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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."
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 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
I posted this before and I'll post it again.
So far in the last 12 months I've had three side projects that projects that were outsourced but for whatever reason such a mess was made of them that the clients have brought them to us to fix at a higher than normal rate.
My employer's now collaborating with an "reverse" outsourcing mob who've set themselves up to help people bring their failing outsourced projects back and are getting a fair bit of work through it.
To be honest, the quality of code I'm seeing is easily the worst I've ever seen and that includes half-assed open source projects. Whether that's because it's just "sweatshop code" as one client put it or they are attempting to write super advanced AI code generators and using them to generate the code...and failing miserably, I don't know. But it's terrible. From the complete lack of imagination and forward thinking in design, right down to the god awful highly inconsistently cased variable names.
Remember this is *three* different projects from three different Indian companies theoretically written by three different sets of programmers. The code all looks and feels the same, which leads me to believe there's something going on industry wide over there. What that is I have no idea but they need to fix it quick smart as the industry as a whole is getting a bit of a reputation.
What I do know is people are willing to pay much more once they've tried outsourcing and failed.
Those that don't go out of business in the mean time that is.
(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee).
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
One of the benefits of proper capitalism is that you are free to set up your own business, hire only US workers, and advertise that you do so. You may even be able to produce at lower cost than those companies you resent so much. You are also free to "boycott companies who outsource."
Ethics and morality are absolutely compatible with capitalism. The issue with ethics and morality in business is a cultural and philosophical one; not an economic one.
And please read up on the definition of capitalism: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/capitalism "An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."
Also: "An economic and political system characterized by a free market for goods and services and private control of production and consumption. (Compare socialism and communism.)"
I'm paid $15/hour and I'm good at what I do. You can live pretty well here in the US for $15/hour.
You won't be driving a BMW, of course, but I find that luxury and living well are not necessarily the same thing.
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!
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.
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. =]
That money came from banks who threw as much as you wanted at you provided you put up your house as collateral.
How it works now, where the real estate bubble popped and banks cling to money like it's worth anything anymore is beyond me, though.
But ... maybe just because banks stopped handing out money like crazy, people can't spend anymore, got no job or got laid off, and the economy is in the gutter? I don't want to say that spending money you don't have is any good, nor do I say that banks should hand any bum money for nothing (and, face it, giving you money for a house that's already drowned in mortgage is 'for nothing'). But what some people don't understand is that the economy can only thrive if people have money to spend. To have money to spend, people need jobs. To make "everyone" have a job you effing have to stop shipping in more people. It should be a no brainer.
One of the core reasons for the economy downturn is simply that companies tried to manufacture in China and India and sell in the US and Europe. That doesn't work. You give a little money to Chinese and Indian people who can basically survive (but not buy your fancy high tech, 'luxury' crap) and pay nothing to US and European people who should in turn buy it. Buy it with what money? People need jobs to earn money, to have money that they can spend. It is as simple as that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My own employer - which is why I'm posting anonymously - went through a fascination period with offshoring coding projects over the last several years. My group tried it twice - under the pressure of management to get more changes implemented faster. Of those two attempts and four others that other friends of mine at the company have been involved in, three have been unmitigated disasters and essentially just cost money and time only to have us have to rewrite the whole thing, two performed some of the functionality but were missing big chunks and completely unmaintainable crap code, and the final one was tolerably functional but still buggy.
In the end, having gone a few rounds with the Indian outsourcers with them trying to force them to live up to their part of the contracts (maintainable code that does what we specified - and believe me, our software requirements docs are usually incredibly detailed), we usually just decide that it's failed and cut the cord. I was never a big fan of the idea, but having seen repeated failures, I'd personally never recommend it as a solution to anyone. If you absolutely must do it, be sure whatever you're handing off is a closed system (meaning, not a lot of dependencies or interfaces, and definitely not a lot of "business knowledge" in the project) and be sure the contract has specific test percentages that must pass before each payment is made. Also, some stipulation on following a pre-defined coding style, as well as design reviews by internal people can help immensely as well. Just make sure that their biggest payments are actually tied to successful results - otherwise they'll try to weasel on you, or just decide that last 20% of the project isn't worth the last 20% of pay.
