...just an idiot. Monitoring and evaluating the computer habits of his boss is not his job unless his superiors instructed him to do so. And from the read of the Decatur Daily article suggests he had a personal axe to grind here, and he also installed the spyware on his wife's machine and the division head's machine.
If he thought somebody was running a web server or downloading pornography, or gambling online, that is one thing. But to take it upon himself to perform his own performance evaluation of his superior, was a bit bold and he was rightfully fired.
His focus should have been on the machines and the network, not carrying out retribution for a personal grudge.
That's the problem with the American job market and why jobs are being outsourced. Too many people expect to make the big bucks immediately. Even raising the minimum wage is helping price American workers out of the market.
A most irksome statement considering that all those "outsourced jobs" has put the biggest dent into new hires.
Traditionally many new graduates and countless others who worked in other company divisions filled these juinor level programming positions. Now those slots have been sent to Asia or filled workers on temporary work visas within the United States.
At my current assignment, I am surrounded by 200+ contract workers working for an offshore firm, but stationed here in corporate America. All of those positions are positions that could be more competently manned by recent college graduates or other American workers who've been displaced to make room for cheaper, foreign replacements.
Just create a disk image of the CD and mount it whenever you want to play WC3 (or any other game). You can combine the steps in a simple AS or bash too.
Here's a how-to guide - though it's written for 10.2, you can use Disk Utility just the same as the article describes using "Disk Copy". You may want to turn off "verify" too, so that the image mounts quicker.
I've done this for quite a few games so when I travel with my PB I don't have to tote the CDs along.
First time was a crusher, guys sent from India, working for an offshore vendor - my primary task was to train them to take over for me, since I was terminated in lieu of them taking over systems support and development. Funny thing was my friend got me the gig there four years earlier but just about all of my training was of the OJT variety, though as a seasoned programmer, it doesn't take me too long to get the underpinnings of the system after I dig a bit. I got another offer, and even though it was for less pay and temporary, gladly took it to escape the burden. One of my team members trained a fellow for six months, thinking that the guy was going back to India. Then he suffered the ultimate insult as the individual got to relocate here and take his work from home position.
Second time I didn't have a job lined up and a team in Mexico took over my function. While I didn't train these folks in person, I was charged with preparing a comprehensive how-to guide that covered every facet of system support and development on that particular application domain. Knowledge transfer was conducted via email and my prepared HTML kit that covered everything from overviews to FAQ on the system. It was easier to stomach, minus the person to person mode.
You do it because as long as you're accepting a paycheck, you're obligated to serve as directed. At least that is the way I was brought up. A honest days work for an honest days pay and all that jazz.
Within a 45 minute drive of my house, I tally >5-10K jobs gone, either to India or handled by immigrant visa worker here in the states. By those numbers, you may be assured that these arn't rinky dink outfits, these are corporate giants in finance, defense industry, semiconductors, etc...
Maybe it's not come to your IT department yet. But the prospect will come soon to the executive management, unless you work for a very small shop, and they will consider it. I served a contract in the summer at a pharmaceutical company and the staff there boasted no way would offshoring and/or outsourcing pervade their organization. A few months into the assignment, senior management there announced a bold new initiative, a partnership with IBM that did indeed involve wholesale migration of their application and systems programming to Indian locales.
Here's a list of firms that have indeed embarked upon campaigns that involved US workers training foreign replacements:
American Express
Bank of America
DHL
Honeywell
Intel
Motorola
You can read about more companies here that have ex-IT workers that can share the same stories. These arn't satellite systems out on the peripheral horizon, only impacting a small percentage. If anything, I'd say the numbers quoted in the story are way under the mark, given these are core systems like accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, financial capture, EDI, MRP, reservation scheduling, accounting, etc...
... and is predominately used on the OS/390 platform.
The minis and PC type architecture is catching up to the mainframe in terms of performance and storage capacity but it still doesn't rival in terms of reliability and failover.
The big problem in converting those legacy applications is threefold. First, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. A lot of systems from charge card capture to reservations systems are efficiently powered by code that is decades old, in some cases going back thirty plus years.
Second, overwhelming bit of "business rules" have been embedded into the system. Programmers no longer work a long and prosperous career, much of the development and support work has been outsourced to India. Analysts and end users have moved on also, promoted to ranks in different disciplines or off to entirely different companies. When these systems were designed and built, the folks who participated in the build process were endeared to the company they worked for. And as time passed, and that model of work eroded, still, big cut and paste jobs were performed and the old code was "wrapped" into a new application. Many features of the product and services being supported exist hidden in the code, only beknownst to the customers affected. Traversing through the labrynth of hundreds of thousands of LOC can be a daunting task, especially when assigned to someone not familiar with the business or new to the profession.
Finally, the sheer bureaucracy that's in place with these applications makes change akin to moving solid mountains. Twelve panels and six VP signatures are required for simple program change. Seven committees, twelve VPs and over two dozen groups may have to get involved in any significant project that offers notable enhancemenets or a rewrite. Testing groups want millions of dollars budgeted to test the new application. Testing tools are sparse and/or non-existent. It's no wonder that many such grandiloquent undertakings are shelved, even after years of development.
