August 20, 2007 by roland.

The marketing looks really great. The implementation is pretty worthless. Forget about getting ANYTHING remotely resembling technical support. All you will get back is badly worded broken English missing most of its prepositions.

They provide all kids of plug-ins which are important to them. Try getting them to add the barest of functionality though….the ability to COUNT the number of times your blog has been visited and to COUNT the number of times an article has been read. A standard plug-in already exists for this in the WordPress community…just don’t EVER expect to see it here.

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August 17, 2007 by roland.

Here is an excerpt from “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer” ISBN 0-97708660-7. After you read it, I will explain why I am posting it here.

While we are on the subject of indexed file lore allow me a moment to show you one more utility and to rant about one of my strongest pet peeves. Rem em ber one of the record types was carriage control? I have yet to figure out the human fascination with wording things “bassackwards.” What makes matters worse is I have run into some UNIX zealots claiming this to actually be true, and that is a very sad testament to the state of affairs in UNIX education. To me this even worse than a bunch of dudes in a military movie running around shouting “lock and load,” which also happens to be “bassackwards!”

The ASCII code for a line feed is decimal 10 (hex 0A). The ASCII code for a carriage return is decimal 13 (hex 0D). The actual sequence for a new line is not carriage return followed by line feed, but rather line feed followed by carriage return. This is completely consistent with the history of typewriters. If any of you can still manage to find a manual typewriter, put in a piece of paper, use the space bar to get the carriage over far enough to ding the margin warning bell, then slowly push the return lever. What you will see is the paper rolls up, then you get past the end of the gear to the block, and the carriage begins sliding back.

Ordinarily this totally incorrect phrasing causes little difficulty in the computing world, but I have watched data communications specifications go out the door at client sites stating they wanted the data terminated by and physically developed a parser that would not accept the bytes in any other order. Needless to say, none of the files sent in by vendors passed testing. Everybody makes a stupid mistake in this industry, no doubt about it, but to argue strongly that the correct order really is when every test done physically proves that is not the case is drastically sad.

Writing a data parser which terminates the data with white space characters and requires those characters to be in a specific order is sadder still. D o not make this mistake. Physically terminate your data specifications with one or more specific ASCII characters which are not white space. Start every record with one or more characters that are not
white space. When parsing, skip all of the characters between the end of one record, and the beginning of another record which are white space.

In case you are wondering about the “lock and load” thing, it started with breach loading rifles and muskets. Before you could fire, you had to open the breach, load the munitions, then physically lock the breach. If you didn’t physically lock the breach, it would pop open when you fired letting the discharge from the powder take a good hunk out of your skull. Som ehow “people”, and I use that term loosely, decided it sounded cooler to shout “lock and load.” If the world still used breach loaders, and these people were allowed to follow their own advice, the problem would eliminate itself, but alas, we exert too much effort trying to make Darwin wrong.

In case you are wondering why I am posting this in my blog is that I ran into it yet again. While at a client site which is working with IBM’s newest and greatest SOA toolset (all of which was developed off-shore) this bug turned up yet again. We solved this problem back in 1975, yet the low skilled off-shore markets keep tossing this problem right back into the main stream. If an XML message is built by anything other than Java this product couldn’t find end of line with a roadmap, seeing eye dog, and GPS device. It’s out there today, touted as a cost saving off-shore success. The reality is it is a failure of biblical proportions working in only a handful of situations. Yet another papered over off-shore catastrophe lands smack dab in the middle of corporate IT. Everyone is looking at the big abyss in the ground with black soot and ash climbing out of it asking “is this our new product?”

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

It seems you cannot turn on a newscast or read a business magazine these days without hearing about this mythical IT shortage. I’ve been hearing about it for years. The truth is, there is a glut of IT talent on the market. While the industry rags have been quoting the lowest unemployment for IT professionals in ages, they strategically waited until enough had been on unemployment so long they fell off. It is legal fraud, but fraud none-the-less.

Quite simply the industry marketing…err…I mean analyst firms are getting paid a lot of money to say anything which will justify boosting the cap for $10.00/day employees. There hasn’t been a shortage of IT talent since prior to 1990. If the country keeps up its trend of off-shoring there will be a devastating shortage of home grown IT skills in less than 8 years. That will be about the time we see Enron type trials happening for the companies which have been hiding off-shore failures in the books. We have been seeing a lot of claims about off-shoring success, but we haven’t seen any actual success. The difference between a claimed success and an actual success is quite simply, the claim. When you have a new system or enhancement which is an actual success, you don’t have to tell anyone. The business simply works better and it is obvious to all who do business with it.

