To Fail", where Chad emphasizes how to fail gracefully and the rewards that can be learned from failure. This wide range of time, difficult, and application of the tips gives you something to work on today, next week, and next year.
The title of the book is silly. Yes, it was catchy enough for me to notice in the bookstore, with the red cover and the homeless (software engineer?) holding a sign, "Will Code For Food". So from that point of view, the cover worked. However, unless you've read the book, you might think it's as campy as the cover and wonder if it is somehow anti-Indian. I think a better title would be along the lines of "How to Get Any Job You Want", since if you can master all of these tips, you'll be the best there ever was.
While I didn't expect any specific technical advice, I would have liked some. I understand that an author needs to be sensitive to how fast technology changes, however just one tip with a warning: "This information is my opinion on April 11, 2007 and will probably change tomorrow". And then describes about how Subversion is a great tool, Python is a great language to learn, and learning design patterns can make your life easier, would have been appreciated. A tip like this would help you to understand the author a bit better and further encourage you to learn more.
If you want to improve yourself and you can accept advice, this book is for you. You will find things you can do better and skills you've never considered. Like some of the other Pragmatic Programmer books, I will never be able to master everything in this book, so I'll be reading this book again and again, trying to get better every time. Don't let the cover put you off, this is a great book.
You can purchase My Job Went To India (and All I Got was This Lousy Book) from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
For example, under "Choosing Your Market", tip #7 "Don't Put Your Eggs In Someone Else's Basket", Chad encourages you to refrain from learning vendor-specific technologies that can disappear with the vendor, and then calls you to action by suggesting you write a small project in a technology that competes with the technology you are used to using. This will help you understand why the technology exists to start with and what opens your horizons for what might be coming next.
Under the section "Investing in your Product", tip #14 called "Practice, Practice, Practice", Chad offers suggestions on how software engineers can get even better by specific kinds of focused practice. The action items at the end of the section suggests practicing "Code Katas" katas similar to martial artists, but instead in code and in different languages.
With 52 tips, this book has a lot of tips, a tip for every week of the year, but you should expect to spend much longer than a week on most of them. A few of the tips you are probably doing already, but many of them you aren't. Some of the tips are fairly straight forward and easy to put in to practice. You could spend your entire life attempting and never achieve some of the other tips, such as tip #39, "Release Your Code." The ultimate goal of this tip is to be able to say in a job interview, "Oh, are you running Nifty++? I can help you with that- I wrote it." Chances are this scenario won't ever happen to you, but by working towards this goal in the ways the book outlines, you will definitely become a better, more valuable software engineer. Many of the tips will make you a better person in general, regardless of your career, such as tip #28, "Learn How To Fail", where Chad emphasizes how to fail gracefully and the rewards that can be learned from failure. This wide range of time, difficult, and application of the tips gives you something to work on today, next week, and next year.
The title of the book is silly. Yes, it was catchy enough for me to notice in the bookstore, with the red cover and the homeless (software engineer?) holding a sign, "Will Code For Food". So from that point of view, the cover worked. However, unless you've read the book, you might think it's as campy as the cover and wonder if it is somehow anti-Indian. I think a better title would be along the lines of "How to Get Any Job You Want", since if you can master all of these tips, you'll be the best there ever was.
While I didn't expect any specific technical advice, I would have liked some. I understand that an author needs to be sensitive to how fast technology changes, however just one tip with a warning: "This information is my opinion on April 11, 2007 and will probably change tomorrow". And then describes about how Subversion is a great tool, Python is a great language to learn, and learning design patterns can make your life easier, would have been appreciated. A tip like this would help you to understand the author a bit better and further encourage you to learn more.
If you want to improve yourself and you can accept advice, this book is for you. You will find things you can do better and skills you've never considered. Like some of the other Pragmatic Programmer books, I will never be able to master everything in this book, so I'll be reading this book again and again, trying to get better every time. Don't let the cover put you off, this is a great book.
You can purchase My Job Went To India (and All I Got was This Lousy Book) from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
They took my job; they took my job; they took my job.
The American companies are to blame, it has nothing to do with America or India. If Dell, HP, GE outsource to India, don't buy their products anymore. Simple as that. But don't blame the poor people over there trying to make a living with what the CEO of Dell does.
Anyway, Python is a great tool, yeah.
slashdot rocks
... MY job went to India.
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
This book was published three years ago. It's a little late for a review of a topical work like this.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Yeah, but it pays really well when you know something that's hot i.e. the latest fad product (that's ALWAYS called a "new technology"). Just save your money and be prepared to jump to the next big thing.
"Learn How To Fail", where Chad emphasizes how to fail gracefully and the rewards that can be learned from failure.
Failure. The trouble is if you fail big, you're labeled as a failure and you're fucked for a very long time. And folks just love to kick a guy when he's down. Then you become older, wiser, and fucking bitter at the goddamn machine!
I have to go. The cafe is throwing me, my cats, and my shopping cart out.
Tip #54: Write a book about blogging using some of that poetry you wrote after a party back in the nineties. Someone will buy it.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
or consultants, or technical writers, or anyone who can work remotely without a strict government issued license :
Get to elance and similar services, and work for yourself. eventually you will be able to make a name, and afterwards you will be able to make money.
AND you can compete with indians. true, they can give out $3/hour for software projects. but, remember, what you pay is what you get. you'll find that there are a lot of people who know that regardless of india or vietnam, you should not be having software done for 3/hour. these people know whether a rate given for a work is rational or not. when bidding for projects of people like these, indian houses that shell out $3 bids are at disadvantage.
it can be done. sometimes it can be hard, until you make a name for yourself. but when you make a name for yourself, you will have continual clients that contact you outside of these services, and youll find that you rarely ever go bid on projects anymore.
well. take a shot at it yourself. its not as if anyone is barring you from doing it, unless you have exclusive items in your contract preventing such work.
Read radical news here
The best thing to do if you are in IT now, try to get out.
If you have kids, or know people you care about. DON'T let them go into IT, or major in it in university.
I'm not against OSS per se, but I'm skeptical that an individual contributing to an OSS project is a good idea. It's one thing for IBM to invest in Linux (for example). If you invest in Linux, you're effectively donating money to for-profit organizations like IBM and Red Hat. This seems to go *against* your self interest of keeping a healthy job pool for software developers. Sure, read and study OSS, but don't lower your own value by working for free.
Hey boss, be sure to take your malaria shots before you go!
What irks me is that they've been trying to offshore computer works for 50 years with mixed results. What the real problem is that they keep asking for more guest workers (who can't change jobs [easily], who aren't citizens, who can't form unions, and restricted to certain employment). Is it our government's role to provide subsidies for wealthy companies and stifle small business? If we're going to have immigrant workers, why can't they use the usual immigration process and not H-1B non-immigrant guest worker policies?
It's a management vision problem, not an American worker productivity problem.
...but if your job went to India, you're expendable. Learn some new skills, get better at what you do, etc. The company I work for now is 70% India, 30% US. They trimmed the fat and sent the cheap labor to India.
If you haven't learned by now that you need to stand out from the crowd with an invaluable skill, your job is going to keep going to India.
by having multiple trades. Don't be so specialized.
What?
Did they stop outsourcing in the last 3 years, or are you saying that the tips on skill development are no longer valid?
Just curious.
And what would you suggest Obi Wan? Maybe Medicine? Law? Literature? Give some alternatives.
Maybe the author should stop by where I work. He can talk to the people they are hiring *back* after the off-shore company ripped us off for millions giving us crap code which was basically unsupportable written by the "experts".