Again, I used to run Linux, but time is a premium for me and getting USB devices, firewire devices, etc. can still be a laborious chore compared to OS X where it just works when you plug it in. And most ISP do not support Linux - if you call in (not a concern for me so much as family) with net availability problems, you get cut off at the first mention of Linux. Yeah, I could go back to broadband, but no I choose not to downgrade my internet connection.
Not interested in developer tools for Windows. Nor am I for Mac OS X either... Linux is cool, all my servers run Linux (or the commercial ones that are UNIX) and I used to run Linux primarily before I switched to OS X - reporting and accounting demands require Office software and then open source stuff is just not up to snuff yet... at least for the requirements I have in running a business.
Yeah I could run Apache on Windows... then again, I could paint my house with a toothbrush too...
FreeType2? How many applications are supported? Will the average user be able to set this up easily? Doubtful... Trying to get anti-aliased fonts working (though I haven't been running Linux since 2002 now, at least in Desktop mode...) in Linux was next to impossible when I tried it...
Apple's terminal is much improved and with Panther just as fast as any other I've used from Windows boxes to a console on Sun servers I've administered. Valid criticism for pre-Jaguar but not apropos anymore.
I don't need fink to install Gimp on OSX, just the GTK libraries and X11 which you don't need Fink for either. It comes standard with OS X now. I used Fink for Jaguar but for Panther I've discovered it's no longer necessary.
I think it's interesting though how Apple is now straddling a tightrope - I see posts scattered here about how tech savvy users have flocked to OS X and even I, in my traveling service partner gig, have sold some folks on OS X after they see me work with my powerbook (whether it be plugged into a projector and teaching classes or just using it for contract *nix work and having folks see what a joy it is compared to Windows boxes...). However, I think Apple has lost some of the old OS 9 customer base that were not so enamored with OS X. Sad, because those folks will now venture back into a world teeming with viruses, worms, spam and clunkier multimedia software.
But I think the increased usage by so referred to technorati has future blessings for Mac users or non Windows users in general. More developers flocking to the platform, even if for curiosity sakes, means more software for Mac users or more cross platform offings.
Again, the best of both worlds - a state of the art desktop GUI (yes, it has some warts still) coupled with all the *nix tools. I used to run Linux on my home desktop - it worked fine for a lot of stuff but I had difficulties with USB devices hooking in, wireless setup and tasks like CD burning - not that these were because of Linux, but still these issues had to be dealt with. OS X just works yet I get the added bonus of superior display aesthetics (and for someone like me with poor eyesight is essential) and all the *nix goodies.
* Comes with all the development tools and IDE to do Cocoa programming or cross platform Java, perl or python.
* Apache server plus PHP built in and easy to add whatever server platform add-on.
* Pretty colors and easy on the eyes fonts for all those ssh sessions needed for work and for home server handling.
* X11 and ability to run the Gimp and the whole gauntlent of free software.
When it's time for a new desktop, I'm going to get another Mac and replace the AMD box that currently sits there...... that Wall Street and the financial barons deem Apple to be a bad stock investment phases me not. I think they can exist as a niche computing hardware supplier and etch out enough profit to stay in business. At least until the next round of monopolistic Microsoft collusion control with hardware manufacturers and media conglomerates that incorporate "trusted" DRM computing that locks out non Windows computer users...
I just read about a guy in America who lost his job to India and he made a T-shirt that said, `I lost my job to India and all I got was this [lousy] T-shirt.' And he made all kinds of money." Only in America, she said, shaking her head, would someone figure out how to profit from his own unemployment. And that, she insisted, was the reason America need not fear outsourcing to India: America is so much more innovative a place than any other country.
Friedman bloviates further, using the T-shirt anecdote to tout American superior innovation that renders these outsourced job losses as trivial.
First, all one has to do is Google that phrase and you will discover that it is not only a British Web site offeringthis t-shirt for sale, but that a U.S.-based Web site, indeed one located in Palo Alto where so many jobs have been lost, has been selling the same T-shirt for some time. It is the online design-your-own t-shirt and apparel store, Zazzle.com
Mr. Tomorrow treaded on and located the enterprising zazzle.com proprietor, eager to discover if his tech career unemployment had led to new found riches. Here is how Mr. Gary Young answered the query:
Wow! So that WAS my shirt Friedman was talking about. I had seen the article and laughed...
1. No, I didn't lose my job YET. My department has been told month after month for the last 6 months that we'd be next in line to be offshored. Several peers at my work have had their jobs sent to India, and my partner had his job offshored.
2. Have I made all kinds of money? This is where I laughed the hardest. I've made about $10 profit total.
I forgot another point - I'm really outraged over the article in the sense that it portrays displaced American tech workers as lashing out and blaming the foreign replacements for their fate. **While I'm sure that there are those few that have a xenophobic and/or blame the foreign worker slant, the vast majority blame the corporate employer and the executives making these decisions, not the offshore worker**
Especially when said management spokespeople and CIOs justify the importing and offshoring by claiming there's a shortage of talented programmers when we witness our brothers and sisters firsthand suffering through unemployment or having the same type of employment that they took when they were in their youth.
... excel in writing ad copy for the Indian outsourcing firms...
First off, the ubiquitous analogy to manufacturing and farming that just isn't apropos. When farming jobs declined, many flocked to the city and toiled in factories and office buildings. When manfacturing jobs left American shores for developing nations and slave labor wages, Americans were urged to pursue higher education, to prepare themselves for a "knowledge economy". Now all of those technology jobs, along with any occupation that is performed in an office, are exported to the lowest bottom feeder, it's an enourmous impact that dwarfs any previous development. At least until there is a radical reformation in the paradigm of work itself in our modern culture.
