Replies

Those of us who know IT keep our toolkit sharp. I was using PCs in business environments when they were S100 Bus systems running CP/M. I then implemented IBM PCs and all the clones through all the OS’, network topologies and protocols, all the while developing and designing ERPs. Trust me, Payroll hasn’t changed much (although the tools to produce it have as has the way it is approached), nor has A=L+SE changed a whit. But to understand the implications takes experience.

Sounds like my background to a 'T', down to starting out with CP/M, except my background is in marketing systems.

I have been in the field for 30 years and I can guarantee we don’t need kids who know how to write C++ — those are a dime a dozen. But I have yet to meet a kid wh understands how a testing cycle is designed and performed, how to manage risk when going live nor how to establish proper production control integrity procedures. Your response tells me you are, at best, just a dumb coder like your contemporaries.

About 2003, seeing where the global economy was going, I shifted from a primarily technical role to a hybrid role using my workplace-acquired business background, along with QA, systems analysis and operations analysis. Try outsourcing that. Instead, I am the one who works out the difficult details that are over the heads of the outsourced QA staff for both my client and my employer. I tell kids nowadays to get as diverse a background as quickly as possible, learn a business or two, learn how to write clearly and simply, how to test and how to audit a production environment. Writing requirements and developing QA procedures, especially replicatible regression sets, are the Achilles Heel of outsourcing projects - most places just do some QC as an afterthought.

>>I shifted from a primarily technical role to a hybrid role using my workplace-acquired business background, along with QA, systems analysis and operations analysis. Try outsourcing that.<<

No way! QA/QC and Ops analysis is how you make sure that room full of coders really did what them there specifications said to — and within the proper context of the enterprise. I like/need my catcher to have a backstop!

Your move was wise — those are the areas with the greatest demand, except maybe good DBAs — the ones with lots of experience (I outsourced DBAs before and sometimes it works well, but a good DBA that knows the environment is a great thing to have).

I try to mentor youngsters to show them that applications programming is a fungible job — easily replaced. It is the roles that develop the milieu like yours where value is added. The sharp ones catch on — the not so sharp ones are mostly on the pavement (or returned to India).

>>Writing requirements and developing QA procedures, especially replicatible regression sets, are the Achilles Heel of outsourcing projects -<<

You wouldn’t happen to have a set of Higher Ed regression test sets in your back pocket, would ya? Doesn’t even have to be in any particular tool set. ;) (LOL)