It would also be an enormous ethics violation, and thanks to those geeks among us who use a different email username for each site we submit data too it would be simple to prove what was happening.
Actually, it would not be an "ethics" issue. It would be a violation of federal election law. Any federal employee (up to the president, because he lives on federal property) is barred from soliciting or accepting contributions on federal government property. (That's why both major political parties maintain offices near the Capitol, in commercial office buildings, where members of either house can make phone solicitations.)
One of the early flaps in the Clinton administration was just what was suggested: people who had emailed the White House were spammed with solicitations for contributions. The Federal Election Commission stepped in, and I think (don't remember) that everybody realized that this was new legal ground--but the practice was stopped.
What may be a very good option for you to consider is improving your Internet connectivity and then exploring VOIP (Voice Over IP). DirecTV has a satellite data arm called DirecWay that offers two-way broadband via satellite dish. (We have considered it, but only as a fallback to our existing circuit.)
Once you have the broadband, look at VOIP...
Once you have broadband, you might want to look at VOIP, especially Vonage. They will assign you a number and provide "local" calling service to every exchange in your "home" area code(s). VOIP quality is improving, and there are more and more people in the newsgroups providing helpful advice.
Is this the BEST solution?
Your mileage may vary. This is certainly a cutting edge solution--and, as the old adage goes, it may be hard to stay on the cutting edge without bleeding. If you're looking for better bandwidth anyway, it's worth taking a look at.
This is the New Media equivalent of trolling
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hi!
One of the challenges of any media business is producing a constant stream of content. If, for instance, SlashDot only put up two or three stories a day, far fewer people would read the site--and they'd have far fewer page hits on which to place banner ads.
BBC Online has exactly the same problem--they have to (in industry parlance) "feed the monster" to keep readers coming back. In interactive media, like SlashDot and BBC Online, they can't just post stories--they really need to post stories that will prompt readers to add comments. (That's why 'red meat' stories like Microsoft cheating on the antitrust deal get posted, and obituaries of Internet pioneers sometimes don't. The Microsoft stories generate all kinds of traffic.) The web site has a continuing need to come up with stories that will generate a lot of interest, generate user comments, and generate a lot of traffic.
It's worth pointing out that in this case BBC Online has succeeded famously: their article landed on SlashDot, so they have hundreds of thousands of additional page views. Which means hundreds of thousands of (billable) ad banners.
Think of it as editorial trolling
In effect, the editors of BBC Online are trolling. Editors and producers keep lists of story subjects that can be dusted off and run any time--even if the subject has been covered before. They're called "evergreen stories" because (like the trees) they never change from one season to the next. I've worked at one of the major television networks in the U.S., and I've seen the whiteboard listing evergreen stories--including "new concerns about Internet security," "Internet dating--is it for you?" "Internet dating--these people found romance!" and a bunch of others. "Age bias among computer programmers" is just another evergreen story that can be run on a Friday afternoon (typically the slowest news period of the week).
Is there any truth to this age bias notion?
Read the article critically: the article, and the "study" on which it reports, are based on anecdotal evidence. (Even when the study throws statistics around, the stats are based on what people told the researchers.) There is anecdotal evidence that Martians landed in Roswell, New Mexico--which is a far cry from saying there's any real proof. While somebody looking to cry "the sky is falling!" can quote anecdotes of people who can't seem to find a job after taking a class, there are plenty of us old folks out here making a buck.
A little anecdotal evidence...
Case in point, me. I'm 44, mostly bald, with quite a bit of gray in what hair is left. I'm working on-site for a local client, with a team of 18 programmers whose average age (including the summer interns) is about 23.
The anecdotes suggest that younger coders are more productive; they write more lines of code; and that they are willing to work longer hours. Nope, nope, and nope. The hands-down champion code writer is an embedded guy who manages during the day, and codes at home all night. The absolute go-to programmers on the team are all in their 40s. And when the project was in crunch time, those same 40-somethings (including me) were the ones staying late, putting in the time, grinding out the project.
The kids? Hey--they have dates. They have plans for the weekend. They're generally (not always) gone at 5:30. They can spend all day asking questions before they write a line of code--and we have to carefully review their code before we release it into production. The old folks on the project are the acknowledged experts on the language--and we're using C#, which only appeared two years ago.
I don't mean to dump on the young people (and several of them read SlashDot). Several of them are extremely talented. But the older developers are much more comfortable working with new tools and platforms, much more experienced (and relaxed) working in a high-pressure environment, and are much more capable of sucking it up and delivering when it's crunch time. We have been there, done that, and will do it yet again.
We explored the issues involved with tracking humans for a client a couple of years ago. Bottom line: you can only track humans who a) know they are being tracked, and b) are willing to participate. The converse is true: you cannot track someone who is not willing to participate.
The crucial point is this: it is possible to do field trials with willing subjects, to demonstrate the feasibility of receiving signals. However--it is child's play to defeat the system. And a tracking system that can be defeated is substantially worse than no system at all.
How GPS works
Most geeks understand the idea behind GPS, in the sense of determining position based on comparing the time signatures broadcast from multiple satellites. What many people don't realize is how low the signal strength actually is: it's actually not much stronger than background radiation. GPS works because DSPs can dig the signals out of that background radiation and get the data. Key point: Very Weak Signal.
Result: It's easy to defeat
Because the GPS signal is so weak, you lose GPS lock (the ability to receive signals from enough satellites) all the time. You lose it going into practically any building; you lose it in tunnels; you can frequently lose it in urban areas (like Manhattan). As a consequence, GPS chipsets simply store (and report) their last known good position. That's usually a good thing. If you're tracking a convict, it could be a very bad thing.
A very bad thing: here's why
A while ago we were contacted by a government official with a specific challenge: in the official's words, "In 40% of all homicides the victim has an outstanding Protection From Abuse order against her attacker." I don't know how accurate that figure is--but it's a compelling number. What the official wanted to do was put a GPS tracking device on people (99% men) with current PFA orders. Great idea!
Except...it is brutally easy to defeat the GPS tracker. Just wrap the device with aluminum foil--or simply cover the GPS antenna with aluminum foil. The GPS unit will simply lose lock--and keep recording your position as the last known good (LKG) position. You can then travel across town, secure in the knowledge that the device cannot report your actual location and warn your ex-wife. And after you've successfully beaten her to death, you'll be able to present the county's own data to demonstrate that while the crime was in progress you were at home--because the GPS unit thinks you're still at the LKG point.
Bottom line:
Great idea. (And I'll elaborate in another message.) But not a viable idea for tracking perps.
Simply put, you should probably list "do enough business to have zoning problems" as one of your business goals. You have to be doing business before you have to worry about whether doing business from your home--and the Number One issue for startup companies is doing business. Here's a list of things you need to worry about, ranked in order of how often I obsess about them:
Cash flow The big employers in town worry about "booking the sale" or "shipping the product." You have to worry first, last, and always about getting paid. You have to deliver the goods, you have to send the bill--but you have to make sure to follow up if the check is late, continue to follow up through a dozen excuses, and even drop by to pick up the check if need be. The grocery store does not accept accounts receivable.
Credit cards Forget what the slick TV ads tell you. If you're doing project work for a limited number of clients, your cash flow (see #1) is at the mercy of your client's accounts payable people. MasterCard doesn't take accounts receivable, either. Use debit cards, require clients to front money for travel, etc., and do not (NOT NOT NOT) float yourself money from a credit card. Loan sharks offer better rates.
Marketing
Big Charlie from Queens, my sometime employee (and sometime employer) reminds me frequently that if I'm not spending 40% of my time marketing my buns, I'm going to go hungry. In project consulting work, that's a tad high--but not much: even if you are hip deep in a killer project with a fabulously wealthy client, keep networking, keep hustling, keep looking out for the next gig and the one after that.
Personal relationships Working from home can do funny things to your relationships. For some people (including my wife and me) working at home can be a terrific thing--and it can be very stressful. When you're both in that state of just-got-the-big-check euphoria (I'm a programmer, she's a book editor) long walks in the woods while the kids are in school can be a blast. But when you're on deadline, and so is she, the stress level can soar. (When the kids start complaining about having too much junk food, and asking to have things like salad, that's a cue.)
Credibility You're not "self-employed," a "small entrepreneur," or "on the cutting edge of new working/living patterns." To 99% of your potential clients you're "some guy who works out of his basement." They've all see the Dilbert "clothing optional" comic strip (and they will all ask you about it) and your choice of working patterns will mean that some of them will never do business with you. Buy a tie, wear a suit, bathe. Shave. Learn to eat with utensils--all the things CDWS (cubicle-dwelling wage slaves) do. The more you look like them, the more you sound like them, the more comfortable they will be.
Credibility #2
You have to do more than walk right and talk right. You have to D-E-L-I-V-E-R. Every single time. You will have a tough time to start: your business will start to prosper when you start doing repeat business: because there is no marketing, advertising, or sales promotion like a long list of clients that have hired you repeatedly. A key performance metric should be how often you have worked for the same client.
Putting enough value on your time
Lots of startup consultants charge way too little. WAY too little. Worse, lots of startup consultants confuse "being busy" with "working." You need to market. You need to network. You need to find projects to try out new concepts and ideas--and usually those are pro bono gigs. But you need to nail down a chunk of billable hours each and every week. You cannot bill more than 30-32 hours per week without seriously hurting your marketing and networking time--and all the stuff like taxes and billing and collections, etc. You have to bill enough to make enough in those thirty hours. And you have to hit those thirty hours week after week after w
You're not the first community to consider the idea. Kutztown, Pennsylvania has had a very successful experience in building out a Municipal Area Network--it would be well worth your while to study how Kutztown set about doing what they've done, and how they did it. Here's a brief overview PDF file from a vendor--it's a vendor's sales piece, but there's a good intro. A couple of key points:
Kutztown has operated a municipal power company for 100 years--they had all kinds of experience with things like poles, bucket trucks, etc. In addition, they had existing utility rights of way.
Kutztown did not enact a municipal franchise (that is, create a monopoly). They built out their fiber network alongside competing cable TV and telephone providers. The competitors grumbled--and IIRC Verizon threatened court action--but Kutztown played fairly.