Next, I'm sick of reading how these job migrations are for "grunt" type technical work while the glitzy, flashy "architect" and super designer jobs will remain. Obviously the folks making these assertions are clueless about the know-how and expertise that goes into crafting systems. The star coders and technical wizards of today become the superstar designers and architects of the future. When the lower level posts drift away enmasse, it won't be long before the pool of such gifted and talented individuals at the upper levels are also decimated.
We're thrashing about headfirst in an awful future direction, one where less work will be necessary but the profits of such efficieny and production gains accrue to a very small segment of the world's population. The unwashed masses will have to fend eachother off the few choice morsels that trickle down their way. A new model of work is needed, but I don't see an awareness yet of this creeping state, just celebratory rhetoric about rising fatter profits and rising stock prices.
After I was required to train my Indian replacements at American Express, I destroyed my American Express cards and ceased my business arrangement with them. Likewise for the other major corporations (IBM, GE, Dell, HP) that have sold out the American worker in lieu of cheaper foreign replacements.
Proprietary format, unable to time shift unless you use a nifty utility program to capture the stream to disk. Even then, I've had problems with streams just conking out five minutes or twenty minutes into an hour recording.
I sent their support crew problem tickets and I got a vapid response about toggling the buffer settings and the internet speed but it didn't make an iota worth of difference. I thought it was because I'm using Mac OS X RealOne but the same behavoir was duplicated on my wife's Windows box.
I wish everyone would fire off a e-note to whoever posts audio material in Real format to persuade them to switch to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or even heaven forbid Windows Media Player format.
RealOne, RealPlayer or whatever catchy moniker they wish to attach to that piece of rubbish is indeed a pile of garbage...
the 9th circuit is the most often overturned court in the federal system.
Chalk it up to the pervasive influence of the Moonie Times, Scaife funded foundations and Father Limbaugh... proving that if something gets repeated enough, it is accepted as truth, despite facts to the contrary.
From a NY Times response by Judge Noonan Jr. of the aforementioned 9th circuit - you'll probably have to pay to get the article but here is a blurb:
"In the calendar year 2001, the Ninth Circuit terminated 10,372 cases, and was reversed in 14, with a correction rate of 1.35 per thousand. The Fourth Circuit, reputedly the most conservative circuit and the circuit with the second-largest number of cases reviewed by the Supreme Court, terminated 5,078 cases and was reversed in 7, making a correction rate of 1.38 per thousand."
Of course, you're free to adhere to the Moonie Times myth that the 9th circuit court is some aberration of justice totally out of alignment with the rest of the world and other judicial bodies...
But everytime I enable an account, sooner or later, all of my settings mysteriously disappear (including browser settings) and I lose everything - pop/smtp settings, bookmarks, browser settings - it will appear that I just DL'ed mozilla and am running it for the first time.
Much of the stuff is still out there - mail folder directories are still there and I wrote down the steps to resurrect everything but it was a big PITA and it was just easier to use a different email application.
I've posted the bug on bugzilla but it never got any attention - I noted a few others encountered the same snafu from groups.google.com searches, but again the workaround is not very elegant and efficient. It probably isn't a mozilla problem and is the fault of WinXP (my wife's OE inserts "localhost" into the pop server and it screws up her email til I reset - it may be some other process that's clobbering - I don't know but at least Mozilla should provide some easy way for me to trick that process out...).
Re:I would be ecstatic...
on
PHP Cookbook
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· Score: 1
...if php would just include one tiny bit of perl goodness: "~="
Instead, I've got to write ugly crap like "if (strpos($alltext, "This string") >-1)" in order to check if a variable contains a string.
In Perl? "if ($alltext ~= "This string")". Much nicer.
if (preg_match('This string', $alltext))
Excellent book, I heartily recommend it to any...
on
PHP Cookbook
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· Score: 3, Informative
...PHP developer.
Relevant, real-life useful examples are given and even a seasoned pro like me picked up a few gems like the example user authentication code that utilizes a hash instead of having to go back to the database on each page fetch.
My bookshelves are full of PHP books but most of them are inferior to the online documentation at php.net. They add nothing and are a true waste of trees. This one, however, does not fall into that category.
First, operators who were shunned as too old, out-of-touch, and told that their function could be performed better by a semi-trained chimpanzee. Their lot was targeted back in the late 80's for extinction as less and less dependence on mounting tapes and unjamming remote job printers thrusted them into layoffs and early retirement. And many had their salaries capped and wisely jumped to another face of the company business, many went back to school or trained to become programmers, serving the company by writing and fixing code that ran on the big iron. Most got old and retired and there really wasn't a big recruitment drive for the blossoming career of mainframe computer operator.
In the 1990's, mainframe coders got the crosshair painted on them as their skill, experience, knowledge and extensive depth of how company business worked meant nothing to the new herds of bean counters and unenlightened Dilbert-esque pointy-headed managers who gleefully gazed over the spreadsheet cells in anticipation of the fat bonuses they were getting for eliminating those "cells". "These old tired mainframers are dragging us down. We want to be online and build glittering GUI applications" with a shelf life of months, rather than the stalwart and resilient systems that have been running and still run the good bulk of manufacturing and financial systems. So they trimmed staffs, sent jobs offshore and supplanted U.S. mainframe programmers with imported H1B visa holders.
