patrick.net

thomaswong.1986 says

nope.. doesnt work that way.. you simply cannot outsource any IT overseas.. not even production of consumer PC or other equipment.. they could all be ticking time bombs hacked by the chinese military

Well Thomas, let's wait and see. Remember, it's not you or me making the big decisions but idiot management consultants. In the meantime, however, moving to Texas may be a good career move for those in tech, regardless of how the global playing field works out, in the years ahead.

thomaswong.1986 says

the cost benefit isnt swinging favorably for globalization..

From the other thread (Half of Recent College Grads Under/Un-employed)...

The reason why that 1st round of IT offshoring failed (2001 to 2006) was that corporate America, like a herd of lemmings, did exactly the same thing w/o considering the risks. They all poured their collective capitals into turning Bangalore-India Inc, into the next South Korea or Taiwan, but for software instead of firmware. Well, that was a joke as India, being a former commodities player for the British Empire, was never an end-to-end solutions provider. Instead, it was a body shop and that aspect of their business culture hadn't changed since Queen Victoria's time. Naturally, software is a value added service, code by itself, is not a *silk or dye* business and thus, it was destined to fail, circa 2006-2009, just as quickly as it had taken off before then.

Today, other Asian players have woken up and realized that in order to win the big global contracts, they need value-added services, not cheap labor. For instance, recent Filipino call centers have not only been taking calls but have been using bulletin boards and chat rooms to categorize problem tickets, gathering more data from alternate sources, and providing more complete follow-up solutions to customers, using text messages, etc, to add greater value to the customers' business concerns.

So I don't exactly see this trend ending anytime soon as the former India Inc will be replaced by other nations which want to cross the digital divide.

Rin says

So I don't exactly see this trend ending anytime soon as the former India Inc will be replaced by other nations which want to cross the digital divide.

National security! too many hacked products (not just lead in baby food) are coming to our shores. Its not just us (USA) but every other nations systems.. be they Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin American corporate, banking, government, military down to the individuals homes have been hacked.

If you were to trust anyone, better to trust the US than Chinese/Indian any day of the year. It may cost more, but so what, its a trusted source as we always have been.

China tech company brags: We hacked U.S. telecoms

http://www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/media/internet/news.php?q=1339792288
June 14, 2012

Electronic 'backdoor' could let outsiders sabotage U.S. systems, sites

WASHINGTON – A major Chinese telecommunications company has been boasting how it was able to hack into U.S. and international telecommunications networks and intercept what it suggested was “malicious” data.

The claim was made at a conference held in Dubai in February by officials with the Chinese firm Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., and left specialists who attended the seminar alarmed.

They told WND that’s because while Huawei may consider the data “malicious,” the act of intercepting and extracting data means the Chinese company also could steal sensitive information or even alter the function of computer systems where the company’s products are installed.

Huawei, which is tied to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, displayed in a PowerPoint-type presentation that it had capabilities in “in-depth traffic analysis to enhance network control,” which a source to WND who attended the conference said meant that it could intercept data and collect it.

thomaswong.1986 says

If you were to trust anyone, better to trust the US than Chinese/Indian any day of the year.

You talk about Asia as if that means India/China, you do realize that there are other countries from Japan to Indonesia to the near east?

The whole India vis-a-vis China is the Japan scare card, all over again, but re-vamped for a new generation. When Japan's economic bubble imploded, now over 2 decades ago, hardware didn't magically re-locate to the US. No, it just moved on to Korea and Taiwan.

Likewise, with all of the world (sans India, sans China) also wanting to be players in the software world, the US MBA crowd still has plenty of overseas partners to help develop, test, and support software for them. The only thing which happened with Bangalore's low quality implosion and China's IP theft, was that the rate of globalization has slowed, allowing others to come up in their place. The story isn't over yet; mark my words!

thomaswong.1986 says

National security! too many hacked products

Thus, the rise of Texas, as our in-shoring center for technology, IT, and of course energy/power. If you want to keep your tech work, move there and don't spend time/money in the SF-SD or Boston-DC coastal corridors.

Texas seems to be the last place left in America with any real industry (i.e. economic activity beyond just real-estate, finance, insurance, fast food, and sick-care).

wthrfrk80 says

exas seems to be the last place left in America with any real industry

I don't mean to sound like a broken record but if you're a tech worker, move to TX ASAP, and work your way to a VP, Director, or Senior/Top-level Engineering job. It may be the best career decision of your life. If you delay in this, other younger kids will take this path and then, you'll also be facing more competition down the road. Right now, I get recruiters (& friends) from Houston & Dallas calling me regularly. Sorry, forgot about Austin & San Antonio, as both of those towns are also huge for IT. I knew a couple, worked hard in Boston, never had enough money for a house ... moved to Austin, bought a house in cash, and now, have nothing but savings accruing.

