I'm hiring right now. My education check-list is (roughly in order):
A CS degree from a good University
A CS degree
A science degree from a good University
A science degree
A good semi-technical degree from a good University
(Liberal arts grads can go blow).
These are not hard and fast rules but the reason I'm being so stringent is that there are still lots of monkeys out there who think they can code (you would not believe the number of "Java programmers" I've interviewed who can't write an equals method). I don't have time to interview everybody. So, a good CS degree at least suggests the candidate has some formal training in analytical thinking and weeds out those who jumped on the dot-com gravy train in the late nineties.
[BTW, I don't have a CS degree but a good physics degree from a good University. Despite being in the industry for nearly 10 years, I sometimes wish I had that CS degree...]
Linus Torvalds is the most influential executive because while other executives can be fired/ousted by shareholders/face a boardroom putsch, Linus will always maintain control over the Linux kernel.
Java... forces you into an object-oriented paradigm, has static typing, and doesn't lend itself well for rapid prototyping and development.
And these are bad things?
OO is generally considered a good thing.
type safety is generally considered a good thing
Rapid prototypes rarely get thrown away. Generally, if management like what they see they say "continue building".
I do agree with you, however, that PERL (the only P language I have experience with) is great for quick applications. But there is no way on G-d's Earth I would use it for enterprise (50 000+ LoC) worthy applications. I'll stick with Java.
Apart from being bad OO (read the book or see Holub's article in JavaWorld), another problem he does not mention is hash code generation.
If you use your object as a key in a hash then change it's members, it will probably mean your hash code value changes (depending on how you generate it). You may then find that your object does not correspond to the value for which it was the key in the hash table.
the name "The Economist" is regarded as qualification enough
... to the uneducated. The Economist has a long history of simply ignoring facts that don't agree with their ideaology.
Some examples:
They consistently maintain low taxes and low regulation leads to high GDP per capita. Yet, a publication from their own stable "The World in XXXX" shows many countries that contradict this.
[Eg, "The World in 2005" lists the GDP per capita of Norway ($55 290), Switzerland ($51 490) Denmark ($48 920) and Sweden ($43 480) - countries with high tax, high regulation economies - beating the low tax, low regulation economy of the US ($41 430)]
These countries have beat the US fairly consistantly over the years. But how many articles does The Economist print praising these their economic models? How many articles do they print praising high social spending and strict regulation?
Another example is Indonesia and Malaysia since the Asian crises. The Economist advocated reforms similar to those prescribed by the IMF. Indonesia swallowed the medicine. Malaysia did not. The Economist wrote many articles condemning Malaysia for closing their markets.
Yet, since those dark days, Malaysia has done much better. How many articles did The Economist print on this? Nobel prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz, expressed exasperation at idiots who thought deliberately removing the social net from the population of Indonesia would make good economic sense (reduced social spending is a central tenet of The Economist's idealogy). Naturally, this action provoked rioting. And nothing scares away foreign investment like a country that has mass riots, as he pointed out. Interestly, Stiglitz's excellent book, "Globalization and its Discontents" got a stinking review in The Economist.
A final example: The Economist believes liberalising markets is of the upmost importance. But anybody who pays even a passing interest in Russia knows that privatization has been a disaster. "Soviet state enterprises did meet some of their citizen's need for food, clothing, housing and transport. The privitized businesses which emerged from them frequently did not," writes Prof John Kay in "The Truth about Markets". Saying in retrospect that the privatization was done badly after advocating it gung-ho suggests their inability to seriously predict anything.
Having said that, I read The Economist religously. It's a great mag. Just don't believe everything it is trying to sell you.
Here in the UK, lawyers must be members of the Law Society. The Law Society regulates who can practise, regulates how many people enter the profession, regulates job titles etc etc.
If this is not a union, what is?
In addition, is this "union" a bad thing?
If there were a union of software engineers that regulated who could practise and who could not, the "learn-X-in-21-days-cowboys" would be a thing of the past.
When I asked a lawyer why the legal profession does not become a free market like the IT industry, he said that it was because of what goes on in the IT industry that law would never become a free market.
