Interesting that many on/. blame MBAs and greedy CEOs for the offshoring quagmire. Remember that management's job is to look out for the interests of their shareholders first and foremost.
Latest word is that offshoring could become a political football. Astute technologists could make a difference here. If Senator Billy Bob is convinced stopping the migration of jobs to other countries will get him more votes, he'll make sure the tax code rewards companies that keep jobs here. Reducing the corporate tax burden, thus increasing profitability, means more money for CEO bonuses.
Unfortunately, a lot of us in technology think government is bad and should keep its hands off. One need only look at the debate over Internet taxation. We are staunchly on the side of keeping the government out, a.k.a. laissez faire. (Yes, yes, I know it's a different issue, but there is a thread between the two.)
Finally, some career advice. Position yourself for the future. The gap between "developer" and "business/systems analyst" is not that great, but the future job prospects are significant. No matter where the code monkeys live, somebody smart has to spec it out.
If we raise the bar and say that no software, commericial or custom, can be sold unless certified and registered "software engineers" wrote and signed off on it, that might prevent a lot of companies (Microsoft, Sun, Oracle) from shipping programming jobs to sweatshops in the third world.
Of course, such a measure would considerably reduce the number of people in the software industry. The ultimate effect would be that salaries for these certified "software engineers" would skyrocket, at least for 10 years or so until the universities restructured their programs and we had enough engineers to meet demand.
Not sure which would happen first: riots because of all the unemployment this would create, or the creation of a software blackmarket.
Can you imagine driving downtown, slowly rolling down your window, and asking if someone could hook you up with the lastest version of MS Office?!
Isn't it ironic that this guy Phipps' job title is given as "chief technology evangelist" yet he snidely quips that he doubts JBoss, a product that has done much to advance J2EE in the small to mid-size business arena, will even pass the tests?
No, you're missing the point. The concern is that someone has figured out a way to detect the stealth fighters (and presumably the stealth bombers).
This may imply an understanding of the stealth technology -- more than you can see on the History Channel special a couple months ago -- but it may be dumb luck, too.
We did lose an F-117 early on in Kosovo. Any chance the recovery helicopters arrived a little too late and something was reclaimed and passed to the Russians, black market, etc.?
B-52s... hmm... didn't they put out that song "Love Shack" a while ago. I didn't realize they were from England.
Seriously though, the military checks journalist credentials and assigns "minders" almost like Hussein does in Iraq to prevent this kind of stuff from happening.
I think there's something more to it, and the stealth technology has been cracked.
Wonder if there was a distributed computing project setup that figured it out?! That would be much cooler than cracking the XBox encryption key...
Anti-aircraft fire & F-117 Stealth detection
on
Updates on War in Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Anti-aircraft going off above Saddam Hussein International Airport now. (At least in the US we wait until after a president is out of office or dead before we name public places for him, e.g. Reagan National Airport in DC.)
CNN reported this morning that there is concern that Iraq knew our F-117 Stealths were coming and started anti-aircraft fire. This is a huge concern, as they are supposed to be undetectable (a.k.a. "stealthy").
If this is true, there is no way the technology to detect our stealths was developed in Iraq. It begs the question: did one of the countries that opposes the war pass this advanced technology, obviously developed since the 1991 Gulf War, to Iraq as an underhanded way of flipping the bird to the US and Bush?
Tim Bray's article, if you didn't read it, is right on the money. The last paragraph basically states that XML is the best alternative to the data interchange problem because it provides a consistent format. Some of you guys who are rounding up the mob and lighting buildings on fire calling for book burnings and the downfall of all XML have to read the article! You're not in agreement with Tim when you say, "Sure, I think XML sucks, too."
So to be clear, XML is here to stay. (An example of XML penetration: there is a working schema for using XML in the farming industry!) Just imagine the chaos that will insue once MS Office saves all documents in true XML.
