Once, when I was myself a fairly junior Java developer, I gave a candidate what I thought was a rather basic exercise, geared to a level of knowledge that could be gleaned from the first few chapters of most introductory Java books: take two integers from the command-line arguments and print their sum to the standard output. If possible exceptions were handled, even better, but printing a sum would have been enough. I supplied the candidate with a machine, a simple text editor, the Java SDK, and the standard API documentation.
I left him alone to work on it for 45 minutes. Although he claimed to have worked with Java in his last job, he had no idea how to proceed.
I think it's entirely reasonable to expect an experienced programmer to have basic skills in reading documentation, writing simple code, and running programs on the target platform.
It's not an English name, so while there may be a generally accepted spelling, there is no single "correct" rendering in English. "Ghandi" is a simple misspelling.
The initial consonant of that name is exactly equivalent to the "g" in English "gab" or "gap" or "gall." There is absolutely no reason to use "gh" for its transliteration. This misspelling is especially egregious because the great man's native language, Gujarati, has a another, distinct sound (and letter) for which "gh" is both a logical and widely-employed Roman transcription.
Buddhism originated in India, but basically disappeared from the culture until recently. These days most converts to Buddhism are dalits (former untouchables) seeking to break with traditional caste-based religious practices.
Do you have a reference for this claim? I know from reading his Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians that he reads Hebrew and I would be surprised if he didn't speak it as well, since he lived in a kibbutz for some time. I also recall that his father was a rabbi. It seems unlikely that he could have avoided learning Hebrew.
You mean to tell me that the Chinese restaurant at the corner of Battlefield Parkway and Lafayette Road, which is run by a dude who immigrated from Xi'an in the Shaanxi province, doesn't serve authentic Chinese food?
Probably not. Just because the owner is Chinese, the cook is Chinese, and all the staff are Chinese does not mean they serve food that any significant percentage of Chinese people would eat. Restaurants are businesses and will serve whatever their clientele will buy as long as it's profitable. Most "Chinese" restaurants serve just this "adapted" cuisine. If there's a sizeable middle-class Chinese population in the area, restaurants may have two entirely different menus, one in English with sugary, cornstarch-laden dishes adorned with baby corn water chestnuts, drowned in soy sauce; and another in Chinese with traditional Chinese fare.
The addition of a regional qualifier like "Mandarin" or "Szechuan" and claims to be "authentic" are usually meaningless. For example, there at least 20 so-called Szechuan restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a large Chinese population. Only one of those restaurants has Chinese diners waiting in the foyer for tables every night.
[A]ll things in, from, or of the US suck, and therefore the Chinese food cooked here sucks.
No, American pseudo-Chinese food is bad because it tastes nasty, not because of its location. There are good Chinese restaurants in the U.S., just not many of them.
I certainly hope not. To attempt to join the words "American" and "cuisine" into one concept is a taste crime.
The British word "curry" doesn't refer to any particular flavor or dish. Most Indians use the term to refer to any dish with a sauce, or to the sauce itself. It's just that useless a word.
Indian food itself is incredibly diverse. Styles of cooking vary markedly from region to region and by ethnicity as well. The stuff you get in restaurants in the West is almost always Punjabi and Muglai food, in fact, the same exact dishes on every menu I see. Somehow it's become singularly identified with Indian food, and few restaurateurs break out of this profitable formula.
Still, as an alternative to the local fare, the Indian version of Chinese food (inauthentic but tastier than the fake American equivalent) is popular in many cities.
Most technology jobs are not in Delhi. Bangalore is the technology hub. Bangalore is in Karnataka, where the local language is Kannada. Office workers will speak English to each other, as it is the lingua franca in India. In fact, plenty of South Indians (and Karnataka is in the South) have little or no knowledge of Hindi.
I think you are being a bit overoptimistic on point 2.
