[ajug-members] Wipro coming to Atlanta

[Frank Paolino]

Ron,
Will you share your own personal  "comparison of java and .net" 
perspective at some point? I rarely get to hear the perspective from 
someone who has/had been in Java so long.
Frank

Ron Cordell wrote:
> In my experience most mid to large companies don't really have the 
> culture that allows good software development to flourish, especially 
> here on the east coast, and so tend to look at the bottom line. They 
> see that they can get "developers" for $16/hour by outsourcing to 
> various companies whether they are in India, China, or Romania, and 
> that's what matters to them. There is a pervasive idea of the 
> "software factory" that drives this, and most middle managers aren't 
> dynamic or smart enough to actually change that. I've worked with a 
> number of offshore "teams", each with an onsite "coordinator" in 
> exactly that situation. At the ground level, the results from these 
> teams is mixed at best. There are two dynamics that I've seen - one 
> where the entire project is given offshore, architecture and 
> everything, and one where the offshore team is an extension to the 
> onshore team. Neither produce good results in my experience when 
> looking in detail at what was produced, but that's not what matters to 
> the business people who approve budgets. They see that they got X 
> functionality at Y price and that's all they care about. They tend to 
> shrug off issues like performance, maintenance of really poorly 
> written code, or the fact that they are trying to push the problem of 
> their poor requirements management under the rug by hiring cheap 
> offshore teams. One of the major problems with trying the approach of 
> integrating an offshore team into an onshore team is lack of control 
> over who comes onto the offshore team. Companies like Wipro, Syntel, 
> Caritor, et al all regard their resources as interchangeable. The same 
> can be said of any outsourcing company, onshore or off shore. Without 
> control over who is on the team, the ability to manage code and 
> architectural quality becomes almost impossible. People with just a 
> couple of years of experience tend to be moved from a team member to 
> team leader or even architecture, but can't code their way out of a 
> paper bag! Yet this is what is sold as a CMM Level 5 solution to the 
> bean counters.
>
> Others have written on this thread about it not being an individual 
> issue but a corporate one, and that's true. But I *can* influence a 
> little bit around me about how people perceive the craft of software 
> development and create a bubble in my own company that becomes known 
> for delivering a quality product. In the company where I currently 
> work it's a long, uphill struggle against sheer incompetence to change 
> things like requirements management and how projects are run, but it 
> can be done.
>
> On the subject of visas - I recently had two positions open for 6 
> months that I was trying to fill from both within the company and 
> without. I was looking for a more entry level person and a more 
> experienced person. It finally took an H1-B to fill the entry level 
> person just because I finally found someone that could actually write 
> a simple method in a class and a set of unit tests for it. That's all 
> I was looking for, but I went through literally hundreds of candidates 
> to find someone that could meet those minimum requirements. The method 
> was slightly more complicated than Hello World. There's lots of people 
> out there that call themselves software developers, but there aren't 
> that many that can actually develop software, and far fewer that 
> understand that developing software is a craft that requires constant 
> refinement and understanding. When you see it from that point of view 
> I am a little more sympathetic to the bean counters about what they 
> pay for developers on a grand scale, but down here on the ground I'll 
> fight for every inch I can to get Software Craftsmanship.
>
> And finally, to those java bigots out there :) I can't resist throwing 
> in that while I've spent the past 8 years working in Java, I've 
> switched to .Net and C# for the time being to be able to explore that 
> platform more thoroughly. It's just a part of that learning process. 
> There isn't nearly the community around .Net that there is around 
> Java, but there are some interesting things to explore and understand 
> the relative strengths and weaknesses of both as Enterprise platforms.
>
>
>
>
>
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