When you CYA make sure that you do it in some sort of trackable form. A phone call or face to face conversation can be denied or forgotten.
This is, in principle, sound advice.
OTOH, there's a certain kind of person who has two defining qualities.
They're crap at their job.
They constantly CTA and shift blame onto others.
These people are no use to anyone.
Everyone makes mistakes. In a good working environment, obviously everyone will try to minimize that, but it is accepted that it will happen. When it does, people will own up to their mistakes and try to put them right, and others will help them to do so if they can.
In a bad working environment, full of blame culture and CYAing weasels, mistakes Just Don't Happen, and when they do it's always Someone Else's Fault. Strangely, such environments tend to be incredibly political, very uncomfortable for those working there, and far less productive in the long run.
Now, a sure way to turn your office into the latter environment is to hire or keep too many CYAing weasels. A direct consequence of that is that writing too many CYAing e-mails and never accepting responsibility for things is a great way to run out of good people to work with real fast. So, CYA when it's justified and necessary, but not as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions. It's morally right to act this way anyway, and in the long run, a reputation for having that kind of integrity is priceless.
Oh, and since when does an apostrophe pluralize something? Quit bastardizing our language and get your own.
There are a few too many words ending in "ize" there for such a champion of correct UK usage, methinks.:-)
Why I didn't buy legacy-free last Xmas
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
Around the start of this year, I was putting together a new PC. Being a bit of a geek, I was choosing all the parts separately, putting them in a funky aluminium case, planning to dual-boot with Linux, etc. etc.
One thing that I seriously investigated was buying a legacy-free motherboard. I figured I had precious little need for "old" kit. I was wrong. Below are a few of the many reasons I rejected the legacy-free option.
USB keyboards and mice suck. There's nothing wrong with the PS/2 ones, but a serious game player will feel the latency with USB.
Serial ATA is untried and untested. Available SATA drives are slower than good PATA ones (I bought a 'cuda IV:-)). The speed advantages of the technology are purely theoretical, since even a RAID array in a home system won't get near the max bandwith of PATA once the cache runs out (i.e., after a fraction of a second).
Ditching a traditional parallel port also means ditching the ability to use nearly every good printer out there, unless you're into home networking and your kit is serious enough to use that way. Only very recent printers have USB and such on them as a general rule, yet your average home laser today is still only a 600dpi B&W job, just like the one I bought six years ago. Why shell out fifteen quid for a port adapter, or 150 for a new printer, when you can just use the same kit you always have?
In the end I went for a system that ditched the pointless stuff. I have no floppy drive installed, for example. I also have a motherboard with decent on-board sound and networking, which cuts down a lot on the add-in cards. But legacy-free I'm not. I connected up my old hard drive to transfer data over, and I could still connect up the floppy or Zip if I needed access to data via those, too. I eventually bought a new printer for other reasons anyway (mumble, mumble, Panasonic and WinXP and no drivers, mumble) so I do use USB for that. I saved thirty quid by sticking with my nice, comfy PS/2 keyboard (none of this overly light, USB-enabled smart keyboard crap for me) and my trusty MS wheel mouse.
And you know what? Somehow, everything works and I don't feel at all held back, however old and boring I may be.
Teaching of subjects by those not qualified to do so -- partly tongue-in-cheek here, of course, but how many lecturers has anyone seen who really understood the programming language they were teaching and weren't one chapter ahead of the class in the textbook?
I wasn't going to comment on this thread, not being particularly informed on C# itself, but two things have struck me that might be worth mentioning.
Coding standards shouldn't be about your style and layout. It's helpful to be consistent in which way you write your {} and how you capitalise your function names, but this is hardly the serious stuff of professional programmers. Coding standards should be a guide to, for example, which common idioms in the language are adopted and which are not (preferably with supporting reasoning for the benefit of those joining later). If there are particular language features that you don't use, e.g., because you've found them to be unstable or there are portability issues, these should go in as well. Any particular idioms that your own projects adopt widely should be included for the benefit of new starters, too. But it's not about whether a tab is 4 characters or 8; we have smart editors for that these days, and it doesn't really matter anyway.