So many job descriptions are written by HR reps who only list off names of various software packages, and only go by a checklist when reviewing candidates.
If someone asks me "Do you know TechnoBuzz software?" my factual answer would be "I haven't used it before, but I'd love to/willing to/confident I can learn it."
What's a better answer to give an HR rep who doesn't know the technology?
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
From experience in the industry, I can contract Tata Consulting, and obtain well commented, thoroughly tested code module for a project for less than 20% the cost of an employed developer here. Bonus is that there are fewer employees needed, which saves immensely on overhead. Plus with payroll taxes the way they are, the IRS almost pays companies to offshore.
Why attempt to hire people here who claim to have programming experience, even with degrees, when one can get code written arguably by the best people on the globe for far less?
Pretty much all my company needs is a guy to run a build for QA and another person to be the InstallShield monkey to ensure the program deploys.
"Get a security clearance".
Those jobs aren't going to India.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Jerbs!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
The very first sentence of this book review has a grammatical error. I'm not sure how the author, the reviewer, and the editor feel about this because there are good editorial services for cheap in India, Ireland, England.
Warned us about.
Globalization sucks...
It's our government that is to blame.
12%
An indian software engineer can earn about 400,000 rupees ($10k)at the moment. In 10 years that will match the west, but long before then the difference will be too marginal to make it worth offshoring.
Deleted
Confucius say "Job is like a woman. Smartest programmer in world cannot keep job from leaving if it wants to."
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Learning new software, programming languages, code-katas or whatever is NOT going to help.
Indians have access to the internet too, you know.
They can learn all this new stuff and provide the same service cheaper.
Some random points:
(1) People who code, administer or test will not survive. If you write/fix any kind of code or scripts or do any kind of testing at least once a day your job is in danger.
(2) People who are unable to create something from nothing will not survive. If you need a well-defined set of requirements and design before you can do your work, your job is in danger. If you need someone else to take some vague problem from the customer/boss and come up with a solution that you can implement, your job is in danger. If, however, you invent solutions, you will be fine.
(3) People with inability to solve problems will not survive. This goes to general smartness/intelligence. If you are the kind who can use a cool-head and solve most of problems (job-related or not) through a combination of steps such as keeping a cool head, knowing what to do, who to approach etc, you will be fine. Many problems are tough but you would be surprised to see many people give up before they even take a stab at the easy ones.
As an example: Here is a problem given to you by a customer: "Size the work effort that you personally will require to install DB2 on my AS400 box"
Bad answer: We are a C++ coding shop. We dont do DB2 admin. We dont know how to size this.
Good answer: 6 months (cuz we have to learn all the shit first)
(4) People who will survive are those who can talk to customers to elicit business requirements, design tecnhnical solutions and coordinate project activities - not people who know how to change a config file to get Linux to play mp3 files.
(5) Good-looking people who can talk with management and customers in a confident non-geeky way in perfect English will survive.
(6) If you can relate well with people and can get them to do favors for you, you will survive. If you are the type of person who ends up leading meetings and discussions, you will survive.
(7) If your job is in IT but deals with some kind of calculation involving dollars at least once a day, you will survive.
I have over 20 years of software development experience in the U.S. I am not working in that field anymore.
One of those big U.S. based multi-nationals laid me off. I have found myself in another engineering field (not software).
My current employer is happy to pay a good salary while I learn this new business. I have now worked there longer than
most of my jobs in the IT world.
When I apply for software jobs, it is all I can do to get people to return my calls. I have to followup
over and over to get to the next step in the interview process. I say, who needs it.
I am turning my back on IT. They only seem to want to pay for 2-5 years of experience. If you have 10 or more years,
they don't want you. They want energetic and cheap. They want to keep making the mistakes that were made 5 years ago.
I think the current technical job market will dissuade people from entering the IT field in the first place. The work
is hard to do in the first place, and they are going to cast you aside eventually.
Indian companies will have an advantage because they will not need to manage projects across so many timezones. They
will have lots of people coming out of college with lots of jobs for them. U.S. based companies will only be able to
find the people they need at the price they want to pay overseas. They will continue to use their money to train
armies of software developers many timezones away.
Over time, these non-U.S. companies will master the rest of the business and bury the US-based ones. Free trade or
protectionist stance will not affect this outcome.
My advice to current U.S. IT workers: don't get too deep into debt and plan a backup career.
This is overlooked by too many people. I'm a physicist/computer guy by training, but I decided to broaden my employability a bit. I used my employer's tuition discount to take some business classes at the local community college, enjoyed them, and went on to earn a MBA at Vanderbilt at nights/weekends. I've started taking pre-med classes at the community college partly for fun, but also because Nashville is a major medical town and I suspect it will increase my employability even more.
I get a 70% discount on a 3 hour class. At the local community college, that works out to ~$300 per class including the textbook. That's $900 a year. That's a no-brainer in my book. I've never bought an asset, never owned a stock, never owned a mutual fund, that has a higher rate of return than my brain.
While I don't think my job is going to India anytime soon, you can't be sure about tomorrow, and why wait until tomorrow when you can do something about it *today*. Most people ignore their tuition benefit. I'm sure most people fail to fund their 401K to the company match too; that's not the company's fault. Take control.
I'm sure monks in the 15th century complained about the printing press taking their jobs and reducing their relevancy as well.
It's call progress. It's going to happen whether you like it or not. Step on board, re-invent your skill set, or get out of the way because someone else is willing to do what you aren't.
And if you don't want to get out of the way, well that's fine too. You will soon find everyone around you passing you by as you continue to complain about the loss of your job.
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
Play poker for a living.
God spoke to me.
ob South Park :-)
Quick, everyone have gay sex...
filthy goobacks.
"As an example: Here is a problem given to you by a customer: "Size the work effort that you personally will require to install DB2 on my AS400 box""
DB2 is already installed on your AS/400 box by default - it's part of the OS.
This would show me the customer is a DULT and doesn't know anything about the system they bought/use.
(I'm a former AS/400 operator/Administrator/RPG developer - Turned Java programmer).
The Truth is a Virus!!!
It's really sad that what our country needs most to remain competitive in the future is more young people learning science and engineering. But because of the effects of globalization our advice to them is to avoid these fields.
It's pretty simple really:
Nationalism = what's best for us, at the cost of everyone else
Globalism = what's best for the world, at the cost of the least efficient (in this case us)
It's all fault of John McLaughlin!
I've been outsourced out of two jobs. (So far.) In one case more than a thousand IT people were laid off; in my department 10 veteran programmers were replaced with two very nervous Indian kids with a combined total of six months' experience in the product. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense if you understand this: outsourcing is about cutting costs, period. Yes, quality went to hell. But quality is very difficult to measure, and the people hurt by the sudden sharp drop in service were far, far below the CIO. The very same CIO that can walk into the CEO's office with a PowerPoint showing how he's removed the, um, "fat" from his organization.
Yes, you are an invaluable employee and they won't dare get rid of you... but only if your CIO
has the vision and brains to defend your salary and benefits based on the true ROI of your work. If he or she is out to cut costs, then you can be replaced. It does not matter if the people replacing you aren't as qualified or wonderful as you. They cost less, programmer A = programmer B, don't let the doorknob etc, etc.
sad but true. thank you that idiot george bush
The author is plain wrong. Learning new languages and tools improves your skills, yes. But that won't reduce the risk of your job getting outsourced or increase your salary. It is all about perception. Someone is valuing and someone decides whose jobs are getting outsourced. What that person, or group of persons, think is your value to the company is the only thing that matters. You might be the best employee at the company working with a team of incompetents that takes all your glory, then it doesn't matter how many languages you know or how many open source projects you have released.
