A friend from college serverd in a support capacity for Microsoft Research (it's called Microsoft Research, BTW not "Microsoft Labs") for over 4 years. His take: smart people get let loose to investigate stupid things. It's a place people go to hide and play academic while getting industry rock star pay.
I'd like to call B.S. on your comparison to Bell Labs on another level: With software, people with good ideas just stand up and do them. It's not like you need massive R&D experiment or new materials development to explore different computational processes and concepts like you do in the physical world (i.e. try to create a transistor from scratch in 195X in your garage).
That was when UNIX was invented, these old school labs were still operating & inventing stuff like the internet (sorry Al Gore). When women voters and black activist groups had more of the power that they diserve through high-profile media attention and grass roots campaigning. There was a sense of change in the air and right wing nut-jobs lost offices and dodged impeachment because of illegal activites in high office instead of holding the nation hostage. For actual progress of everyday american citizens, yeah: I'll call it the good old days.
P.S. It's coming up on 10 years since the mid 90's. Am I the only one who would give anything to hear the top story on the news being about cigars and blue dresses instead of what we're seeing today?
That is to say, "the Buzzword Oriented Bullshit nature of Java Enterprise Edition brings Supremely Over-the-top Acronyms". Don't get me wrong. I write Java. I even use some Enterprise Edition components. I even like Java and (some) of the JEE feature set. However unfortunate, I'm sure the PHB driven drivel about the IT bullshit will bring some confusing so-called "feature" that smart developers will avoid, idiots will grab on to, and consultants will smack their lips over using to leveredge more money out of suckers^^^^^^^clients. Any developer worth a damn knows how to group functionality,layer it, and expose access as needed. There's nothing to see here. Move along...
Disclaimer: I am an agile fanboy/advocate and I do XP. My team follows all the major controversal practices (pair programming, Test Driven developent, continuous integration, short iterations). The motivation for the average programmer is two-fold: test coverage builds confidance in both you and your code base, and spending time writing tests to think about both what you're doing an how you do it makes you become a "better than average" programmer. You know you're building in quality when you go to change something and you predict where tests will break (and they do). You know if you're missing quality when you find a bug, write a test that fails (which describes what the code should NOT do) and then you fix it, thus raising your quality. As for covering real customer situations, unfortunatly there's only one way to address it: you MUST talk to them directly! No matter what SDLC/CMM/Agile/ProcessD'Jour you follow, you won't ship jack that works untill that happens. There's a joke that the next hot new Agile methodology will be XTTAFC (eXtreme Talking To A F*%king Customer). I'd love to see it start to catch on...
My sales pitch goes like this: XP and agile methods are no Silver bullet, but they are a nice collection of wolfsbane, garlic, holly water & crucifixes;) You're not going to kill the monster, but you're much better equipt to make sure you don't get dragged away...
Smart programmers know that management is never as smart as they think they are (hell, for that point the programmers know that about themselves as well;) You're wasting time on requirements when you spend 3 months producing a dead tree in a binder that's already inaccurate. Spending weeks agonizing and planning for things that may never happen to the point that you can't ship anyting of value to anyone is wasting time. As far as management knows, sometimes there's no clue to be had or they get the wrong clue. Even if management knows exactly what they want, it may not be what is needed.
There are things you know that you know, things you know that you don't know, and things you don't know you don't know. Or: known knows, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The only value lies in going after the first for the three. The rest will change for certian. Hell, sometimes the first changes (e.g. they were wrong).
As far as "just write some code". Sure. As long as it's meeting the most important business requirements, you can get feedback, and you take the time to build in quality w/ test coverage: absolutely! That is however different thatn "just hack something out"...
Everyone seems to forget that given enough time and resources, *anything is possible in software. Eveyone forgets how _PATHETICLY RETARDED_ business decisions get made (apologies to the mentally challenged who do manage to tie thier shoes). Snide remarks aside, I'm dead serous here. It takes just as much resources, time, and effort to execut a good business idea as it does to do something so fucking stupid it's amazing it was considered in the first palce.
