Slashdot Mirror
Indian CEO Says Most US Tech Grads "Unemployable"
theodp writes "When questioned about his firm's US hiring, Information Week reports that Vineet Nayar, the CEO of the Indian outsourcing giant HCL Technologies, showed he can stereotype with the best of them, telling an audience in NYC that most American tech grads are 'unemployable.' Explaining that Americans are far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology, the HCL chief added that most Americans are just too expensive to train. HCL, which was reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft last April, gets a personal thumbs-up from Steve Ballmer for 'walking the extra mile.' Ballmer was busy last week pitching more H-1B visas as the cure for America's job ills at The National Summit."
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
I just graduated in computer engineering in the USA. I know stuff, but we never learned the HCL programming language.
...Most Americans are unemployable...
I'd say its time to pull the plug on free trade and let these people jump start their own local economies on their own merits, and not on shoveling their crap into the USA. India has not done a damned thing for the USA and I see no reason why the USA should throw its people out of work to subsidize India's economy.
Free trade is not worth it.
This is my sig.
I've never spoken with an Indian out sourcing worker who knew his ass from a hole in the ground. The only things I saw come back from India were excuses, delays and weak attempts at acting as though they knew what they were talking about.
I recall talking to Congressman Brian Baird about this problem of US businesses over-utilizing immigrants. He had the standard reply, "But they tell me if they don't get the visas, they'll have to outsource business to India!" My reply wasn't standard: "They shouldn't just outsource to India, they should MOVE to India! The US created these industries without massive immigration. The problem with the US isn't a lack of immigrants."
Seastead this.
If they judged employability based on quality of code and not on skin color or nationality, most Indians would be considered unemployable. Just putting that out there.
From my experience the experienced tech employees from developing economies are unwilling to implement, let alone master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology' let alone their less experienced colleagues.
America doesn't hold a monopoly on incompetence you know.
All I have to say is 'Citation Needed' Mr Nayar.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
If Americans are unemployable then why are they the ones paying the Indians to do the job? The money is coming from somewhere, and to make others do the work for you takes some brains. What this guy doesn't answer is why is it that when I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense even to the Indian staff that's stateside?
The entire cause for these outsourcing problems is capitalism. The endless drive to increase the bottom line means that businesses no longer concern themselves with ethics or morality. They cross borders to find the cheapest labor possible. They find out how to deliver the bare minimum for the maximum possible return.
These are all tenets of modern business.
They take for granted their endless supply of customers. The simple way to deal with this is to boycott companies who outsource.
Let management, sales, and any representative know that you don't like a company who won't hire US workers. Write your congresspeople to let them know that Americans jobs are more important to you than corporate profits.
There has to be a balance. When corporate entities decide profit is more important than people, whatever side of the counter they're on, they need to be dealt with the American way; with your wallets. Vote with your wallets. Let them know we don't like their way of doing business. Though they'll probably lobby congress to pass laws to force you to do business with them, and they'll sue anyone who uses the competitor. Welcome to the new American century.
They're using their grammar skills there.
That's exactly how I feel about the code quality I get when I outsource to India.
I know there is going to be a lot of flak directed at HCL.
But unfortunately HCL is not the only monkey around.
I live in India, and have a lot of friends working in such companies (Infosys, Wipro, HCL, TCS etc., etc.,)
These service companies have lot of PR support due to feeding poor kids meals blah blah (you get the philantrophy angle, right?)
However beneath the facade lurks pure evil.
Firstly these are service companies. they bill clients by the hour. Which then brings us to their processes and employees.
Innovation and smart working is discouraged, and the training given is "how to bill maximum hours" and "how to fool the client into believing you are working".
So these drones are taught how not to work smartly, how not to do more with less time. you get tonnes of reports tones of meaningless slides to fool the clients, who are anyways willing to get fooled.
But kid yourself not, same is the case with US based service companies also, but with service companies a smaller percentage in US(except in Law area), things don't seem obvious.
But Indian IT has become a service economy with drones. Drones who are dumb "copy paste" coders.
I am in a product company, and often we get software engineers with 10 years of "coding" experience who do not know how to use regular expressions. Infact in their job, they would do a manual search and replace, because they can bill more hours to client.
Such practices actually make hiring intelligent engineers bad, They want drones.
Till few years back, when product companies were unheard of in India, many people migrated off-shore. Nowadays the drain has stemmed, but with lots of money coming in, even good engineers are flocking to this circus, and the whole place is a mess.
Now why do Amercian comanies like to get screwed? Well the managers there can justify their paychecks more readily if tonnes of drone like reports and jargon filled meaningless data is thrown around in board meetings.
your PHBs love these drones. They work for 14 hours a day at half the cost. OTOH, an intelligent enginner will work for 4 hours finish the work, and charge double. How will they boast that they have a cheap engineer working for 14 hours a day?
Now Microsoft loves these companies very much. Because they promote windows, and in their advertisements, boast about better performance and all that BS. The public here trusts these guys. Wow CEO used to clean his own toilet. Woweee!
They go to these fund raisers, do hoop haa about poor kids, give a few hundred dollars to a charity, and they are the ambassadors of good will.
The dark side is brushed under the carpet.
Whats not told is that number of hours each employee spends at his/her desk is counted. Every time you go in your wing, your clock starts ticking.
Every time you go out, clock stops.
Companies like Accenture India division make employees sign on bonds that they are willing to work 12 hours a day. Its all a circus, and the American PHBs love their circus animals.
Who suffers. Grads in the US, and engineers like us who have so limited options in India. Moreover our reputation suffers. We are clubbed "Indian engineers are not intelligent".
On the plus side product companies are growing, but on the downside most of these have these drones who cannot unlearn what the service industry taught them?
Ever wonder why India does not have companies like Intel, Lenovo, Huawai emerging, but only subsidiaries and service drones?
Well I just gave you your answer.
CEO of Indian outsourcing company says Indians are better workers than Americans. In other news, CEO of GM says that GM is a better company than Toyota.
There was a time America used to peddle stuff all over the world and insist on free trade. Now Third world countries are peddling their labor and insisting on free trade. Karma, what goes around, comes around!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
My tech support coming from India is unintelligible
I was a CS major.
One of the most practical courses I took was one where we did team programming projects, and had to work on a spec. That was as close to real life programming as I ever got...
I don't think it should be a focus but a basic understanding of some process (any process as new processes are derived from elements of old ones) would go a long way to new grads fitting into IT work (which is where most people doing computer stuff in college end up).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
His complaint about American college grads is that they aren't trained in bullshit corporate feel-good busywork initiatives like Six Sigma? I take his rejection as a compliment. While his robotically obedient employees are busily documenting their processes, American college grads will be inventing the technology they'll be adopting 5 years from now.
"reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft"
umm, if it's reported, how is it secretive then ?
This post has the potential to trigger another round of "India sucks" or "Americans are dumb" comments. Frankly, its unwanted and its unnecessary to paint everything as Black and White. Both countries are dependent on each other. Can't help it if citizens of both nations can't accept this simple fact. The common threat to India as well as US is China. Deal with it!
when you pay them $15/hr and expect them to be good at what they do.
If only we could have those 2-week programming courses you give your Indian programmers before you let them loose on mission-critical projects, imagine what great programmers we could be!
there's a reason why those jobs are outsourced, it's because it's A LOT CHEAPER. dont blame the economy on other countries ability to provide labor, companies want to save money.
the government needs to drive down the cost of health care, once that's done, jobs could stabilize in the U.S., not everyone could afford to pay for their employees medical expenses.
I will most likely be called a racist (and I guess I did become a little racist after this experience), so I am posting as a coward. So, I got my Masters in CS at a top-30 US University. I am European and most of my fellow students were Indian & Chinese. The Americans were few. In my experience, the worst students were Indians. Now, I am not saying all or most of the Indians were bad, and I am not even saying that those that I consider the "worst students" were stupid or even less competent than some other low-performance students. But if a European, a Chinese, an American was bad (although the few Americans we had were all pretty good), you could TELL. The Indians seemed to be professional bullshitters, you could not tell the good ones from the total bs ones. They could fool their professors easily, they could even fool some recruiters...
I remember I was at a job fair hiring for a technical position. I got about 10 CV's from Indians that day, and all of them were the same. Yes, the names were different, the layouts were different, the places and even universities were different. However they all had apparently won 1st place on the X (indian village? you've never heard of) math olympiad, they all elaborated on some sort of major project they had undertaken to revamp X airline's ticketing system (which I could tell was the weekly homework in our transaction processing class), and of course all were scoring 99% on their undergrad Indian university. What should I do, call all of them for a follow up interview to figure out who's just BSing and who's not?
if you are poor, you tend to be more highly motivated than when you are rich (and yes, middle class, or even lower middle class american counts as rich in this world)
#2:
if you are poor, you can be paid a lot less to do the same job than someone less motivated and in a better socioeconomic position
do you know what #1 and #2 are? facts. now mod me troll and flamebait, but you know i speak the truth. deal with it (or more likely, suppress my words and go on whining)
computer programming is a rather interesting skill in the internet age: if you have a terminal, and a keyboard, all that matters is the quality of the mind behind those two things. doesn't matter where you are, doesn't matter your age, doesn't matter your education level. here on slashdot, we are all familiar with the internet as a universal leveller when it comes to things like music distribution or political dissent. well guess what: it applies to computer programming as a career choice as well
that fact is not nice if you are rich westerner, but it is still a fact nonetheless: you have a hell of a lot of highly motivated, much cheaper competition out there. deal with it, or whine. but i don't see what the whining is supposed to get you except self-righteous victimization. it certainly won't get rid of the competition or get you higher pay
life is not always kind folks. just fucking deal with it already and stop the pathetic whining
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
On one level, that may be true. There are a lot of people who think that College is supposed to be the same as a tech school. They go to college expecting to be trained for a specific career. Some colleges have begun to oblige and are acting like the trade schools that some students (and parents) expect them to be.
If you've only been trained in retreading tires, you don't know how to mount a new tire on the rim and balance it. When the CS requirements of some schools consist of "MS Office" in three different sections, how in the fuck do they expect their grads to know anything?
Now, on the other hand there are plents of schools who are giving real and complete tech educations. These people are constantly getting screwed by employers who give up after interviewing a few of the other kind of student.
Lastly you have the tech executives who want nothing more than to lower costs. They want the cheapest labor, and nothing else. They are pushing to raise the H1B caps. They are pushing for outsourcing. It has nothing to do with the quality of US grads. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that they want to pay people less money. If I spend 6 years in college and have a Master's degree, you can kiss my ass with your $35k offer. The guys right off the boat from Bombay will be willing to take that sort of job. They don't have $50-200k in student loans to pay back. It's basic economics. What this glut is doing is providing a greater supply of labor in order to drive down prices.
If you're the only plumber in your town, you can charge pretty much whatever you want. No one else has the skills, knowledge or tools to do that work. What happens if overnight four more plumbers come to town? Instead of being able to charge $75 per hour, you may have to cut back to $50. What happens if ten more plumbers come to town? You'll suddenly find yourself working for minimum wage. That's what certain executive-types are trying to do to technology.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Perhaps Mr. Nayar should stop beating around the bush and just state the reasons why he thinks Americans are unemployable:
Americans enjoy running water.
Americans don't want to live in a small mud hut with their whole extended family.
Americans don't want to work 80 hours a week on slave wages with no overtime.
Americans have a higher cost of living in regards to just about everything.
Americans usually need cars to function in American society.
Americans want to have 72"+ LED backlit LCD TVs.
Managers don't get bonuses for hiring Americans.
I personally think that every job should have a wage that a person can live off of, "unskilled" or "skilled". If you want to see something funny, hand a CEO a floor buffer and watch him fumble about with it.
...get code monkeys.
I wonder what he earnt this year? I would say that a rich overpaid CEO complaining that people won't accept a sub-standard wage are the epitome of hypocrisy and greed. I'm surprised he's not whining that good slaves are hard to find.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm currently working at a major US tech company and litterly every program I have inherited from some out sourcing group is utter crap. I'm talking about EVERY variable is a global variable, one source file for a 5000 line program, no makefile just a line at the top which says compile with gcc blah blah blah, and the list goes on. The reason for out sourcing is not skill its cost. Why pay an American programmer who knows what hes doing when you can out source it and get a program which barely works and when bugs arise blame something/someone else.
In the long run these companies are going to learn the hard way that paying an out sourced developer who has a 3 month class in C will get you nowhere near a developer with a CS degree in terms of quality, functionality, and efficiency.
Huh, a businessman in an article (Indian outsourcing) bashing his competitors (USA techies). Nope, no way he's biased or trying to pitch his company, nosiree, completely objective...
Next up, comments by Steve Ballmer on why Windows is better than MacOS and the Ford Family will join us to discuss their views on the best automobiles.
"India has not done a damned thing for the USA"
Not true!
The gave me Old Monk rum to drink while swear and shake my fist in their general direction...
I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense
Amen. I won't say that all the programmers in India suck, because that would be an inaccurate stereotype. However, I will say that The worst code I have ever seen from American programmers I have worked with was better than the best code that came back from Indian outsourced groups. I suspect that all the GOOD INDIAN PROGRAMMERS CAME TO AMERICA TO MAKE BETTER MONEY.
Why would you hire the leftovers? Really, you think that you can just get better quality by spending less? Really?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I work for a large medical company that has a call center in the US headquarters and have also been outsourcing their call center to India and Phillipines. From what I can tell from my observations, by the way I am not directly involved in the call center so my comments are not quantifiable, people anywhere eventually tire of working for shit jobs.
Perhaps people outside the US can last longer than their American counterparts, but over the course of time they eventually develop the same traits that cause them to be terminated as well. Bad attitude, lack of interest, insubordination, lack of job performance. A crap job is just that, if you are hungry then you may accept it, but once your basic needs are met you will realize you no longer wish to be in a crap job. Americans have their basic needs met more easily, than the countries mentioned so they tolerate a bad job in a less amount of time than people that have not eaten or had a decent place to live for many years of their life.
Complacency is human trait not just Americans.
The biz lobbyists first claimed that not enough US citizens were going into the field. Now it's that we are "too lazy for the details", not quantity? Which is it? Outsourcing and H1B's were never sold as a way to replace "C" Americans with "A" 3rd-worlders. Did they lie to Congress and voters?
Table-ized A.I.
Supposedly, the Indians coming to the States are the smartest. I find them to be no better than American educated and trained workers. IIT is not a breeding ground for great talent, rather superior attitudes. No different than the Ivy League in the United States. I have worked with plenty of Indian talent in Silicon Valley, and managed many as well. It depends on the person; where you go to school, or if you go to school, is irrelevant.
The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list.
Slashdot - The great and glorious cluster fuck of Internet wisdom.
Having traded in a Tech major for Music major, it's good to see that I haven't lost anything in potential employability.
Worked in a call center in the US run by an Indian company for over a year fairly recently. Talked with counterparts in India. The difference is really obvious- Indians kiss the bosses ass way, way, _way_ better than Americans. They didn't necessarily know what the hell they were talking about, technically, but they could sure fake it well enough to satisfy the boss. Hard to blame them, really. Obviously they all know that there are about a billion people waiting in line to take their job if they say the wrong thing to the boss.
of bugs and loopholes?
That explains everything...
