Years ago I worked as a developer for a subsidiary of Fujitsu. One day a colleague asked for my help.
The crux of the problem was that he was unfamiliar with the concept of a 'while' loop. Not the specific implementation in the language he was using, but the actual concept itself. He had some kind of computer science degree and he'd been working in the same team as me, as a developer, for at least two years.
It took me a while to realise what the problem was, as it never occurred to me that he might be unfamiliar with basic control flow. He sheepishly explained that the bulk of his degree was coursework (presumably he got some 'help') and that he'd been hammering square blocks into round holes for the last couple of years. From what I recall, whenever a while loop was appropriate he'd instead use a for loop with an extremely high upper limit and a break condition.
I'm sad to say that I've encountered the same situation several times where someone that is supposed to be a CS grad (or what should be a junior/senior CS student) is lacking in something fundamental. Sometimes it is in things that are not so obvious (but should be) such as not knowing what an interface or abstract class is for or thinking that procedural programming means "programming with GOTO statements", or simply not knowing what structured programming really is.
In other cases, the deficiency is graver, like, as you pointed out, not knowing basic control flow structures, not knowing what the structured program theorem really means (or even heard of), or not knowing how to decompose problems. I recently had an e-mail exchange (trying to help) with someone who supposedly passed a data structures course (a mid/upper level 300x level course) but didn't know he could call the "pop" method of a stack in a loop n times after having called "push" on it an equal n amount of times.
And now, and just to picture this, it's not just that this poor guy didn't know that he could call "pop" n times after having called "push" n times as well. He didn't know he could call pop inside a loop even though he knew he could call push (or any method for that matter) on a loop. How the hell can confusion possibly occur!!!??!! This was a guy who supposedly passed data structures and algorithms with a B.
All I can think off is that a professor (or several professors) at his university should be kicked out and forced to flip burgers for a living. Because it is not only one person like that, but many, across the board. People like that have to be made to fail or offer a wider curriculum containing a larger number of mandatory 100x/200x programming courses (hopefully using procedural or multi-paradigm languages.)
Too little time is invested in too few 100x/200x programming courses where instructors try to shuffle as many OO-fashionable concepts they can think of - superficial coverage interfaces, GUI programming, polymorphism, generics and what not - when they don't even make sure their students understand the basics - structured programming theory, control structures, modularity on the small, problem solving, divide-and-conquer strategies and so on and so on.
Students that are not qualified or who are not obviously talented on the mental skills required for programming either need to be flunked out or forced to take more programming courses at a lower, more fundamental level. Then they either get the sufficient practice and knowledge to continue or they flunk and try something else. We all have skills at one thing but not other. Schools make a serious disservice to students by watering down requirements just so that they can pass.
Not excusing mediocre students (who don't necessarily cheat), schools and instructors that let them graduate are the bigger cheaters of all.
Don't like someone badmouthing the government? Require them to register. Then when they (obviously) don't do it, stick 'em in jail and take their money.
Enjoy your democracy, guys.
bad mounting the government =/= subversion.
In other words... your analogy sucks:) But that's ok, the whole idea of asking or requiring subversive groups to register not only sucks more, it's fucking ridiculous. It's like asking a criminal to register his intentions to commit a crime.
If you are a pedo and want to bang a little child, check the box that says "yes", otherwise check "no". </facepalm!!(10+1)>
I can see where the proponents of this law are coming from, but come the fucking on, it's obvious that it is completely unenforceable.
Sometimes I think that the 'suits' will end up destroying the American economy in their pursuit of short term profits at the expense of things like ethics, employee loyalty, the environment, customer loyalty and the middle class.
As interesting as your take on things might be, how do they relate to the engineering task of estimating completion time?
For me, the 'suits' turned the "tractable" problem space I thought I was working in into a slippery quagmire of political decisions and trade offs.
But you thought it was tractable. How do you know it really was? I know where you are coming from (been there as well), but more often than not, all engineering projects are bound by external, non-engineering forces. After all, unless we are paid to do research exclusively, "they" don't pay us just to do engineering, but to produce a deliverable that has a tangible, market/financial value. And that value (and its urgency) are directly dependent on dynamic factors outside the realm of engineering.
It's nice to think we could go Dijkstra all the way and assume for a fact that non-engineering factors are irrelevant to engineering in general, and software development in particular. But projects exist in a human/business context, and as "erratic" as the "suits"'s decisions, more often than not, they are driven by those external factors (factors we sometimes cannot/don't want to even try to understand and manage.)
That was not what I signed up for and eventually I left.
That's too bad.
Given the number of basket case projects I have seen, I think that having competent people doing good work in an environment they can count on goes a very long way towards getting reasonable estimates on completion time and resource requirements.
But again, many times, environments exist according to a context, a business reason. That's what we get paid for.
I agree with you that there are some environments that are truly WTF, but many times it is "us" who choose not to understand to understand otherwise legitimate constrains at best, or choose to dismiss them as irrelevant and beneath the tasks of software development at worst.
Sometimes I think that the 'suits' will end up destroying the American economy in their pursuit of short term profits at the expense of things like ethics, employee loyalty, the environment, customer loyalty and the middle class.
As interesting as your take on things might be, how do they relate to the engineering task of estimating completion time?
But it is not clear whether the internet causes depression or whether depressed people are drawn to it.
So, what we have here is an article with no actual basis for conclusions. Nothing to see here, move along
No, what we have here is a questionable conclusion on a paper, drawn from a line quoted out of context.
It might not have actual basis for a definite conclusion, but it does have actual data and observations with which to draw relations and directions for further research that might lead to a conclusion (or at least a framework for psychological diagnosis, prevention and treatment.)
There is a lot see here, move along if you can't see it.
What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims."
ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!
After spending a while in Japan (and observing their net/electronic pattern usages), combined with purely anecdotal observations on communication and usage patterns of people here in the US and in my beloved 3rd world country of origin, it is fair to say most people are fine with a device that lets them e-mail and twitter and upload pictures on facebook, google for stuff, read the news and job sites, maybe run MS Office or Google Apps, and for the savvyy video conference with skype (which is how my grandma who lives in a little town up in the mountains got to see my newborn baby for the first time after getting Internet over dial-up.) Shit, even some of the Xingu people up in the Amazon have internet access now!!!! Anyways, go back to the topic...
The average electronics consumer WILL NOT use that type of device to run DVDs (there are super-cheapo portable DVDs for that) or run gcc, Mathematica or a LAMP. They don't need a super-duper CPU and the latest and greatest graphics card.
We, what we call "powerusers") certainly want a mighty gadget that can run everything we want in one device. But we do not represent the average electronic consumer.
