Western IT specialist: forget about the ultimate advantage of your IT education. Forget about the experience you collect in suffisticated projects. Don't convince yourself to have a much higher skill set than the cheaper eastern workers. It's all wrong.
Through the hardest price pressure ever, through out-tasking and near-shoring to the european east, through the modern IT professors there who used to work here in the western europe for years, through the flood of information and documentation available on the web, through many (open source) projects initiated and continued by the eastern specialists, and through a huge technology affinity as well as historical advance in general technology (space, army etc.), through tons of green card initiatives all over the world, through all that you cannot push this fact to the back of your mind anymore: eastern IT specialists are not worse. They just might earn less money.
But technology will go more and more (back) to the east. I'm pretty sure it will. It just took some time to shake off the rigidity of the post-Soviet phase. Now it's definitely over, and the pace with which the eastern IT specialists will mix up the technological world will sure be amazing.
11/29/2009
Skill Spam
I have posted some more or less annoyed tweets about this topic, so I would like to say a little more in the blog.
If you remember the Spam sketch by the Monty Python guys, you will probably know what I mean. At some point in your project, you need an expert with a concrete set of existing skills. You ask your recruiting company for help, and you get a CV. A deeper look at it shows you, that they have just added the required skills to the list of the existing ones, though they never appear in the actual project list.
Another example: IT confereneces hunt hypes. This is very well known and will never change - otherwise people wouldn't visit them. The usual practice seems to be, to have a pool of same talkers and to raffle those hype topics out of the pool assigning them to the available talkers. Of course, sponsors need presence, so they get a budget of talk time and darn it with their own talkers.
The problem with both is that when you as a customer look for expertise in a concrete area, it is very possible that you don't get what you expect. It doesn't count that the guy you get or you listen to has hundreds of years of experience. It sure helps him when it comes to going through a talk about a topic which he has no real idea about but which he has prepared himself to talk about. And it helps you to start faster in a project where your experience is the only relevant skill so you need to learn faster.
But, from the customer's (the one who hires or visits the conference) point of view, this is absolutely inefficient, and thus: overpaid. You don't want someone to scratch the syntactical surface, when you need to hear some concrete hints about a programming language. The book does well, and costs much less. You don't need someone to learn about a technology before he can efficiently work in your project and pay thousands of euros a day for him to learn. You need efficiency, and as few financial and time effort as possible.
I can't stand the skill spam. If I need expertise, I look for concrete some out there, or I try to gain some by myself. I don't want to hire or listen to alleged experts who can say about a thing not even more than I can read about it in a book or on the web and who was there for whatever reason, so he does the job. It's a huge waste of time and money.
If you remember the Spam sketch by the Monty Python guys, you will probably know what I mean. At some point in your project, you need an expert with a concrete set of existing skills. You ask your recruiting company for help, and you get a CV. A deeper look at it shows you, that they have just added the required skills to the list of the existing ones, though they never appear in the actual project list.
Another example: IT confereneces hunt hypes. This is very well known and will never change - otherwise people wouldn't visit them. The usual practice seems to be, to have a pool of same talkers and to raffle those hype topics out of the pool assigning them to the available talkers. Of course, sponsors need presence, so they get a budget of talk time and darn it with their own talkers.
The problem with both is that when you as a customer look for expertise in a concrete area, it is very possible that you don't get what you expect. It doesn't count that the guy you get or you listen to has hundreds of years of experience. It sure helps him when it comes to going through a talk about a topic which he has no real idea about but which he has prepared himself to talk about. And it helps you to start faster in a project where your experience is the only relevant skill so you need to learn faster.
But, from the customer's (the one who hires or visits the conference) point of view, this is absolutely inefficient, and thus: overpaid. You don't want someone to scratch the syntactical surface, when you need to hear some concrete hints about a programming language. The book does well, and costs much less. You don't need someone to learn about a technology before he can efficiently work in your project and pay thousands of euros a day for him to learn. You need efficiency, and as few financial and time effort as possible.
I can't stand the skill spam. If I need expertise, I look for concrete some out there, or I try to gain some by myself. I don't want to hire or listen to alleged experts who can say about a thing not even more than I can read about it in a book or on the web and who was there for whatever reason, so he does the job. It's a huge waste of time and money.
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