Value your yourself highly and don't be afraid to let others see it. That's the best tip I know for being successful.
Football Odds
Step 1: Agree to work for 75% of market rate or less Step 2: Always get to work early Step 3: Do lots of important stuff Step 4: Leave late in the evening Step 5: Never ask for a raise
I would suggest law. Once you pass the bar, you have a meal ticket for life, and almost assuredly a six digit salary in a few years, possibly seven depending on region.
To boot, you work 8 hours a day, five days a week, no worries about overtime.
Attorneys get respect by Joe Sixpack. The tech field sadly gets nothing but contempt.
Learn Spanish and get a masters license in some skilled trade.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It isn't IT that is the field to avoid, but to avoid grunt work in IT. There will always be a need for on-site staff for databases and computers. The part that gets outsourced overseas is always the programming. The actual database and business-rule customization of the programs still stays in the US.
From the OP:
There, fixed that for ya.
I entirely agree that individually you need to be as valuable as possible. That's why all the CCNPs I know are working to finish their CCIEs and the CCIEs are working on their Juniper/Avaya certs. All of this is on top of their technical degrees.
The problem is that you and your "invaluable" skills really aren't being taken into account. It doesn't matter if firing you would cripple the company because we're typically thinking 90 days at a time. If you replace a $150K CCIE with a $20K wanna-be, then you as a manager can claim a $130K dollar "savings." Hooray for you, here's your bonus.
When that $20K wonder takes all of your customers down -- and here's the beauty part -- you aren't blamed for it. No one is currently drawing the line between your $130K savings and the customers that walked with their millions of dollars.
The really scary part? I frequently work on municipal, hospital and 911 systems. Infrastructure disasters here can cost lives. I've watched the cheap guys take down emergency systems, and I tried not to think about the calls that were getting dropped as I fought to get them back online. I push the frantic calls for help out of my mind, because if I let my imagination run with what an unanswered 911 call could mean...
The cheap guy's response as I berated him for putting lives at risk? Basically, what do I care? It's not my country.
Every one of the guys I know are putting in 60-hours weeks routinely. Hours like that mean divorces. They mean early heart attacks. They mean neglected children left to raise themselves. They mean broken homes with the societal carnage that goes with it.
It's the classic tragedy of the commons. The people who lead our country are insulated from the carnage associated with gutting our workforce. In the meantime, my country is falling apart. I've got a CS degree from a prestigious college, a CCIE, and a decade of international experience and even I am feeling the heat. I weep for those not as lucky as I.
We're gutting our middle class. We just are, and if you don't see it, it's probably because you're young. I hear your "Well, it's not a problem if you're the best of the best" bravado, and I wonder what you propose to do with the other 99% percent of the population, because they're not just going to just disappear.
I was downtown during the LA Riots of '92. Rodney King and Daryl Gates might have been the spark that set it off, but that riot burned on the fuel of unemployed people. Last time I was in LA, more than a decade later, the damage still hadn't been repaired.
I'd really prefer not to see that happen on a country-wide scale. But me and the other gray-hairs are worried, especially the people I know out in LA. We're getting that "vibe" again.
Things are stretched beyond breaking. Our teachers have flat-out given up. Our cops are showing the sort of violent and unstable behavior you would expect from PTSD. The wave of earnest enlistees that flooded the military after 9/11 have become the sort of weary jaded bastards that could put the most burned-out Vietnam Vet to shame.
We are, for the first time in history, routinely using mercenaries in almost every level of our military and law enforcement. I'm seeing military families, families with generations of service, hang up their uniforms and forbid their children from serving.
Our hospitals are literally allowing people to die from neglect in the ER. Our bridges are falling down. Our electrical grid is one snapped breaker from going dark.
Katrina should have been our moment of clarity. The fact that it so clearly wasn't scares me to death.
But you go ahead, and keep humming that "I'm the best, I'm the best, I'm the best" mantra. Keep closing your eyes as tight as you can and shut your ears tighter. Find a good teddy bear, because the old man, the old man has seen all this before.
I'm terrified of where this train is going.
One day, no matter how much training you get or how well you do your job or even how productive you are, your life and career will be shaken up. With globalization and technology, things change fast and in directions that you will never anticipate. The guys that survive are the "people" people - not the die -hard techies. Looking back, I really wish I knew that and I really wish I wasn't so goddamn arrogant to think that people and networking skills weren't necessary because I mistakenly thought that technical ability mattered above all.
I'd say it would depend on what stage of your career you are in, and what responsibilities you either have or think you might end up having.
If you are in your early 20s, and want to have a family, or own a house definitely change to something that will help you 20 years from now when you are in your 40s. Given the globalization issues, I wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs into any job that could be done through an internet pipe.
I'm in my late 40s, the mortgage is over halfway paid off, and there's no kids to worry about. Worse case is that I lose my permanent position job (for whatever reason), and have to take a pay cut, or do temporary consulting at bargain rates.
I chose IT 25 years ago because I knew it would afford me a nice standard of living, that at least for the foreseeable future there likely would be a job that would pay enough to cover the kind of house I wanted to live in, and leave a little extra for vacations, emergencies, retirement, weddings, etc. It worked out, but I wouldn't recommend it for someone starting their career today. It's definitely a sad state of affairs.
I'd say that one could learn to do something that you can't outsource, like nursing - but even that isn't guaranteed. Many of those jobs are being "insourced" - that is people from developing countries are being hired here at a lower rate than what us locals are willing to bear.
I guess the best bet (if you don't want to deal with the uncertainty of working for yourself) is for whatever you decide to do, to find a job working for a small company that has a good business model. One, which as part of its culture, tries to keep money local -including the money that it pays to its employees. One that really doesn't have the resources to outsource or sponsor people for insourcing.
Off-shoring seems to be just a bunch of FUD designed by the few that have lost their jobs as well as fear-mongering isolationists. In the book What Color is Your Parachute?, it is said that we appear to have only lost 500,000 jobs out of the total 143,700,000 jobs that we have. That is 0.348%. That is so small, it really doesn't matter. With all of the horror stories you hear of off-shoring, it almost seems like it's going to be a matter of time before people realize that is isn't all that it is made out to be.
If you lost your job, I'm sorry that it happened, but it shouldn't be too hard if you are at least a decent worker and are able to not be totally asocial. Go read What Color is Your Parachute? if you need help. It's a great book.
however just one tip with a warning: "This information is my opinion on April 11, 2007 and will probably change tomorrow"
That would be a good trick, considering the book was published in September, 2005.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Grunt work? Setting up and administering systems is "grunt work" in my book. Programming requires far more skill and expertise.
This is basically like if the auto industry collapsed in America (which looks likely, judging by GM's and Ford's current performance). No one would want to be an automotive or mechanical engineer, because there'd be no jobs for them unless they moved to Japan, Germany, India, or China. However, there will still be jobs as mechanics, since all the foreign-made cars will need service here. I'm not trying to denigrate mechanics (it's similar to an electronics technician in the electrical world, who has to know a lot about what he's working on, even though he didn't design it), but being an automotive engineer and designing cars is generally preferable to being a mechanic and fixing cars, and also requires more education, and pays better.
Don't forget to blame the Shrub for the eventual decay of the earth's orbit until it is consumed by the sun.
The idea that programming is mere grunt work or that programmers can be commoditized is one reason why so many software projects and products are utter crap.
