That is a very good idea! But as a person who travels using the Stockholm public transport every day I must add that the problem is far bigger than just "planka.nu". It is effectively free to use the public transport in Stockholm. I see at least five different ways people avoid paying. 1. Planka.nu who simply says that they are not going to pay and know that the lonely conductor (on the trams) is not going to do anything. 2. Middle eastern immigrants in groups that just says fuck off! 3. Swedes that comes with strange excuses like "oh, i forgot but I am just going one station". 4. Nervous Swedes that jumps in and out of the tram depending on where the conductor is. 5. Immigrants who just shake their head when the ticket checker arrives.
I have traveled with the tram to and from work in Stockholm for almost three years now and I have so far yet to see the first fine handed out. The problem with this is that people like me who pay properly are such fucking losers. I assume that the economic reality will catch up with this sooner or later.
Sweden is full of idiots like this. The worst organization is not "planka.nu" but "allt åt alla" (everything to everyone). They think that all the tax money collected should be handed out to anyone who needs money. It is obvious that they aim to receive money and have no ambition to contribute. Basically a modern version of a cargo cult
The great Swedish welfare state is dead. We do not have a working military anymore which makes even the Estonian president to complain. The healthcare is the same. It exists but not for everyone no matter how much tax you pay. Sweden has the fewest hospital beds per 1000 people in Europe. A 27 year old Swede can look forward to 40% of the salary as a pension. A Greek 120%. The School is falling in the PISA statistics. All can be found in different OECD reports.
The quick answer is quit as soon as possible. This would make the system not work especially well. The problem is that this approach is not taken by everyone so the real answer is to assess what is happening and maybe stay if there is a future for you. If there are good motivations for the bad review and a reward and recognition if you improve plus a fair and honest system then it might work.
If you realize that the reviews are based on other things than your performance and you are screwed no matter what you do then the only thing you can do is leave and leave early. This is because in a system like at Microsoft there is a big value in a person who accepts a bad review and still stays.
I used to work for Microsoft and my biggest regret is that I did not quit much much earlier.
My main question to you Google people is: does Google force managers to create 20%, 70% and 10% buckets like at Microsoft? Are the managers forced to single out "worst performers" even if everyone is performing well?
So how do these "superstars just about anywhere else" feel and react when they are given on paper that they are the worst performers at the place they are at? Most people do not like it and I am pretty certain that the people at Google feel the same.
Engineers at Microsoft also participate in perf reviews through the feedback system. This is largely ignored by managers and I assume that it is exactly the same at Google. Mainly because I know that Google is infested with former Microsoft employees which have taken Microsoft practices with them.
Stack ranking is probably even more destructive at Google where you have four reviews per year. Google has a very tough interview process to get employed and I have gone through it. If a person passes that process and then gets it on paper that he sucks then you are doing damage to that very good employee. What is the purpose of that?
I think your parable is very apt. I worked for Microsoft for five years and for three of those I was put in the 10% bucket. The worst was not to be singled out as the poorest employee. The worst was not that it was totally unfair, fundamentally wrong and without any proper motivation. The worst was the bullying that ensued. The managers had nothing that they could motivate it with, since there was nothing wrong with my performance, so they reached for every straw that they could find to try to motivate why I was the bottom performer. Besides pinning other peoples mistakes on me the most popular blame was to give me a really hard time when I did my job really well. Since I worked as a tester (SDET) this was really easy. Every time I found a really good bug (you know, the ones that companies like Google now give out cash rewards for) I got blamed for finding it too late and that it fundamentally was my fault that the bug was there in the first place.
The absolutely biggest regret I have is hanging in there for so long. It is so utterly destructive on your motivation, confidence, happiness and competence to twice per year getting it on paper that you suck and being bullied in between. You can ignore it for a while but in the end it gets you deeper than you could imagine.
One thing that is a bit surprising is that Google evaluate its employees four times per year compared to Microsoft's two. I wonder what consequences that will have...
Good to see at least one tester being promoted to senior. The first one for me and I worked there for 5 years.
One thing I notice is bullet 2 regarding impact. Sure, giving feedback regarding the design and features is part of a testers job but what I found most bizarre was that this was what counted most at review time. If you design a feature or actually code parts of the product (which I ended up doing) then you are doing what a developer or PM should do and that is highly valued. If you for example do a lot of performance testing and find and fix a lot of performance issues then it is not really counted as impacting the product. It is really a bizarre epiphany to realise that if you want to boost your career as a tester then you need to do the job of a PM or dev.