The truth about how well the off-shore thing has been working is now apparent in the trade press for those who know how to read it. Multi-million dollar contract cancellations. Lots of new off-shore contracts running significantly less than 2 years in length. In the past these deals were running 5+ years in length. That just doesn’t happen anymore. You can only hide so much in the books before the auditors uncover it.

Here is a simple test you can all perform. Go to a contracting Web site like Dice.com or some other site you frequent. Pick a skill set which is not widely available. Scan the contracts and keep a log of them. Return every month and scan again. What you will see is the same requirement moving from pimp to pimp to pimp not getting filled. The reason isn’t a shortage of skills, but a shortage of business ethics.

A while back I was contacted about an OpenVMS FORTRAN gig by a recruiter who couldn’t speak English. I recognized the requirements and the general location enough to know what the billing rate was there two years ago. It used to pay up to $90.00/hr to the consultant. The pimp which called me was looking to pay under $40.00/hr. If there really was a shortage of IT people that contract would be offering $110-150/hr. I followed the listing for a few months, watching it move from pimp to pimp, then lost interest. I don’t think it ever got filled. I’m pretty sure management used it as a justification for going off-shore or for violating a student visa.

For anyone willing to look at the details it is easy to see there is no IT skills shortage. Contracting rates have not climbed into the deep three digit per hour range and starting salaries for employees have not sky rocketed. No, my friends, this is just a new spin on an old scam.

I’m old enough to remember when there was a shortage of IT professionals. In those days, you didn’t post your resume anywhere, but you got at least three phone calls per week from recruiters offering up jobs paying more than your current job. Normally you held out until you got either a really great position, or doubled your money. People generally stayed places less than two years and doubled their salary at least every 4 years. Now, the salary you get hired at is pretty much the salary you will die with unless you move into management.

There is no shortage of IT people, only a shortage of ethics.

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

If you were lucky enough to be born in time to witness the golden age of television, or at least the trailing end of it, you got to hear about a lot of different ages. The tail end of WWII ushered in the nuclear age. Later, a lot of people thought using nuclear power would be a good and cheap thing. They pushed off what to do with the waste for “a later date”. The country got used to the construction boom and was willing to wait for that date. Now, some of those “containment” facilities are no longer containing the waste and we are watching it seep into the ground water supply. Some people are waiting with baited breath for the Britta filter that removes radiation from tap water.

We’ve all seen news reel footage of the challenge to put a man on the moon and return him safely to this earth. Most say that was the true dawn of the Space Age. NASA was the pride of the nation and all kids wanted to be astronauts. Now NASA has become the gang that couldn’t shoot straight and we hope they don’t try anything that makes the news. Some call it the age of “faster, cheaper, splat”. Whatever you call it, the place can’t seem to do anything right for less than $20 billion. Even with that price tag it is iffy.

The widespread adoption and use of computers ushered in what some call the Age of Technology. Technology rippled through the world ingraining itself in the fabric of many nations. At one time, IT workers made good livings and spent well beyond their means buying $70K SUV’s and McMansion homes. Senior IT salaries were well above $100K/yr with bennies and life was good. The average price of a family sedan went from less than $8K to over $30K for the same level of vehicle. Automakers thought life was grand and their company leaders kept huge quantities of cash for themselves. Home builders and developers made money hand over fist keeping other high end providers well stocked with orders. The entire country adjusted to, and became accepting of the high prosperity.

Some years later, needing a new slogan for an election campaign, we saw the Information Age get born. Billions were going to be poured into creating an “Information Super Highway”. There was going to be a “Global Community”. Technology was the new commodity in this brave new world. We also saw the forming of a “Global Village Council” become a task for “a later date”. There is no global village council for the same reason the UN takes forever to do anything. Everybody wants to rule, nobody wants to be ruled. Now, whatever is banned in your country, is legally for sale in other countries already on the Web. A nasty day of reckoning is headed everywhere over this debacle.

It didn’t take long for the spin doctors to realize they needed a new age. The DOT-BOMB flame out pretty much spelled it out for a blind man. Enter the Information Age. Information, not technology, was what everybody needed to get an edge. This was the new commodity in the new new new new economy. Ah, nice spin. Of course, you still needed technology to acquire, store and sift through that information, so it was a win-win political slogan.

All of those executives who weren’t raking in the massive stock options of the DOT-BOMB executives wanted to boost their personal take home. They had become accustomed to the large revenue streams their companies had selling overpriced goods to the IT professionals and wanted more. Then, they looked at this Internet thing and said “Hey, we could off shore all of our IT workers for $10.00/day workers and make oceans more for ourselves…err…I mean our shareholders.” There was only one little problem. Somebody had to build enough of an infrastructure in those countries to make it work. That meant they had to tell other executives about it. No problem, they had industry marketing ex….err…I mean Industry Analyst firms to spread the religion of the next Mega-trend.