The difference is that most of the hardware still sits in the U.S., so the demand for operations staff now is acute as offshoring operations may not be as lucrative or convenient or even possible in many instances as it is in the case of programmer staffs.
Having experience in the Mainframe world, I can tell you that I would much rather put in overtime on a PC or UNIX based system than have to deal with the crappy 20 line editors, or the assinine syntax of no-local-variables-or-functions languages available on the mainframe, or the fact that the documentation is close to worthless, or the fact that it practically takes an act of congress to do something as simple as creating a file. I've spent the last year working on a mainframe project that could have been done in a few weeks using Linux. I'm not kidding, either - my productivity improves tenfold when using non-mainframe based systems.
I don't mean this as a flame, but if you went through an "act of Congress" to create a file, you obviously weren't doing your job competently. Yes, the idioms and syntax can be arcane but any skilled mainframer can perform the same tasks done on *nix boxes or PC hardware almost as easily in most instances. It's a question of how deep your toolbox is - using Easyedit on MVS, it's as easy as filling out a panel field and then hitting Enter. Maybe it isn't touch myfile.txt, but it works and doesn't take but a second longer.
Second, the big productivity bottleneck when working with mainframe applications is not the length of time to complete construction or code + test (well, usually not depending on whether or not your shop has invested in maintaining a robust test environment) - it's usually the over-accounting and over-regulation that requires umpteen signoffs and navigation through nineteen panels to request a software install. Change management doctrine that isn't *yet* present in Java/C++ applications where system shelf life is still measured in years, not decades.
...here is a good deal of the comment content defending the H1B program that simply skirts reality.
H1B visa holders are displacing American IT workers, regardless of whatever legal bullet point you wish to flash at me. It is a fact I can personally attest to it - twice, my job as an application support/develoopment programmer was supplanted by an H1B visa holder, and in one case my job was to train my replacement.
H1B workers replacing American programmers is wrong. How can anyone justify adding an American worker to the unemployment queue for the sake of a cheaper, more captive immigrant worker is beyond me. Nothing against the visa holder who are motivated to advance and excel in a profession they desire, but not while skilled Americans are shuffled out of jobs and/or forced to work for lower wages due to the addition of a contrived, more captive, more restricted IT worker poll.
The job advertisements for IT help reflect the sneaky, underhanded manner in which H1B holders are solicited to replace American workers. Instead of looking for bright, industrious individuals who are skilled and are eager to learn and tackle any task, a laundry list of skill set requirements and platform experience is dictated. Meanwhile, resumes and references from offshore can claim the H1B applicant possesses all of the necessary checklist prerequisites but there's no real way to authenticate it's indeed the truth. Again, from first hand experience, I can't tell you how many times the Indian offshore firm's pimp, er marketing guy, touted a prospective hire but then after seeing the guy/gal work for a while, it would be quite evident that the extent of this person's relevant experience was being handed a manual on the plane trip to America.
Once upon a time, way back when, before dot-bombs and the ubiquitous prevalence of Microsoft on the desktop, employers would recruit programmer talent from the business side to address shortages. Aspiring wanna-be coders who arduously studied for a new company role would be given a chance to break in and serve the company in a higher position (many coming from customer service roles). They would endure cumbersome training sessions on their own time, and only a few would be chosen from the pool of hopeful applicants. It was a win/win deal for both employee and employer. After the implemenation of H1B, this is no longer done. In fact, it's had the effect of dissuading those who've already trained extensively and would otherwise be automatically drawn to fulfill a beneficial role in a computing discipline.
Offshore migration of development/support work and importing of H1B temporary visa holders are not mutually exclusive trends. Any offshoring strategy, from the recent experience I've had in multiple instances, is heavily dependent upon immigrant liason agents, which utilize the H1B (or the L-visa) to augment the offshoring strategy. These lead level H1B holders interface between customer service/business user departments in the states and the team of juinor level members who remain in India (or the Phillipines, Malaysia, Mexico, etc....)
You can quote immigration law or cite study statistics about how H1B are paid prevailing wage and such, but the truth is that while for some this may be, for many others it is not - as other posters have detailed in comment posts here, enforcement of H1B stipulations is lax and/or non-existent -- many visa holders are raped wage wise as Company A contracts to Company B which serves as "the bodyshop". Company A spokesman can simply say how much Company B individual is paid is up to Company B. Company B may likely not even be U.S. based, or if they are, they've engaged in repeated violations of U.S. labor law (see Syntel history) without paying much of a penalty for their misdeeds. Perhaps many will discount my anecdotal experience, but I came across a number of Indian H1Bs who "disappeared" in the states because of their restrictive employment
... there is a annoying, irksome bug that prevents me from using it that still hasn't been fixed. Whenever I setup newsgroup servers or pop mail servers, after a while, js.prefs gets clobbered. I don't know what or who, and when I use it just as a browser, it doesn't happen. But after setting up mail servers, it's inevitable at some point in time when I'm not using the program, js.prefs gets clobbered and when I go into Mozilla it appears as if it's the first time I ever loaded it up.