I am sad to see that my bullet 3 (testers do not have careers at Microsoft) still is at least partly valid. Microsoft should really do something about that. James Whittaker (I do not know if he "invented" exploratory testing or just advocated it) still have his blog left on MSDN and he says something regarding poor promotion prospects for testers at Microsoft in it. It will be a nice day for all testers at Microsoft when that blog entry is not true anymore.
Are you sure you put your answer in the right thread because I cannot really match your answers to my bullets.
In any way, most of my list is just a collection of my day to day experiences as a tester at Microsoft. There is really nothing to agree or disagree with. If you have much better experience working as a tester at a place where you got steady promotions, endless respect, a lot of appreciation, etc. then please share.
I have been working in the testing field for almost 20 years but after a 5 year stint at Microsoft I found it to be such a horrible experience that I will never work with testing ever again. There are numerous problems and here is a selection.
1. As a tester at Microsoft your main use is as a scape goat. If you find a big bug then it is all your fault. No matter when you found it, you should have found it earlier. It is a pretty wierd experience when you do your job properly and well and you still can be blamed for doing a bad job.
2. As a tester at Microsoft you really are a second class citizen. You are considered less competent and more stupid. You are also far less important than anyone else since what you do does not explicitly impact the product.
3. As a tester at Microsoft you do not have a career. It is pretty easy for a newbie to reach SDET2 but very few reach senior level. Where I used to work there was a 1:1 ratio between testers and devs but it was a 1:7 ratio between senior testers and senior devs.
4. When you point out the problem with testers not having careers it only results in you having to listen to the director of test lying to you for an hour or two regaring how they are aware of the problem and how more testers now are going to be promoted. The result that year was that 12 devs reached senior level but not a single tester reached senior level.
5. If you are good at your job people are going to hate you. Your job (among many other things) is to find bugs in the product and people really love having someone pointing out all the mistakes they make.
6. If you have bad luck (like me) then you might end up in an automation swamp where the devs repeatedly break your tests and you spend an enormous amount of time fixing all the breaks. This really murders your competence.
7. If you have really bad luck (like me) then you might find yourself with a test manager that has nothing but contempt for testers and their competence plus thinks it is really important for testers to do a lot of mundane manual testing.
8. Also, having tester in your CV is bad if you want to pursue a career in software development. It will make it harder for you to get a job as software developer.
Since it is just passwords to mail accounts I guess he has sniffed the unencrypted POP3 traffic. This is a script kiddy hack. He probably just played with some ARP poisioning tool in the right place and got lucky.
The outsourcing part is the one that also makes me think. I have been working for more than 15 years for a major telecom company and at the end of my employment one of our senior managers pointed out that nowadays our most valuable assets are our intangible assets, i.e. our source code and our IP rights. Since we are outsourcing a lot of our products to Wipro for maintenance I thought it might not be so smart since all Indian guys from Wipro I worked with rotated between jobs faster than Frog in a Blender on setting 6. When I pointed this out to my manager I got the answer that they indeed had big walls, compartments, etc. Riiiiiiiight, I will just get back to my cubicle, get my mug back from Wally, seduce Alice and buy foie gras for my dog.....
You realize that the point with my rant in the end is that the problems you mention are solved? I do not know the exact details but I doubt that the new garbage burning plants release a lot of toxins since it would be suicide in small European countries. (Well, in any country but European countries are more compact (i.e. more densly populated) than e.g. the US.) Regarding greenhouse gases it depends on what you burn. Is it some carbon dioxide neutral stuff or is it something fossile? In any way, unlike US, EU is committed to Kyoto so I cannot see how garbage burning can be allowed if it is globally warming bad.
Awww, I just found some links regarding garbage burning in Sweden but they are all in Swedish. (http://www.vattenfall.se/om_vattenfall/var_verksa mhet/forskning_och_utveckling/kretsloppsbranslen/a nlaggningar/block5/sopor.asp)
I might move to the US. I do not want to live on a frakkin landfill! Burn Burn Burn!
