Posted on 07/15/2003 8:46:20 AM PDT by Willie Green
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:03:03 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Peter Kerrigan encouraged friends to move to Silicon Valley throughout the 1980s and '90s, wooing them with tales of lucrative jobs in a burgeoning industry.
But he lost his network engineering job at a major telecommunications company in August 2001 and remains unemployed. Now 43, the veteran programmer is urging his 18-year-old nephew to stay in suburban Chicago and is discouraging him from pursuing degrees in computer science or engineering.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
Kinda like gravity, it's the law. However, some of us will die rich and some of us will die poor. I just hate it that the financial press is acting like we're on the virge of recovery. The truth is we are in the roaring 20s all over again and depression looms on the horizon.
Mind if I bookmark this so I can say I told you so. ;o)
Oh, I forgot you'll be living in a cardboard box with no internet connection. Party on, Garth!
Just lost a friend on Monday. She was laid off 2 years ago... lost her insurance.... job went to an Indian H`1B. BIG BANK took on some H1B workers... Americans... there's the door.
I am very angry1!
She had a heart condition and cut back on her meds because they were too expensive. She also worked at a pretty low paying job to replace the one she lost. This meant she had to stand and walk more than her IT job.
She was a tiny lady with a great big friendly smile.
She will be missed.
Oh, and for all you "free traitors"... looks like the social security admin. won't have to pay ANOTHER American for their retirement. I just know that all of you will be $imply delighted.
Good luck... but remember, you can always use the computers at the library... no porn, OK?
: ^ )
GOOD GRIEF!! Where we will go then?
I had the same experience. Four Qualcomm employees were on loan to a startup where I was also contracted. I took over responsiblity for their Java code. Arrghh! It took about a week to whip that stuff in to shape. I still wonder why the startup employed 4 people to write such a small volume of inept code. I slipped a "jython" interpreter into the code and had functionality that surpassed the "production" call processing platform.
Thanks so much for your erudite response, containing such compelling logic.
Hey, I'm sorry that the truth hurts. And I'm especially sorry that so many people who claim to be lovers of freedom turn into whiners when it is their ox that's being gored.
Unfortunately, you're quite correct.
The base problem is management's short-term, bean-counter mentality. All most of them care about is what the quarter will look like and can they get promoted prior to the end result of their stupidity being noticed rather than delivering a good product at a good price.
Henry Ford understood that unless he paid his workers enough to be able to buy his products, his market was limited.
Short-term, the profit numbers look great. Long-term, even though the profit per widget is high, revenue tanks because of decreasing sales.
Decreasing sales force companies to drop prices to try to recover market share and revenue... in order to further reduce prices, companies do even siller things like building huge factories in China and "paying" chinese $.50 a day.
The result is what we are seeing many places in the world: a combination of deflation, relatively high unemployment and low or even negative interest rates.
"manufacture products with a high ratio of retail price to shipping cost" shout be "manufacture products with a high ratio of shipping cost to retail price", i.e dog food, paper products, furniture. So it looks like:
Unless you are involved in an export controlled product, work in national defense, manufacture products with a high ratio of shipping cost to retail price, or provide services to those who are left, your US-based job is evaporating before your eyes. We're talking a major deflationary spiral in the works. This is gonna get ugly.
Yes, but....how do you get good design? You have to start before that point.
(1) Understand what is the real business problem. What is the quantifiable cost of the problem? What is the cost if it is not fixed? What is the project cost of the solution? What is the operational cost of the solution?
(2) Correctly extract the solution requirements. Properly scope the solution. What's in and what's out. Document the requirements. Correctly determine the non-functional requirements.
(3) Document as use cases. Elaborate as UML.
(4) Iterate, iterate, iterate. The requirements will evolve. The prototyping will suggest alternative solutions. Priorities for feature sets will change.
And guess what -- that stuff is not done well by being outsourced to people from another culture, where cheating to pass university exams is the norm, where English is a 2nd language, where companies here have little legal recourse if the outsourced company blows the project, steals the company data and intellectual property, and sells it to industrial competitors, organized crime, and international terrorists.
Other than that, outsourcing is a great idea.
Really? What about those who are "overqualified"? Should they learn new skills or hide them?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.