My take on the problem Tim's really talking about: inconsistency and the proliferation of people who want to be the next prodigy in their area of expertise. There are so many parsers and interfaces, even within a language domain, because vendors want to put their own spin on everything. The alphabet soup that results confuses the hell out of people. This has even happened in the open source world, where I can do a Google search on "php xml parsing" and read articles on no less than 10 different approaches. For the average guy who has been told by a project manager, "We need to take these XML files from our business partner, extract and store the data in our database," you need a standard approach. Not to stifle thought and innovation, yes, you should take the initiative to understand whether an event-driven approach (SAX parser) or an in-memory object model approach (DOM parser) is right for the job. After all, you do get paid to do this, so earn your keep! But the XML community hasn't done a good job of specifying best practices and leading people by the nose to a solution. Every XML book I've seen furthers the confusion, with each other offering his opinion with a slight variation of how to do things, leading programmers/scripters/whatevers to use the approach they most recently read about, and not necessarily the one that time has proven out to be the most efficient.
Part of this is the divide between the.Net guys, the Java camp, the Perl/PHP folks, etc., but in the spirit of interoperability, maybe the XML promoters just need to dumb things down a bit to get some simple concepts and best practices into the hands of Joe Sixpack Programmer. Maybe a central authority, a la java.sun.com or php.net?
If Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows, were smart, he would hire or fund this project with the gobs of money he appears to have made from the sale of MP3.com. (He's the guy who put up $100,000 to any group that could get Linux running on an Xbox w/o a mod chip, which led to Operation Project X.)
Not only would it further Lindows' pursuit of capturing the Linux end-user desktop market, it would also be yet another opportunity for him to get Lindows in the news. MS is already suing the company over their us of the name "Lindows"; this would allow him to pool resources with the XPde team and possibly really win big (not just the use of the word, but also the look & feel).
Of course, we'd also have to put up with another article with his mugshot in it. Why does he always do that?
It seems we have consensus that only the worker-bees are at risk of having their jobs outsourced to the third world. Some previous posters have joked that we need to outsource management and the CxO positions to the third world, but does anyone really believe that model would work? Of course not.
The real answer is promote yourself and stop being a worker-bee. Join the management team and keep your job!
Seriously, if you recognize the simple rules of supply and demand and how they affect the labor market and, furthermore, you see that protesting in front of the IMF and the World Bank is not going to stop the tide of globalization, then take action! Don't sit on the sidelines as the world acts upon you. Find a service -- service is key -- that US businesses are willing to pay for and setup shop in India or Sri Lanka! You handle business development and front as the CxO here in the US, and get one reliable person in your third-world location to oversee your own worker-bees. Know how to use PowerPoint?! You've got the skills to do this. All of the Dell, AOL, HP, etc. call centers in the third world are run by small business people who started just like this.
If any of you have co-workers or friends with family in the third world, ask them about contacts back home that you could pursue. I promise you that no matter how many times you post on Slashdot about how furious these trends make you, you're not going to stop it. Best you can do is recognize the trend and make the best of it.
P.S. I'm was laid off last winter because my employer was hit with an FTC lawsuit for telemarketing fraud. If any of you have contacts in the third world, please e-mail me. I'm interested in creating jobs and providing rich opportunities for people you know!
with slogans like "we put the dot in dot com" or "invent." Better yet, the CEO of a Linux company has never been invited to promote a stock exchange like Scott McNealy did for Nasdaq.
If Linux is so good, why don't they have more TV commercials?
Sun not anti-Intel nor anti-open source -- Cobalt
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For you folks that think Sun missed the boat on open source or that Sun is locked into a dead end with their own processor line-up, are you forgetting a little acquisition Sun made of a company called Cobalt?
Sun left well enough alone and didn't change much about this product, including letting it run Linux and on an Intel platform.
This put them in a nice spot with previously invested companies like Rackspace and other hosting providers that survived the crunch.
Diversification is a successful investment strategy.
Re:Sunset a long, long ways off.
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ditto that. This Chicken Little theory ("the sky is falling") is way outside the mainstream. Sun is still hitting their earnings targets, and that's what is important, not that you don't see their TV commercials on CNN anymore.
