Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Look at it like this. Many jobs that were once considered high tech and required an advanced degree are now considered more or less 'busy work'.  I mean it used to be only geeks that fooled with computers at all, and now four year olds can operate a PC with ease. To me, a PC is still not a business computer.  It is a 'personal' computer with a tinker-toy operating system. However, just because someone can 'click here' does not mean that they understand the WHAT and WHY behind that click. I see this all the time in the people I deal with.  They were brought up in Windoze-land and think they are the know-all end-all because they can click a box.  Ask them to manage a Windoze system from the command line and see their eyes glaze over. If you can't use the command line, you truly do not understand what your system is doing. Linux is so l33t, everyone should know how to use it. Windoze sucks. People need to drop the Microsoft hate, it's tired. When Linux, Unix, Sun, BSD, and all of the "hardcore" OS'es make a system which is: 1) Easy to use for non-technical individuals in the business world. 2) Inexpensive 3) Easy to administrate and configure, 4) Compatible with everything 5) Standardized so that when you're $95k/year Linux admin (who built the system from a kernel because he's so r00t-core) gets pissed off because you won't let him browse Manga at work and quits, you can still manage your system/network without having to learn its ins and outs. Perhaps then people will take it more seriously as a general business solution. I agree with the point you're trying to make (which is that some people tinker around in Windows for a while and think they know more than they actually do), but calling Windows a bad a operating system because it's simple is elitist, as well as short sighted.

You sound like a desktop support guy, mid-level manager or Redmond native.

FMJ3
SCSA, RHCE, MCSE, yada yada yada

Quoted: -No, there is a reason for this. In normal Indian business culture, it is a VERY-much top-down command-driven environment. People lower on the heirarchy are not encouraged to innovate, or to question their instructions or their superiors, except as to their exact instructions.

Happy to see someone else mention this. My manager told me to assume that I am dealing with a "robot." Not that he was being racist, but he was making the point that questioning authority, or not following the instructions to the letter, was disrespectful.

Quoted: I am rather surprised that there is not yet a law requiring US medical and banking code and data-processing work to be performed by US citizens inside the US. Medical work concerning any persona data for example is now supposed to require it, but there's no big legal penalty for not doing it, so work gets contracted to US companies who subcontract it and hire "online" and it ends up in the hands of foreign workers in other countries.

Our company takes security VERY seriously. In fact, our current porting contract is on hold because the consulting company (one of the largest software firms in the country) refuses to sign the HIPAA security documents. Pro tip: When you are in a meeting with a vice president, don't question the propriety of allowing foreigners access to our systems by stating "I don't want AlQueda to know that I have herpes."

Quoted: It's funny I have worked with many different cultures in this industry 13 yrs and still going. I have found 2 things 80-90% true Asian techs seem to be smart and easy to work with no egos. Indian techs are less then satisfactory with huge egos. This isnt a survey but my observations on the these 2 cultures tech wise. Sorry if this isnt Politically correct.

Indians are Asians too!

just wait another 15-20 years when india finally reaches the standard of living compared to San Jose...then their salaries will be high just like they are here....and their economy and houseing will change dramatically - no more living in a hut!

Whether stuff gets done or not kinda depends on the company.  A very large Seattle (er, Chicago) area aerospace company that I know had an IT project that had failed with in-Seattle development at least twice that I heard of.  When the India outsourcing thing got big, they moved the project over there.  Thanks to the lack of "managers" interfering with the project, it actually got done and worked.

But that's not the typical experience.

The last software job I had, the company had hired an Indian on a H1-B into our group.  He kept blaming me for his incredibly stupid bugs, every time his code interfaced with my (perfect) programming.  The idiot had been working in the software industry in the U.S. for at least five years, supposedly graduated from a top tech school in India, and he STILL didn't know that array indexes start at zero (0) in C/C++!!!  He kept starting them from one (1) and overflowing the arrays, causing system crashes.

On top of that, he was a socialist asshole who wanted to ban guns.  Typical attitude from Indians in my experience;  the government there has taught them that guns are baaaad and that the government must hold their hands from cradle to grave.  He's probably got his green card by now -- he didn't want to go back to India, and had already applied through the company when I was there.  Funny how that works, despite the H1-B program supposedly being for "temporary" workers who aren't ever supposed to get the benefit of a green card or citizenship. . . .

