If you think so. I have been interviewing for my company for several months. So far everybody I actually thought woyld be competent has turned us down. They all had multiple offers.
However, I have more pride than that. I have beennot selected for several contracts because I showed the customer up front it would not work the way it was specified.
One of the best statements of the case I have ever heard. I try with every new job to find challenge and learning potential. At the moment I happen to also be trying to find more pay or a cheaper place to live but I would never accept a job where this is the only outcome.
The out sourcing trend has several root causes. Every body talks about most of them but I rarely hear one thing that I think is a major reason. Management really does not understand the development process.
I have worked on a number of projects that management dictated large numbers of people. A couple turned out to be super stars, a few were very good, some were capable to do grunt work and 40% drained a lot of time from the other 60%. This has caused many projects I have worked on to be over budget and long delayed. Often missing marketing windows. Yes even as an engineer I think this is important.
Where I work now they are constantly trying to hire only "principle level engineers" for the good of the company. This is crap. Every project needs varying levels of experience for a cost / performance trade off of the engineering and busy work that needs to be done. They also cause projects to be over budget and often late because none of the experienced engineers want to do the crap work.
Now add this to out sourcing. I do believe in the time it takes to write a design document that very carefully outlines every little detail that needs to go into project it could have been coded here anyway. My experience with out sourcing, and this includes India, China and Russia is that every detail is required. That is also my experience with outsourcing in the US. These companies make money by doing the least amount of work for the defined contact. You can not leave even one detail up to a good engineers imagination in these contracts.
Out sourceing has its place but cannot be the answer for everything. Much of it is the mananement solution "du jour". Much of managment is patting itself on the back at the moment but I still think this will change at some point in time.
One thing I hate is the business people in america who state catagorically that outsourcing manufacturing is good for america. As I implied above engineering takes ability and interest. The 40% I mentioned above lacked one or both of the two. Just because engineering was paying well did not mean they could perform. Not all members of our society are capable of high tech and require jobs in manufacturing to provide for their families.
Without projects based in the US there will be no way to screen new graduates for moving up the chain. Trying to entice students in comp sci should be targeted at convincing them there is a future and screening out this who have a chance of creating value for a company.
Maybe and maybe not. I do know of a couple of companies that have gotten burned pretty badly by "off shoring" a significant portion of their development. They got a good price for the quoted head count but the quantity produced suffered with very little quality to make up for it. Bad programming is bad programming and will fail.
Good software is a product of using good methodolgy. There should be some guide to where the project is going up front, software engineers that actually care a bit about what they are doing in the middle and adaquat testing at the end.
During the whole process API documentation and general info on how the product is used needs to be created. Keep in mind I think a "product" is the sum of lots of little products. Each library is a product (and should stand on its own). Each driver and application is a product. Treating sub segments of an application as seperate products leads to library use APIs that can be reused, etc.
All the documentation needs to evolve with the source code and be kept current. In my group engineers that do not do this get their fingers whacked.
I spend my days in Linux driver code. HTML it close to foreign to me. Some how I managed to get too many breaks in. I just checked the page source to find out.
I made the fatal mistake of not testing my code by hitting the preview button.
This is a correct analysis. I think some of the demand graphs in the article show this. I have found in my career a direct correlation between demand a bad programers. As wages increase more bad will be produced along with a marginal increase in capable engineers. At peeks where projects must fail some good engineers but many bad will be let go. Saleries will stagnate supply will drop, etc. etc.
Our society seems to think it is OK to do anything just for the money. The concept of doing something to create actual product if foreign to a large percentage of the american public. Especially in the upper levels of society. Until this changes and we can recognize that you need to do something you are good at it will continue to be so.
This is no different for the outsourcing. Much of it will fail due to unrealistic expectations on both the employers and workers sides.
This is one of the best pieces I have seen on slashdot it a log time. The only comment I would like to add it to the very end.
The programmer needs to speek more than just both languages. They both need to be tempered with knowledge in othe areas to create a clean design. The entity the project is being created for usually only have a vague knowledge of what they want so knowlege in many areas can help create the requirements for a truly usefull tool.
Good attitude. When I graduated I felt qualified for anything that was comming at me. At first I did some crappy and some good things. Managment did recognise my skills and I moved up quickly.