If you're asking this question, perhaps it's too early to be producing a full blown coding standard. The best coding standards I've seen have all evolved. By all means make a start at forming a consistent style within your teams, but until idioms develop (both in general use of C# and within your own project(s)) and best practices come to light with experience, IMHO it's better to keep an open mind than to prescribe one approach based on some artificial reasoning when you don't have the experience to suggest why it's better than any other.
It has come to our attention that you think you are funny. You seem to believe that posting a string of suggestive words on the Internet forum known as "Slashdot" will trigger some sort of secretive, government-sponsored "disappearing" response.
Congratulations, you are correct. In approximately thirty seconds you will never have existed.
Love and hugs,
The guys in suits outside your door, who are not paid to have a sense of humour
But seriously... The problem with looking at the funny side of this is that the other guys are always going to have the last laugh. It's easy to forget that while making a joke, but please remember it again afterwards.
Okay, about dying for one's rights. Maybe it is an assumption, but it's one I'm comfortable making.
At the risk of using a cliche, that may be because there are currently 100,000s in your country's armed forces who are prepared to die to defend those rights for you. Odd, then, that you would give them up so easily after they have been so hard won.
Now for the final point. First we have to define what a single war crime is. [...] Certainly if we consider magnitude, there's no possible way the USA can be compared to Germany or Russia if we take into account the entire 20th century.
An interesting perspective, coming from a nation that is waging a war to prevent damage from weapons of mass destruction, yet which is also the only nation in the world to have dropped a nuclear bomb on another.
Yes, the USA has thrown a bit of weight around, but part of that is that we're just so goddamn heavy!
No, you're really not. Your population is dwarfed by that of Europe, India or China. You have a lot of land, but hardly an exceptional amount. (That standard world map exaggerates the size of the US quite dramatically.) To follow your analogy, you have a lot of weight because you choose to spend silly amounts of money buying pies. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how any military force the size of yours can possibly be for "defence".
Read the books yourself, you won't find a more benevolent world power anywhere in history.
That was a joke, right?
If you don't appreciate how much damage US interference continues to do to the Arab world daily, or the reasons for those interference policies, you need to get yourself informed about them before entering a discussion like this. Yes, you may be trying, but unfortunately you're trying to do the wrong things the wrong way. And then you're telling friends who warn you to **** off instead of listening to them, which makes the problem ten times worse.
Sad to say, Bush and a whole lot of well-intentioned Americans just don't see how what they're trying to accomplish might not be what actually happens. This "privacy vs. safety" tradeoff ain't necessarily so, good example.
And that's exactly the problem with good intentions mixed with naivety. You could make the same case for the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. Ignoring the political motivations and discussions of terror, at least you could make some moral case for war if the likely outcome was a people free from a dictatorship they didn't want.
Obviously, that hasn't happened in Afghanistan, and unfortunately I find it hard to believe it will happen in Iraq either, with western governments coughing up hundreds of billions to fund a war, and hundreds of millions to clear up the mess afterwards. This is the great myth, which unfortunately seems to have taken in vast amounts of the population who don't choose to think critically about what they read in the media.
Several thousand citizens were killed on 9/11. I have little doubt that their families would be more than willing to give up their privacy to have the victims back again. No doubt the vicitms as well, if given incontrovertible proof prior to 9/11 that being deprived of privacy would save their lives, would do so in an instant.
That is an assumption on your part.
My father is very much a man of principle. He once taught me that the only rights you truly have are those for which you are prepared to die. It's a great sound bite, but with more than a little truth in it: anything else can be taken away from you, and if it can be taken away, is it really a right at all? Someone with that attitude might disagree with you.
I'm not sure I could make the hard choice, say if someone were holding guns to my family's heads, but maybe that's immaturity or lack of responsibility on my part. Put it another way, but with a more commonly accepted answer: do you believe in negotiating with terrorists? Does a little short term benefit justify the long term harm? If this is not black and white and there is a balance to be struck, then where do you draw the line?
A much better argument would be "depriving a quarter of a billion American citizens of privacy for the sake of perhaps catching a few terrorists in the future is unaccepetable, especially without proof that giving up privacy will have the desired effect." [Emphasis added]
That, my friend, is the key point that makes so many people from any side of the privacy argument critical here. You are giving up a hell of a lot for something that you don't even know will work (in fact, something that history strongly suggests will not work).