I think what we've seen is that Sun had a couple of fantastic years, fueled and fanned by the dot-com boom. Remember the "we're the dot in dot-com" campaign?" That is just one example of Sun's high caliber marketing folks capitalizing on the times. If you've met with any Sun sales reps lately, you'll know that the new party line is "let us show you how we can save you some money" -- exactly what they should be saying in a down economy. Their marketing tactics are still as sharp as ever.
Believe it or not, much of IT management still subscribes to the belief that "you get what you pay for." If you work in the field and have ever suggested MySQL to an Oracle shop, PHP to an ASP or JSP shop, or Linux to a Windows/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/SGI shop, you've heard that statement. The exceptions are software like Apache, which is nearly ubiquitous, however if you look at BEA's marketing and their broad marketshare, you might even say that they're making in-roads convincing IT management that web & app servers follow the same rule: you get what you pay for. Why is JBoss still only a developer's choice and not the enterprise's? (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-984476.html?tag=fd_ lede1_hed)
McNealy is in no danger of being replaced; he'll adapt and overcome. Sun is not resting on their laurels, and have never forgotten their base -- enterprise datacenters -- as evidenced with new product lines like N1.
I don't argue that you're very unlikely to run a Sun workstation at home on your DSL connection. Linux is just too damned good (price performance) for the Unix-oriented home user, and getting better. But for enterprises, you get what you pay for.
Article proves Sun should have spun off JavaSoft
on
Even Sun Can't Use Java
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've long believed that Sun, a hardware company, should have taken their Java team and spun it off completely as JavaSoft Inc., as was contemplated in the mid 90s. The consulting and development teams would have one objective: furthering the Java platform. Doing so would have made this memo, if it is legit, a non-issue from a PR perspective. JavaSoft probably would have made the same decision on where to focus their efforts: on making the Win32 JVM implementation the best, and supporting other OSes secondarily. That's what this memo is about: pissed off Solaris admins who are tired of sitting in the back of the bus when it comes to Java.
Before the advent of the web applications as the platform of choice for developing new applicattion, and even since, Win32 is where the money is because of the wide install base. (I won't go into whether monopolistic forces caused it; for a software company, you just have to accept this as the current lay of the land.) Obvioiusly the Win32 JVMs get the most development resources, and rightfully so (with Linux probably a close second, thanks to IBM, who wrote their own JVM).
Unfortunately, Sun didn't do the spinoff completely, and now people want to see this as a "rift from within" and "Sun not eating its own dog food."
I want to reiterate the point that others have made, because some of the early posters missed it: the problem highlighted in this article is with the specific JVM implementation for the Solaris OS. It is not about the failings of Java as a language, J2EE as a specification, nor interpreted vs. compiled applications.
Java will be around for a long time to come, particularly in large environments, as evidenced by most major application vendors supporting it (Oracle, Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, etc.) and by the fact that most academic programs are switching to it. In fact, this year for the first time, the high school AP test for programming will be in Java, not C++. It is here to stay because it is a decent enough OO language.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, here goes this same old debate again.
/. blame MBAs and greedy CEOs for the offshoring quagmire. Remember that management's job is to look out for the interests of their shareholders first and foremost.
Interesting that many on
Latest word is that offshoring could become a political football. Astute technologists could make a difference here. If Senator Billy Bob is convinced stopping the migration of jobs to other countries will get him more votes, he'll make sure the tax code rewards companies that keep jobs here. Reducing the corporate tax burden, thus increasing profitability, means more money for CEO bonuses.
Unfortunately, a lot of us in technology think government is bad and should keep its hands off. One need only look at the debate over Internet taxation. We are staunchly on the side of keeping the government out, a.k.a. laissez faire. (Yes, yes, I know it's a different issue, but there is a thread between the two.)
Finally, some career advice. Position yourself for the future. The gap between "developer" and "business/systems analyst" is not that great, but the future job prospects are significant. No matter where the code monkeys live, somebody smart has to spec it out.