My GM for the division from my first job pulled me into his office the first day and gave me a bit of advice.
1. Keep my resume current at all times.
2. If did not like it there to quitely look for a better place while I had a job. And then he reiterated "a better place".
New graduates are not supposed to by Ferraris the second year they are working. If they do their productivity goes down and they get canned.
I have to totaly agree with this statement. Over the years I have interviewed hundreds of new graduates and found most of them totaly lacking in any real understanding of product development. Masters graduates were generaly worse than bachelors graduates. I often got the feeling their graduate work caused them to neglect many of the fundamentals. I have interviewed a few doctoral degrees. Forget it. They have value only to companies that do exactly what they have studied.
Give a couple of graduates who want to learn and I will se to it they do. In a couple of years they will be ready to earn what the masters are asking for and not getting.
This is as it should be. The industry is a pretty screwed up place for a number of reasons. One of them being so many project fail because they are late and over budget.
Its a two fold problem. First there have never been enough good engineers and there are a lot of pretty so-so engineers. I have worked on too many projects where I was trying to design and do major coding while trying to hire and mentor new people.
Second, often this was complicated by my boss dictating that would have a particular number of people wether I needed them or not. Mostly so he or she looked good. The result was, as with so many companies, we got bodies.
I did my best to train them but programming, as with most engineering types, does require some natural ability and INTEREST. Those without it are of very little help down to a real drain on the rest of the project.
Any project of any size needs a leader, some top notch talent and a few worker bees. Too much at any end does not work. They must also each one be capable and willing to do the work.
Companies think they beat the problem by throwing cheap bodies at it offshore. Most of the projects will fail for the same reasons outlined above. They are mostly still just bodies.
It is perfectly posible for this to happen. However, they are currently simply copying the technology of other countries and have a long way to go to doing more than superficial development of their own.
It will occur at some point as the Chinese government is trying to insure the country grows. Ours is doing just the opposite.
I had the luck to work for a German software company in the Frankfurt area and live in Germany several years. I got used to going to the towns weekly market and buying directly from the farmers and/or their co-ops. Luckily living california several of the towns here have the same thing. The truely fresh stuff tastes better.
The problem in while creating high school and college student jobs they have destroyed many other businesses. This includes hardware store owners, small grocers, and big range of positions in factores that used to supply to these. Check out their food section sometime. The last time I was there (it has been several years) I did not find one product of any kind that was locally produced. What does that say about Wall Mart participating in the community.
Shop there all you want. Wall Mart is a leading contributor to the down grade I see in american life styles. They are a typical big business that will do anything to make money with no thought to the consequences.
Check out the recently released statics on the trade deficit. Who is importing all this stuff from China. Everybody but Wall Mart is one of the big leaders in the charge. I know several people that were perfectly happy working in industries that have been replaced. They were not rich by any means now they are much worse off and often at ages where being "retrained" is just not possible.
Do we really need $40 dvd players in every room of the house? Do we really need a bigger store that now carries 20 instead of only 15 types of instant rice? Do we really need to underwear to go down another 10 cents. Etc. etc. etc.
Except for food, cars, gas and housing what I pay for everything has dropped in the last 20 years. And I do mean everything including CDs. But then I have bought a large number of used CDs. Again supporing a local business man and not some investor who never sees his customers.
What kind of arragent bastard are you. To save a few pennies you are willing to support an organization that has to interest in encoraging talent. Its OK to save a buck by importing products from a country that pays its employees in rice. The process requires the use of massive amounts of fuel to ship the stuff here increasing our fuel prices, pollution and our gas prices.
Come on answer. I have much more to say on the subject.
Been there, done that. I could not agree more. But I have had a number of good managers in the past. Did a stint as manager myself at one time. I backed off because, like you, I just plain like to be productive and I think like an engineer. This may it difficult to deal with those above me.
My direct manager right now is acutally one of the best I have seen. The other 3 or 4 layers above are lost and clueless most of the time. Their buzz word at the moment is ISO 9000.
I think your comments bring up another issue. F**k up move up is often not just a saying. I have made friends and lost friends in the past for my opinions but if one of my fellow programmers is just plain incompetent, lazy, or an ass hole then they need to go. I don;t encorage moving them to get them out of my hair. I have done this before and somehow I always ended up having to deal with them again.