If there is a better way to stop terrorism, please share it with the rest of us, because we have no fucking clue. Bush didn't start "bullying the world" until AFTER the destructive terrorist attacks.
The answer to your first sentence lies in your second. The US has been throwing its weight around for a very long time, as the history books will tell you if you choose to read them. Gratuitous provocative comment for discussion: Has the US has committed more terrorist acts and war crimes in the past hundred years than any other nation on earth? (Before you flame, do read the history books for yourself.)
Your current president had established an international reputation as a belligerent man with little care for the rest of the world long before 911. This is why people will give their lives to hurt you, and this is why the international community are reluctant to stand with you on issues like Iraq. So yes, there are several things you could do to significantly reduce your risk of a terrorist attack, but most of them don't involve guns or spies.
A reporter managed to get a provisional driving license (photocard ID), in the name of the minister with the reporter's photo.
David Blunket is blind.
Of course, the scary thing is that you can (and real people really do) get a driving licence while registered blind.
Given that a legal requirement for drivers in the UK is that you must be able to read a number plate at 20.5m (and if you need glasses etc. to do so then you must wear them while driving) that must say something about either the eyesight standards required of drivers, or how much it means to be "registered blind" as opposed to actually being blind.
My identity wasn't used for illegal purposes, but I had a rather strange tax status for several months last year after someone at a tax office mistyped by NI number (similar to a US SSN).
After noticing that my pay cheque for January was smaller than usual for no apparent reason, and tracking this down to a change in my tax code, we did some more investigation and concluded that I had moved house to the far side of the country and started a new, full-time job there... and all without noticing! I must be smarter than I thought.:-)
The greatest part, though, was when I rang up the tax office to sort things out. Sensibly enough, they first wanted to confirm my identity, so they asked me for my name, current address and employer. I provided these details, and got back, "I'm sorry, those details don't match what's on my computer. I need to hear what it says here before I can help you. Are you sure those details are current?"
I recited every previous address and employer I'd ever had since working and paying tax, and none of them showed up. It took saying the right thing at the right time* to get them to listen to me at all, and then three further months of hassle to sort things out, luckily just in time for the end of the financial year. Still, even though everything is (I hope) OK now, I was out of pocket by hundreds of pounds for several months. To many people, that would have been crippling. And all it took was someone mistyping a digit on a computer in a government office.
But it's OK. I've got nothing to hide, so I should trust the government to collect lots of data on me, and take it as read that no problems will result, right?
*If you ever have the same problem in the UK, where you surprisingly start a non-existent second job and change to a new address at the same time, one of your jobs will get a tax code change to BR (basic rate only, no allowances). Tell your tax office this while explaining what's happened, and they may at least start to believe that their records of your address may be incorrect as well. You will probably still have to write to them and formally state that you are who you say you are, unless you're lucky enough that they can spot the problem fairly quickly and your "official" situation is obviously implausible, but at least you'll be able to get things sorted out.
Well, since both languages effectively use the same library care of.Net, that shouldn't be much of an issue. There's obviously more weirdo VB syntax now it has to support the.Net OO system as well, though. Still, at least by using one you're getting some practice with the shared library, and if.Net takes off over the next few years, that'll be valuable experience.
I love the women at a party line, BTW. Anything bashing a MS language, particularly using another one to do so, is automatically consdered sig-worthy material.;-)
I'd rather have a paycut then a lose my job, but then again england does seem to have a better unemployment system.
I think the point is that under UK law, if you're being made redundant, you are entitled to certain things, typically including a notice period and compensation. If you're an employee (as opposed to, say, a contractor), then you can't just be let go on a whim.
I've known two or three people who've managed to take advantage of this, getting themselves made redundant on Friday (and thus getting, say, three months of salary for doing nothing) and then starting at a new job on the Monday. Even if the new job has a slightly lower starting salary, it can make it profitable to move, and if you get to improve the working conditions in the process, so much the better.