What you are worth is not directly related to what you are paid.
Was Kenneth Lay really worth $300 million? I don't think many Enron investors believe he was.
What you are paid is influenced by many, many factors - one of which is how good at negotiation you are.
It's a massive over-simplification to say that something is "worth" what the market is prepared to pay. Was Enron really worth $X billion one day and nothing the next?
There is a great book on the subject - The Truth About Markets by Professor John Kay. It's extremely readable and every page has a profound insight.
The reason why publications like the New York Times... are considered authoritative [snip]
The New York Times is authoritative? Are you shitting me? Those SoBs will print anything.
Does anybody else remember the toppling of democracy in Venezuela where the World's fourth largest oil producing country was run by an unelected puppet? The NYTimes reported it thus:
"Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened
by a would-be dictator... the military
intervened and handed power to a respected business
leader." (April 13 2002).
Now, I'm no politics grad, but duh?!? A man who won by a landslide is "a would-be dictator"? Democracy is saved by an unelected businessman? Come on!
Myself, the only news I trust is the BBC - even if the website is a bit populist:-( My reasons why are:
They don't take advertising so they cannot be cajoled by their sponsors.
Their reputation is impeccable.
I worked for them (albeit as a science journalist) and I can honestly say their standards are top-notch. Once, I did a radio report about Internet cafes in China and called the regime there "repressive". My editor quickly stopped me from broadcasting that.
"Why?" I asked. "We all know it is!"
"It's not your job to pass judgements. Stick to the facts," he told me.
The older I become, the more impressed I am by the wisdom and impartiality of his comment.
Each to their own. I have the Sony Ericsson P900 and I spend most of my time:
Reading books I downloaded from Gutenberg. This helps pass the time on my daily one-hour commute.
As a Palm replacement. My excellent Palm died 5 months ago.
Occasional web surfing. I used it only Sunday night to decide the winner of a bet I had in a pub. (I lost).
Practising my French. I have about 20 mins of French audio on it that I listen to while reading the transcript (amazing how good for the soul that one hour commute is...)
In short, if you don't like any of these and similar activities, don't buy a smartphone. If you have a few hundred dollars to spare, I can recommend it.
It would be very naive to believe that a
company (whose loyality is to shareholders),
will sit still on such a burning issue.
They have finally realized that they most (sic)
do this [make MS Windows secure]
So, you admit that, at least for some years, they did sit on this "burning issue"?
Whoa! Did anybody read the last line of the NewsForge article?
"It's good to see that President Bush's plan to stimulate the economy is working so well."
No prizes for guessing where this journalist's sympathies lie. This blatant bias makes the whole article a little harder to swallow.
Vsprint wrote:
Do you really expect an American CEO to ever admit the multi-million dollar bonuses s/he recieved were based on a mistake?
Sure CEOs won't admit that offshoring their IT was a mistake but they can't keep making those mistakes forever. Offshoring will fall out of fashion along with all other management fads.
Offshoring and outsourcing are inherently bad for business*. Anybody on the ground level knows this. And these people are tomorrow's CEOs.
Having software engineers onsite boosts productivity no end. When it is in the interest of those programmers to build the system correctly (ie, not outsourced), they can guide the customer's requirements when typically the customer does not really know what s/he wants.
Be proactive about your own PR. If you've done something well, let people know. Think that is being arrogant? Welcome to the World, baby.
A much-loved IT manager at my present company sent around an email to everyone that basically said: "We've upgraded the whole network and the fact that nobody noticed is a sign of how well we did our job". Brilliant. He was 100% accurate but wasn't going to let an amazing piece of work go unnoticed.
Higlight overpaid, underskilled consultants to your management. In my last two jobs, I've shown management that those highly paid consultants they hired were charlatans. It's really not that hard and everybody wins (except the consultants, of course). The company gets to save money by purging corporate parasites and you look good by dispelling these people who were sucking the business dry.
Tips to do this are:
Document their mistakes in writing and show this to your boss.
But be reasonable. If you cry "charlatan!" at every little mistake, you just look petulant.
