I got a Handspring Visor Deluxe when they first came out and it has suited me just fine (the IR port on it never worked properly, but that didn't really bother me all that much - I certainly haven't told him this though, that would just feed his threory).
He feels that they are crap products. He has two friends that have gone through a series of their PDAs and had problems with them, and his brother has a Treo that crashes when he uses a large ACT database on it. So this, and I think combined with the idea that he sees them as a startup that doesn't know what they are doing, makes him refuse to deal with one. It isn't clear to me if he has ever owned one or not.
I agree, and I have told him this as well, Handspring would have all of the things he wants/needs available to him and make it easy.
I think part of it too is that he wants something that is impossible just so that he can say to his friends that he wants something that isn't out there but "has his people looking into it".
I can't wait to go into business on my own. You can always just fire clients.
wow! you are way better at the silver lining thing than I am.:)
I suppose that really would be the case if he didn't also want me doing other stuff as well, and calling a bunch of people regarding vaious random things.
fortunately he has been out of the office much of this week, hence the amount of time I spend on slashdot has gone up a bit.
Not that I know of. The issue here (Bermuda) is the current government makes it very hard for people to come in and work here. I am here because my fiancee is Bermudian, otherwise, I don't think I could be here.
Oooo, he would love getting something custom made. Except that he is cheap. He isn't going to want to pay more than $400 - I know this already from dealing with him when this all started and he "just" wanted a suped-up mp3 player.
The problem with the attachment type scenerio is that he doesn't want to carry a lot of crap around. He just wants a single small little shiny phone that does everything.
I should just give him a ball of tin foil and say that it is a micracle phone and that it might be too hard to work. He won't want to seem stupid and might stay quiet for awhile.
it doesn't have a phone jack from what I can see... and I don't really see why it would, which is part of the issue when looking for such a thing.
he is way into Sony, so he might have already seen that, but I will mention it to him.
do you know if that is available for GSM like what they have in the states and London (he spends most of his time there when travelling, or just here in Bermuda)
I have been trying to automate some tasks here where the end results are graphs. The problem is that for Joe Nerd, the output of a scripted graph is "good enough" - I use GD for a lot of things and it looks fine and is fast enough to be generated on the fly.
But my current need is to get graphs that look really good so that they can be used on a brochure type site, but can be updated frequently with the most recent market data (not updated in real time, every time the page is loaded - but updated by a script every month).
My current process is to use Excel sice its graphs are customizable enough and look pretty good in the end. But the process unfortunately doesn't really lend itself to automation. (create graph in Excel, take screen capture, dump to Photoshop, tweak, dump to png)
ImageMagick is very useful for many things though, and you can do some suprisingly good looking stuff with it. I have mainly ever used it for adding text to a whole lot of images, and also for converting images en masse.
LOL - no, I'm at a hedge fund management company in Bermuda.
This guy is paranoid and knows just enough to make really uninformed decisions.
I can't fault him for linking small and shiny gadgets though - I too am drawn to new toys. But I investigate it all myself isntead of finding an office bitch to do it. (me being the office bitch in this case - IT Manager or Office Bitch... they should put both on my business card... if I had one)
He recently told me "Handspring is getting bought out by Palm - their stuff sucks" - so I hope that he isn't now against Palm as well. (Handspring was started by two guys that used to work for Palm, and he actually knows that - so I could see him being anti-Palm as well)
He even has a frickin converter - but he is convinced for some reason that it only works on his current phone and with his current analog tape recorder...
seriously, this guy is too funny... only he doesn't try to be.
I tried to tell him to do that, and he was sort of sold on it, but he doesn't trust conversion - he is convinced that he wants that phone jack in there.
I'm tempted to take the phone off of my desk and unplug the cord from it and then tell him that he can walk around and use that for everything. I'm fairly certain that he just wants a cool gadget to show his friends at meetings.
One of the owners of the company I currently work with has taken me aside many times and has me on a quest for what I think is the unattainable... mainly because the idea is retarded.
But I have to ask, since this seems about like the perfect place to do so. Or instead of asking - maybe I should just describe what he wants and enthusiasts can chime in.