So what do you suggest? Uninventing it? Destroying anything that could lead to its re-discovery? Kill anyone smart enough to think of something similar?
Sure, why not? We're talking 15-25 years away, right? It worked for John Connor... and they'll have discovered lasers that fire slowly enough to look good in a movie by then, too.
I think I agree with pretty much everything you say. It's not that I have a problem with the idea of Indians as developers. As others have noted, they are often enthusiastic, hard-working and educated, all admirable qualities. My problem is that as things stand today, exporting the job just doesn't get it done most of the time, in my experience.
There seems to be, at least from what I've seen, a lack of technical expertise amongst the average programming population compared to the calibre of people you'd find routinely in high-tech centres in the US or Europe. I totally understand the communication problems as well; I used to work with a very nice Chinese lad, no personal issues, but his language skills created a barrier that seriously hampered his technical ability to work with others.
Of course, it's also quite possible, as you suggest, that better management could fix these issues. Treating the foreign developers like people worthy of your time, investing in their training to bring technical skills up to scratch where they're lacking, providing better channels of communication and the opportunity to improve (human) language skills as necessary would all help. We can but hope that good businesses who invest in their people like this will be the ones to reap the rewards.
It's interesting that you've had such different experiences with people from different places. I've worked with the Japanese before -- from a distance (e-mail, phone, paperwork) they seemed to be very formal and professional, but the guy who used to come over and work with us on-site now and then always turned up in jeans and seemed pretty laid back, which surprised me the first time after all the formality. Did a good job, though, so no complaints.
A proper VM can actually perform faster in many complex scenarios where runtime optimization is better than static compilation.
This old chestnut seems to come up in every other programming thread these days.:-)
It's an intriguing and credible idea, and I don't dismiss it out of hand. However, speaking as someone who writes performance-critical maths software all day, I maintain a certain skepticism because I've yet to see any real evidence (or even a convincing anecdote) to support it. Can you give us any more information?
What I'd prefer to see is an objective article on why.NET and/or web services are ever better, rather than an assumptive "are they not always better?" piece. As has often been noted in these parts, often new != better, whereas tried-and-tested is a Good Thing in the absence of a compelling reason to change. The line at the top of the article is pretty telling:
Sometimes we automatically assume that the latest platform or tool is the universal best.
Not if we're smart, we don't! (Although if we did, MS would be much happier. How many places do you know who haven't moved to VS.NET yet, because of either the things MS messed up compared to VS 6 or because they simply see no business case for doing so?)
I have seen lots of waffly arguments about.NET and web services, most of them sponsored by MS and others with an interest in selling the development tools. I can easily believe that there is some truth behind them, and some applications for which they are well suited, but I've yet to see anyone put forth a convincing and supported case for why it's worth moving to web services from established tools such as C++, Java and VB.
He apparently objects to "C++ gurus" (or "crafty old-hands who don't believe hype", as they're sometimes known) suggesting that things like.NET aren't actually offering any real advantage over existing practice. It's ironic that this comment should appear in an article that pretty much supports exactly that point.:-)
You'll need to get used to the fact that only xenophobic people are going to take your argument without actual proof. Case studies, testimonials, education information with regard to the segment importing foreign software contracts, etc.
I don't expect people to radically adjust their views to my thinking based on a few personal anecdotes. I posted my thoughts purely to stimulate discussion (as clearly they have). Also, since I was responding to a post with which my personal experience differs markedly, I adopted something of a "devil's advocate" tone. It's a shame that apparently only half the people responding had enough of a clue to understand that.:-/
However, for now, there is precious little good evidence one way or another. There seems to be a mounting volume of case studies where things haven't worked (don't take my word for it, spend half an hour starting with Google and form your own opinion) but in the meantime, I find it interesting to compare my own experiences with those of others, which is why I'm here. I suggest that if you are allergic to anecdotal evidence and want nothing but scientific studies, you stay away from threads like this and come back in five or ten years when enough such studies exist.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
This is, in principle, sound advice.
OTOH, there's a certain kind of person who has two defining qualities.
These people are no use to anyone.
Everyone makes mistakes. In a good working environment, obviously everyone will try to minimize that, but it is accepted that it will happen. When it does, people will own up to their mistakes and try to put them right, and others will help them to do so if they can.