The funniest thing is, in my CS classes apx 30% were from India and 30% from rest of Asia. The remainder were mostly white Americans.
These ratios were pretty much consistent throughout pretty much the entire engineering school.
So anything over $.20 per hr is overpriced? Now you get an idea of the source of MS's QC on Windows is coming from and how much it is worth. So its buggy, the price is right.
I think the gist of it is that a lot of "western" software engineers don't want to work as "code monkeys"; programmers just doing their job without any sense of ownership of the project. I don't want to disparage people doing that job, but great software requires that programmers have a sense of ownership of the project and their code. I don't think the "top down" style of software engineering - where you have a few project leaders and an army of willing coders - is going to yield the same product quality as a smaller team of programmers who own part of their project and may not be as easy to guide.
I've worked from tier 3 to tier 1 networks, from dial up support to networking to information security, and I've dealt with India since the mid to late 90s, and I must say this Indian CEO couldn't be more right! What you have to do is take it with a grain of salt and look at it from the other perspective. Sure Indian IT workers are cheap and they are awesome at mastering the BORING aspects of IT. You know why? Because they RUN from ADVANCED IT problems like the PLAGUE! Usually those are advanced up to the upper tech echelons of IT companies to deal with (Usually based either out of the US or Europe). You know why this happens? The US and Europe have a good 2 to 3 generations of technology embedded into our society that India never will have. I've never seen a truly passionate Indian IT worker that learns IT because its what he calls fun. They do it for the money or to support their family or just out of necessity. That unfortunately is never going to drive them to be as skilled as a passionate worker who enjoys what he is doing and got into IT specifically for that reason. The same can be said about US IT workers, but generally speaking, that is what drives the reason of why US workers are more expensive than Indian workers. I don't really see the developed "Nerd" culture in India that the US or Europe has (And created since basically like the 40s...). What the Indian CEO is saying is a dual edged sword. They do have the cheap workforce, but they do not have the generations of knowledge and experience embedded in their society that US and European workers have. It all comes down to the age old saying, you get what you pay for. =]
"master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology"
Ha!
I myself have worked for large outfits and many in my family work for large outfits. My experience and that of my loved ones is that working with Indian companies is a guarantee for disaster. Recently my sister witnessed a $50 million project being trashed. The problem is that Indian IT companies usually limit themselves to implementing exactly what you specify. Or, if you ask for an analysis, they let a bloated system emerge. Unless you work for a CMMI level 4 company this attitude is next to useless.
People that master "tech process and methodology" wind up being slaves to "quality". Quality as in "meticulously following the procedures." As more than 90% of businesses don't really have quality in place -or at best, have some quality shroud- this means that de facto they are slaves to the next management level. Very convenient once you are the manager.
The problem is that higher management and share holders don't understand that this is common practice. They only see that Indians cost 10 times less than European/US people. If you need 20 times more people to do the work, cost double. The bureaucracy of 20 times more people cripples your organization.
Man, I've seen a team of 10-15 people writing 'make' files for package generation. And particularly crappy 'make' files at that. Had to wait hours to have them running a 'make pkg' command and returning me the generated package. For Christ's sake! This is something you think about and implement on a rainy afternoon and which takes 1 minute to run each time afterwards.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
At least at the rates you'd pay to someone in India. Ya know, it's kinda hard to survive on 500 bucks a month here...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Indians claim knowledge of the Process to get the contracts. We'll be "cheaper and better" they say.
There is a hot new software development methodology making waves in India. It's called "copy and paste" programming.
Step 1: Spend entirety of college asking inane questions merely to signal to the professor that you are attending class and are engaged in the discussion.
Step 2: Get your MCSE.
Step 3: Get your masters in computer science from any university
Step 4: Adopt an unwavering affinity for the quickest possible solution to any and all programming problems. Ignore maintenance or readability. Ignore the inevitable requirements changes. Eschew infrastructure and tools like build systems and source control because they take too much time to setup and configure. Spam the message boards with URGENT pleas for help with some well-documented library* you can't seem to figure out. Complete each task independently, no matter how much code is available for reuse. Document NOTHING.
Step 5: Go to work for an outsourcing company with an enormous and proficient business development department.
Step 6: Profit!
I've seen this before at multiple companies. I now do government contracting and enjoy the distinct lack of foreign outsourcing on work requiring a security clearance.
*Okay, that might be an oxymoron....
I am from India but have been working in the UK for the last 3 years and before that I worked for 2 years in India.
Having worked here in UK I have come across only a couple of super brilliant techies and at the same time I have worked with some of the worst coders ever, keeping in mind they claim to have worked for 10+ years in the industry but it doesn't reflect in their code ... they wouldn't even know whats the advantage of using 'if-else' instead of 'if' and so on.
The two years I worked in India (2003-2005) I never came across above mentioned level of incompetence. Even if a guy was fresh out of college he would have been dedicated to sit through the entire night to understand the stuff he was about to handle so that no mistakes were made. But this happened in companies which were no where close the size of Infy or Wipro and the likes. These were small companies formed by some very highly competitive and hard working people.
But I believe the scenario may have changed since then in India. When US and rest of the West started investing in India they gave some of the most unbelievable salaries to people who didn't think it was even possible to earn that much. I think the very first or second batch of people who started getting those kind of salaries were the people who came into the 'business of coding' were the ones who really wanted to be there in the first place i.e. loved being a techie , loved coding and delivered some serious quality.
But the money they were getting kind of stuck into the heads of the people who were to follow. They wanted to get in there for the lifestyle which could only be afforded if you had those kind of salaries. People who may not necessarily have loved to code for the rest of their lives but yes they do want that money. The effect of the money was such that even 10 year old kids in school wanted to be future 'Software Engineer' because their friend's daddy was one and was driving around in a then expensive Maruti Esteem (one of the first luxury cars to be manufactured in India and everybody wanted it)
I guess maybe that's the same in US as well. Most of the people who want to get into being a techie is probably because they don't really love coding but they want the money that quite a lot of people have managed to earn being in the same line of work.
Both bad and good coders (i like that term better than Software Engineer) exist be it in India or in the US and somewhere in the middle (recently I had the chance to maintain something written in Romania, and it was such a nightmare). If the company in the US does not interview the entire team in India/Philippines/whereever, then they themselves are taking a risk. Big shops like Infy, Wipro etc have a hiring process but the sheer size of these shops is clearly indicative of the risk. It should not be so difficult for a company to set up a small team of 2 or 3 competitive techies in the US company who interview the people in the outsourcing shop before they get started on the work ?
Or is it that even those 2 or 3 highly competitive people are not around, or if they are around they don't manage to see the good from the bad ? Or is it that the bottom line is so so so f*****g important that those companies don't even want to spend even little money and time on implementing a shortlisting criteria when they outsource work ?
Agreed, but this here is part of the problem. There is no magic panacea, if you want good work, you have to pay for good work, the higher-ups are just deluding themselves otherwise. On the same note however, saying that their best get paid as much as our best is just silly. Whether that means we demand for to much compensation, or that they demand too low, is another story. I do not think bothering with this dude's baiting is really productive. Right now, we DO know that we are better, or at least just as good. The problem here is that they are willing to work for significantly less. We either have to take a hit, or empower them to be properly compensated for their efforts.
It is amusing (and sad :( ) to read all these comments of American pro-protectionism/isolationism leftists.
Looking at what has been going in the US lately I can't believe that this nation used to stand against commies.
Congress full of socialists printed another $2 trillion, going to "nationalize" the healthcare system etc. What next? Turn USA into USSR?
Did you forget your own history people? Is it what the Founding Fathers created America for? :) Or at least to Russia (where something like USSR-lite seems being restored lately).
Isn't it a free country for free people? If so then all those here whining about having to compete with foreigners for their jobs not only deserve being replaced by brighter person from abroad, but also exiled to Cuba or North Korea where they belong
Feel a need for abolishing free trade, closing borders or want tough immigration controls? Why waste time waiting for this changes in the US? Move to North Korea and enjoy everything you desire - today!
He's right... I absolutely hate that this guy is correct about this, but he is. I really hate to flash my social science background on slashdot, but here it goes:
There's been a trend in American society in the past couple decades towards "Helicopter parenting" and what could be considered a "participation trophy" society. We are a society that rewards mediocrity with enthusiasm and teaches every child to be a superstar. The downside to this is that we have a generation of workers who require constant affirmation and a high degree of reward for relatively small amounts of work.
Computer science is an engineering field, it does not require merely creativity and an artistic zeal but the steadiness of mind and capability of a traditional engineer, one who might design an engine, or build a bridge, even. It's not the technique of traditional engineering that computer science needs, but the character and demeanor. It would be one problem if only the students themselves thought of themselves as Larry Page's and Steve Jobs', but the employers are buying into it also. Companies like Google are swimming in talent but drowning in their own lack of discipline.
I must say, though, that the answer does not lie in outsourcing to foreign workers out in India... we have a country full of people who actually are employable. Why not hire some self-motivated community college students to do menial tasks, or perhaps start bringing in some of these unemployed IT workers? How about some people with battle scars from web 1.0, with the attention to detail necessary to keep commercial systems running? How about we bring in more old guys and expect more from our young talent? There are plenty of workers in America that deserve a fair shot, and we should not let the egos of some of our "rock star" graduates of fancy schools sink the reputation of the U.S. work ethic?
We have talent and I feel it's time our job market turn towards precision.
Are you saying that this is a luxury car in India??
Man, we are really screwed if your people are that easily wow'ed.
I'm seeing a lot of comments regarding the (low) quality of outsourced code.
I think what people in US companies fail to understand is that, instead of aiming to cut down their development costs to US$5/hour, they should try to using outsourcing as a tool to hire *good* developers. You can get a top notch developer which would cost US$100+/hour in the US for about US$25-35/hour in Brazil.
This whole "outsourced code is crap" debate happens not because Indians (or Brazilians) have an intrinsic inability to code. This happens because outsourcing companies such as Accenture go to these countries and then hire the cheapest developers who can write something that passes as "working code". They can hire such developers here with a US$1000 monthly wage and the shitty developers will be happy with it!
But the good developers don't work for these companies.
As an advice, if you're ever considering outsourcing to Brazil, never do that to any company with more than 50-80 developers. Ideal would be around 15-30 developers - this is the sweet spot from my personal experience. As a side bonus, these companies are actually cheaper and pay their employees better. These "famous" service companies charge ridiculous amounts of money from their clients - I guess all the money goes to their senior executives bonuses.
The main reason why there are proportionally more crappy developers in developing countries is because there is much higher demand for crappy developers in those countries. So we have hundreds of cheapo colleges springing up on every corner offering IT-related courses.
This is all supported by these large service companies which regularly come up with nonsense such as stating they're recruiting future IT-workers in English classes because, according to them, it's easier to teach Java in 3 months than to learn English. And since they're so eager to hire, that's their only option.
Of course, this is a lie: there's plenty of *qualified* developers. Despite stating they're actively hiring, they're actually firing people right now. And then replacing some of them with people willing to work for a lower salary. So this is what you get from outsourcing to these large companies.
So keep these things in mind. These companies play the same tricks everywhere. In the US, they might want more foreign visas and colleges with courses matching their needs. Here in Brazil, they also play these same tricks regarding universities and try to push the government to allow for more than 8 hours a day without overtime (or even illegally coerce their employees into working unpaid overtime). I can bet they also do something nasty in India.
... "most" Indian tech grade are unemployable, too, but for different reasons. (if you want a good laugh, check out the discussion boards for various microcontrollers. Not a day passes without someone posting a "please solve my homework/exam/project for me, it's URGENT" posting).
However, since India produces a lot more tech grads, there's still plenty of employable (and quite a few outright excellent) ones left to fill the existing positions.
TFA explains that HCL Technologies is an "Indian outsourcing giant".
Good luck with your new career.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
What that CEO actually means is that American employees aren't willing to 1. Put in 4-6 extra hours every day 2. Lower coding standards (use 's' as variable names, enormous methods, no refactoring, cutting corners) 3. Be mindless enough to follow a team lead's decisions without proactive thinking or questioning. Which is why they'd never fit in at HCL.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
People who call themselves Americans are campaigning for more H1-B visas when US employment is scratching 10 percent.
Amazing.
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to be a labor organizer. For all their faults, at least unions aren't just plain anti-American.
American Grads may indeed be unemployable - I've never worked in the USA though, so I cannot say for sure either way. ;)
;)
But I have worked with HCL in the UK. The standard working week for an Indian HCL employee is easily 90 hours if you don't count weekends. There is usually a ratio of around 3 HCL employees to replace each UK employee they make redundant. By my weak math skills, I would guess that HCL (at a savings) replaces 1 UK employee with the equivalent of 7 HCL employees on an effort basis.
It would be wonderful of course if those ~7 staff gave ~7x benefit. Sadly in my experience their total sum gives less than half the quality of the 1 UK employee. Mistakes are made, decisions are wrapped up in red tape, and chaos ensues. Put an HCL employee in a situation where there isn't a blow-by-blow script on how to do the job, and they flounder. Badly.
HCL may help save money on the accountants books, but they put the company at risk if the company is stupid enough to outsource without first having everything in order. Sadly the main companies that do outsource are those that don't have a clue how their business is run, and expect HCL employees to be able to think outside of the box, and to be able to use their vast experience in the companies assets to achieve minor miracles on a daily basis. Finding an HCL employee that can think, let alone think outside of the box would be a major miracle...
At least I know which companies shares not to invest in
Please note the above is in my experience only and could possibly be unique and not a unilateral standard. I've met some very nice people who work at HCL - I just wish their 'niceness' translated directly into 'quality output'. It's also possible that HCL do actually give quality to some clients (maybe they put their best on the highest payers *shrug*). Anything is possible.
It's also worth noting that I've never been made redundant due to HCL coming in to a company - indeed, I've actually got more work at a company due to them being there. For each external UK person like myself who benefited, there were at least 10 UK people that were made redundant though, and that's a ratio that I dislike moreso than a lack of quality.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
...is a spoiled fsckstick who thinks he's entitled to a $100k salary right out of college simply for existing. During my time in this industry, I've worked with the some really good engineers. They were the ones who were willing to go twenty extra miles when you only asked for one. Unfortunately, they were also the ones who wanted to know business and technical justifications for their assignments (to the consternation of business majors everywhere, who all seem to simply be lemmings that do what they're told because they were told).
I've worked at way too many companies where IT Engineers were expected to be brilliant and insightful in the field or in design meetings but leave their brain at the door when it came to bullshit company politics, outright lies told by executives, and the utterly unbalanced compensation plans forced down their throats by companies.
Fsck that shit. I spoke up at my last company about all of these things and was told to STFU a number of times. Right before I quit, I spent two months putting together a 50 page reorganization plan (in consultation with middle and senior management across the company) in response to the internal griping about inefficiency and mismanagement in the consulting practice of which I was a member. This document was reviewed and discussed several times a week, and everyone was 1000% on board with my suggestions.
I finally quit when I presented my final draft to the same people that I had developed it with and the "official" response was that they thought the document was full of good ideas that would definitely resolve the problems we were facing with relatively little effort, but unfortunately many of the ideas were very radical for the culture of the organization and nobody had the fscking balls to stand up for what was right and stop pissing away money that could be paid to the engineers on lost contracts and wasted time due to territorial pissing matches.
