[dba-Tech] FYI: Friday technical reading: Hitting the high notes...

Shamil Salakhetdinov shamil at users.mns.ru
Fri Aug 5 16:12:33 CDT 2005


Hi All,

Do you agree with this article/statement?

"... So, why isn't there room in the software industry for a low cost
provider, someone who uses the cheapest programmers available? (Remind me to
ask Quark how that whole fire-everybody-and-hire-low-cost-replacements plan
is working.)
Here's why: duplication of software is free. That means that the cost of
programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With
software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of
each unit sold.

Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost...."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

(I'm curios how you feel about that living there in rather well paid for
programmers' work countries as far as I have heard and seen because  I'm  a
kind of (alone) indirectly fighting with low cost programmers army here in
my country when I'm trying to get work here at rates, which allow to keep my
big family well and I'm also trying to stay straight  against "dirt cheap"
programmers from India, East Europe (yes, Russia too of course), China,
Latin America etc  competing for the projects on Internet sites like
RentACoder.  Not easy excersize I must say. Unfortunately I don't have
enough real samples of the code of my competitors to say that cheap
programmers can't be good by definition. With some rare exceptions, which
only prove this rule. Am I wrong that cheap programmers can't be good? - if
I'm wrong and if Joel is wrong then for me this means that programming
profession will soon die even there in your countries under the pressure of
"dirt cheap" Eastern and Latin America programmers' dumping rates forcing
most of software programming to go off-shore...)

This another article from Joel is also interesting I think:

"Rub a dub dub"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html

Shamil




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