This is the US you are talking about. They do not even tell how much some coins are worth. I was pretty confused when I saw a dime. Hmm, where are the digits telling me how much it is? A quarter I can guess but a dime? Also, the US has a long way to go besides their currency. I think they should introduce something called "the lever" on doors. I can handle knobs just fine but won't someone think of the chil... handicapped. Or people carrying grocery bags conviniently lacking any kind of handles. Yeah, grocery bags with handles, they should introduce that as well. And a hose with a showerhead instead of those freaking wall mounted showerheads. And they should ban some stuff as well. To have the break light and direction indicator light (whatever it is called in English) as the same should be banned. One is red and the other one orange. Nothing else. And those lousy top fed washing mashines. I thought they disappeared together with the dodo but no, in the US they got them. Ban! They should also ban the practice of making the front door out of papier mache. I have always thought that the police movies where you see some guy kicking in a door was just fake but when it all got very clear when I saw a house in the US for the first time. They are pretty rickety. And finally, news flash for US! No modern country is using land fills anymore. We burn the stuff and get energy! And please, some besserwisser slashdottie, tell me that it is not true that in the US you build houses on top of land fills!
Economic incentives only work if you give people a choice. In the example I mentioned people does not have a choice. I guess I missed to mention that in Sweden you pay for the size of your garbage bin and also the frequency it is emptied. If you fill it with plastic or no plastic whatsoever does not affect the price.
The thing is that if they wanted to give people a choice they would have put the tax on the price of the items wrapped in plastic and also plastic bags in the supermarket. Then people can easily avoid buying things since they see that they are more expensive but the government does not want people to have a choice because then people could avoid paying this tax.
Let me give you an example of how this science is used in Sweden. The green party in Sweden succeeded in adding a tax for burning plastic. (Unlike US we do not bury our trash, we burn it) The companies which burn trash ofcourse just add this tax to the price for displosal of garbage. The result is that we burn just as much plastic as before but the price is higher for the consumer who does not have any means to avoid this tax. The social democrats which was in power of course listened to the green party regarding adding the tax but then ignored their suggestion that the increased tax income should be used to improve public transport. So, at least in leftist Sweden the climate issue is just used as an excuse to rise taxes.
So I guess that the difference regarding left and right way of dealing with global warming can be summed up as : Left - Rise taxes and ignore the problem. Right - Just ignore the problem.
I agree with you. All this climate crap is just one big chicken little.
In the 70s everyone was screaming "OMG OMG The oil is going to run out!!!"
In the 80s everyone was screaming "OMG OMG Nuclear power is really dangerous and we will have china syndroms and waste problems!!!"
In the 90s everyone was screaming "OMG OMG A big asteroid might hit us and wipe out all life!!!"
And now 2006. "OMG OMG Climate change and it is all our fault!!!"
Are they wrong? Not really I would guess. Did the future turn out as bad as the chicken littles screamed? Nope! Does it keep me awake at night? No! My personal guess is that this planet is good for another couple of generations of stupid humans. (not that the/. crowd will contribute much to that though...;-)
I have worked in the telecom industry for 14 years and I have still to see a successful outsourcing project, i.e. a project where it is obvious that money have been saved. Outsourcing has several big costs. First it is the move itself. Moving an entire product costs a lot of money and at the same time you lose a lot of knowledge and competence. If the move fails then you lose even more by the failure and the succesive move. I have observerved this e.g. when a major company moved manufacturing of a product from Sweden to Scotland. The scots sucked so bad that a very silent move was made to Hungary. I have also seen other functions move bigtime to other parts of Europe just to silently move back since it just did not work. Another case is where you move a product made out of very expensive components to a low salary country. If the salary cost is less than 10% of the product it is debatable if a move really makes sense. It would make sense to redesign the product with cheaper components but not doing a move since the cost of the move might not be earned back in many many years. Another thing that affects the efficency of any development is proximity. It is more efficient if people sit close to eachother. A distributed project over timezones, languages and cultures has a lot of problems and overhead.
I think this is a job for mythbusters. Start some development projects and outsource some them to India, China or Pakistan (or better, a project of mixed Indians and Pakistanis!) and see how much money you save and how much grief your projectmanagers get. I honestly think that outsourcing simply does not work and is just a big myth because no one has ever calculated properly how much it costs.