Typical people, the average electronics consumer of 2010, whether here or Japan or south of the border, on the other hand will be happy to have an iPhone/BlackBerry, the smallest possible laptop/netbook that can do the job without much jitters and a portable DVD player (comes handy for entertaining your kids while you are busy with your laptop/netbook while having breakfast at Panera or wherever they sell breakfast with free wifi).
Warren East is re-stating the obvious (and inflating stock values), but that's his job. What we are missing here, is our ability to objectively judge the merits of his claims, not from our point of view as l33t hax0rs, but from the shoes of the average consumer - they are the ones that constitute the market (and the opportunities therein), not us.
Can you give examples of English songs that someone should be listening to? If I turned on the radio, I don't think hearing Beyonce/Eminem/Green Day/Metallica/Jay-Z/BrittneySpears would help me learn english. I can't imagine trying to pick out Farsi with a singer who's using a voice synthesizer.
Frank Sinatra? Barry White? Or perhaps someone more recent like Billy Ocean, Lionel Ritchie, Stevie Wonder, Heart
If all you know is cheap pop culture, then obviously everything will sound either as
"yo, yo, mama, you, shake dah shit, mah crew wanna pop littl' furry thang!", or
WAAAAAR, IT'S ALL FOOBARRRR, DIE11111!!! UGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!
Shit, we don't even have to look for famous singers. Children songs are an excellent way to learn correct pronunciation (given that children songs tend to teach that.) If all you have is a hammer, everything is going to kinda like oh my god look like a nail cuz you know your like kinda have a hammer with a synthezizer cuz they are like the bomb lol.
It's not just websites. I don't know what the fascination is with scripting languages on the Linux platform or with FOSS in general, but it results in slow programs with flaky UIs.
Slow programs with flaky UIs can be obtained with any languages - just a matter of looking at the graphical C/C++ applications written in the 90s will show that this is true.
The reasons behind whether an application runs well enough are varied and complex and cannot be pigeonholed into simple "it's the language" explanations. There are architectural issues that many people, scripting languages or not, do not take into account which makes systems flop.
I like to use refurbished/recycled machines; which means that I'll have an old P4, 512M RAM and a slow bus.
What kind of applications, how many users and what type of usage patterns are we talking about when referring to this type of platform? What type of application/system architecture are we talking about here?
Many times, applications written in a scripting language, whether it be Perl, Python, PHP, or whatever, will hang often and then start working. I can always tell.
Can you quantify that statement? I've seen applications written in Java or C/C++ doing the same. Any software engineer worth his salt knows that erratic/subpar performance behavior is not just a function of programming language.
That's why I knew Open Office was written in something like C when others on the Net were stating it was written in some such interpreted language.
So that's how you knew it was written in C? By eye-balling its performance? I would have thought that looking at the developers' documentation and source code would have been a much more viable way to measure it.
... plus a person willing to put "Assembly" in the resumes should be aware that it implies dexterity with binary arithmetic, bitwise ops, 2-s complements and all of that good shit.
Do you hire people who need to know obscure bits of x86 asm often, or is this just a way of catching people who exaggerate on their CVs?
Probably the later, which is completely legit. It could be a bit uncalled for if the position the interview is for is, say, for developing web pages. But still, with something put on the resume, you take it (or put it) at risk. It would be very questionable, however, if a person is solely dismissed for passing a trivia, specially if it is not related to the job at hand (not that I'm accusing RabidOverYou of doing that, just sayin'...)
If you put something on your resume, you better be able to back it up technically in an interview. Or perhaps be a bit more careful and explicitly quantify what you know..ie. expertise in MASM, or familiarity with X86 Assembly (TASM). Just saying "x86 Assembly" without quantifying the exposure and without explicitly stating the assembler/syntax, that could possibly open a can of worms.
We all taylor (or should taylor) our resumes (with truth facts, obviously) for specific job openings. What is always important is to be truthful (.ie. you "know" assembler), in a manner that is accurate and that does not come as a misrepresentation (you know it but it's been a long time back in school? Put in your "interests" or "hobbies" section, and not among your main skills.)
Once the government starts taking from one person to give to another, that is socialist, even if it doesn't run any part of the economy.
In that case, pretty much all forms of government in human history (including tribal ones) are of a socialist nature... even absolute monarchies (specially absolute monarchies.)
It is also ridiculous to that a government is socialist even (as you put it) it doesn't run any part of the economy considering that the essence of socialist is of being a class of economic theories of human organization (with Marxism being the bitter extreme case for attempting to explain all human aspects, even psychological and behavioral ones, in economic terms.)
Your statement is a generalization on the nature of governments, a generalization based on absolutes. You are simply making up a new definition of what a socialist government is just to give credence to your opinion. It is not a valid logical argument.
A government, by its most basic functions, will take something from someone and give it to someone else. Taxes, they take your taxes and give it to someone else in many ways, in infrastructure, in support for people under the poverty line, in the form of subsidized student loans and federal grants, etc, etc, etc.
If that's what a socialist government is, then hell, the US has been ruled a socialist government for a very long time.
I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
I know the countries you speak of, and if you look at policies passed / proposed in the past year, you'll find that Obama has emulated them wonderfully. Just because Obama knows he can't change the entire government overnight doesn't mean he doesn't WANT to.
Having lived (and suffered) myself at one point in my life under a real hard leftist yoke, I gotta say this: Nope. Not even closed.
All the policies he's been trying to push are remarkably mild (more of a pragmatic mid-center social-democrat nature) compared to an actual "hard left" which is what the anonymous OP I replied to attempted to imply.
I have issues with his "spread the wealth" speeches (specially when they are not coupled with a "and by the way, we also have to share responsibilities" part.) I have a problem with trying to increase taxes to the wealth-and-work-generating people, corporations and enterprenaurs, a sector of the population whose tax contributions to the public coffers are disproportionately larger than their usage of public infrastructure or their size % relative to the population of the entire country.
That kind of thing is not necessarily conductive to the promotion of entities capable of producing jobs and generate wealth.
But that hardly qualifies as a leftist policy, and it's more of a different take of the role of government and tax distribution in a capitalist system. You might need to brush up on what leftism and socialism actually entails.
On a side note: I do agree, whoever with his health care plans, or at least with a need for reform. What we have now is not workable.
I know what policies he's passing, but let's play devil's advocate. Please pray tell which policies he's passing that are emulating left policies in those countries very well.
Good God, folks, he graded out as the most leftist Senator, by far.
Why the hell is anyone surprised that he's governed from the hard left?
As a republican who voted for McCain, I gotta tell you, stop that stupid shit. Who graded him out, creationists? I don't like some of his policies (fuck I didn't even voted for him), but he's far from being a leftist.