He wants a handheld device. He loves Sony products, and hates Handspring products. He has no real reasons or logical justification for this as far as I can tell - but he isn't going to change. He wants something that will keep track of all of his appointments. He wants something that can play mp3s. Ideally it would also have a camera and a phone in it, but that isn't necessary.
But what he *really* wants... and this is the part that I find amusing - he wants this thing to have a phone jack in it. For two reasons - the first reason is so that he can put a phone line into it and record conversations. For some reason he thinks that there is a large demand for this, just because he wants it. He also wants this thing to be able to check e-mail - but he doesn't want to pay cell phone charges for checking e-mail, and bluetooth and wi-fi are out because he wants to travel the globe with this thing and plug into the phone lines at hotels and then dial up and check his e-mail. Via the modem jack of course.
I thought I had him sold on the cool Neuros, but then this phone jack idea occurred to him and he is now focused on that.
The worst part is that he finds the fact that it doesn't exist and that nobody else would want this a personal failing on my part. As if I'm just not trying hard enough.
I feel like telling him that if he clicks his heels together, rubs a lamp, and also *really* believes in it, then it will happen.
Anyway, anyone know of such a beast to exist? (he has a laptop, but apparently that is "too bulky" - so that solution is out - and I know that Handspring has plug-ins for all of that stuff, but he hates Handsprings and refuses to ever own one)
I take it you haven't read a single other post of mine on this thread.
You will see that I'm largely on your side when it comes to outsourcing things.
I am simply raising the point that it isn't likely that CEOs will ever be outsourced simply due to the intagibles at hand.
And the fact that you say "Alot of those suits..." - really means nothing at all. There are plenty of people in all walks of the business circle that suck at math. Big deal - there are equally many (especially the successful ones - Gates, Case, Turner, etc) that are quite good at it - so I really don't get your point.
From my experience, the computer guy needs to know a few different computer languages, they need to know some algorithms, and it really helps if they are good at logic and math. Ideally they would be good at dealing with specs - writing and reading them, as well as communicating with others - but these are probably seen far less often as the first few are.
The CEO on the other hand has to be aware of the social structure of the company. The CEO has to be aware of what is going on in the company currently, as well as have a vision for where the company should go and what it will take to get there. The CEO needs to have the skills to talk to his managers - both to give out the orders of what comes next, as well as react to what they are telling him/her and make decisions as to where to go next. The need to be aware of what resources they have available to them and at what cost, and they need to know where they can cut corners - whether they actually think of this, or whether they just know how to delegate to is another issue. They need the social skills to be able to go out and shmooze clients - something that is considerably harder than it sounds, and I guarentee that the bulk of the Slashdot audience couldn't do it for shit unless they were given the task of shmoozing fellow geeks. At the companies I have worked at/with in the past, the CEO did in fact know much if not all of what the underlings knew - but that isn't always the case - the larger the company, the harder that is to achieve. At GM, there is no way for that to happen. But it helps that if it is a tech company, the CEO has a tech background - if it is a publishing company, it helps if the CEO has worked their way up through that and learned the ropes.
You can give me examples all day long about the anomolies to those - but the fact is, just because we aren't personally CEOs, we see them doing things to us that are foreign. They may seem like they are fucking things up, or just goofing off - and hell, maybe they are. Not as if programmers don't go through the same things.
But in the end, having a math and logic background while learning a few programming languages is a trait that can be done anywhere in the world. It is a skillset that isn't that far off from plumbing or an auto mechanic.
The social interaction side alone of the CEOs job makes it so that there are fewer people that can do it - and when you throw in the fact that they have their egos as do their fellow CEOs that they do business with - you can't just bring in anyone to do it, nor just farm it out to just anyone.
There are hundreds of programmers out there for everyone one CEO.
It is easy to sit back and be the armchair CEO of a company and state how incredibly stupid they are for doing this and that - but given the actual responsibility, most anyone would either crack, or fuck up equally or worse.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for those that bitch and moan about it all, yet have never sat in that position themselves.
right. in that quote I said they did more, I never said anything about them having the same skillset as the people under them and then doing more on top of that.