The fact that American Engineers are independent thinkers who will ask their management to justify why they should work 80 hours in a row to meet an arbitrary deadline is a good thing. If you want the IT equivalent of a grocery bagger then please, by all means, outsource your work to Accenture so they can pay some poor Indian bastard $5 to churn out code that doesn't even compile correctly.
What BS.
Let's see: the computer you typed your BS on: Made in Far East.
The car you drive: either a car from bankrupt GM or Chrysler, or a car designed by a company from Far East.
The stuff you work on: Sold to the Far East.
Companies like Microsoft make more than half of their money by selling stuff outside the US. Block free trade, and MS has to lay off half of its people.
Or, take Linux: developed by people all over the world. Stop free trade, and they may just stop giving you all that hard work for free.
So, stop free trade and you end up doing farm work.
But it seems some stupid trolls who are apparently unable to use their brains just want that.
Good luck, while the rest of the world laughs their asses off.
with international programming contract auction sites, I can do my own stereotyping:
There are a boatload of Indian and Pakistani firms that may be graduates of their own education systems, but are woefully incompetent. They may be "more willing" to learn the drudgery of a lot of contract work, but (I am stereotyping here but doing it as realistically as I can), they NEED that learning because they did not get it in their education. Expecting employers to then train people to do what they should already know how to do, is unrealistic.
I have seen firms from these countries (and a few others) bid on contracts en masse... using a standard form letter that basically says this: "We are experts in this particular field. Choose our company which has 4 yeears of experience doing this very thing.", and underbidding nearly everyone else.
The problem on these sites is: those who offer the jobs do not see all these responses to other job offers. They only see the answers to their own ads. So they don't see that someone has claimed "expertise" in every subfield under the sun, all for the same low price.
And of course then they don't deliver. I have seen a rapidly increasing number of ads that say "only accepting bids from the Americas and Western Europe... we have been ripped off too often by Eastern companies claiming to be experts who do not deliver."
Do not write me back and accuse me of prejudice. This is my actual long-term experience. If your own experience has been different, fine. Situations vary. I can only report what I have personally seen.
A UK perspective: I believe the quality of engineering graduates has declined steadily since the early 90s. It appears that higher education here is promoting knowledge without understanding, so you get guys that have passed exams but haven't a clue.
Obligatory anecdote: MSc (MSEE) qualified employee comes to me saying the main voltage rail is measuring too low on a board he is playing with. I think "it's drawing too much current, some chip is getting hot...." but when I question him about his theories, current does not get a mention. I become concerned, and - to cut a long story short - begin to wander if he understands electricity at all. So, I hold up a piece of wire and say "prove to me, without using a continuity checking meter, that this works". Employee goes off for 5 minutes, and returns with a request to use an oscilloscope. I inform him that Yes, he can, and he can use the refridgerator if he wants, but no meters are allowed. Another 40 minutes go by. He admits defeat. I ring my wife, who studied French and Italian, and who teaches younger kids, and ask the same question. She says some sensible stuff about batteries, light bulbs etc. Employee considers this and laughs - he hadn't thought of that.
This problem may be down to a reduction in the pursuit of electronics and programming as hobbies (when I got started, if you wanted to play a game on your computer you often had to write the game!). I really don't know. But it worries me. There is also much more of a tendancy now to treat work (in engineering) as a necessary evil rather than with enthusiasm. My younger engineers seem to be more pessimistic than I remember being, and most are doing nothing to plan for the future.
Not so bad:
1) I've been putting in a new ecommerce architecture for one of my clients using Mule and ATG at the front end. We need to call an external Webservice so had the usual Java debate, CXF vs Axis 1 vs Axis 2. As I'm getting old, I'm more pragmatic than I used to be I advised their tech team to use the same method as their large Indian offshore company so that they would only have one technology to teach their developers (support and maintenance being a major concern). The internal architect came back to tell me they had hard coded each call using DOM to build and read the services - with it taking 50 man days per call (over 2 man years). By that afternoon, we'd chosen a framework and built all the calls, as well as refactoring their code to use our Mule services, and have built test scripts to test it all! This was frustrating for their finance dept.
Worse
2) At a previous client we were asked (as a niche supplier) to code review the work coming back from offshore. Again it was Java and the code showed a total lack of knowledge of the language or object orientation. Example issues were - all instance attributes declared as public which led to a total lack of encapsulation - classes directly referenced other variable classes with impunity, no use of interfaces at all, copy and paste code where inheritance may have worked, I say may as the code was written as if Java was a procedural language - one massive class, one main method...
Appalling
3) A 2nd hand story. I worked with an architect who was sent to India by a retail bank in the UK as code wouldn't compile when returned to the client (Java again). He arrived and asked what IDE they used to which they replied Notepad - "ok" he said, not sure why, but I assume you use Ant or Maven to build your projects. "No, we just write it in Notepad and send it to you"... That explained a lot.
Anyway, all the above led me to start my own company (shameless plug) and we get quite a bit of work fixing offshore issues, or actually helping large consultancies improve their project quality before the client sees examples like the above. I would like to point out though, the issue IMHO is not with India or the countries in question, it's with the mentality of large companies who stuff in as many graduates into the mincer as possible, whether they have IT / programming qualifications or not, with little or no programming training with the hope that "it'll be ok". Grads are of course, some of the most profitable resources for a big company as they're paid peanuts. Having been in this situation at Cambridge Technology Partners in the UK, I saw tonnes of similar mistakes being made by arts graduates with no programming experience (including somebody using 2 digit years in code in 1998!).
Finally, coming back to the original topic, unless something major has changed in the States in the last ten years the CEO is talking utter rubbish - the USA is where tech innovation happens, with the valley still a major centre of this. Also, every US CTP technical person I met was utterly excellent at their job (Boston and San Matteo offices for me). Vineet Nayer is just peddling lies
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
Last time I complained about M$ and their H1 visas, I almost got a job interview from Microsoft. This was right about the time before people were finally acknowledging the recession. I have a degree in scientific computing from Carnegie Mellon University and I've developed software at home for over twenty years. I've almost solo coded entire MMORPGS(takes many years). I've *NEVER* in my 7 years of job searching ever found a job through online. I've been unemployed for over 6 of my past 7 years having graduated from college. I put out thousands of resumes and talked to dozens of head hunters, but apparently no one wanted to hire. I don't think my only option should be: Start your own business and basement dwell. But hey, thats just me, a spoiled American I guess.
God spoke to me.
I see no reason why the USA should throw its people out of work to subsidize India's economy.
You not subsidizing anything... It's just the terms of the free market...
Free trade is not worth it.
You don't want socialism, you don't want free trade... :)
What do you want? Protectionism? FYI that's kind of what they have in North Korea...
I'm not a capitalist, more like a liberal socialist, but I'm fairly confident that free trade is better for everyone in the longterm...
I work for a large tech company that employees a lot of HCL employees in addition to our own staff there is nothing in my experience that sets them above their counterparts elsewhere in any way whatsoever. They do the job, though with what seems like less interest. They put in just the hours required. They seem to be competent. That's about it. The only complaint the CEO from HCL has is that he couldn't employ Americans because they won't work for a shit salary, because the cost of living in America and the cost of Tuition in America makes it so that by the time an American graduates, they have as much debt due to their education as an entire team of HCL employees will even ever make in their entire lives, combined.
Their greatest contribution has simply been to let us fire lots fo competant people in our company over our many rounds of layoffs and replace them with cheaper contracted labor 12k miles away.
My experience with the majority (and yes there are exceptions) of Indian IT workers is that they have little or no creativity or the ability/willingness to question obviously bad design. Yes they get the work done but at what overall cost to the business.
For example, the IT of an Airline was outsourced to an Indian company. We had to get a firewall rule added so that passenger details could be sent to Homeland Security. It took over 3 months for their supposedly expert network managers to get the rule added even though they had been supplied with detailed instructions on how to do it.
When asked why it had taken so long, the answer given was 'We have no one here who has done that sort of configuration before'. This was coming from a company that boasted how many Cisco certified people they had.
On the other hand, there are exceptions and most of those (IMHO) are people who have been trained outside India and have thus broken the mould so to speak. Many of these can think creatively and add real value to projects. Ironically, these Indians have a very low opinion of companies such as HCL etc to properly run western IT departments.
I'm posting as an AC as I'm currently working in an IT Dept that is about to be outsourced to and Indian Company. I'd like to keep my job as long as possible.
I work in Silicon Valley, was a consultant for most of the last 30 years. Manager for about half that time.
I have hired lots of Indians, Chinese, Philipinos, ... no Indians have ever hired me. My friends and I don't know of a case where an Indian has hired a European. Some of the sharpest people I know have been rejected at companies like Brocade by Indian interviewers who pronounced them "not sharp enough".
Indians, generally, think Americans aren't much good. I have had Indian teachers in a local college class remark to their class of non-Indians that their daughters would never marry Americans, as they aren't suitable -- not serious people, etc. This was a standard attitude among Indian parents in private schools our kid has attended.
Judging people across a cultural divide is difficult. Standard interviews are nearly useless in making hiring decisions (lots of research to this point), so most people are hired on some dimension of "we like him/her, he/she is like us". Thus, the groups within Silicon Valley companies, and entire companies, who are all of one ethnic group, e.g. mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hindi speakers, ...
If we Europeans discriminated like that, EEOE would be down our necks.
Really?? I've had the particular misfortune to work with a number of Indian engineers, electrical, mechanical and civil, and almost without exception the only "skill" they had was that of sucking up to their bosses. Not one of them had a single clue when it came to real world problem solving and only two were capable of realising how useless their education had been. The rest, after decades in the work force in some cases, were utterly incapable of seeing anything but the gold edged certificate they had been awarded from their university and refused to acknowledge that ANYONE could have a valid thought but themselves, while consistently producing the most ridiculous ideas (often a first year apprentice could see it would never work) and outright dishonest reports for their directors.
something fundamentally wrong with this posted statement. Vineet Nayar is not the CEO of HCL, but is the CEO of Mahindra Infotech...the company which very recently bought Satyam. Mr Nayar used to be the CEO of HCL earlier....unless this statement is from long back and has been posted here as a copy paste. So, we can choose to argue about whether the numbers are right or not, and whether US undergrads are employable or not....but the whole article itself might be false. Very recently, someone pointed out that a newspaper had reported that Wal-Mart gave away its IT systems and signed a $0.5Bn deal with Indian providers. That was as untrue :-)
thats discontinued. That said Luxury range starts with Toyota Corolla price range(20,000$)
Eco cars start at 4000$, and ultra ECO is 2000$ Nano.
Middle class owns a 10-12K car with upper middle class owning 20K $ cars.
The richer folks spend 30K$ on their cars, and industrialists can be seen driving 60,000$ cars like the BMW 3 series.
Some super rick blokes own cars costing 200,000$ also.
PS: My post has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion, I was just education you about cars and prices in India.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Ignoring his annoying generalization:
Does he mean American grads are "spoiled," in that we don't learn rote process because there are other options and we have high expectations?
In a relative sense, his observation may be correct, but what he did not do was demonstrate the necessity of this more rigorous process in producing high-quality code.
Futurist Traditionalism
So, what's your problem with efficient coding robots? They have their places. Problem is, when an employer can't see what he needs most, and replaces too many sw engineers with coder robots. Other than that, I can see no problem with hiring a worker who makes the job cheaper and is willing to invest more effort.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The original quote goes back nearly three years, when it was reported that more than 80% of the MBAs in India were unemployable. The boys tend to do nothing but spend their time finding ways to copy from each other and fake their way thru higher learning, it seems. This revelation came out right around the time Apple folded up their efforts to set up shop inside India.
This isn't anecdotal. I went thru hell dealing with those jackals and I pity anyone having to do the same. I had to go thru 5,000 candidate 'engineers' just to find 100 that were anywhere near being hireable. So many of the individuals we interviewed had unverifiable work records...so many had the same answers to recruitment screening tests....it took months to wad thru the imposters and we still didn't have a solid 100 when we were done.
Never thought that windows could be any worse, but with more "bangalore code" new possibilities are open.
But India's best and brightest aren't coming to the US to be code monkeys. Among the upper middle and upper class of Bangladesh and India, those kind of jobs are considered somewhat middling. India's best and brightest, the people you think should be "smartest," if they are in the US and not Europe, are getting MBAs, JDs, MDs., etc.
I think the parent's last paragraph is very insightful, and that it also applies to all ethnicities.
In years past CS/Engineering only attracted the best and brightest, and those people were committed to quality. These days software is just a commodity that can be generated by code monkeys with a two-year associates degree.
The sad truth is that even the brightest kid with an associates degree (and in some cases even a four-year CS degrees) today would have been considered too stupid to work in software 15 years ago. Back then the interviews were really mini IQ tests, and bar was set at around +2 standard deviations, so it was really common to have highly intelligent co-workers in the +3 range, and it wasn't uncommon for a lab to have at least one +4 super-genius that could solve anyone's problem in sixty seconds or less.
Now the bar is at or below +1, and most of the +3's and +4's have gone elsewhere. This leaves us with the problem that +1's cannot comprehend what +2's and higher consider simple concepts. They'll spend a week figuring out how to do something that a +2 could do in 10 minutes, except they'll do it the stupid way that has some glaring corner-case bug or solves the problem in O(N^2) instead of O(N) and wonder why it's mind-numbingly slow. And they don't bother to ask, so we have to constantly look over their shoulders, since waiting for code-review means they'll waste a few weeks of "work" that will have to be undone.
Disclaimer: I'm a crotchety old +3, and I used to view the +2's as stupid. Now I have to work with +1's that would fail a sophomore-level logic course. I really wish I had chosen another field, because I'm getting too old to clean up their messes, and they don't learn as quickly as the +2's. :(
p.s. As for your comment about languages: When I worked at Microsoft in Redmond, the distribution in my buildings was roughly 40% Caucasian, 20% Chinese, and 20% Indian. All three groups had proportional shares of idiots and geniuses -- and far fewer of the latter than you'd expect at a place like Microsoft. As a native speaker, I will agree with you that the Indians were better speakers than the Chinese. However, we also had quite a few Caucasians from former-Soviet countries that still couldn't speak English well, and we had plenty of Chinese with superb English.
Most code out there is in-house stuff, and 99% of it sucks harder than Windows ME. Outsource that crap, and you won't get anything better, there is no reason for it. People (PHBs) who managed these projects and got them where they are the same who are managing the outsourcing. It can't possibly be any better. Cheaper? Not even sure about that.
There is a huge difference between domestic shitpiles of bad code and outsourced dungmounds of crappy software. The domestic bad coders might not know shit about coding, but they know what it's supposed to do, and eventually, they manage, through trial and error, to produce something that sort of does something useful.
The Indian developer has no reason to be any worse than his western counterpart, but he certainly doesn't share the same culture. Simple things can be worlds apart; and even the if the spec is super detailed, you end up with something that fits it (sort of) but is completely retarded because the programmer had no idea what the fuck he was coding it for.
I don't have a degree and yet I've been working in IT for 20 years (everything from sysadmin to, yes, Java and Oracle coding) and it really shocks me that people would not even know where to start on questions as simple as those, and your later post where you qualify that you don't post degree requirements makes me honestly wonder what the hell they teach in American unis these days.
It honestly blows my mind, or at least it would, until I realise that here in Europe, I've got external people doing enterprise networking support who don't know what QoS is. And they're employed and they charge us for their lack of knowledge.