I've tried the workarounds I've discovered from others on Usenet - building a new profile and getting rid of any potential corrupted files, etc.... but it has not fixed the problem.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get paid more because of unions regulations. And all the other checkers gave me hell because I was making their lazy asses look bad. At least I was able to get better hours on the schedule.
Um, you "couldn't get paid more" because the big grocer/food distributors have been quite successful in busting and weakening "union regulations". 20+ years ago, jobs in the grocery mart, be it bagging or checkout clerk paid $12 per hour starting wage (that mark would be at least double, in "real" dollars, considering "cost of living" adjustments and inflation) with good benefits. As a result of successful waging of "war" on the influence of unions, the wages for these jobs were reduced exponentially.
And with the "union" workers, pride and workmanship reigned for the most part, with clerks and stockers taking their roles seriously, unlike the carousel of high turnover and the apathy and incompetence it brings with it.
Even with all of the greatest and latest developments in software, the issue of the differing perspectives between developer, user and the "bridge" between them has not been properly addressed. Each of these three parties has a different perspective and is motivated by drastically different forms of stimulation. The developer is coding to specifications or engaged in a challenge to craft a polished product. The user is primarily interested in effectively using "the tool" to expedite his job tasks. I realize this sounds like simplistic rhetoric... I guess an anecdotal reference will better illustrate:
Back in the 80's, I worked for a major U.S. steel manufacturing company. I developed and supported software that scheduled the mill and tracked quality and production. Cutbacks eliminated the "user requirements" (or substitute whatever "analyst" position du jour in there...) group so it was necessary for the developer to perform this role. What I quickly discovered was that there was a huge disparity between what the folks representing the users clamored for and what the users actually wished for, and more importantly, what they really needed. I learned by sitting with an end user and observing him perform his job's daily tasks. And it was astonishing to find that things that they thought were impossible were simple changes that made life easier by an exponential factor. Like eliminating the need to flip through four screen panels with one simple "fill in and hit enter" deal. Other issues where what the user thought was trivial but was incredibly complex were solved by sharing information on how a desired function or operation could be easily attained with an unused command or software feature.
What I'm trying to get at is that what many analysts believe the user needs and wants is often entirely different that the real actual user needs, and often at odds with the dictated words from the users themselves. There's no substitute for a developer to sit next to a user and observe them using the software. No, I'm not talking about focus groups or any other marketing magical mumbo jumbo, just for the developer to simply witness someone tinkering with his creation or adaptation.
But in this day and age, all of these functions are supposed to be "compartmentalized", meaning that analyst meets with user, hands off some requirements to a developer who then draws up an architecture plan. Then a set of specifications is handed to an external team which possibly may be working offshore or even if in physical proximity, have no intimate contact or contact is limited to a few individuals who's perspective on matters is not totally consistent.
In my estimation, it's another black check mark against the "architect/build" paradigm that unfortunately still clung to.
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If he thought somebody was running a web server or downloading pornography, or gambling online, that is one thing. But to take it upon himself to perform his own performance evaluation of his superior, was a bit bold and he was rightfully fired.
His focus should have been on the machines and the network, not carrying out retribution for a personal grudge.
For Mac OS X.
Free. Though please send a donation in support if you like it.
A most irksome statement considering that all those "outsourced jobs" has put the biggest dent into new hires.
Traditionally many new graduates and countless others who worked in other company divisions filled these juinor level programming positions. Now those slots have been sent to Asia or filled workers on temporary work visas within the United States.
At my current assignment, I am surrounded by 200+ contract workers working for an offshore firm, but stationed here in corporate America. All of those positions are positions that could be more competently manned by recent college graduates or other American workers who've been displaced to make room for cheaper, foreign replacements.
Rescue American Jobs
Here's a how-to guide - though it's written for 10.2, you can use Disk Utility just the same as the article describes using "Disk Copy". You may want to turn off "verify" too, so that the image mounts quicker.
I've done this for quite a few games so when I travel with my PB I don't have to tote the CDs along.
First time was a crusher, guys sent from India, working for an offshore vendor - my primary task was to train them to take over for me, since I was terminated in lieu of them taking over systems support and development. Funny thing was my friend got me the gig there four years earlier but just about all of my training was of the OJT variety, though as a seasoned programmer, it doesn't take me too long to get the underpinnings of the system after I dig a bit. I got another offer, and even though it was for less pay and temporary, gladly took it to escape the burden. One of my team members trained a fellow for six months, thinking that the guy was going back to India. Then he suffered the ultimate insult as the individual got to relocate here and take his work from home position.
Second time I didn't have a job lined up and a team in Mexico took over my function. While I didn't train these folks in person, I was charged with preparing a comprehensive how-to guide that covered every facet of system support and development on that particular application domain. Knowledge transfer was conducted via email and my prepared HTML kit that covered everything from overviews to FAQ on the system. It was easier to stomach, minus the person to person mode.
You do it because as long as you're accepting a paycheck, you're obligated to serve as directed. At least that is the way I was brought up. A honest days work for an honest days pay and all that jazz.
Within a 45 minute drive of my house, I tally >5-10K jobs gone, either to India or handled by immigrant visa worker here in the states. By those numbers, you may be assured that these arn't rinky dink outfits, these are corporate giants in finance, defense industry, semiconductors, etc...