Bitch all you want about rapid paths like Ruby On Rails not addressing the long term method, but don't forget the ADD nature of the 6 figure mouth-breathers in the board room. By the time it get's done in a 1/2 assed fashion, you can confirm or deny weather it was worth doing in the first place. Worst case scenario, you have something making money that is hard to deal with. In that case _THROW IT OUT!!!!_ and take into account what you now know for sure about the market/customers/some-sucker-who-will-pay and build the _NEW_ thing that will best make money from them. Too hard you say? Won't work you say? Get some test coverage and push ahead. If you don't, just go home now, because your competition will. Adapt or die. In a global market place, you can't affort to buy "what if" engineering dollars.
Arguments like "We need something that will respond to something we don't know yet" is a variation on big design up front and other various sorts of "slow" waterfall mentality to building software. Yes, I'll admit to being one of those annoying agile assholes, but for 80% of the "business decisions" that get made in the corporate IT (and even startup) world, it holds true: the guys in suits don't know what they are doing. There are numerous reasons why Fredrick P. Brooks said in The Mythical Man Month (now over a quarter century old!) "build one to throw away. You will anyways" was because the nature of business hasn't changed. Anyone selling you some path to something you don't need today needs to be avoided like the plague.
I'll agreee with the/. masses: Microsoft are a buch of stupid dicks. However, they do one thing (perhaps only one thing) right: they get version 1 out infront of people to figure out what they need to do. Where they go wrong is assuming that 1.2 can be built off the 0.9 beta code base, but that's marketings fault. Given a company with a strong enough technical staff, these things can be corrected. If no strong technical staff exists, then they are doomed anyways and don't know it yet...
To summarize: this argumet is a load of crap presented by people who want to cling to "proven-to-fail" approaches to building sofware. It's not a bridge, it's not a car, it's ones and zeroes that may or may not see the light of day. The same optimization axion aobut "never prematurely optimize" applies even better to "never assume you have it right". As soon as people drop they fronts of how much they think they know about building products, the better off we all will be. Try, learn, and adapt. Again, if you don't your competition will...
Footnote: * within reason. You're not going to create a miracle, but you know what I mean here...
Nobody cares about what happens to the workers who get fired.
Anybody who still or might some day work for said company cares. People still working want to know what happens since companies are creatures of habit when it comes to lay-off policy. If it's 3 hours notice and zero severence, people will step up the job hunt and take just about any offer to get the hell out. If it's a nice pacakge, they'll take stock in thier own finances and weigh the bail-out-now option against it. Anyone who might want to work for the company will shy away for 18 months or so (long enough to forget and/or tell themselves "yeah, there were layoffs, but that was almost two years ago and...").
Cutting staff is never a good sign and reflects a colossal amount of stupidity on the part of management. In this case, it means "we couldn't figure out how to make money with these 5,000 people". Unless it's 5K worth of mouth-breathing middle-management, it's a sad statement on the company vision & direction from the top and the lack of grasroots channels to communicate from below. Nothing worthwhile coming from the top, nothing able to break through from the bottom....
The real question is, how much of a pay cut are the top execs taking? What's that you say, zero? In fact you say they're getting fat bonuses? Yeah... that's what I thought....
there was a 7:1 difference in productivity between best & mediocre developers
There's two problems with pulling this off: identification of the best developers, and retention of the best developers given typical stupid company behavior.
Managers almost never identify the best from the mediocre. The mediocre developers often can't identify the best from the mediocre. And sometimes, the best believe that anyone who is mediocre now has the potential to become the best if they keep working hard and learning (since they weren't always the best themselves). So, this is a great theory, but how can you get that 7:1 return on a skill attribute that you can't identify?
Even if you get those best developers, they may somehow end up on projects directed by your former "used car sales" type marketing and sales drones. By the time they see the project heading south, they're on the phone to that head-hunter who keeps bugging them and out the door in less than a month. Even if you can get thos best developers with 7:1 return, how do you retain them in the face of Dilbert Inc. style corporate America?
