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 _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com