Caste discrimination has certainly been illegal since independence. The same can be said of the U.S. caste system, since 1965. The Indian caste system only "worked" in the sense that slavery "worked" for the U.S. The everyday reality of caste in both countries continues to differ markedly from the legal mandates. For examples, the following links:
Torture of children in Mississippi http://www.bolivarcom.com/NF/omf/boli var/opinion_s tory.html?[rkey=0015834+[cr=gdn http://www.npr.or g/features/feature.php?wfId=15345 07 (audio)
Caste war escalates in Bihar http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/79472 4.stm
As for the status of women, certainly there are changes all the time, but in most areas of India patriarchy has reigned for thousands of years. Certainly, the preference for male children if anything should indicate so. Pardah isn't much of an issue and sati even less so (though it's not entirely unknown), but dowry murders (often by fire) are too common to ignore.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?cont en t_id=24405
The script direction would seem to me to be just a display issue. However the user enters the domain name, it would be encoded and transmitted in just one direction. I think that even scripts written vertically (as mainland Chinese was until the Communist Party adopted the horizontal as a standard) should be supportable.
Indeed, I was surprised to learn that portability has been in the works since 1996. It's shocking that the government allowed the companies to delay implementation for 9 years.
Yes and no. One carrier would initiate the transfer, but it does require the cooperation of the other carrier. They are following government mandates and could easily be sued or fined for millions of dollars if they were to fail to comply.
It's not at all easy for Indian technical workers to immigrate to the US. It takes years of struggling with the INS, even with the best of credentials.
I can understand why India might not allow immigration, since they already deal with a population of 1 billion, and are growing faster than China. However, they do allow immigration to citizens of Singapore and Canada, as specified in the Citizenship Act of 1955 and detailed at the web site of the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs.
The Indian Embassy web site details the requirements for getting a work visa, which look pretty similar to what would be required for an US H-1 visa.
Specifically,
EMPLOYMENT VISA: An appointment letter, contract letter, applicant's resume and proof that the organization is registered in India are required. Duration of visa would depend on the period of the contract.
Many international companies are opening offices in India and other places where wages are relatively low, so they won't have the problems associated with remote management.
English is a major Indian language. Imposed by hundreds of years of British colonialism, it has become an omnipresent first or second language for the educated middle and upper classes who work in IT. In fact, there are proposals to make it the official national language, despite the odious association with British rule. Many South Indians resent the dominance of Hindi, a purely North Indian language which bears little or no similarity to their own, and would rather adopt English as a neutral common language.
So, though you may have trouble understanding some Indian engineers, the difference is a matter of dialect. They understand each other perfectly well.
As to the quality of Indian engineers, your kilometerage will no doubt vary as it would with any nationality. I have worked with excellent and abysmal Indian programmers, and good and bad programmers from many different countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Once, when I was myself a fairly junior Java developer, I gave a candidate what I thought was a rather basic exercise, geared to a level of knowledge that could be gleaned from the first few chapters of most introductory Java books: take two integers from the command-line arguments and print their sum to the standard output. If possible exceptions were handled, even better, but printing a sum would have been enough. I supplied the candidate with a machine, a simple text editor, the Java SDK, and the standard API documentation.
I left him alone to work on it for 45 minutes. Although he claimed to have worked with Java in his last job, he had no idea how to proceed.
I think it's entirely reasonable to expect an experienced programmer to have basic skills in reading documentation, writing simple code, and running programs on the target platform.
The initial consonant of that name is exactly equivalent to the "g" in English "gab" or "gap" or "gall." There is absolutely no reason to use "gh" for its transliteration. This misspelling is especially egregious because the great man's native language, Gujarati, has a another, distinct sound (and letter) for which "gh" is both a logical and widely-employed Roman transcription.
What he shouted at the intersection is generally translated as "God is great!"
You are thinking of a different interjection.
Buddhism originated in India, but basically disappeared from the culture until recently. These days most converts to Buddhism are dalits (former untouchables) seeking to break with traditional caste-based religious practices.
...Chomsky only speaks English.
Do you have a reference for this claim? I know from reading his Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians that he reads Hebrew and I would be surprised if he didn't speak it as well, since he lived in a kibbutz for some time. I also recall that his father was a rabbi. It seems unlikely that he could have avoided learning Hebrew.
