Women in IT (Aug 3). Online freedom of speech (Aug 5th)

[Andrew Hammond]

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Ahmad wrote:
> Andrew Hammond wrote:
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>>>        I agree on that. As IT globalises (read: outsources), those
>>> that are specialised have a hard time, because they're replaced in
>>> waves.
>>
>> Outsourcing has turned out to be less cost-effective than originally
>> imagined. People who whine about having lost their job to India, in my
>> experience either were
>>
>> 1) code grinders or data entry technicians (assuming there's a
>> difference)
>> 2) working on boring crap anyway
>>
> <snip>
> 
> No this is wrong.  I use to think that India would never get decent
> software engineering jobs and especially not R & D jobs but they have.
> Oracle has lots of development jobs in India.  Microsoft has a poured
> lots of cash into a company to do R & D and software engineering for new
> Microsoft products.  Let's hope Indian software developers are worse
> than U of Waterloo ones.  Heck Microsoft has poured a lot of money into
> Indian I.T. period.  IBM is right behind them.  Linux and Unix work in
> India too.  Check Monster India to see the jobs they have there.  I saw
> job postings that seem to fit the experience you have.  Nothing like
> hearing from the business drones in the media "Jobless recovery.". "I.T.
> sector down 17% in Canada this year."

Large companies that are IT oriented are one of the few cases for which
it turns out to be cost-effective to off-shore. However since all of Big
Biz supplies less than 30% of the jobs in IT, that's not a terribly big
loss.

Furthermore, it appears that while it's possible to off-shore structured
development such as maintenance coding and stuff like 1st tier
phone/email support, it is not a good idea to off-shore things like RAD
efforts, anything that involve much user-interaction, and most sysadmin
type stuff. Hence my comment about the interesting stuff still being
local. I will however agree that it has made entry level positions
harder to find.

> I guess I might stay here and practice saying "Would you like to super
> size that?" or I can try and get a visa to India(I think it is tough to
> get one) and write software for about the same salary as a Fry
> Technician here.

Currently salaries for non-junior people in India range from 1/4 to 1/2
what you'd pay a Canadian. Which is indeed close to what you'd pay a
burger flipper.

> Awww yeah Dorothy, I.T. is going bye bye.

Got any numbers to substantiate that? The numbers I've seen say that IT
is still growing (albeit slower) in North America, despite off-shoring.
This has apparently been driven by the small business sector, especially
in geographic areas which are not traditionally tech-sectors. I wonder
if that includes Kansas?

Drew
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