Shouldn't throw stones.
This is the current response (for anything)
from www.cooltechzone.com.
mossession::store failed DB function failed with error number 1062 Duplicate entry '1-' for key 2 SQL=INSERT INTO mos_session ( `session_id`,`time`,`username`,`gid`,`guest` ) VALUES ( '72b6c7b9e673a644d65da36a704bedda','1147723582','','0','1' )
Perhaps they should try not self-destructing themselves;)
If this guy knew what he was doing, he'd have his cable modem/DSL connected to a proxy server that only routes http (e.g. Squid) in a locked closet and tell the kid they can surf whatever they want, but he'll know all about it. That child protection software will do no good once the kid figures out how to download and burn a copy of any live Linux distro...
From TFA: Some of the more traditional IT positions -- application maintenance, transcription services, base application development -- may be outsourced for a number of reasons, principally cost and availability of workers.
Ok Gina, let's talk the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition as it applies to building software. Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Programmer fame has a nice article here discussing why this model describes how people learn to build software. Now answer me this: when things like "application maintenance" and "base application development" become the 1st things to be outsourced, what are you supposed to do with those freshly minted C.S. majors? You know, the ones with no practical experience in a development cycle? How are they supposed to become Experts (as Dave Thomas asks) when all the tasks that give the novice and beginner ranks the foundation to be experts don't get done by the local team? Do you want them on YOUR team, taking the chance of messing up mission critical work that they have limited frame of reference for? You can't kill a career path for cost savings and expect to magicly maintain a profession you rely on.
I'm amazed that you don't see the plain truth in numbers, Gina: the jobs being outsourced as people with experience move around and adjust (fighting tooth and nail, thank-you very much) aren't so much being "stolen" these days as they are never being created. All those drops in enrolement see the same thing Dave Thomas' article is talking about: no career path, too much risk.
Now for the last question: the one that probably makes for the icing on the cake in terms of why US and EMEA students are keeping away from C.S.. How long before that maintainable Dryfus Model of Skill Aquisition in other counteries like India and China turns into a competative force against US and EMEA businesses? Is it 14 years? Long enough to get through university, rack up student loan debt, and pay it off? No?!?! Do you honestly think that those countries are going to be content for 14 years to take scraps of "application maintenance" and "base application development" without any domestic business and technical growth?
Until the attitude of companies changes towards fostering the software building career path instead of taking the first 3 rungs off the latter: you and your Fortune 500 ilk have made your bed Gina, now lie in it.
When we have all lost faith in the social contract, this will be a very dark place
I don't know what planet you're living on pal, but corporations have been shitting all over the social contract for years. Nobody said anything when it was factory rat jobs like assembly line work or sewing t-shirts that can be trained in a matter of days and hardly require a level of functional literacy. Now that it's office work jobs that require a B.S. in order to get your resume in order to get past the HR drones, that require years of experience as well, people are up in arms about it.
Fuckyouverymuch, but when somebody digs into student loan debt in a society that supposedly values education commitment and runs into the wonderful scenario of seing the job market they focused on for 4+ years outsourced, the origional response is the _ONLY_ sane one to have. We as little worker peons don't set the rules, we just have to live by them. And when the game is being stacked so severely against the middle class, it's time to stop playing and come up with a new strategy.
The truth of the matter is, it's not so much the current IT jobs that are now being outsourced, it's the future ones. People in IT now are either scheming how to move up or move out, or planning a fight strategy to stay in the game. Every bright young freshman mind that looks at all the outsourcing articles and says to themselves, "I'd love to work with computers or biotech, but I better not do any sort of math, science, or engineering degree since I won't be able to eat let alone pay the student loans off" is one more job that gets outsourced before it has a chance to be in the US.
I'm planning a fight. Outsourcing IT is not a cure all for any size organization. In 5-10 years when the pendilum swings back, I'll more than make up for lost dollars (and do it with a smile).
