Work in BigTech for Hire: Americans Need Not Apply

National Review ^ | 8/24/15 | Ian Smith

[rarestia]

There’s no statistical anomalies when it comes to STEM competence of our high school students. I posted a handful of articles in a previous post that show that American high school students not only don’t excel in STEM, they aren’t even interested in it. This, of course, is a bit of a generalization, but by and large, when compared to other industrialized nations, we aren’t at the top of the heap anymore.

I couldn’t agree with you more on the “group test takers” designation. I know too many Indian resources who could blaze through a certification test but retain nothing. When I was studying for my MCSA, I got so frustrated from my failures that I’d considered quitting. I was going through every scenario and permutation I could in my labs, but I still got tripped up by Microsoft’s testing methodology. I finally past, and I feel like I actually earned my certification.

Not two weeks after I got my certification, I was working with Microsoft support on an issue, explained all of the troubleshooting I’d done, spent an hour on the phone watching them validate what I’d done, and I wound up fixing the problem after going through some additional troubleshooting. The engineer had no fewer than 5 acronyms after his name but couldn’t figure out basic configuration settings were incorrect. This happens all too often.

So that said, I get it, and as I’m trying to get CodeToad to understand, I’m not advocating for offshore resources. I’m seeing too many of them and find that they’re often lazy, unmotivated, and they only care about meeting metrics that management set as benchmarks to keep the contract with the contracting agency intact. We do most of their work for them.