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Outsourcing and offshoring are 2 different things. People often get this confused. Offshoring model is very limited anyway. The main issue with offshoring is that workers are out of touch with the business. Believe it or not, culture doesn't carry over to the other side of the world. I've worked with "follow the sun" and "offshoring" models for the last 7 years. Majority offshores are dysfunctional. They are easily 2 or 3 levels below the typical American resource. Some H1B workers do come to the USA, but they either stay and get a greencard (working for the same rates as your typical American) or go back home.
Trust me, the average offshore developer is nowhere near the level as your average onshore developer. The main problem is that American developers have to focus on quality, as they know the impact of bad code. Offshore the code is comparatively worse. Even a would-be bad coder in America, learns really quick to become a better developers if they're working with projects in development hell.
Also support, engineering, devops jobs aren't going anywhere. Anyone who does really doesn't work with large scale, high sensitivity applications. There are systems you just can't leave up to offshore.
Outsourcing and offshoring are 2 different things. People often get this confused. Offshoring model is very limited anyway. The main issue with offshoring is that workers are out of touch with the business. Believe it or not, culture doesn't carry over to the other side of the world. I've worked with "follow the sun" and "offshoring" models for the last 7 years. Majority offshores are dysfunctional. They are easily 2 or 3 levels below the typical American resource. Some H1B workers do come to the USA, but they either stay and get a greencard (working for the same rates as your typical American) or go back home.
Trust me, the average offshore developer is nowhere near the level as your average onshore developer. The main problem is that American developers have to focus on quality, as they know the impact of bad code. Offshore the code is comparatively worse. Even a would-be bad coder in America, learns really quick to become a better developers if they're working with projects in development hell.
Also support, engineering, devops jobs aren't going anywhere. Anyone who does really doesn't work with large scale, high sensitivity applications. There are systems you just can't leave up to offshore.
There's plenty of successful, good quality code generating, offshore implementations. Adobe is a great example. They insourced offshore. They used this model to create software like Photoshop, Acrobat, and Postscript engines.
Outsourcing is one of the greatest things to come along in our industry. It turns employees into the product. The outsourcing companies have incentive to keep investing in you. The pay is great too since they want to keep you onboard since they invested in you.
The best place is to be in technology. You want to work for a company where technology is the product. Yahoo, Razorfish, The NY Times, WSJ, Google, etc. IT jobs in banks, manufacturing companies, etc. are the lowest on the the totem pole. You have the choice of being a SQL developer (extremely outdated) at a finance organization, or an innovator at a technology organization. When the economy is down, who do you think is more marketable?
This is the mentality of Silicon Valley that annoys me. And things like this let's me know how out of touch people in Silicon Valley are. First of all, Google wouldn't mean anything if it weren't for people and businesses that use Google. Google doesn't provide solutions for the next Google. It provides solutions for real customers. There was a lecture I looked at not too long ago, and the guy brought up this very thing.
He said the main problem with most tech departments these days is that they have a hard to envisioning their audience. A lot of engineers design solutions as if the only people who would benefit from the product is another engineer. The reality is, that the lady checking her online account is your customer, or the 80 year old grandpa who needs to get to his email is your customer. And the main issue is that people in IT spend too much time trying to be smart and slick, instead of trying to be practical and have common sense. This is why I really like working in DevOps more so than anything else. No one else is more in touch with reality than people who knows how code impacts people.
My point is, Oracle would be NOTHING if they didn't have database solutions for financial institutions and banks. Microsoft would be nothing if it couldn't provide software for the common user. Apple would be nothing if they didn't sell consumer products. The bottomline is that Banks, Telecom companies, manufacturing comapnis, etc are the very companies that drive demand and need. You could have the next HA distributed file system, but if the market doesn't need it, then it will fail to matter.
And how in the world is a SQL developer outdated? What out there can replace SQL? I've used both Cassandra and HBASE, and trust me they aren't good alternatives to something as mature as a RDBMS. But anyway I digress. You are certainly not low tier working for anything Telecom, Banking, Financial, manufacturing, or industry related. If anything it shows that you can write software that has a real impact on people's life. See the thing is, when you work at Google or Apple, for every hotshot good programmer, there are a lot of programmers who write bad code. You can get away with that at those companies, because Apple or Google goes away, who cares? Take Bank Of America out of the picture, or have buggy financial application, and things start to get serious.
Again, seems like Silicon Valley is losing touch with reality. They forget why who these companies exist for in the first place, and who really drives the demand.
There's plenty of successful, good quality code generating, offshore implementations. Adobe is a great example. They insourced offshore. They used this model to create software like Photoshop, Acrobat, and Postscript engines.
Yes, it can work if you have some sort of design where you can modularize the development process. For example, you could have your code performance tested so well, that you can have developers offshore just draw a tree, and write in a little code here and there. Truth be told, many offshore developers who write "quality code" can hardly be called developers at all. At the end of the day, offshore is best at people who are code monkeys just following some requirement. If you need good quality code with developers who can 1) Communicate with business 2) communicate with stakeholders 3) understand process 4) Get requirements, you need to keep things onshore. The main issue with offshore is not talent, it's them being completely out of touch with American business and culture. For every good model of offshore, the are plenty of bad examples. I know of so many offshore horror stories, and they are typical.