I agree that had I said what you are saying, it would be bad logic at best and basically wrong... but I never said that.
I like that technique though. probably considered bad form in normal debate - but seems like a good skill for advertising or government positions.
If you mean one of the shitty ones, then I have to agree with you - Penn has a good business school, and graduate school at Cornell is good, but the "Ivy League" is just a reference to the sports conference of the undergrand - and those two school suck nuts for undergrad. There are arguements to be made that Dartmouth could suck too.
Brown used to have a no grades policy - perhaps that is what you are referring to.
Harvard recently has had a lot of noise over grade inflation there - it is notorious for being very hard to get into, and then once you are there, it is very easy (for undergrad).
Other than that though - which I suppose only really leaves Princeton, Yale, and Columbia - they are good schools - the first two probably being the best out of those.
But unless you have actually been through one of those programs, you are totally talking out of your ass if you think you can skip classes and just get a C and certainly not a B. (although, like I said, perhaps at the lowest of those that I first mentioned)
In the end, you are arguing the way it should be against the way it is. Two very different things, and in the end a waste of breath aside from letting you vent your displeasure for it.
I personally would argue against the "many generations", but yes I agree that it isn't a direct "we give you $1 and it feeds right back into our country immediately" - but in a global economy, the pool of resources expands, but in the end, it comes sloshing back around.
I don't particularly get the concept of "We were the 900lb gorilla and the fact that by doing this, there might become another 800lb gorilla scares me" The fact of the matter, the more I travel around the world, the more I see how much everyone universally loathes Americans. This is largely why.
In the end, if a company is spending less to make a product, they either sell it at the same price and make more money, or they lower the cost, increase the number of units sold that way, and... make more money. Basically, this is all so companies can make more money. If companies are making more money - jobs will eventually pick back up.
Will they be the programming jobs? Not if we outsource them all for cheaper - which is the point - perhaps the programming job is no longer needed as much. Perhaps the people that did that in the past need a new career.
To claim that by getting rid of US programmers and instead getting individuals that are willing to work for less, then somehow relegates the US programmers to poverty level is a bit extreme.
They have the brainpower to learn what got them there in the first place - they perhaps need to change the target of their skillset, but they are in no way destined to poverty.
When the US car companies moved their plants to Mexico because the labor was cheaper, there were still plenty of Americans buying those products, even though there were auto-workers all over the states that had to learn new skills, or apply their skills towards other trades. Programmers aren't really all that different, they just get less greasy.
In the end, I have worked for two companies that had divisions in India and the states. The idea was that while we were working on a project during the day in the States, the Indian group was sleeping. Then as the people in the States slept, the Indian group would wake up and kick ass and take names on the code where the States group left off. Inevitably that wouldn't work out because it was a logistical nightmare and there were always misommunications that would get amplified by the time difference and slightly language barrier. So then they set it up so that the US side would do components, and the Indian side would do components - that worked out better - ended up with competition as to who's crap would be better. They were just black boxes, as long as it took in the right junk and spit out the right junk, and didn't crash, we didn't care what they did.
I personally have no issue with moving the stuff overseas. there are plenty of places where it can go wrong - but to write it all off because there are opportunities for failure seems a bit rash.
The project can fail just as easily in the states with poor planning, and it would do it at a higher cost basis along the way.
I wish I had an MBA - or even the money/time to get one.
As I have written in response to other comments on this thread, even if the CEOs are total douchebags, the networking skills and connections they have are very valuable to a company. Sure they can't program for shit, but they can run a company. In the same way that the CEO sees projects not getting finished on time and there being bugs in the code, and then assumes that the programmers must be idiots - you see the CEO doing what is part of his job, and perhaps not always succeeding beautifully, and you write them off as dipshits.
Not to say that a lot of them aren't dipshits.
In terms of cultural issues - I certainly think that there are plenty cultures beyond ours that can lead a workforce here - but I don't know that they would fit into the "ol boy network" - they aren't going to replace every CEO with someone from overseas - just in the same way that all IT isn't getting outsourced. So you get a mishmash of all kinds of cultures. Culture clashes are not what lead to great business deals.