Rin says

The story isn't over yet; mark my words!

Yes. i do understand.. i been in Tech industry for 3 decades, going on to 4.

Rin says

It may be the best career decision of your life.

Maybe, but everyone already knows this. Following the herd is rarely a good idea.

Rin says

If you delay in this, other younger kids will take this path and then, you'll also be facing more competition down the road.

Buy now or be priced out forever! ;-)

wthrfrk80 says

Maybe, but everyone already knows this. Following the herd is rarely a good idea.

Can always move back. This is America, after all, and trying a new city (unless it's Detroit) never hurts :-)

Rin says

Can always move back. This is America, after all, and trying a new city (unless it's Detroit) never hurts :-)

and in some cases they come to you.. since we saw plenty of Texas based tech companies acquiring SV companies for some time now.. Dell and Texas Instruments come to mind. I dont know how long they will stick around. The Japanese and Europeans certainly left town after a few years of buying up the Semi companies.

The thing about Texas is that normal houses there, go from under $200K to $350K. Compared to Boston, New York, Chicago, SF, LA, etc, that's a staggeringly low price but in comparing job positions, between Boston and Dallas, I've found salary differences of only 15% for the top tier categories. So a senior systems/performance consultant, earning ~$110K in Boston, he can find a similar position for Dallas at ~$90K. In Boston, however, that house would go for $600K whereas in Dallas, it would be $220K.

Rin says

The thing about Texas is that normal houses there, go from under $200K to $350K. Compared to Boston, New York, Chicago, SF, LA, etc, that's a staggeringly low price but in comparing job positions, between Boston and Dallas, I've found salary differences of only 15% for the top tier categories.

Absolutely. That's why I have considered moving to Houston because of the ratio of good-paying engineering jobs relative to house prices. But family is in the Pittsburgh, PA area. And the scenery is nicer here. Not having winter would be nice though. Decisions decisions.

HRHMedia says

CaptainShuddup says

I actually work

CaptainShuddup says

I can't find a kid to mentor to save my life,

CaptainShuddup says

I actually work for a company that chucks Young applicants resumes in the garbag

Social Media Guru Since 1999

Cut the Crap Aladdin.

wthrfrk80 says

not having winter would be nice though

If you can handle continuous high humidity/hot temp weather, then Houston's the place. Normally for me, tropical climates take about 3+ weeks to adapt to. What you save in housing costs can easily be applied towards your AC bill :-)

Rin says

wthrfrk80 says

exas seems to be the last place left in America with any real industry

I don't mean to sound like a broken record but if you're a tech worker, move to TX ASAP, and work your way to a VP, Director, or Senior/Top-level Engineering job. It may be the best career decision of your life. If you delay in this, other younger kids will take this path and then, you'll also be facing more competition down the road. Right now, I get recruiters (& friends) from Houston & Dallas calling me regularly. Sorry, forgot about Austin & San Antonio, as both of those towns are also huge for IT. I knew a couple, worked hard in Boston, never had enough money for a house ... moved to Austin, bought a house in cash, and now, have nothing but savings accruing.

yes, please everyone move to Texas. Don't even consider the SF Bay Area -- it's terrible here. A veritable hell on earth. You'll be much better in Texas or Virginia or Atlanta or Sophia Antipoles. Run, don't walk...

I cannot stand the heat nor the humidity. Otherwise Texas would be a great place for me.

My "ideal" temperature is 59F year round. The climate of the Bay Area is quite close to that. (It is 64F outside right now.)

BTW, software cannot be reduced to equations because you still need to know what to build. You can have the best code but it will still be useless if you really wanted something else.

There is a huge cultural component to software development.

Randy H says

Don't even consider the SF Bay Area -- it's terrible here. A veritable hell on earth.

SF is even more expensive than Boston. Yes, that's CoL hell on earth & the view of the Bay isn't enough for one to get price gouged, as badly as that. Next, aside from the lack of wintery snowstorms, does SF really have more to offer than any municipality in the northeast corridor? I mean if you want liberals around here, we have our Amherst or Northampton MA. And much of the New York/New England region is quite green and pleasant, overall, and houses in upstate NY go for $100K (sometimes less) and that's within an hour from either Montreal Canada or Burlington VT.