Probably not. Just because the owner is Chinese, the cook is Chinese, and all the staff are Chinese does not mean they serve food that any significant percentage of Chinese people would eat. Restaurants are businesses and will serve whatever their clientele will buy as long as it's profitable. Most "Chinese" restaurants serve just this "adapted" cuisine. If there's a sizeable middle-class Chinese population in the area, restaurants may have two entirely different menus, one in English with sugary, cornstarch-laden dishes adorned with baby corn water chestnuts, drowned in soy sauce; and another in Chinese with traditional Chinese fare.
The addition of a regional qualifier like "Mandarin" or "Szechuan" and claims to be "authentic" are usually meaningless. For example, there at least 20 so-called Szechuan restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a large Chinese population. Only one of those restaurants has Chinese diners waiting in the foyer for tables every night.
No, American pseudo-Chinese food is bad because it tastes nasty, not because of its location. There are good Chinese restaurants in the U.S., just not many of them.
I certainly hope not. To attempt to join the words "American" and "cuisine" into one concept is a taste crime.
The British word "curry" doesn't refer to any particular flavor or dish. Most Indians use the term to refer to any dish with a sauce, or to the sauce itself. It's just that useless a word.
Indian food itself is incredibly diverse. Styles of cooking vary markedly from region to region and by ethnicity as well. The stuff you get in restaurants in the West is almost always Punjabi and Muglai food, in fact, the same exact dishes on every menu I see. Somehow it's become singularly identified with Indian food, and few restaurateurs break out of this profitable formula.
Still, as an alternative to the local fare, the Indian version of Chinese food (inauthentic but tastier than the fake American equivalent) is popular in many cities.
Most technology jobs are not in Delhi. Bangalore is the technology hub. Bangalore is in Karnataka, where the local language is Kannada. Office workers will speak English to each other, as it is the lingua franca in India. In fact, plenty of South Indians (and Karnataka is in the South) have little or no knowledge of Hindi.
I think you are being a bit overoptimistic on point 2.
i var/opinion_s tory.html?[rkey=0015834+[cr=gdnr g/features/feature.php?wfId=15345 07 (audio)
2 4.stm
t en t_id=24405
Caste discrimination has certainly been illegal since independence. The same can be said of the U.S. caste system, since 1965. The Indian caste system only "worked" in the sense that slavery "worked" for the U.S. The everyday reality of caste in both countries continues to differ markedly from the legal mandates. For examples, the following links:
Torture of children in Mississippi
http://www.bolivarcom.com/NF/omf/bol
http://www.npr.o
Caste war escalates in Bihar
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7947
As for the status of women, certainly there are changes all the time, but in most areas of India patriarchy has reigned for thousands of years. Certainly, the preference for male children if anything should indicate so. Pardah isn't much of an issue and sati even less so (though it's not entirely unknown), but dowry murders (often by fire) are too common to ignore.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?con
I'm stunned by the use of "cum-guzzling whore" as an aspersion. Most guys like having it swallowed.
The script direction would seem to me to be just a display issue. However the user enters the domain name, it would be encoded and transmitted in just one direction. I think that even scripts written vertically (as mainland Chinese was until the Communist Party adopted the horizontal as a standard) should be supportable.
In the ten years that I have known her, I have never seen my Chinese friend gesture characters when she talks to other Chinese speakers.
I agree, all of the efforts that I have seen are last-minute fiascos.
Indeed, I was surprised to learn that portability has been in the works since 1996. It's shocking that the government allowed the companies to delay implementation for 9 years.
Yes and no. One carrier would initiate the transfer, but it does require the cooperation of the other carrier. They are following government mandates and could easily be sued or fined for millions of dollars if they were to fail to comply.
Many international companies are opening offices in India and other places where wages are relatively low, so they won't have the problems associated with remote management.
English is a major Indian language. Imposed by hundreds of years of British colonialism, it has become an omnipresent first or second language for the educated middle and upper classes who work in IT. In fact, there are proposals to make it the official national language, despite the odious association with British rule. Many South Indians resent the dominance of Hindi, a purely North Indian language which bears little or no similarity to their own, and would rather adopt English as a neutral common language.
So, though you may have trouble understanding some Indian engineers, the difference is a matter of dialect. They understand each other perfectly well.
As to the quality of Indian engineers, your kilometerage will no doubt vary as it would with any nationality. I have worked with excellent and abysmal Indian programmers, and good and bad programmers from many different countries.