Be confident. The idiots I dealt with at "Ass-centre" and "Toilet and Douche" talked the talk but were little more than glorified salesmen. It wasn't too hard to demonstrate that they lacked any skills other than salesmanship.
Check their work as they produce it. There is nothing worse than finding out after you have paid $750 000 that the quality of work is appalling. However, if you say "this is a cock-up" all along, you can only look good when your prophesies come true (and 99% of the time you'd be right).
Let it be known that their work is bad throughout the company in kitchen chats (only, if of course, it really is bad). This kinda news spreads like a virus. Do you think this is Machiavelian? It probably is. But they are going to screw you over - afterall, it will be you maintaining their abortion after they have taken the money and run. So either shut up and take the pain later or do something about it now.
Don't think other professions are hugely different. Over here, Doctors get paid crap and work much harder than I do and in much worse conditions.
Outline your objections to your boss. If you think you deserve overtime, ask for it. If they refuse, refuse to do the work. If you lack the spine to stand up for your rights, tough. I can't help you. If they give your job to somebody else, good for them. Now move on.
Bottom line: IT people need to realize that they have to play the political game just like everybody else. We are not so high and mighty that we are above it.
I'm all for automated unit testing (though it's by no means the only testing that needs to be done) and I like the idea of test first.
The thing is, I like to get the interfaces about right before I start writing the tests... and maybe a *little* code.
What I don't like about test driven development is that I always refactor my first draft of code and that means refactoring all my test classes - ie, twice as much work.
Far better to get a *very* basic class structure set out, then write the tests then fully implement the methods.
Does anybody else do this? Or am I just being lazy?
"Well duh, of course her critics were happy with her resigning."
I didn't say happy I said admired. Please read my post before you make a childish attempt to denigrate it.
"Point is, no nation of sufficient size can operate a democracy with no controversy involved in the elections."
What controversy? You're really clutching at straws if you're attempting to draw comparisons between Sonia Gandhi selflessly declining to take power after a fair and legitimate election and Dubya's well documented seizing of power that many view as dubious.
Dude, what Sonia Gandhi did is her own business. Listening to her inner voice and standing down is a damn noble act that won admiration from even her critics.
How you can possibly compare that to removing tens of thousands of black people from the electoral role because they are the same race and have the same name as a felon without even bothering to check if they have the same social security number or date of birth? If you cannot see these are two totally different things, you're an idiot.
> > The largest democracy in the World,
> > India, seems to manage to hold elections
> > without disenfranchisement of its minorities.
> >
> > I wonder how the World would react if India
> > suddenly removed 50 000 Sikhs from the
> > electoral roles and then claimed
> > "accidents happen"?
> I believe many in India who voted for Sonia
> Ghandi in their last election may feel otherwise.
WTF are you talking about?
Links, please! Facts, if you will! Any evidence to back your claim!
Sonia Ghandi won the last election in India and then voluntarily chose to step down and nominated a Sikh to replace her.
But how free markets should work and how they do work are often two different things.
Hey, don't get me wrong. I like living in a free market economy. But I am not so naive as to think free markets don't require some regulation - especially in health care.
I think the gravy train may be pulling into the station again.
I work in the UK and Sweden and the job market for IT people is pretty damn good.
I'm reading a lot of comments by Americans here and it's all negative. Are there any Europeans reading this who want to confirm/deny that the IT market - after a prolonged recession - is good?
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I can't help feeling it's because European management has recognised that throwing the requirements over the wall and some dude in India coding them is not a great business model. Programmers need to sit and talk to the business people.
Even the feverish hacks at The Economist seem less certain that offshoring will change the IT landscape. Compare:
"The shift of service jobs to low-cost countries has only just begun"
(The Economist, Relocating the Back Office December 13, 2003)
with:
"So even the bullish-sounding projections about 'infrastructure-management
services' hardly suggest a revolution either in the global outsourcing
market or in the structure of India's information-technology industry:
not so much one big wave; more a rising tide."