Weather-wise, if you can only afford to live at one location, SFBA is really hard to beat.

Peter P says

Weather-wise, if you can only afford to live at one location, SFBA is really hard to beat.

It's good to have a giant thermal mass just to the west!

wthrfrk80 says

Peter P says

Weather-wise, if you can only afford to live at one location, SFBA is really hard to beat.

It's good to have a giant thermal mass just to the west!

Somehow it is slightly more effective than having a thermal mass just to the east. :-)

Anyway, with climate change and all perhaps Iqaluit will become the new haven.

Peter P says

Somehow it is slightly more effective than having a thermal mass just to the east. :-)

A lot more effective, since weather systems move from west to east! Where I live, it's either the Canadians dumping their crappy frigid air on us in the winter or the Texans sending us their overheated air in the summer.

Ruki says

Being older can actually be an advantage because the kids these days are proving to be very unreliable. The sole exception is younger H1-B foreign imports.

H1-B 'imports' are only popular because they don't come with the student loan debt and thus don't require a salary that would allow them to pay that off and eat. Employers in tech know they can't keep younger workers as the most dedicated want to start their own company and nobody wants to train tomorrow's competitor. Older workers with appropriate skills and experience have the advantage for this reason, not because of some libertarian think tank myth of the lazy American worker.

CaptainShuddup says

I can't find a kid to mentor to save my life, not even on a Bet.

I can't either. It amazes me. I wished my whole life to have a mentor, never found a willing one, so had to chart my own course...the hard way naturally. Now I want to give back, to give away what I always wished for but have been totally unsuccessful in doing so. I am rather kind, patient, smart and successful by most common objective measures and love to teach to boot....ideal traits of a good mentor. You can lead a horse to water but can't make them drink comes to mind....

Randy H says

yes, please everyone move to Texas. Don't even consider the SF Bay Area -- it's terrible here. A veritable hell on earth. You'll be much better in Texas or Virginia or Atlanta or Sophia Antipoles. Run, don't walk...

hahahahahahaha...good idea.

wthrfrk80 says

Rin says

Because age discrimination kicks in between ages 45 and 55, esp in tech fields.

I'm wondering if that's because technology changes so fast. Whereas the human body doesn't.

A lot of technical positions are ultimately skill or aptitude based not knowledge based which leaves salary and dominance as real issues.

For example, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that the abilities to understand indirection, parallelism, and recursion are inherent aptitudes for software people.

Computer science departments attempts to teach them often fail and I wouldn't hire some one (even an intern) who didn't grasp them.

While practitioners need to know certain technologies, they're generally similar enough to what you already know that you can pick them up very quickly. Microsoft hired me to write C# which I'd never done before and it wasn't a big deal.

Demarco and Lister note in _Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams_ that in their coding war games

People who had ten years of experience did not outperform those with two years of experience. There was no correlation between experience and performance except that those with less than six months' experience with the language used in the exercise did not do as well as the rest of the sample

Compensation packages for fresh computer science graduates at the big Silicon Valley companies are somewhat north of $100K. A good engineer with 15+ years of experience can gross over double that at the same sort of company.

The extra money can buy you experience that delivers higher quality products in less time with the savings more than covering the cost delta - some of it personal and some second hand via people the individual in question has worked with ( I picked up a few things on reliability from having RAID inventor Dave Patterson as a technical advisor ) although such an individual with leadership skills can also multiply the efforts of a dozen less experienced people producing very similar results to what you'd get from a dozen experienced people for half the money.

Second rate managers and individual contributors don't want to look bad in comparison and prefer the malleability of younger subordinates with less worldly experience.

drew_eckhardt says

For example, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that the abilities to understand indirection, parallelism, and recursion are inherent aptitudes for software people.

Computer science departments attempts to teach them often fail and I wouldn't attempt to hire some one (even an intern) who didn't grasp them.

I think computer science departments should not teach languages like Java and C++. Instead, they should pick a statically-typed multi-paradigm language like OCaml, F#, and Scala.

I doubt parallelism can be tackled successfully without a good understanding of functional programming. Likewise, I feel one needs to leverage meta-programming to be productive.

BTW, words cannot describe how wonderful F# is. Microsoft certainly has a winner here.

CaptainShuddup says

I can't find a kid to mentor to save my life, not even on a Bet.
1995 one could have filled a Colosseum with hopeful quick studies.