Quoted: Quoted: Look at it like this. Many jobs that were once considered high tech and required an advanced degree are now considered more or less 'busy work'.  I mean it used to be only geeks that fooled with computers at all, and now four year olds can operate a PC with ease. To me, a PC is still not a business computer.  It is a 'personal' computer with a tinker-toy operating system. However, just because someone can 'click here' does not mean that they understand the WHAT and WHY behind that click. I see this all the time in the people I deal with.  They were brought up in Windoze-land and think they are the know-all end-all because they can click a box.  Ask them to manage a Windoze system from the command line and see their eyes glaze over. If you can't use the command line, you truly do not understand what your system is doing.

Lovely essay by Neal Stephenson:  "In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line".  Freely downloadable here:
www.cryptonomicon.com/command.zip

Quoted: Linux is so l33t, everyone should know how to use it. Windoze sucks. People need to drop the Microsoft hate, it's tired. When Linux, Unix, Sun, BSD, and all of the "hardcore" OS'es make a system which is: (...blah, blah, blah...) Perhaps then people will take it more seriously as a general business solution. I agree with the point you're trying to make (which is that some people tinker around in Windows for a while and think they know more than they actually do), but calling Windows a bad a operating system because it's simple is elitist, as well as short sighted.

You don't get out much, do you?

www.morphix.org/
Boots up automatically on every computer I've owned, works flawlessly, doesn't fall apart constantly like Windows does, doesn't allow virus intrusions at whim. . . .  It's a desktop OS for the masses.  Oh, gotta love your "2) Inexpensive" -- US$0 is a hell of a lot less than US$150, or whatever WinXP is selling for now.

Quoted: Quoted: I feel the arguement still applies though. You have a specialized user build you an interface or a system in such a way that only THEY know how it all works, and they've got hooks in your business for life. That's exactly the reason us "old timers" have this thing called documentation. Before any system or interface is released to the general user population, it needs full (and regression) testing along with total documentation.  If you can't document it, you don't understand it.  And if it ain't documented, it doesn't go into production. Add system audits to that and you're pretty well covered. However, today's group of "compile clean and deploy" programmers wouldn't last a month back in the good old days of IT.

Get with it grandpa, it's an XP world today.

Quoted: Funny how that works, despite the H1-B program supposedly being for "temporary" workers who aren't ever supposed to get the benefit of a green card or citizenship. . . .

I wonder about that as well. The H-1B is a non-immigrant VISA, yet it is consistently used as the means to obtain permanent residency.

Quoted: Get with it grandpa, it's an XP world today.

Only for those poor, uneducated masses that know no better.

Quoted: I've worked in IT for the better part of 19 years (started off doing customer support for WordPerfect Corp).   I am often in contact with the Indian folks that man Cisco's TAC and believe me, it ain't no picnic.  I don't begrudge jobs to the Indians.  I do, however, hold with great contempt the CEOs and CFOs who outsource and undermine American jobs and knowledge in the name of padding their stock price... I find Indian folks in the IT sector to be about the same as white folks - some are smart, some aren't.  Asians, however, kick all our asses...

It is worth saying that all of the Asians I work with are lazy, stupid and dishonest.  

I have found that people are people and that Indians, Asians and Whites all have the same ratio of bullshit to value.

Quoted: Quoted: I've worked in IT for the better part of 19 years (started off doing customer support for WordPerfect Corp).   I am often in contact with the Indian folks that man Cisco's TAC and believe me, it ain't no picnic.  I don't begrudge jobs to the Indians.  I do, however, hold with great contempt the CEOs and CFOs who outsource and undermine American jobs and knowledge in the name of padding their stock price... I find Indian folks in the IT sector to be about the same as white folks - some are smart, some aren't.  Asians, however, kick all our asses... Every once in a while I call in a tac case and the support guy tells me his name is  John or Steve with a very heavy Indian accent.  Come on man, we both know your name isn't John.

It is probably Vishnijohnaramajanimad.