More resources
A copy of an article from the Allentown Morning Call describing the Kutztown project in more detail, including gripes from local utility competitors. Especially interesting is the article's comments on the experiences of the city of Ashland, Oregon in forcing substantial service improvements from their incumbent (monopoly) cable TV company: Wired in Kutztown (Note: this is a Word document, not an HTML page)
Concord, Massachusetts review of Kutztown: this is an interesting paper by a Concord, Ma. resident who was evidently involved in planning a FTTH implementation there. Among other things, he includes notes from conversations with Frank Caruso in Kutztown (and Mr. Caruso's phone number), as well as statistics from Home Utilicom's first year of operation (400 subscribers out of 2200 households in town--they expect 700+ by mid-2003). Concord, MA study
Hometown Utilicom: a little short on pizzazz but a place to start looking for contact information. Note that the home page includes a link to current HU statistics: 442 users as of 2/5/2003. Hometown Utilicom (Kutztown, PA)
A key point:
Note the user statistics on the HU web site, and carefully read the end of the David Allen paper: key to a successful buildout is reselling cable TV: Internet access alone doesn't generate enough revenue. That observation came originally from Frank Caruso of Kutztown (David Allen is quoting him in the paper).
Look at the existing municipal infrastructure--do you have the physical plant? Do you have billing systems, etc.? Are you overbuilding on top of an incumbent cable TV provider? Will Dartmouth College view you as a threat--or can you count on them for cooperation? What percentage of the town can you expect to subscribe for cable? For phone service? For Internet access? How firm are those figures? How did you arrive at them?
What kind of capital funding sources do you have access to? Is there any state economic development funding available?
What kind of peering/partnership opportunities do you have? If you have an incumbent cable TV provider, might you consider some kind of joint operating agreement? Might you consider some kind of joint operation with Dartmouth (considering the property taxes Hanover doesn't collect on college-owned property)?
David Allen of Concord, Ma., is entirely correct in his advice to the Town Selectmen: don't do this as a hobby, or a "let's see how it goes" kind of thing: do it as a business venture. That means a fully-thought-through business plan--and it includes key performance indicators and a hard-and-fast exit strategy if you cannot make your numbers. Kutztown has done it--learn from them, and maybe you can too.
The fellow who is promoting has a decent idea--albeit not an original one. The concept was promoted in Allentown (an hour south of Wilkes-Barre) almost two years ago. And prompted by some of the same ideas, the local power company (PP&L) developed a subsidiary to locate and light redundant fiber along some of its rights-of-way throughout northeastern Pennsylvania.
Two thoughts:
First, this is just a proposal--and a proposal that heavily depends (I'm sure) on state technology grant funding. Consider the last paragraph of the WNEP article:
Plans for the project will be unveiled to the public Sunday at Genetti Hotel and Conference Center in Wilkes Barre at 3:00 p.m. Greco will also present his plan to Governor Ed Rendell on Monday when he is in town for a private economic summit. He hopes to get a promise of state support for his plan.
Translation: Greco is fishing for a six-figure grant from the Pennsylvania Technology Investment Authority, and is hoping for support from the governor.
Second, just because he's fishing for a big grant doesn't mean that it isn't a bad idea. Several people have criticized this as a "build it and they will come" investment. Yeah, and so was the Interstate System. Which will go down in history as the single most tranformational use of federal government money in the history of our nation. (For fun--ponder the impact of building all those highways on the auto, steel, aluminum, glass, plastic, concrete, paint, and petroleum industries over the years.)
Using state economic development funding to develop IP-based infrastructure makes an enormous amount of sense. Adding another inch to the depth of pavement on a street in Wilkes-Barre isn't going to make a big dent in Luzerne County unemployment. But providing low-cost bandwidth might induce somebody to stay in town, rather than move his business elsewhere--or convince somebody in New York or Philadelphia to decide to locate his business someplace a lot saner (and safer), where costs are a low lower. In a sense, the question to ask isn't why they're doing it--the question should be, why haven't they done anything sooner?
These numbers are as dumb as you claim Talbot is. Clue 1: Employees have more overhead than just the money that goes to their pay check. Clue 2: Taxes.
Hi!
Thanks for your comment. Please note that in my original post I wrote: "6 full-time equivalent employees at a fully-loaded cost of $60,000 apiece (including salary, taxes, benefits, etc.)." [Emphasis added]
"Fully-loaded" is a standard accounting term--you might think of it as the "soup to nuts" price: all of the directly-related costs are included. I was a bit redundant in the parenthetical statement that followed (spelling out that I meant salary, taxes, benefits, etc.). All of those costs are included in the meaning of the fully-loaded cost of a full-time equivalent employee.
And yes--I did mean $60K/year to be a good average for a full-time equivalent at a magazine publisher. Magazines, in general, pay very, very little. (LOTS of Madison Avenue magazines depend upon "interns" and "assistants" who supplement their minimum-wage salaries with substantial trust fund income.) I'd really figure that they have two or three people making big bucks (in magazine industry terms, over $60K) and one or two making $25K-30K; and a handful of part-timers getting small bucks and zero benefits. Key word: average. The bottom line: $360K is a pretty good figure for gross payroll. (Yes--I have worked in the publishing business.)
Office space varies widely in price--largely depending upon the prestige of the building and it's location. A brand-new building with elevators, a bank in the lobby, glass elevators and a four-story atrium lobby will cost a lot of money in rent. A 24' by 48' section of a "office/flex" building (essentially prefabricated steel structures erected on a concrete slab--what you'll see in most industrial parks) will cost you substantially less.
In either case, rent is priced as the annual rent per square foot. Somebody paying $120 per square foot in mid-town Manhattan is paying that for the year--or $10 per square foot per month.
I haven't priced commercial real estate very recently (within the past year) but there was plenty of space to be had for $8 per sq. foot in my area (Lehigh Valley--Allentown, Pennsylvania) a year ago. I'd bet there still is.
Business Plan Math for the Startup
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Salon Asks for Help
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· Score: 5, Insightful
MEMO:
TO: David Talbot
FROM: John Murdoch, consultant
RE: Salon Business Plan
Executive summary: It's the math, stupid.
Dear Dave:
I have read of your impending demise on SlashDot, including links to an article on the Globe and Mail site suggesting that you are paying $200,000 per month in rent for space in San Francisco and a smaller--but similarly mind-blowing--amount on space in New York. I also read your plea to readers, saying that if each of your 53,000 subscribers just signed up one additional subscriber, why Salon would be able to break even. America would continue to have a vocally left-wing e-rag; the earth would continue to revolve.
The business problem
It's the math, stupid. If your assertion in the editorial plea is correct (that you need an additional 50,000 subscriptions to break even) then your annual budget is in the neighborhood of $3,000,000. But your annual rent ($200,000/month) runs to $2,400,000 a year--leaving $600,000 for staff and editorial content.
Simply put, you have zero reason to have any office space in San Francisco or New York. You're running a virtual magazine, remember? That's a synonym for website. If Rob Malda and Jeff Bates can run SlashDot from Holland, Michigan, what makes you think you need to be paying $100 per square foot? You need a decent connection to your hosting sites, and a place to keep the handful of full-time employees left on the payroll.
How you could re-organize
File for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. That protects you from your creditors while you develop a plan for re-organization to submit to a bankruptcy court judge. Yeah--your main money men will take it in the shorts: John Warnock and the Silicon Valley liberals who fronted the $81,000,000 you have pissed away will have to write off their investments. But the big thing Chapter 11 will do is get you out of those, um, burdensome (read: IN-blinking-SANE) leases. No bankruptcy judge in the country will allow you to pay for top-dollar real estate for the purpose of hosting a web site--the leases will be broken. Then you can move on to the rest of your re-organization.
Re-organization:
You have 53,000 subscribers--some pay $18.50 per year, but most pay $30 per year to avoid the ads. Let's assume an average subscription of $24, and (round numbers) gross revenue of $1,270,000. Let's figure on 6 full-time equivalent employees at a fully-loaded cost of $60,000 apiece (including salary, taxes, benefits, etc.): that's $360,000 in payroll. 1000 square feet of "office/flex" space in any moderate industrial park will run you approximately $8 per square foot per year--that's $8,000 in rent. Toss in a thousand a month for heat/light/power/telephone, and another thousand for office expenses, furnishings, furniture, and equipment--soup to nuts, your total "SG&A" expenses run to $392,000. Leaving you $880,000 per year for writers and hosting fees. Top-notch editorial doesn't come for free--but almost Nine Hundred Grand buys you a lot of articles at a thousand bucks a pop.
But don't let that stop you from begging...
Hey--public broadcasting stations have been threatening their imminent demise for decades. So, for that matter, have dozens of television evangelists. If you're just scamming your subscribers for a bit more cash--hey, it helps the bottom line. Even the politically-correct have to pay the rent....
But let's be clear about one thing
Your financial problems are problems of your own making. Paying millions of dollars for glam real estate was "making a statement." It sure was--"we are D-U-M-B!" You have the ability to solve your problems--use the bankruptcy provisions the law allows you. Doing so will keep you in business, and allow you to continue to have a voice in American public discourse. If you fail to do so, your voice will be silenced by your own management failure--not some secret cabal of "voices in the present administration" who might want to silence you.
It was stated, as it was repeated. Your response was to cite the obvious literal exception (which is itself a red herring) to a rule of economics that appears in every text, is taught in every class, and which has been part of basic economic theory for centuries. I am not going to argue a red herring. The point stands.
You assertion is that "every company has to pay its employees enough to buy its products" is
True
Is a rule of economics that appears in every text
Is taught in every economics class
Has been part of basic economic theory for centuries
Is that your assertion?
If so, I beg to disagree. I have a degree in economics, and I'm an adjunct professor in the MBA program at DeSales University.
The assertion is not true in the limited sense in which you first asserted it--as I've pointed out, any manufacturer of capital goods cannot expect its employees to be able to buy its products. Think of locomotives, tractors, industrial equipment; think of cement kilns and distillation columns and gas turbines; think of any product that is not a consumer good. Boeing does not expect its employees to be able to buy 777s. That's not an exception, nor is it a "red herring" (a term from murder mysteries, not economics, BTW).
The assertion is false in the universal sense as well: the output of an entire region or even nation may be beyond the means of its citizens--by definition "exports" are products for which the best markets are elsewhere. If the local market can consume the goods, there would be nothing to export. Countries that are exporters of diamonds, gold, coffee, cocoa, and other commodities export those items because they do not have sufficient demand within their borders for the products.