(The Economist, After the call-centre, now the IT department is off to India, September 10, 2004)
The British Crime Survey, which includes crimes not reported to police, also found:
Overall crime fell
The risk of being a victim is the same as in 1981, at 26.9%
There were 5% fewer violent crimes reported to the survey in the 12 months to June 2003
Recorded robbery fell 7% in April-June 2003 compared to same period last year
America has about 12 500 murders a year compared to about 850 for the UK. Even taking into account population differences (60mil in UK, about 290mil in US), that makes American homicide figures much worse than the UK. America has over 2 million people in jail, for heaven's sake!
Whatsmore, there is no way you can call "new" Labour a socialist government. It is one of the most right-wing in Europe. And socialist, continental Europe generally has lower crime rates than both the UK and the US.
Come on, people! Google is a great tool! Learn how to use it!
You're never going to stop the outsourcing/offshoring bandwagon with arguments of "treat your workers/citizens better".
But, then you don't need to.
The quality of outsourced/offshored work is generally abysmal (and if there are coders* out there who wish to dispute this, please let me know).
This has little to do with the quality of coders out in the Third World and much more to do with the human aspects of writing software.
I sit next to my customer and I can't imagine working any other way. Sure, there is email. Sure, there is video conferencing. But, anybody who says this is reasonable replacement from talking to the guy next to you has never seriously coded in his life.
Agile Methodologies are the way to go. The trouble is, the large consultancies don't want you to believe this. They're trying to drag everybody back to a Waterfall Methodology, years after it was discredited**. They want their requirements gatherers to write a huge document up front and send it offshore to be coded. I have never seen this approach work. The requirements are always going to be ambiguous ('cos they are written in natural language). And the only unambiguous language is the code itself.
Let this management fad pass. PHBs are already starting to realize (in this part of the World at least) that a small, on-site team produces better work and is much cheaper than sending the work abroad.
* "Coders" rather than "managers" as managers have far less of an idea of what good code is. Hell, most don't even know that 60% of the ToC is in maintainence - see
"Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering"
by Dr Robert L Glass.
** Waterfall is OK if you have very clearly defined requirements from the beginning. But this is so rare as to only be appropriate for all but a few niche industries.
Slashdot Mirror
(Liberal arts grads can go blow).
These are not hard and fast rules but the reason I'm being so stringent is that there are still lots of monkeys out there who think they can code (you would not believe the number of "Java programmers" I've interviewed who can't write an equals method). I don't have time to interview everybody. So, a good CS degree at least suggests the candidate has some formal training in analytical thinking and weeds out those who jumped on the dot-com gravy train in the late nineties.
[BTW, I don't have a CS degree but a good physics degree from a good University. Despite being in the industry for nearly 10 years, I sometimes wish I had that CS degree...]
Period.
And these are bad things?
I do agree with you, however, that PERL (the only P language I have experience with) is great for quick applications. But there is no way on G-d's Earth I would use it for enterprise (50 000+ LoC) worthy applications. I'll stick with Java.
But that's just my opinion...
If you use your object as a key in a hash then change it's members, it will probably mean your hash code value changes (depending on how you generate it). You may then find that your object does not correspond to the value for which it was the key in the hash table.
Regards.
And maybe, just maybe, M$ aren't telling the whole truth about not being able to find people...
Either that, or they they genuinely can't find coders with 10 years experience who will accept $50k/year.
Ok, I'm cynical. So, sue me.
Some examples:
They consistently maintain low taxes and low regulation leads to high GDP per capita. Yet, a publication from their own stable "The World in XXXX" shows many countries that contradict this.
[Eg, "The World in 2005" lists the GDP per capita of Norway ($55 290), Switzerland ($51 490) Denmark ($48 920) and Sweden ($43 480) - countries with high tax, high regulation economies - beating the low tax, low regulation economy of the US ($41 430)]
These countries have beat the US fairly consistantly over the years. But how many articles does The Economist print praising these their economic models? How many articles do they print praising high social spending and strict regulation?
Another example is Indonesia and Malaysia since the Asian crises. The Economist advocated reforms similar to those prescribed by the IMF. Indonesia swallowed the medicine. Malaysia did not. The Economist wrote many articles condemning Malaysia for closing their markets.
