Self satisfaction, not happiness, is the goal of life
Another interesting HuffPo article discussing the ho hum topics of political and financial corruption. Definition of a sociopath:
Glibness and superficial charm. Grandiose sense of self-worth. Pathological lying. Cunning and manipulative behavior. Lack of remorse or guilt. Lack of empathy. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Sound familiar?
Two postings on my CIO magazine feed.. Silicon Valley twentysomethings eating dirt now, and 25% of US IT jobs to be offshored within two years. Have a nice day.
The French Foreign Legion still exists, and is willing to possibly take you if you’re out of work, disgusted or weary of it all. You get a white hat, a new identity, a rifle and duty somewhere in Africa. Oh, and still male only.
Worried about layoffs? Backstabbers at work, can’t really trust anyone, not even your ‘friends?’
Scapegoating is also more common during a recession because bad economic times draw attention to problems and inefficiencies inside companies that might otherwise be ignored during a boom, says Harvey.
“When things tighten up, inefficiencies and problems become bigger issues. You can no longer hide them,” he adds.
It’s easy to get blindsided by a co-worker playing the blame game, because such subterfuge takes place behind the scenes and because people are so focused on the specter of a layoff that they fail to recognize coworkers’ machinations. Thus, a victim of workplace scapegoating often doesn’t realize what’s happening until his boss calls him into the office for a tense discussion about why the victim’s software contains more bugs than the Amityville Horror House.
Don’t trust the ones who you obviously shouldn’t trust, and don’t trust the ones who you have been trusting:
You also need to tune your radar to people who might try to throw you under the bus. Take a look around the office and identify the complainers and back-stabbers, the people you’ve heard bad-mouthing others, and realize that they could direct their ire at you, too.
Don’t ignore your friends, either, says Harvey. “It is so common for people to not want to be blamed that even people who are your friends, when push comes to shove, if they feel their career is in jeopardy, they may feel justified in doing it,” he says.
I saw this long comment posted to a question regarding small businesses in the US outsourcing all their employees in order to survive.
If they are practicising yoga in place of the foosball, I could find that a bit more acceptable. Actually, I find that at least some of this rings true in situations I;ve been party to.
Well not all the outsourcing is good enough. I am on EAD and soon have my green card. I work for the top indian IT consulting company which claims to have a robust and successful outsourcing model. We work on a 80-20 or 70-30 model where 20% or 30% of the people are here in US and rest in India. Typically billing rates for people working in US from our company is $85 per hour while that in India is $21. So indian worker seems to be costing just 1/4 of the person who is working in USA. But quality wise almost all the significant and most critical work is done by US team. They essentially have 12-14 hours kind of work day. They take the calls morning at 7:30 AM and also takes the calls starting from India at 11:30 PM onwards. Very less sleep for these onsite US team folks. And it is this US team which takes the bottomline, respnsibility and accountability of the work. Client grabs their neck for everything. While team in india has got attitude problem. As number of jobs in india are too much, they simply don’t care about the work. They come to the office at 10:00 AM and leaves by 5:00 PM. They have generous 2 hours kind of lunch and tea breaks. They have lot of extra curricular activities, games, sports, gym, yoga classes, training courses at the very good campus with free lunches. Most of these indian team members are looking for excuses for not doing any work. They simply tell these excuses-that their PC is not having enough RAM, program hangs, network cable is missing etc… and so they cannot do the work. As my company wants to increase it’s profit margins in india-they don’t mind kicking out best of breed, talented and experienced folks and rather keep people who are fresh out of college or with less than 1 yr. of experience. And of top of it, in my company-most of these people the moment they get experience of 3 yrs-they don’t want to touch coding or do any technical work. Somebody is lead, somebody is manager, junior or senior manager etc…These non-technical people increases the overhead. As a result there are very few people who are actually working. Better to say in a team of 10 folks, only two are bright and two are above average, rest are there to play plain politics, flatter their bosses and do total time pass. As client is sitting in US-they have no idea what is happening as they do monitoring very minutely. In the end, people who have to suffer are these onsite team members because they cannot afford to be lousy or those 30-40% people in offshore team who are working. When everybody is getting their share of salary why only 30-35% people work in this global outsourced project?
Re-skill yourself! For some reason, I don’t like this word. It is a synonym for retraining (another re-word), retooling perhaps, or just training.
You shouldnt miss this. A random sample of H1-B applications pulled out and reviewed found that 21% of the sample contained fraudulent info, such as fake degrees, etc.
Infoworld offers its American readers advice on how to move with your job to the overseas hotspots for IT employment. Some thoughts:
Hiring slowdowns, fewer college grads being hired, layoffs have occurred and more to happen?
I thought this was a reasonable, not too short but too long description. Not hung up on narrow technical skills (except for those of the vendor’s products of course, but even then was reasonable considering the employer’s needs):
Major Responsibilities
1. Lead the design and development of desktop, client-server, smart client, web service and web applications based on the ESRI ArcGIS product line.
2. Develops procedures, programs, and scripts to facilitate the entry, delivery, manipulation, and archiving of data.
3. Analyzes, designs, implements, tests, documents, and maintains software applications, primarily for enterprise GIS systems.
4. Creates new software designs for projects, with long term goals of simplicity, stability and re-use.
5. Evaluate and recommend hardware and network configurations for internal use and for clients.
6. Evaluates software requests for feasibility, level of effort, and compatibility with existing systems.
7. Evaluates and designs spatial databases.
8. Write requirements documents and software specifications
9. Consults with internal and external customers to provide technical assistance and gather requirements.
10. Uses tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio and Visual Studio .NET to develop and test software components written in various languages, including, but not limited to Visual Basic .NET, C#, ASP.NET.
11. Negotiate scope with development team leads and clients
12. Contributes and presents technical details for proposal preparation and selection meetings.
13. Develops new software engineering skills and develops understanding of GIS technologies and systems as required to complete projects, and disseminates this to the rest of the team.
14. Maintains expert level knowledge of software development tools/techniques and the ESRI ArcGIS software product line.
15. Assists other developers in completion of tasks
Supervisory Responsibilities
This position oversees a team of software developers/engineers.
Qualifications
Current knowledge of industry standard software engineering practices, including agile methodologies, unit testing, code generation, managing a daily build process and automated code documentation. Ability to select or design a development methodology and oversee its implementation within an organization. Experience customizing ESRI software products including ArcIMS, ArcGIS Desktop, ArcEngine, ArcSDE and ArcGIS Server. Requires strong relational / spatial database skills and knowledge, with particular emphasis on the ESRI Geodatabase model.