Of course, such a measure would considerably reduce the number of people in the software industry. The ultimate effect would be that salaries for these certified "software engineers" would skyrocket, at least for 10 years or so until the universities restructured their programs and we had enough engineers to meet demand.
Not sure which would happen first: riots because of all the unemployment this would create, or the creation of a software blackmarket.
Can you imagine driving downtown, slowly rolling down your window, and asking if someone could hook you up with the lastest version of MS Office?!
Isn't it ironic that this guy Phipps' job title is given as "chief technology evangelist" yet he snidely quips that he doubts JBoss, a product that has done much to advance J2EE in the small to mid-size business arena, will even pass the tests?
This may imply an understanding of the stealth technology -- more than you can see on the History Channel special a couple months ago -- but it may be dumb luck, too.
We did lose an F-117 early on in Kosovo. Any chance the recovery helicopters arrived a little too late and something was reclaimed and passed to the Russians, black market, etc.?
Seriously though, the military checks journalist credentials and assigns "minders" almost like Hussein does in Iraq to prevent this kind of stuff from happening.
I think there's something more to it, and the stealth technology has been cracked.
Wonder if there was a distributed computing project setup that figured it out?! That would be much cooler than cracking the XBox encryption key...
CNN reported this morning that there is concern that Iraq knew our F-117 Stealths were coming and started anti-aircraft fire. This is a huge concern, as they are supposed to be undetectable (a.k.a. "stealthy").
If this is true, there is no way the technology to detect our stealths was developed in Iraq. It begs the question: did one of the countries that opposes the war pass this advanced technology, obviously developed since the 1991 Gulf War, to Iraq as an underhanded way of flipping the bird to the US and Bush?
So to be clear, XML is here to stay. (An example of XML penetration: there is a working schema for using XML in the farming industry!) Just imagine the chaos that will insue once MS Office saves all documents in true XML.
My take on the problem Tim's really talking about: inconsistency and the proliferation of people who want to be the next prodigy in their area of expertise. There are so many parsers and interfaces, even within a language domain, because vendors want to put their own spin on everything. The alphabet soup that results confuses the hell out of people. This has even happened in the open source world, where I can do a Google search on "php xml parsing" and read articles on no less than 10 different approaches. For the average guy who has been told by a project manager, "We need to take these XML files from our business partner, extract and store the data in our database," you need a standard approach. Not to stifle thought and innovation, yes, you should take the initiative to understand whether an event-driven approach (SAX parser) or an in-memory object model approach (DOM parser) is right for the job. After all, you do get paid to do this, so earn your keep! But the XML community hasn't done a good job of specifying best practices and leading people by the nose to a solution. Every XML book I've seen furthers the confusion, with each other offering his opinion with a slight variation of how to do things, leading programmers/scripters/whatevers to use the approach they most recently read about, and not necessarily the one that time has proven out to be the most efficient.
Part of this is the divide between the .Net guys, the Java camp, the Perl/PHP folks, etc., but in the spirit of interoperability, maybe the XML promoters just need to dumb things down a bit to get some simple concepts and best practices into the hands of Joe Sixpack Programmer. Maybe a central authority, a la java.sun.com or php.net?
Not only would it further Lindows' pursuit of capturing the Linux end-user desktop market, it would also be yet another opportunity for him to get Lindows in the news. MS is already suing the company over their us of the name "Lindows"; this would allow him to pool resources with the XPde team and possibly really win big (not just the use of the word, but also the look & feel).
Of course, we'd also have to put up with another article with his mugshot in it. Why does he always do that?
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technolog y/maney/2003-02-25-maney_x.htm
The real answer is promote yourself and stop being a worker-bee. Join the management team and keep your job!
Seriously, if you recognize the simple rules of supply and demand and how they affect the labor market and, furthermore, you see that protesting in front of the IMF and the World Bank is not going to stop the tide of globalization, then take action! Don't sit on the sidelines as the world acts upon you. Find a service -- service is key -- that US businesses are willing to pay for and setup shop in India or Sri Lanka! You handle business development and front as the CxO here in the US, and get one reliable person in your third-world location to oversee your own worker-bees. Know how to use PowerPoint?! You've got the skills to do this. All of the Dell, AOL, HP, etc. call centers in the third world are run by small business people who started just like this.
