[ajug-members] Wipro coming to Atlanta

[Ron Cordell]

Sure, Frank - I'd be happy to do that on another thread. I've been into it
for a few months, now, and there's both a new language and a new platform to
learn. Initial impressions are that I really like C# as a language, although
there are some head-scratchers occasionally. .Net as a platform is a mix -
there are some way cool features and capabilities that come from being so
integrated with the OS (like WCF) and in other ways it's amazingly primitive
when compared to available Java-based enterprise platforms (ASP comes to
mind). Part of that has to do with the lack of community around .Net like
there is around Java; there's just no comparison. When I get a little more
under my belt I'll do a post or maybe see if Burr wants to do a
presentation.

On 8/3/07, Frank Paolino <frankp at attglobal.net> wrote:
>
>  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.
>
>
>
>
> >
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> ajug-members mailing list
> ajug-members at ajug.orghttp://www.ajug.org/mailman/listinfo/ajug-members
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> ajug-members mailing list
> ajug-members at ajug.org
> http://www.ajug.org/mailman/listinfo/ajug-members
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.ajug.org/pipermail/ajug-members/attachments/20070803/d1ac99df/attachment.html