In fact, you have no idea of what a "hard left" is. People like you whorify what it means to be to left or to the right, to the point that those labels become meaningless. They become more and more like elementary school taunting name tagging than actual classifications of ideology and policy. I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
I really have to wonder what metric they use for deciding whether or not news is important. I stubbed my toe today, is that important?
The president of Monaco (.7 square miles) tried to push his/her agenda onto Canada, is that important?
Man, your education is showing. There is no president of Monaco. I know that little detail is unimportant to the argument at hand, but come *the fucking* on!
Anyways, taking your comic hypothetical scenario, it could be, depending on the agenda, which might affect, I dunno, banking or investors who own assets in your country, or what not. If you are in the habit of taking news superficially, in particular international news, with nothing more than country size, population or distance from your TiVo and super-sized McDonalds combo, of course you will be tempted to ask such a silly question (who decides what's important).
But that's a function of you, not the news. The importance of a piece of news is not a function of your perception, or anyone. It is important or it is not.
You can't measure the importance of news by their (apparent) immediate impact on your life or your impression of how important and impervious your country is to external events originating from a seemingly unimportant (and perhaps backward-looking) place in the world... like Afghanistan in 1991.
Remember that time, when no one gave a shit, when many retarded animals used to say Afgha-what-how-the-fuck-you-call that shit? That "Arab (or whatever)" place where people where towels on their heads and ride camels. Whatever, I'm so like whatever! Why should I care? Fucking SuperBowl, that's important, lemme watch Chuck Norris kick some ass, we are awesome!!!!. Remember that time?
Turn the clock to 1994 for another example... being aware of the Rwandan Genocide over following the O.J. Simpson shitfest would seem to have been a very important news to watch and be aware off, even for someone living in a little cow town in the middle of nowhere. Not because it might have a direct impact, but at least showing you have something resembling a moral compass.
But that's just me... plus the media is incredibly guilty at that:
All in all, a piece of news does not have to have an immediate, tangible and direct impact in your life, your town or your country. Gross violation of human rights, international news, science news, global and regional politics, global/regional/even local historic events, those are important news. The mark of the uneducated is that he will find those boring and "non-important" compare to watching "American Idol", some dude dancing on his head on MTV or "Real Shallow Stupid Whores of Orange County."
The idea that you need to have someone decide which news are important or not is stupid. There are important news, and there are non-important news.
The perception of their importance is a function of the audience's intelligence, education, and to a degree, their moral ability to give a shit about things. Important news are important news, independently of whether people can understand their importance.
Let's see. Web browsing, sure though lacking Flash is an issue. Lot of Flash sites these days. Not saying it is a good thing, but it is what it is. Book reading, not so much. For one, the battery life is fairly short compared to most readers. With a Kindle or a Nook, you are talking weeks of battery life, not hours. LCDs also aren't as nice as eink (or real paper) for long periods of reading. Plus you aren't going to get good outdoor performance. You need a reflective screen for that, there's no way you can crank the brightness enough on an emissive screen and keep the battery life useful.
Watching movies? Maybe, but of course Flash is how one watches movies online that is right out. There's also the question of how you get non-online movies to it, doesn't appear to have USB or SD card the like so you have to transfer everything wirelessly from your desktop and then save them on the small internal memory.
I dunno, but I would find one of these things to be extremely useful for reading indoors/at night when plugged to an outlet. I have a ton of reading/listening media, PDFs and powerpoint doc$s that *I must read* as part of my work and current studies, and which I can't use on my kindle.
Having one of these would be extremely useful, but I won't buy since I've already invested on my kindle. Perhaps next year when the prices drop. I'm sure there will be better versions of this device, but using an *obsolete* one (obsolete by then) would be fine for me.
There are uses for this thing, and obviously there are usage patterns for which you'll be better served with a netbook or a full-blown laptop. There is no such thing as a homogeneous customer base when it comes to electronic devices.
Well, there you go then. If you work on something that doesn't require massive amounts of horsepower, you could just have your own very portable computer to take wherever you want to go.
Yes, a netbook will be cheaper, more durable, more powerful, etc. But there's a lot of appeal to a flat unit you can use like a clipboard while resting back in your favorite lounge chair or sitting up in bed.
There will be a market for this. I probably won't be part of it, but mostly on price and lack of flexibility.
Exaaactly. This is not a product for a customer base made out of power computer/laptop video-streaming users. It could perfectly appeal, however, to a mass of netbook users who only care about checking e-mails, sending/storing pictures (pretty much the standard user profile in, say, Japan). Reading books and googling things out on it, that's another plus.
I can see a lot of netbook users wanting to get one of these. It would have been perfect for my wife (for whom I got a netbook and loves it), except that with a one-year old baby this iPad thing would be a lot more fragile than the netbook she already has.
The problem with a lot of/. posters (or people in general) is that they equate themselves with *what they think* is the average customer on *what they think* is an homogeneous computing market. If we really pay attention, this is not even close to market reality.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I was expecting the thing to have a different take on ebook readers. I'll stick to a kindle/nook with its eink and the smaller profile..
I'd actually go for an iPad to tell you the truth. I have a kindle and I like it... for what it is. But I have a ton of PDFs and videocasts (all work-related) that I can't use on my kindle. All that stuff I have to carry on burned DVDs and thumb drives. Having them, and watching them in one of these thingies would be so convenient.
Considering that I paid over $300 for my kindle when it came out, I think this is a well-priced gadget... for what it is. Whether I can afford to for almost $500 right now for one of them, though, that's another thing:)
This has given me a glimpse to a darker side of Indian offshore consulting, which I've actually talked a lot with several of my Indian colleagues who also agree on this: you can end up with a consulting firm that sells the idea of development guided by a a top-notch architect, and you swallow the tripe. And then the top-notch architect designs a system which looks solid, then he moves to another project.
So, you get exactly what was represented to you, no more and no less. That's what you ought to expect in any arm's-length, contractual agreement. Anything else is irrational.
If you wanted a specific background for the development team and not just the architect, that should have been specified in the agreement.
Nope. That doesn't work that way. Your analogy would be like you contracting a licensed architect and a team of engineers to give you a proper design, project plan and cost estimation of a suspension bridge, and then have the construction company execute them all with substandard materials and unlicensed technicians and subcontractors without any oversight as to the quality of execution.
When a software consulting company presents you with a solid and sound project plan and architecture devised by a top-notch architect, that architecture is a design contract for an implementation that follows it.
It should be said that in all those instances I've mentioned, the contracts with the consulting companies explicitly stated the type and seniority expected of developers, coding conventions, usage of source control and many other things.