If a fortune 100 company wants to make a huge deal in Japan's chip market, they sure as hell don't send some Texan in a cowboy hat to Japan to make the deal. The same way that in order to seal a deal in Texas, you wouldn't necessarily to send in a CEO that is from Somoa.
there are just cultural expectations that whether they are right or wrong in the whole political correct realm, they exist in the fullest at the highest levels of the top companies, and in order to do business, there is a fixed way of doing it. In the end, you get the guys that all went to the same set of schools, and they all know each other through some degree of separation from friends networked. to bring in an outsider is cultural suicide for a company.
In IT, these cultural boundaries don't exist because we were already brining in brains from outside for years. It isn't a good ol boy network in computers - it is the young geeks (young being a largely relative term - but for the most part, at least a decade or two younger than the good ol boys of top level management).
In terms of braintrust being all in IT - that would depend largely on what the company does. In terms of Microsoft, that is pretty much the entire package, the programmers - so they really need them. Other companies have things that they need to get done, but the brainwork isn't in the software, it is in the deals and the logic to develop the ideas that drive the products.
This is all getting away from the original point, which is that there are many things preventing CEO level people from moving around as much. If you don't like those things, that is great - you are entitled to your opinion. But that sure as hell doesn't mean that they are going to turn, say "wha" and then go running out of their position, arms akimo and flailing into the night leaving it wide open for others to fill.
They have the power to stay where they want, and that is pretty much the key in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no clue why he doesn't like Handspring.
I got a Handspring Visor Deluxe when they first came out and it has suited me just fine (the IR port on it never worked properly, but that didn't really bother me all that much - I certainly haven't told him this though, that would just feed his threory).
He feels that they are crap products. He has two friends that have gone through a series of their PDAs and had problems with them, and his brother has a Treo that crashes when he uses a large ACT database on it.
So this, and I think combined with the idea that he sees them as a startup that doesn't know what they are doing, makes him refuse to deal with one.
It isn't clear to me if he has ever owned one or not.
I agree, and I have told him this as well, Handspring would have all of the things he wants/needs available to him and make it easy.
I think part of it too is that he wants something that is impossible just so that he can say to his friends that he wants something that isn't out there but "has his people looking into it".
I can't wait to go into business on my own. You can always just fire clients.
Are you coming on to me?
It was the honey that did it, wasn't it?
I knew I was probably doing it wrong.
Apparently nobody has any business using it, so if they do use it, I know something is amiss.
I'm still not sure how the honey comes into play, but I'm trying it out right now. So far, I'm guessing this is going to be a hassle to clean up.
I'm working on it :)
This current job is a place holder until one of two other options comes to fruition.
*fingers crossed*
wow! you are way better at the silver lining thing than I am. :)
I suppose that really would be the case if he didn't also want me doing other stuff as well, and calling a bunch of people regarding vaious random things.
fortunately he has been out of the office much of this week, hence the amount of time I spend on slashdot has gone up a bit.
Not that I know of.
The issue here (Bermuda) is the current government makes it very hard for people to come in and work here.
I am here because my fiancee is Bermudian, otherwise, I don't think I could be here.
If only he didn't hate Handspring.
Oooo, he would love getting something custom made.
Except that he is cheap. He isn't going to want to pay more than $400 - I know this already from dealing with him when this all started and he "just" wanted a suped-up mp3 player.
The problem with the attachment type scenerio is that he doesn't want to carry a lot of crap around. He just wants a single small little shiny phone that does everything.
I should just give him a ball of tin foil and say that it is a micracle phone and that it might be too hard to work. He won't want to seem stupid and might stay quiet for awhile.
Interesting. I could see him saying that is too large, but I will definitely mention that too him.
Just sending him that site alone might let him surf around and distract him for a bit.
Like giving a child a spoon and some pots to bang on.
well that does look a lot like what he wants.
it doesn't have a phone jack from what I can see... and I don't really see why it would, which is part of the issue when looking for such a thing.
he is way into Sony, so he might have already seen that, but I will mention it to him.
do you know if that is available for GSM like what they have in the states and London (he spends most of his time there when travelling, or just here in Bermuda)
I have been trying to automate some tasks here where the end results are graphs.