That's all about off-shore outsourcing, though. Of our H1Bs, several do excellent work on par with any of our best domestic employees, and several couldn't code "Hello World" (and have been not-so-promptly fired). That's not that much different from our domestic employees, except that we can't seem to get rid of the incompetent ones as easily.
Is there any way to turn off all this superfluous and stupid javascript and AJAX shit that is totally ruining slashdot these days? I know this is OT, but there's nowhere else to ask. Man, I pine for the days when the pages loaded fast, rendered properly, payed attention my prefs, and didn't have !stupid! slider widgets and ridiculous color-scale search things.
Slashdot is nearly unusable anymore,
Being a coder from India, I can answer your question. The reason is plain and simple economics and greed. While Indian coders in general come cheap when compared to those in US companies wanna further reduce costs there are other factors.
I earn a lot more than my counterparts doing same job because I belong to a top engineering school and quality of work expected from me is different than several others. While my company is full of guys from lower level colleges where education situation is really bad. Companies hire these guys cause they come cheap (some earn even 1/4 of what I do). While guys from top colleges ask for more companies refrain from hiring these people and hire college grads from lower colleges who would work on minimum wage.
IT job is thus considered worst in most IIT's and most engineers end up doing MS/PHD or MBA's.
I am actually implying that well-paid engineers are rather more creative and efficient than overworked and unmotivated ones.
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
Yeah, because unemployment is "the problem" - not getting the damned job done so that something of value gets created and sold so that wealth can actually get produced, salaries, taxes, and bills paid, and economies improved, right?
I've been having a tough time finding a reasonably qualified programmer from straight out of college. I'm not looking for senior database developers, just people who can solve basic logic skills and... write software!
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".
I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? How *does* one get a Masters Degree in Information Science without being able to answer basic questions like this? Supposedly, the job I'm offering is why they went to school, but they aren't even qualified to begin. So what did they do for 6 years?
If you are hiring a welder, he'd better know how to weld. If you hire a doctor, he'd better have a good working knowledge of medicine.
Why can't we expect to hire fresh programmers who know how to... program?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
I don't qualify my advertising with *any* form of educational requirement. I only list the skills required. Of all the programmers we now have at our small-but-growing-fast company, none of them have even a BA.
PS: We're flexible enough with our hours that one of our programmers is going to school to complete a degree in Mathematics.
I'm not asking for Masters degrees, but I'm getting them. And they sure aren't helping them much, at least as far as I'm concerned.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
Double plus, by getting modded -1 Anti-crapslashcode (which this may be) anyone that browses at -1 will still be unable to view your post, since -1 is now hidden EVEN IF YOU SET PREFERENCES TO VIEW AT -1. back on topic, this is typical kdawson 'they're taking out jobs' short-sighted crap.
Use NoScript. It loads me a nice reasonable rendition of slashdot without all the bullshit. Slashdot is actually the reason I started using the plugin. I don't know what the fuck Slashdot coders are doing that is so script intensive on a fucking news/forum site since Google docs and Gmail which uses tons upon tons of Javascript runs reasonably while what should be a simple site of html,css, and a conservative amount of javascript feels like I am loading 72 instances of Eclipse on a 486. Get your shit together slashdot.
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.
Even architects have to know the basics. Or their fancy designs would fall over. There's a reason you make engineering students build bridges out of spaghetti. The same computer students should know how to build a DB out of a flat file.
the dumbing down of software (and everything else apparently, the UK A levels - .. erm exams for 16 year olds after mainstream schooling is over) was recently described as 'too much like sat-nav' where the students are guided through the answers. Universities want students capable of 'map reading' instead, where they have to figure out where the are and where they're going.