Also, with the advent of server virtualization and data center consolidation and aggregation, those system engineer jobs may not be so safe and plentiful onshore in a few years, especially when so much administration can be done remotely. Maybe the CAT5E cable monkeys can unionize to protect their wages.
Before the slashdot crowd turns akin to angry villagers wielding pitchforks, let us just put things in perspective. Money *IS A GOOD* tool although it may not be the *ONLY GOOD* tool. However it is a darn good yardstick to bring the best in everyone (which is why capitalism has worked so well for this country over all these years). If you feel that you lost your job to a fellow "Starvin Marvin" in India, there is a good chance that there is at least *one thing* that is wrong with you. I agree that *outsourcing* is not the best thing since sliced bread. All these outsourcing-bets-on-quantity-not-quality rants aside, not all outsourcing sucks balls. However if you want to prove otherwise, show your company that how outsourcing will not be a good strategical choice, how communication gap could be a stumbling block in the progress of the company, why you cannot find Haskell programmers in India....
When my job was sent to India, we got two 1-hour group sessions with a job coach, who had absolutely no experience in our field or what we were experiencing, and who admitted up front that he usually does sessions a minimum of 8 hours long.
I will say that his resume style ideas seem to have been good advice, if nothing else.
But I think I'd have rather had a book like this, were that it had existed.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I know of very few programmers who can effectively administer.
I know of very few administrators who can effecively "code"
Okay, next topic.
I wouldn't count on that. With technologies like HP's Integrated Lights Out and Dell's Remote Access Console boards the only thing I can't do today from anywhere in the world is actually put a server in a rack. With things like Virtual Desktop Initiatives, there's no need for on-site techs, either. Give every user a smart terminal and a phone number to call for issues. If something happens to the terminal itself, the user can swap it themselves with one of the dozen spares you keep in the closet. The only folks who have nothing to fear from outsourcing for the immediate future are the rack and cable monkeys, but even they can be gotten rid of by simply moving your whole data center to India. Of course, in order to provide 24/7 support, they'd then have to have support folks in the US to do stuff during the Indian "night". :)
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
Obviously you don't know many attorneys.
Fact is, very few high-level jobs let you work 40 hours a week. Just the way it is. You're right on one point though, there are certainly no worries about overtime.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Cause the fact of the matter is that whether you specifically keep your job or not is not really the point. Instead, potential IT workers need to realize that wages will be pushed down across the board.
If you love the job, then you've got a choice - do what you like even in a job market that does not compensate you fairly (relative to other industries where your brain will get you far), or get out now and start concentrating on an industry that will not be marganilized as much - think law, finance, etc.
If, on the other hand, you can tolerate programming, but are not necessarily passionate about it, and are more concerned about making good money, having a more prestigious job, less risk - probably less brain intensive than software developing - get the hell out of the industry now! You will be miserable competing with third world wages while doing a pretty tough job.
A few years out of college and I'm learning myself - I worked my ass off in engineering school for five years. The guys that had Fridays off (business school) and did about 5 hours of homework a week are making the same as me. Their most complex assignments use Excel, while mine require far more intelligence, experience, and energy. I'm very confident in the belief that, even though far less people could do what I do compared to the amount that could do what they do, our salaries do not differ due to the offshoring/H1B visa probs.
In the end, you'll just get pissed off doing more work than everyone else, while getting paid the same (or less), having a position that is constantly being threatened by management to be 'outsourced,' and absolutely earning no respect.
Just my .02
Short-term cost benefits are exactly what's driving the industry. Long-term failures are never attributed to the instigator of offshoring. In fact, the long-term failures necessite further cost reductions, and further layoffs.
Sooner than they think, the third-world wannabes will become has-beens themselves. Africa is still a vast, unexplored region of cheap labor. In large corporations, head count per dollar is what's visible, and cost-cutting will win out over touchy-feely (and fungible) quality and schedule considerations for a long time to come yet.
If you post it, they will read.
Gee, I didn't realize I had the ability to decide if my job gets outsourced or not. Somehow I always thought the beancounters in corner offices made that decision. How silly of me.
This advice is of some use in keeping yourself marketable in case you become unemployed but there's nothing the individual employee can do if the decision is made. Trying to give that impression is just, well, wrong.
And why is outsourcing any different from downsizing, rightsourcing, consolidation, 'tightening our belts' or any other justification they use to reduce the labor force at a company? Yes, I realize they're still paying for the product but in terms of the employees affected it's the same result. You're shown the door.
Yet another author trying to sell books with those trigger words. "Oh noes! My job may be outsourced! How convenient that this book is available to tell me how to prevent that!"
Yawn. Pass.
The only folks who have nothing to fear from outsourcing for the immediate future are the rack and cable monkeys, but even they can be gotten rid of by simply moving your whole data center to India. Of course, in order to provide 24/7 support, they'd then have to have support folks in the US to do stuff during the Indian "night". :)
They can pay someone to cover the night shift. Labor is cheep enough there that they can have 3 squads of admins.
Maybe it's just been my experience, but the projects I've seen utilizing outsource developers have been almost universally bad. The foreign outsource providers have a small core here, but the heavy lifting is done in India or Pakistan. The work I've seen with my own eyes has been pretty crappy, though YMMV. The sales guys and project managers are usually pretty good, but the coding quality can vary widely. When I say "vary widely" I really mean it can range from average to horrible. The funny thing is, when I point out coding issues, places where they didn't follow good design or where they did something really badly, the project manager runs back around to our CEO and whines that I'm being xenophobic. But I despise poorly constructed and commented code regardless of its national origin.
If you're looking for .NET or Windows development, some of that work is adequate. But just that. The domestic contract providers are more consistent in the quality they deliver and you don't have to fight the language barrier, but their overhead is so high. I can't imagine, as easy as it is to fire people these days, that paying that overhead can be worth it.
After getting into a position to make those decisions, my opinion is companies going low-cost outsource deserve what they get. Unfortunately, most companies are going to care more about the up front costs instead of either the build quality or time to market. And that gets worse in bigger companies, especially if there's a merger or acquisition going on. PM's can find their local dev's cut loose and get saddled with an outsource developer. That would suck.
If you're worried about your job, the only job security you'll ever have is if you run your own company. I did that for a while. Ironically, that led to this job. Move up by moving out really does work. For sure you're never going to get anywhere stuck in a cubicle.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Funeral. Home. Director. (or Owner if you can get the seed capital together).
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos011.htm
Median annual earnings for wage and salary funeral directors were $49,620 in May 2006. The middle 50 percent earned between $37,200 and $65,260. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $28,410 and the top 10 percent earned more than $91,800.
Salaries of funeral directors depend on the number of years of experience in funeral service, the number of services performed, the number of facilities operated, the area of the country, and the director's level of formal education. Funeral directors in large cities usually earn more than their counterparts in small towns and rural areas.
There will always be people dying......
Layne
This is a touchy subject for everyone, I'm sure. However, you have to admit there's some good nuggets of advice in there.
My background is in systems administration and engineering. We're not as bad off as software developers...yet. But I do know the day will come when it will be deemed too expensive to hire anyone but the best from my field locally too. Right or wrong, short-sighted or not, no one can compete with the greater numbers of lower-paid workers in other parts of the world. Look at what happened to manufacturing -- that's coming for almost every non-management job in the US and Europe. It's a done deal, we let it happen, and now we have to work with the resulting landscape.
So, if you want to stay employed, you have a couple of choices.
I freely admit that I'm not a big fan of outsourcing...projects take way too long because of the language barrier, incomplete requirements, and the difficulty of coordinating efforts. BUT...it's here. Instead of fighting and complaining about it, work within the system you're given. Become really good at what you do. Study. Keep learning outside of your skill set. Get yourself a reputation for being a problem solver.