Even companies like IBM had to limit their offshore operations because quality dropped so bad. It's not as easy as just going to India or China, opening and office, and just pulling your latest CS grads from a third world country. Many of people from India have no intentions of staying in the USA. I work with a lot of Indians who are onshore, and they say they don't even care about getting a citizenship. They just want to make some money, and then return home.
Again, the offshore model isn't as cut and dry as people would like to believe. American jobs aren't nearly as threatened as the media likes to pretend. Anyone who has worked with offshore extensively can definitely tell you, that it's a difficult model to implement. I'm sure some executive see short term cost savings, but operational cost goes up more, because there is a major breakdown in communication with offshore and onsite teams. So more time is spent on maintenance. This is why a ton of Indian based sourcing companies actually are hiring American talent onsite at competitive rates. I currently work for a big IT company in Silicon Valley through an Indian vendor, and my rate is very good. They refuse to take the entire model offshore because they don't trust the quality of offshore.
The reality is that the only thing that you can effectively take offshore are menial task that can be followed with a playbook. Complex troubleshooting and diagnostics are better left to people on site. The people from overseas who are talented end up coming here anyway, or move up the ranks quickly in their home countries.
He said the main problem with most tech departments these days is that they have a hard to envisioning their audience. A lot of engineers design solutions as if the only people who would benefit from the product is another engineer. The reality is, that the lady checking her online account is your customer, or the 80 year old grandpa who needs to get to his email is your customer. And the main issue is that people in IT spend too much time trying to be smart and slick, instead of trying to be practical and have common sense. This is why I really like working in DevOps more so than anything else. No one else is more in touch with reality than people who knows how code impacts people.
This is true. The UX revolution was supposed to solve this. But as research and testing functions are slashed and the focus is on development, fewer useful products are created.
This is the mentality of Silicon Valley that annoys me. And things like this let's me know how out of touch people in Silicon Valley are.
It can annoy you as much as you want, but it's true. It's better for an employee to be working on the main business of a company as opposed to working on support, "line" as opposed to "staff". That's definitely true in "IT".
It can annoy you as much as you want, but it's true. It's better for an employee to be working on the main business of a company as opposed to working on support, "line" as opposed to "staff". That's definitely true in "IT".
Support comes in many forms. There is a world of difference between the guy who resets your active directory password and the guy who is figuring out how to scale out a distributed application, doing heap dumps, and providing stack traces. Support has way too many levels. Clearly top of the line support people work closely with developers and have a very versatile skillset. People forget that code have to be maintained. That's the biggest issue that people don't understand. Code is oftentimes buggy and it messes up the user experience. This is why there is DevOps. And to be frank businesses who focus on the support and maintanence aspect have evolving products. I've worked at companies that clearly were developed focus and had almost zero support. They spent 80% of their time fixing bugs and redeploying code constantly. Their product never evolved because they could never get it to work. To contrast that I've seen companies focus on support and they actually had great products that evolved with customer need.
Again this is what people forget, the customer. The only person that matters. Any developer who doesnt believe in support and maintanence probably works in a place that's hell. A top support person knows code, data bases, hardware, architecture, good designs vs bad designs, how to make a system high available, automation and deployment. All of that is support, which is a far cry from help desk. Support people can be some of the most technically well rounded people you'll run across.
I can't be the only grizzled (does 12 years of work w/ Solaris/Linux count as grizzled these days?) sysadmin posting in this thread...
Seems you're doing some entry/low mid-level Windows admin work there. Honorable work -- you'd probably have to start off as a helpdesk type unless you know someone/can really convince an interviewer that you can learn on the fly.
If you're willing to learn Linux/UNIX, there's more opportunities than just a pure Windows guy.
Get some old computers, set up Linux distributions like CentOS or Ubuntu. Get familiar with the command line, using your Google-fu to learn how to do stuff, etc.
I've gotten some bonus experience managing a server running a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack simply because none of the other Eurovision fans knew how to log into a system and set it up. :P Can you find opportunities like that?
Some of the UNIX types like Solaris, HP/UX, etc., are odd in that there's not many jobs for those operating systems, but there is $$$ if you know your way around those operating systems.
Only downside to sysadmin work is that you end up being on call or working the odd weekend/evening shift. Programmers/software developers end up having to work tons of hours and sit through meetings, and the Gandalf/Gregory House persona doesn't fly anymore.
I considered running a WAMP to deploy a ticketing system where I volunteer, but we had to resolve some other issues before doing that. I wasn't aware of a LAMP, but I'll definitely look into it. A couple of classmates also convinced me to use an old computer I have sitting around and put Linux on it, so that'll definitely be a project I can work on. In reality, I'd like to have my focus be on programming/software engineering but if it takes some time to get there I'll need to be patient.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nybbler
It can annoy you as much as you want, but it's true. It's better for an employee to be working on the main business of a company as opposed to working on support, "line" as opposed to "staff". That's definitely true in "IT".
I have also found this to be very true, based on the demand from job postings and from networking. As an IT staff, you're exponentially more disposable unless it's in an environment with an intersection of their field and IT. Even those jobs can be difficult to secure.
Quote:
Originally Posted by minos16
by off chance....does the op speak Korean? I might have a job for her. really good pay for entry level I.t.
oh, learn how to use virtual machines. you can setup all the free practice servers and distributions you need on one machine.
virtual box is free and easy to get started with.
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