I think it might generally just be a human problem, in that people will try to get away with as much as they possibly can while doing as little as possible.
Funny story for you, HCL bid themselves into a project at a German bank. They didn't realise that it was different to the UK.
The Germans can understand English but not accented Indian English. The Indians could not understand the Germans or there ways of doing things. The Indians did not understand banking and were just generic developers, the Germans thought they were getting an experienced team.
Last I heard was HCL desperately trying to find German/UK people with detailed securities settlement knowledge to help them at about â350/day. The going rate was about â1K/day at the time.
See my journal, I write things there
Jajaja los gringos hueones se picaron heavy. Cuando los atacan en lo que les duele son implacables. Como pueden ser los indios mejor que ELLOS?? Jajajajajajaja. Hay una envidia y rabia increíble en los comentarios.
Seriously though, it really sounds like a study of the TCO of MBAs is more in order -- how many outsourcing snafus, and how much of the current financial woes in the US, are due to MBAs with precisely the mentality noted by the GP:
Unfortunately, we find much of this same short-sighted idiotic MBA behaviour in the US government over the past several years:
"We support our troops," indeed. How bitter. I have good friends in the military, and these Blackwater goons are effectively stealing wages from them. Meh. Another example:
By any strict economic definition, there is another word for "profit" -- "inefficiency". Ethically speaking, one might even stretch things a bit and call it "theft". Making a living is one thing, but fleecing your customers simply because you can is a crime in all but name.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
People are forgetting the exchange rate in the comments. Bottom line is that jobs got transfered to India and China by countries artificially holding the exchange rates down. The exchange rate was and still is managed by their governments officially and unofficially. That $500/month for an engineer translates into a wonderful fairly luxurious lifestyle in India or China and poverty in America. Hence countries like India and China then got all all the middle class engineering jobs and knowledge as well as our manufacturing base transfered to them. Our corporate heads didn't care as they made a huge amount off the outsourcing and globalization. The middle class in America got to buy a cheaper computer but eventually lost their jobs to buy that computer width. Of course now even upper class jobs like law are getting offshored. The propped up exchange rate system is not sustainable. Eventually the Indians and Chinese will have to compete on a level exchange rate i.e. equivalent lifestyle exchange rate as everyone else. Hopefully we will still have some knowlege base left in this country when that happens. Then one day this Indian CEO we are talking about here will wake and realize they are not as genetically special and smart and smug as this he arrogantly expresses right now. It was just numbers.
This post and its associated rating (currently 50% Troll) is a prime example of how /.'s moderators have really gone downhill. The text of the post is both relevant and spot-on, rather more insightful than otherwise, and in no way is it seeking to get a rise out of the readership by misleading obstinacy. Sure, it's cynical as hell, but then again, the current situation in the US would seem to warrant precisely such an attitude.
It seems the mods need more education about what "Troll" really means -- for starters, "Troll" != "Disagree", and "Troll" != "Do not like".
Methinks this kind of modding behaviour is the /. equivalent of griefers. Meh.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
people in India working in similar jobs enjoy most of the amenities you are describing.
If you really think that people competing against you live in mud huts then you are really deluded.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And a certain big company in Redmond in its infinite wisdom is picking too many non-shit core engineering jobs to outsource, when they have plenty of shit jobs that could go.
For example, the one I used to have at that company. It wasn't originally that, of course, or I wouldn't have hired on there. I had multiple offers, and theirs just happened to involve the most professionally interesting work. But, things change over time, and the team ended up with a manage-by-metrics management team that knew little about technology, but a lot about how good it looked for their careers when numbers of all types went up. So over time, they moved all the interesting, time-consuming, hard-to-metric technical work out of the team, and kept the easy-to-count manual labor crap, making it even worse by layering on 5 or 6 tracking gates onto various stages of the manual labor so that they could report on their metrics on demand. Other teams approached me with offers to go back to meaningful tech work, because they knew my skill set. Problem solved, right?
If you think so, let me introduce you to big-company reality. I couldn't leave the shit job because the political game is that your manager rules all at most large companies including this one, and mine deemed me critical to their project. He'd seen me work incessant 14 hour days back when the job was interesting and still wanted me to continue that, even though the job was now slaveshop disengage-brain, move-mouse, click checkboxes depending on what you see on the screen, labor, because again with the focus on metrics, he thought the output I'd produce as a slave working 16 hours a day would make him look good. It appears that it never occurred to him that I might be unwilling to keep up the 16 hour days when there were no more learning opportunities. It also never occurred to him that my brain would quickly begin to petrify doing the job he'd re-engineered our team's work to be, and that even if I agreed to still be there for 16 hours a day, he wouldn't be getting an extra 8 hours of results out of me anyway. PHB's aren't known for complex logical thought, and this one didn't understand that 16 hours of slave labor a day carried with it mental exhaustion that would reduce productivity. So I cut back, and used the extra time to re-engage my engineer's brain and prepare for interviews on other teams. Hooooo-ooooooo-weeeeee was he unhappy with me when he saw me cut back to 8 hour days and saw numbers drop below his projections largely because of my reduced time on the job. In retaliation, he deemed me "critical" and did not allow me to move off the team.
Being a lateral thinker, I then contemplated the unthinkable to get out of a bad situation: making the team I was on redundant by replacing it with something else that was a better financial deal for the company, and hoping that the team would be disbanded, thereby freeing me to pursue better opportunities at the company. I was accustomed to finding ways to "work myself out of a job" when I was part of an ethical consulting agency that had this as part of their business and PR model; we'd bust ass and complete a gig, collect customer compliments for being on time or under budget (usually not both, realistically), and move on to the next revenue-generating opportunity. But this was the first time I'd contemplated doing so as a full time employee of a company. I had contacts in other departments who used outsourcers. So I investigated how it worked, how one could structure contracts to increase the odds of success, what kinds of work were most trouble-free to outsource, how much one could save, etc. It was as good a course on it from the management and budgetary angles as one could hope for, without having practical experience themselves. Approaching management with a proposal to move most of our group's work to {pick your favorite outsourcing destination, I won't single one out here and catch f
... how somebody making money says it like it is, and instead of reflexive thought about how to get better at doing the work, one gets a tirade about how bad the Indians actually are.
This guy will hire US workers if it was more profitable, it isn't, deal with it.
I have interviewed many people from India and Pakistan, and in general terms they were technically superior to people from EU countries (bar Poland) and the US.
But you can keep dreaming that you have an inherent right to be better. Scratch the surface of most tech companies of any note in the last 20 years, and often you find that the involvement of foreigners to make things happen is quite prevalent.
I don't know where most of you have worked, I have worked for several of the most recognized companies in the world, and where there was involvement with Indian companies what was there was a very fruitful relationship, with people getting things actually done.
If you really think that money is the only motivation to relocate or outsource, you are sorely deluded. As long as you decide to follow this path of delusion you will be in no position to address the real problem: the lack of competitivity of US Tech workers.in some tech sectors (it is not like everything is being outsourced BTW)....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Here's the deal: Don't fucking tell me how to spend my mod points. I've know slashdot's "guidelines" very well, thanks, but I will rate posts as I please. I would have modded you down too, but I've already used up my allotment. Rest assured, I will get more very soon, and I've bookmarked your user page. It probably isn't a good idea to call a moderator "stupid," is it?
I'd guess any programmer who takes this approach fits perfectly into a vat of HCl. Solves the problem for sure!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The makeup of the talent has changed considerably.
When I first met some offshore programmers around 2004, I was actually impressed by their skillsets. They were assisting with some Java projects and worked efficiently.
Fast forward to 2008. We hired some developers to migrate some simple Perl code. At first the emails were pretty high level: "How would you approach this?" Then the coding started. Emails became more specific: "The DBI module is not found." Then it got idiotic: "It keeps on saying, 'File not found.' "
My Perl is middling fair, good enough for general admin tasks, but these were supposed Perl experts who did not understand how to build an array or had never used a hash table.
Just last week I had to hand-hold two developers on how to reference a locally installed module.
Doesn't matter I suppose. I can bill out the hours to their team, and will. When they ask why, I will show them the email trail, the Sametime trail, the phone call logs showing that I did everything but type the damn code for them.
Exactly, they are cheap and you get what you pay.
I can undestand why a lot of enterprises give the software developement to Indian outsourcing, it's just to save money. But I can't undestand how they can not realize that in the long time they spent and will spend more money than if they had paid good US enginneers because:
1.- They would not invest so much money to mantain and support all that crap of code.
2.- They will not be attached to the indians because a good engineer can't make new software modules on that kind of code, only the indians can develop new awful code on their own mess.
3.- They will have a good and full documentation of the source code.
But well they like to pay less at the moment, get a cheap software and pay more for mantain the awful code. And later pay again to good engineers to do all the software again.
Three years ago I worked giving outsourcing to a very important US enterprise, I was in Mexico and they paid me for receiving and finding bugs of software developed by Indians. Really the software was a mess and some of the applications where very important for the enterprise. There were plenty of code like: if( exception big problem) then.....NOTHING.
Nothing! how can you find the problem in lines and lines of code if you don't even send something to the user, to a log or something.
On US business hours this kind of support was managed at Mexico and on US nights it was managed by an Indian outsourcing (the same that made the code).
I think the mexican team made a good job but unfortunately the Indians where cheaper than us and one day the enterprise sent all the support to India and I loose my job.
Nothing wrong with that in some cases, you're right that they have their places. But the role of a developer is evolving - they need to understand the system they're working on and find out if something's wrong when the specs are given to them. If there's a potential red flag, raise it. That sort of thing.
If HCL is as world class as it would like to think, it needs world class developers. Else code-monkey-organizations are a dime a dozen. TFA also talks about the Japanese and Indian mentalities, and I've worked with 'coders' from both of these places. djupedal's comment below this also testifies to the situation, as does AC's comment above this. It's impossible to teach them! They'd rather copy paste from my examples than look at the approach I've taken to a problem.
The point I'm weakly trying to make is that if you're outsourcing, you're trying to save money, but it doesn't mean that you should try to sacrifice quality. Sacrificing quality is something you'd do for an in-house project, but would you really want to do that for a public-facing product?
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Oh and of the various stereotypes I've experienced, American coders are among the best, along with Europeans. Also, I'm neither of these, so my opinion must count for something.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Posting the Halting Problem to GetACoder? Someone deserves a medal.
The best part of that is someone named "BusyBeaver" offering to solve the problem 'in the most productive manner possible'.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I hire Indians for an Indian company. I can say that generally Indian tech grads less employable than US tech grads. Many Indians are so poor they grow up never owning a computer (only using the school computer). Indians lucky enough have a computer have to deal with terrible internet speeds and have to deal with constant power cuts (like having electricity only 12 hours a day). Many Indians grow up without proper nutrition or proper health care and therefore have stunted growth (perhaps stunted mental growth too?). India is still quite a primitive, backward country.
it is that many colleges are not setup to deliver people with an education that gives them the skills necessary to work. Oh sure, they know this language or that language and some "college specified" fundamentals but damn it doesn't make them good, let alone god which some come off as thinking they are.
Actually that last line may be more in line with what this guy is really saying : They don't listen. Too full of ideas after a few days on the job they don't give time to understand why things work they way they do they only assume all the old timers are dolts and they could fix everything if anyone would just listen.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This should never have been modded up.
Let me put it in a different way:
What the CEO actually means is that American employees arent willing to: 1. Work 8 hours in an 8-hour day, they want 1.5 hours for lunch and want to spend 2-3 hours per day reading slashdot and the web. 2. Be willing to accept that they dont know everything there is to know, and they arent the best developer thats ever been invented, and actually learn from people who are much, much better at this than they are. 3. Understand that in a real business, not all the work is 'fun' and not all products released are perfectly coded. Sometimes you have to make compromises for valid business reasons, so that we can all keep getting paid.
In short, a great deal of American workers are: 1. Lazy, 2. Arrogant, and 3. Unrealistic and Ignorant.
Not all mind, you but many. At least with alot of foreign workers, they're actually willing to put their heads down, and learn and actually work hard, and get things done, and be part of the business, and not just think that their little corner of the universe is more important than everyone else's.
This isn't anecdotal. I went thru hell dealing with those jackals and I pity anyone having to do the same. I had to go thru 5,000 candidate 'engineers' just to find 100 that were anywhere near being hireable. So many of the individuals we interviewed had unverifiable work records...so many had the same answers to recruitment screening tests....it took months to wad thru the imposters and we still didn't have a solid 100 when we were done.
Strange .. seems anecdotal to me.
.. the year it was released. Employers are asking their candidates to lie, or at least to misrepresent themselves.
Seriously though, from the other side of things, it's just as difficult to find employment in a company who is truly looking for the qualities they describe as necessary. I keep reminding myself, when reading job descriptions, of the time I read of a company looking for five years of Windows 98 experience
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
Until a couple of years ago, I worked for a major US IT firm, in Storage, and went to Bangalore to train new 2nd-level support guys on our mid-range products. The guys themselves were generally OK, since they weren't new to the industry, though there were some odd gaps in basic storage knowledge, such as SCSI protocols. Not something you'd expect to find in a person who'd allegedly done 2nd level support at another company, one that specialized in storage!
In general, though, I wasn't training new graduates from the likes of IIIT-B, but I met a few and had discussions with their managers. What I learned was that these young people were under immense pressure to succeed in IT, with the hopes and expectations of whole extended families riding on their backs. IT is the ticket out of the slums, and families make enormous sacrifices to get their kids in to the industry in the first place. In college, I was told, there's also massive pressure to score high marks, and the process is more biased towards rote learning and cramming for exams. Not totally, of course - that would be impossible - but the point is that, like the Indian education system in general, it's tighter and more authoritarian in terms of curriculum, and the schools themselves were under govt. pressure to deliver high numbers of graduates.
I hate to say this, but I met a few "graduates" who were simply not "graduate material", in terms of basic intelligence, curiosity, enthusiasm, or ability to absorb new concepts. Other graduates I met have great careers ahead of them, but I came away with the impression that "graduate" over there is a bit (again, not totally!) like "MCSE" in other countries: a statement of the exams you have passed, not a wider measure of your ability to function in a complex, ever-changing IT world. The problem with "cramming" is that while it might get you through an exam, the knowledge is not integrated and retained as well as it should be. I'm seeing this myself, now that I'm getting to go to university as a mature student (Engineering), where some subjects would IMHO be better assessed by e.g. thesis, not exam.
(this is not a
Zeroes was invented by the Mayans centuries before the Indians,
THEY TOOK R JOBS!
He's looking for someone to do a relatively simple DB-related job. He's asking a few questions that should be dead simple for anyone who's only so much as worked through tutorials in a few related subjects. It ain't rocket science.
You talk about "foreign formats," about not expecting academics to have practical experience, you talk about "tailored toward job postings"... but those are all hand-waving and pretty feeble excuses for not having a clue of basic concepts of the job they're applying for. No employer should be obligated to hire morons unless it's to do with Affirmative Action. If they can't handle this kind of stuff they should submit their application to MacDonalds.