I have been working as both a FTE and contractor at the same huge company and can fully understand why full time employees do not like contractors. The main reason is that contractors are expensive and longtime contractors are therefore a direct threat to my employment and the economy of the department I work at. I currently work with two contractors and they cost around 2.5 times more than me. One of them has been with us for almost two years now so his cost is as much as if my employer would have payed five years salary to me.
The second reason that contractors are bad and should be treated as lepers is that they have their obvious own agenda. They make a shit load of money as long as they have an assignment so their primary goal is to keep it as long as possible. Give a contractor a piece of code and he will instantly scream that it needs to be rewritten from scratch.
The third reason why contractors annoy employees is because they get far more respect from management. When I was a contractor I was shocked by the respect management had for my competence. I was also quite pleased when they offered me a salary that was more than twice what I had when I quit and became a contractor two years earlier. I am now back as a despised emplyee but with a reasonable salary.
I totally agree with you but I think your aim is a bit off. I do not see the engineers from India as competitors. I see it as my managers just gives my job away to anyone they feel like. If my manager does not value my competence there is nothing I can do about it.
The company I work for outsource projects to Wipro and TCS. The thing that is strange is that any person they send is automatically accepted as an engineer without any tests or screening what so ever. Ofcourse this is now being abused and I am now seeing 24 year old graduates arriving into mission critical projects.
The problem is that management is seeing software development as hard as digging a ditch. You just give anyone (preferebly the cheapest one) a shovel and off he/she go. The thing that is most funny is that in the company I work for it is all based on a lie. My manager plus a senior manager I spoke to 2 days ago claims that I cost 4 times as much as a resource from India. This is not true. What they are comparing is my funny money internal cost with the real fee from Wipro or TCS. What I really cost is 1.5 times. (+ the cost for my office) Of the cost for my salary the Swedish government is taking 55% and when ever I buy something I pay around 25% sales tax. (Food is 12.5% and taxi/bus is 6%) so in the end I might earn LESS than my Indian counterpart.
I want to finish off my rant with a quote from a management book, Object Technology - A Manager's Guide. Page 11. I think this quote explaines quite well managements view on us software developers. "For most business people, polymorphism is so obvious that they have a hard time seeing what is so special about it"
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That is a very good idea! But as a person who travels using the Stockholm public transport every day I must add that the problem is far bigger than just "planka.nu". It is effectively free to use the public transport in Stockholm. I see at least five different ways people avoid paying. 1. Planka.nu who simply says that they are not going to pay and know that the lonely conductor (on the trams) is not going to do anything. 2. Middle eastern immigrants in groups that just says fuck off! 3. Swedes that comes with strange excuses like "oh, i forgot but I am just going one station". 4. Nervous Swedes that jumps in and out of the tram depending on where the conductor is. 5. Immigrants who just shake their head when the ticket checker arrives.
I have traveled with the tram to and from work in Stockholm for almost three years now and I have so far yet to see the first fine handed out. The problem with this is that people like me who pay properly are such fucking losers. I assume that the economic reality will catch up with this sooner or later.
Sweden is full of idiots like this. The worst organization is not "planka.nu" but "allt åt alla" (everything to everyone). They think that all the tax money collected should be handed out to anyone who needs money. It is obvious that they aim to receive money and have no ambition to contribute. Basically a modern version of a cargo cult
The great Swedish welfare state is dead. We do not have a working military anymore which makes even the Estonian president to complain. The healthcare is the same. It exists but not for everyone no matter how much tax you pay. Sweden has the fewest hospital beds per 1000 people in Europe. A 27 year old Swede can look forward to 40% of the salary as a pension. A Greek 120%. The School is falling in the PISA statistics. All can be found in different OECD reports.
I am soon emigrating. I am not paying anymore.
The quick answer is quit as soon as possible. This would make the system not work especially well. The problem is that this approach is not taken by everyone so the real answer is to assess what is happening and maybe stay if there is a future for you. If there are good motivations for the bad review and a reward and recognition if you improve plus a fair and honest system then it might work.
If you realize that the reviews are based on other things than your performance and you are screwed no matter what you do then the only thing you can do is leave and leave early. This is because in a system like at Microsoft there is a big value in a person who accepts a bad review and still stays.
I used to work for Microsoft and my biggest regret is that I did not quit much much earlier.
My main question to you Google people is: does Google force managers to create 20%, 70% and 10% buckets like at Microsoft? Are the managers forced to single out "worst performers" even if everyone is performing well?
