I was just thinking, is outsourcing really that great? The first thing that comes to mind when I think of outsourcing is ValueJet. They outsourced almost everything. It didn't work out too well.
There is one group in the company I work for that is almost entirely populated with Indians. They also happen to be the group that got the company succesfully sued for over $250 million.
Maybe you get what you pay for. In addition I wonder why there doesn't seem to be an even distribution of Indian IT workers in this country. Around here at least it seems a company has 75% Indian developers or 1%. Maybe I'm paranoid but is there maybe some sort of preference here. I noticed that one of the people in this article that was so high on outsourcing to Inida had a very Indian sounding name. Could it be possible he's exiticed about all the males in his family being exectives.
"Don't believe the hype!" - Flavor Flav
"It has 3,000 MegaHertz, which means three billion cycles per second."
Are you really this stupid?
Mega means million
Giga means billion
There is no bigger tool than a belligerant dumbass.
"The author only mentions how to be a decent programmer for your employer. What I want to know is how to be a programmer; I and almost everybody else I know have followed the following steps:"
What poeple rarely consider when choosing a school is how well the school does at placing graduates. I had three offers before graduation and I didn't even start interviewing until 2 months before graduation.
Of course that was then and now we have a huge glut of experienced programmers looking for work.
One word of advice, though, if you are trying to get a job at a small company where everyone wears jeans and sneakers, forget it. Those companies have neither the time nor the resources to train and nuture you. Unless you graduated top of your class from MIT, you're going to have to put in your three years in cubicle hell. If you live in California, consider moving. Washington D.C., where I happen to reside has tons of job opportunities and never fear, the traffic is almost as bad (anthrax and small pox are survivable.)
Last of all, get a decent suit, cut your hair, smile, be polite and humble, and read a book on interviewing for jobs. Never, ever BS in a technical interview.
Good luck to you.
"Who modded this up? A single base change in DNA is almost never fatal. For a start, considerably more than 90% of the human genome is junk that has no expressive effect anyway (according to some theories it helps protect the rest of the genome.)"
I already added to this but a single flaw in a program is almost never fatal either. Just as in DNA it has to be an important piece of info. I think tha analogy is a valid counter-argument to the interview.
One of the points that Jaron makes in this interview is that a single bit errors casuses catastraphic results and that this is unlike nature.
I have three points about this.
1. There are many times that I come back to code that I or someone else wrote and it is clearly wrong. If I had never looked at it again, no one would have ever noticed. Other times I have found errors that shouldn't be there but never manifest themselves because they are corrected by other code. I don't know what code he works with but this kind of thing is not the norm. If you get a bad packet from a web site, it doesn't crash your computer (unless you are running WinME.)
2. There are many times a small change will cause huge results in nature. Anyone who doubts this must read
Chaos
by Jame Gleik. People have made the construction analogy but lets take the Tacoma Narrows bridge for example. One small oversight and an entire bridge is destroyed by the wind.
3. In a lot of ways, absolute perfection is not only a requirement of some parts* (see above) of a program in order so they will work, it is also a functional requirement. I wouldn't want my tax preparation software using fuzzy pattern recognition to calculate what I owe. In a lot of ways the precision of computers and software is their greatest strength. If a program is written correctly, you can depend on it giving you the right answer ever single time you use it. I don't know if that is true for what he is proposing.
All of this smacks of the "drag and drop" programming concept of the late 90s. A couple years ago someone was telling me that we wont need programmers anymore because we will have software that allows anyone to write a program. That has happend on a very superficial level but the real work of computing is still done by expert geeks.
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I was just thinking, is outsourcing really that great? The first thing that comes to mind when I think of outsourcing is ValueJet. They outsourced almost everything. It didn't work out too well. There is one group in the company I work for that is almost entirely populated with Indians. They also happen to be the group that got the company succesfully sued for over $250 million. Maybe you get what you pay for. In addition I wonder why there doesn't seem to be an even distribution of Indian IT workers in this country. Around here at least it seems a company has 75% Indian developers or 1%. Maybe I'm paranoid but is there maybe some sort of preference here. I noticed that one of the people in this article that was so high on outsourcing to Inida had a very Indian sounding name. Could it be possible he's exiticed about all the males in his family being exectives. "Don't believe the hype!" - Flavor Flav
You talk to countries? You must be very famous.
"It has 3,000 MegaHertz, which means three billion cycles per second." Are you really this stupid? Mega means million Giga means billion There is no bigger tool than a belligerant dumbass.
"The author only mentions how to be a decent programmer for your employer. What I want to know is how to be a programmer; I and almost everybody else I know have followed the following steps:" What poeple rarely consider when choosing a school is how well the school does at placing graduates. I had three offers before graduation and I didn't even start interviewing until 2 months before graduation. Of course that was then and now we have a huge glut of experienced programmers looking for work. One word of advice, though, if you are trying to get a job at a small company where everyone wears jeans and sneakers, forget it. Those companies have neither the time nor the resources to train and nuture you. Unless you graduated top of your class from MIT, you're going to have to put in your three years in cubicle hell. If you live in California, consider moving. Washington D.C., where I happen to reside has tons of job opportunities and never fear, the traffic is almost as bad (anthrax and small pox are survivable.) Last of all, get a decent suit, cut your hair, smile, be polite and humble, and read a book on interviewing for jobs. Never, ever BS in a technical interview. Good luck to you.
"Who modded this up? A single base change in DNA is almost never fatal. For a start, considerably more than 90% of the human genome is junk that has no expressive effect anyway (according to some theories it helps protect the rest of the genome.)" I already added to this but a single flaw in a program is almost never fatal either. Just as in DNA it has to be an important piece of info. I think tha analogy is a valid counter-argument to the interview.
- Chaos
by Jame Gleik. People have made the construction analogy but lets take the Tacoma Narrows bridge for example. One small oversight and an entire bridge is destroyed by the wind. 3. In a lot of ways, absolute perfection is not only a requirement of some parts* (see above) of a program in order so they will work, it is also a functional requirement. I wouldn't want my tax preparation software using fuzzy pattern recognition to calculate what I owe. In a lot of ways the precision of computers and software is their greatest strength. If a program is written correctly, you can depend on it giving you the right answer ever single time you use it. I don't know if that is true for what he is proposing. All of this smacks of the "drag and drop" programming concept of the late 90s. A couple years ago someone was telling me that we wont need programmers anymore because we will have software that allows anyone to write a program. That has happend on a very superficial level but the real work of computing is still done by expert geeks.