And let's be clear about our terms as well: don't mistake the sociological term "middle class" for the economic meaning of the term: the middle class is employed. Having a home in the 'burbs doesn't make you middle class (in economics) having a job does.
It would be helpful to see the cite for your "Federal agency study".
Like you, I landed a couple of small jobs in the interim, but St. Louis is not the hopping market that NYC is, and I've been perm all my career, so I don't have all the networking contacts that you need to get all those contracting jobs. I've been working on them, but it's been very slow. I've also considered moving to some city that is actually hiring Perl people, but uprooting the family is a huge step, and I'm not that desperate, yet.
First, let me apologize for leaping to the conclusion that you are young--very sorry about that. Second, perhaps you might disabuse me of another notion: my sense is that zillions of kids straight out of college got jobs writing CGI/Perl applications--and when the dot-com bust happened, they ended up on the street. Where, one might imagine, it is a buyer's market. It may well be that H-1Bs are part and parcel of the same crowd (he's a kid, and he's here on an H-1B visa). Are you competing in the job marketplace against H-1Bs--or the dot-com dropouts?
Another thought for you: I'm an independent. Sometimes I'll take a fixed-bid job; frequently I'll do a "fixed budget" job. If I'm onsite at the clients inevitably somebody will ask how in the world I can stand the stress of never knowing where my next job will come from. My reply is that the difference between a "permanent" employee and a temp is that the temp knows that he is only on the payroll for the next three months. I'm not just being glib--I've watched lots of people in permanent positions spend chunks of their careers working at the same version level of the same technology. A former client had a wonderful question: does he have five years of experience--or one year of experience five times? Think of the people you know who are maintaining a project they wrote three or four years ago, that are not using the current version of the technology.
My buddy Charlie (who posted a comment in this thread earlier) works for a Major Media Company--well known for its rodent mascot. Charlie has worked for a number of companies in New York City--and he's always been a permanent employee. He's pretty up front: he works with the current version of technology, or he's gone. (I'm about a hundred miles due west of New York City, and I find New Yorkers entertaining--they have this wonderfully blunt way of asserting that kind of thing.)
Even though Charlie's a permanent employee, he effectively approaches his job like a temp--he participates in beta tests, he develops code at home, he volunteers for the pilot projects, he is always looking to try something new. So if/when the bubble bursts and he has to look for a job, he can claim experience with.NET and SQL Server 2000 and Windows XP and all the rest--because he's made the effort to stay current. On the other hand, there's a guy down the hall from him who is still working in VB 3.0--16-bit VB. Who had better be on his knees every morning in fervent prayer that Mickey is still making money, because if he ever has to look for a new job, he is going to have a lousy looking resume.
My point: Even if you're a "permanent" employee, you only have a job for the next three months. And in this day and age, when "corporate loyalty" means "we'll give you a t-shirt when we need you to attend a rally in 'support' of our executives, right before we fire you" you have to be looking out for your own interests. Which means looking forward to pick the technologies that will be in demand, and thinking about how you can develop those skills.
John
P.S. Moving your family from St. Louis to the New York area might be nuts--but just a thought: DB2 experience is a very valuable thing in the NY Metro area. JM
I just linked to the Daily Yalie site, and in their comments on the article there's a note from a former columnist in the Yale Herald: back in 2000 he wrote a column pointing out Yale's prediliction for using the SSN for a password, and how anybody with half a brain could use that to hack all sorts of Yale systems. Definitely worth a look--and it will lead you to the conclusion that Yale's admissions people are, well, stupid.
Citing an exception doesn't make an argument. The point stands as stated. If the cost of living exceeds the wages of the middle class (which isn't hard when wages are zero), businesses will either fail or lower their prices, and since companies could care less if they fail (since senior management all walk out the door in a solid gold tuxedos), well, there you go.
No--the point you defend wasn't stated. The point made was that every company had to pay their employees enough to buy their products--otherwise ("like gravity," he wrote) the economy will collapse. My rejoinder (any manufacturer of capital equipment disproves the theory) isn't a "few examples" or a "red herring." I used a couple of examples of capital equipment manufacturers--but the list is enormous.
The cost of living You write "if the cost of living exceeds the income of the middle class (which isn't hard when wages are zero)"--and make a mistake. If your wages are zero, you're not in the middle class. You are poor. If you are out of work and cannot afford to buy anything, and many others are in the same position, then businesses directly affected by consumer spending--particularly discretionary consumer spending--will feel the impact. However, businesses are not faced with a binary set of outcomes--profit or failure. And only with a catastrophic rate of unemployment (on the order of 25% or higher) will you see widespread business closure.
Learning new skills
Then they start over with no experience (according to HR) at half their salary, sell their house and move into a small apartment and slowly watch their savings absorbed by taxes and inflation while they hurriedly fill out financial aid forms so their kids can go to college and learn...new skills.
Um, no. Software development experience is software development experience. If you've spent two years developing GIS applications, but have another 11 years of experience coding, working with databases, etc., you have a lot more experience than somebody with two years of experience with GIS. And especially anybody with no experience, but a vendor certificate from ESRI, MapInfo, or another vendor. Pay rates reflect demand for skills: if you have experience and the requisite skill set, the money will be there. If you don't have much experience and don't have the skill set, your only hope is to take a low rate and hope to gain experience you can use next time. It's tough to graph out price/demand curves in HTML, but this is simple microeconomic pricing theory.
That's not the case here. First, you have a dubious statistic (5.7% unemployment among American members of IEEE) put forth by a clearly-biased source. Second, even if the statistic is true
Third: Demeaning the unemployment rate with the team whining is simply infuriating. I suggest you try being out of work for 7 months (like me), with a BSEE and MSCS and a Sun Java 2 Programmer certification. The fact is that companies are not willing to hire unless you have on-the-job experience (can't just read it in a book, nosiree bob!) in a whole laundry list of technologies. They are unwilling to train anyone, and can't seem to fathom that people can learn things without that wonderful on-the-job experience.
Put yourself in the company's position You're not in business to provide job opportunities to earnest, diligent folk who have been working hard to get vendor certifications. You are in business to sell a product, perform a service, move material from point A to point B, or otherwise earn a buck. And--as you have noticed--earning a buck is not easy these days, for you or your prospective employer. What does the company do?
Any reasonable business manager--any competent business manager--is going to 1) seriously question why anybody needs to be hired at all, and 2) if somebody simply must be hired, look/wait for candidates with years of real experience. That's not prejudice or foolishness--it's called 'mitigating risk.' (Five syllables that can also be expressed in the acronym CYA.)
So when a manager sees a resume from somebody with two or three years of experience developing database applications, and two or three years experience developing with Java, he or she will invariably pick that resume over one with a lot of vendor certificates, but no experience. That's enormously frustrating when you're young--but it is a fact of life.
Two points: First, yes--experience is more valuable than reading about the subject in a book. An oft-cited statistic (although I think it must be exaggerated) is that 70% of IT projects fail. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not--what's important is that IT managers believe it. In consequence they have come to really value "full life-cycle experience"--starting on a new project, working through design, development, deployment, and perhaps into a second release. Why? Because it indicates that you are less likely than most to paint yourself into a logical corner. You are less likely to quit when the project bogs down. You are more likely to contribute to a successful team. In hockey they keep a statistic called the on-ice scoring differential: there are players who never rack up a lot of points, but the teams with a lot of high-differential guys always seem to win. If you have gone full life-cycle on two or three projects you may not be the star player--but chances are your team will score. You simply don't (and can't) get that from a book--or from a training class. You get that from experience--either from working with a good team and a good tech lead, or from hard experience working for a bozo.
Second, you can get experience--valuable experience that will help you get a better job next time. The woods are full of non-profits that don't have a web page--or have a web page that truly stinks. They can all use a much more interactive web site--give them a data-driven web site (perhaps using SlashCode, so it is self-maintaining) and you have a showpiece. If you have done something particularly clever (like making it data-driven, so it is self-maintaining) you can turn your interview into a show-and-tell: here's a site I developed, and here's what's happening under the hood. When conversation in the interview turns to maintaining state or ensuring secure access, you can draw an analogy to how you solved the problem already for North Coast Therapeutic Riding or somebody else. (And, I might add, make the world a better place at the same time.)
P.P.S. I just got a job, starting Monday, but I had to take a 20% pay cut, and I was not overpaid before. How would you like that to happen to you? Would you whine?
About this time last year I was hip-deep in the second round of proposals for a big job: a little under $75,000 for the first phase, with a probable follow-on for another $25,000--plus some vigorish on the equipment and server software. Nothing huge--but a nice bit of work that would let me hire a couple of friends, and build a relationship with a big brokerage house that would likely be the source of more work down the road. We won the job--and were set to start on September 17.
Except, on September 11th, the World Trade Center collapsed. And the brokerage firm that was funding the project collapsed with it. My project, and my cash flow for 6 months, collapsed with it. I did not whine, I did not write letters to Congress blaming my troubles on H-1Bs. I called old clients, I picked up dribs and drabs, I networked like crazy, I hustled my cakes. I just landed a very sweet gig recently--but I had to give up a chunk of money on my typical day rate to get it. I'm still not whining--I spent some of my time over the past year developing new skills (FreeBSD) and improving others (GIS applications, Apache). I developed web sites for two non-profits, and helped a third network their offices. I gained experience.
You're evidently a young person--and you're faced with the conundrum we all had to face: how do you get experience when nobody will hire you? You have to find people who will give you a chance--sometimes by taking a pay cut, sometimes by working for free. Some day you'll wake up and discover that you really have been there, and done that, and that all of a sudden you're the most experienced person in the office. It will come, but only with time, effort, and hustle. And no whining.
A company MUST PAY their employees enough to afford to buy their product or THEY WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS. PERIOD. It's like gravity, fellas. Can't get around it no matter how many accountants and lawyers you hire.
This would appear to spell doom for Ferrari, Lamborghini, DeBeers, Moet et Chandon--and Freightliner, Terex, and Boeing. In fact, it would appear to spell doom for any company making a "luxury" good or any kind of capital equipment. It is simply not the case--an enormous number of companies produce goods that their employees can never hope to be able to afford. This does not mean that Pratt & Whitney is running a sweatshop--just that they make big-ticket capital items that are not sold at the mall.