So how do these "superstars just about anywhere else" feel and react when they are given on paper that they are the worst performers at the place they are at? Most people do not like it and I am pretty certain that the people at Google feel the same.
Engineers at Microsoft also participate in perf reviews through the feedback system. This is largely ignored by managers and I assume that it is exactly the same at Google. Mainly because I know that Google is infested with former Microsoft employees which have taken Microsoft practices with them.
Stack ranking is probably even more destructive at Google where you have four reviews per year. Google has a very tough interview process to get employed and I have gone through it. If a person passes that process and then gets it on paper that he sucks then you are doing damage to that very good employee. What is the purpose of that?
I think your parable is very apt. I worked for Microsoft for five years and for three of those I was put in the 10% bucket. The worst was not to be singled out as the poorest employee. The worst was not that it was totally unfair, fundamentally wrong and without any proper motivation. The worst was the bullying that ensued. The managers had nothing that they could motivate it with, since there was nothing wrong with my performance, so they reached for every straw that they could find to try to motivate why I was the bottom performer. Besides pinning other peoples mistakes on me the most popular blame was to give me a really hard time when I did my job really well. Since I worked as a tester (SDET) this was really easy. Every time I found a really good bug (you know, the ones that companies like Google now give out cash rewards for) I got blamed for finding it too late and that it fundamentally was my fault that the bug was there in the first place.
The absolutely biggest regret I have is hanging in there for so long. It is so utterly destructive on your motivation, confidence, happiness and competence to twice per year getting it on paper that you suck and being bullied in between. You can ignore it for a while but in the end it gets you deeper than you could imagine.
One thing that is a bit surprising is that Google evaluate its employees four times per year compared to Microsoft's two. I wonder what consequences that will have...
Good to see at least one tester being promoted to senior. The first one for me and I worked there for 5 years.
One thing I notice is bullet 2 regarding impact. Sure, giving feedback regarding the design and features is part of a testers job but what I found most bizarre was that this was what counted most at review time. If you design a feature or actually code parts of the product (which I ended up doing) then you are doing what a developer or PM should do and that is highly valued. If you for example do a lot of performance testing and find and fix a lot of performance issues then it is not really counted as impacting the product. It is really a bizarre epiphany to realise that if you want to boost your career as a tester then you need to do the job of a PM or dev.
I am sad to see that my bullet 3 (testers do not have careers at Microsoft) still is at least partly valid. Microsoft should really do something about that. James Whittaker (I do not know if he "invented" exploratory testing or just advocated it) still have his blog left on MSDN and he says something regarding poor promotion prospects for testers at Microsoft in it. It will be a nice day for all testers at Microsoft when that blog entry is not true anymore.
Are you sure you put your answer in the right thread because I cannot really match your answers to my bullets.
In any way, most of my list is just a collection of my day to day experiences as a tester at Microsoft. There is really nothing to agree or disagree with. If you have much better experience working as a tester at a place where you got steady promotions, endless respect, a lot of appreciation, etc. then please share.
I have been working in the testing field for almost 20 years but after a 5 year stint at Microsoft I found it to be such a horrible experience that I will never work with testing ever again. There are numerous problems and here is a selection.
1. As a tester at Microsoft your main use is as a scape goat. If you find a big bug then it is all your fault. No matter when you found it, you should have found it earlier. It is a pretty wierd experience when you do your job properly and well and you still can be blamed for doing a bad job.
2. As a tester at Microsoft you really are a second class citizen. You are considered less competent and more stupid. You are also far less important than anyone else since what you do does not explicitly impact the product.
3. As a tester at Microsoft you do not have a career. It is pretty easy for a newbie to reach SDET2 but very few reach senior level. Where I used to work there was a 1:1 ratio between testers and devs but it was a 1:7 ratio between senior testers and senior devs.
4. When you point out the problem with testers not having careers it only results in you having to listen to the director of test lying to you for an hour or two regaring how they are aware of the problem and how more testers now are going to be promoted. The result that year was that 12 devs reached senior level but not a single tester reached senior level.
5. If you are good at your job people are going to hate you. Your job (among many other things) is to find bugs in the product and people really love having someone pointing out all the mistakes they make.
6. If you have bad luck (like me) then you might end up in an automation swamp where the devs repeatedly break your tests and you spend an enormous amount of time fixing all the breaks. This really murders your competence.