The marketing experts…I mean analysts were highly skilled at their jobs. They had been employed to push every worthless idea which came along (remember “right sizing”?). This was right up their alley. Suddenly everybody was hopping on the band wagon. The great purge began and highly skilled well paid IT workers were replaced with unskilled low paid workers. Ah, this was Utopia. Campaign contributions came pouring in to make certain this was done all legal like. Politicians who plaid their cards right couldn’t spend all of the money they got for their campaigns.

Finally, the other shoe dropped. While high gas prices were publicly blamed, the auto industry knew the real reason their dealer lots were filled with overpriced SUVs nobody bought. The target market had been eliminated. Oh, there were still some employed in IT, but they weren’t buying the overpriced rides anymore. They were buying used, or that other American car company, Toyota. (A lot of people get offended at that statement, but Toyota has enough plants in the USA to be considered an American car company, they just didn’t start here.)

The next to feel the bite were the builders. Real estate speculators kept prices artificially high for a while, but the air is coming out of the bubble now and a lot of them are eating places they cannot pay for. Following on their heels are the companies who made the high end toys for the McMansions. The $300 washer is finding its way into peoples homes instead of the $3000 stainless steel model. The same is true for kitchen appliances, entertainment systems and all other McMansion must-haves.

What happened is that politicians and executives started reading their own hype. They went on this journey looking no farther than the next quarter’s numbers. They ASS-U-MEd there would be no drop off in sales and they could “cost cut” their way to a larger valued stock option. Then back date the option to make it worth even more. In the immortal words of Ron White “You can’t fix stupid.”

Basically, everybody at the top appears to be in the mode of looking no farther than the next payoff. The credit card companies figured this out. They saw they were about to be victimized by this trend, poured huge amounts of cash into campaigns and viola! We have a new bankruptcy law protecting them. Why did they do this? Well, the unemployed IT workers believed the hype at first, and didn’t change their life styles. Only a few companies were doing this to be more competitive, they would have jobs soon. As the months dragged on the limits started getting hit and minimum payments were all that was coming in. The number of IT workers being shown the door increased and so did the amount at risk of default. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out they were all going to default soon and wipe out the assets of the credit card companies. So, another big round of payoffs (contributions) and an even bigger payoff (new bankruptcy law that didn’t reduce maximum credit card rates or penalties) was handed to them.

I’m sure the spin doctors will give it another name, but from where I sit, we all have just watched the beginnings of the Age of Corruption.

This entry was posted on August 14, 2007 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

This isn’t appearing in any of my books, it is just some thoughts I had today.

There has been a lot of discussion on-line and in the trade press about offshoring. What is surprising to me as I read through the IT news is that everybody bit at the smoke and nobody saw the fire.

Currently you read about the tens of thousands of programmers who have been let go so management could “cut costs” to artificially inflate the values of their stock options. You read the fraudulent stories about shortages of IT professionals in this county. These articles use doctored up numbers which don’t include the tens of thousands of IT professionals who have been laid off so long they are no longer counted in the unemployment statistics.

Yes, everybody is taking a swing at the smoke and nobody is paying attention to the fire. As smoke screens go, this was a good one. So thick it bowls most people over. The flames are showing up in articles nationwide, but nobody has put it together.

What flames you ask? Take some time and scan through the weekly trade press and business news for the past 5-6 months. Skip over all of the articles about H1-B and offshoring. What is left? You will find many articles covering Sarbanes and companies running afoul of it. There will be articles about mega-million dollar fines and penalties handed out because some agency seized or attempted to seize e-mail. Articles talking about various individuals getting in trouble due to data destruction.

Do you see the flames yet?

The real reason behind offshoring is criminal intent and/or prison avoidance. If your e-mail server is located in a country which has no extradition treaty with the U.S. it can never be seized by government agents. If all of your e-mail clients are configured to store their messages on the server only, there is no evidence inside of this country which can be used against your company. If your entire programming staff is in such a country and working through a third party they can never be compelled to testify in a court in this country.

One thing is becoming abundantly clear in the weekly trade press. The vast majority of offshore projects either fail or cost more than they would have cost to do inside of this country. The smoke screen about saving money is quickly fading. Eventually the true magnitude of these failures will become self evident as they will have to appear in financial filings. Some already are appearing as companies yank back multi-million dollar projects and have to issue huge checks for cancellation fees.

These stories leave the reader questioning why companies are still pursuing the offshore model for cost savings when it apparently is providing none. The real cost savings can only be explained in terms of avoidance fees. One company in the news over the past year has been handed multiple fines for e-mail issues. How many millions would they have saved if they had contracted a third party in a country without extradition to host and store all of their e-mail? I don’t have an answer, but it is a thought provoking question. Could they have side stepped the entire issue or most of it by pointing to that other company in a different country and sent the feds after them?