The problem is that for Joe Nerd, the output of a scripted graph is "good enough" - I use GD for a lot of things and it looks fine and is fast enough to be generated on the fly.
But my current need is to get graphs that look really good so that they can be used on a brochure type site, but can be updated frequently with the most recent market data (not updated in real time, every time the page is loaded - but updated by a script every month).
My current process is to use Excel sice its graphs are customizable enough and look pretty good in the end. But the process unfortunately doesn't really lend itself to automation. (create graph in Excel, take screen capture, dump to Photoshop, tweak, dump to png)
ImageMagick is very useful for many things though, and you can do some suprisingly good looking stuff with it.
I have mainly ever used it for adding text to a whole lot of images, and also for converting images en masse.
LOL - no, I'm at a hedge fund management company in Bermuda.
This guy is paranoid and knows just enough to make really uninformed decisions.
I can't fault him for linking small and shiny gadgets though - I too am drawn to new toys. But I investigate it all myself isntead of finding an office bitch to do it. (me being the office bitch in this case - IT Manager or Office Bitch... they should put both on my business card... if I had one)
Excellent - I will look into this.
He recently told me "Handspring is getting bought out by Palm - their stuff sucks" - so I hope that he isn't now against Palm as well.
(Handspring was started by two guys that used to work for Palm, and he actually knows that - so I could see him being anti-Palm as well)
He even has a frickin converter - but he is convinced for some reason that it only works on his current phone and with his current analog tape recorder...
seriously, this guy is too funny... only he doesn't try to be.
I tried to tell him to do that, and he was sort of sold on it, but he doesn't trust conversion - he is convinced that he wants that phone jack in there.
I'm tempted to take the phone off of my desk and unplug the cord from it and then tell him that he can walk around and use that for everything.
I'm fairly certain that he just wants a cool gadget to show his friends at meetings.
One of the owners of the company I currently work with has taken me aside many times and has me on a quest for what I think is the unattainable... mainly because the idea is retarded.
But I have to ask, since this seems about like the perfect place to do so. Or instead of asking - maybe I should just describe what he wants and enthusiasts can chime in.
He wants a handheld device. He loves Sony products, and hates Handspring products. He has no real reasons or logical justification for this as far as I can tell - but he isn't going to change.
He wants something that will keep track of all of his appointments. He wants something that can play mp3s.
Ideally it would also have a camera and a phone in it, but that isn't necessary.
But what he *really* wants... and this is the part that I find amusing - he wants this thing to have a phone jack in it.
For two reasons - the first reason is so that he can put a phone line into it and record conversations. For some reason he thinks that there is a large demand for this, just because he wants it.
He also wants this thing to be able to check e-mail - but he doesn't want to pay cell phone charges for checking e-mail, and bluetooth and wi-fi are out because he wants to travel the globe with this thing and plug into the phone lines at hotels and then dial up and check his e-mail. Via the modem jack of course.
I thought I had him sold on the cool Neuros, but then this phone jack idea occurred to him and he is now focused on that.
The worst part is that he finds the fact that it doesn't exist and that nobody else would want this a personal failing on my part.
As if I'm just not trying hard enough.
I feel like telling him that if he clicks his heels together, rubs a lamp, and also *really* believes in it, then it will happen.
Anyway, anyone know of such a beast to exist? (he has a laptop, but apparently that is "too bulky" - so that solution is out - and I know that Handspring has plug-ins for all of that stuff, but he hates Handsprings and refuses to ever own one)
I suppose beer companies sponsoring really fast driving is just as inane as a rocket...
I just hope that it draws the white trash chicks that are willing to show us their tits on the big screens.
what sort of uptime?
I take it you haven't read a single other post of mine on this thread.
You will see that I'm largely on your side when it comes to outsourcing things.
I am simply raising the point that it isn't likely that CEOs will ever be outsourced simply due to the intagibles at hand.