This might be a win win for all concerned

wthrfrk80 says

I think the claimed "shortage" of scientists and engineers in America is propaganda.

As an ex-engineer I can say that this is 100% true and has been the case for decades now.

Ruki says

The boomers are retiring.

They have enough money to retire???

Rin says

SF is even more expensive than Boston. Yes, that's CoL hell on earth & the view of the Bay isn't enough for one to get price gouged, as badly as that. Next, aside from the lack of wintery snowstorms, does SF really have more to offer than any municipality in the northeast corridor?

The same could be said for any city/metro enjoying a virtuous cycle economy. Like I said, move on over to Texas if you prefer a different flavor. It's entirely possible one of those Texas metros could eventually become a virtuous cycle economy too...though the smart money is short on that outcome. Same reason all the US top service industry HQs aren't in Des Moines and Kansas City now, like was predicted by the demographic pundits and other self interested smarty pants circa 1980.

Peter P says

BTW, words cannot describe how wonderful F# is. Microsoft certainly has a winner here.

I'll wait until someone discovers "B#".

Ruki says

That is changing and will drastically change in as little as five years, when massive labor shortages kick in. The boomers are retiring.

Given the current employment landscape with random layoffs at NASA, Motorola, and various other enterprises, on/off, I don't think enough boomers will have cash in the eggs nest to officially retire in mass. Instead, if there's a short term labor shortage, they'll be able to work as contractors, until the company is fully re-located to Vietnam, if it's not Texan bound.

zzyzzx says

As an ex-engineer I can say that this is 100% true and has been the case for decades now.

What are you doing these days? The mechanical engineering profession is being de-skilled, automated, and outsourced. I'm thinking of getting out.

To the original topic: Science and Engineering careers are not obsolete, but they have continued to evolve significantly. I continue to be unable to hire for open engineer roles for a few reasons (listed below in no particular order):

* Most applicants are over specialized and uninterested in generalizing their knowledge. What is valued more than anything now is flexibility; we source super-specialization when needed from contractors.

* Anyone with more than 5 years experience wants to "be a manager", even though they have all the people skills of a feral labradoodle.

* Many are offended at the notion that they have to act as Business Analyst as much as Genius Technologist in order to be successful. We can outsource/offshore/automate the purely deterministic part of your job, but the reason we need an actual person is for inductive, heuristic, and judgmental skills. Sadly, so many Engineers seem to think that those things are "someone else's job".

* Testing. I can't tell you how many applicants (in software specifically) I've binned simply based upon their reaction when they realize that I consider testing skills to be among their first and foremost fundamental skills. Somewhere along the line something went very wrong in our collective approach to SW engineering and development whereby engineers and programers think they are "too valuable" to test. Any hint of that and I stamp the candidate as 'rejected'.

* Most of the rest "want to be an architect" or any of the derivative "I don't want to code" (again in software in these cases; less of a problem in hw). I pretty much reject anyone claiming they are a "software architect" 95% of the time simply based on how they present themselves in that context. And "I don't want to code" is code itself for "someone else should do the work". There are many forms of coding, and being able to go all the way to the detailed solutions is essential to engineering, so these people are all disqualified.

Our problem is not that there are a surplus of engineers. It's that there are a surplus of people educated and experienced in some form of engineering discipline who believe they are entitled to ignore the commercial realities of what pays their salaries.

Randy H says

Like I said, move on over to Texas if you prefer a different flavor.

If I were to stick to IT, instead of hedge fund stuff, I'd move to TX, despite being a northeast person, for the sake of my career, not for the weather or barbecue. All and all, what's happened in places like Boston or NYC is that there's a landed class, those who'd made money in the past (or work in finance/surgeons/actors), vs present-day professionals who're stretched to make ends meet. Thus, the fundamentals for the NE is that labor plus CoE costs are high and thus, not worth it for anyone but the executives to stick around. Whenever a big defense project in MA wraps up, the next cycle starts in Dallas, and then, the accountants can immediately show a 15% reduction in overhead w/o showing a loss of delivery. This has been on-going now for almost a decade.

Rin says

All and all, what's happened in places like Boston or NYC is that there's a landed class, those who'd made money in the past (or work in finance/surgeons/actors), vs present-day professionals who're stretched to make ends meet. Thus, the fundamentals for the NE is that labor plus CoE costs are high and thus, not worth it for anyone but the executives to stick around.

True. See the following thread:

/?p=1214445