Why do I say this? One of the tips was to never put your eggs in one basket. That's excellent advice. I'm constantly learning outside of my specialty because I know Microsoft isn't going to be the king forever.
Anyone who's tried hiring people lately knows that the field is still full of people who truly don't understand things beyond the narrow scope of duties they have. These are the "eggs in one basket people" and the most likely to be replaced if they are deemed too expensive. I would much rather hire a natural troubleshooter and problem solver who can figure out the details of a system after reading the manuals and playing a little. The innate ability has to be there. Everything else is teachable.
Some specialization is good too. You have to balance the need to be a good generalist with having a current, in-depth subset of your skills that you can market. Look at all the OpenVMS and IBM mainframe consultants out there. They print their own paychecks going from one weird specialist project to the other. Along the way, they pick up skills.
In summary, stay educated to stay employed. Never assume your job situation won't change, and be ready for anything.
I recently had a problem with dbx on a AIX system. Yes, from the "Theater of the Hard to Believe", but even the modest dbx didn't work. Our support folks opened up a ticket. Since I had, in a former life, done some kernel development for AIX, I wrote to the folks in Austin. The answer:
"This is supported by IBM India now ... good luck with debugging with printf"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So you're saying that the people who complain about outsourcing are can't get jobs because they're not decent workers or they act like Napoleon Dynamite? I wish that were true...
And what would you suggest Obi Wan? Maybe Medicine? Law? Literature? Give some alternatives.
For anyone with aptitude in math and physics and who is always trying to figure out how stuff works, you could consider getting into the field of aircraft structural engineering.
I manage the structural engineering group at a medium-sized Canadian company. Yesterday we tried to offer an experienced guy a $75/hour contract job and he politely declined. We can't afford him. He is contracting because he wants to and has several other offers. With bonuses and OT he would have grossed around $200K per year and it wasn't enough.
I have two Indian subcontractors working for me with another on the way. We do that not because of the cost but because it's so hard to find good people in this field. I have working for me one Indian/Canaidan girl, a French/Canadian guy, a plain vanilla Canaidan guy, the two Indians, a Moroccan, a Brit, and a Venezuelan guy working for me. Americans don't seem to be on the market because they are all sucked up by US defence companies that like US citizens for security reasons.
The labour market is tight right now. It is cyclic but I have to admit I haven't seen any unemployment amongst my peers in 20 years, the last rough spot being the late 70's/early 80's.
Here's how you get into it. A bachelors in mechanical or aerospace engineering is basic. Most people have a Masters, try to orient that toward materials or structural analysis. A thesis on composites would be good. The education is hard, you have to think of it on the same level as getting a medical degree. Suffer through it if you have to.
Develop an interest in manual analysis with a pencil. I get lots of resumes from people that can make finite element meshes and run NASTRAN, what I want is people who know what a piece of structure should look like and why and you get that ability from just sitting and thinking about things and reading the bible "Analysis and Design of Flight Vehicle Structures" by E.H. Bruhn. That book is 40 years old and anyone who knows it forward and backward can get their $200K job.
Then get a job with a large prime like Boeing for 5 years. Think of that like your internship. At the end of that you can start contracting, or move jobs to push your salary up. I would recommend contracting, not just for the money but for the contacts you make. It's a small world in this business and if you know the people you can always get a job.
So if you are 18 now, you are looking at a plan that will get you in a really good place when you are 30. Not many people want seem to have the stomach for that kind of commitment, but it'll pay off, I promise. And, all along the way you get to work on pretty cool stuff.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
...to lead and participate in the efforts to clean up shitty Indian code that comes back. The garbage code that these monkeys turn over almost always needs a major refactoring after they've had their paws on it for a while; hell, you could make a comfortable living in the US specializing in nothing but cleaning up cut-and-paste code and duplicate classes. Sure, it's not glorious work, but it'll pay the bills and it's better than standing around whining about your job getting shipped overseas.
If you're such a crappy coder that these guys in India fresh out of an "In 21 Days" book can replace you by writing the hideous software they do, you're not bringing much value to your employer in the first place.
Whatever happened to: Work hard, be smart, learn, and respect others? I tend to think these things are 90% of being successful, and the other 10% are the kinds of tactics the author lays out. I haven't seen people pull their former coworkers into a company because they decided to learn XYZ. Chances are, XYZ programmers are not in short supply. It's the other qualities that make one a pleasure to work with productively that trumps everything else.
Lean to say "you want fries with that?", "Hey buddy, can you spare some change?", "Hey, that's my shopping cart!".
Pretty empty under the overpass tonight.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I'd say the outsource hysteria is almost over from my vantage point. And if it is not, and still considered the next best thing to sliced bread by competitors - all the better. Meanwhile I'm recommending to my customers to 'outsource' to sourceforge.net.
"This indian crew ABC can do X for Y Euros less." - "Well, you can get Z, which has all X needs plus some extra features for free. Or at least a 5 minute download. It's called 'Open Source'". "Oh, really? That's cool."
Ever wondered why there's hardly any outsourcing complaints in the web developement field? That's the reason. At the quality and price I delivered in my last PHP project I was competing with eastern europe. And I won both ways. 85% of the work is finished by a download of the correct package and 3 hours of setup by an experienced developer on site. Nothing more to outsource there. Once the diversification in desktops and servers has merged into OSS/*nix, I presume it will be that way for most scenarios. All else will be high profile specialist work anyway.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Attorneys get respect by Joe Sixpack. The tech field sadly gets nothing but contempt.
I think you got that backwards. How many lawyer jokes are there compared to IT worker jokes?
WTB [sig], PST!!!
I would suggest law. Once you pass the bar, you have a meal ticket for life...
Provided that you can live with yourself. The usual goal in life is to be happy and while money may help it is rarely sufficient by itself.
Ive generally found that the portions of code that are outsourced to India are the grunt work.
Usually the stuff no one else wants to work on, almost always with little to no documentation or design direction.
And remember also, that those Indian companies are thinking of the bottom line too. They don't hire the best of the best programmers to write your outsourced code, they hire the cheapest people they can find.
If you expect 100 first year grads to produce a masterpiece for you with no direction or mentoring... well.. ya.. that doesn't happen here so why would it happen there.
You don't have to look far anywhere in the world to find low bid contractors that produce garbage work.
Being flexible to change is really the only broad advice anyone could give.
Corporate IT firms usually have trouble working with the medium + small business range. But individual contractors can make a killing there.
Why would I wonder if it's "anti-Indian"? Who da hell cares? India is the primary source of underqualified IT labor. If anything, we should thank India's colleges for giving IT offshoring a bad name.
Also, start your own company and show what you can do,
Of course you won't be able to compete with the companies that do outsource their jobs since their prices are lower than yours.
They will be able to out-code you, but it's not like you have no advantages. For example, you can concentrate on specialized markets. If a company is big enough to outsource, you don't want to be in the same market. Target niches that aren't served by larger companies. Or write Mac software, Mac users are willing to spend money on well-designed software, and many larger companies don't care about the Mac market because it's too small.
You can out-design them. You're on your home turf. You know the language. You know the people who will use your software. The outsourcing company will write the code per the spec; you can write the code your customers actually want. Run usability test. Hire a graphics artist to make your application attractive.
There are many ways how you and two or three friends can compete with a few dozen indian programmers. Don't try to out-code them. Play to your own strengths.
You probably won't get rich, but it's certainly possible to make a good living writing code, even if you aren't living in India.