And the fact that you say "Alot of those suits..." - really means nothing at all. There are plenty of people in all walks of the business circle that suck at math. Big deal - there are equally many (especially the successful ones - Gates, Case, Turner, etc) that are quite good at it - so I really don't get your point.
From my experience, the computer guy needs to know a few different computer languages, they need to know some algorithms, and it really helps if they are good at logic and math.
Ideally they would be good at dealing with specs - writing and reading them, as well as communicating with others - but these are probably seen far less often as the first few are.
The CEO on the other hand has to be aware of the social structure of the company. The CEO has to be aware of what is going on in the company currently, as well as have a vision for where the company should go and what it will take to get there.
The CEO needs to have the skills to talk to his managers - both to give out the orders of what comes next, as well as react to what they are telling him/her and make decisions as to where to go next.
The need to be aware of what resources they have available to them and at what cost, and they need to know where they can cut corners - whether they actually think of this, or whether they just know how to delegate to is another issue.
They need the social skills to be able to go out and shmooze clients - something that is considerably harder than it sounds, and I guarentee that the bulk of the Slashdot audience couldn't do it for shit unless they were given the task of shmoozing fellow geeks.
At the companies I have worked at/with in the past, the CEO did in fact know much if not all of what the underlings knew - but that isn't always the case - the larger the company, the harder that is to achieve. At GM, there is no way for that to happen.
But it helps that if it is a tech company, the CEO has a tech background - if it is a publishing company, it helps if the CEO has worked their way up through that and learned the ropes.
You can give me examples all day long about the anomolies to those - but the fact is, just because we aren't personally CEOs, we see them doing things to us that are foreign. They may seem like they are fucking things up, or just goofing off - and hell, maybe they are. Not as if programmers don't go through the same things.
But in the end, having a math and logic background while learning a few programming languages is a trait that can be done anywhere in the world. It is a skillset that isn't that far off from plumbing or an auto mechanic.
The social interaction side alone of the CEOs job makes it so that there are fewer people that can do it - and when you throw in the fact that they have their egos as do their fellow CEOs that they do business with - you can't just bring in anyone to do it, nor just farm it out to just anyone.
There are hundreds of programmers out there for everyone one CEO.
It is easy to sit back and be the armchair CEO of a company and state how incredibly stupid they are for doing this and that - but given the actual responsibility, most anyone would either crack, or fuck up equally or worse.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for those that bitch and moan about it all, yet have never sat in that position themselves.
right. in that quote I said they did more, I never said anything about them having the same skillset as the people under them and then doing more on top of that.
I agree that had I said what you are saying, it would be bad logic at best and basically wrong... but I never said that.
I like that technique though. probably considered bad form in normal debate - but seems like a good skill for advertising or government positions.
Have you been through an Ivy League school?
If you mean one of the shitty ones, then I have to agree with you - Penn has a good business school, and graduate school at Cornell is good, but the "Ivy League" is just a reference to the sports conference of the undergrand - and those two school suck nuts for undergrad.
There are arguements to be made that Dartmouth could suck too.
Brown used to have a no grades policy - perhaps that is what you are referring to.
Harvard recently has had a lot of noise over grade inflation there - it is notorious for being very hard to get into, and then once you are there, it is very easy (for undergrad).
Other than that though - which I suppose only really leaves Princeton, Yale, and Columbia - they are good schools - the first two probably being the best out of those.
But unless you have actually been through one of those programs, you are totally talking out of your ass if you think you can skip classes and just get a C and certainly not a B. (although, like I said, perhaps at the lowest of those that I first mentioned)
In the end, you are arguing the way it should be against the way it is. Two very different things, and in the end a waste of breath aside from letting you vent your displeasure for it.
uh, exactly at what point did I claim that the execs did, or could do everything that the people below them did?
I personally would argue against the "many generations", but yes I agree that it isn't a direct "we give you $1 and it feeds right back into our country immediately" - but in a global economy, the pool of resources expands, but in the end, it comes sloshing back around.
... make more money.
I don't particularly get the concept of "We were the 900lb gorilla and the fact that by doing this, there might become another 800lb gorilla scares me"
The fact of the matter, the more I travel around the world, the more I see how much everyone universally loathes Americans.
