Marketing ideas -- I have to strongly _disagree_ with 99% of this ...

Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith at ieee.org
Sat Apr 22 14:44:39 UTC 2006


On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 02:41 -0500, Jasper O'neal Hartline wrote:
> You must have lived a very sheltered childhood.  I too come from a
> military background, in fact my uncle is a retired Marine Captain
> and is now working as a civilian at the Pentagon. My Grandfather and 
> Mother both are retired military, my Grandfather being a veteran of
> Vietnam.
> It may have been off-key, but racist??

It was out-of-context without detail, I apologize.

Understand I am an American-born engineer who has worked _most_ of my
early career with _far_more_intelligent_ and _experienced_ foreign-born
workers than myself.

But the trend of H1B Visa abuse and outsourcing in the last 8 years has
utterly turned it 180 degrees the other way!  These developments are the
_crap_ that is writing software at or for Boeing, Diebold, IBM,
Lockheed-Martin, Microsoft, State Farm, etc...

> Read what he wrote:
> incompetent, oursourced or H1B Visa Indian, Irish and Israeli
> programmers who have had virtually _little_ (if any) exposure to any
> formal software development or engineering processes

That is _who_ Diebold, IBM, Microsoft, State Farm, etc... are using
right now to develop commercial and in-house software.  They are using
the "lowest price the world has to offer."

Open source will _continue_ to be the "best the world has to offer." 

You've never seen the H1B Visa system in action until you've seen that
10% foreign, minority _expert_ have to deal with the other 90% of _crap_
that came from the same (and other) countries.  And the only reason they
came is because they were _cheap_ and they cannot leave for another
American company because they don't hold Green Cards.

It's really bad people.  It's abuse.

The problem with immigration in America has never been the immigrant.
It's always been the American who is ready to abuse them.  The H1B Visa
is a legalized system of abuse.  With the Green Card system,
foreign-born workers could change jobs and get paid what they are worth.
Those who were not qualified would not get jobs, or not last long, and
would not.

Oursourcing is a major problem.  American managers, who are nearsighted
to only 3 years or less of budget, don't care what kind of software they
get back -- just that they met deadlines and saved a lot of money.
There are only a very select few engineer-managed companies left, like
HP (which, not surprisingly, is one of the _real_ companies that "get
Linux" -- because they're engineers!) and look at a 30 year plan.

NASA was nearsighted in the '90s too.  After the Mars Pathfinder
mission, they started slashing budgets 90% and using COTS.  They didn't
realize they were slashing necessary costs like QA.  So it wasn't a big
surprise when the Mars Polar Lander crashed because one team was using
Metric units and another Imperial standard.  They realized that they
couldn't save on everything, but maybe save 30-40% overall by using
COTS.

The same is happening in outsourcing today.  American managers save 90%
and save on everything -- not realizing you can't outsource it all.  But
what do they care, they'll be promoted and freed up by the time the
software goes into production.  I mean, you have things like business
logic and locale being developed by foreign developers who have no
concept of American common law and business.  I constantly had to define
American legal and other terms, and train developers on details.  It's
one thing for them to write a low-level subsystem for communication
(although some were utterly lacking in basic architecture/concepts), but
to write user-interfaces, documentation, etc...  Nuts!

Again, the problem isn't the people, it's the _system_ setup that causes
the problems.  I've worked with so many qualified, foreign-born experts
-- people more intelligent than myself.  But with increased H1B Visa
abuse and outsourcing, it's gone from 90% qualified immigrants/workers
(far in excess of the native American percentage) to 10% qualified
immigrants/workers (often replacing the greater percentage of native,
American knowledge -- and only because they are cheaper).

Sorry, I didn't mean to introduce this tangent.  But this is commercial
software for you in the US today.  It's utter crap.  That's why I
believe in open source strongly -- the best the world has to offer!


-- 
Bryan J. Smith             Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org       http://thebs413.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------------------------
****** Speed doesn't kill.  Difference in speed does! ******





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