Yes, it's "short shot" so you get less espresso, but it doesn't taste quite like burnt dog shit. If given the choice to walk across the street to anything else, I will. Otherwise, I'll order my double ristretto tall mocha. It's still not as good as almost anywhere else, but you won't gag...
That one group of Church leaders under the direction of then Roman emperor (Constantine) chose to include Revelations instead of The Apocalypse of Peter (see the APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS for all the rest of the stuff left out) when they were whimsically throwing together a collection of writings that they believed were correct according to thier power induced plans of what direction Christianity should go in a full 300+ years after Jesus was dead.
If only that had been arbitrarily put in and Revelations left out. We'd all be talking about how Jesus went to hell and that after the Apocolypse, if those who ascended to heaven asked to for clemancy for those in hell, it would be granted. Guess it just didn't have the fire and brimstone to keep the stupid peasants under controll that all the 666 bullshit and no redemption theme Revelations does.
The worst thing about modern so called "christians" is that they don't know thier own history.
My job is under threat of being outsourced, my boss brought it up at a meeting recently. I suppose it's time for me to do something that distinguishes me from the potential cheaper employees or get left behind. Imagine that - I have to work to stay ahead.
If your company is considering outsourcing your job, there are only one or two explanations. Both lead to the same conclusion:
1.) You do not provide a direct competitive advantage and generate revenue for them
OR
2.) They are bean-counting morons who don't understand that you provide a direct competitive advantage and generate revenue for them
Either way, just quietly start looking for a new job now making sure that when you sit down in the interview process and get to talk to the business people (if there are no biz people in the interview, don't take the job) have them explain how what you'll be doing creates a direct competitive advantage and generates revenue. It's not that the tasks you do can be outsourced and done cheaper, it's that you have to understand the business well enough to generate insights and deliver on the right tasks that maximize the ROI of keeping you around the company. If the business people in a perspective job doen't get that, leave them alone and let that bunch of idiots die off (like most new business ventures do). If a perspective job is part of a cost center, you don't want it. If a perspective job is not linked to the vision statement, you are not central enough to the business & you don't want it.
The new economy definition of job security is having the drive and professional skills to say "fuck you" to your current employer and go secure a job elsewhere.
I have found that the automatic code generation in VS 2005 allows me to spend more time on security and correct by design (not correct by testing).
It's uniformed youngsters like you that keep old Java farts like me in business:) By the time you've code generated an untested, pseudo-designed pile of crap built with layer of layer of bad decisions that you don't have the test coverage to refactor in confidence, I'll get to come along and replace the whole thing with TDD matched to the object domain you could neither devine from scratch (and nobody can) or evolve with a good foundation. I'll get the pleasure of throwing out the M$ trash, putting my Nth CruiseControll/CVS(Subversion)/Eclipse build environment, and demonstrating lower project defects. FP Brooks used to like to say, "Make one version to throw away. You will anyhow". While unit test coverage lets you get away with NOT doing that these days, it's a great old saw to pull out as an excuse to nuke Microsoft garbageware from orbit:)
Webmail - do all communication, interview scheduling, resume sending ect. through it (since you can access anywhere).
Cellphone - Anywhere access again. Keep it on vibrate, though. You can take a "dinner break" from your horendous hours and streach it out into a phone interview in your car if the weather isn't too bad.
"Emergencies" - If you have an afternoon interview, show up for a few hours and leave due to a family emergency. Come up with a good one. The point here is to use sick time so that they have to pay out your vacation in cold hard cash once you get out of there.
Employers own you far less than you even think you owe them. They have no honor, no loyalty, and no guilt. "It's just business" is what they say when layoffs go around and you have to remember that "It's just business" when you quit their ass for something (hopefully) better.
One last thing: Always leave a one line resignation letter in classic business letter format (google it) that says, "Effective as of (two weeks from today's date) I resign my position as (insert job title) with (insert company name)". It's two weeks customary polite notice, you've put it in writing, and there's nothing either fluffy or derogitory to come back at you.
It doesn't take a Stanford MBA to deduce that the potential rewards of opting to use FairPlay far outstrip the rewards of going with PlaysForSure
Gates might stand a chance then, since he dropped out:) And wasn't Balmer in Delta House along with John 'Bluto' Blutarsky? Smashing guitars & throwing chairs?
Slashdot Mirror
Most of us don't need the Pentium 6 12Ghz chip to check email, watch porn and program PHP, do we? ;)
You admit that you program PHP?!?! (just kidding;)
Completely unrelated to the fact the the US middle class is shrinking, I suppose?
A friend from college serverd in a support capacity for Microsoft Research (it's called Microsoft Research, BTW not "Microsoft Labs") for over 4 years. His take: smart people get let loose to investigate stupid things. It's a place people go to hide and play academic while getting industry rock star pay.
I'd like to call B.S. on your comparison to Bell Labs on another level: With software, people with good ideas just stand up and do them. It's not like you need massive R&D experiment or new materials development to explore different computational processes and concepts like you do in the physical world (i.e. try to create a transistor from scratch in 195X in your garage).
That was when UNIX was invented, these old school labs were still operating & inventing stuff like the internet (sorry Al Gore). When women voters and black activist groups had more of the power that they diserve through high-profile media attention and grass roots campaigning. There was a sense of change in the air and right wing nut-jobs lost offices and dodged impeachment because of illegal activites in high office instead of holding the nation hostage. For actual progress of everyday american citizens, yeah: I'll call it the good old days.
P.S. It's coming up on 10 years since the mid 90's. Am I the only one who would give anything to hear the top story on the news being about cigars and blue dresses instead of what we're seeing today?
You know the world of today sucks when you're nostalgic for your parents good old days.
That is to say, "the Buzzword Oriented Bullshit nature of Java Enterprise Edition brings Supremely Over-the-top Acronyms". Don't get me wrong. I write Java. I even use some Enterprise Edition components. I even like Java and (some) of the JEE feature set. However unfortunate, I'm sure the PHB driven drivel about the IT bullshit will bring some confusing so-called "feature" that smart developers will avoid, idiots will grab on to, and consultants will smack their lips over using to leveredge more money out of suckers^^^^^^^clients. Any developer worth a damn knows how to group functionality,layer it, and expose access as needed. There's nothing to see here. Move along...
Disclaimer: I am an agile fanboy/advocate and I do XP. My team follows all the major controversal practices (pair programming, Test Driven developent, continuous integration, short iterations). The motivation for the average programmer is two-fold: test coverage builds confidance in both you and your code base, and spending time writing tests to think about both what you're doing an how you do it makes you become a "better than average" programmer. You know you're building in quality when you go to change something and you predict where tests will break (and they do). You know if you're missing quality when you find a bug, write a test that fails (which describes what the code should NOT do) and then you fix it, thus raising your quality. As for covering real customer situations, unfortunatly there's only one way to address it: you MUST talk to them directly! No matter what SDLC/CMM/Agile/ProcessD'Jour you follow, you won't ship jack that works untill that happens. There's a joke that the next hot new Agile methodology will be XTTAFC (eXtreme Talking To A F*%king Customer). I'd love to see it start to catch on...
My sales pitch goes like this: XP and agile methods are no Silver bullet, but they are a nice collection of wolfsbane, garlic, holly water & crucifixes;) You're not going to kill the monster, but you're much better equipt to make sure you don't get dragged away...
Smart programmers know that management is never as smart as they think they are (hell, for that point the programmers know that about themselves as well;) You're wasting time on requirements when you spend 3 months producing a dead tree in a binder that's already inaccurate. Spending weeks agonizing and planning for things that may never happen to the point that you can't ship anyting of value to anyone is wasting time. As far as management knows, sometimes there's no clue to be had or they get the wrong clue. Even if management knows exactly what they want, it may not be what is needed.
There are things you know that you know, things you know that you don't know, and things you don't know you don't know. Or: known knows, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The only value lies in going after the first for the three. The rest will change for certian. Hell, sometimes the first changes (e.g. they were wrong).
As far as "just write some code". Sure. As long as it's meeting the most important business requirements, you can get feedback, and you take the time to build in quality w/ test coverage: absolutely! That is however different thatn "just hack something out"...
Everyone seems to forget that given enough time and resources, *anything is possible in software. Eveyone forgets how _PATHETICLY RETARDED_ business decisions get made (apologies to the mentally challenged who do manage to tie thier shoes). Snide remarks aside, I'm dead serous here. It takes just as much resources, time, and effort to execut a good business idea as it does to do something so fucking stupid it's amazing it was considered in the first palce.
/. masses: Microsoft are a buch of stupid dicks. However, they do one thing (perhaps only one thing) right: they get version 1 out infront of people to figure out what they need to do. Where they go wrong is assuming that 1.2 can be built off the 0.9 beta code base, but that's marketings fault. Given a company with a strong enough technical staff, these things can be corrected. If no strong technical staff exists, then they are doomed anyways and don't know it yet...
Bitch all you want about rapid paths like Ruby On Rails not addressing the long term method, but don't forget the ADD nature of the 6 figure mouth-breathers in the board room. By the time it get's done in a 1/2 assed fashion, you can confirm or deny weather it was worth doing in the first place. Worst case scenario, you have something making money that is hard to deal with. In that case _THROW IT OUT!!!!_ and take into account what you now know for sure about the market/customers/some-sucker-who-will-pay and build the _NEW_ thing that will best make money from them. Too hard you say? Won't work you say? Get some test coverage and push ahead. If you don't, just go home now, because your competition will. Adapt or die. In a global market place, you can't affort to buy "what if" engineering dollars.
Arguments like "We need something that will respond to something we don't know yet" is a variation on big design up front and other various sorts of "slow" waterfall mentality to building software. Yes, I'll admit to being one of those annoying agile assholes, but for 80% of the "business decisions" that get made in the corporate IT (and even startup) world, it holds true: the guys in suits don't know what they are doing. There are numerous reasons why Fredrick P. Brooks said in The Mythical Man Month (now over a quarter century old!) "build one to throw away. You will anyways" was because the nature of business hasn't changed. Anyone selling you some path to something you don't need today needs to be avoided like the plague.
I'll agreee with the
To summarize: this argumet is a load of crap presented by people who want to cling to "proven-to-fail" approaches to building sofware. It's not a bridge, it's not a car, it's ones and zeroes that may or may not see the light of day. The same optimization axion aobut "never prematurely optimize" applies even better to "never assume you have it right". As soon as people drop they fronts of how much they think they know about building products, the better off we all will be. Try, learn, and adapt. Again, if you don't your competition will...
Footnote: * within reason. You're not going to create a miracle, but you know what I mean here...
...sin commits you!
Anybody who still or might some day work for said company cares. People still working want to know what happens since companies are creatures of habit when it comes to lay-off policy. If it's 3 hours notice and zero severence, people will step up the job hunt and take just about any offer to get the hell out. If it's a nice pacakge, they'll take stock in thier own finances and weigh the bail-out-now option against it. Anyone who might want to work for the company will shy away for 18 months or so (long enough to forget and/or tell themselves "yeah, there were layoffs, but that was almost two years ago and...").
Cutting staff is never a good sign and reflects a colossal amount of stupidity on the part of management. In this case, it means "we couldn't figure out how to make money with these 5,000 people". Unless it's 5K worth of mouth-breathing middle-management, it's a sad statement on the company vision & direction from the top and the lack of grasroots channels to communicate from below. Nothing worthwhile coming from the top, nothing able to break through from the bottom....
The real question is, how much of a pay cut are the top execs taking? What's that you say, zero? In fact you say they're getting fat bonuses? Yeah... that's what I thought....
The little price tags attached to the same damn rehash of racing games, shooters, RPGs and action games.
It makes me laugh to think that studios can command such money for re-heated ideas....
there was a 7:1 difference in productivity between best & mediocre developers
There's two problems with pulling this off: identification of the best developers, and retention of the best developers given typical stupid company behavior.
Managers almost never identify the best from the mediocre. The mediocre developers often can't identify the best from the mediocre. And sometimes, the best believe that anyone who is mediocre now has the potential to become the best if they keep working hard and learning (since they weren't always the best themselves). So, this is a great theory, but how can you get that 7:1 return on a skill attribute that you can't identify?
Even if you get those best developers, they may somehow end up on projects directed by your former "used car sales" type marketing and sales drones. By the time they see the project heading south, they're on the phone to that head-hunter who keeps bugging them and out the door in less than a month. Even if you can get thos best developers with 7:1 return, how do you retain them in the face of Dilbert Inc. style corporate America?
Perhaps they should try not self-destructing themselves;)
Of course not! Kids are too precious to be used as target practice.
Now advanced product testing on the other hand...
If this guy knew what he was doing, he'd have his cable modem/DSL connected to a proxy server that only routes http (e.g. Squid) in a locked closet and tell the kid they can surf whatever they want, but he'll know all about it. That child protection software will do no good once the kid figures out how to download and burn a copy of any live Linux distro...
Ok Gina, let's talk the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition as it applies to building software. Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Programmer fame has a nice article here discussing why this model describes how people learn to build software. Now answer me this: when things like "application maintenance" and "base application development" become the 1st things to be outsourced, what are you supposed to do with those freshly minted C.S. majors? You know, the ones with no practical experience in a development cycle? How are they supposed to become Experts (as Dave Thomas asks) when all the tasks that give the novice and beginner ranks the foundation to be experts don't get done by the local team? Do you want them on YOUR team, taking the chance of messing up mission critical work that they have limited frame of reference for? You can't kill a career path for cost savings and expect to magicly maintain a profession you rely on.
I'm amazed that you don't see the plain truth in numbers, Gina: the jobs being outsourced as people with experience move around and adjust (fighting tooth and nail, thank-you very much) aren't so much being "stolen" these days as they are never being created. All those drops in enrolement see the same thing Dave Thomas' article is talking about: no career path, too much risk.
Now for the last question: the one that probably makes for the icing on the cake in terms of why US and EMEA students are keeping away from C.S.. How long before that maintainable Dryfus Model of Skill Aquisition in other counteries like India and China turns into a competative force against US and EMEA businesses? Is it 14 years? Long enough to get through university, rack up student loan debt, and pay it off? No?!?! Do you honestly think that those countries are going to be content for 14 years to take scraps of "application maintenance" and "base application development" without any domestic business and technical growth? Until the attitude of companies changes towards fostering the software building career path instead of taking the first 3 rungs off the latter: you and your Fortune 500 ilk have made your bed Gina, now lie in it.
I don't know what planet you're living on pal, but corporations have been shitting all over the social contract for years. Nobody said anything when it was factory rat jobs like assembly line work or sewing t-shirts that can be trained in a matter of days and hardly require a level of functional literacy. Now that it's office work jobs that require a B.S. in order to get your resume in order to get past the HR drones, that require years of experience as well, people are up in arms about it.
Fuckyouverymuch, but when somebody digs into student loan debt in a society that supposedly values education commitment and runs into the wonderful scenario of seing the job market they focused on for 4+ years outsourced, the origional response is the _ONLY_ sane one to have. We as little worker peons don't set the rules, we just have to live by them. And when the game is being stacked so severely against the middle class, it's time to stop playing and come up with a new strategy.
The truth of the matter is, it's not so much the current IT jobs that are now being outsourced, it's the future ones. People in IT now are either scheming how to move up or move out, or planning a fight strategy to stay in the game. Every bright young freshman mind that looks at all the outsourcing articles and says to themselves, "I'd love to work with computers or biotech, but I better not do any sort of math, science, or engineering degree since I won't be able to eat let alone pay the student loans off" is one more job that gets outsourced before it has a chance to be in the US.