I find it hard to believe it's so hard to get a hold of people with such basic skills. But if it's true, the educational system is deeply flawed and we need fixes, not excuses.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
The truth is that Indians are lying cheating pieces of crap who will sell their own mother to make a profit. Of course they are going to say they are better than Americans. The point here is to realize that everyone else shits on America and for some reason we cheer them on. If you stand up for America you are a protectionist. If you are a smelly Indian and steal someone else's job then you are the underdog hero.
human beings are a form of capital. and when you have a lot of them, that capital goes down in value. it is yet another evil conclusion to overpopulation. you wonder why you should care about overpopulation somewhere else in the world. well, now you see why you should care: for certain types of job, they lower your career outlook, they decrease your salary by yolking you to their desperate calculus
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
our elite have sold us out, which is treasonous. Hang them. Time we get serious about the class war
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
In a dark room at night, ARGGGGGGGGGGGGG the white screen lights up the room and is
too bright and TOO CORPORATE , and NOT GEEKY.
Dude, since when is any geek/nerd site use a white background, ALL GEEKS use black backgrounds, with green text.
This is news for Rich Employed Corporate Geeks wanabee nerds. Ahahaha.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Let me be the first to say: "Get out of our country, you racist fuck".
I don't know where you're working. Such poor work habits have only been the case in one environment I've ever seen, out of many my own job history and the many partners I've worked with, where the manager had frightened and alienated all the staff and they were all job hunting. (All 5 of those engineers resigned within one week of each other: it was frightening to see as a corporate partner, but I gave 2 of them recommendations because they were _good_ at dealing with that mess beyond what I would have tolerated.) One of the reasons those engineers balked was because not only was the product "not perfect" it was demonstrably broken due to the excess "features" added by the manager that were not part of the core requirements, and it simply would not work.
American workers are more willing to question authority. It drives authority nuts, and I've had it happen with international scenarios, where I struggled to be allowed to speak directly with the actual engineers so we could resolve the confusion about the most effective approach. We also loathe the telephone tag of sending our question to a call center or a manager, who rewrite and re-interpret it, then having them talk to a technician, who re-interprets it, and eventually gets to an engineer who wonders why we want to gogo-fratz with the banana puddijng, but does their best to send back an answer. We Americans try to sneak past those layers of management and bureaucracy to find the person who actually knows, and trade notes. (I do, anyway, and try to send them my patches.)
The americans saved your asses and all you can do is make crappy sidewalks? A lot of thanks, there, son.
They'd rather copy paste from my examples than look at the approach I've taken to a problem.
This probably has much to do with the work philosophies they come in contact with. Most of the time they are probably expected to deliver "faster" than "better". Also, outsource coders are probably working at companies which try to catch as many work as they can, dumping the work on their workforce, most of them working on many things at a time. I - thankfully - never worked at such a company, but I know people who did, and sometimes they have a hard time keeping up. I'm not saying I like the way it's being done, but I somewhat understand why they sometimes produce under expected quality.
Sacrificing quality is something you'd do for an in-house project, but would you really want to do that for a public-facing product?
Of course not, I'm with you on this one.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Would you kindly ask you government why it's much MUCH easier to get an H1-B visa (so; move to the US, work for 3 years, then take half your earnings and all your experience home) than it is an EB-1, EB-2 or EB-3 ( http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=84096138f898d010VgnVCM10000048f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=4f719c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD ) or similar visa for people who actually want to move full time to the US? EB-1-3 visa have waiting periods of about 3-4 years, vs 6 months for H1-B with 1 month express processing apparently an option...
I'd switch the order of those, but I probably am a bit biased - my being european and all :D Also, I've always thought "western" sw eng.s&coders tend to overengineer stuff from time to time.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I don't know where you're working. Such poor work habits have only been the case in one environment I've ever seen
This is the last 12 years of hiring software developers and starting up and running a consultancy.
Mind you, its largely a younger person phenomenon (not that Im a greybeard yet, mid-30's).
A classic case is a brilliant developer who cant figure out how to not sabotage their own job, even after getting fired several times in a row. He just keeps doing the same dumb ass things over and over.
American workers are more willing to question authority.
Questioning authority is okay, when its appropriate.
But you have to remember, we're talking about entry-level jobs here, about college grads. Most college grads are idiots. They may be decent at laying code, but when it comes to big picture things like client relationship, 'good enough' vs. perfect, and the inevitable compromise that comes when running a business.
What I see alot of though is a college grad who thinks he knows better than the business owner, or director of their department, though they dont have a freaking clue about the bigger picture. Their viewpoints are very provincial and limited. This isnt a slam of anyone in particular, except youth. Youth has good energy and often great attitude, but terriblly limited viewpoints.
In addition, they get pissed of when they cant make $75k their first year out of college (particularly where we live, which isnt a coast).
So maybe we're talking about different things. Questioning authority is fine, but it takes most software devs 10 years to get enough experience to be able to ask meaningful questions, outside of a very narrow coding scope.
1.) You clearly can't discern the difference between uneducated (which doesn't necessarily mean you are dumb) and stupid (which does mean you're dumb). The person you just pointlessly threatened never mentioned or implied anything about your intelligence level.
2.) Wasting your mod points is well... wasteful. Instead of making juvenile attempts to mod people's posts down with crap like "flamebait", and "troll" mods when it's clearly not warranted, you would better serve the community by modding up the more insightful, humorous, and intelligent posts. It's easy enough to ignore the trollish stuff anyway. It's not always easy to find those nuggets of wisdom in the random Slashdot post. There's also meta-moderation which usually gets rid of unwarranted bad moderation.
By "Boring details" I assume he means the ability to follow a support script verbatim long after it has become amazingly obvious that it does not apply to the problem that needs to be solved.
What exactly is a "tech grad"? A student with a degree in computer science? Is a university computer science education now supposed to be job training for the tech industry?
Bud bud buddbud bud I am haveing one doubt bud bud bud.
Thank you so very much!!
:-( I've been a regular reader and commenter here for the past 9 years, and if this shit keeps up I'll be leaving for good soon.
I did that and also checked "use classic index" under the "dynamic index" feature. It's much better to use this site now, but it still takes forever to load and parse the JS and whatever else the hell is going on (Borked CSS!?). At least I'm not currently having the comments page cluttered with widget artifacts to the point of not being able to see the comment content anymore.
Hopefully the admins don't roll out any more changes that break the site like they have been for the past few months
Maybe it's because I haven't had a job that has been outsourced, but I cannot feel racist towards India; if anything, it's entirely the opposite.
I'm Caucasian myself, I admit; but to the degree that a white individual is able to at least, I converted to Hinduism three years ago. I am helplessly in love with virtually everything about the country that I have been able to discover; its' religion, its' music, its' art, its' architecture, its' food...all of it. My reaction to the recent racist violence towards Indians here in Melbourne has been one of grief and concern.
I cannot resent the Indian people themselves for international corporations having outsourced to their country, as well; that is hardly their fault, despite the fact that, of course, they are going to economically benefit from it. Still, India is a country which in places is still desperately poor; infusions of money there could potentially save large numbers of lives.
We do need to find ways to turn corporate focus back towards the West as well, yes; but I feel that if corporations and subsequent money and opportunities go to Third World countries, it is only mean-spirited of us to resent their populations for it. They are gaining the opportunity now to have a standard of living which we have already had for a long time; I feel happy for them.
Sounds like an investigation of HCL is due. If his hiring mirrors what is being said, HCL may be in violation of EEOC laws by discriminating against Americans.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
I have worked at 2 companies now and at both companies the indian workers did a much much worse job than the us workers. This guy is way off.
More stereotypes for you:
Most Indian tech grads are un-understandable.
Most Indian tech grads don't know how to read and implement a specification
Most Indian tech grads don't shower enough.
Please do _say_ that you're referring to entry level work, then. I can see some related phenomona to what you describe, but I may be blessed in working among a whole bunch of really intense and creative people, who need to be intense and motivated to do what they do, and we recruit accordingly, and they already have some breadth or we wouldn't hire them. We don't do entry level work, except occasionally to make sure a project is completed on time or properly.
Many managers are very poor about getting that big picture to their staff, and I'll agree that Americans expect to know about the big picture in a way that other countries' engineers do not. I just spent a fascinating half hour with a data center in Asia, trying to get past the claims of their help desk to discuss with the real engineer whether the network problem was one issue, or the other, so that we'd know which solution to apply. They kept insisting that there was no such problem, but obviously had no actual knowledge with which to verify it: I'd left the "script" with which they did their jobs. It drove me _nuts_ to spin my wheels that way.
That's the best advice I've had today!
Paki employs YOU
If an American called Indians unemployable, that American would labeled a bigot. But Indians say that sort of thing about Americans all the time. According to India, and a lot of US companies: all the smart people in the world come from countries where people earn as little as $1 a day.
If anybody in the US suggests that visa limits not be raised, India screams and cries about US racism and xenophobia. But, what percentage of Americans work for WiPro? My understanding is that India is not all accepting of immigrants from Bangladesh. And how can India's caste system not be consider one of the earth's most extreme form of bigotry? I might add, the US has a well earned reputation of being lavishly generous in matters of immigration.
India constantly warns the US about the horrors of a "brain drain" that would be
caused by the US not allowing unlimited guest workers from India. But why is
India not worried about the Indian "brain drain" caused by the "best and
brightest" leaving India. We might also want to give some thought to the US
"brain drain" that is being caused by the US "best and brightest" avoiding STEM
jobs, because the job prospects for Americans is so dismal.
Azim Premji, who owns 79% of WiPro, recently wrote an article that warned that "US protectionism will be counter-productive"
"If we get into protectionism, then the West is going to get a wave of protectionism in response, and that is going to turn back the clock 20 years," Premji told The Sunday Times.
"And it will be America and Europe that suffer," he said because they will be excluded from the only growth markets left, in Asia, Africa and China. You are not going to grow at 10 per cent trading in London, are you," he asked.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/ITeS/US-protectionism-will-be-counter-productive-Azim-Premji/articleshow/4683155.cms
Ever hear the expression: "what is good for the goose, is good for the gander?"
India is one of the most protectionist nations on earth, and they have been for
a long time. If India wants to consider guest workers part of trade agreements,
then when does India make good for the three million Indians already living in
the USA? Or does India consider "protectionism" a one-way thing?
It's funny, because when I was an undergraduate, we had a lot of Turkish and Indian students in the electrical engineering and computer science programs (as I double major, I saw it all). "Rampant cheating" is an understatement of how bad things were. These guys could not even cheat creatively: they handed in 100% identical assignments. A friend of mine, who was a graduate student, taught a course called "graduate remedial programming," which was exclusively populated by Indian students, because despite having received a bachelor's in CS (or equivalent) from an Indian university, they were unable to pass an elementary programming exam where they could use any programming language they wanted.
Yes, perhaps it is a biased sample because all of the students went to the same university. Yet after seeing the level of copyright infringement that Indian programmers seem to commit, I have to wonder if the 300~ students at my university were representative of the norm. As you said, "not all, but many" -- a great deal of Indian workers are: 1. Cheaters, 2. Incompetent and 3. Legally risky as employees.
Palm trees and 8
"They're far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland"
Since when is Ireland a developing country? It has one of the highest GDP/Capita rates in Europe.
So I guess Mr. Nayar will soon have to include many of his fellow country men (and women). Washington State Governor just signed legislation to allow H1B workers and their dependents to gain residency rates on tuition at Washington States colleges and universities. This was, of course, spearheaded by former Microsoft employee turned state representative, Ross Hunter.
So will Microsoft and the other high tech companies in the Northwest not consider hiring US trained H1B workers in the future? I think not.
Story here @ the Seattle Times
there are plenty of people in this world who are rich and didn't lift a finger (in some parts of the world, the majority)
there are plenty of people in this world who are poor and work their asses off (flat out majority in the world)
the world is slightly more complicated than a pure meritocracy. there are plenty of forces that elevate the lazy offspring of the rich into permanent riches, and suppress the efforts of the hard working poor due to structural injustices in various societies
you should familiarize yourself with the reality of the world you live in a little better before speaking and sounding ignorant
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Srsly? Your statements were borderline racism.
Take a parameter. Any parameter. Intelligence, humility, courage, penis length any parameter, and draw a distribution curve of number of people on the param. You know what you draw? It's called a bell curve.
Now obviously it is an issue of the mean and variance of the population with respect to the param.I have been to IIT KGP and IIMA, and would say the the mean of arrogance is not so much different between US, Chinese, Europe and Australians.
You were right about it being about a person, but the moment you preferred Europeans over any other population, you were just following the stereotype. If you are speaking out of personal experience, I would believe you just got lucky the few times you tried.
*HCL* is saying that US people are unemployable? Let me tell you about my experience as the lead security analyst at a fortune 500 trying to transition some work to that company...
No, there's no way to turn it off. It was designed by all those incompetent American programmers!
Not too long ago I read an editorial (in English) in a Bengal IT newspaper section. They were bewailing the quality of all that programming work that was their natural domain being outsourced to China. They used the arguments of poor communications, time zone shifts, and lessened quality. Frankly, the same arguments I remember hearing (and making, let's be honest) back when offshoring was first getting a toe-hold. The irony was delicious.
I wonder how long it will be before the Chinese write that same editorial, and bewail the Phillipines, the Koreans, the Elbonians, whatever. Enough of a trend to forecast with, I think.
But it's no joke about the descending spiral of interest in technology jobs if you're in one of the countries where the tech jobs and tech salaries are evaporating.
Put it another way - I firmly believe the human race will conquer space, but I am less and less convinced the common language will be English.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
... and that seems to be what this guy expects a graduate to have studied. Ridiculous.
I am running on 3.0.11 with adblock on Windows 7 and I don't see any of that...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
If a mans work week is valued at $900 today, that is equal to one ounce of gold.
It was the same 5000 years ago, one weeks worth would generate that income too.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
HCL recently took over a company that we used for various services. I have learned that the folks HCL brought in are very polite, very nice. However, once they get put into a situation that they don't have a prewritten set of instructions on how to handle they completely fall apart. We have hired temps with nothing but highschool diplomas and little to no prior experience that have exhibited better problem solving skills.
So yes, for doing purely mechanical and incredibly boring tasks they are pretty good. Fast turnaround etc. Get them out of that realm and into the realm of "thinking for themselves." Like I said... they fall apart.
I know this isn't how all Indian workers are since I went to school with some that were quite intelligent. The only experience I have with an offshore outsourcing firm is HCL and that has only happened recently.
Clarification on #1 above: it's put in 4 to 6 extra hours *unpaid overtime* per day.
That's usually done by giving more than 8 hours work per day/40 hours per week, stating the overtime is not approved, and seeing who will be the sucker to work those extra hours off the clock (i.e., working them but not billing them).
If this is what they want, they should not make the position hourly pay/overtime eligible, they should make it salaried.
On a more serious note, well said. People are often quick to complain about the accent, or the quality of service, or myriad other things -- but the vast majority will feel that they've done their part after having complained, and continue to use the same products and services because they /are/ cheaper. The adage "you get what you pay for" may be overused, but it also happens to be true in most cases.
Looks like plenty of /.'ers have beat me to posting on this hot button topic but I figure I will throw my two cents in anyways. Ironically, I tend to agree that US/Canada IT graduates are NOT ready for the working world and either are most graduates for that matter. Most freshly schooled folks don't usually have the opportunity to home their skills if they don't put serious initiative into learning the glory details of tech and development which does not usually include any sunshine and lollypops. However, to argue to that India's graduates with limited access to subpar technology and weaker institutional standards are better than US graduates is a total farce. The truth is that the employee from India has likely been "thrown" into more situations than the US graduate before, during, and after graduation and therefore are more likely come up with some type of hackjob response faster than a fresh US grad. Most Indian graduates are working during their academic career and freelancing at ridiculously cheap rates to gain experience in the real world with real North American clients. So when time comes for them to enter the job market they already have experience working professionally that US graduates don't.
