This is completely absurd. I was offered a tech lead developer position in Bangalore for 120,000 rupees per month. Your average school teacher, considered to be middle class, makes about 6000 rupees per month. Your average college professor considered to be upper middle class makes about 20,000 rupees per month. 120,000 rupees per month, not including the free apartment I was offered, is enough to buy a trick home, own 2 cars, private school for the kids, a full time maid, a cook, a gardner, a driver, a nanny, vacations in Goa, etc. etc. You are completely and totally right to think technical programming jobs are not middle class; thats because they are upper middle class at the very least. The average software engineer's salary is increasing at a rate of 25% per year. Do the math, it won't be long until those salary are not just middle class by Indian standards, but by US standards as well. Absolutely unlike commentary on/., there is not an infinite supply of SW engineers in India, if there was, how on Earth could the salaries be shooting through the roof.
"Hashing" for an audio file is such early 90s technology - wake up and read the literature. Pattern matching algorithms are in place in commercially deployed technology (the technology was even slashdotted many years ago here: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/12/0450221.shtm l ) that very effectively identify content irrespective of compression type, bit rate/codec/ripper etc. From a business standpoint, so what if the id gets hacked, there are still many people (I would say >90%) willing to put up 15$ a month for unlimited clean content on a p2p where every song they download is linked to all kinds of worthwhile and *accurate* metadata. The real question is whether the labels will ever allow a legit p2p to operate.
I can assure you, the labor laws in India are a heck of a lot stronger than those in the US. Most Indians get atleast 2 months of paid leave a year. And if you're an employer, its virtually impossible to fire (or layoff) someone. The Hi-Tech co's are striving to decrease the potency of these laws, as they see them as a major threat to their competitiveness -- and to some extent, tech co's that operate in the "tech parks" are shielded from labor laws. Even the environmental laws are incredibly strict in India. The main problem, in India and much of the third world, is not the strength of the laws, but the innability or lack-of-desire to enforce the laws due to low government funding or rampant corruption; both of which will only be resolved through more capital flow and competition from abroad.
The entire context of this thread is tiresome; no one in this/. community or any other American community whines for the poor saps in Europe that often lose their jobs when they're shipped to America, due to, among other things, cheaper labor and corporate taxes. In the past 5 years, I've worked at 2 companies that relocated there headquarters from the UK to the US, trashed huge divisions of staff, and staffed my group up. Face it, even w/ a labor cost disadvantage, companies can thrive. Look at Volkswagon/Audi - significantly higher labor wages yet extremely successful on the world stage due to, nothing other than, high quality engineering and high worker productivity.
So you've proved your company has a sucky interviewing procedure. I fail to see how this proves people, due to their visa status, are bad programmers. I could site a number of cases where I've been at companies w/ similarly sucky interviewing procedures yielded an American programmer w/ equally bad code. I could also site a number of colleagues, on H1B visas, that have been truly outstanding contributers.
I think it depends on the skills required for a particular job. I have an MSEE and have been working as a software engineer for over 12 years. I've worked in many cultures as well - academic research, corporate research, bland corporate, and start up. I've also done a lot of hiring of PhDs, MS's, and Bachelor's degrees, and on occassion those without any higher formal education. On the occasions where I was looking for skills that typically come w/ a PhD, it was in an area where we really needed theoretical and academic style depth. For example, at my start up, we were developing a sophisticated audio classification system; it was an area where the public literature was light. I was hiring to build out a team to form the core of our applied research group. We ended up hiring about half PhDs, and half masters degrees. We didn't go out and look for a degree, we went out looking for depth in a particular set of areas that happened to be built on a significant mathematical foundation. It so happens that all had higher degrees. By the nature of the work, I think it would be rare to find that set of experience in a BS, let alone a high school grad.
We also had a significant technology transfer component. We needed to get the work out to product as soon as possible and translate the algorithms into very efficient implementation. This part of the team was more mixed. We needed some hybrid folks - those that can hang with the geeks yet not overwhelm the researchers with geek speak. We also had some more traditional IT roles (i.e. Sys Admin - platform tweaker) - in this case, I agree that formal education plays less of a role. Formal education in the right discipline establishes rigour, and can indicate a candidate has sweat well and hard and thinks efficiently. Rigour can be established in other manners as well; I would jump to hire a person that was a grandiose chess player self transformed into a programmer.
Bottom line: sometimes as a highering manager you need skills that start from scratch (research + algorithmic level innovation) and will ultimately require efficient, architecturally sound programmatic implementation. You need to build your team out so that all skills are represented.
Of Course an Open License Can be Restricted
on
Open Source Code And War
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The bulk of the comments here all seem to insinuate something to the effect that as an open source developer, you should not expect to have any restrictions whatsoever placed upon your work, and that you accept this upon "opening" your work. This is totally ridiculous. The GPL itself places all types of restrictions on the use of the open source. It could be argued that some of these restrictions are in fact politically motivated. Arguments to the effect that it is impossible to define "military uses" could be applied to just about anything in the law. The law is all about attempting to place a concrete definition on an inherently ambiguous problem, so that folks can interpret it as their reason dictates -- and upon a conflict of understanding, the parties show up in a court and a judge/jury settles the dispute w/ their interpretation. I see the task of defining an open source license that excludes military uses as no more difficult than defining the GPL that excludes derivative uses (i.e. new apps that uses GPL'd libraries) from not being GPL'd. If a group of programmers wants such an open source license, I say great, go for it, and get a good lawyer to help you draft it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is completely absurd. I was offered a tech lead developer position in Bangalore for 120,000 rupees per month. Your average school teacher, considered to be middle class, makes about 6000 rupees per month. Your average college professor considered to be upper middle class makes about 20,000 rupees per month. 120,000 rupees per month, not including the free apartment I was offered, is enough to buy a trick home, own 2 cars, private school for the kids, a full time maid, a cook, a gardner, a driver, a nanny, vacations in Goa, etc. etc. You are completely and totally right to think technical programming jobs are not middle class; thats because they are upper middle class at the very least. The average software engineer's salary is increasing at a rate of 25% per year. Do the math, it won't be long until those salary are not just middle class by Indian standards, but by US standards as well. Absolutely unlike commentary on /., there is not an infinite supply of SW engineers in India, if there was, how on Earth could the salaries be shooting through the roof.