First, I work for a large financial institution.   I have had one experience with an offshore team.  Basically, the project was 80% offshore, but after 6 months it fell ridiculously behind schedule due to poor performance in India and poor management from the requirements/architecture side.  We were caught in the middle.  In the end they ended up adding 2 resources in one location and 3 resources in our other primary location, which effectively doubled the size of the team.  In the end, the budget was exceeded by 80% and timeline has been exceeded by 150% and still counting.  

The offshore team was one of the worst groups of developers I have ever seen.  This was made worse that the specs and architecture were not provided on time.  There were failures on both sides, so I can't say it would have succeeded if done in the U.S.  But offshoring certainly did not save any money at all.

2 years ago I worked for a leading global IT research firm.  I managed internal tier 2 and 3 help desk support for 10 west coast offices.  Corporate decided to outsource the tier 1 support to India, as this company at the time was advising the world the outsourcing was a strategic advantage.  SO we unceremoniously lay off the entire US Tier 1 call center staff and move the calls to India.

Things don't go well.  Our users are pissed off to no end.  language is a huge issue, as is performance.  We spend tons of money flying some management and trainers to India.  Things still don't go well.  Then we spent more money flying the ENTIRE Indian support staff to New York to train in house for two weeks.  When they returned to India they still sucked.  Shortly after returning to India a few of them quit for other higher paying outsourcing jobs in India, and some are terminated for performance.  

I left the company in the spring of 05 as they closed down the Portland operations.  Now I own a small IT services company.  I have a client that has Dell computers.  The Power supply went bad in a system.  To maintain their warranty they must replace it with a Dell component.  I call Dell.  I spend about 30 minutes on the phone, including 10 minuted explaining to the Dell Indian call center rep the concept of "2nd street".  

Yes folks, it actually took me 10 minutes to give them the address of where to send the replacement power supply.  

Quoted: When Linux, Unix, Sun, BSD, and all of the "hardcore" OS'es make a system which is: 1) Easy to use for non-technical individuals in the business world. 2) Inexpensive 3) Easy to administrate and configure, 4) Compatible with everything 5) Standardized so that when you're $95k/year Linux admin (who built the system from a kernel because he's so r00t-core) gets pissed off because you won't let him browse Manga at work and quits, you can still manage your system/network without having to learn its ins and outs.

Strange that you should mention that.  When Microsoft came down hard on Ernie Ball strings for licensing issues, Ernie Ball changed their entire business to Linux and Open Office.  

I work for a very large software company.  Where I work, my team is responsible for about 10,000 servers.  Of those, about 100-150 are windoze.  The rest are either Linux or Genuine Unix.  Our entire business model is based on Linux now because of the expense of licensing Microsoft products.  Well, and as far as I know, we don't like to give money to the competition!  

Anyway, the biggest thing I've noticed is the M$ stuff is very manpower intensive to maintain, while we script most of the maintenance for Unix, so most of our Unix work is find one, fix many.

Either way, for large enterprise operations, not business office, but the actual number crunching that gets things done, Microsoft is nowhere near able to deal with the processing involved.  I can't even imagine Microsoft OS trying to handle the load of a multinational company's financials.

So, as I've always said, M$ OS is a pretty good OS for the end user who wants to maybe fire up e-mail, and excel spreadsheet, or a small database, maybe write some small documents.  If you're planning on dealing with terabytes and petabytes of relational data, M$ ain't going to cut it.

I don't think that has anything to do with the subject, but I don't see my company getting rid of me to replace my AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and Tru64 servers with a bunch of PCs running Windows, either.  

Cheers,

kk7sm

[edited to avoid giving too many hints]

Quoted: I feel the arguement still applies though. You have a specialized user build you an interface or a system in such a way that only THEY know how it all works, and they've got hooks in your business for life.

At my company, the desktop support guys cooked up a Linux installation for end-users.  Some of my counterparts are using it.  It's pretty slick.  Pop in a CD, wait a while, and out pops a Linux box.  It automagically installs all the software you need to do your job and if you need more, you go to a little website and it installs it for you.

Very slick.  Cheaper than a Windows license.

Darn, I had to rewrite this to avoid naming names and stuff.  