Anything that we can do here, they can do there.
And most often for less.
They made buying generic drugs illegal here, they made
going to Canada for your drugs illegal.
Protect the corporate profits, not the citizens.
Saw an old man boarding a bus on TV saying he was a criminal
and grinning. They go as a busloads to Canada to get
their 'illegal' Meds so they don't die because they are poor.
It is pathetic.
We have billion dollar bail outs of banks, and ppl are thrown
out of their homes.
Why no bail out for the home owners ? Protecting Cash Inc. again.
I'd say a job that requires a Security Clearance, or the
person needs to speak very clear English. That doesn't
equal many jobs for the average person though.
Everything else is fair game for being offshored, outsourced,
near sourced, Alphabet VISA'd, or worked by border jumpers.
Things like the L1 Visa have 'unlimited' caps on them, and
H1-B has been raised to huge levels per year.
Once the VISA workers live here, they get a guest VISA
for Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, etc etc etc.
The person with the guest VISA never goes home and you meet
him at the local fast food place serving you food, or quickie
mart selling you your gas, etc etc etc.
This game is going to continue until they can reduce wages
on any and all jobs to the point the Corporate Whores are
happy with their level of profits.
In case you have not noticed they always want more...
You do the math...
The race for the Bottom is on ! Who is the winner ?
Not the Sled Dog ....and that is the working class.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Does that book say what industry those jobs were in? I'd be willing to bet that most of them are in the IT, high tech or software development industries. The point of this article was in relation to IT and software development, not all jobs. Sure the people who's jobs can't easily be off shored (Doctors, Lawyers, teachers) don't have anything to worry about, but for those who's job may be subject to off shoring, this book might be useful.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Your listening to corporate Propaganda again.
The H1-b workers ALONE have exceeded your tiny 500k number.
Do some research before you post.
The Alphabet list of VISA's are listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_visas#Select_List_of_the_Various_Types_of_Visas
Sell your Corporate Whore Bull$hit somewhere else.
The truth is the truth, no amount of bull$hit is going
to cover it up.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Like it or not, pure coding jobs in the "Western world" are going away. The "cheap code" genie is out of the bottle.
I think the "salvation" of those of is with programming and systems experience is to leverage our skills in leadership positions where we enable companies to do more outsourcing with successful outcomes. Would I like to be paid to code all day? Absolutely. But I don't think that's realistic when somebody claims that they can do the same job for less than half of what I make. The survivors, the pointy-hair bosses and consultants, stay around because they market their ability to get things accomplished. Our best hope for survival as senior developers is to sell upper management that we are their best chance to successfully use the inexpensive labor they are so desperate to hire.
The only folks who have nothing to fear from outsourcing for the immediate future are the rack and cable monkeys, but even they can be gotten rid of by simply moving your whole data center to India.
Good luck with that during one of the indian summer power outages.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Fair enough. My only two responses to that would be how many of those 500,000 are call center jobs? Also, a lot of IT jobs simply can't be farmed out because of security controls.
My point is more though that there are plenty of jobs out there, but you might need to do more than just throw your resume out there and demand employment. I also think that the disadvantages of off-shoring are becoming much, much more apparent now and it is not going to be as attractive as it once was.
But those who call their customers DULTs won't survive! Even if it's true.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
To boot, you work 8 hours a day, five days a week, no worries about overtime.
*Boggles* You've obviously never been a lawyer.
(just as an example, many of the prestigious law firms want you to bill at least 2,000 hours in a year only to be eligible for a bonus - that's over 38 hours per week assuming you don't take any vacation, and that's purely billable hours, so expect to be working a LOT more than that)
Median annual earnings for wage and salary funeral directors were $49,620 in May 2006. The middle 50 percent earned between $37,200 and $65,260. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $28,410 and the top 10 percent earned more than $91,800.
Have fun trying to live on $50K in any major or minor city in the USA, particularly if you want to have a family.
Advice: on VPS providers
Grunt work? Setting up and administering systems is "grunt work" in my book. Programming requires far more skill and expertise.
He's here all week. Tip your waitresses.
Advice: on VPS providers
Your listening to corporate Propaganda again....Do some research before you post...Sell your Corporate Whore Bull$hit somewhere else...The truth is the truth, no amount of bull$hit is going to cover it up.
Well, there you have it.
Advice: on VPS providers
Don't forget to blame the Shrub for the eventual decay of the earth's orbit until it is consumed by the sun.
That's actually Cheney's fault.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The way things are going I might be joining you under the overpass.
Develop an interest in manual analysis with a pencil. I get lots of resumes from people that can make finite element meshes and run NASTRAN, what I want is people who know what a piece of structure should look like and why and you get that ability from just sitting and thinking about things and reading the bible "Analysis and Design of Flight Vehicle Structures" by E.H. Bruhn. That book is 40 years old and anyone who knows it forward and backward can get their $200K job.
Amazing how aeronautical engineering texts seem to stay the same - one om the ones I used was in a Smithsonian display. My structures prof was one of the best I had - he taught you to understand and visualize the affects of the various forces acting on a structure; not the use of rote calculations; as well as the proper way to use a plumbers wrench to calibrate train and pressure gauges. As he put it "Mother nature doesn't give a damn about your calculations..." forces. Doc Bailey was a real character.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Have fun trying to live on $50K in any major or minor city in the USA, particularly if you want to have a family.
Are you kidding? You must live in San Francisco or something.
You can afford a home living in Houston making $35k/yr. Making $50k/yr in San Antonio is living like a king. If you're not living in NY, DC, or the West Coast, $50k/yr isn't bad.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
(just as an example, many of the prestigious law firms want you to bill at least 2,000 hours in a year only to be eligible for a bonus - that's over 38 hours per week assuming you don't take any vacation, and that's purely billable hours, so expect to be working a LOT more than that)
Isn't 2000 hours a year normally the minimum for any job to be considered full time? 2000 hours / 50 weeks (2 weeks for vacation + holidays) is 40 hours a week (which is 8 hour days x 5 days/week). Granted I can't remember the last time I (science field) or anyone else I know (science and engineering fields) has worked only 40 hours a week, but.... 2000 hours a year doesn't seem like much of a requirement.
And there's all the money to be made selling spare parts on the black market too!
Have fun trying to live on $50K in any major or minor city in the USA, particularly if you want to have a family.
Actually I live in NYC (Manhattan) with a wife and kid making less than $50K. It can be done, but don't expect to live the lap of luxury, or eat out, or have a car, or ... It's surely not "fun" but it beats not having anything.
If today's corporations want their regular rank-and-file employees to wear many hats, be multi-talented, and have a lot of business skills, then they're simply not doing their own jobs correctly.
When you are one of the major players in a monopoly or cartel-controlled industry, you can get away with that kind of sloth. All you really have to worry about is using your leverage in the market to make sure that when your employees leave and start their own business, they fail.
The crux of the problem is that Fortune-500's can lower their greatest expenses: dodge corporate income taxes and hire developing world/sweatshop labor. But none of us can offshore OUR single greatest expense: housing. With the real estate bubble still going on, those of us trapped in the US will need to (a) pay a First World real estate bill (including leasing business space, etc. if you're self-employed) and (b) compete with the big companies that can take advantage of Free Trade, off-shoring, etc. to minimize their costs. Bottom-line, I'd go self-employed tomorrow if I felt I could make ends meet. This isn't just an IT problem. Stripmalls have been built within 10 minutes of my home, 2-3 years ago -- and have been vacant ever since. The owners of the property, clearly, can afford to sit on it forever. They don't need to lower their lease in order to get small business tenants. They are part of a non-local economy, probably a large development/holding corporation (possibly even foreign). I heard from a neighbor that in addition to business leasing costs, some of the owners also demand a percentage of profits. There's just no competing sometimes -- the market isn't exactly free (sometimes it's a racket). Although I've been a programmer (B.S. CSci) for more than a decade, I've had second thoughts about this industry. If I should lose my job, I'd probably change careers altogether. Something that can't be easily off-shored.