7. If you have really bad luck (like me) then you might find yourself with a test manager that has nothing but contempt for testers and their competence plus thinks it is really important for testers to do a lot of mundane manual testing.
8. Also, having tester in your CV is bad if you want to pursue a career in software development. It will make it harder for you to get a job as software developer.
Since it is just passwords to mail accounts I guess he has sniffed the unencrypted POP3 traffic. This is a script kiddy hack. He probably just played with some ARP poisioning tool in the right place and got lucky.
The outsourcing part is the one that also makes me think. I have been working for more than 15 years for a major telecom company and at the end of my employment one of our senior managers pointed out that nowadays our most valuable assets are our intangible assets, i.e. our source code and our IP rights. Since we are outsourcing a lot of our products to Wipro for maintenance I thought it might not be so smart since all Indian guys from Wipro I worked with rotated between jobs faster than Frog in a Blender on setting 6. When I pointed this out to my manager I got the answer that they indeed had big walls, compartments, etc. Riiiiiiiight, I will just get back to my cubicle, get my mug back from Wally, seduce Alice and buy foie gras for my dog.....
...how is this dangerous to me?
I do not care what causes it. I do not care about all the statistics. I just care about me!
You realize that the point with my rant in the end is that the problems you mention are solved? I do not know the exact details but I doubt that the new garbage burning plants release a lot of toxins since it would be suicide in small European countries. (Well, in any country but European countries are more compact (i.e. more densly populated) than e.g. the US.) Regarding greenhouse gases it depends on what you burn. Is it some carbon dioxide neutral stuff or is it something fossile? In any way, unlike US, EU is committed to Kyoto so I cannot see how garbage burning can be allowed if it is globally warming bad.
a mhet/forskning_och_utveckling/kretsloppsbranslen/a nlaggningar/block5/sopor.asp)
Awww, I just found some links regarding garbage burning in Sweden but they are all in Swedish. (http://www.vattenfall.se/om_vattenfall/var_verks
I might move to the US. I do not want to live on a frakkin landfill! Burn Burn Burn!
This is the US you are talking about. They do not even tell how much some coins are worth. I was pretty confused when I saw a dime. Hmm, where are the digits telling me how much it is? A quarter I can guess but a dime?
Also, the US has a long way to go besides their currency. I think they should introduce something called "the lever" on doors. I can handle knobs just fine but won't someone think of the chil... handicapped. Or people carrying grocery bags conviniently lacking any kind of handles. Yeah, grocery bags with handles, they should introduce that as well. And a hose with a showerhead instead of those freaking wall mounted showerheads. And they should ban some stuff as well. To have the break light and direction indicator light (whatever it is called in English) as the same should be banned. One is red and the other one orange. Nothing else. And those lousy top fed washing mashines. I thought they disappeared together with the dodo but no, in the US they got them. Ban! They should also ban the practice of making the front door out of papier mache. I have always thought that the police movies where you see some guy kicking in a door was just fake but when it all got very clear when I saw a house in the US for the first time. They are pretty rickety.
And finally, news flash for US! No modern country is using land fills anymore. We burn the stuff and get energy! And please, some besserwisser slashdottie, tell me that it is not true that in the US you build houses on top of land fills!
Economic incentives only work if you give people a choice. In the example I mentioned people does not have a choice. I guess I missed to mention that in Sweden you pay for the size of your garbage bin and also the frequency it is emptied. If you fill it with plastic or no plastic whatsoever does not affect the price.
The thing is that if they wanted to give people a choice they would have put the tax on the price of the items wrapped in plastic and also plastic bags in the supermarket. Then people can easily avoid buying things since they see that they are more expensive but the government does not want people to have a choice because then people could avoid paying this tax.
Let me give you an example of how this science is used in Sweden. The green party in Sweden succeeded in adding a tax for burning plastic. (Unlike US we do not bury our trash, we burn it) The companies which burn trash ofcourse just add this tax to the price for displosal of garbage. The result is that we burn just as much plastic as before but the price is higher for the consumer who does not have any means to avoid this tax. The social democrats which was in power of course listened to the green party regarding adding the tax but then ignored their suggestion that the increased tax income should be used to improve public transport. So, at least in leftist Sweden the climate issue is just used as an excuse to rise taxes.