Yet, since those dark days, Malaysia has done much better. How many articles did The Economist print on this? Nobel prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz, expressed exasperation at idiots who thought deliberately removing the social net from the population of Indonesia would make good economic sense (reduced social spending is a central tenet of The Economist's idealogy). Naturally, this action provoked rioting. And nothing scares away foreign investment like a country that has mass riots, as he pointed out. Interestly, Stiglitz's excellent book, "Globalization and its Discontents" got a stinking review in The Economist.
A final example: The Economist believes liberalising markets is of the upmost importance. But anybody who pays even a passing interest in Russia knows that privatization has been a disaster. "Soviet state enterprises did meet some of their citizen's need for food, clothing, housing and transport. The privitized businesses which emerged from them frequently did not," writes Prof John Kay in "The Truth about Markets". Saying in retrospect that the privatization was done badly after advocating it gung-ho suggests their inability to seriously predict anything.
Having said that, I read The Economist religously. It's a great mag. Just don't believe everything it is trying to sell you.
Here in the UK, lawyers must be members of the Law Society. The Law Society regulates who can practise, regulates how many people enter the profession, regulates job titles etc etc.
If this is not a union, what is?
In addition, is this "union" a bad thing? If there were a union of software engineers that regulated who could practise and who could not, the "learn-X-in-21-days-cowboys" would be a thing of the past.
When I asked a lawyer why the legal profession does not become a free market like the IT industry, he said that it was because of what goes on in the IT industry that law would never become a free market.
England has some of the lowest (the lowest?) tax rates in Europe. Most people are on 25% income tax rate in the UK.
And, when you count US state taxes, there is not a huge difference between the two countries.
Whether low taxes are good (as you rightly point out - low tax can mean high debt) is another thing entirely.
Just my two penneth (minus 25% tax).
Obviously you do.
What you are worth is not directly related to what you are paid.
Was Kenneth Lay really worth $300 million? I don't think many Enron investors believe he was.
What you are paid is influenced by many, many factors - one of which is how good at negotiation you are.
It's a massive over-simplification to say that something is "worth" what the market is prepared to pay. Was Enron really worth $X billion one day and nothing the next?
There is a great book on the subject - The Truth About Markets by Professor John Kay. It's extremely readable and every page has a profound insight.
The New York Times is authoritative? Are you shitting me? Those SoBs will print anything.
Does anybody else remember the toppling of democracy in Venezuela where the World's fourth largest oil producing country was run by an unelected puppet? The NYTimes reported it thus:
"Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator ... the military
intervened and handed power to a respected business
leader." (April 13 2002).
Now, I'm no politics grad, but duh?!? A man who won by a landslide is "a would-be dictator"? Democracy is saved by an unelected businessman? Come on!
Myself, the only news I trust is the BBC - even if the website is a bit populist :-( My reasons why are:
"Why?" I asked. "We all know it is!"
"It's not your job to pass judgements. Stick to the facts," he told me.
The older I become, the more impressed I am by the wisdom and impartiality of his comment.
- Reading books I downloaded from Gutenberg. This helps pass the time on my daily one-hour commute.
- As a Palm replacement. My excellent Palm died 5 months ago.
- Occasional web surfing. I used it only Sunday night to decide the winner of a bet I had in a pub. (I lost).
- Practising my French. I have about 20 mins of French audio on it that I listen to while reading the transcript (amazing how good for the soul that one hour commute is...)
In short, if you don't like any of these and similar activities, don't buy a smartphone. If you have a few hundred dollars to spare, I can recommend it.company (whose loyality is to shareholders),
will sit still on such a burning issue.
They have finally realized that they most (sic)
do this [make MS Windows secure]
So, you admit that, at least for some years, they did sit on this "burning issue"?
"It's good to see that President Bush's plan to stimulate the economy is working so well."
No prizes for guessing where this journalist's sympathies lie. This blatant bias makes the whole article a little harder to swallow.
Vsprint wrote:
Do you really expect an American CEO to ever admit the multi-million dollar bonuses s/he recieved were based on a mistake?
Sure CEOs won't admit that offshoring their IT was a mistake but they can't keep making those mistakes forever. Offshoring will fall out of fashion along with all other management fads.
