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'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 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 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?
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
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
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!
The last code delivered by Infosys was functional... but had to be ripped back out of production.
The next bit of code didn't follow any of our published standards. It took several days to fix the obvious problems, then it got booted out of testing for a week's corrections.
They used to be a lot better back in 2003.
The biggest problem right now is that they won't say "no" to management about anything. Insanely crazy schedules-- "Sure, we can meet that". Grossly abbreviated testing... "Okay- we can mitigate that risk".
I think most of the super sharp guys are now management there. The actual coders are now getting down to low experience yes men/women who are not as clever and rush things without following standards.
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
I think the problem with corporations is the same as the problem with copyright.
Both were created for the public good- not for the private good.
The primary stakeholders in each has lost sight of the fact that their special privileges were created for the public good.
When it gets bad enough, those rights can be taken back.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.)"
...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.
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.
Vote with your wallets
This will never work. Just like businesses, most people care about their bottom line. Any Midwestern autoworker would sign under your post, and yet look at their spending habits outside of buying (heavily discounted) American cars. I bet they don't think twice about buying the cheapest jeans or kitchenware made in china while shopping at some mega retailer.
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.
of bugs and loopholes?
That explains everything...
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.
Doesn't matter-- you just can't get around the fact that they currently make 1/10th of what we do and bill out at 1/3 of what we do.
This is part of the problem with the kind of short term "thinking" that a lot of the MBAs who decide to outsource a lot of this stuff engage in. They don't realize and/or don't care that paying 1/3 of what it would cost to write it here is actually more expensive in both "money cost" and missed opportunity (which is often the *really* big price that causes a lot of companies to go under) when you have to do it several times over before you get something close to usable.
Instead, they tend to see things more like this: "I cut our expenses by x%. I want a bonus. Now let me find another place to work before this decision catches up with me."
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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. =]
It depends who you deal with of course; but yes, generally I've found outsourced teams have no real innovation, you need to specify everything point by point, they don't want to go off on their own and solve problems.
However that's nothing compared to the "I deserve a good job and large salary" attitude endemic in US graduates. If anything their attitudes are worse because very few (of the ones I've dealt with) are taught to think for themselves either, but worse, they actually believe they know it all. Most US (and UK) degrees suck - they teach outmoded practices, bad design skills and very little that is useful, but the graduates believe that they know the right way and don't listen and don't want to learn.
Slashdot posters (or stack overflow posters, or any other real technical forum) are a rarity, we're generally here to learn, to discuss, and we don't mind too much about hanging our ignorance out for others to correct. Those are the people you want to employ, regardless of where they come from - but the US education system does not produce those, it produces people with unrealistic expectations and people who believe they no longer need to learn.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Then you're doing something wrong. I'm sorry for this, but I can't stand people who blame job markets for being unemployed. There's *always* work, so long as you know where to look.
If you have a CMU degree, developing software at home *casually* for 20 years is hardly an endorsement. I could say that same thing and I'm only 30. Being unemployed for 6 out of 7 years is also very, very bad. I'd think twice about even touching you for *any* job if I found that out. Hell, working in MacD's would have looked better - I've recommended IT staff for employment even though they've been working at supermarkets, etc. lately because I *know* it's a tough market and they need to take what they can get. It also makes me wonder what the hell you *have* been doing for those years, if you weren't working. Maybe you travelled, maybe you lived off your savings, maybe you started your own business, maybe you did other things, but hell - 6 entire years of unemployment is a bad place to start from. You think you're going to land an MS job with that on your record (not that I've ever seen the big deal with MS jobs, to be honest)?
And I've found jobs online and offline - the best ones are normally online but I've landed some lovely places offline too, usually by word-of-mouth (90% of my clients over the last nine years have been by word-of-mouth). And I don't mean "keyboard shuffler" jobs. I make a good living providing IT management to schools (state and private, primary, secondary, college, already supported for IT or not) in London - hardly an "easy" job to land, especially for a kid straight out of university, especially for one with *NO* work experience when they started, especially for nine years of full employment in a row (seven self-employed but often working for only a handful of clients on a regular basis) and *especially* when I was actually hired to work on critical IT systems in preference to the existing, "free", borough services provided to those schools & colleges. It's a matter of persistence and having something to show. Getting an interview and getting a job are vastly different things - the interview is HARD to get, the job shouldn't be if you've got to interview.