There is also the type that are just biding their engineering time till they can become a manager. I have generally found these guys to be less than worthless. They are usually garanteed to make the worst managers.
These are the criteria I usually find good in a manager and tried to use as one:
1. Have a good broad software background. If working at the kernel level (including driver) have a basic understanding of hardware
2. Understand how software impacts the potential customers and their needs. Books have been written on this, most of them wrong.
3. Know your employees and their stengths and weaknesses. Use this to build a team that can and will perform.
4. Trust the team but keep track of everything anyways.
5. Process is a must but it should be pretty lightweight. Make it enforcable and do not waiver in ensuring the necessary pieces occur.
6. Insulate your engineers from most of the stuff above. Not all, just most of it. Usually controlling the flow will suffice (often this involves rumor squashing).
What you say is mostly true. Managers often get on my nerves too. Especially at crunch time. I also know a few developers that actually expect the code they write will never fail.
What ever the case, good management will know when to get involved and when not to. There are always signs of problems. As an example: Many years ago I worked at a company that was second marketing several different Unix machines under their own name. We did a lot of work to make them as compatable as possible to give customers a real choise. A whole group of tests were thrown together to try and test this. At any time over 80 percent produced some kind of failure messages on all or some of the different platforms. This was in the late 80's and 2 consultants were brought in to look at the test and failures. They were supposed to fix the tests where needed and report on real problems. 3 or 4 months later, on a saturday, I was trying to use the tests to validate some compatability changes I had made. They all passed. A couple of months before nothing had passed. I expected some success but not complete by a long shot. Every test I needed had simply been commented out in the latest snapshot of the tests. They had done nothing at all. When confronted they had no excuse but "we are still identifing tests that fail". They were gone about 2 hours later.
Point being, I think most quality failures are from both managment and development being secretive, self serving and practicing a lot of CYA. I guess these are the reasons why I like OSS. Secretive and CYA has a very hard time occuring and self serving comes about because the programmer gets reconized for both managing and developing on a project far above industry standard quality levels.
If you want an example of managment gone bad take a look at ISO 9000 time sinks.
I actually worked in an environment I found to be even better than the Joels. I worked for 3 years for Software AG in Darmstadt-Eberstadt Germany.
The owner of the company was a bit different. He build a building based on hexigons. The halls were arranged in a large hexgon with offices on both sides. All offices had windows the inside of the hexagon looked over a pond and the outside mostly faced fields or forests. Because of the shape of the building there were many offices of a basic rectanle with a few odd shaped ones at the corners. Each office had from 2 to 4 people in it with no walls.
What they had was even better. The desks were made from hooking 1 meter hexagon segments together. Each segment had 2 legs and required the support or others. I used 6 segments. 4 were connected in a U shape around me. The other two were each in the back of 2. I place the monitor on these and could set bake pretty far from the screen.
To make it even better I could open the window. I had fresh air, my office mate and I never turned on the lights during the day.
Connectivity was good and power recepticals were plentiful.
If I felt I could have progressed in my carrier I would never have left that job.
This has already happened once in the history of the US. I think we need to show more parallels with the greate depression.
Just as then big business has talked many american households into becomming indebted. Just as then loss of jobs has caused defaults on those loans and highly qualified workers had to take lesser jobs. Taking this lesser jobs causes less qualified workers to move down.
I would gladly pay twice the $300 I paid for the last upgrade to my system if it was made in the US.
I did may more to have a VW beetle than the toyota I used to drive. The Toyota rattled and buzed on every corner, the Beetle does not. I bought both used and the Toyota had less miles on it.
I have a TV. For all I use it I don't really need it. I actually wear shoes that were made in Europe. I tend to wear them for several years and the cost is in general less that the crap that quickly falls apart.
Oh and buy the way I work with Linux every day.
I bet you were one of those that rushed to Walmart, where nothing is made in the US, and tried to get one of the DVDs for $20 or $30 before christmas.
This has nothing to do with patriatism. Despite the bludgeoning the US takes from most Arab and Asian countries we got a good economy by the hard work and creativeness of the citizens. However it has always been the view of managment that the producers were to be controlled. Look at the level of middle manangement that acumulated in the late 90s.
