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

Arthur Fuller artful at rogers.com
Fri Aug 5 18:52:55 CDT 2005


An interesting missive, not surprising from one of the smartest persons on
this list. But I think that in at least a couple of areas you have made some
serious errors in your analysis, my friend Shamil.

1. Young kids come out of school full of hormones and enthusiasm and empty
of any sense of business requirements. (In general.) Given an assignment
they can code it adequately and even well, but asked to come up with a
design for 400 tables, there are only two chances they'll get it right -- a
fat one and a slim one. 

2. Add to this problem the knowledge or lack thereof of business of someone
in another country (any country will do -- for example, even a US programmer
will have trouble with CDN conventions -- Hindman aside of course). Way up
here in the cold we sign debits as positive and credits as negative. Perhaps
it's all the icebergs that caused this.

The point being, Shamil, that nothing NOTHING beats experience. You have
demonstrated countless times your virtuosity to this group. Use any of us as
references. I personally have subcontracted you and was extremely happy with
the results. I am quite confident that many other listers will attest to
your skills, even if they haven't actually hired you.

I contracted you to do a specific thing that I was not confident that I knew
how to do. You did it. Your bill was reasonable, I used the code, the client
liked it (I took all the credit of course), and that was that.

You can hire cheap or you can hire good. Worse, you can hire expensive that
poses as good. If you make this mistake you get a blemish on your resume
that lasts forever.

Of course this all could be the rationalizations of an old fart who was once
a young Turk. But this argument seems to work with various clients. I recall
a case where one of the stakeholders mentioned MTBF and I know what it
means. I suggested that we add a function to the program to email the
clients when the given MTBF was about a month away. Now perhaps this is more
a statement about the client than about my perspicacity, but that is neither
here nor there. The point is that a long time ago I learned what MTBF means
and an opportunity came up to re-use the knowledge. THAT is the point of
experience. That is what you can market that the young (regardless how
talented) cannot bring to the table -- and more so if they reside in another
nation.

And there is one more thing. If your clients reside in St. Petersburg then
you can face-to-face them, which someone in Beijing or Athens or Cairo
cannot do, at least not as inexpensively. Much as I love to work from my
home, there is something to be said for face-to-face.

So, my friend Shamil, you bring to the table three very important things: 1.
experience. 2. breadth. 3. brilliance. 

Given the sort of assignment that I last gave you, I would choose you in a
New York minute over someone 25 years old with no visible track record, even
though your price might be 5 times his. Why? 1. You have demonstrated that
you can do it. 2. You have a web site and abundant examples of your code to
prove it. 3. Your command of English is excellent and my command of Russian
is non-existent.

>From a manager's point of view (not that I am always in that role, but that
is beside the point), my most important priority is "Get it Done."
Additional priorites include "On Time" and "On Budget". If I hit all three
bases, I and everyone above me are in Biscuit City. If I fail on one, I get
a blemish. Two, a scar. Three, it's time to look for a new employer.

I can safely say that of all the numerous talented people I have met thanks
to this list, you dazzle me. This is not a love letter, just a statement of
where I personally think you stand in the world of developers I know. I
hired you once. You delivered, on time and on budget. The code worked.

Enough said.

Arthur

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Shamil
Salakhetdinov
Sent: August 5, 2005 5:13 PM
To: !dba-Tech
Subject: [dba-Tech] FYI: Friday technical reading: Hitting the high notes...

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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