In a bad working environment, full of blame culture and CYAing weasels, mistakes Just Don't Happen, and when they do it's always Someone Else's Fault. Strangely, such environments tend to be incredibly political, very uncomfortable for those working there, and far less productive in the long run.
Now, a sure way to turn your office into the latter environment is to hire or keep too many CYAing weasels. A direct consequence of that is that writing too many CYAing e-mails and never accepting responsibility for things is a great way to run out of good people to work with real fast. So, CYA when it's justified and necessary, but not as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions. It's morally right to act this way anyway, and in the long run, a reputation for having that kind of integrity is priceless.
There are a few too many words ending in "ize" there for such a champion of correct UK usage, methinks. :-)
Around the start of this year, I was putting together a new PC. Being a bit of a geek, I was choosing all the parts separately, putting them in a funky aluminium case, planning to dual-boot with Linux, etc. etc.
One thing that I seriously investigated was buying a legacy-free motherboard. I figured I had precious little need for "old" kit. I was wrong. Below are a few of the many reasons I rejected the legacy-free option.
In the end I went for a system that ditched the pointless stuff. I have no floppy drive installed, for example. I also have a motherboard with decent on-board sound and networking, which cuts down a lot on the add-in cards. But legacy-free I'm not. I connected up my old hard drive to transfer data over, and I could still connect up the floppy or Zip if I needed access to data via those, too. I eventually bought a new printer for other reasons anyway (mumble, mumble, Panasonic and WinXP and no drivers, mumble) so I do use USB for that. I saved thirty quid by sticking with my nice, comfy PS/2 keyboard (none of this overly light, USB-enabled smart keyboard crap for me) and my trusty MS wheel mouse.
And you know what? Somehow, everything works and I don't feel at all held back, however old and boring I may be.
I wasn't going to comment on this thread, not being particularly informed on C# itself, but two things have struck me that might be worth mentioning.
Dear Sir,
It has come to our attention that you think you are funny. You seem to believe that posting a string of suggestive words on the Internet forum known as "Slashdot" will trigger some sort of secretive, government-sponsored "disappearing" response.
Congratulations, you are correct. In approximately thirty seconds you will never have existed.
Love and hugs,
The guys in suits outside your door, who are not paid to have a sense of humour
But seriously... The problem with looking at the funny side of this is that the other guys are always going to have the last laugh. It's easy to forget that while making a joke, but please remember it again afterwards.
At the risk of using a cliche, that may be because there are currently 100,000s in your country's armed forces who are prepared to die to defend those rights for you. Odd, then, that you would give them up so easily after they have been so hard won.
An interesting perspective, coming from a nation that is waging a war to prevent damage from weapons of mass destruction, yet which is also the only nation in the world to have dropped a nuclear bomb on another.
No, you're really not. Your population is dwarfed by that of Europe, India or China. You have a lot of land, but hardly an exceptional amount. (That standard world map exaggerates the size of the US quite dramatically.) To follow your analogy, you have a lot of weight because you choose to spend silly amounts of money buying pies. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how any military force the size of yours can possibly be for "defence".
That was a joke, right?
If you don't appreciate how much damage US interference continues to do to the Arab world daily, or the reasons for those interference policies, you need to get yourself informed about them before entering a discussion like this. Yes, you may be trying, but unfortunately you're trying to do the wrong things the wrong way. And then you're telling friends who warn you to **** off instead of listening to them, which makes the problem ten times worse.
And that's exactly the problem with good intentions mixed with naivety. You could make the same case for the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. Ignoring the political motivations and discussions of terror, at least you could make some moral case for war if the likely outcome was a people free from a dictatorship they didn't want.
Obviously, that hasn't happened in Afghanistan, and unfortunately I find it hard to believe it will happen in Iraq either, with western governments coughing up hundreds of billions to fund a war, and hundreds of millions to clear up the mess afterwards. This is the great myth, which unfortunately seems to have taken in vast amounts of the population who don't choose to think critically about what they read in the media.
Um... Nope, sorry. Not unless that was the other guy they confused me with. :-)
That is an assumption on your part.