Simple historical fact: What is an historical fact is that over time any job with specialized technical knowledge will be automated to the point that less-expensive workers can do it. The classic economic case study is typesetting: from the time of Gutenberg until the early 1880s type was set by hand. It was a time-consuming process that required real skill--a capable, quick typesetter could make good money. When Ottmar Mergenthaler introduced his Linotype machine (which made it possible for anybody who could use a keyboard to set better type in a fraction of the time) approximately 90% of typesetters lost their jobs. More or less overnight.
Programming computers is a specialized task that requires expert knowledge. Guess what? The natural response of any businessman will be to try to find a cheaper solution. Some are looking overseas (such as Bangalore), others are importing workers on temp visas. The long-term trend will be to simpler and simpler computer systems that require less skilled talent--and talent with less skill. A good case in point is in small accounting systems: ten years ago there were a lot of people writing accounting systems for small companies. Nowadays those companies buy QuickBooks, or go upscale to buy Solomon or Best. The marketplace for single-user PC accounting software development is essentially gone.
Some people recognize this... ...and learn new skills. Nobody is looking for a programmer to write a G/L package in FoxPro anymore. But there are people looking for programmers to write GIS software; and people looking for programmers to write Palm OS or WinCE software; and people looking for programmers to write Web software; and so on. And the programmers who continue to focus on learning those skills, and learning to work in new markets, and learning to adapt to a changing marketplace will thrive.
Those who do not--who just expect the same skills in the same industry to last them a lifetime--will ultimately be left with nothing to do but whine to Congress about H1Bs taking their jobs.
First, the math: If somebody wrote an article asserting that 235,000 members of the National Council of Teachers of English had sent a letter to Congress I'd have just let it pass. You can depend upon English teachers to never split an infinitive, but numbers sometimes escape them. Engineers, on the other hand, have no excuse: this was not 235,000 EE's, it was the US trade association to which they belong.
Second, the subject is moot Despite the fact that Congress authorized up to 160,000 H-1B visas per year, the Globe article points out that only 40,000 were used last year, and only half of those were for IT jobs. Look at the job sites: again, and again, and again you will see "We will|do|can not sponsor H-1B applicants." Petitioning Congress to limit the number of H-1B visas when they're not being used is kind of beside the point.
Third, they're whining C'mon--unemployment of 5.7%? That's hardly a catastrophe--and the numbers are deeply suspect. First, not every EE is a programmer (or works in IT). Second, not every programmer is an EE--and in point of fact a lot of EEs have little business attempting to program. Much like Computer Science curricula, EE programs focused on IT tend to focus on skills that aren't in demand--and ignore skills that are important to a lot of commercial programming. Databases don't fall within the purview of a EE program--but database programming is a big part of the IT job market. If a company brings in somebody from the Indian subcontinent on an H-1B visa to write stored procedures on Oracle, does an EE lose a job? Post hoc ergo propter hoc (logical fallacy of false cause).
Fourth, what solution do they propose? Bleating to Congress is a lovely thing for the association's executives to do, in order to demonstrate to their members that the execs deserve to be paid. But what exactly do they propose? That we track down all of these people on H-1B visas and ship them home? With their husbands or wives, with their children? Even if those children, born in the U.S.A., are U.S. citizens?
A Word from the English Teachers: Stand up, clear your throat, and recite with me:
The New Colossus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch whose flame is imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips.
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I think it would be a big mistake to count Transmeta out any time soon. I say that not because I'm a penguin-loving Linus-worshipper. To the contrary, I primarily use Microsoft development tools, and when I'm feeling giddy about Unix I use FreeBSD. The only Linux boxes around here belong to paying customers.
So why not write off Transmeta? Simply put, they're working their way into the product channel. Transmeta does have a very low-power chip--and that Transmeta technology is at the core of an emerging form of hardware: the smarter embedded system. Don't think "desktop replacement"--think "death to the PLC."
What's a PLC? Programmable Logic Controllers are tiny CPUs that appear in all sorts of specialty uses: controllers, valves, automated-just-about-anything. They're cheap, they're generally very reliable--and they have zero memory, have very limited functionality, and require programmers who demand significant coin. When you try to add a feature to an embedded application you will typically a response on the order of "that will take--at least--200 bytes of memory. And we only have 68 bytes left. So what feature do you want to drop to do this?"
Coming soon, to a factory floor near you... The Palm OS, WinCE, and the Transmeta chips are going to change all that. Handhelds and rugged semi-embedded handhelds are appearing in larger numbers--with gigabytes of flash storage, and 128 MB of RAM. Skip counting bytes--add all the features you want. Connectivity? They have 802.11 already embedded, along with USB, serial ports, etc., etc., etc. Some of the vendors I've browsed recently include InfoCater and SyntegraTech; they're both distributors for Tablets, WebPads, and handhelds that run with WinCE or Midori Linux. Very, very cool stuff.
Laying off 20% of your staff may be painful--but it is not the same thing as shutting the doors. For example, note that VA Software is still around....
One other point: maybe your firm is different, but I've suffered through enough poorly-written consulting-firm code to realize that said consulting firms have hardly cornered the market on hiring good software engineers, nor do they necessarily have any better understanding of good software engineering practices than an in-house developer does.
That's entirely true: practically everybody I talk to about a prospective project asks me who we've done work for. Nobody ever asks who we have worked for twice. But that's a very important metric: how many clients have given you another project after you delivered the first one? How many clients have given you a fifth, or a sixth, or a twelfth?
In the case of this thread, the original poster is stuck with a contract shop--he thinks his options are an outsourcing company in India. My point was to emphasize that unless his project is huge, he's a lot better off looking for outsourcing help closer to home. One option is to hire a firm like us (and nobody has ever suggested that our code was anything less than spectacular, I might add); another is to hire a Canadian firm. Any way he approaches this problem, his employers have decided they're going to outsource the project.
Depending upon the project and the consultant, you may not have to have a lot of in-house support for a project. One of our clients is a major industrial gas company--we've done a bunch of work for them over the years. Some of those projects have been turned over to in-house staff; others, generally smaller projects, have a corner of somebody's desk, but if the app needs tweaking they'll toss us a couple of bucks to make the changes. We're sufficiently tuned into the client's release procedures that we look like just another development team at roll-out.
Other consultants have different views--and perhaps they make more money than we do. My view on consulting is that I want a continuing relationship with a client, doing new and interesting stuff. I do not want to spend my career fixing bugs and writing tweaks for ancient projects on out-of-date platforms. The way to get to do that is to be the guy the client thinks of when they're talking about methodology, be it "software engineering" or something else.
Software development--particularly business software development--isn't about computer "science" or "engineering." It is about communication--communication amongst your team, communication with the computer, and communication through the computer with the end user. Communication is the key.
In hiring offshore developers you face substantially more complex challenges than you do working with a telecommuter. People who telecommute have established relationships with their employer--so they already know the implications of the tone of your voice, and what you mean when you preface your sentence with "I don't mean to be rude, but...." An offshore development team doesn't know that--you don't have the kind of relationship, based on trust, common bonds, and plain old time, that are necessary to make a team work.
There is a simple way to deal with that problem. It is called an airplane ticket. You go to them, or they (all of them) come to you--naturally that means you're the one on the plane. You can find a whole range of airfares, and a whole range of hotel prices, and a whole range of expenses involved in traveling literally halfway around the world. And unless your project is huge, you'll blow any conceivable cost savings on the travel.
You have other options
One (warning: self-serving promo coming) is to outsource to a consulting firm. They'll charge you a fee--but at the end of the project they will go away. You don't have any overhead costs, you don't have any headcount, and you don't have costs for machines and toolsets that you no longer need.
Another option is to consider outsourcing to an "offshore" country that is considerably easier to get to. If you're in the United States, you might look very carefully at consulting firms in Canada: the Canadian exchange rate makes tech workers up north very attractive. And Canadian "offshore" development avoids a lot of the problems with outsourcing to the Indian subcontinent: Canadian firms are (mostly) on the same time zones as U.S. firms; Canadians and Americans share a common language--most of the time; and Canadians and Americans share a common cultural heritage (most of the time). In general Canadians are more polite than Americans, more funny than Americans, and perhaps more serious about their work than a lot of Americans.
Believe it or not, sometimes outsourcing deals don't work out.... An old dictum of business law says that you don't need a contract when everybody is making money. You only need the contract when things go bad. That's true--and that's why you'll need a solid contract before you start any project with any outsourcing firm. It is a lot easier to find legal help with contracts between U.S. and Canadian firms than it is to find legal help with contracts between U.S. firms and Indian firms. And--(look for articles on this subject in Fortune or The Wall Street Journal) the legal climate in India is not as stable as you'll find in developed countries. Long before Enron hit the headlines with its accounting problems, Enron was embroiled in a long-term dispute (see this BBC article, for instance) with the government of India. There are all kinds of charges and counter-charges, but many in the West have viewed the debacle as proof that in India contracts are not nearly as ironclad as we view them to be. If it comes to it, it is substantially easier to litigate in Canada than in India.
Bottom line:
There is lots of outsourcing talent here in the U.S., and your total project cost with a small consulting firm can be surprisingly affordable.
There is loads of talent in Canada where time zones, language, culture, and ease of travel are not problems.
The costs of outsourcing to the Indian subcontinent include a lot of travel, a fair bit of legal and contractual complexity, and a potentially ugly downside in the event of a project failure.
Every time I see mention of evidence "from the Internet" or "from computer files" I wonder: how much evidence produced in court is actually genuine. We all know how impressed most people are with computer technology--and we all know how simple it is to create a simple text file. An email from Nicky Scarfo, Jr. admitting to loansharking? A trivial matter--just take any old email from Nicky, edit the text, and presto! "Direct" evidence that would impress 99 juries out of 99. While we're at it, why not have Nicky confess to financing the World Trade Center bombing?
This kind of thing isn't limited to email. Want to establish an alibi? If you have access to the database that stores key pass data (or E-Z Pass data) you can write a simple INSERT statement to add records necessary to prove you were on the Tappan Zee Bridge when the dirty deed was done (dirt cheap).
My point is that it is brutally easy to fabricate data--and I think the technologically unsophisticated are all too willing to accept anything that is presented as coming from "the computer".
A hypothetical example
Let's pretend that I'm a local police officer. I've been working a case for months--we've had several complaints about a man who might be a sex offender. But they're complaints of creepy behavior--nothing criminal. But I know--I know in my bones--that this guy is a ticking time bomb, just waiting to go off. And--being devoted to protecting the children of my community--I want to stop this creep before he hurts any (more?) children.