However, unlike civil engineering contracts, software contracts are usually impossible to enforce for practical reasons (specially when development is being performed half-way across the planet.)
"I've found CompTIA certs a useful part of my portfolio of credentials"
then you say
"Well, I don't give a great God damn how useful my certs are on my job"
Of course, that bit of mental contortionism makes perfect sense to you, but you also think CompTIA certs aren't worthless...
He's saying the later as he's been pushed by people who insult his credentials for no valid reason (by many who post and nit-pick anonymously without providing any evidence of their own credentials.)
As of yet, all the quasi-evidence some posters present here regarding the uselessness of these certs are just mixtures of e-insults combined with personal anecdotes of running into mediocre people.
Which just about proves my point in it's entirety.
"not to be a dick..."
TY
I always get a laugh at how crazy and defensive you get when you're obviously and irrefutably wrong and shown so,like you were here.
He does have a point man. You are insulting his skills by calling his "computer G.E.D" and by ridiculing his justified defensiveness.
He is still not shown to be wrong in any manner that could be construed as obvious or irrefutable. His question remains unanswered: where is the evidence? I personally and professionally do not think CompTIA certs are necessarily a joke, nor that people who possess them have no significant skills whatsoever.
I have a B.S. in Computer Science, pursued a MS up to my thesis, and currently pursuing a MS in Comp.Eng. I have 15 years of software development experience, both on the commercial and defense sectors, ranging from SysAdmin to programmer to soft. engineer, from developing back-end e-commerce sites to implementations of network protocols to grad research. That certainly gives me a proven insight when assessing the value proposition of certain types of certificates.
Is one CompTia cert a joke? Depends on the individual. Likewise I can say based on professional experience that a B.S. degree (or even a M.S. degree) can be a joke at the hands of a mediocre individual.
On the other hand, when you meet a technician that has been working on the field for years and has a stack of certs like the ones some e-start wannabes like to laugh at, chances are that person knows his shit inside out (as opposed to many compsci dilettantes who have no clue how little they know.)
If there is objective and measurable evidence that indeed we can unequivocally generalize and dismiss people with these type of certs (read "objective and measurable evidence" not feel-good dick-waging), then let's hear it.
On another note, I do not see what the problem is with certs having an expiration date. In a technology field, certs should be hold for re-examination and renewal (or they should be versioned like the java certs.)
Looking back at my own experiences when I graduated, I would have been better served if I had started at a lower salary when I graduated.
See, many of us during the dot-com boom-boom (and many who graduate now) came to the profession thinking big bucks. The reality is that a $50k salary (or even a $40K salary) is a decent salary for a single person... if you live frugally (unless you live in an expensive area like NY). Living frugally and with financial responsibility appreciating a $50k salary is a far better life lesson than just graduating and getting $60-$70k just because. Many of us in the software industry lost touch with respect to reasonable proportions of salary as a function of our work functions.
No, it is not. And it shouldn't be just because it's "programming"
There is a big difference between modifying JSP/ASP/PHP pages vs low-level programming or programming and architecting highly available e-commerce back ends. There is a big difference between IT support calls where you try to help users how to press the any key vs being a Tier III support Sysadmin/Network guy who knows that kind of shit inside out.
Just as software-related jobs run the spectrum from mundane to highly complex, so the salaries that go with them. That is reality. We got to "thanks" the dot-com brainfartopocalypse and the washing down of undergraduate CS curriculum that we still get new graduates that think they'll make as much as the under qualified prima-donas of the late 90's even if don't know the difference between a pointer and a coconut or don't know the difference between a Vector from an ArrayList in Java or who think C# is the same as C++ or who have never written anything more than a "hello world" program in assembler.
You can tell the difference between the graduate who just went through the bare minimum course curriculum and the one who took far more programming courses and who tried to work at the college labs or tried to get internships somewhere (anywhere!) or who at the very least tried to run Linux at home and played with as many programming classes as possible and who found big-O notation fascinating.
What type of job should each of these two should get? And what salaries should they get? There are people who graduate from MIS and CS now who should have never been able to graduate 10-15 years ago. But they graduate. Schools let them as a response of what the industry need.
And what the IT industry now needs is a gamut of software professionals that can do a variety of jobs, from the mundane to the holy-crap-this-is-hard(10+1)! With more of the former than the later. The drop in salaries is just a reflection of that.
If programmers want more moolah, then they should try to tackle harder jobs that warrant better salaries. That requires specialization of skills: be it embedded programming or system-level programming or becoming a JEE specialist/architect who knows how to write solid back-end systems, or becoming a systems engineer, or a software architect, or work your way to become a team lead, or become a solid gold SysAdmin/DBA, etc, etc.
Being a "computer guy" stopped being a cash cow a long time ago. It can provide for a decent living (just like any other well-done trade or profession). But for those who go to school and graduate thinking they should deserve $70 just because their diplomas read "Computer" somewhere, nope. Graduate and become an specialist that can tackle hard problems. Then earn it.
The reality is that salaries are going down, and that's a justified reflection on the fact that the software industry is inundated with mediocre programmers.
Not that I disagree entirely that it may be more difficult to manage someone in India, and I've certainly heard horror stories, but come on. These could all be applied to just about any remote contractor who isn't worth their salt. I have worked with/currently work with plenty of Indians who really knew/know their stuff.
I gotta side with cerberuss on this one. Yes, c'mon all of those can be applied to any remote consultant that is not worth his salt. However, from my experience working with remote teams (India, Brazil, within the US), there is something specific about the consulting industry in India that can really bit you in the ass harder than in other cases.
Now, just like you, I've worked with plenty of Indians who really knew their stuff. In fact, most of the remote projects I've worked that involved teams in India have had a high success ratio. But the few that have failed have done so far more miserably and catastrophically than with other teams on other countries.
This has given me a glimpse to a darker side of Indian offshore consulting, which I've actually talked a lot with several of my Indian colleagues who also agree on this: you can end up with a consulting firm that sells the idea of development guided by a a top-notch architect, and you swallow the tripe. And then the top-notch architect designs a system which looks solid, then he moves to another project. Then the consulting firm gets a whole bunch of sophomore kids from college find ways to replicate GOTO statements in Java to do the implementation. My first encounter with such practices from such a consulting team was when I was working together with an Indian colleague of mine (a really good software developer) in trying to make sense out of the mess. When we looked at the code and the original design, all we could do was say "WTF?".
That's an experience I've had to repeat several times. It's a reality, and it has nothing to do with dissing people from X or Y country. It's an unfortunate reality that cannot be denied or politically correctly sugar coat it.