Quoted: But can you imagine trying to get documentation from one of the new age Unix programmers? It would be like asking the devil for the Necronomicon to some of them.

The combination of SAS-70 and Sarbanes-Oxley is taking care of a lot of that problem for us.  Someone has to document it and if the programmer won't, we'll find another who will.  

Quoted: just wait another 15-20 years when india finally reaches the standard of living compared to San Jose...then their salaries will be high just like they are here....and their economy and houseing will change dramatically - no more living in a hut!

It's already happening.  Bangalore is pretty much like Silicon Valley was in the mid-90s.  People jumping ship as soon as they get a better offer.  They're in their "dot com boom."

Keep in mind that India only educates a very small portion of it's population.  They are now tapped out, and pulling people out of the mud huts.

Quoted: Quoted: just wait another 15-20 years when india finally reaches the standard of living compared to San Jose...then their salaries will be high just like they are here....and their economy and houseing will change dramatically - no more living in a hut! It's already happening.  Bangalore is pretty much like Silicon Valley was in the mid-90s.  People jumping ship as soon as they get a better offer.  They're in their "dot com boom."

In a few years the next outsourcing rage will be Africa. Some guy in a loin cloth will be coding C# on his Anus laptop in the jungle. He'll be issued a generator and a mini-frig to put his laptop in while he's working. His pay will be a dry sleeping mat, a glass of dirty river water and some smoked monkey meat every day. He'll code for shit, but he'll be cheap and happy to oblige, and the upper managment will celebrate their cost-cutting prowess.

That is, until the mgt find out that ecomm is now the biggest growth channel out there, and that users will not put up with a shitty ecomm experience. When I see a '501' page during a shopping experience, I leave.

Quoted: 2 years ago I worked for a leading global IT research firm.  I managed internal tier 2 and 3 help desk support for 10 west coast offices.  Corporate decided to outsource the tier 1 support to India, as this company at the time was advising the world the outsourcing was a strategic advantage.  SO we unceremoniously lay off the entire US Tier 1 call center staff and move the calls to India. Things don't go well.  Our users are pissed off to no end.  language is a huge issue, as is performance.  We spend tons of money flying some management and trainers to India.  Things still don't go well.  Then we spent more money flying the ENTIRE Indian support staff to New York to train in house for two weeks.  When they returned to India they still sucked.  Shortly after returning to India a few of them quit for other higher paying outsourcing jobs in India, and some are terminated for performance.   I left the company in the spring of 05 as they closed down the Portland operations.  Now I own a small IT services company.  I have a client that has Dell computers.  The Power supply went bad in a system.  To maintain their warranty they must replace it with a Dell component.  I call Dell.  I spend about 30 minutes on the phone, including 10 minuted explaining to the Dell Indian call center rep the concept of "2nd street".   Yes folks, it actually took me 10 minutes to give them the address of where to send the replacement power supply.

Buy Gold support  and you'll get someone in the states (for now anyway). We've had great luck with the Dell servers and Linux (we were a SUN shop until IBM weaseled their way in through mgmt channels) - so good in fact that we're replacing most of our AIX (Power 4 & 5 platforms) systems with them. These x86/Linux servers are spanking the AIX systems that cost 4-6 times as much - in some cases running IBMs own applications (DB2e, Websphere, LDAP). I think we'll see clusters of inexpensive Linux nodes replacing a lot of the traditional UNIX infrastructure in the next few years.  

Quoted: Buy Gold support  and you'll get someone in the states (for now anyway). We've had great luck with the Dell servers and Linux (we were a SUN shop until IBM weaseled their way in through mgmt channels) - so good in fact that we're replacing most of our AIX (Power 4 & 5 platforms) systems with them. These x86/Linux servers are spanking the AIX systems that cost 4-6 times as much - in some cases running IBMs own applications (DB2e, Websphere, LDAP). I think we'll see clusters of inexpensive Linux nodes replacing a lot of the traditional UNIX infrastructure in the next few years.

We're doing pretty much the same thing.  We've been working with some of the Dell PowerEdge systems, as well as some HP and Sun 64 bit on the x86_64 processors.  We have onsite support from those vendors, though, which helps considerably.