I'm in Pennsylvania, where judges are elected. A local judge who's up for re-election is likely to err in my favor when it comes to search warrants on suspected child molesters--so I get a warrant, and I seize the perp's computer. And--damn. The creep is evidently aware of the danger of computer evidence, because there is not a single shred of incriminating evidence on his hard drive.
Or is there? I can copy a few choice files into his temp directory, and copy a few incriminating cookies while I'm at it. Maybe I copy more than a few. All it takes is a floppy disk of helpful evidence and a moment or two alone with the computer--and who's going to believe the creep when he claims he never saw those pictures?
The chain of evidence? (The "chain of evidence" is a legal requirement that prosecutors be able to identify a particular person responsible for a piece of evidence from the time it is seized until it is presented in court.) I gave the perp a receipt for his computer. There's nothing that requires me to provide the perp with a listing of all the files--and no court in the world would let the perp do anything to that computer (like listing his files) when I seize it. I've provided a receipt for his computer--but who's to say what's on the hard drive?
Could this happen?
A frequent element of police fiction--and perhaps police reality--is that police officers carry "throw down" guns; a throw down gun is a firearm with no identifying numbers that can be dropped at a crime scene when a police officer shoots a suspect: the cop asserts that the suspect pulled a gun, but the cop shot first. There's the gun--and the suspect a) has an arrest record, b) is dead, or c) both. Who's to say?
In the same way, an overzealous cop or prosecutor could easily use "throw down" data to "tighten up" a case. The "bad guy" gets what he deserves--the entirely theoretical child molester gets sent to prison.
When the police come with the warrant
I have a client who pays me a few bucks to co-locate a server--which technically makes me an ISP. Ed hosts a couple of mailing lists, and while I seriously doubt any of these lists will ever be the subject of a search warrant, if I'm ever served with one I'm going to be particularly careful to maintain copies of what I provided to the cops. Sure--I'm all in favor of law and order. But fabricating computer "evidence" is so easy that it must be a temptation that is very hard to resist.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi!
Actually, it would not be an "ethics" issue. It would be a violation of federal election law. Any federal employee (up to the president, because he lives on federal property) is barred from soliciting or accepting contributions on federal government property. (That's why both major political parties maintain offices near the Capitol, in commercial office buildings, where members of either house can make phone solicitations.)
One of the early flaps in the Clinton administration was just what was suggested: people who had emailed the White House were spammed with solicitations for contributions. The Federal Election Commission stepped in, and I think (don't remember) that everybody realized that this was new legal ground--but the practice was stopped.
Hi!
What may be a very good option for you to consider is improving your Internet connectivity and then exploring VOIP (Voice Over IP). DirecTV has a satellite data arm called DirecWay that offers two-way broadband via satellite dish. (We have considered it, but only as a fallback to our existing circuit.)
Once you have the broadband, look at VOIP...
Once you have broadband, you might want to look at VOIP, especially Vonage. They will assign you a number and provide "local" calling service to every exchange in your "home" area code(s). VOIP quality is improving, and there are more and more people in the newsgroups providing helpful advice.
Is this the BEST solution?
Your mileage may vary. This is certainly a cutting edge solution--and, as the old adage goes, it may be hard to stay on the cutting edge without bleeding. If you're looking for better bandwidth anyway, it's worth taking a look at.
Hi!
One of the challenges of any media business is producing a constant stream of content. If, for instance, SlashDot only put up two or three stories a day, far fewer people would read the site--and they'd have far fewer page hits on which to place banner ads.
BBC Online has exactly the same problem--they have to (in industry parlance) "feed the monster" to keep readers coming back. In interactive media, like SlashDot and BBC Online, they can't just post stories--they really need to post stories that will prompt readers to add comments. (That's why 'red meat' stories like Microsoft cheating on the antitrust deal get posted, and obituaries of Internet pioneers sometimes don't. The Microsoft stories generate all kinds of traffic.) The web site has a continuing need to come up with stories that will generate a lot of interest, generate user comments, and generate a lot of traffic.
Think of it as editorial trolling
In effect, the editors of BBC Online are trolling. Editors and producers keep lists of story subjects that can be dusted off and run any time--even if the subject has been covered before. They're called "evergreen stories" because (like the trees) they never change from one season to the next. I've worked at one of the major television networks in the U.S., and I've seen the whiteboard listing evergreen stories--including "new concerns about Internet security," "Internet dating--is it for you?" "Internet dating--these people found romance!" and a bunch of others. "Age bias among computer programmers" is just another evergreen story that can be run on a Friday afternoon (typically the slowest news period of the week).
Is there any truth to this age bias notion?
Read the article critically: the article, and the "study" on which it reports, are based on anecdotal evidence. (Even when the study throws statistics around, the stats are based on what people told the researchers.) There is anecdotal evidence that Martians landed in Roswell, New Mexico--which is a far cry from saying there's any real proof. While somebody looking to cry "the sky is falling!" can quote anecdotes of people who can't seem to find a job after taking a class, there are plenty of us old folks out here making a buck.
A little anecdotal evidence...
Case in point, me. I'm 44, mostly bald, with quite a bit of gray in what hair is left. I'm working on-site for a local client, with a team of 18 programmers whose average age (including the summer interns) is about 23.
The anecdotes suggest that younger coders are more productive; they write more lines of code; and that they are willing to work longer hours. Nope, nope, and nope. The hands-down champion code writer is an embedded guy who manages during the day, and codes at home all night. The absolute go-to programmers on the team are all in their 40s. And when the project was in crunch time, those same 40-somethings (including me) were the ones staying late, putting in the time, grinding out the project.
The kids? Hey--they have dates. They have plans for the weekend. They're generally (not always) gone at 5:30. They can spend all day asking questions before they write a line of code--and we have to carefully review their code before we release it into production. The old folks on the project are the acknowledged experts on the language--and we're using C#, which only appeared two years ago.
I don't mean to dump on the young people (and several of them read SlashDot). Several of them are extremely talented. But the older developers are much more comfortable working with new tools and platforms, much more experienced (and relaxed) working in a high-pressure environment, and are much more capable of sucking it up and delivering when it's crunch time. We have been there, done that, and will do it yet again.
And yes, Virginia, we get paid a lot more.
Er...
That would be the University of California, whose main campus is in Berkeley, California.
Hi!
We explored the issues involved with tracking humans for a client a couple of years ago. Bottom line: you can only track humans who a) know they are being tracked, and b) are willing to participate. The converse is true: you cannot track someone who is not willing to participate.
The crucial point is this: it is possible to do field trials with willing subjects, to demonstrate the feasibility of receiving signals. However--it is child's play to defeat the system. And a tracking system that can be defeated is substantially worse than no system at all.
How GPS works
Most geeks understand the idea behind GPS, in the sense of determining position based on comparing the time signatures broadcast from multiple satellites. What many people don't realize is how low the signal strength actually is: it's actually not much stronger than background radiation. GPS works because DSPs can dig the signals out of that background radiation and get the data. Key point: Very Weak Signal.
Result: It's easy to defeat
Because the GPS signal is so weak, you lose GPS lock (the ability to receive signals from enough satellites) all the time. You lose it going into practically any building; you lose it in tunnels; you can frequently lose it in urban areas (like Manhattan). As a consequence, GPS chipsets simply store (and report) their last known good position. That's usually a good thing. If you're tracking a convict, it could be a very bad thing.
A very bad thing: here's why
A while ago we were contacted by a government official with a specific challenge: in the official's words, "In 40% of all homicides the victim has an outstanding Protection From Abuse order against her attacker." I don't know how accurate that figure is--but it's a compelling number. What the official wanted to do was put a GPS tracking device on people (99% men) with current PFA orders. Great idea!
Except...it is brutally easy to defeat the GPS tracker. Just wrap the device with aluminum foil--or simply cover the GPS antenna with aluminum foil. The GPS unit will simply lose lock--and keep recording your position as the last known good (LKG) position. You can then travel across town, secure in the knowledge that the device cannot report your actual location and warn your ex-wife. And after you've successfully beaten her to death, you'll be able to present the county's own data to demonstrate that while the crime was in progress you were at home--because the GPS unit thinks you're still at the LKG point.
Bottom line:
Great idea. (And I'll elaborate in another message.) But not a viable idea for tracking perps.
Hi!
A quote from the VPR Matrix website (from their "history" page, trumpeting the fact that they've been in business a whole year):
In other words, this is Best Buy's store brand.
Simply put, you should probably list "do enough business to have zoning problems" as one of your business goals. You have to be doing business before you have to worry about whether doing business from your home--and the Number One issue for startup companies is doing business. Here's a list of things you need to worry about, ranked in order of how often I obsess about them:
The big employers in town worry about "booking the sale" or "shipping the product." You have to worry first, last, and always about getting paid. You have to deliver the goods, you have to send the bill--but you have to make sure to follow up if the check is late, continue to follow up through a dozen excuses, and even drop by to pick up the check if need be. The grocery store does not accept accounts receivable.
Forget what the slick TV ads tell you. If you're doing project work for a limited number of clients, your cash flow (see #1) is at the mercy of your client's accounts payable people. MasterCard doesn't take accounts receivable, either. Use debit cards, require clients to front money for travel, etc., and do not (NOT NOT NOT) float yourself money from a credit card. Loan sharks offer better rates.
Big Charlie from Queens, my sometime employee (and sometime employer) reminds me frequently that if I'm not spending 40% of my time marketing my buns, I'm going to go hungry. In project consulting work, that's a tad high--but not much: even if you are hip deep in a killer project with a fabulously wealthy client, keep networking, keep hustling, keep looking out for the next gig and the one after that.
Working from home can do funny things to your relationships. For some people (including my wife and me) working at home can be a terrific thing--and it can be very stressful. When you're both in that state of just-got-the-big-check euphoria (I'm a programmer, she's a book editor) long walks in the woods while the kids are in school can be a blast. But when you're on deadline, and so is she, the stress level can soar. (When the kids start complaining about having too much junk food, and asking to have things like salad, that's a cue.)
You're not "self-employed," a "small entrepreneur," or "on the cutting edge of new working/living patterns." To 99% of your potential clients you're "some guy who works out of his basement." They've all see the Dilbert "clothing optional" comic strip (and they will all ask you about it) and your choice of working patterns will mean that some of them will never do business with you. Buy a tie, wear a suit, bathe. Shave. Learn to eat with utensils--all the things CDWS (cubicle-dwelling wage slaves) do. The more you look like them, the more you sound like them, the more comfortable they will be.
