141–150 of 406 posts
When I graduated in 1995, some of my friends were disappointed when they went into computer science for lack of a better option. By 1999, they were getting frantic calls from recruiters trying to outbid each other.
In the mid-80s, I went to a job fair, and two jaded programmers told me that there was no future in computer science, everything was already done and invented, and the job was mostly boring maintenance.
I sense a cycle...
"News" is almost always bad news. I find that I have to create my own content if I want to share news that's not the most negative spin one can reasonably make. To get any more negative, you would need to start fabricating stories and leave the land of plausibility. Edit: Come to think of it, when I was interviewed for a news story about the quiet little hep a epidemic a few years back, they fabricated a quote from m…
> they fabricated a quote from me Whenever I see someone mention having been interviewed, chances are good they'll mention this.
I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all the jobs would be going to India and tell me I should pursue something else. This seemed to be very much the prevailing wisdom of the time. I pursued it anyway as it was my passion. I was one of five students in my program that had been a huge multi-campus prog…
My father was very strongly against my decision to get into web development (2012) and he echoed this sentiment heavily. I distinctly remember him yelling at me as a teenager; "you'll be living under a bridge in 5 years if you do this! India has this market!". He eventually kicked me out for not listening, forcing me to to borrow money from a friend to pay tuition in my final semester. Needless to say he was complete…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I was just starting CS course at university in 2003 in Poland and it was obvious to everybody it's the future and there will be enough jobs for everybody. There were 20 candidates for each place in the course so you had to pass the entry exams really well (and it wasn't the best university in Poland, far from it). I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :)
> I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :) Personally i'd agree that this is good for individual employment prospects, but not necessarily good for the country itself. For example, here in Latvia i've heard that there's a shortage of developers and hence many government projects can't be fully staffed easily, because they're having problems being competitive in regards to…
Let's say government hires 1% of the developers in the country, foreign companies pay them 3 times more and if not for outsourcing 50% of these people would have to emigrate.
If X is base salary ignoring outsourcing then the country would earn 0.5 * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * X without outsourcing and 3 * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * 3 * X with outsourcing
So the change is (3 - 0.5) * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * X * (3-1) = 2.5 * X * tax_rate - 0.02 * X = X * (2.5 * tax_rate - 0.02)
So in this simplistic example for the country to benefit from outsourcing it suffices that tax_rate > 0.008 which is pretty much always true.
Let's say government hires 10% of developers, nobody would migrate and the salary difference would be 500%. Even with such unrealistic assumptions the tax_rate would just need to be higher than 10% for the country to benefit from outsourcing.
tax_rate > (5-1) * 0.1 / (5-1) = 0.1
tax_rate > ((salary_foreign - salary_domestic) * percent_hired_by_government) / (salary_foreign - (salary_domestic* forced_migration))Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW £18k in 2001 is ~£30k in today's money which is on the upper end of graduate starting salaries even for today
Im especially glad I’m not British - in America my $150k TC out of undergrad was mediocre.
I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all the jobs would be going to India and tell me I should pursue something else. This seemed to be very much the prevailing wisdom of the time. I pursued it anyway as it was my passion. I was one of five students in my program that had been a huge multi-campus prog…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im especially glad I’m not British - in America my $150k TC out of undergrad was mediocre.
Yeah America seems to have the nice combo of reasonably price places to live and high tech salaries. Since “remote, but US” is common I do t see why you can’t take your $150k and live off a quarter of that somewhere and save most!
I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all the jobs would be going to India and tell me I should pursue something else. This seemed to be very much the prevailing wisdom of the time. I pursued it anyway as it was my passion. I was one of five students in my program that had been a huge multi-campus prog…
My father was very strongly against my decision to get into web development (2012) and he echoed this sentiment heavily. I distinctly remember him yelling at me as a teenager; "you'll be living under a bridge in 5 years if you do this! India has this market!". He eventually kicked me out for not listening, forcing me to to borrow money from a friend to pay tuition in my final semester. Needless to say he was complete…
My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one weekend, bailed out and lied my way into a sysadmin job for 2x the money. 20 odd years down the line I’m glad I made that choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I was just starting CS course at university in 2003 in Poland and it was obvious to everybody it's the future and there will be enough jobs for everybody. There were 20 candidates for each place in the course so you had to pass the entry exams really well (and it wasn't the best university in Poland, far from it). I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :)
> I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :) Personally i'd agree that this is good for individual employment prospects, but not necessarily good for the country itself. For example, here in Latvia i've heard that there's a shortage of developers and hence many government projects can't be fully staffed easily, because they're having problems being competitive in regards to…