Slashdot Mirror
Years ago I worked as a developer for a subsidiary of Fujitsu. One day a colleague asked for my help.
The crux of the problem was that he was unfamiliar with the concept of a 'while' loop. Not the specific implementation in the language he was using, but the actual concept itself. He had some kind of computer science degree and he'd been working in the same team as me, as a developer, for at least two years.
It took me a while to realise what the problem was, as it never occurred to me that he might be unfamiliar with basic control flow. He sheepishly explained that the bulk of his degree was coursework (presumably he got some 'help') and that he'd been hammering square blocks into round holes for the last couple of years. From what I recall, whenever a while loop was appropriate he'd instead use a for loop with an extremely high upper limit and a break condition.
I'm sad to say that I've encountered the same situation several times where someone that is supposed to be a CS grad (or what should be a junior/senior CS student) is lacking in something fundamental. Sometimes it is in things that are not so obvious (but should be) such as not knowing what an interface or abstract class is for or thinking that procedural programming means "programming with GOTO statements", or simply not knowing what structured programming really is.
In other cases, the deficiency is graver, like, as you pointed out, not knowing basic control flow structures, not knowing what the structured program theorem really means (or even heard of), or not knowing how to decompose problems. I recently had an e-mail exchange (trying to help) with someone who supposedly passed a data structures course (a mid/upper level 300x level course) but didn't know he could call the "pop" method of a stack in a loop n times after having called "push" on it an equal n amount of times.
And now, and just to picture this, it's not just that this poor guy didn't know that he could call "pop" n times after having called "push" n times as well. He didn't know he could call pop inside a loop even though he knew he could call push (or any method for that matter) on a loop. How the hell can confusion possibly occur!!!??!! This was a guy who supposedly passed data structures and algorithms with a B.
All I can think off is that a professor (or several professors) at his university should be kicked out and forced to flip burgers for a living. Because it is not only one person like that, but many, across the board. People like that have to be made to fail or offer a wider curriculum containing a larger number of mandatory 100x/200x programming courses (hopefully using procedural or multi-paradigm languages.)
Too little time is invested in too few 100x/200x programming courses where instructors try to shuffle as many OO-fashionable concepts they can think of - superficial coverage interfaces, GUI programming, polymorphism, generics and what not - when they don't even make sure their students understand the basics - structured programming theory, control structures, modularity on the small, problem solving, divide-and-conquer strategies and so on and so on.
Students that are not qualified or who are not obviously talented on the mental skills required for programming either need to be flunked out or forced to take more programming courses at a lower, more fundamental level. Then they either get the sufficient practice and knowledge to continue or they flunk and try something else. We all have skills at one thing but not other. Schools make a serious disservice to students by watering down requirements just so that they can pass.
Not excusing mediocre students (who don't necessarily cheat), schools and instructors that let them graduate are the bigger cheaters of all.
Don't like someone badmouthing the government? Require them to register. Then when they (obviously) don't do it, stick 'em in jail and take their money.
Enjoy your democracy, guys.
bad mounting the government =/= subversion.
In other words... your analogy sucks :) But that's ok, the whole idea of asking or requiring subversive groups to register not only sucks more, it's fucking ridiculous. It's like asking a criminal to register his intentions to commit a crime.
If you are a pedo and want to bang a little child, check the box that says "yes", otherwise check "no". </facepalm!!(10+1)>
I can see where the proponents of this law are coming from, but come the fucking on, it's obvious that it is completely unenforceable.
Sometimes I think that the 'suits' will end up destroying the American economy in their pursuit of short term profits at the expense of things like ethics, employee loyalty, the environment, customer loyalty and the middle class.
As interesting as your take on things might be, how do they relate to the engineering task of estimating completion time?
For me, the 'suits' turned the "tractable" problem space I thought I was working in into a slippery quagmire of political decisions and trade offs.
But you thought it was tractable. How do you know it really was? I know where you are coming from (been there as well), but more often than not, all engineering projects are bound by external, non-engineering forces. After all, unless we are paid to do research exclusively, "they" don't pay us just to do engineering, but to produce a deliverable that has a tangible, market/financial value. And that value (and its urgency) are directly dependent on dynamic factors outside the realm of engineering.
It's nice to think we could go Dijkstra all the way and assume for a fact that non-engineering factors are irrelevant to engineering in general, and software development in particular. But projects exist in a human/business context, and as "erratic" as the "suits"'s decisions, more often than not, they are driven by those external factors (factors we sometimes cannot/don't want to even try to understand and manage.)
That was not what I signed up for and eventually I left.
That's too bad.
Given the number of basket case projects I have seen, I think that having competent people doing good work in an environment they can count on goes a very long way towards getting reasonable estimates on completion time and resource requirements.
But again, many times, environments exist according to a context, a business reason. That's what we get paid for.
I agree with you that there are some environments that are truly WTF, but many times it is "us" who choose not to understand to understand otherwise legitimate constrains at best, or choose to dismiss them as irrelevant and beneath the tasks of software development at worst.
Sometimes I think that the 'suits' will end up destroying the American economy in their pursuit of short term profits at the expense of things like ethics, employee loyalty, the environment, customer loyalty and the middle class.
As interesting as your take on things might be, how do they relate to the engineering task of estimating completion time?
But it is not clear whether the internet causes depression or whether depressed people are drawn to it.
So, what we have here is an article with no actual basis for conclusions. Nothing to see here, move along
No, what we have here is a questionable conclusion on a paper, drawn from a line quoted out of context.
It might not have actual basis for a definite conclusion, but it does have actual data and observations with which to draw relations and directions for further research that might lead to a conclusion (or at least a framework for psychological diagnosis, prevention and treatment.)
There is a lot see here, move along if you can't see it.
What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims." ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!
After spending a while in Japan (and observing their net/electronic pattern usages), combined with purely anecdotal observations on communication and usage patterns of people here in the US and in my beloved 3rd world country of origin, it is fair to say most people are fine with a device that lets them e-mail and twitter and upload pictures on facebook, google for stuff, read the news and job sites, maybe run MS Office or Google Apps, and for the savvyy video conference with skype (which is how my grandma who lives in a little town up in the mountains got to see my newborn baby for the first time after getting Internet over dial-up.) Shit, even some of the Xingu people up in the Amazon have internet access now!!!! Anyways, go back to the topic...
The average electronics consumer WILL NOT use that type of device to run DVDs (there are super-cheapo portable DVDs for that) or run gcc, Mathematica or a LAMP. They don't need a super-duper CPU and the latest and greatest graphics card.
We, what we call "powerusers") certainly want a mighty gadget that can run everything we want in one device. But we do not represent the average electronic consumer.