You have to do more than walk right and talk right. You have to D-E-L-I-V-E-R. Every single time. You will have a tough time to start: your business will start to prosper when you start doing repeat business: because there is no marketing, advertising, or sales promotion like a long list of clients that have hired you repeatedly. A key performance metric should be how often you have worked for the same client.
Lots of startup consultants charge way too little. WAY too little. Worse, lots of startup consultants confuse "being busy" with "working." You need to market. You need to network. You need to find projects to try out new concepts and ideas--and usually those are pro bono gigs. But you need to nail down a chunk of billable hours each and every week. You cannot bill more than 30-32 hours per week without seriously hurting your marketing and networking time--and all the stuff like taxes and billing and collections, etc. You have to bill enough to make enough in those thirty hours. And you have to hit those thirty hours week after week after w
Hi!
You're not the first community to consider the idea. Kutztown, Pennsylvania has had a very successful experience in building out a Municipal Area Network--it would be well worth your while to study how Kutztown set about doing what they've done, and how they did it. Here's a brief overview PDF file from a vendor--it's a vendor's sales piece, but there's a good intro. A couple of key points:
More resources
Wired in Kutztown (Note: this is a Word document, not an HTML page)
Concord, MA study
Hometown Utilicom (Kutztown, PA)
A key point:
Note the user statistics on the HU web site, and carefully read the end of the David Allen paper: key to a successful buildout is reselling cable TV: Internet access alone doesn't generate enough revenue. That observation came originally from Frank Caruso of Kutztown (David Allen is quoting him in the paper).
Look at the existing municipal infrastructure--do you have the physical plant? Do you have billing systems, etc.? Are you overbuilding on top of an incumbent cable TV provider? Will Dartmouth College view you as a threat--or can you count on them for cooperation? What percentage of the town can you expect to subscribe for cable? For phone service? For Internet access? How firm are those figures? How did you arrive at them?
What kind of capital funding sources do you have access to? Is there any state economic development funding available?
What kind of peering/partnership opportunities do you have? If you have an incumbent cable TV provider, might you consider some kind of joint operating agreement? Might you consider some kind of joint operation with Dartmouth (considering the property taxes Hanover doesn't collect on college-owned property)?
David Allen of Concord, Ma., is entirely correct in his advice to the Town Selectmen: don't do this as a hobby, or a "let's see how it goes" kind of thing: do it as a business venture. That means a fully-thought-through business plan--and it includes key performance indicators and a hard-and-fast exit strategy if you cannot make your numbers. Kutztown has done it--learn from them, and maybe you can too.
Good luck!
Hi!
The fellow who is promoting has a decent idea--albeit not an original one. The concept was promoted in Allentown (an hour south of Wilkes-Barre) almost two years ago. And prompted by some of the same ideas, the local power company (PP&L) developed a subsidiary to locate and light redundant fiber along some of its rights-of-way throughout northeastern Pennsylvania.
Two thoughts:
First, this is just a proposal--and a proposal that heavily depends (I'm sure) on state technology grant funding. Consider the last paragraph of the WNEP article:
Translation: Greco is fishing for a six-figure grant from the Pennsylvania Technology Investment Authority, and is hoping for support from the governor.
Second, just because he's fishing for a big grant doesn't mean that it isn't a bad idea. Several people have criticized this as a "build it and they will come" investment. Yeah, and so was the Interstate System. Which will go down in history as the single most tranformational use of federal government money in the history of our nation. (For fun--ponder the impact of building all those highways on the auto, steel, aluminum, glass, plastic, concrete, paint, and petroleum industries over the years.)
Using state economic development funding to develop IP-based infrastructure makes an enormous amount of sense. Adding another inch to the depth of pavement on a street in Wilkes-Barre isn't going to make a big dent in Luzerne County unemployment. But providing low-cost bandwidth might induce somebody to stay in town, rather than move his business elsewhere--or convince somebody in New York or Philadelphia to decide to locate his business someplace a lot saner (and safer), where costs are a low lower. In a sense, the question to ask isn't why they're doing it--the question should be, why haven't they done anything sooner?
Hi!
Thanks for your comment. Please note that in my original post I wrote: "6 full-time equivalent employees at a fully-loaded cost of $60,000 apiece (including salary, taxes, benefits, etc.)." [Emphasis added]
"Fully-loaded" is a standard accounting term--you might think of it as the "soup to nuts" price: all of the directly-related costs are included. I was a bit redundant in the parenthetical statement that followed (spelling out that I meant salary, taxes, benefits, etc.). All of those costs are included in the meaning of the fully-loaded cost of a full-time equivalent employee.
And yes--I did mean $60K/year to be a good average for a full-time equivalent at a magazine publisher. Magazines, in general, pay very, very little. (LOTS of Madison Avenue magazines depend upon "interns" and "assistants" who supplement their minimum-wage salaries with substantial trust fund income.) I'd really figure that they have two or three people making big bucks (in magazine industry terms, over $60K) and one or two making $25K-30K; and a handful of part-timers getting small bucks and zero benefits. Key word: average. The bottom line: $360K is a pretty good figure for gross payroll. (Yes--I have worked in the publishing business.)
Hi!
Office space varies widely in price--largely depending upon the prestige of the building and it's location. A brand-new building with elevators, a bank in the lobby, glass elevators and a four-story atrium lobby will cost a lot of money in rent. A 24' by 48' section of a "office/flex" building (essentially prefabricated steel structures erected on a concrete slab--what you'll see in most industrial parks) will cost you substantially less.
In either case, rent is priced as the annual rent per square foot. Somebody paying $120 per square foot in mid-town Manhattan is paying that for the year--or $10 per square foot per month.
I haven't priced commercial real estate very recently (within the past year) but there was plenty of space to be had for $8 per sq. foot in my area (Lehigh Valley--Allentown, Pennsylvania) a year ago. I'd bet there still is.
MEMO:
TO: David Talbot
FROM: John Murdoch, consultant
RE: Salon Business Plan
Executive summary: It's the math, stupid.
Dear Dave:
I have read of your impending demise on SlashDot, including links to an article on the Globe and Mail site suggesting that you are paying $200,000 per month in rent for space in San Francisco and a smaller--but similarly mind-blowing--amount on space in New York. I also read your plea to readers, saying that if each of your 53,000 subscribers just signed up one additional subscriber, why Salon would be able to break even. America would continue to have a vocally left-wing e-rag; the earth would continue to revolve.
The business problem
It's the math, stupid. If your assertion in the editorial plea is correct (that you need an additional 50,000 subscriptions to break even) then your annual budget is in the neighborhood of $3,000,000. But your annual rent ($200,000/month) runs to $2,400,000 a year--leaving $600,000 for staff and editorial content.
Simply put, you have zero reason to have any office space in San Francisco or New York. You're running a virtual magazine, remember? That's a synonym for website. If Rob Malda and Jeff Bates can run SlashDot from Holland, Michigan, what makes you think you need to be paying $100 per square foot? You need a decent connection to your hosting sites, and a place to keep the handful of full-time employees left on the payroll.
How you could re-organize
File for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. That protects you from your creditors while you develop a plan for re-organization to submit to a bankruptcy court judge. Yeah--your main money men will take it in the shorts: John Warnock and the Silicon Valley liberals who fronted the $81,000,000 you have pissed away will have to write off their investments. But the big thing Chapter 11 will do is get you out of those, um, burdensome (read: IN-blinking-SANE) leases. No bankruptcy judge in the country will allow you to pay for top-dollar real estate for the purpose of hosting a web site--the leases will be broken. Then you can move on to the rest of your re-organization.
Re-organization:
You have 53,000 subscribers--some pay $18.50 per year, but most pay $30 per year to avoid the ads. Let's assume an average subscription of $24, and (round numbers) gross revenue of $1,270,000. Let's figure on 6 full-time equivalent employees at a fully-loaded cost of $60,000 apiece (including salary, taxes, benefits, etc.): that's $360,000 in payroll. 1000 square feet of "office/flex" space in any moderate industrial park will run you approximately $8 per square foot per year--that's $8,000 in rent. Toss in a thousand a month for heat/light/power/telephone, and another thousand for office expenses, furnishings, furniture, and equipment--soup to nuts, your total "SG&A" expenses run to $392,000. Leaving you $880,000 per year for writers and hosting fees. Top-notch editorial doesn't come for free--but almost Nine Hundred Grand buys you a lot of articles at a thousand bucks a pop.
But don't let that stop you from begging...
Hey--public broadcasting stations have been threatening their imminent demise for decades. So, for that matter, have dozens of television evangelists. If you're just scamming your subscribers for a bit more cash--hey, it helps the bottom line. Even the politically-correct have to pay the rent....
But let's be clear about one thing
Your financial problems are problems of your own making. Paying millions of dollars for glam real estate was "making a statement." It sure was--"we are D-U-M-B!" You have the ability to solve your problems--use the bankruptcy provisions the law allows you. Doing so will keep you in business, and allow you to continue to have a voice in American public discourse. If you fail to do so, your voice will be silenced by your own management failure--not some secret cabal of "voices in the present administration" who might want to silence you.
When I was the play-by-play announcer for Penn basketball on WXPN (1978-1980) we didn't have any trouble with Princeton. Duke was another story....
How many Princeton students does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to mix the martinis, the other to call an electrician....
Drink a highball.
You assertion is that "every company has to pay its employees enough to buy its products" is
Is that your assertion?
If so, I beg to disagree. I have a degree in economics, and I'm an adjunct professor in the MBA program at DeSales University.
The assertion is not true in the limited sense in which you first asserted it--as I've pointed out, any manufacturer of capital goods cannot expect its employees to be able to buy its products. Think of locomotives, tractors, industrial equipment; think of cement kilns and distillation columns and gas turbines; think of any product that is not a consumer good. Boeing does not expect its employees to be able to buy 777s. That's not an exception, nor is it a "red herring" (a term from murder mysteries, not economics, BTW).
The assertion is false in the universal sense as well: the output of an entire region or even nation may be beyond the means of its citizens--by definition "exports" are products for which the best markets are elsewhere. If the local market can consume the goods, there would be nothing to export. Countries that are exporters of diamonds, gold, coffee, cocoa, and other commodities export those items because they do not have sufficient demand within their borders for the products.
