Cringely: A tale of two H1-Bs.

Post #323,908 by Another Scott 4/1/10 10:00:01 PM Reply	Cringely: A tale of two H1-Bs. http://www.cringely....ale-of-two-h1-bs/ An interesting read. Several good comments, too. Cheers, Scott.
Post #323,911 by boxley 4/1/10 10:31:02 PM Reply	dunno, my take on it repetitive sysadmin jobs where you dont have to have a finger pushing in a pci card is well served by offshoring. qa and other testing cycles, well served by same. grunt programming where you issue cause and effect results in a "strict" well served by offshore where it fails is systemic glue integration of different products into a homogeneous system and firemen coders problem is the more of the same crowd cannot differentiate between the systems and either tend to push one way or the other to the detriment of both. Outsourcing 3rd world has a place but senior system engineers should direct such tasks not beancounters or PM's If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
Post #323,917 by drook 4/2/10 1:06:12 AM Reply	Several problems, but one big one Outsourcing 3rd world has a place but senior system engineers should direct such tasks not beancounters or PM's But we've outsourced all the entry-level grunt work. Where are the senior system engineers supposed to come from? -- Drew
Post #323,923 by boxley 4/2/10 8:32:05 AM Reply	not really senior sysadmins come from the noc, data center and interns If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
Post #323,934 by crazy 4/2/10 2:37:28 PM Reply	And those are not system architects Spend a few years on the application side, the profit side, fighting with the admins who see perfection as a reasonable goal, as well as the admin side, and you start to get a balance.
Post #323,921 by pwhysall 4/2/10 4:26:08 AM Reply	We tried outsourcing programming Didn't work. Complete disaster, in fact. I reckon you could make it work if the work being outsourced: (a) requires no domain knowledge (b) can be completely defined in a formal specification (c) requires no specialist knowledge or skills (d) doesn't have strict time constraints ...and, to be fair, that might constitute quite a lot of programming work for some companies. All four criteria were not met by what we tried to outsource, and the experiment fell flat on its arse.
Post #323,913 by jay 4/1/10 11:00:19 PM Reply	Re: Cringely: A tale of two H1-Bs. All engineers in all fields needed to be taught (but most were not) that the half-life of their education was Â maybe Â 10 years, often five. A lot of the problem is the flip side of that. Managers need to realize that experience is actually worth a lot and having the right keywords on your resume is not worth as much as people think. A good computer programmer can pickup a new language in a month by reading a book and experimenting. There will be a learning curve while they pickup the subtle points of the language, but an inexperienced programmer right out of school is going to take even longer to really get up to speed. Companies would rather spend months on an open ended quest to find the perfect candidate then train one themselves. The primary reasons for this is that Human Resources judge people by keywords because it's a lot easier then trying to measure real skill, training is a budget cost while lost opportunity isn't and managers tend to feel they can beat any problem by throwing more bodies at it. And that is all before actually getting into the issues of companies abusing H1-Bs to drive down salary. Jay
Post #323,933 by lincoln 4/2/10 2:35:07 PM Reply	Re: Cringely: A tale of two H1-Bs. Managers need to realize that experience is actually worth a lot and having the right keywords on your resume is not worth as much as people think. Ain't gonna happen in today's business environment. I've already been told by a former coworker turned recruiter that his firm shitcans any resume they receive from anybody over the age of 35. This week I had a recruiter contact me for a 1 year contract, no benefits, wanting 3 - 5 years experience, and they were willing to pay $50K - completely not giving a damn that a recent study of college graduates with NO experience and an IT degree are averaging salaries of $60K. A good computer programmer can pickup a new language in a month by reading a book and experimenting. I'm doing that now, and every recruiter I say that to reply that it's irrelevant because client companies want to see you having experience in specific languages at your past employers. "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to IWETHEY!