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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (19576)	6/8/2002 5:09:46 PM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Respond to of 74559

we have a group of programmers, size 15. Save for the two (and a half), whose disappearance would be a catastrophy, the rest is, let's say, normal . Now we have some new guys on visas: one (tacit, does not say or actually cant say much) Ukrainian, who's doing an absolutely essential part of the future generation sw (cca 4 years later then we ever expected). And a group of Serbs, that - judging by one example (watch out for statistics, can be wrong) - will just blow the other out of their socks and positions. It's not just the question of price. It's also the superb quality of the work of the new underdogs (underdogs?! that's absolutely alpha material).

To: Snowshoe who wrote (19576)	6/8/2002 5:14:06 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Snowshoe, I'm a believer in voltage driving trade and that the lowest competent bidder should get the business. By that I mean, money flows like a river, downhill. So, rich Japanese hire poor Kiwis who hire poorer Chinese who get impoverished Indians to do the chores. It's immoral to stop poor people bidding for work though I'd draw the line at slave labour or criminal regimes who would get their paws on some or all of the money. Our son can do computer stuff and Japanese. Here's a couple of websites he developed snowadventures.co.nz and eigokyoshitsu.com We have friends in Cochin and the plan was going to be for Tarken [son] to get software development business from Japanese, and give it to the people in Cochin [or elsewhere] to develop. But there are lots of opportunities so he didn't do that one. There is a huge market for such activities though. Our friends prefer to live in India, being Indian, so having cross-border trade in software is great for everyone. India, having English as a major language, has got a great advantage over other countries, but they are wasting that advantage. They are even reducing English teaching in many schools, which is stupid of them. The young ones soon realize how stupid when they try to get jobs. Question number one for good jobs "How good are you at English?" American is actually preferred, but they say English. Cyberspace has zero transport cost around the world, so there's no need to have the manufacturing process near the consumer. Heck, even large goods have got a low transport cost component these days. It's a global world! More or less anyway. Mqurice

To: Snowshoe who wrote (19576)	6/8/2002 6:42:53 PM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Snowshoe, 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. I agree with your conclusions, and would add this also... The vast majority of all foreign programmers have no idea of the underlying business guidelines for the systems that they program. Many of them have preconceived notions of how things are (or should be) and how business flows. More often than not, they're wrong. I was a designer/programmer/coder mostly with older COBOL systems. Just prior to early retirement, I was an Oracle database manager, and did some design and coding in the relational systems. (For the record, I prefer the older COBOL systems, which gave the designer/programmer much more flexibility in problem solving, albeit at the sacrifice of quick, easy future changes.) When we hired outside consultants (to supplement the in-house programming teams), many were foreigners. While these guys knew the relational coding well (SQL, C++, etc.), they were nearly completely blank on the nature of our business (education), very weak on the rules of accounting, and most had never written a single line of COBOL code, so had no idea on how to migrate legacy systems written in COBOL to a relational database. To their credit and much to our amazement, they learned extremely quickly and ultimately were/are an asset to the various project teams. However, we had to spend much time documenting the older legacy systems so that they could understand the migration process. For anyone who has never had to do this, it is a very time consuming chore, with no rewards and most definitely plays havoc with your timelines on current projects. And most legacy programmers find the chore distasteful, because they of course fully understand the legacy systems and don't require the documentation of what, for them, is second nature... Anyway, my two cents (US) worth... KJC