The issue isn't restricted to USA, but all the western world, possibly you have a system of 'inclusion at all costs' where you can't fail anyone in case it upsets the poor thickos, or anyone too lazy to study should still pass because it helps the schools post ever-increasing pass rates.
The same applies to software today, especially now we have .NET with its 'Visual Basic' style coding, that's designed to be so easy anyone can do it, we get people who havn't the faintest clue about what they're doing, just that the examples and generated boilerplate does it for them.
Uhm, the guys who invented the transistor, and setup a bunch of well-known semiconductor companies, the traitorous eight, how many were born outside the USA? Of the rest, how many were born to immigrants to the USA?
(The answers: "at least 3" for the first, and "at least 1" for the second).
It's hilarious that a nation whose success was built on waves of immigration can spawn people so ignorant of the contributions of immigrants. The rest of the 1st world doesn't mind though - we'll be glad to take the USAs spot as patron of the world's best & brightest - please do stop your H1-B programme.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
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.
Agreed. I used to read Slashdot 10 years ago on 233 MHz Sparc 5 workstations, running SlowArseis and it was perfectly reasonable. Now it keeps beachballing my MacBookPro, which is ten times faster on clock speed alone, never mind it can do a lot more in a cycle, has faster bus, RAM and hard disk.
I would've thought Slashdot of all places wouldn't succumb to the gleeful bloat which has rendered spectacular advances in hardware almost irrelevant to the end user experience.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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."
That's why I dropped degrees as a requirement altogether. Yes, that means that sifting through applicants becomes a lot like an American Idol casting (you have a few hundred applicants for the position, 90% of which don't even come close to qualifying), but it's worth it.
As it's for malware forensic, asm plays a role. Especially understanding asm you didn't write. So one of the centerpiece questions is basically:
You have this piece of code in a subroutine:
pop eax
inc eax
push eax
retn
What do you expect it to do, and what would you do in your disassembler?
Believe it or not, anyone who was able to solve that was a VERY good analyst. That's a question you can hand out in written form, get written answers and you sieve out those 90% that don't even have the foggiest idea what's going on (those are also the 90% you don't need). I don't even read the answers (ok, I glance at them so I won't get someone who wrote "no idea, but I don't care, I'm here for the fat check"), I don't care how they answer it. I care that they understood what's there and that they have an idea or at least a hunch (hunches are quite valuable in that biz) where to put the crowbar.
The rest is training. What I need is people who don't fear to get their feet wet, who don't mind poking at code and who can play with it. I need explorers and tinkerers. It doesn't matter if your answer is right. What matters is that I see you pondered it and had an idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I would've thought Slashdot of all places wouldn't succumb to the gleeful bloat which has rendered spectacular advances in hardware almost irrelevant to the end user experience.
Indeed, this shit does not bode well for the future of slashdot. These sorts of counter-productive and superfluous web-site "upgrades" are the kind of thing that often precedes the death of a company. It's like the brains have already left the building and the company is just left running on empty until it collapses under the weight of the remaining stupidity.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Perhaps we should split comp-sci into two paths? One for people intending to get a job in academia and one for those destined for the commercial job market?
In theory, that distinction would be computer science versus software engineering. The former often part of a math department, and the latter in with electrical & computer engineering.
In practice, the people you want to hire are learning on their own anyway. So restricting the pool based on their program omits a lot of the good candidates, and still leaves you with a stack of mediocre resumes to filter through. The best algorithmic developer I know was a physics undergraduate, and only got into programming because of a competition.
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
You'd be surprised. From what I've seen, architects are like Captain Kirk - always asking for warp 20 on busted dylithium crystals 5 minutes ago. They come up with the fancy plans, then the engineers explain to them why it won't work, and the result ends up being a compromise between the two. Just look at some of the difficulties they were having with the proposed designs for the "Freedom Tower" in New York.
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 see, your hiring people who learned how to program while they were kids, not collage graduates. It sounds like you've been lucky thus far, but this hiring strategy doesn't necessarily scale well. I think you need to figure out what you want : cleverness or skill set. You might need cleverness more than you think if you're so happy with your future math major.