My father is very much a man of principle. He once taught me that the only rights you truly have are those for which you are prepared to die. It's a great sound bite, but with more than a little truth in it: anything else can be taken away from you, and if it can be taken away, is it really a right at all? Someone with that attitude might disagree with you.
I'm not sure I could make the hard choice, say if someone were holding guns to my family's heads, but maybe that's immaturity or lack of responsibility on my part. Put it another way, but with a more commonly accepted answer: do you believe in negotiating with terrorists? Does a little short term benefit justify the long term harm? If this is not black and white and there is a balance to be struck, then where do you draw the line?
That, my friend, is the key point that makes so many people from any side of the privacy argument critical here. You are giving up a hell of a lot for something that you don't even know will work (in fact, something that history strongly suggests will not work).
The answer to your first sentence lies in your second. The US has been throwing its weight around for a very long time, as the history books will tell you if you choose to read them. Gratuitous provocative comment for discussion: Has the US has committed more terrorist acts and war crimes in the past hundred years than any other nation on earth? (Before you flame, do read the history books for yourself.)
Your current president had established an international reputation as a belligerent man with little care for the rest of the world long before 911. This is why people will give their lives to hurt you, and this is why the international community are reluctant to stand with you on issues like Iraq. So yes, there are several things you could do to significantly reduce your risk of a terrorist attack, but most of them don't involve guns or spies.
Of course, the scary thing is that you can (and real people really do) get a driving licence while registered blind.
Given that a legal requirement for drivers in the UK is that you must be able to read a number plate at 20.5m (and if you need glasses etc. to do so then you must wear them while driving) that must say something about either the eyesight standards required of drivers, or how much it means to be "registered blind" as opposed to actually being blind.
My identity wasn't used for illegal purposes, but I had a rather strange tax status for several months last year after someone at a tax office mistyped by NI number (similar to a US SSN).
After noticing that my pay cheque for January was smaller than usual for no apparent reason, and tracking this down to a change in my tax code, we did some more investigation and concluded that I had moved house to the far side of the country and started a new, full-time job there... and all without noticing! I must be smarter than I thought. :-)
The greatest part, though, was when I rang up the tax office to sort things out. Sensibly enough, they first wanted to confirm my identity, so they asked me for my name, current address and employer. I provided these details, and got back, "I'm sorry, those details don't match what's on my computer. I need to hear what it says here before I can help you. Are you sure those details are current?"
I recited every previous address and employer I'd ever had since working and paying tax, and none of them showed up. It took saying the right thing at the right time* to get them to listen to me at all, and then three further months of hassle to sort things out, luckily just in time for the end of the financial year. Still, even though everything is (I hope) OK now, I was out of pocket by hundreds of pounds for several months. To many people, that would have been crippling. And all it took was someone mistyping a digit on a computer in a government office.
But it's OK. I've got nothing to hide, so I should trust the government to collect lots of data on me, and take it as read that no problems will result, right?
*If you ever have the same problem in the UK, where you surprisingly start a non-existent second job and change to a new address at the same time, one of your jobs will get a tax code change to BR (basic rate only, no allowances). Tell your tax office this while explaining what's happened, and they may at least start to believe that their records of your address may be incorrect as well. You will probably still have to write to them and formally state that you are who you say you are, unless you're lucky enough that they can spot the problem fairly quickly and your "official" situation is obviously implausible, but at least you'll be able to get things sorted out.
Well, since both languages effectively use the same library care of .Net, that shouldn't be much of an issue. There's obviously more weirdo VB syntax now it has to support the .Net OO system as well, though. Still, at least by using one you're getting some practice with the shared library, and if .Net takes off over the next few years, that'll be valuable experience.
I love the women at a party line, BTW. Anything bashing a MS language, particularly using another one to do so, is automatically consdered sig-worthy material. ;-)
I think the point is that under UK law, if you're being made redundant, you are entitled to certain things, typically including a notice period and compensation. If you're an employee (as opposed to, say, a contractor), then you can't just be let go on a whim.