So I guess that the difference regarding left and right way of dealing with global warming can be summed up as : Left - Rise taxes and ignore the problem. Right - Just ignore the problem.
I agree with you. All this climate crap is just one big chicken little. In the 70s everyone was screaming "OMG OMG The oil is going to run out!!!" In the 80s everyone was screaming "OMG OMG Nuclear power is really dangerous and we will have china syndroms and waste problems!!!" In the 90s everyone was screaming "OMG OMG A big asteroid might hit us and wipe out all life!!!" And now 2006. "OMG OMG Climate change and it is all our fault!!!" Are they wrong? Not really I would guess. Did the future turn out as bad as the chicken littles screamed? Nope! Does it keep me awake at night? No! My personal guess is that this planet is good for another couple of generations of stupid humans. (not that the /. crowd will contribute much to that though... ;-)
I have worked in the telecom industry for 14 years and I have still to see a successful outsourcing project, i.e. a project where it is obvious that money have been saved. Outsourcing has several big costs. First it is the move itself. Moving an entire product costs a lot of money and at the same time you lose a lot of knowledge and competence. If the move fails then you lose even more by the failure and the succesive move. I have observerved this e.g. when a major company moved manufacturing of a product from Sweden to Scotland. The scots sucked so bad that a very silent move was made to Hungary. I have also seen other functions move bigtime to other parts of Europe just to silently move back since it just did not work.
Another case is where you move a product made out of very expensive components to a low salary country. If the salary cost is less than 10% of the product it is debatable if a move really makes sense. It would make sense to redesign the product with cheaper components but not doing a move since the cost of the move might not be earned back in many many years.
Another thing that affects the efficency of any development is proximity. It is more efficient if people sit close to eachother. A distributed project over timezones, languages and cultures has a lot of problems and overhead.
I think this is a job for mythbusters. Start some development projects and outsource some them to India, China or Pakistan (or better, a project of mixed Indians and Pakistanis!) and see how much money you save and how much grief your projectmanagers get. I honestly think that outsourcing simply does not work and is just a big myth because no one has ever calculated properly how much it costs.
I have been working as both a FTE and contractor at the same huge company and can fully understand why full time employees do not like contractors.
The main reason is that contractors are expensive and longtime contractors are therefore a direct threat to my employment and the economy of the department I work at. I currently work with two contractors and they cost around 2.5 times more than me. One of them has been with us for almost two years now so his cost is as much as if my employer would have payed five years salary to me.
The second reason that contractors are bad and should be treated as lepers is that they have their obvious own agenda. They make a shit load of money as long as they have an assignment so their primary goal is to keep it as long as possible. Give a contractor a piece of code and he will instantly scream that it needs to be rewritten from scratch.
The third reason why contractors annoy employees is because they get far more respect from management. When I was a contractor I was shocked by the respect management had for my competence. I was also quite pleased when they offered me a salary that was more than twice what I had when I quit and became a contractor two years earlier. I am now back as a despised emplyee but with a reasonable salary.
I totally agree with you but I think your aim is a bit off. I do not see the engineers from India as competitors. I see it as my managers just gives my job away to anyone they feel like. If my manager does not value my competence there is nothing I can do about it.
The company I work for outsource projects to Wipro and TCS. The thing that is strange is that any person they send is automatically accepted as an engineer without any tests or screening what so ever. Ofcourse this is now being abused and I am now seeing 24 year old graduates arriving into mission critical projects.
The problem is that management is seeing software development as hard as digging a ditch. You just give anyone (preferebly the cheapest one) a shovel and off he/she go. The thing that is most funny is that in the company I work for it is all based on a lie. My manager plus a senior manager I spoke to 2 days ago claims that I cost 4 times as much as a resource from India. This is not true. What they are comparing is my funny money internal cost with the real fee from Wipro or TCS. What I really cost is 1.5 times. (+ the cost for my office) Of the cost for my salary the Swedish government is taking 55% and when ever I buy something I pay around 25% sales tax. (Food is 12.5% and taxi/bus is 6%) so in the end I might earn LESS than my Indian counterpart.
I want to finish off my rant with a quote from a management book, Object Technology - A Manager's Guide. Page 11. I think this quote explaines quite well managements view on us software developers. "For most business people, polymorphism is so obvious that they have a hard time seeing what is so special about it"