Maybe it's not come to your IT department yet. But the prospect will come soon to the executive management, unless you work for a very small shop, and they will consider it. I served a contract in the summer at a pharmaceutical company and the staff there boasted no way would offshoring and/or outsourcing pervade their organization. A few months into the assignment, senior management there announced a bold new initiative, a partnership with IBM that did indeed involve wholesale migration of their application and systems programming to Indian locales.
Here's a list of firms that have indeed embarked upon campaigns that involved US workers training foreign replacements:
You can read about more companies here that have ex-IT workers that can share the same stories. These arn't satellite systems out on the peripheral horizon, only impacting a small percentage. If anything, I'd say the numbers quoted in the story are way under the mark, given these are core systems like accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, financial capture, EDI, MRP, reservation scheduling, accounting, etc...
Yay globalism.
The minis and PC type architecture is catching up to the mainframe in terms of performance and storage capacity but it still doesn't rival in terms of reliability and failover.
The big problem in converting those legacy applications is threefold. First, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. A lot of systems from charge card capture to reservations systems are efficiently powered by code that is decades old, in some cases going back thirty plus years.
Second, overwhelming bit of "business rules" have been embedded into the system. Programmers no longer work a long and prosperous career, much of the development and support work has been outsourced to India. Analysts and end users have moved on also, promoted to ranks in different disciplines or off to entirely different companies. When these systems were designed and built, the folks who participated in the build process were endeared to the company they worked for. And as time passed, and that model of work eroded, still, big cut and paste jobs were performed and the old code was "wrapped" into a new application. Many features of the product and services being supported exist hidden in the code, only beknownst to the customers affected. Traversing through the labrynth of hundreds of thousands of LOC can be a daunting task, especially when assigned to someone not familiar with the business or new to the profession.
Finally, the sheer bureaucracy that's in place with these applications makes change akin to moving solid mountains. Twelve panels and six VP signatures are required for simple program change. Seven committees, twelve VPs and over two dozen groups may have to get involved in any significant project that offers notable enhancemenets or a rewrite. Testing groups want millions of dollars budgeted to test the new application. Testing tools are sparse and/or non-existent. It's no wonder that many such grandiloquent undertakings are shelved, even after years of development.
... and I misspelled gauntlet...
Again, I used to run Linux, but time is a premium for me and getting USB devices, firewire devices, etc. can still be a laborious chore compared to OS X where it just works when you plug it in. And most ISP do not support Linux - if you call in (not a concern for me so much as family) with net availability problems, you get cut off at the first mention of Linux. Yeah, I could go back to broadband, but no I choose not to downgrade my internet connection.
Not interested in developer tools for Windows. Nor am I for Mac OS X either... Linux is cool, all my servers run Linux (or the commercial ones that are UNIX) and I used to run Linux primarily before I switched to OS X - reporting and accounting demands require Office software and then open source stuff is just not up to snuff yet... at least for the requirements I have in running a business.
Yeah I could run Apache on Windows... then again, I could paint my house with a toothbrush too...
FreeType2? How many applications are supported? Will the average user be able to set this up easily? Doubtful... Trying to get anti-aliased fonts working (though I haven't been running Linux since 2002 now, at least in Desktop mode...) in Linux was next to impossible when I tried it...
Apple's terminal is much improved and with Panther just as fast as any other I've used from Windows boxes to a console on Sun servers I've administered. Valid criticism for pre-Jaguar but not apropos anymore.
I don't need fink to install Gimp on OSX, just the GTK libraries and X11 which you don't need Fink for either. It comes standard with OS X now. I used Fink for Jaguar but for Panther I've discovered it's no longer necessary.
This isn't news anymore...
... that Wall Street and the financial barons deem Apple to be a bad stock investment phases me not. I think they can exist as a niche computing hardware supplier and etch out enough profit to stay in business. At least until the next round of monopolistic Microsoft collusion control with hardware manufacturers and media conglomerates that incorporate "trusted" DRM computing that locks out non Windows computer users...
I think it's interesting though how Apple is now straddling a tightrope - I see posts scattered here about how tech savvy users have flocked to OS X and even I, in my traveling service partner gig, have sold some folks on OS X after they see me work with my powerbook (whether it be plugged into a projector and teaching classes or just using it for contract *nix work and having folks see what a joy it is compared to Windows boxes...). However, I think Apple has lost some of the old OS 9 customer base that were not so enamored with OS X. Sad, because those folks will now venture back into a world teeming with viruses, worms, spam and clunkier multimedia software.
But I think the increased usage by so referred to technorati has future blessings for Mac users or non Windows users in general. More developers flocking to the platform, even if for curiosity sakes, means more software for Mac users or more cross platform offings.
Again, the best of both worlds - a state of the art desktop GUI (yes, it has some warts still) coupled with all the *nix tools. I used to run Linux on my home desktop - it worked fine for a lot of stuff but I had difficulties with USB devices hooking in, wireless setup and tasks like CD burning - not that these were because of Linux, but still these issues had to be dealt with. OS X just works yet I get the added bonus of superior display aesthetics (and for someone like me with poor eyesight is essential) and all the *nix goodies.
* Comes with all the development tools and IDE to do Cocoa programming or cross platform Java, perl or python.
* Apache server plus PHP built in and easy to add whatever server platform add-on.
* Pretty colors and easy on the eyes fonts for all those ssh sessions needed for work and for home server handling.