I work both professionally and in academia and most of the time the people I meet with the same degree as me (either BSc. or MSc.) makes me ashamed that they have the same degree as me. It is a well known fact that its not the degree that makes the professional but its how they use it. I don't have a computer science degree, infact I have an Environment Sciences MSc. and a BSc. in Biology. However, I can score an IT position faster then someone with a PhD in computer sciences because I have real life experience working with clients, government, and organizations which are dependent on qualified developers and techs. When I am not working in IT I follow all of the latest technologies and languages and work well beyond that typical 40 hours a week in open source and online development projects (as a hobby!). If you are not totally immersed in your field you are only there for the pay cheque. Most grads I know were and are still only interested in the bottom line and unfortunately for those people their dream job just doesn't exist right now.
I find it a little too convenient when the /. libertarian audience
I'm not libertarian. I'm a nationalist. I've running stories advocating protectionism on my website and only buy American cars and products where ever possible.
We'll also have such a depreciated dollar, and the Indian talent will be relatively scarce, we will reach a parity, and all boats will rise.
We will never reach a parity with India. In order to have a parity, you have to have a notion of money that is genuinely free market and the advent of central banks has made that utterly impossible. So free trade is a sham.
We were promised forty years ago that we would reach parity with even Japan, and trade remains unbalanced. You know when we'll achieve this fairy tale parity with India? Never.
There is no stability attractor when it comes to trade.
This is my sig.
The correct Libertarian approach isn't an idealistic one, but a societal "greedy" one. We shouldn't have 100% open trade because of some ideal. We should determine what policies will be in our best interests and will protect the rights of US citizens, everything else is secondary.
I'm in favor of something like a libertarian nationalism. Let ideas flow freely among the nations, keep trade balanced, don't be dicks around the world, and stop blaming gay people for the world's problems. I think that's a practical alternative.
I mean, why should we really have shiploads of cars and other goodies flowing from the first world to the third, when we could theoretically educate through the free exchange of information the third world's ability to manufacture for itself.
This is my sig.
If you cut off free trade with India and China expect a massive cost of living increase in the US to the point some of the poorer people in society wont even be able to afford clothes or feed their families.
No, what would happen is that we would see an uptick in the increase of automation in the USA and we would have robots making the stuff we need. No chinese or indians required, and we would have better products and a more advanced society. For that manufacturing we did do, we would have middle skill jobs that would allow people to do something with their lives that is useful, to get them to buy into the idea of a work ethic, and savings, and personal industry. Impoverished regions would be raised up, schools would improve for better funding and better students, and geez, the USA would be a happier, more advanced place.
Sounds like a winner to me.
This is my sig.
The reason abstract skills are important is that they allow you to acquire concrete skills in a much shorter time. You cannot be a generalist without abstract skills. And no universities cannot tailor their programs for your exact concrete needs because then they would have 1000 different CS cursus (one per enterprise) with only one student in each of them.
Believe it or not but: the last part of the formation from abstract/semi concrete teaching to the concrete specific skills needed in your enterprise (and only in your enterprise) must be provided by YOU. You scrapped completely internal professional formation: your fault.
Universities are there to teach the intersection set of that with on top abstract knowledge that can be readily used to acquire specific concrete knowledge. This means that people out of the university won't be ready for the job first day
but I can tell you that they will be after 10 days and if you need to move them around to another job, then they'll only need 10 other days to pick it up (instead of 8 months for those that only have concrete skills).
Now to all those saying, this is the question I ask in job interviews and they don't even know the answer. Well, you're only surprised because you are but a one trick pony. This is the (only) question you thought about for so long that now the answer now appears as self evident for you. You even thought about it for so long that you don't even accept correct answer if they aren't the same as the one you seek. Hey even people hitting the correct answer you seek will get a "not quite but close" because they didn't use your exact words.
People from developing countries, in general (which means *NOT ALWAYS BUT USUALLY*, don't kill me) are willing to spend most of their waking hours working for a livable wage.
It is a better deal than they ever used to get. So whenever they aren't working hard, they are studying hard to be a better worker. And they are cheaper.
This makes them far more employable than Americans, who insist on being paid more and having free time to enjoy their lives. This free time makes them lag behind in their skill set optimization and the extra salary isn't enough to prevent them from jumping to another job as soon as they get bored.
The only advantage American works have is that they are native English speakers. For many employers, this just isn't worth the added expense and reduced productivity.
Sure, it sucks. In an ideal world, everyone *should* be able to work a relatively tolerable job and for it receive enough money to save up for a comfortable retirement while also raising a family and having some indulgence money left over to spend during one's free time.
In the real world, much of the world lives in abject poverty, and are ready, willing, and able to work basically all the time just for nutritious food, a non-leaking roof, respectable clothes, running water, and (if they are lucky) air conditioning.
In a global market, American workers are the corporate product (high price low quality) that people only buy when they are basically forced to.
No, prices are dependent on the particular conditions of each market. That's all. They certainly are not "absolute truths" -- if that makes them "relative" then I'm comfortable with that term.
Seems to me a problem is that big corps get to pick and choose which markets they want to play in, and then artificially restrict the general public from doing the same.
So, you put your production lines in a company where labour laws are virtually non-existent, and production is cheap. Then, you outsource your IT etc divisions to another country where wages are equally low. Then you add DRM and regionalization, or other restrictions so that local citizens can only by the product you sell in the local market which is 10-100x the price.
So there is no *market*. There are many markets, and a global market, but corps artificially get to pick-and-choose which ones they play in while restricting almost everyone else from doing so.
At the software company I work at, upper management had the fabulous idea of using an outsourcing company to rework parts of our site not business critical. Six months later, one of my fellow developers here decides to check up on how the project is coming along. To his shock and complete horror, he discovers the entire project has been done in VB6. Why the requirements weren't stated better, I don't know. They were obviously taken off the project and I don't think we'll ever be working with them again. Now we're stuck with a nightmare project to complete and for many years to come, a nightmare project to maintain. As if we don't already have enough VB6 code to maintain.
In many cases it seems that immigrants have all the same bad habits of locals, and you can end up with excellent contributions from either side. Heck, one of the most revered and well-known scientists to-date wasn't from the US (E=MC^2).
However, the issue is not with the immigrants themselves, but with the companies who abuse both the local populace and the remote workers. Sure, it seems like a nice ride for now, but in the future they'll be happy to drop Indian/Thai/Chinese/etc labour just as quickly as those in the US when it becomes cheaper to move elsewhere. It might take a long time, but it will happen.
you write perfect english
if you were hungarian yourSentences wouldBeFormatted inProperHungarianNotation ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Or is it that the bottom line is so so so f*****g important that those companies don't even want to spend even little money and time on implementing a shortlisting criteria when they outsource work ?
Amen to that. For all those that complain about hiring outsourced labour, I've seen plenty of shit-workers produced right here in my own country (in this case, Canada). So perhaps another issue is that by outsourcing the work, you've just given up the ability to filter, monitor, and/or control it in most ways. We had *tons* of local applicants claiming all sorts of great background, experience, and skills. One of the more promising ones never showed up for his first workday (apparently he found better work elsewhere and decided not to tell until until day two), others were often a mix of home-tinkerers and people those who only looked good on paper. We also had a few "foreign" applicants who from what we could tell were quite skilled in the technical arena, but unfortunately lacked the communications/language skills needed to work in the team. It wasn't the best-paying job, and it definitely had grind-times, but in comparing it was likely better than a lot of what was out there as most jobs I was seeing were about the same but often only 2-6 month temp stints.
So maybe it's a sense of "crap here, crap there", but locally you can better filter out the crap to get somebody good, while remotely the crap workers are at least cheaper.
I'm fine if we went back to farm work. When we've got the food THEN who will be laughing their ass off?
Your reply smacks as much of BS as the original. I don't see how your trolling was any different.
No. He means that US college grads have no solid skillset. And he's absolutely right. You go to college here to gain a broad understanding of many topics. It's not a trade school.
Maybe he should be hiring from devry.
MSFT has have mostly boring and buggy products for years, and will will continue to do so.
Or maybe these outsourcing firms are too focused on these management magic bullets (ITIL, Six Sigma) ?
Software services companies like HCL look for specific technical skills to fill needs in specific projects, especially when hiring in the US.
Grads come with generic programming skills that needs to be honed. Comp Sci grads in India are trained to program for 4 months on an average after they graduate by companies like HCL. But the training costs about $3000 dollars for 4 months including the salary of the graduate during the period.
Grads in the US can be trained in about 30-60 days but that is still expensive when compared to what it costs back in India. It would be great if HCL could give the univ a list of technology skills they are hiring next quarter and the university does the training for free. That way HCL can lower their training costs.
Of course, as a person who believes in free as in beer software, I think HCL is trying to be cheap but then, hey I am cheap too!
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
Don't be an idiot, the original post was absolutely 100% racist. Let's read it carefully:
"The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list."
He clearly has stated that he shows preference to people of a specific ethnicity over others. That's textbook racism. It's not crosses burning on your lawn or racial slurs racism, but it is racism.
What the original poster has done has clearly described that they do not judge each Indian or American applicant on their own merits, and gives preference to Chinese and Europeans by "moving them to the top of the interview list." It may turn out that he hires more Europeans and Chinese over Americans and Indians, but their country of origin should have no bearing on his choice of qualified employees. Only their work experience and the answers they have to questions pertaining to the job should be relevant in an interview.
Besides, if he overlooks that one star programmer from India or the US just because of his prejudice, then he's doing a disservice both to the himself as well as the prospect.
We may be a litigious society that's lost a lot of it's motivation for working hard, but I'm an American myself and if you had treated me that way and you had interviewed me for a US position, I would show you just how hard working and litigious I personally could be. Thank goodness such treatment is against the law in the US.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
A study of major software development firms has shown that most Indian tech grads are unemployable due to the fact that they can't speak understandable english, have poor personal hygiene, and in general can't grasp basic programming concepts. It seems most have to have their hands held and be shown how to do anything and don't extrapolate new algorithms from those previously seen. H1-B is BS especially in this economy. Indians: STAY HOME WE DON"T WANT YOU IN THE US!
They seem to be good with that stuff.
Every time my company sends work to our India business office (instead of outsourcing, we have our own offices and direct employees there), we end up having to spend twice the time fixing it that we would have to just do it right ourselves the first time.
The only way I've ever seen decent work come out of the "Bangalore Bargain Bin" was when the project was IMPOSSIBLY over-specced.
I will say that we have an Indian DBA who lives here in the US, and she is phenomenal... it's specifically our India business office that's utter crap, and from what I gather from outsourcing horror stories, they're just the same.
Newsflash third world, it's EXPENSIVE to live in the first world, especially given that we have the added burden of covertly and overtly funding the third world.
Then again if you're a rich, even in first world terms, third worlder little things like cost of living have no meaning.
In short, a great deal of American workers are: 1. Lazy, 2. Arrogant, and 3. Unrealistic and Ignorant.
Not all mind, you but many. At least with alot of foreign workers, they're actually willing to put their heads down, and learn and actually work hard, and get things done, and be part of the business, and not just think that their little corner of the universe is more important than everyone else's.
I think it is way to easy to take the negative route and point the finger at the
lazy, arrogant, and unrealistic americans.
That tone and language you are using has been applied to every American industry such as the auto workers, mill workers, IT, researchers, etc...
You need to get back to work so you can meet your over paid sales teams unrealistic expectations with the minimal resources you have.
This CEO ended up into a cultural clash. The kind of one Japanese bosses experienced while opening branches in the US and in Europe during the 80's. They thought for years the Japanese way was the best and their local workers should adapt themselves to their way of working. Things weren't working as expected. They thought those western guys were lazy, Discipline was the key and respect to the hierarchy was the key. . They finally understood that those guys were simply working differently.
Most innovations in the computing industry happen in the US...The biggest (by far) computing companies are Americans...And yet he claims that US tech grads are unemployable...It looks like there is a "big" flaw in his logic. (I'm not American BTW).
If I was the main shareholder of his company, I would sack him. He should remain an engineer not a manager and certainly not an entrepreneur.
The only rule in the business world is to adapt yourself.
Lazy? I don't think so. Americans take less vacation time than Europeans. Are you one of those people who thinks you should get 8 hours of work out of an 8 hour day? You don't value time spent on anything but work that produces profits. You consider 5 minute breaks for a bit of solitaire or web surfing or chatting at the water cooler a complete waste of time. You frown on experiments and discourage innovations because they might not work.
Questioning authority is okay, when its appropriate.
Who is the authority on the appropriateness of any questioning? Surely not the same authorities who might be the ones being questioned? Somebody might be wrong, and it might be authority, or the questioner, or both or neither. It might all be a big unprofitable waste of time. Authority hates being questioned, and has the power to fire people who disagree.
An anecdote: At one job, the president and owner of the company gave a charming little speech at an employee banquet. First he groused that if he'd invested his money in the stock market instead of the company, he would have made more money. (At this point I wanted to but didn't "question authority" and yell out that he should do it, then he'd make more money and be happier, and we'd get better management and be happier.) Possibly he thought he was pointing out what a nice sacrificing altruistic thing he was doing in forgoing the market for the sake of all our jobs, instead of implying that we were all a bunch of slackers, losers, and dimwits. Then he expressed disdain over global warming, saying that if it really was happening, all the better for the company as he felt the business would sell more product!
Most college grads are idiots.
I have no doubt that with an attitude like that, the grads who aren't idiots and who therefore have choices don't choose to work for you, and you never even learn they exist. You're suffering from selection bias.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
India has allowed us to save $0.05, $5, $50, maybe $500 on a consumer goods at the cost of our manufacturing base.
The problem is, the savings aren't actually real. Assuming no currency manipulation, India's labor prices will be met as the US dollar declines in value. What this means is that assets in the USA decline in value as well. Sure, you might be able to buy a $500 consumer good for $200 because it was made by slave labor, but, the end result is that your house will be worth suddenly much less than it really is, because the value of the dollar will drop to match the disparity of pricing.
This is my sig.
All the Indian co-workers I've ever dealt with don't have any of these attributes. They would go as far as lieing to me to tell me work had been done and was checked, when they weren't anywhere close simply because they didn't want to appear to have failed (even when it would have been perfectly fine to tell me they weren't done and needed help!).
I have also worked with a few HCL employees. They aren't incompetent by any means, but I second this totally. They're just average, they do what you tell them to do for the most part. They turn in mistakes just like anybody else, and they get behind schedule just like slow, dumb Americans. They are basically a less flexible, less adaptable, but much less expensive version of their American counterparts. It is total bullshit to say that Americans need to concentrate on better education -- if you want to succeed like HCL, what you really need are people with 6 weeks of boot camp who are willing to do mindless labor in exactly the way you tell them for $20k/yr. We are seeing the IT industry go the way of the Auto industry, and the real complaint here is that colleges are turning out craftsmen (or let's say people who aspire to be craftsmen) instead of people who just want to work the production line.