Ultimately, land is all "we" have and we shouldn't be giving it up to others without either a fight or a frontier to which we can escape.
Seastead this.
Remove the loopholes that enable offshoring, and ensure that businesses cannot exit the US when faced with regulation.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Thuoookr djourr! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2fGl9587X8
"This is supported by IBM India now ... good luck with debugging with printf"
...who probably know less about it than the Western counterpart.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If you're worried about your job, the only job security you'll ever have is if work for the government
Fixed that for you. Businesses do not have "divine right" over an indefinite area. Nor should they have it over the government, or any citizen who wishes to object.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If you stop and look around at what's happening, it terrifies you. So you quit looking and try to kill or at least discredit the messenger.
The last time I was in an emergency room I was escorting someone with uncontrolled bleeding. I had done my boy scout best, but I am not a medic. It was a three-hour wait while the orderlies joked about how much weed they were planning to smoke that weekend. When I asked for a doctor, they referred me to a security guard. I mentioned the incident to my doctor at my next visit. She winced and said "Yeah, we avoid that place like the plague when we can." It's the largest, best-funded hospital in the area.
The last time I asked a cop for directions in a strange city -- wearing business casual clothes, mind you -- he placed his hand on his weapon and told me in rude terms he wasn't a tour guide. I'd like to think he was just a random jackass, but the attitude smelled like he was trying to bluff through insecurity and fear.
The last time I went on a business trip, I watched a TSA agent browbeat and threaten a small clumsy woman with incarceration if she didn't take her shoes off faster. When I spoke to his supervisor, he called over an armed officer in uniform and threatened to arrest me. The supervisor caved and apologized when I pointed out the surveillance camera recording the incident.
My kids' teachers have that vacant look of learned helplessness in their eyes. They were idealists once. It's been beaten out of them.
There's a major elevated highway in my city. It's been basically condemned and it's still in use. When it falls, there's a large number of buildings and thoroughfares that it will take with it. Everybody knows. No one can do anything. I try to avoid it when I can.
Forget McCain and Obama. We need a seance with Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and both Roosevelts, Teddy and Frank. I honestly think it would take all six to get us out of this mess, after they kicked all of our respective asses for letting it get this bad.
There will always be people dying......
However, due to advances in medical science, the average life expectancy is going up, hence the rate at which people are dying will go down unless the growth in the birth rate + immigration balance it out.
There are ways of doing it, but they require the mass rejection of business as an untouchable entity and the acceptance of business as a responsible member of the local community. That means that they incur some inescapable penalty that they avoid or pay.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Let's bomb india. problem solved.
6. Remove the stranglehold that business has on the government.
7. Ensure that what happened in 1980 leaves in 2009.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The Microsoft Library has a copy. Although it is currently checked out.
Despite the funny title, it's not that useful. The author says a lot of blatantly obvious stuff, and much of it seems to be stuff he's *thought about* that might work, not stuff he actually *did himself*. So to save you time here's the conclusion: Don't try and compete with India on price. Find an area you can specialize in where they absolutely need you on site or its a bleeding edge tech that's yet to appear in India. Emphasize quality: At $50 p/h you are still a better deal than a $10 p/h coder in a distant land if you are going to do a better job. I've a buddy who outsources his coders - he has a few good one he keeps - but he says most of them are a complete waste of time even talking to. Even with the ones he keeps he knows when they slack off he can tell but there's nothing he can do - he doesn't want to say anything that'll upset them because at that distance he has very little control. Despite all that he still uses them, but he does get very tired of the drawbacks.
I would suggest law. Once you pass the bar, you have a meal ticket for life, and almost assuredly a six digit salary in a few years, possibly seven depending on region.
To boot, you work 8 hours a day, five days a week, no worries about overtime.
Can't... resist... feeding... troll...
12*6 = 40?
Even with life expectancy going up, people will eventually die......
The "baby boomer" group is hitting retirement age / dying age. Even if they live longer, there are lots of them.
The population growth is about 1.0%....but that is COMPOUNDING.
The death rate in 2007 was about 83 per 10,000. In cities with populations approaching 1M, that's 8300 per year.
The birth rate in 2007 was about 142 per 10,000. Almost twice as many people being born as dying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
And it will be hard to outsource the job of funeral director to another country.
"I'm sorry ma'am, but your husband's remains were shipped SmartPost and won't be available for viewing for another two weeks. Please accept our condolences."
Layne
Capitalism? The US Fortune-500 pretty much outsourced to China. Last I checked, that's a communist labor pool. We're well beyond the left/right, liberal/conservative, capitalist/socialist set of dualisms. This is "extraordinary money" vs. the individual.
That's interesting -- actually advocating a spiral to the bottom. I'd frankly rather get the pink slip, change careers into something that makes better cash and tell my supervisor what he can do with a substandard wage.
No matter you say, really valuable engineers that can invent things, design em and code, are always respected everywhere. No matter where you come from, even you are Sibarian white bear, but you can create OS kernel yourself from the scratch, you still will be very highly payed and very-very wanted.
Actually a socialized health care would save corporations billions. IT's not about money, it's about a stupid ideology that's making us the laughing stock of the world.
And generic drugs are legal. I don't ahve a clue why you think otherwise.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well lawyers can't bill for every single hour they spend in the office. They do try though.
In a past life I was IT Manager at a couple of places. I have first-hand experience of an outsourcing event or two, so here's my observations.
1. Low quality is an absolute myth
I don't know where people get the idea that as a rule, all outsourced code is poor quality. That is absolute rubbish in my view.
A company I worked for was building a new system for in-house document handling (it was a legal firm, docs are the lifeblood). At the time I had no idea who to hire, we couldn't do it in-house, so we devised a test - we'd hire 3 or 4 outsource/consulting agencies to do a small task, then hire the one we liked the most. I'm not really a programming god but I do know good code when I see it so I took part in the process.
Two results were of such low quality we threw them out immediately. One of them was *local* and charged a lot of money for the privilege.
Of the other two, the results were pretty good - the best results were more expensive but still less than half the price of the incompetent local consulting company. We took a vote and unanimously agreed to hire them.
2. Set yourself up properly
Their setup was that they had a local guy who knew his stuff. He'd communicate with us, the clients, and act as local liason. He'd deal with the remote staff - I can't even remember where they were - and make sure everything was cool, all the time.
His service was *invaluable* and you can bet he made a lot of money. I would seriously recommend a lot of people who are afraid of losing their jobs to foreign outsourcing companies start thinking about setting themselves up as intermediataries for SMB like that guy did. You will make a fortune.
As someone hiring an outsourcing team, I do not want to be on the phone to india/estonia/whereever. I don't want to organise everything. I want to talk to someone local, who knows the team, knows what they need to do a good job, will be my point of contact, and will see that I'm happy - and he should pass on most of the savings from the outsourcing but is welcome to keep a fair cut for himself. *Be that guy*. Hell, if I was going to change careers tomorrow, I'd be doing that.
Outsourcing consultant, guys. Say it. Embrace the enemy. You sure as hell cannot beat them, so join them.