If any of you have co-workers or friends with family in the third world, ask them about contacts back home that you could pursue. I promise you that no matter how many times you post on Slashdot about how furious these trends make you, you're not going to stop it. Best you can do is recognize the trend and make the best of it.
P.S. I'm was laid off last winter because my employer was hit with an FTC lawsuit for telemarketing fraud. If any of you have contacts in the third world, please e-mail me. I'm interested in creating jobs and providing rich opportunities for people you know!
http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/JetBlue_WPP_Sun.wm v
If Linux is so good, why don't they have more TV commercials?
http://www.sun.com/hardware/serverappliances/
Sun left well enough alone and didn't change much about this product, including letting it run Linux and on an Intel platform.
This put them in a nice spot with previously invested companies like Rackspace and other hosting providers that survived the crunch.
Diversification is a successful investment strategy.
I think what we've seen is that Sun had a couple of fantastic years, fueled and fanned by the dot-com boom. Remember the "we're the dot in dot-com" campaign?" That is just one example of Sun's high caliber marketing folks capitalizing on the times. If you've met with any Sun sales reps lately, you'll know that the new party line is "let us show you how we can save you some money" -- exactly what they should be saying in a down economy. Their marketing tactics are still as sharp as ever.
Believe it or not, much of IT management still subscribes to the belief that "you get what you pay for." If you work in the field and have ever suggested MySQL to an Oracle shop, PHP to an ASP or JSP shop, or Linux to a Windows/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/SGI shop, you've heard that statement. The exceptions are software like Apache, which is nearly ubiquitous, however if you look at BEA's marketing and their broad marketshare, you might even say that they're making in-roads convincing IT management that web & app servers follow the same rule: you get what you pay for. Why is JBoss still only a developer's choice and not the enterprise's? (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-984476.html?tag=fd_ lede1_hed)
McNealy is in no danger of being replaced; he'll adapt and overcome. Sun is not resting on their laurels, and have never forgotten their base -- enterprise datacenters -- as evidenced with new product lines like N1.
I don't argue that you're very unlikely to run a Sun workstation at home on your DSL connection. Linux is just too damned good (price performance) for the Unix-oriented home user, and getting better. But for enterprises, you get what you pay for.
I've long believed that Sun, a hardware company, should have taken their Java team and spun it off completely as JavaSoft Inc., as was contemplated in the mid 90s. The consulting and development teams would have one objective: furthering the Java platform. Doing so would have made this memo, if it is legit, a non-issue from a PR perspective. JavaSoft probably would have made the same decision on where to focus their efforts: on making the Win32 JVM implementation the best, and supporting other OSes secondarily. That's what this memo is about: pissed off Solaris admins who are tired of sitting in the back of the bus when it comes to Java. Before the advent of the web applications as the platform of choice for developing new applicattion, and even since, Win32 is where the money is because of the wide install base. (I won't go into whether monopolistic forces caused it; for a software company, you just have to accept this as the current lay of the land.) Obvioiusly the Win32 JVMs get the most development resources, and rightfully so (with Linux probably a close second, thanks to IBM, who wrote their own JVM). Unfortunately, Sun didn't do the spinoff completely, and now people want to see this as a "rift from within" and "Sun not eating its own dog food." I want to reiterate the point that others have made, because some of the early posters missed it: the problem highlighted in this article is with the specific JVM implementation for the Solaris OS. It is not about the failings of Java as a language, J2EE as a specification, nor interpreted vs. compiled applications. Java will be around for a long time to come, particularly in large environments, as evidenced by most major application vendors supporting it (Oracle, Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, etc.) and by the fact that most academic programs are switching to it. In fact, this year for the first time, the high school AP test for programming will be in Java, not C++. It is here to stay because it is a decent enough OO language.