I've known two or three people who've managed to take advantage of this, getting themselves made redundant on Friday (and thus getting, say, three months of salary for doing nothing) and then starting at a new job on the Monday. Even if the new job has a slightly lower starting salary, it can make it profitable to move, and if you get to improve the working conditions in the process, so much the better.
What's the difference? ;-)
(Seriously, VB.Net is a lot closer to C# than to VB6 from what I've seen so far.)
Sure, why not? We're talking 15-25 years away, right? It worked for John Connor... and they'll have discovered lasers that fire slowly enough to look good in a movie by then, too.
The OICW was my first thought, too. A decent intro is here for the interested. Love the URL. :-)
That's what I said, but then some new-fangled security protocol thing told me the content was "evil" and I wasn't allowed to see it.
Oh, man... If hacking Windows is what's on your mind at that point, you really need to get out more.
I think I agree with pretty much everything you say. It's not that I have a problem with the idea of Indians as developers. As others have noted, they are often enthusiastic, hard-working and educated, all admirable qualities. My problem is that as things stand today, exporting the job just doesn't get it done most of the time, in my experience.
There seems to be, at least from what I've seen, a lack of technical expertise amongst the average programming population compared to the calibre of people you'd find routinely in high-tech centres in the US or Europe. I totally understand the communication problems as well; I used to work with a very nice Chinese lad, no personal issues, but his language skills created a barrier that seriously hampered his technical ability to work with others.
Of course, it's also quite possible, as you suggest, that better management could fix these issues. Treating the foreign developers like people worthy of your time, investing in their training to bring technical skills up to scratch where they're lacking, providing better channels of communication and the opportunity to improve (human) language skills as necessary would all help. We can but hope that good businesses who invest in their people like this will be the ones to reap the rewards.
Thanks for the informative response.
It's interesting that you've had such different experiences with people from different places. I've worked with the Japanese before -- from a distance (e-mail, phone, paperwork) they seemed to be very formal and professional, but the guy who used to come over and work with us on-site now and then always turned up in jeans and seemed pretty laid back, which surprised me the first time after all the formality. Did a good job, though, so no complaints.
This old chestnut seems to come up in every other programming thread these days. :-)
It's an intriguing and credible idea, and I don't dismiss it out of hand. However, speaking as someone who writes performance-critical maths software all day, I maintain a certain skepticism because I've yet to see any real evidence (or even a convincing anecdote) to support it. Can you give us any more information?
What I'd prefer to see is an objective article on why .NET and/or web services are ever better, rather than an assumptive "are they not always better?" piece. As has often been noted in these parts, often new != better, whereas tried-and-tested is a Good Thing in the absence of a compelling reason to change. The line at the top of the article is pretty telling:
Not if we're smart, we don't! (Although if we did, MS would be much happier. How many places do you know who haven't moved to VS.NET yet, because of either the things MS messed up compared to VS 6 or because they simply see no business case for doing so?)
I have seen lots of waffly arguments about .NET and web services, most of them sponsored by MS and others with an interest in selling the development tools. I can easily believe that there is some truth behind them, and some applications for which they are well suited, but I've yet to see anyone put forth a convincing and supported case for why it's worth moving to web services from established tools such as C++, Java and VB.
He apparently objects to "C++ gurus" (or "crafty old-hands who don't believe hype", as they're sometimes known) suggesting that things like .NET aren't actually offering any real advantage over existing practice. It's ironic that this comment should appear in an article that pretty much supports exactly that point. :-)
I don't expect people to radically adjust their views to my thinking based on a few personal anecdotes. I posted my thoughts purely to stimulate discussion (as clearly they have). Also, since I was responding to a post with which my personal experience differs markedly, I adopted something of a "devil's advocate" tone. It's a shame that apparently only half the people responding had enough of a clue to understand that. :-/
However, for now, there is precious little good evidence one way or another. There seems to be a mounting volume of case studies where things haven't worked (don't take my word for it, spend half an hour starting with Google and form your own opinion) but in the meantime, I find it interesting to compare my own experiences with those of others, which is why I'm here. I suggest that if you are allergic to anecdotal evidence and want nothing but scientific studies, you stay away from threads like this and come back in five or ten years when enough such studies exist. :-)