You might ask about co-op programs where the students spend 1/2 the year working for you and 1/2 taking classes. I don't know if your business can handle that level of quasi-turnover, but it sounds similar to your existing hiring strategy while somewhat more "scalable", and some portion will hang around after graduation.
I don't think you'll find that many really clever people with these managerial degrees like IS. Worse, I once read an analysis explaining that these management and IS majors are usually risk averse people, meaning they'll strongly prefer larger more stable companies, so you'd only see the dregs.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
x86 eats about anything you throw at it. Given that its asm is by now so bloated that almost anything is a legal instruction, it might even do something for a long time before it burps when you end up somewhere with your IP where you shouldn't. Doesn't really make it easier to disassemble heavily self modifying code (but usually lots of floating unit instructions is a good sign that you're where you shouldn't be :)).
Essentially you're right. But you should probably tell the dasm to ignore the byte after the call to the function, not the byte after the function itself. It does ignore that byte usually by itself. :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
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
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
Excuse me, but why does a nation have to produce undergrads who can write SELECT statements? I personally learned query statements, programming, programming languages, and a general feel for the field outside of school. It was my personal interest that drove me to learn these techniques and skills.
That does not mean school was unnecessary. I acquired a completely different experience from school than from my personal work experience. I learned how to rigorously think about issues, was exposed to different ways of solving problems, learned the foundations of my area of study, and met other students and professors with different life experiences. This is extremely valuable to me personally even if it is not completely apparent during the job application process.
Getting an undergraduate degree today is like getting a high school degree of decades past. The level of basic academic training has been raised to the college level. It doesn't necessarily prepare you for your job, but it does prepare you for life in general.
Why is this bad? We also "free them from oppression" for free, and "bring them American culture" for free and "educate them on intellectual property law" for free. Since we are the world police, why shouldn't we do something that might actually benefit them--for free? I think it will ultimately help us in the end since the USA isn't a closed system, but even if it helps others and not us, is it a bad thing? What happened to pride in your country's generosity and nobility? Are we all so coldhearted that helping others is treasonous?
Perhaps you misunderstood my point: Ph.D. Graduates who want to stay and contribute to American society are being sent back to their home countries. I agree that accepting foreign students is a great way to improve our image overseas.
I'm all in favor of an open education system. However, when we're training (and retaining) very few of our own as a matter of policy, there's a serious problem.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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).
It's still not insightful. "Fried Chicken" is fried Chicken.
The point that both are playing off of is still wrong. There is no WOOOSH if I'm pointing out that the central point of a post is based on inaccurate FUD, unless the original post was playing off of the general acceptance that the FUD in question is wrong. That is not the impression I got from either post, or from your explanation.
Many people (the GPPP and yourself included) appear to believe that it is legal and/or common for fast food chains to adulterate the food they sell to somehow make it completely other than what it is presented as being. Since it is neither legal or common, yet the belief persists, I see no WOOOSH moment when I point that out.
The ground beef at McD's, the chicken wings at KFC, etc, are all exactly what they claim to be, otherwise they'd have been shut down by the government a while ago. The FUD in question is spread by vegetarian activist groups (HSUS, PETA, ALF, ELF, etc.) that have no moral qualms with lying in order to achieve their political agenda, which is vegetarianism for all with no exceptions. Compared to politically motivated groups that lie when it suits them, I'd trust McD's and KFC any day of the week because the companies are at least accountable to consumers. the activist groups have no such check on their behavior.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
They aren't actually - that's the really strange thing. In talking with people I know who are left there - they pay them 60,000 rupees a month - that's about 1200-1300 US dollars. They feed them, give them a clothing allowance, and house them (yes this is a relatively well known software firm - they'll even finance your car if you live there) - none of which was ever offered to me in the US.
They take longer to find and write solutions as well.
So no - I don't see where the cost savings are.