Offshoring and outsourcing are inherently bad for business*. Anybody on the ground level knows this. And these people are tomorrow's CEOs.
* A few reasons:
-
Outsourcers don't answer to the same shareholders as their client. When
"maintenance typically consumes 40 to 80 percent (average, 60 percent) of software costs" it's not exactly in an outsourcer's interests to provide maintenance-free software.
-
Having software engineers onsite boosts productivity no end. When it is in the interest of those programmers to build the system correctly (ie, not outsourced), they can guide the customer's requirements when typically the customer does not really know what s/he wants.
-
"Given a choice between paying $1 million per year for a team of 20 average developers or paying $1 million per year for a team of three outstanding developers, I'd choose the small team every time. The added bonus is that the
hidden overhead costs are much smaller with the smaller team - another benefit of using outstanding developers." This kind of advice has been around for decades and it's still as true as it ever was.
-
Contract negotiation is expensive. Litigation is even more expensive. It's cheaper to just get programmers who are aligned to your interests.
There are dozens of other good reasons but I am starting to get hoarse shouting...- Be proactive about your own PR. If you've done something well, let people know. Think that is being arrogant? Welcome to the World, baby.
- Higlight overpaid, underskilled consultants to your management. In my last two jobs, I've shown management that those highly paid consultants they hired were charlatans. It's really not that hard and everybody wins (except the consultants, of course). The company gets to save money by purging corporate parasites and you look good by dispelling these people who were sucking the business dry.
- Document their mistakes in writing and show this to your boss.
- But be reasonable. If you cry "charlatan!" at every little mistake, you just look petulant.
- Be confident. The idiots I dealt with at "Ass-centre" and "Toilet and Douche" talked the talk but were little more than glorified salesmen. It wasn't too hard to demonstrate that they lacked any skills other than salesmanship.
- Check their work as they produce it. There is nothing worse than finding out after you have paid $750 000 that the quality of work is appalling. However, if you say "this is a cock-up" all along, you can only look good when your prophesies come true (and 99% of the time you'd be right).
- Let it be known that their work is bad throughout the company in kitchen chats (only, if of course, it really is bad). This kinda news spreads like a virus. Do you think this is Machiavelian? It probably is. But they are going to screw you over - afterall, it will be you maintaining their abortion after they have taken the money and run. So either shut up and take the pain later or do something about it now.
- Don't think other professions are hugely different. Over here, Doctors get paid crap and work much harder than I do and in much worse conditions.
- Outline your objections to your boss. If you think you deserve overtime, ask for it. If they refuse, refuse to do the work. If you lack the spine to stand up for your rights, tough. I can't help you. If they give your job to somebody else, good for them. Now move on.
Bottom line: IT people need to realize that they have to play the political game just like everybody else. We are not so high and mighty that we are above it.A much-loved IT manager at my present company sent around an email to everyone that basically said: "We've upgraded the whole network and the fact that nobody noticed is a sign of how well we did our job". Brilliant. He was 100% accurate but wasn't going to let an amazing piece of work go unnoticed.
Tips to do this are:
The thing is, I like to get the interfaces about right before I start writing the tests... and maybe a *little* code.
What I don't like about test driven development is that I always refactor my first draft of code and that means refactoring all my test classes - ie, twice as much work.
Far better to get a *very* basic class structure set out, then write the tests then fully implement the methods.
Does anybody else do this? Or am I just being lazy?
If assassination was likely then wouldn't it have been sensible for Bush to get out of a classroom full of school children on the morning on 9/11?
BTW, which finishing school did you attend? Dude, give your readers a little respect and spellcheck.
Yeah, because we all thought those 19 cheeky Arabs who destroyed the World Trade Centre with their jolly japes were a hoot.
C'mon! Most people view suicide bombers as abhorrent. But that does not give Israel carte blanche to flout the Geneva Convention.
I didn't say happy I said admired. Please read my post before you make a childish attempt to denigrate it.
"Point is, no nation of sufficient size can operate a democracy with no controversy involved in the elections."
