It is amazing see how many Indian programmers need to move to the west on short-term projects. Most of them get very little support from their organization.
There is little acknowledgement of cultural issues and soft issue. Many of us know US only through holywood movies.
I believe most Indians go through severe mental agony (By western standards) in the first few months before coming to terms with their surroundings. Most of them cope and get out of it and a few fall by the way side.
In this context, it would be difficult for us to relate to this topic. What's the big deal in moving between East and West Coast. We do it all the time !!!
Hey... it is worse in the US. At Safeway counter they ask you "How was your day?"... do i have a choice of telling them i had a screwed up day ?... no way. Everytime i had to smile and say it was great.
This took some time to fish out. You might want to read Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson
He makes a very convincing case for why TV and other gadgets are actually good for kids.
I also have a brother-in-law who now hates camping due to the excessive camping his dad took him for every vacation. It is important to realize that your kids are separate personalities and not everything which suited you, may suit your kids.
The Hindu reported some statistics on India outsourcing giving a good perspective on how outsourcing to India givings savings in US. Read Outsourcing IT? These are the real numbers... to get insight into the economics behind outsourcing.
Haven't any of you heard.. if you can't beat them join them.
How about joining one of Indian IT companies and work as a part of their onsite (US based team).
If you are more adventurous you could even try a stint in India;-) It's a very challenging country to live in.
BTW, i'm an Indian IT worker. If you factor in Purchasing Power, we are paid and treated and taken care of very well. Clearing mis-conception... India has very rigourous labour laws and this is actually one of the biggest hindrances in the country going forward. It is very difficult for Indian companies to hire and fire without adequate justification. We still are trying to shake away our socialistic roots.
Oracle 8 triggers an incident in my mind.
When we were looking for alternates to Postgres for high-availablity, i had been to oracle and talked to some tech guys about Oracle 8 solutions. They gave us a great marketing material and presentations on Parallel server. Later i found that in India (where we wanted to deploy this) there was not a single installation of parallel server and world-over less than dozen installations. This is a few years back.
Whatever solution is chosen, it is best to talk to a referenceable client who has used this solutions and try and get as much first hand info as possible.
Couple of years back i was involved in the development of India's leading adserver. We used postgres as the database. We had this algo (requirement) to ensure that ads were served in the ratio of leftover page-views booked. This required that we update into the database numbers of ads served, as this will affect which ad would be served in the next page view.
We used postgres initially. After every ad was served we updated back to the database. Software worked like a dream in the test environment. We launched the adserver and started bringing web sites live on it. It worked fine the first few weeks. Within no time, i was getting frantic calls that the Postgres server has shutdown and programs were bombing (charecterized by broken gifs is different web sites).
We struggled through a week of sleepless nights to fix the problem. Basic problem was, if you try updating online, continuously, the database just can't take it. I know for sure postgres couldn't but haven't checked with commercial dbs.
Being wiser we moved to a more sober solution using tied-hashes with Perl combined with compromises in requirement (update the ads served every half-hour). Solution worked like a dream.
We scaled upto 8 million ads a day with a single intel box.
I have found some of my old postings on this.
Take a hardlook at your problem to see whether you REALLY require real-time updates.
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It is amazing see how many Indian programmers need to move to the west on short-term projects. Most of them get very little support from their organization. There is little acknowledgement of cultural issues and soft issue. Many of us know US only through holywood movies. I believe most Indians go through severe mental agony (By western standards) in the first few months before coming to terms with their surroundings. Most of them cope and get out of it and a few fall by the way side. In this context, it would be difficult for us to relate to this topic. What's the big deal in moving between East and West Coast. We do it all the time !!!
Hey... it is worse in the US. At Safeway counter they ask you "How was your day?"... do i have a choice of telling them i had a screwed up day ?... no way. Everytime i had to smile and say it was great.
This took some time to fish out. You might want to read Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson He makes a very convincing case for why TV and other gadgets are actually good for kids. I also have a brother-in-law who now hates camping due to the excessive camping his dad took him for every vacation. It is important to realize that your kids are separate personalities and not everything which suited you, may suit your kids.
Instead you could outsource it to India (the land of Vedic Maths)
The Hindu reported some statistics on India outsourcing giving a good perspective on how outsourcing to India givings savings in US. Read Outsourcing IT? These are the real numbers... to get insight into the economics behind outsourcing.
Haven't any of you heard .. if you can't beat them join them.
How about joining one of Indian IT companies and work as a part of their onsite (US based team).
If you are more adventurous you could even try a stint in India ;-) It's a very challenging country to live in.
BTW, i'm an Indian IT worker. If you factor in Purchasing Power, we are paid and treated and taken care of very well. Clearing mis-conception... India has very rigourous labour laws and this is actually one of the biggest hindrances in the country going forward. It is very difficult for Indian companies to hire and fire without adequate justification. We still are trying to shake away our socialistic roots.
Oracle 8 triggers an incident in my mind. When we were looking for alternates to Postgres for high-availablity, i had been to oracle and talked to some tech guys about Oracle 8 solutions. They gave us a great marketing material and presentations on Parallel server. Later i found that in India (where we wanted to deploy this) there was not a single installation of parallel server and world-over less than dozen installations. This is a few years back.
Whatever solution is chosen, it is best to talk to a referenceable client who has used this solutions and try and get as much first hand info as possible.
Couple of years back i was involved in the development of India's leading adserver. We used postgres as the database. We had this algo (requirement) to ensure that ads were served in the ratio of leftover page-views booked. This required that we update into the database numbers of ads served, as this will affect which ad would be served in the next page view. We used postgres initially. After every ad was served we updated back to the database. Software worked like a dream in the test environment. We launched the adserver and started bringing web sites live on it. It worked fine the first few weeks. Within no time, i was getting frantic calls that the Postgres server has shutdown and programs were bombing (charecterized by broken gifs is different web sites).
We struggled through a week of sleepless nights to fix the problem. Basic problem was, if you try updating online, continuously, the database just can't take it. I know for sure postgres couldn't but haven't checked with commercial dbs. Being wiser we moved to a more sober solution using tied-hashes with Perl combined with compromises in requirement (update the ads served every half-hour). Solution worked like a dream. We scaled upto 8 million ads a day with a single intel box.
I have found some of my old postings on this.
Take a hardlook at your problem to see whether you REALLY require real-time updates.