Maybe that's just inevitable with business, since the goal always seems to be to neatly (and suboptimally) package processes to minimize their expense. It's just sad, because it chases all of the actual passion right out of the industry.
It's funny. Some of the comments here from college educated professionals with technical degrees are a little ironic. In my earlier life, I was a blue-collar tradesman and member of a union. I distinctly remember that when it was only the jobs of the working class that seemed threatened by competition from abroad (either through trade or immigration), that most of the professional class would respond that more competition would result in net higher living standards. Claims from the working class to the contrary were dismissed as ignorant of economics, and of the effects of comparative advantage. Now that it is your own professions that are threatened, I see that you are engaged in what you once considered "whining" by others.
But cowboying our way through is what got us where we are today!
Steve Ballface can take his two thumbs-up and every chair in his office, the MS Boardroom, and hell even the fucking production floor and stick them all up his ass.
If he thinks it's better to outsource jobs, then maybe Microsoft should move to India. Cost of living is better there and he can have a Solid gold Building with all the money he can save by moving there.
If you don't like Americans, get out of America so we can cut the loss and bullshit and let the rest of the people do what they need to survive.
Likewise, any company that produces something that cuts cost by decreasing their production staff should look at the big hole they're shooting in their foot. It does no good for the sales people who aren't selling anyway to sell more if the company can't produce what is being sold.
Fuck you Steve, 20 years ago you could make a good living simply by being willing to work, now you have to spend $40,000 just to take a gamble at an entry-level job that *surprise* you probably won't get because it's being sent out of the country.
I'm a fan of survival of the fittest and a market driven economy, but lately it seems like business is providing the bare minimum to call a product functional and making sure no one else is able/allowed to produce a better competing product.
[1] Ask a bunch of IT people, on an IT focused site, that worry about outsourcing what they think about the workers that may get their jobs in the future.
[2] Get back a long list of responses about how Indians aren't any better and the USA is the rulez.
[3] Veil overt racism under the premise of cost of living and "reasonable" employee expectations.
[4] ???
[5] Profit? or layoff?
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
I used to hate all the outsourcing businesses but have come to realize that I make a pretty damn good living fixing other people's shitty code irrespective of their nationality. Yes, I'd prefer to just do things right the first time, but if US companies stupidly insist on sending design work to cheaper, less qualified people, I will happily keep taking their money to fix the shitty code they get for having done so. Penny wise, pound foolish...
is a parlor trick, brought to you by your local MBA, to make short term gains on the bottom line with no thought for the future. Forget the fact that 80% of the turd world workers are neither better nor worse at their jobs than Americans. Forget that Americans are cheaper because when you're all sitting in the same office the communications overhead is minute compared to trying to communicate with "english as a work language" people 9 to 12 hours out of phase with our time zone. And forget the fact that the arrogance level of the third world workers has gone up expontially since MBA's have found a quick and easy way to cook the books causing them to be some of the worst people to work with from a personal standpoint. Forget all that. Just think about the USA as a country that has an economy in meltdown and approaching 10% unemployment and you still have treasonous bastards like Balmer telling us "outsourcing is good for American". Hang the punk by his testacies in Bangladesh if he loves India so much. Not to mention the loss of technical expertise (totally lost on the business pukes) caused by handing projects to our enemies. The day is coming when these "business leaders" will be made to suffer for the damage they've done to this country for their own personal financial gain. And it's come right soon....
I have to agree with him, but he's not very original. I live in a university town (and I graduated from the university). About the time I graduated, a HP hiring manager (HP is a major local employer) said the same thing about grads from our university. It became a big political to-do with articles in the local paper, and he ended up issuing an apology and clarification statement. But I'm sure he meant what he said, and I agreed with him. Having just come through the CS program, I knew that it was my work experience and use of computers as a hobby, not anything I learned in class, that made me employable. But with our education system's "everyone gets an A" policy and politics crushing dissenters, it's getting worse, not better.
CS is something that should be practical and hands on like engineering, but the profs think of themselves as intellectuals and don't teach the nitty gritty of programming and systems administration, usually because they're not even close to competent at it themselves. CS is simply a very easy degree to get for left-brained people, so we end up churning out grads who truly are incompetent in the workplace.
I've met many Indian programmers. Some of them are brilliant, most of them are borderline retarded. The retarded ones got hired because the managers are Indians.
And don't you know you smell like shit? God damn it, do something about it, we are living in a society!
...that American Grads do not like to be treated like slaves?
So shit Sherlock? ^^
I find that a good thing, actually.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Having done hiring I have found that 90% of the Indians I have hired were inferior. Many if not most LIED on their resumes, they had been coached on how to answer interview questions specific to the technoligies they were interviewing for. When you throw a real world situation at them and ask them how they would solve it - they freeze up and get that "deer in the headlights" look. When you hire ones that make it taht far - you find out many times what they -really- know - jack squat! Things they claim they knew on their resume and were able to answer "coached" answeres they can't really do. I had one that actually would go out "lift" code from open source projects - remove the copyrights and drop it into our code and put his name to it. He was quickly ESCORTED from the building when this was finally discoverd and we had to go back through -all- code with his name on it and remove it - because we weren't gaurenteed it wasn't "lifted" code.
Europeans I have found are superior when it comes to technology related matters - especially programming. Of all the Europeans hired only one or two didn't work out. Unfortunately I have found Europeans better than most American programmers. Usually when I hire university grads I have them mentored by the European programmers. I tell the grad - "take most of what you learned in class and dump it. You'll learn real world now.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
What the government should do is require US companies outsourcing work that
could (should) be done by US citizens to owe payroll tax to the IRS as if
the foreign workers were paying US income tax. IE: by outsourcing US jobs,
US companies are DEFRAUDING the IRS of tax money.
I am not suprised that Microsoft is happy with this result. The buggiest and poorest excuse for software ever to plauge the surface of the earth! The fact that the chair thrower wants to save a buck while forcing this crap up the world rectal track just shows the company's commitment to quality (NONE). The same could be said of GM or insert to big to fail compnay name here.
Yes its good to hear I am not the only one in a company like yours. While I dont do 16 hours consecutively I feel your pain.
When your in it, its hard to see whats better, the mind numbing slave work for days on end or unemployment.
Grass is greener whichever side of the fence your on in a company run as such.
Americans have voted with their wallets. And they've overwhelmingly decided that they prefer cheap, inferior quality Chinese made goods sold at Walmart to more expensive domestic goods. What makes you think they wouldn't apply the same criteria they use in deciding which toilet seat to buy to software as well?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Thank you, Good Citizen PinchDuck, for your higher intelligence level. Invariably, someone will post that the article is right, and there are just too many dumb f**ks who don't comprehend software engineering or computer sci --- I can't speak to that at this very time, but am aware of far too many pioneer types, such as myself, who have long ago given up on getting hired by any Americanski outfit - so we work for ourselves, or hack for our own pleasure. In the state I divide part of my time in, Washington, the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce (together with their Trade Alliance) gave seminars to local corporations - in the early '00s - on how to smoothly offshore American jobs and realize the most labor and tax savings. Predictably, tax revenues have been falling over the past years, and now dramatically so with the most recent wave of offshoring.
Not too though, the brilliant pols have another SOLUTION to this situation.
Americans will soon be realizing (even the blithering idiots who voted for Nixon, Reagan, Bush, etc.) that we have finally reached critical mass in the offshoring of American jobs - from this point on we'll be experiencing cascading unemployment of local, shrinking consumer-type employment (the type which requires citizens with jobs).
"of the sample group", but then that's the whole gimmick.
BLS includes all those currently employed -- whether legal, illegal, on non-immigrant visas or green cards -- as part of the labor force, along with those in the USA who are unemployed and actively seeking work.
Well, if they're unemployed, those on H-1Bs quickly move over to the illegal alien category, but, if they still actively seek work they increase the official unemployment rate. And if they don't actively seek work they're categorized as "discouraged" or "marginal" labor force participants, so long as they're still in the USA and show up statistically in the surveys.
Sounds naive, but it is the truth.
1) Limit or eliminate the ability give out the visas.
2) Severely tax companies participating in off-shore hiring or corporate shareholder wealth building.
3) Eliminate all tax relief for any company participating with these companies that off-shore.
Make those countries overseas build their own technology and their own industries. We don't need to increase the wealth of their countries any more than they did for us.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I'm sorry, the joke is on the Indians.
H1B is part of a secret plan to destroy India's culture....
In fact, many of the better H1B coders I know from India have become American citizens, are raising their kids in America, and have started to do things like listen to Heavy Metal, play video games, buy fast cars, drink "heinous" amounts of beer, eat meat every day and other "bad" habits that make Americans who they are.
Meanwhile, I don't see many American girls wearing Sair's or American kids watching Bollywood movies...
Muha-ha-ha!!!
India may take the IT market - but America is conquering India and winning in a cultural war.
Its only a matter of time before India will have a McDonalds on every corner and 50 WalMarts in Mumbai - and Hindi and Muslim kids everywhere in India will be listening to Metallica or Ministry on the weekends while they are eating a Big Mac and fries instead of going to temple or mosque.
The jokes on you guys!!! So what - maybe you take our jobs. You will send the money right back to us while you buy our food, music, movies, video games, and clothing...
HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Yep, US grads are not rote drones. We're capable of dynamic problem solving, creativity, innovation. Not to mention that many of the currently unemployed and under-employed US IT workers have been productive software developers for decades, and done everything from tech support to SQA to application architecture to performance bench-marking to data-base analysis and design to preparing proposals.
What a jackass. I've dealt with folks like him and the best thing I can possibly say is he's a slaver. It's likely his company takes passports away from outsourced individuals and thinks fear is the best management technique. They deliver adequate product against Moore's Law and think that's that's intelligence. Listen up, mister idiot. We invented most of the tools you rely on to drive your Dilbertspace. You've pissed me off enough to think about a tool that will replace you. You are a fly waiting for the windshield to come.
American companies seldom hire intelligently in the past, and today virtually never. The only things they know how to do are:
offshore jobs, inshore foreign scab workers, issue junk paper, and do leveraged buyouts ("pump and dumps") which destroy the target companies and employment.
It's funny how corporations and CEO's around the world are starting to play this game: to pit programmers in different parts of the world against each other, in order to serve the corporate bottom line. It's the same game politicians play by exploiting differences in religion, nationalism in order to gain and retain power. It's sad that they are succeeding so easily and the supposedly illuminated and smart programmers act no differently than angry villagers, blaming each other instead of looking at the big picture. The truth is that both the Indian and American programmers are exploited as much as possible by corporations. It is possible to do it as long as there are huge wage differences at different segments of the world and there is always more surplus for work than demand. This applies virtually to all professions these days - again, as a general tendency. This will only get worse, as countries with huge population start to produce better educated workforce by the millions every year. The trend is pretty clear, earning power for employees is on a steady decline. The term "third world countries" will not be defined by borders, it will be extended to all employees, regardless where they live. The concentration of power and wealth continues and it will be clear that being an American or British employee in any field no longer qualifies to guaranteed better lifestyle than the members of the same profession in India or China. It's difficult to see how it's not gonna be class struggle all over again once corporations manage to re-create proletariat from former middle-class knowledge workers. Eventually the crowd of a few billion will demand explanation from the other 1 percent, as seen in history over and over again. So deja vu.
I hate to say it, but as someone with experience in this situation this is 100% true (well in the case of the one Indian team I work with). The remote team I work with is guilty of every one of those many times over... especially the the lower coding standards. I do work with plenty of good Indian developers (usually local in the US) that don't do this, but I find that many that have been churned out of the Indian schools do exactly that. I think the US is a quite a bit ahead in terms of code quality. I'm not saying that India software industry cannot do it, but it hasn't matured to the point that the US software industry has.
There are a couple historical book on the computer industry one which has a story that gives the founding and initial growth of Sierra, as an example.
The founder at one point decided to hire a bunch of corporate coders and let the creative crews go by the wayside. In the end he got very manageable code but it was completely unappealing to anyone. He almost killed his business taking that tact.
People should learn from those past examples.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Some time ago I worked at Convergys and was able to observe a lot of interesting trends. They did what they could to import cheap H1B people for sure. But the most interesting thing was not just limited to H1Bers. Rather the idea that ticket resolution was so unimportant for so many companies.
Some companies did not even have resolution as a metric for evaluations. If the by the book steps did not fix a customer, oh well! Refer them to someone else like the OEM and have a nice day!
With that in mind someone who is willing to read from a script and make next to nothing is perfect for them. Not that we Americans are excused from this. Some companies do better than others at trying to make sure their phone reps can actually think but I'd still be willing to say the majority of them go into panic mode if the script does not work.
And on top of that you can get some real winners gaming the system then. There was one guy who, while I was auditing an ISPs calls, had a 2m turnover on his calls. I'm not shitting you all, 2m from the time he picked up to when he would be ready for the next customer on average. This was back when DUN would frequently break in 95/98 and need to be reinstalled. So whenever it became clear that needed to be done he would punt the caller with some excuse. Leaving it for the next tech to do so that his numbers would still look 'good'.
Steering back on topic I think the metric for 'employable' when you are talking about tech grads to the CEO in question scores pay and willingness to be browbeaten highly. Stay on script! Keep you call time down! No breaks! Go figure US grads, even accounting for our overinflated sense of entitlement, might not score highly when looking though his lens.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Americans killed about 25% of the population of the Philippines.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Please ignore this idiot/racist CEO. He does not represent Indians and is just trying to use foolish( if not completely idiotic) methods to make his case or what ever he is trying to do, which obviously will not work.
As an Indian working in US, I greatly respect/appreciate all my American coworkers. Most of them are very intelligent/friendly ( more so than some Indians I have worked with in past). Even my class mates (American University) were some of the most intelligent folks I have worked with.
Only idiots think that a person is more intelligent just because he/she was born/studied in a particular country. Do not pay any attention to such a statement.
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
Python: def strrep(target, idx, len, bullet): return target[:idx] + bullet + target[idx+len:]
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
Haskell: map (+5) array -- I cheat and use a list.
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
UPDATE TABLE foo SET field = field + 5
4) Write up any form of database "select" query.
SELECT jonaskoelker
FROM candidates
WHERE clue > 0
Why you'd name a field after me I don't know, but there you go ;-)
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
Guile (GNU embeddable scheme): (format #f "I have ~a children" a-variable-containing-the-value-5)
I sure hope no one will plagiarize my hard work! :D
On the matter of increasing H-1b visas during a recession, I absolutely guarantee our whores^H^H^H^H^H^Hcongressmen will agree with Vineet Nayar.
So in other words you're just a xenophobic fantacist?
If I am a xenophobic fantacist, then you are a goddamned traitor. My sentiments and support lay for the people who are my countrymen. Yours are obviously for some other country than you are own.
That's all well and good that you would twist my words around. I said that a labor shortage inspires automation, and quite frankly, it has. If you have plenty of slave labor, there's no need to innovate, and this is essentially why the Romans were more or less stagnant technologically during their reign.
You and other free traders keep telling protectionists that free trade is somehow grounded in reality, and protectionism is not. Yet, protectionism grew the British Empire, grew the United States, grew Japan and is growing China and South Korea. By comparison all you criminal assholes have delivered on is enormous trade deficits that will someday be balanced once we accept our assets are devalued.
You should be shot.
This is my sig.