Most of the boom of the late 90s was based on Venture capitalists that were willing to take any risk for the posibility of making a huge profit. As an engineer I took a look an many a project and thought "Hey what a stupid idea, I would never buy that." In the long run the bust came for many reasons but stuplid ideas were not the lease of them. Nobody ever said having money gave you brains.
Now the same people are tired of looking stupid so they come up with another idea. Hey why don't we try the same ideas but with people who make next to nothing. And by the way, since these people don't vote we can have US politians look the other way why we take advantage of them. And we can ignore all the laws in america that forbid doing things we do not want.
In the long run for an Indian middle class to be truly viable they must mostly produce for their own people. That is definitly what is not happening here.
Also until India removes its restrictions on hiring foreign workers the are not paricipating in a free and equal economy. They are just hell bent to pink us clean.
One of the problems is the consumerism of americans. Far too many of us think getting a "deal" is more important than the source of that deal. At one time Walmart marketed itself as one of the most American of american companies. It is responsible itself for a large portion of our trade deficite. It is short sighted of the american consumers to support this company. We can change this by chosing to buy elsewhere.
We could also change the outsourcing of high tech in the same way. We are still the primary consumer of these services and products in the world. If we all ban together and quit supporting these companies they and the problem would dry up and blow away.
Americans are more consumers of marketing than anything else. We have forgotten to take most of it with a grain of salt. Most politics are a popularity contest and money buys popularity. Most polititions are more interested in the big money that buys their campaigns. It is the governments responsibility to promote the good of the poeple and not the good of the corperation.
In the long run the american economy has been good not for because the economy benifited most people in some way. We had a small rich class, a large middle class and a small (but larger than it should be) poor class. Economies have to work on all levels. People earn money and pay for other things produced by people to earn money, etc. This rolls the money back on itself and tends to keep going. Suddenly shifting and sending it someplace else can and to some extent will cause whole sections of the economy to collapse. If the collapsing sections are large then it will tend to grow and encrease and cause massive problems. Happy and supplied people tend also have the time, energy and resources to address other issues such as the environment and the general well being of others.
The job of a CEO is to promote one part of the economy at the expense of all others. It is his job to maximize profit. As long as that profit is for short term benifit (ala Wall Street) he has not incentive to keep the general economy going. The statement in the article that most CEOs do not like to see its work force layed of or in agony (or however it was said) is pure and literal bull shit. Check out Carly at for the ultimate bitch slap to the american worker.
Corperations lisensed in the US to operate do it with the permission of the US government and are required to meet cirtain standards as to employee treatment, environmental protection, etc. The purpose of going to India or China is to curcumvent the cost of these regulations. If the US government were to require all corperations licensed in the US to have all employees and production facilities meet these requirements then most of the off shorte outsourcing would immediatly become less lucrative.
If our congressmen and senators realy and truly cared about their constituents (those that did not have the money to contribute large chunks of cash) the would not hesitate to find ways to charge these companies for their actions.
India and China's governments are extreamly protectionist. All we have to do is return the favor.
Not doing too good for who? I am sure that in all of them the people with money and jobs get additional coverage somehow. At least those without coverage can get seen without having to be dying first.
Then most of the people are stupid. History shows that when you rely on a job from somebody else, they have the power to hurt you. Our society is supposedly based on our ability to work hard and prosper. One of the ways to do this is to get a better education. As university graduates this year will tell you, it ain't working. Blame all you want on the bad economy but that is not the whole picture. Every, and I do mean every, big high tech company is transfering more manufacturing and now as much engineering work out of the country. They built the expensive mess in Silicon Valley and elsewere and now are abandoning the workers for India, China and Russia. Who do you think is helping the "comrads"?
You are partly right. I am an american who worked for a german software company (Software AG) in Darmstadt for 3 years. I probably do not have it all correct but here is what I understand.
After WWII Germany had a large problem with too few men. As a result they invited the "guest workers" from other countries to come in and take positions that were not filled. Of course they were mostly the lower paid positions.
As I understand it, the German Arbeits Amt (Work Office) requires unemployed people to to look for work but not at a large step back from their last postion. At some time their unemployment will run out anyways.
In the mean time the lower positions are already filled with people that have had them for many years. Or they may be filled with their kids where are German citizens. Would it be fair to kick them out of their jobs?