This is largely why.
In the end, if a company is spending less to make a product, they either sell it at the same price and make more money, or they lower the cost, increase the number of units sold that way, and
Basically, this is all so companies can make more money.
If companies are making more money - jobs will eventually pick back up.
Will they be the programming jobs? Not if we outsource them all for cheaper - which is the point - perhaps the programming job is no longer needed as much.
Perhaps the people that did that in the past need a new career.
To claim that by getting rid of US programmers and instead getting individuals that are willing to work for less, then somehow relegates the US programmers to poverty level is a bit extreme.
They have the brainpower to learn what got them there in the first place - they perhaps need to change the target of their skillset, but they are in no way destined to poverty.
When the US car companies moved their plants to Mexico because the labor was cheaper, there were still plenty of Americans buying those products, even though there were auto-workers all over the states that had to learn new skills, or apply their skills towards other trades.
Programmers aren't really all that different, they just get less greasy.
In the end, I have worked for two companies that had divisions in India and the states. The idea was that while we were working on a project during the day in the States, the Indian group was sleeping.
Then as the people in the States slept, the Indian group would wake up and kick ass and take names on the code where the States group left off.
Inevitably that wouldn't work out because it was a logistical nightmare and there were always misommunications that would get amplified by the time difference and slightly language barrier.
So then they set it up so that the US side would do components, and the Indian side would do components - that worked out better - ended up with competition as to who's crap would be better. They were just black boxes, as long as it took in the right junk and spit out the right junk, and didn't crash, we didn't care what they did.
I personally have no issue with moving the stuff overseas.
there are plenty of places where it can go wrong - but to write it all off because there are opportunities for failure seems a bit rash.
The project can fail just as easily in the states with poor planning, and it would do it at a higher cost basis along the way.
I wish I had an MBA - or even the money/time to get one.
As I have written in response to other comments on this thread, even if the CEOs are total douchebags, the networking skills and connections they have are very valuable to a company.
Sure they can't program for shit, but they can run a company. In the same way that the CEO sees projects not getting finished on time and there being bugs in the code, and then assumes that the programmers must be idiots - you see the CEO doing what is part of his job, and perhaps not always succeeding beautifully, and you write them off as dipshits.
Not to say that a lot of them aren't dipshits.
In terms of cultural issues - I certainly think that there are plenty cultures beyond ours that can lead a workforce here - but I don't know that they would fit into the "ol boy network" - they aren't going to replace every CEO with someone from overseas - just in the same way that all IT isn't getting outsourced.
So you get a mishmash of all kinds of cultures.
Culture clashes are not what lead to great business deals.
If a fortune 100 company wants to make a huge deal in Japan's chip market, they sure as hell don't send some Texan in a cowboy hat to Japan to make the deal.
The same way that in order to seal a deal in Texas, you wouldn't necessarily to send in a CEO that is from Somoa.
there are just cultural expectations that whether they are right or wrong in the whole political correct realm, they exist in the fullest at the highest levels of the top companies, and in order to do business, there is a fixed way of doing it.
In the end, you get the guys that all went to the same set of schools, and they all know each other through some degree of separation from friends networked.
to bring in an outsider is cultural suicide for a company.
In IT, these cultural boundaries don't exist because we were already brining in brains from outside for years. It isn't a good ol boy network in computers - it is the young geeks (young being a largely relative term - but for the most part, at least a decade or two younger than the good ol boys of top level management).
In terms of braintrust being all in IT - that would depend largely on what the company does. In terms of Microsoft, that is pretty much the entire package, the programmers - so they really need them.
Other companies have things that they need to get done, but the brainwork isn't in the software, it is in the deals and the logic to develop the ideas that drive the products.
This is all getting away from the original point, which is that there are many things preventing CEO level people from moving around as much.
If you don't like those things, that is great - you are entitled to your opinion.
But that sure as hell doesn't mean that they are going to turn, say "wha" and then go running out of their position, arms akimo and flailing into the night leaving it wide open for others to fill.
They have the power to stay where they want, and that is pretty much the key in the end.