Typical people, the average electronics consumer of 2010, whether here or Japan or south of the border, on the other hand will be happy to have an iPhone/BlackBerry, the smallest possible laptop/netbook that can do the job without much jitters and a portable DVD player (comes handy for entertaining your kids while you are busy with your laptop/netbook while having breakfast at Panera or wherever they sell breakfast with free wifi).
Warren East is re-stating the obvious (and inflating stock values), but that's his job. What we are missing here, is our ability to objectively judge the merits of his claims, not from our point of view as l33t hax0rs, but from the shoes of the average consumer - they are the ones that constitute the market (and the opportunities therein), not us.
Can you give examples of English songs that someone should be listening to? If I turned on the radio, I don't think hearing Beyonce/Eminem/Green Day/Metallica/Jay-Z/BrittneySpears would help me learn english. I can't imagine trying to pick out Farsi with a singer who's using a voice synthesizer.
Frank Sinatra? Barry White? Or perhaps someone more recent like Billy Ocean, Lionel Ritchie, Stevie Wonder, Heart
If all you know is cheap pop culture, then obviously everything will sound either as
Shit, we don't even have to look for famous singers. Children songs are an excellent way to learn correct pronunciation (given that children songs tend to teach that.) If all you have is a hammer, everything is going to kinda like oh my god look like a nail cuz you know your like kinda have a hammer with a synthezizer cuz they are like the bomb lol.
It's not just websites. I don't know what the fascination is with scripting languages on the Linux platform or with FOSS in general, but it results in slow programs with flaky UIs.
Slow programs with flaky UIs can be obtained with any languages - just a matter of looking at the graphical C/C++ applications written in the 90s will show that this is true. The reasons behind whether an application runs well enough are varied and complex and cannot be pigeonholed into simple "it's the language" explanations. There are architectural issues that many people, scripting languages or not, do not take into account which makes systems flop.
I like to use refurbished/recycled machines; which means that I'll have an old P4, 512M RAM and a slow bus.
What kind of applications, how many users and what type of usage patterns are we talking about when referring to this type of platform? What type of application/system architecture are we talking about here?
Many times, applications written in a scripting language, whether it be Perl, Python, PHP, or whatever, will hang often and then start working. I can always tell.
Can you quantify that statement? I've seen applications written in Java or C/C++ doing the same. Any software engineer worth his salt knows that erratic/subpar performance behavior is not just a function of programming language.
That's why I knew Open Office was written in something like C when others on the Net were stating it was written in some such interpreted language.
So that's how you knew it was written in C? By eye-balling its performance? I would have thought that looking at the developers' documentation and source code would have been a much more viable way to measure it.
Anecdotes as form of evidence win again.
... plus a person willing to put "Assembly" in the resumes should be aware that it implies dexterity with binary arithmetic, bitwise ops, 2-s complements and all of that good shit.
Do you hire people who need to know obscure bits of x86 asm often, or is this just a way of catching people who exaggerate on their CVs?
Probably the later, which is completely legit. It could be a bit uncalled for if the position the interview is for is, say, for developing web pages. But still, with something put on the resume, you take it (or put it) at risk. It would be very questionable, however, if a person is solely dismissed for passing a trivia, specially if it is not related to the job at hand (not that I'm accusing RabidOverYou of doing that, just sayin'...)
If you put something on your resume, you better be able to back it up technically in an interview. Or perhaps be a bit more careful and explicitly quantify what you know. .ie. expertise in MASM , or familiarity with X86 Assembly (TASM). Just saying "x86 Assembly" without quantifying the exposure and without explicitly stating the assembler/syntax, that could possibly open a can of worms.
We all taylor (or should taylor) our resumes (with truth facts, obviously) for specific job openings. What is always important is to be truthful (.ie. you "know" assembler), in a manner that is accurate and that does not come as a misrepresentation (you know it but it's been a long time back in school? Put in your "interests" or "hobbies" section, and not among your main skills.)
but Obama's policies in general perfectly mirrored those of Chavez.
In general? Not even close dude. Tell me what policies "in general" mirror those of Chavez? Which ones and how?
Once the government starts taking from one person to give to another, that is socialist, even if it doesn't run any part of the economy.
In that case, pretty much all forms of government in human history (including tribal ones) are of a socialist nature... even absolute monarchies (specially absolute monarchies.)
It is also ridiculous to that a government is socialist even (as you put it) it doesn't run any part of the economy considering that the essence of socialist is of being a class of economic theories of human organization (with Marxism being the bitter extreme case for attempting to explain all human aspects, even psychological and behavioral ones, in economic terms.)
Your statement is a generalization on the nature of governments, a generalization based on absolutes. You are simply making up a new definition of what a socialist government is just to give credence to your opinion. It is not a valid logical argument.
A government, by its most basic functions, will take something from someone and give it to someone else. Taxes, they take your taxes and give it to someone else in many ways, in infrastructure, in support for people under the poverty line, in the form of subsidized student loans and federal grants, etc, etc, etc.
If that's what a socialist government is, then hell, the US has been ruled a socialist government for a very long time.
I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
I know the countries you speak of, and if you look at policies passed / proposed in the past year, you'll find that Obama has emulated them wonderfully. Just because Obama knows he can't change the entire government overnight doesn't mean he doesn't WANT to.
Having lived (and suffered) myself at one point in my life under a real hard leftist yoke, I gotta say this: Nope. Not even closed.
All the policies he's been trying to push are remarkably mild (more of a pragmatic mid-center social-democrat nature) compared to an actual "hard left" which is what the anonymous OP I replied to attempted to imply.
I have issues with his "spread the wealth" speeches (specially when they are not coupled with a "and by the way, we also have to share responsibilities" part.) I have a problem with trying to increase taxes to the wealth-and-work-generating people, corporations and enterprenaurs, a sector of the population whose tax contributions to the public coffers are disproportionately larger than their usage of public infrastructure or their size % relative to the population of the entire country.
That kind of thing is not necessarily conductive to the promotion of entities capable of producing jobs and generate wealth.
But that hardly qualifies as a leftist policy, and it's more of a different take of the role of government and tax distribution in a capitalist system. You might need to brush up on what leftism and socialism actually entails.
On a side note: I do agree, whoever with his health care plans, or at least with a need for reform. What we have now is not workable.
I know what policies he's passing, but let's play devil's advocate. Please pray tell which policies he's passing that are emulating left policies in those countries very well.
Good God, folks, he graded out as the most leftist Senator, by far.
Why the hell is anyone surprised that he's governed from the hard left?