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If you think so. I have been interviewing for my company for several months. So far everybody I actually thought woyld be competent has turned us down. They all had multiple offers.
I think that was part of the point.
However, I have more pride than that. I have beennot selected for several contracts because I showed the customer up front it would not work the way it was specified.
Got a few because I did too.
Try not to be simply average.
One of the best statements of the case I have ever heard. I try with every new job to find challenge and learning potential. At the moment I happen to also be trying to find more pay or a cheaper place to live but I would never accept a job where this is the only outcome.
The out sourcing trend has several root causes. Every body talks about most of them but I rarely hear one thing that I think is a major reason. Management really does not understand the development process.
I have worked on a number of projects that management dictated large numbers of people. A couple turned out to be super stars, a few were very good, some were capable to do grunt work and 40% drained a lot of time from the other 60%. This has caused many projects I have worked on to be over budget and long delayed. Often missing marketing windows. Yes even as an engineer I think this is important.
Where I work now they are constantly trying to hire only "principle level engineers" for the good of the company. This is crap. Every project needs varying levels of experience for a cost / performance trade off of the engineering and busy work that needs to be done. They also cause projects to be over budget and often late because none of the experienced engineers want to do the crap work.
Now add this to out sourcing. I do believe in the time it takes to write a design document that very carefully outlines every little detail that needs to go into project it could have been coded here anyway. My experience with out sourcing, and this includes India, China and Russia is that every detail is required. That is also my experience with outsourcing in the US. These companies make money by doing the least amount of work for the defined contact. You can not leave even one detail up to a good engineers imagination in these contracts.
Out sourceing has its place but cannot be the answer for everything. Much of it is the mananement solution "du jour". Much of managment is patting itself on the back at the moment but I still think this will change at some point in time.
One thing I hate is the business people in america who state catagorically that outsourcing manufacturing is good for america. As I implied above engineering takes ability and interest. The 40% I mentioned above lacked one or both of the two. Just because engineering was paying well did not mean they could perform. Not all members of our society are capable of high tech and require jobs in manufacturing to provide for their families.
Without projects based in the US there will be no way to screen new graduates for moving up the chain. Trying to entice students in comp sci should be targeted at convincing them there is a future and screening out this who have a chance of creating value for a company.
Maybe and maybe not. I do know of a couple of companies that have gotten burned pretty badly by "off shoring" a significant portion of their development. They got a good price for the quoted head count but the quantity produced suffered with very little quality to make up for it. Bad programming is bad programming and will fail.
Good software is a product of using good methodolgy. There should be some guide to where the project is going up front, software engineers that actually care a bit about what they are doing in the middle and adaquat testing at the end.
During the whole process API documentation and general info on how the product is used needs to be created. Keep in mind I think a "product" is the sum of lots of little products. Each library is a product (and should stand on its own). Each driver and application is a product. Treating sub segments of an application as seperate products leads to library use APIs that can be reused, etc.
All the documentation needs to evolve with the source code and be kept current. In my group engineers that do not do this get their fingers whacked.
I spend my days in Linux driver code. HTML it close to foreign to me. Some how I managed to get too many breaks in. I just checked the page source to find out.
I made the fatal mistake of not testing my code by hitting the preview button.
This is a correct analysis. I think some of the demand graphs in the article show this. I have found in my career a direct correlation between demand a bad programers. As wages increase more bad will be produced along with a marginal increase in capable engineers. At peeks where projects must fail some good engineers but many bad will be let go. Saleries will stagnate supply will drop, etc. etc.
Our society seems to think it is OK to do anything just for the money. The concept of doing something to create actual product if foreign to a large percentage of the american public. Especially in the upper levels of society. Until this changes and we can recognize that you need to do something you are good at it will continue to be so.
This is no different for the outsourcing. Much of it will fail due to unrealistic expectations on both the employers and workers sides.
This is one of the best pieces I have seen on slashdot it a log time. The only comment I would like to add it to the very end.
The programmer needs to speek more than just both languages. They both need to be tempered with knowledge in othe areas to create a clean design. The entity the project is being created for usually only have a vague knowledge of what they want so knowlege in many areas can help create the requirements for a truly usefull tool.
Good attitude. When I graduated I felt qualified for anything that was comming at me. At first I did some crappy and some good things. Managment did recognise my skills and I moved up quickly.