You think you know good code from bad? Put that in the brochure. Sell yourself. You want to improve the world with good code? You can improve it a lot more if you leverage against an entire team! Pissed off at not being a manager yet? *Make yourself a manager* !
3. This is completely unstoppable
30 years ago, my country had a thriving textiles industry. Now, you'd be lucky to find a single textiles factory per state. No-one cried for the t-shirt machine operators, and no-one made an effort to "buy local" and save the local manufacturing jobs. It was inevitable. But the t-shirts are still designed here.
20 years ago when I was in High School my bus ride took me past a factory that made actual computers. Obviously it is now closed, everything is made in East Asia. No-one paid triple the cost to buy local ... but it's still designed in the west.
10 years ago you could make serious money just knowing HTML. That didn't last long did it?
My point is things change. The jobs float up, nothing is set in stone. To be honest I am surprised programming is still so manual and low-level - maybe in another 10 years the whole programming field worldwide will be decimated by a decent system of code that writes code.
Who will people complain to then?
Half the programming jobs today exist only because there's no truly good open source modular code-sharing system. Come on you know it's true. Thousands of people are re-inventing the wheel even as we speak. There's nothing inherently wrong with cut and pasting code if it's *good* and it *fits* and it *works*. It's all just a matter of time.
Things change. They will not stop changing because you fail to adapt. Tough love, some other commentors mentioned? No
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
Every time incomes come up, people say stupid stuff like that, because everyone is convinced it's impossible to live on any less than their own actually generous income.
Median Household Income, New York City, 2007: $46K
Half the households in NYC live on less than that.
In case you have not noticed they always want more...
And you want less? (a simple yes or no would suffice)
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Do some research before you post.
The Alphabet list of Chemical Elements is listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements_by_name
The truth is the truth, no amount of bull$hit is going
to cover it up.
(now, where is my Informative mod?)
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Remind me to never work in the US. We get four weeks minimum.
Shocking dude. EU + Australia/NZ for the win.
Couldn't stand the weather
And generic drugs are legal. I don't ahve a clue why you think otherwise.
Perhaps GP mispoke. There are plenty of drugs you cannot import because they are not FDA approved. It can be difficult importing items that are FDA approved but were previously exported on the understanding - implied or explicit - that they not be sold in the US. Often a drug is sold overseas at greatly reduced price to the US price. Sure we may get a discount on DVDs and CDs, but if you need 'scripts to live, then the latest Spiderman flick isn't tops on your budget.
Actually a socialized health care would save corporations billions.
Maybe. *shrug*. Corporations really shouldn't be providing this for employers any more than they should be providing houses or other essentials you don't want tied to your job. When you negotiate a mortgage, you can get a fixed rate for 30 years. Thirty fucking years! Health care via your employer has no such assurance. They change the plan, you lose your favorite doctor. You lose your job, you lose your plan (eventually) or pay out the ass for it. I'm 100% opposed to socialized medicine but I am 110% opposed to the status quo. It makes it hard to choose.
Not a troll - just lawyer material, i guess...
Don't work in IT. If you want to code or do stuff with computers there are plenty of jobs in businesses selling actual software. Pay may not be as good but definitely better than collecting unemployment checks or what else do you do when your job goes to India. This industry is outsourcing-proof. If outsources could compete they would be pushing their own software instead of giving it to their US clients so those could sell at take most of the profit. Your skills don't become obsolete - if you knew C++ 20 years ago it's still the same old C++ (with a lot of new stuff you could learn and use for another 20 years). Algorithms, math - still all the same, we might be able to use more of them but the old knowledge has not gone away. You won't be in a hurry to learn the newest and bestest technology every few months - we have new C++ standard coming sometimes in next 2-3 years and it will probably take another couple of years for compilers to catch up and even then nobody will fire you for not knowing it. The only catch is that you need to be able to actually engineer some software, fancy certifications and knowledge of most recent buzzwords won't make you any money. Nowadays we see people trying to come in from IT and they look really pitiful on the interviews knowing less about programming than a bright first year CS student. As the things going now business people will eventually realize that it's still cheaper to pay $20K to Indian guys who can learn all the needed buzzwords just as well as you and $50K to an Indian manager who speaks fine English and translates for 30 buzzword guys than to pay for their own IT division with 50 people at $150K a piece.
I think you got that backwards. How many lawyer jokes are there compared to IT worker jokes?
Tinkering with computers isn't even thought of as a real job to a sufficient extent to make a joke out of it.
Lawyers are considered evil, but to be taken seriously. It's like Nazi Germany versus Liechtenstein.
Funeral. Home. Director.
Die, be a homemaker, or be a manager? Only the last of those is likely to lead to a salary. Or perhaps you just need to work on your punctuation. This isn't MySpace.
It is a best example to show nobody sees anyone equal... I think that if u have balls to show that u can provide the same service for the same cost then do it...otherwise dont blame anyone. Or Blame the company.
Shouldn't have violated the Prime Directive. "The Prime Directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal affairs of other civilizations" If we didn't give them our "advanced" technology, we wouldn't have this problem.
Which is exactly why you can get away with a quote of 6 months to install a piece of off the shelf software. The world is full of companies who bought some piece of software for no other reason than the CEO's brother in law had good things to say about it over a game of golf. Successful companies like Accenture are built off the opportunities these suckers present.
You assume that every H1-B worker is a job lost for a US citizen. This is essentially the same logic that RIAA uses to claim losses from piracy, and it is just as wrong.
There are many skilled people but
it takes several years to get into the field and noone wants to invest into their education that's why so few actually take the risks. And you know - when you have nowhere to live taking a debt to pay for your education is a very huge risk most people not ready to take
Are you ready to pay for their education ?
the shrub?
Quoting 'What Color is Your Parachute?' about job statistics is like quoting Sex and the city about relationships. 'What Color is Your Parachute?' is NOT a book based on trends or anything close to statistics. you clearly have not a clue.
very well said, thankx.
the shrub?
Common left-wing slang for George W. Bush. Usually used by the same people who blame him for everything under the sun, commonly including things that he has no control over.
Ever heard of an ODM? One company is estimated to be designing and making about 33 percent of the notebook market, on behalf of clients like Dell, Apple etc.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
All I know is that I present numbers and everyone else here presents anecdotes about how the IT industry is imploding. It's not. There are tons of jobs out there. You have to just be willing to do what it takes to get them. Too many people have this sense of entitlement as if companies are going to be knocking on doors to find people. That's not the way it works.
you're all aware that most of Windows code are outsourced to India. those people are lousy workers and they smell too.
no wonder Windows keeps BSODing!
not quite.
what you call as 'in-house' is a long term business relationship thats just inside a company's roof. (sometimes even not under the same roof). an outsourcing is no different. IF you do it properly, as a long term relationship.
some of you people have the tendency of taking outsourcing as a "on a need basis, one shot go" type of relationship. it isnt.
it doesnt differ zit from any kind of business relationship since the dawn of trade - you have to choose carefully, you have to choose a reliable source to do business with, you have to choose according to your needs, and also, buyer beware.
i want to stress reliable. this is the key to any business relationship, not only outsourcing.
in any reliable business relationship you'll find that the interaction between companies over a long duration of time start to resemble what you call in-house business relationships under one company's roof.
Read radical news here
I second this. Another reason it is a bad example, this machine is about lowest bang for buck on seat. And has moved wholesale over to India as a result.
(I'm too am a former AS/400 operator/Administrator/RPG developer - turned XXXXX programmer)
...your employer can't tell that you would do a much better job than the outsourced workers until it's too late.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Smartest programmer in world works for his own darn self.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.