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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries
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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19519)6/8/2002 4:36:01 PM
From: Snowshoe  Read Replies (3) of 74559
 
Maurice,

The comments by the guy who started Rent-A-Coder were a real eye-opener. If I were a young person in the USA starting my career today, I think the competition would scare me away from being a programmer.

OTOH, with 25 years of experience in this business I don't feel very threatened. As a consultant I had a situation several years ago where I was asked to coach an Indian programmer brought in for a six-month assignment. But I had to recommend his termination after four days because of his poor English ability and mismatched skill set. As a result we postponed the project for several months and then I did it myself.

Later one of my colleagues hired several Indian programmers and they worked out alright. My conclusion from this limited experience was that these fellows did better when: a) they worked with more modern systems rather than legacy systems, and b) they were assigned mainly to programming duties rather than design and analysis. In fact, when it came time cut some overhead a couple of USA guys got the boot and these guys were kept.

The dirty little secret is that a lot of US programmers aren't very good at what they do. There is a significant lack of professional standards in this business, and you have to really shop around to find good programmers. A lot of the foreign programmers aren't that good either, but at least by increasing the pool of available talent we increase our chances of finding people who can do the job.
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