As a republican who voted for McCain, I gotta tell you, stop that stupid shit. Who graded him out, creationists? I don't like some of his policies (fuck I didn't even voted for him), but he's far from being a leftist.
In fact, you have no idea of what a "hard left" is. People like you whorify what it means to be to left or to the right, to the point that those labels become meaningless. They become more and more like elementary school taunting name tagging than actual classifications of ideology and policy. I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
I really have to wonder what metric they use for deciding whether or not news is important. I stubbed my toe today, is that important?
The president of Monaco (.7 square miles) tried to push his/her agenda onto Canada, is that important?
Man, your education is showing. There is no president of Monaco. I know that little detail is unimportant to the argument at hand, but come *the fucking* on!
Anyways, taking your comic hypothetical scenario, it could be, depending on the agenda, which might affect, I dunno, banking or investors who own assets in your country, or what not. If you are in the habit of taking news superficially, in particular international news, with nothing more than country size, population or distance from your TiVo and super-sized McDonalds combo, of course you will be tempted to ask such a silly question (who decides what's important).
But that's a function of you, not the news. The importance of a piece of news is not a function of your perception, or anyone. It is important or it is not.
You can't measure the importance of news by their (apparent) immediate impact on your life or your impression of how important and impervious your country is to external events originating from a seemingly unimportant (and perhaps backward-looking) place in the world... like Afghanistan in 1991.
Remember that time, when no one gave a shit, when many retarded animals used to say Afgha-what-how-the-fuck-you-call that shit? That "Arab (or whatever)" place where people where towels on their heads and ride camels. Whatever, I'm so like whatever! Why should I care? Fucking SuperBowl, that's important, lemme watch Chuck Norris kick some ass, we are awesome!!!!. Remember that time?
Turn the clock to 1994 for another example... being aware of the Rwandan Genocide over following the O.J. Simpson shitfest would seem to have been a very important news to watch and be aware off, even for someone living in a little cow town in the middle of nowhere. Not because it might have a direct impact, but at least showing you have something resembling a moral compass.
But that's just me... plus the media is incredibly guilty at that:
http://www.journalismethics.ca/interviews/media_failure_in_Rwanda.htm
All in all, a piece of news does not have to have an immediate, tangible and direct impact in your life, your town or your country. Gross violation of human rights, international news, science news, global and regional politics, global/regional/even local historic events, those are important news. The mark of the uneducated is that he will find those boring and "non-important" compare to watching "American Idol", some dude dancing on his head on MTV or "Real Shallow Stupid Whores of Orange County."
The idea that you need to have someone decide which news are important or not is stupid. There are important news, and there are non-important news.
The perception of their importance is a function of the audience's intelligence, education, and to a degree, their moral ability to give a shit about things. Important news are important news, independently of whether people can understand their importance.
Let's see. Web browsing, sure though lacking Flash is an issue. Lot of Flash sites these days. Not saying it is a good thing, but it is what it is. Book reading, not so much. For one, the battery life is fairly short compared to most readers. With a Kindle or a Nook, you are talking weeks of battery life, not hours. LCDs also aren't as nice as eink (or real paper) for long periods of reading. Plus you aren't going to get good outdoor performance. You need a reflective screen for that, there's no way you can crank the brightness enough on an emissive screen and keep the battery life useful.
Watching movies? Maybe, but of course Flash is how one watches movies online that is right out. There's also the question of how you get non-online movies to it, doesn't appear to have USB or SD card the like so you have to transfer everything wirelessly from your desktop and then save them on the small internal memory.
I dunno, but I would find one of these things to be extremely useful for reading indoors/at night when plugged to an outlet. I have a ton of reading/listening media, PDFs and powerpoint doc$s that *I must read* as part of my work and current studies, and which I can't use on my kindle.
Having one of these would be extremely useful, but I won't buy since I've already invested on my kindle. Perhaps next year when the prices drop. I'm sure there will be better versions of this device, but using an *obsolete* one (obsolete by then) would be fine for me.
There are uses for this thing, and obviously there are usage patterns for which you'll be better served with a netbook or a full-blown laptop. There is no such thing as a homogeneous customer base when it comes to electronic devices.
Well, there you go then. If you work on something that doesn't require massive amounts of horsepower, you could just have your own very portable computer to take wherever you want to go.
Yes, a netbook will be cheaper, more durable, more powerful, etc. But there's a lot of appeal to a flat unit you can use like a clipboard while resting back in your favorite lounge chair or sitting up in bed.
There will be a market for this. I probably won't be part of it, but mostly on price and lack of flexibility.
Exaaactly. This is not a product for a customer base made out of power computer/laptop video-streaming users. It could perfectly appeal, however, to a mass of netbook users who only care about checking e-mails, sending/storing pictures (pretty much the standard user profile in, say, Japan). Reading books and googling things out on it, that's another plus.
I can see a lot of netbook users wanting to get one of these. It would have been perfect for my wife (for whom I got a netbook and loves it), except that with a one-year old baby this iPad thing would be a lot more fragile than the netbook she already has.
The problem with a lot of /. posters (or people in general) is that they equate themselves with *what they think* is the average customer on *what they think* is an homogeneous computing market. If we really pay attention, this is not even close to market reality.
Isn't this just a big expensive iPod touch now?
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I was expecting the thing to have a different take on ebook readers. I'll stick to a kindle/nook with its eink and the smaller profile..
I'd actually go for an iPad to tell you the truth. I have a kindle and I like it... for what it is. But I have a ton of PDFs and videocasts (all work-related) that I can't use on my kindle. All that stuff I have to carry on burned DVDs and thumb drives. Having them, and watching them in one of these thingies would be so convenient.
Considering that I paid over $300 for my kindle when it came out, I think this is a well-priced gadget... for what it is. Whether I can afford to for almost $500 right now for one of them, though, that's another thing :)
So, you get exactly what was represented to you, no more and no less. That's what you ought to expect in any arm's-length, contractual agreement. Anything else is irrational.
If you wanted a specific background for the development team and not just the architect, that should have been specified in the agreement.
Nope. That doesn't work that way. Your analogy would be like you contracting a licensed architect and a team of engineers to give you a proper design, project plan and cost estimation of a suspension bridge, and then have the construction company execute them all with substandard materials and unlicensed technicians and subcontractors without any oversight as to the quality of execution.
When a software consulting company presents you with a solid and sound project plan and architecture devised by a top-notch architect, that architecture is a design contract for an implementation that follows it.
It should be said that in all those instances I've mentioned, the contracts with the consulting companies explicitly stated the type and seniority expected of developers, coding conventions, usage of source control and many other things.
However, unlike civil engineering contracts, software contracts are usually impossible to enforce for practical reasons (specially when development is being performed half-way across the planet.)