"Hashing" for an audio file is such early 90s technology - wake up and read the literature. Pattern matching algorithms are in place in commercially deployed technology (the technology was even slashdotted many years ago here: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/12/0450221.shtm l ) that very effectively identify content irrespective of compression type, bit rate/codec/ripper etc. From a business standpoint, so what if the id gets hacked, there are still many people (I would say >90%) willing to put up 15$ a month for unlimited clean content on a p2p where every song they download is linked to all kinds of worthwhile and *accurate* metadata. The real question is whether the labels will ever allow a legit p2p to operate.
I can assure you, the labor laws in India are a heck of a lot stronger than those in the US. Most Indians get atleast 2 months of paid leave a year. And if you're an employer, its virtually impossible to fire (or layoff) someone. The Hi-Tech co's are striving to decrease the potency of these laws, as they see them as a major threat to their competitiveness -- and to some extent, tech co's that operate in the "tech parks" are shielded from labor laws. Even the environmental laws are incredibly strict in India. The main problem, in India and much of the third world, is not the strength of the laws, but the innability or lack-of-desire to enforce the laws due to low government funding or rampant corruption; both of which will only be resolved through more capital flow and competition from abroad. The entire context of this thread is tiresome; no one in this /. community or any other American community whines for the poor saps in Europe that often lose their jobs when they're shipped to America, due to, among other things, cheaper labor and corporate taxes. In the past 5 years, I've worked at 2 companies that relocated there headquarters from the UK to the US, trashed huge divisions of staff, and staffed my group up. Face it, even w/ a labor cost disadvantage, companies can thrive. Look at Volkswagon/Audi - significantly higher labor wages yet extremely successful on the world stage due to, nothing other than, high quality engineering and high worker productivity.
So you've proved your company has a sucky interviewing procedure. I fail to see how this proves people, due to their visa status, are bad programmers. I could site a number of cases where I've been at companies w/ similarly sucky interviewing procedures yielded an American programmer w/ equally bad code. I could also site a number of colleagues, on H1B visas, that have been truly outstanding contributers.
I think it depends on the skills required for a particular job. I have an MSEE and have been working as a software engineer for over 12 years. I've worked in many cultures as well - academic research, corporate research, bland corporate, and start up. I've also done a lot of hiring of PhDs, MS's, and Bachelor's degrees, and on occassion those without any higher formal education. On the occasions where I was looking for skills that typically come w/ a PhD, it was in an area where we really needed theoretical and academic style depth. For example, at my start up, we were developing a sophisticated audio classification system; it was an area where the public literature was light. I was hiring to build out a team to form the core of our applied research group. We ended up hiring about half PhDs, and half masters degrees. We didn't go out and look for a degree, we went out looking for depth in a particular set of areas that happened to be built on a significant mathematical foundation. It so happens that all had higher degrees. By the nature of the work, I think it would be rare to find that set of experience in a BS, let alone a high school grad.
We also had a significant technology transfer component. We needed to get the work out to product as soon as possible and translate the algorithms into very efficient implementation. This part of the team was more mixed. We needed some hybrid folks - those that can hang with the geeks yet not overwhelm the researchers with geek speak. We also had some more traditional IT roles (i.e. Sys Admin - platform tweaker) - in this case, I agree that formal education plays less of a role. Formal education in the right discipline establishes rigour, and can indicate a candidate has sweat well and hard and thinks efficiently. Rigour can be established in other manners as well; I would jump to hire a person that was a grandiose chess player self transformed into a programmer.
Bottom line: sometimes as a highering manager you need skills that start from scratch (research + algorithmic level innovation) and will ultimately require efficient, architecturally sound programmatic implementation. You need to build your team out so that all skills are represented.
The bulk of the comments here all seem to insinuate something to the effect that as an open source developer, you should not expect to have any restrictions whatsoever placed upon your work, and that you accept this upon "opening" your work. This is totally ridiculous. The GPL itself places all types of restrictions on the use of the open source. It could be argued that some of these restrictions are in fact politically motivated. Arguments to the effect that it is impossible to define "military uses" could be applied to just about anything in the law. The law is all about attempting to place a concrete definition on an inherently ambiguous problem, so that folks can interpret it as their reason dictates -- and upon a conflict of understanding, the parties show up in a court and a judge/jury settles the dispute w/ their interpretation. I see the task of defining an open source license that excludes military uses as no more difficult than defining the GPL that excludes derivative uses (i.e. new apps that uses GPL'd libraries) from not being GPL'd. If a group of programmers wants such an open source license, I say great, go for it, and get a good lawyer to help you draft it.