And let's be clear about our terms as well: don't mistake the sociological term "middle class" for the economic meaning of the term: the middle class is employed. Having a home in the 'burbs doesn't make you middle class (in economics) having a job does.
It would be helpful to see the cite for your "Federal agency study".
Hi!
First, let me apologize for leaping to the conclusion that you are young--very sorry about that. Second, perhaps you might disabuse me of another notion: my sense is that zillions of kids straight out of college got jobs writing CGI/Perl applications--and when the dot-com bust happened, they ended up on the street. Where, one might imagine, it is a buyer's market. It may well be that H-1Bs are part and parcel of the same crowd (he's a kid, and he's here on an H-1B visa). Are you competing in the job marketplace against H-1Bs--or the dot-com dropouts?
Another thought for you: I'm an independent. Sometimes I'll take a fixed-bid job; frequently I'll do a "fixed budget" job. If I'm onsite at the clients inevitably somebody will ask how in the world I can stand the stress of never knowing where my next job will come from. My reply is that the difference between a "permanent" employee and a temp is that the temp knows that he is only on the payroll for the next three months. I'm not just being glib--I've watched lots of people in permanent positions spend chunks of their careers working at the same version level of the same technology. A former client had a wonderful question: does he have five years of experience--or one year of experience five times? Think of the people you know who are maintaining a project they wrote three or four years ago, that are not using the current version of the technology.
My buddy Charlie (who posted a comment in this thread earlier) works for a Major Media Company--well known for its rodent mascot. Charlie has worked for a number of companies in New York City--and he's always been a permanent employee. He's pretty up front: he works with the current version of technology, or he's gone. (I'm about a hundred miles due west of New York City, and I find New Yorkers entertaining--they have this wonderfully blunt way of asserting that kind of thing.)
Even though Charlie's a permanent employee, he effectively approaches his job like a temp--he participates in beta tests, he develops code at home, he volunteers for the pilot projects, he is always looking to try something new. So if/when the bubble bursts and he has to look for a job, he can claim experience with .NET and SQL Server 2000 and Windows XP and all the rest--because he's made the effort to stay current. On the other hand, there's a guy down the hall from him who is still working in VB 3.0--16-bit VB. Who had better be on his knees every morning in fervent prayer that Mickey is still making money, because if he ever has to look for a new job, he is going to have a lousy looking resume.
My point:
Even if you're a "permanent" employee, you only have a job for the next three months. And in this day and age, when "corporate loyalty" means "we'll give you a t-shirt when we need you to attend a rally in 'support' of our executives, right before we fire you" you have to be looking out for your own interests. Which means looking forward to pick the technologies that will be in demand, and thinking about how you can develop those skills.
John
P.S. Moving your family from St. Louis to the New York area might be nuts--but just a thought: DB2 experience is a very valuable thing in the NY Metro area. JM
I just linked to the Daily Yalie site, and in their comments on the article there's a note from a former columnist in the Yale Herald: back in 2000 he wrote a column pointing out Yale's prediliction for using the SSN for a password, and how anybody with half a brain could use that to hack all sorts of Yale systems. Definitely worth a look--and it will lead you to the conclusion that Yale's admissions people are, well, stupid.
John Murdoch
Penn '80
No--the point you defend wasn't stated. The point made was that every company had to pay their employees enough to buy their products--otherwise ("like gravity," he wrote) the economy will collapse. My rejoinder (any manufacturer of capital equipment disproves the theory) isn't a "few examples" or a "red herring." I used a couple of examples of capital equipment manufacturers--but the list is enormous.
The cost of living
You write "if the cost of living exceeds the income of the middle class (which isn't hard when wages are zero)"--and make a mistake. If your wages are zero, you're not in the middle class. You are poor. If you are out of work and cannot afford to buy anything, and many others are in the same position, then businesses directly affected by consumer spending--particularly discretionary consumer spending--will feel the impact. However, businesses are not faced with a binary set of outcomes--profit or failure. And only with a catastrophic rate of unemployment (on the order of 25% or higher) will you see widespread business closure.
Learning new skills
Um, no. Software development experience is software development experience. If you've spent two years developing GIS applications, but have another 11 years of experience coding, working with databases, etc., you have a lot more experience than somebody with two years of experience with GIS. And especially anybody with no experience, but a vendor certificate from ESRI, MapInfo, or another vendor. Pay rates reflect demand for skills: if you have experience and the requisite skill set, the money will be there. If you don't have much experience and don't have the skill set, your only hope is to take a low rate and hope to gain experience you can use next time. It's tough to graph out price/demand curves in HTML, but this is simple microeconomic pricing theory.
That's not the case here. First, you have a dubious statistic (5.7% unemployment among American members of IEEE) put forth by a clearly-biased source. Second, even if the statistic is true
Put yourself in the company's position
You're not in business to provide job opportunities to earnest, diligent folk who have been working hard to get vendor certifications. You are in business to sell a product, perform a service, move material from point A to point B, or otherwise earn a buck. And--as you have noticed--earning a buck is not easy these days, for you or your prospective employer. What does the company do?
Any reasonable business manager--any competent business manager--is going to 1) seriously question why anybody needs to be hired at all, and 2) if somebody simply must be hired, look/wait for candidates with years of real experience. That's not prejudice or foolishness--it's called 'mitigating risk.' (Five syllables that can also be expressed in the acronym CYA.)
So when a manager sees a resume from somebody with two or three years of experience developing database applications, and two or three years experience developing with Java, he or she will invariably pick that resume over one with a lot of vendor certificates, but no experience. That's enormously frustrating when you're young--but it is a fact of life.
Two points:
First, yes--experience is more valuable than reading about the subject in a book. An oft-cited statistic (although I think it must be exaggerated) is that 70% of IT projects fail. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not--what's important is that IT managers believe it. In consequence they have come to really value "full life-cycle experience"--starting on a new project, working through design, development, deployment, and perhaps into a second release. Why? Because it indicates that you are less likely than most to paint yourself into a logical corner. You are less likely to quit when the project bogs down. You are more likely to contribute to a successful team. In hockey they keep a statistic called the on-ice scoring differential: there are players who never rack up a lot of points, but the teams with a lot of high-differential guys always seem to win. If you have gone full life-cycle on two or three projects you may not be the star player--but chances are your team will score. You simply don't (and can't) get that from a book--or from a training class. You get that from experience--either from working with a good team and a good tech lead, or from hard experience working for a bozo.
Second, you can get experience--valuable experience that will help you get a better job next time. The woods are full of non-profits that don't have a web page--or have a web page that truly stinks. They can all use a much more interactive web site--give them a data-driven web site (perhaps using SlashCode, so it is self-maintaining) and you have a showpiece. If you have done something particularly clever (like making it data-driven, so it is self-maintaining) you can turn your interview into a show-and-tell: here's a site I developed, and here's what's happening under the hood. When conversation in the interview turns to maintaining state or ensuring secure access, you can draw an analogy to how you solved the problem already for North Coast Therapeutic Riding or somebody else. (And, I might add, make the world a better place at the same time.)
About this time last year I was hip-deep in the second round of proposals for a big job: a little under $75,000 for the first phase, with a probable follow-on for another $25,000--plus some vigorish on the equipment and server software. Nothing huge--but a nice bit of work that would let me hire a couple of friends, and build a relationship with a big brokerage house that would likely be the source of more work down the road. We won the job--and were set to start on September 17.
Except, on September 11th, the World Trade Center collapsed. And the brokerage firm that was funding the project collapsed with it. My project, and my cash flow for 6 months, collapsed with it. I did not whine, I did not write letters to Congress blaming my troubles on H-1Bs. I called old clients, I picked up dribs and drabs, I networked like crazy, I hustled my cakes. I just landed a very sweet gig recently--but I had to give up a chunk of money on my typical day rate to get it. I'm still not whining--I spent some of my time over the past year developing new skills (FreeBSD) and improving others (GIS applications, Apache). I developed web sites for two non-profits, and helped a third network their offices. I gained experience.
You're evidently a young person--and you're faced with the conundrum we all had to face: how do you get experience when nobody will hire you? You have to find people who will give you a chance--sometimes by taking a pay cut, sometimes by working for free. Some day you'll wake up and discover that you really have been there, and done that, and that all of a sudden you're the most experienced person in the office. It will come, but only with time, effort, and hustle. And no whining.
Hi!
Interesting statistics: can you provide a link to your sources?
This would appear to spell doom for Ferrari, Lamborghini, DeBeers, Moet et Chandon--and Freightliner, Terex, and Boeing. In fact, it would appear to spell doom for any company making a "luxury" good or any kind of capital equipment. It is simply not the case--an enormous number of companies produce goods that their employees can never hope to be able to afford. This does not mean that Pratt & Whitney is running a sweatshop--just that they make big-ticket capital items that are not sold at the mall.
Simple historical fact:
What is an historical fact is that over time any job with specialized technical knowledge will be automated to the point that less-expensive workers can do it. The classic economic case study is typesetting: from the time of Gutenberg until the early 1880s type was set by hand. It was a time-consuming process that required real skill--a capable, quick typesetter could make good money. When Ottmar Mergenthaler introduced his Linotype machine (which made it possible for anybody who could use a keyboard to set better type in a fraction of the time) approximately 90% of typesetters lost their jobs. More or less overnight.
Programming computers is a specialized task that requires expert knowledge. Guess what? The natural response of any businessman will be to try to find a cheaper solution. Some are looking overseas (such as Bangalore), others are importing workers on temp visas. The long-term trend will be to simpler and simpler computer systems that require less skilled talent--and talent with less skill. A good case in point is in small accounting systems: ten years ago there were a lot of people writing accounting systems for small companies. Nowadays those companies buy QuickBooks, or go upscale to buy Solomon or Best. The marketplace for single-user PC accounting software development is essentially gone.
Some people recognize this...
...and learn new skills. Nobody is looking for a programmer to write a G/L package in FoxPro anymore. But there are people looking for programmers to write GIS software; and people looking for programmers to write Palm OS or WinCE software; and people looking for programmers to write Web software; and so on. And the programmers who continue to focus on learning those skills, and learning to work in new markets, and learning to adapt to a changing marketplace will thrive.
Those who do not--who just expect the same skills in the same industry to last them a lifetime--will ultimately be left with nothing to do but whine to Congress about H1Bs taking their jobs.