Something about your post suggests to me that you have FAR too high an expectation based on the fact that you have a skill that you have rarely demonstrated in a work environment, but mostly "at home" on toy projects. I can program in C, Z80 and x86 assembly. I can manage SQL databases. I've made my own toy operating systems. I can build and manage networks. None of that matters, even though I use it as part of my job. I'd love to have a job doing certain parts of that, but it's just not possible to fill my hours with the tasks I enjoy the most. I have dozens of those sorts of qualifications, projects, etc. too, they appear on my CV, but equally I have a full history of employment in a relevant sector. Recession? Stop blaming external factors for your expectations. England is in one of it's worst ever "recessions"... at the height of it, I left one job to seek out another because I wasn't enjoying it. I have a house with substantial mortgage, a wife who earns her share and (at the time) a newborn child. I competed for the new role against 50-year experienced IT managers, in a London borough, and walked into the job - not because I was cheap, not because I was perceived as being easily led, but because my history spoke for itself even though my employers understood 0.1% of what was on my CV.
I don't think "no one wanted to hire"... I think "no one wanted to hire YOU". I'd probably bin your CV if you have a six year unexplained gap in it and your biggest project was an MMORPG (I'm sorry, but it's a game... unless I'm a game developer, I *will* just ignore that project as nothing more than a hobby). I'd be worried that you can't find a job online (I view submissions from skilled IT people who submit on paper with suspicion if they could have filed online) - that's where the *best* IT jobs are... they are shor
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."
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."
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.
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
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
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.)
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...
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.
"It lasts, right now, for 1.25 years. Do the math."
Erm... 1.25 years of unemployment on a CV (and I don't know the rules but in most places you ARE allowed to do volunteer work and sometimes a small amount of actual work and still claim). Followed by the following thoughts in a potential employer's head:
"He was on benefits for over a year."
"He didn't do anything else in that time."
"If I employ him, there's nothing to stop him leaving in 3/6/9 months, whatever the cut-off point is, and then going back on full benefits for another year."
"Maybe he's using me to 'refresh' his benefits."
"I'm not going to get the best work out of him, and he's been idle for at least a year, and then he'll probably leave or get himself sacked."
"Why should I employ him?"
Unless you can answer that last question, there's nothing in it for an employer. It's harsh, yes, but true. Especially true as you get older... if you're going to employ a 40-year-old over a 30-year-old, they better have 10 years of experience to draw on! If they can't show that, you might as well employ the 30-year-old (who will want less money) and train him.
Perhaps, but the concept of zero didn't migrate into the mainstream of human culture via the Mayans. The height of Mayan civilization was pre-Columbian, and there's no evidence that their ideas made it across the Pacific, so they didn't have a chance to contribute their ideas to the rest of humanity.
Now, if they'd only filed a patent...
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
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
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.
I recall reading somewhere that in a basic programming concepts class, during the time when everyone was hopping on the comp sci bandwagon for easy money, there will be about half the people who come out of it simply unable to grasp such simple concepts as control structures and variables in any meaningful way -- no matter how good the instruction. The problem as I've come to see it is in India, your actual aptitude for programming isn't really relevant to whether you get into the training. I don't know why this is, because in theory this is tested for ahead of time.
The difference I see is that in the US, most people without such aptitude will change their majors. In India, it's no deterrent -- this is often the only way out of abject poverty and so they will understandably fight tooth and nail to complete their training and enter the workforce. This in turn heavily weights the available pool of developers in the direction of "incompetent".
It's not that the people of India are as a whole any less likely to have the ability to succeed in computer-related careers than anywhere else in the world population -- but desperation drives a disproportionately large percentage of unqualified people into this career path.
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"
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.
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).