First you say
"I've found CompTIA certs a useful part of my portfolio of credentials"
then you say
"Well, I don't give a great God damn how useful my certs are on my job"
Of course, that bit of mental contortionism makes perfect sense to you, but you also think CompTIA certs aren't worthless...
He's saying the later as he's been pushed by people who insult his credentials for no valid reason (by many who post and nit-pick anonymously without providing any evidence of their own credentials.)
As of yet, all the quasi-evidence some posters present here regarding the uselessness of these certs are just mixtures of e-insults combined with personal anecdotes of running into mediocre people.
Which just about proves my point in it's entirety.
"not to be a dick..."
TY
I always get a laugh at how crazy and defensive you get when you're obviously and irrefutably wrong and shown so,like you were here.
He does have a point man. You are insulting his skills by calling his "computer G.E.D" and by ridiculing his justified defensiveness.
He is still not shown to be wrong in any manner that could be construed as obvious or irrefutable. His question remains unanswered: where is the evidence? I personally and professionally do not think CompTIA certs are necessarily a joke, nor that people who possess them have no significant skills whatsoever.
I have a B.S. in Computer Science, pursued a MS up to my thesis, and currently pursuing a MS in Comp.Eng. I have 15 years of software development experience, both on the commercial and defense sectors, ranging from SysAdmin to programmer to soft. engineer, from developing back-end e-commerce sites to implementations of network protocols to grad research. That certainly gives me a proven insight when assessing the value proposition of certain types of certificates.
Is one CompTia cert a joke? Depends on the individual. Likewise I can say based on professional experience that a B.S. degree (or even a M.S. degree) can be a joke at the hands of a mediocre individual.
On the other hand, when you meet a technician that has been working on the field for years and has a stack of certs like the ones some e-start wannabes like to laugh at, chances are that person knows his shit inside out (as opposed to many compsci dilettantes who have no clue how little they know.)
If there is objective and measurable evidence that indeed we can unequivocally generalize and dismiss people with these type of certs (read "objective and measurable evidence" not feel-good dick-waging), then let's hear it. On another note, I do not see what the problem is with certs having an expiration date. In a technology field, certs should be hold for re-examination and renewal (or they should be versioned like the java certs.)
last i checked, Engineering wasn't considered IT.
Well, most people can't tell the difference between EE, CS/Soft. Engineering or IT Computing. We are all IT, the "tech guys" you know?
See, many of us during the dot-com boom-boom (and many who graduate now) came to the profession thinking big bucks. The reality is that a $50k salary (or even a $40K salary) is a decent salary for a single person ... if you live frugally (unless you live in an expensive area like NY). Living frugally and with financial responsibility appreciating a $50k salary is a far better life lesson than just graduating and getting $60-$70k just because. Many of us in the software industry lost touch with respect to reasonable proportions of salary as a function of our work functions.
That is the worst legacy of the dot-com era.
Is Programming a Lucrative Profession?
No, it is not. And it shouldn't be just because it's "programming"
There is a big difference between modifying JSP/ASP/PHP pages vs low-level programming or programming and architecting highly available e-commerce back ends. There is a big difference between IT support calls where you try to help users how to press the any key vs being a Tier III support Sysadmin/Network guy who knows that kind of shit inside out.
Just as software-related jobs run the spectrum from mundane to highly complex, so the salaries that go with them. That is reality. We got to "thanks" the dot-com brainfartopocalypse and the washing down of undergraduate CS curriculum that we still get new graduates that think they'll make as much as the under qualified prima-donas of the late 90's even if don't know the difference between a pointer and a coconut or don't know the difference between a Vector from an ArrayList in Java or who think C# is the same as C++ or who have never written anything more than a "hello world" program in assembler.
You can tell the difference between the graduate who just went through the bare minimum course curriculum and the one who took far more programming courses and who tried to work at the college labs or tried to get internships somewhere (anywhere!) or who at the very least tried to run Linux at home and played with as many programming classes as possible and who found big-O notation fascinating.
What type of job should each of these two should get? And what salaries should they get? There are people who graduate from MIS and CS now who should have never been able to graduate 10-15 years ago. But they graduate. Schools let them as a response of what the industry need.
And what the IT industry now needs is a gamut of software professionals that can do a variety of jobs, from the mundane to the holy-crap-this-is-hard(10+1)! With more of the former than the later. The drop in salaries is just a reflection of that.
If programmers want more moolah, then they should try to tackle harder jobs that warrant better salaries. That requires specialization of skills: be it embedded programming or system-level programming or becoming a JEE specialist/architect who knows how to write solid back-end systems, or becoming a systems engineer, or a software architect, or work your way to become a team lead, or become a solid gold SysAdmin/DBA, etc, etc.
Being a "computer guy" stopped being a cash cow a long time ago. It can provide for a decent living (just like any other well-done trade or profession). But for those who go to school and graduate thinking they should deserve $70 just because their diplomas read "Computer" somewhere, nope. Graduate and become an specialist that can tackle hard problems. Then earn it. The reality is that salaries are going down, and that's a justified reflection on the fact that the software industry is inundated with mediocre programmers.
Not that I disagree entirely that it may be more difficult to manage someone in India, and I've certainly heard horror stories, but come on. These could all be applied to just about any remote contractor who isn't worth their salt. I have worked with/currently work with plenty of Indians who really knew/know their stuff.
I gotta side with cerberuss on this one. Yes, c'mon all of those can be applied to any remote consultant that is not worth his salt. However, from my experience working with remote teams (India, Brazil, within the US), there is something specific about the consulting industry in India that can really bit you in the ass harder than in other cases.
Now, just like you, I've worked with plenty of Indians who really knew their stuff. In fact, most of the remote projects I've worked that involved teams in India have had a high success ratio. But the few that have failed have done so far more miserably and catastrophically than with other teams on other countries.
This has given me a glimpse to a darker side of Indian offshore consulting, which I've actually talked a lot with several of my Indian colleagues who also agree on this: you can end up with a consulting firm that sells the idea of development guided by a a top-notch architect, and you swallow the tripe. And then the top-notch architect designs a system which looks solid, then he moves to another project. Then the consulting firm gets a whole bunch of sophomore kids from college find ways to replicate GOTO statements in Java to do the implementation. My first encounter with such practices from such a consulting team was when I was working together with an Indian colleague of mine (a really good software developer) in trying to make sense out of the mess. When we looked at the code and the original design, all we could do was say "WTF?".
That's an experience I've had to repeat several times. It's a reality, and it has nothing to do with dissing people from X or Y country. It's an unfortunate reality that cannot be denied or politically correctly sugar coat it.