* X11 and ability to run the Gimp and the whole gauntlent of free software.
When it's time for a new desktop, I'm going to get another Mac and replace the AMD box that currently sits there...
Friedman bloviates further, using the T-shirt anecdote to tout American superior innovation that renders these outsourced job losses as trivial.
But once again, the reality detached scribe is exposed again. This time, famed progressive cartoonist Tom Tomorrow got the straight dope on Friedman's "Americans profiting from their unemployment" spiel. It turns out, that the savvy entrepreneur highlighted in Friedman's piece is neither American nor unemployed.
Then, Friedman fired off a missive to the skeptical cartoonist in defense of his corporatist claptrap:
Mr. Tomorrow treaded on and located the enterprising zazzle.com proprietor, eager to discover if his tech career unemployment had led to new found riches. Here is how Mr. Gary Young answered the query:
I forgot another point - I'm really outraged over the article in the sense that it portrays displaced American tech workers as lashing out and blaming the foreign replacements for their fate. **While I'm sure that there are those few that have a xenophobic and/or blame the foreign worker slant, the vast majority blame the corporate employer and the executives making these decisions, not the offshore worker**
Especially when said management spokespeople and CIOs justify the importing and offshoring by claiming there's a shortage of talented programmers when we witness our brothers and sisters firsthand suffering through unemployment or having the same type of employment that they took when they were in their youth.
First off, the ubiquitous analogy to manufacturing and farming that just isn't apropos. When farming jobs declined, many flocked to the city and toiled in factories and office buildings. When manfacturing jobs left American shores for developing nations and slave labor wages, Americans were urged to pursue higher education, to prepare themselves for a "knowledge economy". Now all of those technology jobs, along with any occupation that is performed in an office, are exported to the lowest bottom feeder, it's an enourmous impact that dwarfs any previous development. At least until there is a radical reformation in the paradigm of work itself in our modern culture.
Next, I'm sick of reading how these job migrations are for "grunt" type technical work while the glitzy, flashy "architect" and super designer jobs will remain. Obviously the folks making these assertions are clueless about the know-how and expertise that goes into crafting systems. The star coders and technical wizards of today become the superstar designers and architects of the future. When the lower level posts drift away enmasse, it won't be long before the pool of such gifted and talented individuals at the upper levels are also decimated.
We're thrashing about headfirst in an awful future direction, one where less work will be necessary but the profits of such efficieny and production gains accrue to a very small segment of the world's population. The unwashed masses will have to fend eachother off the few choice morsels that trickle down their way. A new model of work is needed, but I don't see an awareness yet of this creeping state, just celebratory rhetoric about rising fatter profits and rising stock prices.
After I was required to train my Indian replacements at American Express, I destroyed my American Express cards and ceased my business arrangement with them. Likewise for the other major corporations (IBM, GE, Dell, HP) that have sold out the American worker in lieu of cheaper foreign replacements.
I sent their support crew problem tickets and I got a vapid response about toggling the buffer settings and the internet speed but it didn't make an iota worth of difference. I thought it was because I'm using Mac OS X RealOne but the same behavoir was duplicated on my wife's Windows box.
I wish everyone would fire off a e-note to whoever posts audio material in Real format to persuade them to switch to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or even heaven forbid Windows Media Player format.
RealOne, RealPlayer or whatever catchy moniker they wish to attach to that piece of rubbish is indeed a pile of garbage...
What happens if I spill a coke all over my open notebook and it ceases to function? Will you hook me up with a new powerbook and/or fix it?
No, that's probably covered under your home owner's insurance, if you have it.
OK, no thanks then.
Chalk it up to the pervasive influence of the Moonie Times, Scaife funded foundations and Father Limbaugh ... proving that if something gets repeated enough, it is accepted as truth, despite facts to the contrary.
From a NY Times response by Judge Noonan Jr. of the aforementioned 9th circuit - you'll probably have to pay to get the article but here is a blurb:
Of course, you're free to adhere to the Moonie Times myth that the 9th circuit court is some aberration of justice totally out of alignment with the rest of the world and other judicial bodies...
But everytime I enable an account, sooner or later, all of my settings mysteriously disappear (including browser settings) and I lose everything - pop/smtp settings, bookmarks, browser settings - it will appear that I just DL'ed mozilla and am running it for the first time.
Much of the stuff is still out there - mail folder directories are still there and I wrote down the steps to resurrect everything but it was a big PITA and it was just easier to use a different email application.
I've posted the bug on bugzilla but it never got any attention - I noted a few others encountered the same snafu from groups.google.com searches, but again the workaround is not very elegant and efficient. It probably isn't a mozilla problem and is the fault of WinXP (my wife's OE inserts "localhost" into the pop server and it screws up her email til I reset - it may be some other process that's clobbering - I don't know but at least Mozilla should provide some easy way for me to trick that process out...).
if (preg_match('This string', $alltext))
Relevant, real-life useful examples are given and even a seasoned pro like me picked up a few gems like the example user authentication code that utilizes a hash instead of having to go back to the database on each page fetch.
My bookshelves are full of PHP books but most of them are inferior to the online documentation at php.net. They add nothing and are a true waste of trees. This one, however, does not fall into that category.
Shadowbane
... quite some time now.