My GM for the division from my first job pulled me into his office the first day and gave me a bit of advice.
1. Keep my resume current at all times. 2. If did not like it there to quitely look for a better place while I had a job. And then he reiterated "a better place".
New graduates are not supposed to by Ferraris the second year they are working. If they do their productivity goes down and they get canned.
I have to totaly agree with this statement. Over the years I have interviewed hundreds of new graduates and found most of them totaly lacking in any real understanding of product development. Masters graduates were generaly worse than bachelors graduates. I often got the feeling their graduate work caused them to neglect many of the fundamentals. I have interviewed a few doctoral degrees. Forget it. They have value only to companies that do exactly what they have studied. Give a couple of graduates who want to learn and I will se to it they do. In a couple of years they will be ready to earn what the masters are asking for and not getting.
This is as it should be. The industry is a pretty screwed up place for a number of reasons. One of them being so many project fail because they are late and over budget.
Its a two fold problem. First there have never been enough good engineers and there are a lot of pretty so-so engineers. I have worked on too many projects where I was trying to design and do major coding while trying to hire and mentor new people.
Second, often this was complicated by my boss dictating that would have a particular number of people wether I needed them or not. Mostly so he or she looked good. The result was, as with so many companies, we got bodies.
I did my best to train them but programming, as with most engineering types, does require some natural ability and INTEREST. Those without it are of very little help down to a real drain on the rest of the project.
Any project of any size needs a leader, some top notch talent and a few worker bees. Too much at any end does not work. They must also each one be capable and willing to do the work.
Companies think they beat the problem by throwing cheap bodies at it offshore. Most of the projects will fail for the same reasons outlined above. They are mostly still just bodies.
It is perfectly posible for this to happen. However, they are currently simply copying the technology of other countries and have a long way to go to doing more than superficial development of their own.
It will occur at some point as the Chinese government is trying to insure the country grows. Ours is doing just the opposite.
I had the luck to work for a German software company in the Frankfurt area and live in Germany several years. I got used to going to the towns weekly market and buying directly from the farmers and/or their co-ops. Luckily living california several of the towns here have the same thing. The truely fresh stuff tastes better.
The problem in while creating high school and college student jobs they have destroyed many other businesses. This includes hardware store owners, small grocers, and big range of positions in factores that used to supply to these. Check out their food section sometime. The last time I was there (it has been several years) I did not find one product of any kind that was locally produced. What does that say about Wall Mart participating in the community.
Shop there all you want. Wall Mart is a leading contributor to the down grade I see in american life styles. They are a typical big business that will do anything to make money with no thought to the consequences.
Check out the recently released statics on the trade deficit. Who is importing all this stuff from China. Everybody but Wall Mart is one of the big leaders in the charge. I know several people that were perfectly happy working in industries that have been replaced. They were not rich by any means now they are much worse off and often at ages where being "retrained" is just not possible.
Do we really need $40 dvd players in every room of the house? Do we really need a bigger store that now carries 20 instead of only 15 types of instant rice? Do we really need to underwear to go down another 10 cents. Etc. etc. etc.
Except for food, cars, gas and housing what I pay for everything has dropped in the last 20 years. And I do mean everything including CDs. But then I have bought a large number of used CDs. Again supporing a local business man and not some investor who never sees his customers.
What kind of arragent bastard are you. To save a few pennies you are willing to support an organization that has to interest in encoraging talent. Its OK to save a buck by importing products from a country that pays its employees in rice. The process requires the use of massive amounts of fuel to ship the stuff here increasing our fuel prices, pollution and our gas prices.
Come on answer. I have much more to say on the subject.
Been there, done that. I could not agree more. But I have had a number of good managers in the past. Did a stint as manager myself at one time. I backed off because, like you, I just plain like to be productive and I think like an engineer. This may it difficult to deal with those above me.
My direct manager right now is acutally one of the best I have seen. The other 3 or 4 layers above are lost and clueless most of the time. Their buzz word at the moment is ISO 9000.
I think your comments bring up another issue. F**k up move up is often not just a saying. I have made friends and lost friends in the past for my opinions but if one of my fellow programmers is just plain incompetent, lazy, or an ass hole then they need to go. I don;t encorage moving them to get them out of my hair. I have done this before and somehow I always ended up having to deal with them again.