What controversy? You're really clutching at straws if you're attempting to draw comparisons between Sonia Gandhi selflessly declining to take power after a fair and legitimate election and Dubya's well documented seizing of power that many view as dubious.
How you can possibly compare that to removing tens of thousands of black people from the electoral role because they are the same race and have the same name as a felon without even bothering to check if they have the same social security number or date of birth? If you cannot see these are two totally different things, you're an idiot.
> > India, seems to manage to hold elections
> > without disenfranchisement of its minorities.
> >
> > I wonder how the World would react if India
> > suddenly removed 50 000 Sikhs from the
> > electoral roles and then claimed
> > "accidents happen"?
> I believe many in India who voted for Sonia
> Ghandi in their last election may feel otherwise.
WTF are you talking about?
Links, please! Facts, if you will! Any evidence to back your claim!
Sonia Ghandi won the last election in India and then voluntarily chose to step down and nominated a Sikh to replace her.
So, what's your point?
The largest democracy in the World, India, seems to manage to hold elections without disenfranchisement of its minorities.
I wonder how the World would react if India suddenly removed 50 000 Sikhs from the electoral roles and then claimed "accidents happen"?
(See this report at the BBC for more)
Hey, don't get me wrong. I like living in a free market economy. But I am not so naive as to think free markets don't require some regulation - especially in health care.
I work in the UK and Sweden and the job market for IT people is pretty damn good.
I'm reading a lot of comments by Americans here and it's all negative. Are there any Europeans reading this who want to confirm/deny that the IT market - after a prolonged recession - is good?
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I can't help feeling it's because European management has recognised that throwing the requirements over the wall and some dude in India coding them is not a great business model. Programmers need to sit and talk to the business people.
Even the feverish hacks at The Economist seem less certain that offshoring will change the IT landscape. Compare:
"The shift of service jobs to low-cost countries has only just begun"
(The Economist, Relocating the Back Office December 13, 2003)
with:
"So even the bullish-sounding projections about 'infrastructure-management services' hardly suggest a revolution either in the global outsourcing market or in the structure of India's information-technology industry: not so much one big wave; more a rising tide."
(The Economist, After the call-centre, now the IT department is off to India, September 10, 2004)
When did you last check? In the Victorian era?
How the heck did this post get voted "Insightful"?
Good grief! Give us some facts and links! Don't just shout your uninformed opinion!
Even a doom-laden report from the BBC says:
The British Crime Survey, which includes crimes not reported to police, also found:
America has about 12 500 murders a year compared to about 850 for the UK. Even taking into account population differences (60mil in UK, about 290mil in US), that makes American homicide figures much worse than the UK. America has over 2 million people in jail, for heaven's sake!
Whatsmore, there is no way you can call "new" Labour a socialist government. It is one of the most right-wing in Europe. And socialist, continental Europe generally has lower crime rates than both the UK and the US.
Come on, people! Google is a great tool! Learn how to use it!
But, then you don't need to.
The quality of outsourced/offshored work is generally abysmal (and if there are coders* out there who wish to dispute this, please let me know).
This has little to do with the quality of coders out in the Third World and much more to do with the human aspects of writing software.
I sit next to my customer and I can't imagine working any other way. Sure, there is email. Sure, there is video conferencing. But, anybody who says this is reasonable replacement from talking to the guy next to you has never seriously coded in his life.
Agile Methodologies are the way to go. The trouble is, the large consultancies don't want you to believe this. They're trying to drag everybody back to a Waterfall Methodology, years after it was discredited**. They want their requirements gatherers to write a huge document up front and send it offshore to be coded. I have never seen this approach work. The requirements are always going to be ambiguous ('cos they are written in natural language). And the only unambiguous language is the code itself.
Let this management fad pass. PHBs are already starting to realize (in this part of the World at least) that a small, on-site team produces better work and is much cheaper than sending the work abroad.
* "Coders" rather than "managers" as managers have far less of an idea of what good code is. Hell, most don't even know that 60% of the ToC is in maintainence - see "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" by Dr Robert L Glass.
** Waterfall is OK if you have very clearly defined requirements from the beginning. But this is so rare as to only be appropriate for all but a few niche industries.