First, operators who were shunned as too old, out-of-touch, and told that their function could be performed better by a semi-trained chimpanzee. Their lot was targeted back in the late 80's for extinction as less and less dependence on mounting tapes and unjamming remote job printers thrusted them into layoffs and early retirement. And many had their salaries capped and wisely jumped to another face of the company business, many went back to school or trained to become programmers, serving the company by writing and fixing code that ran on the big iron. Most got old and retired and there really wasn't a big recruitment drive for the blossoming career of mainframe computer operator.
In the 1990's, mainframe coders got the crosshair painted on them as their skill, experience, knowledge and extensive depth of how company business worked meant nothing to the new herds of bean counters and unenlightened Dilbert-esque pointy-headed managers who gleefully gazed over the spreadsheet cells in anticipation of the fat bonuses they were getting for eliminating those "cells". "These old tired mainframers are dragging us down. We want to be online and build glittering GUI applications" with a shelf life of months, rather than the stalwart and resilient systems that have been running and still run the good bulk of manufacturing and financial systems. So they trimmed staffs, sent jobs offshore and supplanted U.S. mainframe programmers with imported H1B visa holders.
The difference is that most of the hardware still sits in the U.S., so the demand for operations staff now is acute as offshoring operations may not be as lucrative or convenient or even possible in many instances as it is in the case of programmer staffs.
I don't mean this as a flame, but if you went through an "act of Congress" to create a file, you obviously weren't doing your job competently. Yes, the idioms and syntax can be arcane but any skilled mainframer can perform the same tasks done on *nix boxes or PC hardware almost as easily in most instances. It's a question of how deep your toolbox is - using Easyedit on MVS, it's as easy as filling out a panel field and then hitting Enter. Maybe it isn't touch myfile.txt, but it works and doesn't take but a second longer.
Second, the big productivity bottleneck when working with mainframe applications is not the length of time to complete construction or code + test (well, usually not depending on whether or not your shop has invested in maintaining a robust test environment) - it's usually the over-accounting and over-regulation that requires umpteen signoffs and navigation through nineteen panels to request a software install. Change management doctrine that isn't *yet* present in Java/C++ applications where system shelf life is still measured in years, not decades.
...here is a good deal of the comment content defending the H1B program that simply skirts reality.
... there is a annoying, irksome bug that prevents me from using it that still hasn't been fixed. Whenever I setup newsgroup servers or pop mail servers, after a while, js.prefs gets clobbered. I don't know what or who, and when I use it just as a browser, it doesn't happen. But after setting up mail servers, it's inevitable at some point in time when I'm not using the program, js.prefs gets clobbered and when I go into Mozilla it appears as if it's the first time I ever loaded it up.
I've tried the workarounds I've discovered from others on Usenet - building a new profile and getting rid of any potential corrupted files, etc. ... but it has not fixed the problem.
Um, you "couldn't get paid more" because the big grocer/food distributors have been quite successful in busting and weakening "union regulations". 20+ years ago, jobs in the grocery mart, be it bagging or checkout clerk paid $12 per hour starting wage (that mark would be at least double, in "real" dollars, considering "cost of living" adjustments and inflation) with good benefits. As a result of successful waging of "war" on the influence of unions, the wages for these jobs were reduced exponentially.
And with the "union" workers, pride and workmanship reigned for the most part, with clerks and stockers taking their roles seriously, unlike the carousel of high turnover and the apathy and incompetence it brings with it.
Even with all of the greatest and latest developments in software, the issue of the differing perspectives between developer, user and the "bridge" between them has not been properly addressed. Each of these three parties has a different perspective and is motivated by drastically different forms of stimulation. The developer is coding to specifications or engaged in a challenge to craft a polished product. The user is primarily interested in effectively using "the tool" to expedite his job tasks. I realize this sounds like simplistic rhetoric ... I guess an anecdotal reference will better illustrate:
Back in the 80's, I worked for a major U.S. steel manufacturing company. I developed and supported software that scheduled the mill and tracked quality and production. Cutbacks eliminated the "user requirements" (or substitute whatever "analyst" position du jour in there ...) group so it was necessary for the developer to perform this role. What I quickly discovered was that there was a huge disparity between what the folks representing the users clamored for and what the users actually wished for, and more importantly, what they really needed. I learned by sitting with an end user and observing him perform his job's daily tasks. And it was astonishing to find that things that they thought were impossible were simple changes that made life easier by an exponential factor. Like eliminating the need to flip through four screen panels with one simple "fill in and hit enter" deal. Other issues where what the user thought was trivial but was incredibly complex were solved by sharing information on how a desired function or operation could be easily attained with an unused command or software feature.
What I'm trying to get at is that what many analysts believe the user needs and wants is often entirely different that the real actual user needs, and often at odds with the dictated words from the users themselves. There's no substitute for a developer to sit next to a user and observe them using the software. No, I'm not talking about focus groups or any other marketing magical mumbo jumbo, just for the developer to simply witness someone tinkering with his creation or adaptation.
But in this day and age, all of these functions are supposed to be "compartmentalized", meaning that analyst meets with user, hands off some requirements to a developer who then draws up an architecture plan. Then a set of specifications is handed to an external team which possibly may be working offshore or even if in physical proximity, have no intimate contact or contact is limited to a few individuals who's perspective on matters is not totally consistent.
In my estimation, it's another black check mark against the "architect/build" paradigm that unfortunately still clung to.