There is also the type that are just biding their engineering time till they can become a manager. I have generally found these guys to be less than worthless. They are usually garanteed to make the worst managers.
These are the criteria I usually find good in a manager and tried to use as one:
1. Have a good broad software background. If working at the kernel level (including driver) have a basic understanding of hardware
2. Understand how software impacts the potential customers and their needs. Books have been written on this, most of them wrong.
3. Know your employees and their stengths and weaknesses. Use this to build a team that can and will perform.
4. Trust the team but keep track of everything anyways.
5. Process is a must but it should be pretty lightweight. Make it enforcable and do not waiver in ensuring the necessary pieces occur.
6. Insulate your engineers from most of the stuff above. Not all, just most of it. Usually controlling the flow will suffice (often this involves rumor squashing).
OK enough for now.
What you say is mostly true. Managers often get on my nerves too. Especially at crunch time. I also know a few developers that actually expect the code they write will never fail.
What ever the case, good management will know when to get involved and when not to. There are always signs of problems. As an example: Many years ago I worked at a company that was second marketing several different Unix machines under their own name. We did a lot of work to make them as compatable as possible to give customers a real choise. A whole group of tests were thrown together to try and test this. At any time over 80 percent produced some kind of failure messages on all or some of the different platforms. This was in the late 80's and 2 consultants were brought in to look at the test and failures. They were supposed to fix the tests where needed and report on real problems. 3 or 4 months later, on a saturday, I was trying to use the tests to validate some compatability changes I had made. They all passed. A couple of months before nothing had passed. I expected some success but not complete by a long shot. Every test I needed had simply been commented out in the latest snapshot of the tests. They had done nothing at all. When confronted they had no excuse but "we are still identifing tests that fail". They were gone about 2 hours later.
Point being, I think most quality failures are from both managment and development being secretive, self serving and practicing a lot of CYA. I guess these are the reasons why I like OSS. Secretive and CYA has a very hard time occuring and self serving comes about because the programmer gets reconized for both managing and developing on a project far above industry standard quality levels.
If you want an example of managment gone bad take a look at ISO 9000 time sinks.
I actually worked in an environment I found to be even better than the Joels. I worked for 3 years for Software AG in Darmstadt-Eberstadt Germany.
The owner of the company was a bit different. He build a building based on hexigons. The halls were arranged in a large hexgon with offices on both sides. All offices had windows the inside of the hexagon looked over a pond and the outside mostly faced fields or forests. Because of the shape of the building there were many offices of a basic rectanle with a few odd shaped ones at the corners. Each office had from 2 to 4 people in it with no walls.
What they had was even better. The desks were made from hooking 1 meter hexagon segments together. Each segment had 2 legs and required the support or others. I used 6 segments. 4 were connected in a U shape around me. The other two were each in the back of 2. I place the monitor on these and could set bake pretty far from the screen.
To make it even better I could open the window. I had fresh air, my office mate and I never turned on the lights during the day.
Connectivity was good and power recepticals were plentiful.
If I felt I could have progressed in my carrier I would never have left that job.
This has already happened once in the history of the US. I think we need to show more parallels with the greate depression.
Just as then big business has talked many american households into becomming indebted. Just as then loss of jobs has caused defaults on those loans and highly qualified workers had to take lesser jobs. Taking this lesser jobs causes less qualified workers to move down.
I would gladly pay twice the $300 I paid for the last upgrade to my system if it was made in the US.
I did may more to have a VW beetle than the toyota I used to drive. The Toyota rattled and buzed on every corner, the Beetle does not. I bought both used and the Toyota had less miles on it.
I have a TV. For all I use it I don't really need it. I actually wear shoes that were made in Europe. I tend to wear them for several years and the cost is in general less that the crap that quickly falls apart.
Oh and buy the way I work with Linux every day.
I bet you were one of those that rushed to Walmart, where nothing is made in the US, and tried to get one of the DVDs for $20 or $30 before christmas.
This has nothing to do with patriatism. Despite the bludgeoning the US takes from most Arab and Asian countries we got a good economy by the hard work and creativeness of the citizens. However it has always been the view of managment that the producers were to be controlled. Look at the level of middle manangement that acumulated in the late 90s.
