I worked at one of these firms in India before. The common practice there is to file for a H-1B visa in anticipation of future onsite trips. Many hundreds go unused. A number of my collegues got their visas stamped, but never travelled. Some were never intended to be used at all. The project manager told me they are just a backup in case of emergency situations (e.g., an onsite contractor might have to go back to India within short notice etc.) I think this is the main reason behind the recent inflation in number of H1-B applicants. This is certainly abuse of the H1-B program!
These companies should not be granted so many visas. If you want to increase competitiveness grant more visas to foreign students from top universities in the US. Giving out visas to these companies will only get you mediocre people who know nothing about computer science (yeah well, they know a lot about time sheets, status reports and how not to manage a team) - ofcourse there will be exceptions, but the largely the crowd that comes here aren't any super skilled programmers. They would just know a bit of their client's business and a few programs in some subsystem that is written in COBOL.
I am happy to have left that sweat shop in pursuit of my masters degree a couple of years ago. Never wanna go back to them! they do not do anything related to computer science there! it's all plain business. You are not allowed to fix ugly code if you feel like it - the client should be ready to pay for that too !! no smart ideas here please.. every solution to every possible problem is documented (hey we're a CMM level 5 company!) and no process that wassn't used before should ever be encouraged.
Trust me, tis nothing like cutting edge. Far from it. I laugh when Bangalore is called the silicon valley of the East!
well, I am surprised nobody mentioned our modern day personality dev gurus. They advocate cultivation of good thoughts in the mind. If you think negatively 'bad things' happen to you. Their reasoning however is that if you think in a way you see as 'positive' you start acting like that and the rest of the world will comply. Paulo Coelho wrote in his book 'The Alchemist' that if you want something badly the world conspires to bring it to you. Another book called 'As a man thinketh' also explored the effect of thoughts on events of daily life(search for it and you should find a free pdf copy).
But affecting the operation of a machine just by sitting before it and thinking may not fall into this model.
I worked with a company that had most of their IT systems on an old mainframe written in COBOL and assembler. We had to migrate a few programs to use DB2 (relational) database instead of IMS (an old hierarchial database). This proved to be a nightmare due to lack of tools to analyze COBOL source code. We had to write REXX scripts to parse the code and automate some of the process. In another project, a variable had to be expanded (in terms of lenght), and another nightmare followed. More rexx to track where this veriable goes, what it is used for, what files it gets written to.. well this part involved parsing JCL files as well using rexx!
Yes, we need better (mainframe based) tools to make this language livable with.
It is almost universally accepted that your team manager is invariably your boss! Why should the manager be your boss? why can't a team have a 'team manager' as another team member. Think of a music band's manager. What does this person do? He/she works 'for' the team instead of the other way round. Can tech teams be the 'front men' (like the musicians) and their manager be relegated to the background? In this case, the manager need not be very technical at all. The 'team lead' (very much like the lead composer/singer of the band) must however be able to outcode everyone else in the team. Will this work?
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I worked at one of these firms in India before. The common practice there is to file for a H-1B visa in anticipation of future onsite trips. Many hundreds go unused. A number of my collegues got their visas stamped, but never travelled. Some were never intended to be used at all. The project manager told me they are just a backup in case of emergency situations (e.g., an onsite contractor might have to go back to India within short notice etc.) I think this is the main reason behind the recent inflation in number of H1-B applicants. This is certainly abuse of the H1-B program!
These companies should not be granted so many visas. If you want to increase competitiveness grant more visas to foreign students from top universities in the US. Giving out visas to these companies will only get you mediocre people who know nothing about computer science (yeah well, they know a lot about time sheets, status reports and how not to manage a team) - ofcourse there will be exceptions, but the largely the crowd that comes here aren't any super skilled programmers. They would just know a bit of their client's business and a few programs in some subsystem that is written in COBOL.
I am happy to have left that sweat shop in pursuit of my masters degree a couple of years ago. Never wanna go back to them! they do not do anything related to computer science there! it's all plain business. You are not allowed to fix ugly code if you feel like it - the client should be ready to pay for that too !! no smart ideas here please .. every solution to every possible problem is documented (hey we're a CMM level 5 company!) and no process that wassn't used before should ever be encouraged.
Trust me, tis nothing like cutting edge. Far from it. I laugh when Bangalore is called the silicon valley of the East!
well, I am surprised nobody mentioned our modern day personality dev gurus. They advocate cultivation of good thoughts in the mind. If you think negatively 'bad things' happen to you. Their reasoning however is that if you think in a way you see as 'positive' you start acting like that and the rest of the world will comply. Paulo Coelho wrote in his book 'The Alchemist' that if you want something badly the world conspires to bring it to you. Another book called 'As a man thinketh' also explored the effect of thoughts on events of daily life(search for it and you should find a free pdf copy). But affecting the operation of a machine just by sitting before it and thinking may not fall into this model.
I worked with a company that had most of their IT systems on an old mainframe written in COBOL and assembler. We had to migrate a few programs to use DB2 (relational) database instead of IMS (an old hierarchial database). This proved to be a nightmare due to lack of tools to analyze COBOL source code. We had to write REXX scripts to parse the code and automate some of the process. In another project, a variable had to be expanded (in terms of lenght), and another nightmare followed. More rexx to track where this veriable goes, what it is used for, what files it gets written to .. well this part involved parsing JCL files as well using rexx!
Yes, we need better (mainframe based) tools to make this language livable with.
Ok,so now techies are also supposed to watch out when getting hired; not just lawyers like those in that John Grisham novel. :)
It is almost universally accepted that your team manager is invariably your boss! Why should the manager be your boss? why can't a team have a 'team manager' as another team member. Think of a music band's manager. What does this person do? He/she works 'for' the team instead of the other way round. Can tech teams be the 'front men' (like the musicians) and their manager be relegated to the background? In this case, the manager need not be very technical at all. The 'team lead' (very much like the lead composer/singer of the band) must however be able to outcode everyone else in the team. Will this work?