First, the math:
If somebody wrote an article asserting that 235,000 members of the National Council of Teachers of English had sent a letter to Congress I'd have just let it pass. You can depend upon English teachers to never split an infinitive, but numbers sometimes escape them. Engineers, on the other hand, have no excuse: this was not 235,000 EE's, it was the US trade association to which they belong.
Second, the subject is moot
Despite the fact that Congress authorized up to 160,000 H-1B visas per year, the Globe article points out that only 40,000 were used last year, and only half of those were for IT jobs. Look at the job sites: again, and again, and again you will see "We will|do|can not sponsor H-1B applicants." Petitioning Congress to limit the number of H-1B visas when they're not being used is kind of beside the point.
Third, they're whining
C'mon--unemployment of 5.7%? That's hardly a catastrophe--and the numbers are deeply suspect. First, not every EE is a programmer (or works in IT). Second, not every programmer is an EE--and in point of fact a lot of EEs have little business attempting to program. Much like Computer Science curricula, EE programs focused on IT tend to focus on skills that aren't in demand--and ignore skills that are important to a lot of commercial programming. Databases don't fall within the purview of a EE program--but database programming is a big part of the IT job market. If a company brings in somebody from the Indian subcontinent on an H-1B visa to write stored procedures on Oracle, does an EE lose a job? Post hoc ergo propter hoc (logical fallacy of false cause).
Fourth, what solution do they propose?
Bleating to Congress is a lovely thing for the association's executives to do, in order to demonstrate to their members that the execs deserve to be paid. But what exactly do they propose? That we track down all of these people on H-1B visas and ship them home? With their husbands or wives, with their children? Even if those children, born in the U.S.A., are U.S. citizens?
A Word from the English Teachers:
Stand up, clear your throat, and recite with me:
Hi All!
I think it would be a big mistake to count Transmeta out any time soon. I say that not because I'm a penguin-loving Linus-worshipper. To the contrary, I primarily use Microsoft development tools, and when I'm feeling giddy about Unix I use FreeBSD. The only Linux boxes around here belong to paying customers.
So why not write off Transmeta?
Simply put, they're working their way into the product channel. Transmeta does have a very low-power chip--and that Transmeta technology is at the core of an emerging form of hardware: the smarter embedded system. Don't think "desktop replacement"--think "death to the PLC."
What's a PLC?
Programmable Logic Controllers are tiny CPUs that appear in all sorts of specialty uses: controllers, valves, automated-just-about-anything. They're cheap, they're generally very reliable--and they have zero memory, have very limited functionality, and require programmers who demand significant coin. When you try to add a feature to an embedded application you will typically a response on the order of "that will take--at least--200 bytes of memory. And we only have 68 bytes left. So what feature do you want to drop to do this?"
Coming soon, to a factory floor near you...
The Palm OS, WinCE, and the Transmeta chips are going to change all that. Handhelds and rugged semi-embedded handhelds are appearing in larger numbers--with gigabytes of flash storage, and 128 MB of RAM. Skip counting bytes--add all the features you want. Connectivity? They have 802.11 already embedded, along with USB, serial ports, etc., etc., etc. Some of the vendors I've browsed recently include InfoCater and SyntegraTech; they're both distributors for Tablets, WebPads, and handhelds that run with WinCE or Midori Linux. Very, very cool stuff.
Laying off 20% of your staff may be painful--but it is not the same thing as shutting the doors. For example, note that VA Software is still around....
That's entirely true: practically everybody I talk to about a prospective project asks me who we've done work for. Nobody ever asks who we have worked for twice. But that's a very important metric: how many clients have given you another project after you delivered the first one? How many clients have given you a fifth, or a sixth, or a twelfth?
In the case of this thread, the original poster is stuck with a contract shop--he thinks his options are an outsourcing company in India. My point was to emphasize that unless his project is huge, he's a lot better off looking for outsourcing help closer to home. One option is to hire a firm like us (and nobody has ever suggested that our code was anything less than spectacular, I might add); another is to hire a Canadian firm. Any way he approaches this problem, his employers have decided they're going to outsource the project.
Depending upon the project and the consultant, you may not have to have a lot of in-house support for a project. One of our clients is a major industrial gas company--we've done a bunch of work for them over the years. Some of those projects have been turned over to in-house staff; others, generally smaller projects, have a corner of somebody's desk, but if the app needs tweaking they'll toss us a couple of bucks to make the changes. We're sufficiently tuned into the client's release procedures that we look like just another development team at roll-out.
Other consultants have different views--and perhaps they make more money than we do. My view on consulting is that I want a continuing relationship with a client, doing new and interesting stuff. I do not want to spend my career fixing bugs and writing tweaks for ancient projects on out-of-date platforms. The way to get to do that is to be the guy the client thinks of when they're talking about methodology, be it "software engineering" or something else.
Software development--particularly business software development--isn't about computer "science" or "engineering." It is about communication--communication amongst your team, communication with the computer, and communication through the computer with the end user. Communication is the key.
In hiring offshore developers you face substantially more complex challenges than you do working with a telecommuter. People who telecommute have established relationships with their employer--so they already know the implications of the tone of your voice, and what you mean when you preface your sentence with "I don't mean to be rude, but...." An offshore development team doesn't know that--you don't have the kind of relationship, based on trust, common bonds, and plain old time, that are necessary to make a team work.
There is a simple way to deal with that problem. It is called an airplane ticket. You go to them, or they (all of them) come to you--naturally that means you're the one on the plane. You can find a whole range of airfares, and a whole range of hotel prices, and a whole range of expenses involved in traveling literally halfway around the world. And unless your project is huge, you'll blow any conceivable cost savings on the travel.
You have other options
One (warning: self-serving promo coming) is to outsource to a consulting firm. They'll charge you a fee--but at the end of the project they will go away. You don't have any overhead costs, you don't have any headcount, and you don't have costs for machines and toolsets that you no longer need.
Another option is to consider outsourcing to an "offshore" country that is considerably easier to get to. If you're in the United States, you might look very carefully at consulting firms in Canada: the Canadian exchange rate makes tech workers up north very attractive. And Canadian "offshore" development avoids a lot of the problems with outsourcing to the Indian subcontinent: Canadian firms are (mostly) on the same time zones as U.S. firms; Canadians and Americans share a common language--most of the time; and Canadians and Americans share a common cultural heritage (most of the time). In general Canadians are more polite than Americans, more funny than Americans, and perhaps more serious about their work than a lot of Americans.
Believe it or not, sometimes outsourcing deals don't work out....
An old dictum of business law says that you don't need a contract when everybody is making money. You only need the contract when things go bad. That's true--and that's why you'll need a solid contract before you start any project with any outsourcing firm. It is a lot easier to find legal help with contracts between U.S. and Canadian firms than it is to find legal help with contracts between U.S. firms and Indian firms. And--(look for articles on this subject in Fortune or The Wall Street Journal) the legal climate in India is not as stable as you'll find in developed countries. Long before Enron hit the headlines with its accounting problems, Enron was embroiled in a long-term dispute (see this BBC article, for instance) with the government of India. There are all kinds of charges and counter-charges, but many in the West have viewed the debacle as proof that in India contracts are not nearly as ironclad as we view them to be. If it comes to it, it is substantially easier to litigate in Canada than in India.
Bottom line:
Every time I see mention of evidence "from the Internet" or "from computer files" I wonder: how much evidence produced in court is actually genuine. We all know how impressed most people are with computer technology--and we all know how simple it is to create a simple text file. An email from Nicky Scarfo, Jr. admitting to loansharking? A trivial matter--just take any old email from Nicky, edit the text, and presto! "Direct" evidence that would impress 99 juries out of 99. While we're at it, why not have Nicky confess to financing the World Trade Center bombing?
This kind of thing isn't limited to email. Want to establish an alibi? If you have access to the database that stores key pass data (or E-Z Pass data) you can write a simple INSERT statement to add records necessary to prove you were on the Tappan Zee Bridge when the dirty deed was done (dirt cheap).
My point is that it is brutally easy to fabricate data--and I think the technologically unsophisticated are all too willing to accept anything that is presented as coming from "the computer".
A hypothetical example
Let's pretend that I'm a local police officer. I've been working a case for months--we've had several complaints about a man who might be a sex offender. But they're complaints of creepy behavior--nothing criminal. But I know--I know in my bones--that this guy is a ticking time bomb, just waiting to go off. And--being devoted to protecting the children of my community--I want to stop this creep before he hurts any (more?) children.
I'm in Pennsylvania, where judges are elected. A local judge who's up for re-election is likely to err in my favor when it comes to search warrants on suspected child molesters--so I get a warrant, and I seize the perp's computer. And--damn. The creep is evidently aware of the danger of computer evidence, because there is not a single shred of incriminating evidence on his hard drive.
Or is there? I can copy a few choice files into his temp directory, and copy a few incriminating cookies while I'm at it. Maybe I copy more than a few. All it takes is a floppy disk of helpful evidence and a moment or two alone with the computer--and who's going to believe the creep when he claims he never saw those pictures?
The chain of evidence? (The "chain of evidence" is a legal requirement that prosecutors be able to identify a particular person responsible for a piece of evidence from the time it is seized until it is presented in court.) I gave the perp a receipt for his computer. There's nothing that requires me to provide the perp with a listing of all the files--and no court in the world would let the perp do anything to that computer (like listing his files) when I seize it. I've provided a receipt for his computer--but who's to say what's on the hard drive?
Could this happen?
A frequent element of police fiction--and perhaps police reality--is that police officers carry "throw down" guns; a throw down gun is a firearm with no identifying numbers that can be dropped at a crime scene when a police officer shoots a suspect: the cop asserts that the suspect pulled a gun, but the cop shot first. There's the gun--and the suspect a) has an arrest record, b) is dead, or c) both. Who's to say?
In the same way, an overzealous cop or prosecutor could easily use "throw down" data to "tighten up" a case. The "bad guy" gets what he deserves--the entirely theoretical child molester gets sent to prison.
When the police come with the warrant
I have a client who pays me a few bucks to co-locate a server--which technically makes me an ISP. Ed hosts a couple of mailing lists, and while I seriously doubt any of these lists will ever be the subject of a search warrant, if I'm ever served with one I'm going to be particularly careful to maintain copies of what I provided to the cops. Sure--I'm all in favor of law and order. But fabricating computer "evidence" is so easy that it must be a temptation that is very hard to resist.