See and you thought Bill Gates was the root of all evil.
Chris Sheppard
Don't you guys get it? Programming is no longer a high tech job if a third world high school graduate can do it.
You cannot rely on an easy programming job to get a decent life any more. You either move up on the food chain by sharpening up
your skill or get devoured by massive 3rd world cheap labor.
I'd like to see a list of these companies that actually FOLLOW Six Sigma and REAL Project Management Principles. I work in Healthcare and the joke is that any places I have seen they don't have time TIME or the MONEY to implement real methodologies. They just want code monkeys for the most part.
Please do _say_ that you're referring to entry level work, then.
TFA is about hiring college grads, so I didnt think it needed to be explicitly stated.
Based on the responses though, maybe I should have.
First, remember that we're talking about hiring college grads for entry level development positions. My statements are not true for seasoned veterans.
Lazy? I don't think so. Americans take less vacation time than Europeans. Are you one of those people who thinks you should get 8 hours of work out of an 8 hour day? You don't value time spent on anything but work that produces profits. You consider 5 minute breaks for a bit of solitaire or web surfing or chatting at the water cooler a complete waste of time. You frown on experiments and discourage innovations because they might not work.
So its nice that you can make up lots of things that arent true and try to label them on me, but lets stick to personal experiences or factual items please.
That being said, I do think I should get most of 8 hours of work out of a 9 hour day. A couple breaks are fine, a few minutes here and there on the web is fine. Thats not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the bulk of devs out there who will get away with doing an hour or two of work per day, and reading slashdot the rest, if they can get away with it.
It's also self interest. The more effective a person is at their job, the more money the business makes, and the more money that staffer makes. Conversely, the less effective a person is, the less money the company makes, which puts their own job at risk.
Who is the authority on the appropriateness of any questioning? Surely not the same authorities who might be the ones being questioned? Somebody might be wrong, and it might be authority, or the questioner, or both or neither. It might all be a big unprofitable waste of time. Authority hates being questioned, and has the power to fire people who disagree.
A newly graduated college student, for the vast majority of them, dont have the experience, perspective, or skills to have opinions on anything but things narrowly focused on their job. Ie, code, design, etc. They generally have zero idea about what it takes to run a business, to constantly have to bring in revenue so that everyone gets paid, or how to effectively deal with troublesome customers in a way that builds the relationship and makes the company more money.
There are a rare few that are gems, but in general, college grads are incredibly green.
I have no doubt that with an attitude like that, the grads who aren't idiots and who therefore have choices don't choose to work for you, and you never even learn they exist. You're suffering from selection bias.
The grads who arent idiots I hire, or at least try to. They are a small minority.
I should say that I dont have any direct experience with Indian ethnic folks.
But the chinese, Russian (or generally eastern european), Vietnamese and Korean folks I've worked with tend to be a cut above. If nothing else, they're willing to work hard and just 'get things done' without thinking that the occasional boring work was beneath them.
Again, I think its a cultural thing here in the states. Too many students coming out of college think that they'll be the next Gates or Brin or Ellison, and they genuinely get offended when you offer them a market wage commensurate with their experience. Or they get upset when they have to do 'boring' work, even if its just now and then. Or if its not fun and interesting work, they will barely work on it.
It's a cultural entitlement thing. People think that because they can program, they deserve to make six figures right out of college (again, not on the coasts).
I think everyone should have to spend 5 years starting and growing a small business, so they can get a clue what is actually involved with building something from nothing, and what hard work really is.
Yeah, but his point still stands.
See what you get for understanding that "flipping burgers" is shorthand for "stimulating local demand for goods and services." Not to mention that in the other countries mentioned in TFA, China; Brazil; South Africa; and Ireland, the cow is anything but a sacred animal.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
All of us programmers are reaping what we sow...Many people out there were like "Oh, manufacturing, of course thats going to be outsourced...You shouldn't be able to earn $40/hour to turn a screwdriver on an assembly line"...well, the same thing that happened in the manufacturing industry is going to happen in programming. Sure, right now the quality of the code in India isn't that great, but the people who live there are just as smart as us and it's only a matter of time before they catch up. And, when they catch up, they'll still cost less...which means most of the jobs will go over there, and just like the uaw worker who's been out a job for the last decade, we'll be looking at the unemployment line. Pretty soon everybody will be working at either a hospital, wal-mart, or mcdonalds.
What Ballmer is doing is directly against the people of the United States and in support of an international monopoly, Microsoft. These kinds of actions by citizens supposedly of this country, the United States of America, by a citizen of this nation, Ballmer, must needs be equated with and called for what they are, and that is simply...Treason! Since micro#$%^#@ is registered as a corporation in the United States and since Ballmer is the CEO of that corporation, then the whole corporate structure is also treasonous and should be prosecuted as such. Since this corporation is really kind of a company controlled by two men, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the 'corporate veil' should also be pierced in this instance by the federal court and THOSE two 'worthies' should also be prosecuted as traitors inasmuch as they actively sought out this litiginous barrator and recruited him from his former post at Lotus (who remembers Lotus?).
1. Put in 4-6 extra hours every day
=>
What is wrong with this? What Americans like you wish to do? Get some crap degree from some college and earn USD 200K per year for working 6 hours a day in a 4 day week? I find it really absurd that you guys who are reading Slashdot think this is a problem! I think Slashdot has lost its quality over time.
2. Lower coding standards (use 's' as variable names, enormous methods, no refactoring, cutting corners)
=>
I am an Indian programmer working in HP labs in US and I have seen piece of legacy code coming from an American company (it was aquired by HP).
It has a statement like this:
if(o == 0) //Is 0 equal to 0x0? WTF? //something
{
}
This piece of code was in the core part of product, I remember this after many years since my team and me had made fun of that guy. By the way, before you ask, the name of the single author was displayed in the headers! What do you say about this?
3. Be mindless enough to follow a team lead's decisions without proactive thinking or questioning. Which is why they'd never fit in at HCL.
=>
I dont know about HCL, but I have worked with guys from Princeton etc, I dont find them any brighter than most of the IITans/NITians coming from India.
Where the fuck is India?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well I don't know about this guy's company, but I do know that Indian outsourcing / insourcing companies are very scared of class action and RICO lawsuits regarding their discriminatory hiring practices. Remember, this is coming from a guy whose country has for centuries explicitly practiced discrimination against all but the Brahmin class. It's inherent to their way of thinking that some people are "superior" to others. They're racist and classist to their very core.
What they're finding out is that kind of crap doesn't fly over here and what's more - there are laws against it - holy cow!!!!
We all know the incessant cries for more H1Bs is coming from junk companies like Satyam and all the rest who collude in violation of applicable RICO laws to systematically distort the truth about the relative qualifications of tech candidates for the purpose of personally enriching themselves even as they pump into the system unqualified candidate after candidate from the Brahmin class of India.
Take a look at the guy in Slumdog who was living the high life with his whores and his coke and his "lifestyle" and you can pretty much see what motivates this kind of demented filth. That goes for all the American corporations also. These are purely sociopathic personalities operating on the Ayn Rand principle of enrich me and screw everyone and everything else, including the ground I stand on.
Just a thought; maybe because the world appears to be very rosy for Steve Ballmers, that maybe he can spend some of it in India. I'm told that the culture there is old, and wise. A good thing for people that like to sing and dance for the H1B listeners. I think the U.S. maybe a place to small for the likes of Steve? Steve, India awaits your grand entrance.
Just another anonymous coward who doesn't want to sign up in /..
They surely are unemployable by HCL! . Considering the kind of contracts that HCL takes up no American grad is gonna stay. HCL has loads of highly skilled _drones_ sitting on bench and recently the salary of all the benched were cut by 25%. Still they make the profit despite paying these people for just having coffee or browsing the net.Just imagine!
Just check any firm which hire H1bs and you will find a pattern , they have loads of legacy code written by - who?- The American coders who have retired with their fat paychecks or IPOs.
So crap code is not the sole hallmark of any particular ethnicity.Any bad professional with no commitment to the work being done can do that. Crap code -> maintenance costs . Do you wanna give $$ to an American grad to do some copy-paste when the Indian can do it for significantly less $. Plain economics. Well this has been reiterated many times over and over again the internet forums i know.
Instead of posting on Slashdot against h1bs or giving examples of how bad the h1bs code (everybody knows that!) , better try to put pressure on the hiring manager of your comp who is making your life hell. I am not sure why comps trust these Indian Body shops this much , why cant they hire with a proper interview?. I can tell whether an engineer is crap or not in 5 minutes or less. So it is just blatant lazyness, shortsightedness and corruption in the part of American comps that has caused all this mess. Iam sure that such employee requests can make a much more effect in an American workculture. So just do it. I am sure that things will change. Just expose them!!! . You need not get a brain f**k due to the dumb and greedy company policies. There is no space for mediocrity in America - The land of opportunity. And . I hope that USA is a democracy where the Vox populi will be heard. More over you will be doing a BIG favour to the technology industry in India. I am concerned when i work on core tech in india and some cheapskate flies to US using a bodyshopper and finally increase the cost of living and real estate price here beyond what i can afford.
-- _just_another_indian_technologist_
Ps:Slashdot isn't a place to give the message to the h1b drones, they might be cooly checking scraps in _some social networking site_ sitting in the high rise American office misusing the American bandwidth. :)
And they never pay attention to details nor do they follow the process. I guess he's never called his own help desk.
A good friend who happens to be Indian, and is a very experienced software engineer came back to the US. He was laid off in the US due to outsourcing. Went back to India. Found the work ethic and environment there to be total crap, and returned to the US. Meanwhile, his father is an Indian venture capitalist who is into starting up businesses over there. He can have the pick of jobs in India if he wanted to, yet he does not. He can't stand the business culture and environment. If you think things are sleazy here, take a look at India. It is far worse. Imagine not getting a job because you aren't of the right 'social caste'.
The purpose of outsourcing is simple. Short term cost cutting to make the bottom line look better. For long term prospects, at the scale this is going on, is unsustainable for the US economy. These big-wig execs make their bottom line look wonderful on the short term. They then escape after a short stint with a huge treasure trove.. either retiring or moving on to another company to bilk in the same manner. In the meantime, companies are losing their best and most experience talent. The smart companies are picking these people up -now- to gain what matters. Intellectual capital. When the economy turns, they will be FAR ahead of the curve and far more productive than an India based development house.
Unfortunately through all this, the US economy has eroded to depression levels. Healthcare costs are at a critical level (some 60% of bankrupcies are caused by medical bills), greed and criminality in the financial markets finally burst the bubble, and wages are tanking. Many highly skilled individuals are losing their homes and have ruined their credit rating as a result. Oh yes, the very credit system managed by the financial institutions which helped hose the economy.
Don't you believe it. The US is not at a 9% unemployment rate. Look around your town and city. Use your own eyes. The unemployment rate is FAR higher.
So its nice that you can make up lots of things that arent true and try to label them on me, but lets stick to personal experiences or factual items please.
Right back at you. You made a lot of unkind blanket statements about new grads.
I do think I should get most of 8 hours of work out of a 9 hour day.
I have heard that 4 hours of work out of an 8 hour day is average. Banks asked for loans evaluate business plans with that in mind. Of course you must keep expecting more, or you might only get 2 hours.
A newly graduated college student, for the vast majority of them, dont have the experience, perspective, or skills to have opinions on anything but things narrowly focused on their job
There you go again! You seriously underestimate this group. It's very popular to analyze and typecast the next generation. I hesitate to stereotype any such huge group-- they will simply be too diverse. Are people not in those groups really that much better? There's no fool like an old fool. For instance, Iran's youth, green though they are (in both experience and dress!) certainly has opinions, and I venture to suggest their opinions are correct. They may be Iran's best hope of a much brighter future. The Pirate Party draws most of its support from the young. That one you may see as evidence that the young are indeed stupid, I see it as the wisdom of youth in their flexibility and adaptability, their greater willingness to move on to new things when the old no longer works. Stereotyped views on my part, I suppose, but a different perspective than yours.
Your green employees probably feel compelled to speak up. They know they don't know much, they fear to admit that, but have to demonstrate as best they can that they are participating and trying to learn. They risk looking like idiots or rebels and losing their jobs in order to avoid looking like drones and losing their jobs for that reason. Your contempt just makes things more difficult. I suspect you have high turnover.
I suggest that this naivety has its upside. They are perhaps more honest, less "sophisticated", less accustomed to the myriad ways of cheating and getting away with it. Another anecdote: Occasionally, I sell my old car privately. (Dealers, bleh.) One time, the buyer was in high school. His parents wrote a check for it, but shorted me $50 on the agreed price. He insisted on setting that right, and made sure I got the full amount!
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Finally a CEO who is audacious enough to state the facts right.!!
I think Vineet has been quoted in a wrong context...Check out Vineet's perspective on 'Employability' at his blog post http://vineet.hclblogs.com/?p=76
I do not think that graduates overseas are better prepared, they have a better attitude as this Financial Genius says, they have the attitude that "ring$" to his CEO ear$, meaning: "I'm willing to do anything for 95 cents/hour, (or less)"
Yeah! that's the attitude kid, that's the spirit..!
Go for the extra mile without any gas!!
Why should a true AMERICAN company have anything to do with a guy who consider ourselves useless?
Maybe because despite the fact that we are unemployable and therefore, unemployed he can make 170Million "USD" (not rupees) per contract from Microsoft?
Barack my friend, shouldn't we have a legislation somewhere to stop this? before we all end in jobs that cannot be outsourced, like janitor, plumber, warder with our unemployable American degrees? What is the point of creating thousands of jobs and then send em abroad only to increase profit? (and decrease quality)
Typical frog in the well comment. Not having seen what the people are capable of, it is best to refrain from ill-informed comments. I'm Indian, live in India and am from the industry. I've worked for US companies and have spent a lot of time in the US.
Contrasting work styles, it is the Americans who follow templated processes very well without any deviation or application of grey matter. Culturally, America is system driven and so this manifestation. I've seen instances aplenty where 10% of the Americans conceive and the rest follow. It works for America.
Indians are less system driven. It is difficult to drive consistency across a large mass and in the last few years, many services companies have managed to achieve good consistency levels.
Whether you like it or not, Indian work harder than most Americans. Like all countries, we have bad apples and oranges too. Comments on quality of code pervade across countries. I've seen enough nincompoops in the US holding key positions too. From my long years across these two countries, an average working Indian is more resourceful than an average working American.
Maybe Ballmer should be outsourced.
Frankly, it comes down to money. It always does.
It's not that "right shored" workers can do the job better, it's that they do it for less money. That's the sales pitch that many CIOs believe and
it's a load of crap. EDS (HP) and all the other consulting firms preach this relentlessly. There's lots of talented people all over the world but frankly perpetuating a caste system in IT does nothing but exploit workers in other countries while giving Directors and Shareholders a perceived value. Once you've dealt with a "Right Shored" outsourcing project you can see why it never works out properly. Is it worth a couple of bucks to put your neighbor out of work? I don't think it is.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Why waste 5 years college learning computer science only to be told you are banned practicing it in the U.S. because you are a citizen? Skip college degrees for software, they'll hire you anyways if they need and you avoid the 5 year debt to pay off.
The only exception in labor law for 'exempt' is for software. Why not doctors, managers, car mechanics etc.? It's software bigotry. Why not except State workers?
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous