...so you're suggesting that taking a person from roughly a 15th century existence and handing them a smartphone doesn't immediately make them a sophisticated, worldly Western-world consumer?
Well hell, why didn't someone say that before?
Humans are adaptable. Prior to WW1 most Americans were farmers so you dont even have to go back to the 15th century. In fact Africa probably had a higher urbanisation rate than Americans 100 years back. If Americans can understand tech 100 years after coming off the farm so can Africans. Give them about 20 years and they will be kicking American tech ass as well as the Indians are doing now. Only hope is to go into their countries and create civil wars otherwise prepare for your new African overlords (same as the current Chinese overlords and the previous British overlords)
as long as everyone buys in that Quality is important and fixing urgent bugs is also important.
When we go to production we have a 3 day code freeze during which only P0 bugs (which are rare at that point) can lead to the code being changed. After production the code is tagged and new development start on a new branch. Any Production bugs which cant wait till next release are fixed on the production branch, tested by QA team and released. The developer makes sure to do the same fix in the new code branch (if the code has changed significantly sometimes the fix is no longer needed or you do an equivalent fix) Code is built everyday. At the end of everyday we let the QA team know which stories are ready for testing. Developers work on their private branches and at 2 PM merge and build. A list of tickets fixed and stories completed is sent to QA team and they can start testin (what do they do till 2 PM? Work on automation) After 2 Pm developers will not check in code unless its for a fix to one of the stories they sent for testing and QA raised a bug. This is done if the build is broken and QA cannot work else it is fixed in private branch and available next days build. By the end of the sprint pretty much every story has been tested - we dont consider a story done if QA is not done and all P0 and P1 bugs are fixed. Automation may not be complete but at least manual QA is done for the effort to count in that scrums velocity. Before every release we have a strenghtening Sprint where we are not doing new functionality rather fixing all leftover P2 and P3 bugs (we do fix these durings Sprints but a story is not considered blocked for P2 and P3). This also gives time for other activities like preparing runbooks and data dumps for the switchover. Typically Business UAT team is running one cycle behind the dev and QA team so this also gives them a chance to catch up , do one final round verifying all stories and production tickets for the release and give a signoff. 3 days before we freeze. Typically by this time if we dont have a lot of bugs the team is actually pruning stories for the next release. The only tricky part is when we tag and branch and try to start working on the new features during the strenghtening sprint. Then we have to be carefull about merging back the last minute fixes into the next release branch.
Well not at the same cost as the cost of living is higher here because we tend to pay our lower skilled support staff like Electricians and Plumbers and Janitors way more than they are paid in India. While this is good from a social cohesion point of view by keeping the gap between rich and poor down if you have a job that can be done remotely from a country where they are too busy surviving to give a shit about the poor the middle class can outcompete you on price. Of course you might have a few advantages like the electricity and the internet always working and not haing to bother about bribing the local goons to make sure you have a parking space fro your car but at the same time folks in India can afford a maid to clean, a cook to cook, a babysitter to watch the kids, a driver to drive them to work while they can focus on coding. Which means they can outcompete you on coding skills and you need to provide something which they cannot provide remotely in order to keep your job in a globalized market.
How about when you go to the movies and there is a queue for tickets the movie theater announces that they will sell 10 tickets at a time with 1 reserved for each person with a 3 character first name, 4 character first name so on till 12 first names. So if you are a Joe or a cristopher you get your ticket immediately but if you are a Sloan or a James or a Stanley you have to wait because most names are 5-7 characters long. Now if this system was in place and then you said no its first come first served than yes the number of tickets being issued to Joes and Christophers would go down and those issued to James' and Stanleys would go up. This however does not mean we are reducing the tickets issued to Joes and Christophers. We are merely correcting an unfair current situation. And yes you are correct the basic problem is that the theater is only selling tickets for half the seats. The US could easily sustain 5 million net immigration instead of 1 million - most of the Mountain west is pretty much empty forests even today and the midwest is open fields. There is no shortage of space in the US. What is needed is open unlimited immigration for qualified folks and these folks need to be pushed out into the heartland instead of clustering on the coasts. The reason immigrants tend to stick in cities are threefold - one the jobs are in the cities, two the welfare network is in the cities, three the heartland is predominantly white and immigrants fear discrimination. Solution strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and bar first generation immigrants from any welfare -CHIP,Medicaid,Section 8, bus passes,food banks in cities and also remove minimum wage restrictions for immigrants in the heartland (keep them in the coastal cities). This way immigrants will move away from the crowded coasts.
There is no proposal to hold any other country down . Just do it first applied first approved. Right now Indians are waiting 10 years while other country citizens re waiting months.
The solution of course is the German model where if a property is vacant the owner pays a penalty to the govt every month. The penalty is to cover the lost taxes the govt is not getting because the people who would have stayed there and paid sales tax and income tax are not there. Instead in the US we subsidize landlords by letting them keep apartments empty with no penalty. Rents are veeeery reasonable in Germany and people dont waste money on vacation homes. They vacation in hotels.
You know being a landlord with a property on rentberry is as bad as being a tenant who is on the sexual offenders list. No family is going to rent from rentberry landlords. Only crashpads and slums will be listed. Noone who wants a stable rental life wants to deal with an openly mercentalist landlord. People will go to the landlords who care about having a long term stable tenant who does not bother them too much, pays on time and treats the property nicely while rentberry landlords will get all the problem tenants who cant get a rental anywhere else.
My point exactly. There has been enough discrimination against Chinese and Indian immigrants. Time to get rid of the 7% cap to prevent artificially holding down immigration from these countries. USA is a nation of immigrants , about time it started behaving like one instead of behaving like a nation of white only immigrants.
This "Disney workers training replacements" meme is wrong and is getting old.
There was no training, it was knowledge transfer. Its like when a factory shift takes over the next shift, previous shift let them know what are the issues that happened during the previous shift. Doesn't mean the next shift doesn't know the job and needs training.
And Disney stayed within the letter of the law. They did not replace folks with H1Bs. They outsourced the function to an outside firm. That firm could have hired the ex Disney employees or used its own employees sitting on the bench. Guess who they chose?
Dont like the law , change it so that every time a function is outsourced the vendor has to hire the ex employees from the department being abolished. And this has nothing to do with H1B. They could easily have been replaced with citizen employees from the vendor as well.
Ultimately most of the work being outsourced is doable by High School graduates. The 4 year degree requirement is a sop to the offshoring companies. If you are going to require a 4 year degree for something you cant pay 100 dollars an hour for it (even though what its really worth is 30 dollars). So then the only option left is to send it offshore or bring folks on H1B who will work below their qualification level to get a shot at immigrating to the US. Stop H1B and the only option is Offshoring. Noone is going to pay 100K to sort spreadsheets though that what a lot of "IT" workers do. Show me an anti H1B shill and I will show you a pro Offshoring Shill.
The Indian companies dont really want to file for H1Bs. They want to take the work offshore. They file a large number of H1Bs and dont use all of them. But this way the client companies who dont plan visas years in advance dont have a visa available when they do give up on searching for local candidates and are willing to settle for a visa candidate. At that point they have 2 choices wait a year or hire as contractor from the consulting firms. This is bad as students graduating in the winter semester cannot get H1s as they havn't landed their jobs by April. Companies cant do direct hire and have to hire from consulting firms and people working on H1s dont get paid as much as they could as the Consulting firms have to make their cut as well. An unlimited quotaH1B with a 100K salary minimum would be a much better solution and push the consulting firms out of the visa hoarding business. The H1 visa is already portable. What is not portable is the Green Card priority date. The dates for Indians are seriously backlogged to 10 years. The countrywise cap on GreenCards needs to be eliminated - currently the cap for a country with a billion people is the same as for a country with 50000 so the backlogs for India and China are by design. This would right a historical wrong where Indian and Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship before WW2 even if they had the same or better qualifications than European immigrants. (Before WW2 you did not need any qualifications to immigrate to the US other than getting on a ship. There were no visas. For becoming citizens however you had to be white so only the next generation could become citizens)
TCS/Wipro/Infosys/Cognizant do game the lottery but the main way they game it is by using up so many slots that others cant. They hardly use a fraction of the H1s they do get. In your scenario they can still game it by applying for a large number of H1s with LCAs with high salaries but never sending those folks . When there is a resultant shortage of workers in the US the entire project will be sent offshore and the offshoring firms will be happy. You want to fight against offshoring make H1b unlimited. Any company who needs a programmer should be able to file and get a visa within a month. Ifcompanies can get people directly no need to go to consulting firms who have large offshore benches. If you use an offshoring firm then eventually all work will get offshored.
All this memo is saying is that since the Nebraska center is now processing H1Bs like it did during the Y2K rush it needs to do so at the existing standards (4 yr degree needed) instead of the Y2K standards (No degree needed to get H1B). Nothing to see here. keep walking. From 2006 onwards only the Texas center has processed H1Bs and the standard has been a 4 year degree is needed.
Why cant you setup your own DR instead of going to a Cloud Hosted Model? Cloud hosting is a continuos drain whereas with your own DR you can use that money to fund your own IT positions forever. Again efficiency for the sake of efficiency is dumb when you end up eliminating your own job.
A Gucci purse cost 5 dollars to manufacture in a sweatshop in Bangladesh. its sold for 5000 USD. Why? Because people in the fashion industry know not to shit where they eat. Software developers are their own worse enemy. The cost of something is not what it costs you to produce, its what someone is willing to pay for it. Thats Economics 101
I swear IT customers are like girls who fall for the bad boys and ignore the decent guys. if a company wants a simple license fee to use its software people will pirate it or ignore it and use "open source". But if you get someone who abuses you by saying my way or the highway they will stick to him/it even closer. Witness Apple, Cisco,Accenture etc etc
But owning enough stock does give you a seat on the board and the right to appoint the CEO. And then your friendly CEO can order his subordinates to work with their offshore partners in an atmosphere of complete trust and transparency.
Ultimately software is supposed to solve a real world problem. Its a means not an end. If you focus on writing the greatest, most stable software of all time and the company goes bankrupt around you because you never released and you feel it doesn't reflect badly on you - after all your code was perfect- than you are lying to yourself.
At some point the rich have to pay the "Dont kill and eat me " tax. If its a choice between living with a tax and becoming lunch even 99% doesnt seem confiscatory. Especially if its 99% of billions earned from robot factories. But even before we get to that point at some earlier point a basic income will have to be introduced as otherwise who will all the factories sell to? There is only so much that a small elite class can consume.
We could go to the Kuwait Oil Company model. every child born in Kuwait gets 1000 shares of Kuwait Oil Company stock. With free housing, schooling,medicare, subsidized food the living expenses are low enough that the dividend from those shares is enough that no Kuwaiti needs to work. All work is done by expats. Replace expats with robots and you have a similar situation. Of course it does need state ownership of the KOC.
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...so you're suggesting that taking a person from roughly a 15th century existence and handing them a smartphone doesn't immediately make them a sophisticated, worldly Western-world consumer?
Well hell, why didn't someone say that before?
Humans are adaptable. Prior to WW1 most Americans were farmers so you dont even have to go back to the 15th century. In fact Africa probably had a higher urbanisation rate than Americans 100 years back. If Americans can understand tech 100 years after coming off the farm so can Africans. Give them about 20 years and they will be kicking American tech ass as well as the Indians are doing now. Only hope is to go into their countries and create civil wars otherwise prepare for your new African overlords (same as the current Chinese overlords and the previous British overlords)
Now that most jocks are addicted to their smartphones, nerds are going to get their own back
as long as everyone buys in that Quality is important and fixing urgent bugs is also important.
When we go to production we have a 3 day code freeze during which only P0 bugs (which are rare at that point) can lead to the code being changed.
After production the code is tagged and new development start on a new branch.
Any Production bugs which cant wait till next release are fixed on the production branch, tested by QA team and released.
The developer makes sure to do the same fix in the new code branch (if the code has changed significantly sometimes the fix is no longer needed or you do an equivalent fix)
Code is built everyday. At the end of everyday we let the QA team know which stories are ready for testing. Developers work on their private branches and at 2 PM merge and build. A list of tickets fixed and stories completed is sent to QA team and they can start testin (what do they do till 2 PM? Work on automation) After 2 Pm developers will not check in code unless its for a fix to one of the stories they sent for testing and QA raised a bug. This is done if the build is broken and QA cannot work else it is fixed in private branch and available next days build. By the end of the sprint pretty much every story has been tested - we dont consider a story done if QA is not done and all P0 and P1 bugs are fixed. Automation may not be complete but at least manual QA is done for the effort to count in that scrums velocity.
Before every release we have a strenghtening Sprint where we are not doing new functionality rather fixing all leftover P2 and P3 bugs (we do fix these durings Sprints but a story is not considered blocked for P2 and P3). This also gives time for other activities like preparing runbooks and data dumps for the switchover.
Typically Business UAT team is running one cycle behind the dev and QA team so this also gives them a chance to catch up , do one final round verifying all stories and production tickets for the release and give a signoff. 3 days before we freeze. Typically by this time if we dont have a lot of bugs the team is actually pruning stories for the next release.
The only tricky part is when we tag and branch and try to start working on the new features during the strenghtening sprint. Then we have to be carefull about merging back the last minute fixes into the next release branch.
Well not at the same cost as the cost of living is higher here because we tend to pay our lower skilled support staff like Electricians and Plumbers and Janitors way more than they are paid in India. While this is good from a social cohesion point of view by keeping the gap between rich and poor down if you have a job that can be done remotely from a country where they are too busy surviving to give a shit about the poor the middle class can outcompete you on price. Of course you might have a few advantages like the electricity and the internet always working and not haing to bother about bribing the local goons to make sure you have a parking space fro your car but at the same time folks in India can afford a maid to clean, a cook to cook, a babysitter to watch the kids, a driver to drive them to work while they can focus on coding. Which means they can outcompete you on coding skills and you need to provide something which they cannot provide remotely in order to keep your job in a globalized market.
You New Amsterdam folks and your BIg Apple mentality. Grow up.
"Or maybe teach the kids to code."
Thats cruel. I have half a mind to call Child services on you.
How about when you go to the movies and there is a queue for tickets the movie theater announces that they will sell 10 tickets at a time with 1 reserved for each person with a 3 character first name, 4 character first name so on till 12 first names. So if you are a Joe or a cristopher you get your ticket immediately but if you are a Sloan or a James or a Stanley you have to wait because most names are 5-7 characters long.
Now if this system was in place and then you said no its first come first served than yes the number of tickets being issued to Joes and Christophers would go down and those issued to James' and Stanleys would go up.
This however does not mean we are reducing the tickets issued to Joes and Christophers. We are merely correcting an unfair current situation.
And yes you are correct the basic problem is that the theater is only selling tickets for half the seats. The US could easily sustain 5 million net immigration instead of 1 million - most of the Mountain west is pretty much empty forests even today and the midwest is open fields. There is no shortage of space in the US. What is needed is open unlimited immigration for qualified folks and these folks need to be pushed out into the heartland instead of clustering on the coasts. The reason immigrants tend to stick in cities are threefold - one the jobs are in the cities, two the welfare network is in the cities, three the heartland is predominantly white and immigrants fear discrimination. Solution strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and bar first generation immigrants from any welfare -CHIP,Medicaid,Section 8, bus passes,food banks in cities and also remove minimum wage restrictions for immigrants in the heartland (keep them in the coastal cities). This way immigrants will move away from the crowded coasts.
There is no proposal to hold any other country down . Just do it first applied first approved. Right now Indians are waiting 10 years while other country citizens re waiting months.
The solution of course is the German model where if a property is vacant the owner pays a penalty to the govt every month. The penalty is to cover the lost taxes the govt is not getting because the people who would have stayed there and paid sales tax and income tax are not there. Instead in the US we subsidize landlords by letting them keep apartments empty with no penalty.
Rents are veeeery reasonable in Germany and people dont waste money on vacation homes. They vacation in hotels.
You know being a landlord with a property on rentberry is as bad as being a tenant who is on the sexual offenders list. No family is going to rent from rentberry landlords. Only crashpads and slums will be listed. Noone who wants a stable rental life wants to deal with an openly mercentalist landlord. People will go to the landlords who care about having a long term stable tenant who does not bother them too much, pays on time and treats the property nicely while rentberry landlords will get all the problem tenants who cant get a rental anywhere else.
My point exactly. There has been enough discrimination against Chinese and Indian immigrants. Time to get rid of the 7% cap to prevent artificially holding down immigration from these countries. USA is a nation of immigrants , about time it started behaving like one instead of behaving like a nation of white only immigrants.
This "Disney workers training replacements" meme is wrong and is getting old.
There was no training, it was knowledge transfer.
Its like when a factory shift takes over the next shift, previous shift let them know what are the issues that happened during the previous shift. Doesn't mean the next shift doesn't know the job and needs training.
And Disney stayed within the letter of the law. They did not replace folks with H1Bs. They outsourced the function to an outside firm. That firm could have hired the ex Disney employees or used its own employees sitting on the bench. Guess who they chose?
Dont like the law , change it so that every time a function is outsourced the vendor has to hire the ex employees from the department being abolished. And this has nothing to do with H1B. They could easily have been replaced with citizen employees from the vendor as well.
Ultimately most of the work being outsourced is doable by High School graduates. The 4 year degree requirement is a sop to the offshoring companies. If you are going to require a 4 year degree for something you cant pay 100 dollars an hour for it (even though what its really worth is 30 dollars). So then the only option left is to send it offshore or bring folks on H1B who will work below their qualification level to get a shot at immigrating to the US. Stop H1B and the only option is Offshoring. Noone is going to pay 100K to sort spreadsheets though that what a lot of "IT" workers do.
Show me an anti H1B shill and I will show you a pro Offshoring Shill.
The Indian companies dont really want to file for H1Bs. They want to take the work offshore. They file a large number of H1Bs and dont use all of them. But this way the client companies who dont plan visas years in advance dont have a visa available when they do give up on searching for local candidates and are willing to settle for a visa candidate. At that point they have 2 choices wait a year or hire as contractor from the consulting firms.
This is bad as students graduating in the winter semester cannot get H1s as they havn't landed their jobs by April. Companies cant do direct hire and have to hire from consulting firms and people working on H1s dont get paid as much as they could as the Consulting firms have to make their cut as well.
An unlimited quotaH1B with a 100K salary minimum would be a much better solution and push the consulting firms out of the visa hoarding business.
The H1 visa is already portable. What is not portable is the Green Card priority date. The dates for Indians are seriously backlogged to 10 years.
The countrywise cap on GreenCards needs to be eliminated - currently the cap for a country with a billion people is the same as for a country with 50000 so the backlogs for India and China are by design. This would right a historical wrong where Indian and Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship before WW2 even if they had the same or better qualifications than European immigrants. (Before WW2 you did not need any qualifications to immigrate to the US other than getting on a ship. There were no visas. For becoming citizens however you had to be white so only the next generation could become citizens)
TCS/Wipro/Infosys/Cognizant do game the lottery but the main way they game it is by using up so many slots that others cant. They hardly use a fraction of the H1s they do get. In your scenario they can still game it by applying for a large number of H1s with LCAs with high salaries but never sending those folks . When there is a resultant shortage of workers in the US the entire project will be sent offshore and the offshoring firms will be happy.
You want to fight against offshoring make H1b unlimited. Any company who needs a programmer should be able to file and get a visa within a month. Ifcompanies can get people directly no need to go to consulting firms who have large offshore benches. If you use an offshoring firm then eventually all work will get offshored.
All this memo is saying is that since the Nebraska center is now processing H1Bs like it did during the Y2K rush it needs to do so at the existing standards (4 yr degree needed) instead of the Y2K standards (No degree needed to get H1B). Nothing to see here. keep walking.
From 2006 onwards only the Texas center has processed H1Bs and the standard has been a 4 year degree is needed.
Why cant you setup your own DR instead of going to a Cloud Hosted Model? Cloud hosting is a continuos drain whereas with your own DR you can use that money to fund your own IT positions forever. Again efficiency for the sake of efficiency is dumb when you end up eliminating your own job.
A Gucci purse cost 5 dollars to manufacture in a sweatshop in Bangladesh. its sold for 5000 USD. Why? Because people in the fashion industry know not to shit where they eat. Software developers are their own worse enemy. The cost of something is not what it costs you to produce, its what someone is willing to pay for it. Thats Economics 101
I swear IT customers are like girls who fall for the bad boys and ignore the decent guys. if a company wants a simple license fee to use its software people will pirate it or ignore it and use "open source". But if you get someone who abuses you by saying my way or the highway they will stick to him/it even closer. Witness Apple, Cisco,Accenture etc etc
How do you afford the admission after paying the crazy rent?
But owning enough stock does give you a seat on the board and the right to appoint the CEO. And then your friendly CEO can order his subordinates to work with their offshore partners in an atmosphere of complete trust and transparency.
than the people paying for it.
Ultimately software is supposed to solve a real world problem. Its a means not an end. If you focus on writing the greatest, most stable software of all time and the company goes bankrupt around you because you never released and you feel it doesn't reflect badly on you - after all your code was perfect- than you are lying to yourself.
Average US education is still better than average third world education
At some point the rich have to pay the "Dont kill and eat me " tax. If its a choice between living with a tax and becoming lunch even 99% doesnt seem confiscatory. Especially if its 99% of billions earned from robot factories. But even before we get to that point at some earlier point a basic income will have to be introduced as otherwise who will all the factories sell to? There is only so much that a small elite class can consume.
We could go to the Kuwait Oil Company model. every child born in Kuwait gets 1000 shares of Kuwait Oil Company stock. With free housing, schooling,medicare, subsidized food the living expenses are low enough that the dividend from those shares is enough that no Kuwaiti needs to work. All work is done by expats. Replace expats with robots and you have a similar situation. Of course it does need state ownership of the KOC.