Most of the boom of the late 90s was based on Venture capitalists that were willing to take any risk for the posibility of making a huge profit. As an engineer I took a look an many a project and thought "Hey what a stupid idea, I would never buy that." In the long run the bust came for many reasons but stuplid ideas were not the lease of them. Nobody ever said having money gave you brains.
Now the same people are tired of looking stupid so they come up with another idea. Hey why don't we try the same ideas but with people who make next to nothing. And by the way, since these people don't vote we can have US politians look the other way why we take advantage of them. And we can ignore all the laws in america that forbid doing things we do not want.
In the long run for an Indian middle class to be truly viable they must mostly produce for their own people. That is definitly what is not happening here.
Also until India removes its restrictions on hiring foreign workers the are not paricipating in a free and equal economy. They are just hell bent to pink us clean.
One of the problems is the consumerism of americans. Far too many of us think getting a "deal" is more important than the source of that deal. At one time Walmart marketed itself as one of the most American of american companies. It is responsible itself for a large portion of our trade deficite. It is short sighted of the american consumers to support this company. We can change this by chosing to buy elsewhere.
We could also change the outsourcing of high tech in the same way. We are still the primary consumer of these services and products in the world. If we all ban together and quit supporting these companies they and the problem would dry up and blow away.
Americans are more consumers of marketing than anything else. We have forgotten to take most of it with a grain of salt. Most politics are a popularity contest and money buys popularity. Most polititions are more interested in the big money that buys their campaigns. It is the governments responsibility to promote the good of the poeple and not the good of the corperation.
In the long run the american economy has been good not for because the economy benifited most people in some way. We had a small rich class, a large middle class and a small (but larger than it should be) poor class. Economies have to work on all levels. People earn money and pay for other things produced by people to earn money, etc. This rolls the money back on itself and tends to keep going. Suddenly shifting and sending it someplace else can and to some extent will cause whole sections of the economy to collapse. If the collapsing sections are large then it will tend to grow and encrease and cause massive problems. Happy and supplied people tend also have the time, energy and resources to address other issues such as the environment and the general well being of others.
The job of a CEO is to promote one part of the economy at the expense of all others. It is his job to maximize profit. As long as that profit is for short term benifit (ala Wall Street) he has not incentive to keep the general economy going. The statement in the article that most CEOs do not like to see its work force layed of or in agony (or however it was said) is pure and literal bull shit. Check out Carly at for the ultimate bitch slap to the american worker.
Corperations lisensed in the US to operate do it with the permission of the US government and are required to meet cirtain standards as to employee treatment, environmental protection, etc. The purpose of going to India or China is to curcumvent the cost of these regulations. If the US government were to require all corperations licensed in the US to have all employees and production facilities meet these requirements then most of the off shorte outsourcing would immediatly become less lucrative.
If our congressmen and senators realy and truly cared about their constituents (those that did not have the money to contribute large chunks of cash) the would not hesitate to find ways to charge these companies for their actions.
India and China's governments are extreamly protectionist. All we have to do is return the favor.
Not doing too good for who? I am sure that in all of them the people with money and jobs get additional coverage somehow. At least those without coverage can get seen without having to be dying first.
Then most of the people are stupid. History shows that when you rely on a job from somebody else, they have the power to hurt you. Our society is supposedly based on our ability to work hard and prosper. One of the ways to do this is to get a better education. As university graduates this year will tell you, it ain't working. Blame all you want on the bad economy but that is not the whole picture. Every, and I do mean every, big high tech company is transfering more manufacturing and now as much engineering work out of the country. They built the expensive mess in Silicon Valley and elsewere and now are abandoning the workers for India, China and Russia. Who do you think is helping the "comrads"?
You are partly right. I am an american who worked for a german software company (Software AG) in Darmstadt for 3 years. I probably do not have it all correct but here is what I understand. After WWII Germany had a large problem with too few men. As a result they invited the "guest workers" from other countries to come in and take positions that were not filled. Of course they were mostly the lower paid positions. As I understand it, the German Arbeits Amt (Work Office) requires unemployed people to to look for work but not at a large step back from their last postion. At some time their unemployment will run out anyways. In the mean time the lower positions are already filled with people that have had them for many years. Or they may be filled with their kids where are German citizens. Would it be fair to kick them out of their jobs?