I'm planning a fight. Outsourcing IT is not a cure all for any size organization. In 5-10 years when the pendilum swings back, I'll more than make up for lost dollars (and do it with a smile).
Yes, it's "short shot" so you get less espresso, but it doesn't taste quite like burnt dog shit. If given the choice to walk across the street to anything else, I will. Otherwise, I'll order my double ristretto tall mocha. It's still not as good as almost anywhere else, but you won't gag...
The fist may be tiny, but the middle finger stands proudly atop it;)
If only that had been arbitrarily put in and Revelations left out. We'd all be talking about how Jesus went to hell and that after the Apocolypse, if those who ascended to heaven asked to for clemancy for those in hell, it would be granted. Guess it just didn't have the fire and brimstone to keep the stupid peasants under controll that all the 666 bullshit and no redemption theme Revelations does.
The worst thing about modern so called "christians" is that they don't know thier own history.
If your company is considering outsourcing your job, there are only one or two explanations. Both lead to the same conclusion:
1.) You do not provide a direct competitive advantage and generate revenue for them
OR
2.) They are bean-counting morons who don't understand that you provide a direct competitive advantage and generate revenue for them
Either way, just quietly start looking for a new job now making sure that when you sit down in the interview process and get to talk to the business people (if there are no biz people in the interview, don't take the job) have them explain how what you'll be doing creates a direct competitive advantage and generates revenue. It's not that the tasks you do can be outsourced and done cheaper, it's that you have to understand the business well enough to generate insights and deliver on the right tasks that maximize the ROI of keeping you around the company. If the business people in a perspective job doen't get that, leave them alone and let that bunch of idiots die off (like most new business ventures do). If a perspective job is part of a cost center, you don't want it. If a perspective job is not linked to the vision statement, you are not central enough to the business & you don't want it.
The new economy definition of job security is having the drive and professional skills to say "fuck you" to your current employer and go secure a job elsewhere.
I have found that the automatic code generation in VS 2005 allows me to spend more time on security and correct by design (not correct by testing).
It's uniformed youngsters like you that keep old Java farts like me in business:) By the time you've code generated an untested, pseudo-designed pile of crap built with layer of layer of bad decisions that you don't have the test coverage to refactor in confidence, I'll get to come along and replace the whole thing with TDD matched to the object domain you could neither devine from scratch (and nobody can) or evolve with a good foundation. I'll get the pleasure of throwing out the M$ trash, putting my Nth CruiseControll/CVS(Subversion)/Eclipse build environment, and demonstrating lower project defects. FP Brooks used to like to say, "Make one version to throw away. You will anyhow". While unit test coverage lets you get away with NOT doing that these days, it's a great old saw to pull out as an excuse to nuke Microsoft garbageware from orbit:)
Webmail - do all communication, interview scheduling, resume sending ect. through it (since you can access anywhere).
Cellphone - Anywhere access again. Keep it on vibrate, though. You can take a "dinner break" from your horendous hours and streach it out into a phone interview in your car if the weather isn't too bad.
"Emergencies" - If you have an afternoon interview, show up for a few hours and leave due to a family emergency. Come up with a good one. The point here is to use sick time so that they have to pay out your vacation in cold hard cash once you get out of there.
Employers own you far less than you even think you owe them. They have no honor, no loyalty, and no guilt. "It's just business" is what they say when layoffs go around and you have to remember that "It's just business" when you quit their ass for something (hopefully) better.
One last thing: Always leave a one line resignation letter in classic business letter format (google it) that says, "Effective as of (two weeks from today's date) I resign my position as (insert job title) with (insert company name)". It's two weeks customary polite notice, you've put it in writing, and there's nothing either fluffy or derogitory to come back at you.
Gates might stand a chance then, since he dropped out:) And wasn't Balmer in Delta House along with John 'Bluto' Blutarsky? Smashing guitars & throwing chairs?
Yeah. I'm willing to burn some karma today...