From time to time IT workers are asked to develop things which are less than legal. On some occasions the IT worker takes it to the legal department for a second opinion, but on other occasions they don’t know it is illegal and do it anyway. How many of you reading this has ever heard a programmer for an offshore company ask if something they have been assigned to do is legal? I never have, but perhaps you have.

As an IT professional, how many times have you personally been given a project which just “smelled wrong”? Be honest now. Of those projects, how many did you run past the legal or regulatory department and tell them to give you a “get out of jail free” card? The IT profession itself had little in the way of regulation prior to the Sarbanes-Oxley stuff. The industries we serve can be highly regulated. The financial, health care and pharmaceutical industries have mass quantities of regulations. We cannot hope to understand them all, but if we work in those industries we have to have a sense of the really important ones. More importantly, we have to know who to ask. Does your offshore company have a staff of legal and regulatory professionals fully versed in all U.S. law and regulations pertaining to your industry? Do they have access to your companies staff?

We are standing at the edge of a great chasm and being told the march forward is good for us. I personally don’t see it that way.

Here is a question for the legal minds, and it is one they better answer before this and the other trends go any further. All of the industry analysts are getting behind the sales pitch for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). All of the industry analysts have at one point or another proclaimed offshoring as a “mega-trend”. If you can believe the visions, we will all have itty bitty Web access devices with no storage and own no software. All services, even word processing, will be hosted on the Web somewhere. If this comes true and the companies have this all hosted on computers residing within the borders of a country with no extradition treaty, how do you obtain their records for a criminal trial? How do you prosecute them for failure to produce e-mail?

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

A lot of attention has been given to the hijacked title of Business Analyst by the trade press recently. The title used to be used by the “Independent” analysis firms for people who were doing “research”. Some time later they started calling these people “Industry Analysts” leaving the other title open for thieving. Since the vast majority of MBA’s who get put in charge of IT departments do whatever these marketing…I mean analyst firms tell them to do, they started using the title for another batch of MBA’s brought into the corporate structure to oversee off-shored projects.

This title is usually broken up into junior and senior. The senior Business Analyst is fresh out of MBA school. They took their one day/week course using a worthless Microsoft product (insert your favorite Microsoft product name here) to point and click their way into creating a contact manager, got their certificate, and were now certified to head up IT departments and projects. Being able to use this title to bring in more MBA’s below them set a twinkle in the older MBA’s eyes. They live for the “minnie me” principal.

In theory, the Business Analyst is supposed to be what a Systems Analyst used to be years ago. Way back, before we had computers, there used to be people called “Efficiency Experts”. These people walked around factory floors, job sites, offices and every other place the company had operations. They took all kinds of notes, then disappeared into a room for days or weeks. When they emerged, they put together a document which showed how to improve business processes to either reduce waste, reduce injuries or cut costs. The “cut costs” part always appealed to the MBA’s. They just had to say it cut costs and toss out a big number. MBA’s would never read far enough into the document to see there was no supporting data.

Computers came onto the scene and the programmers were initially under the domain of the finance department. As we discussed earlier, the first systems written or purchased were for accounting. After accounting was quasi taken care of, the order processing systems started getting written. Every first cut at an order processing system did the same thing, replicate the paper forms. Later came picking tickets for those actually filling the orders, shipping tickets and invoicing. It all revolved around accounting.

Some efficiency experts embraced the technology. They started hanging out with the IT people long before it was cool to do so. The IT people passed along some basic IT books of the day and the efficiency experts read up on the topic. The efficiency experts started looking at the systems in place, walking around asking questions and taking notes. They disappeared into that same little room and came out with a document about how to improve one or more systems. The difference this time is that the IT people read the document all the way through.

By the time the 1980’s rolled around, the title of “Efficiency Expert” pretty much didn’t exist anymore. Those who embraced the new technology were called Systems Analysts. Those who didn’t usually ended up driving a cab or a truck. Education also started changing drastically for IT people. Books were written and classes taught on systems design. Every wanna be programmer was required to sit through at least one. (The classes don’t exist anymore and you will probably have to find the books in a used book store.)

More and more IT departments sprung up around the country at companies too small to have had an efficiency expert. A new crop of Systems Analysts had to be found. By default, it was the programmer who spent the most time walking around the various company processes learning how the company actually worked. They knew who to invite to meetings that would generate real answers rather than schedule additional meetings. They had come from programming stock, so they knew what was and wasn’t possible in the time frame available. It was a win-win situation as far as systems development was concerned. A lot of the people who were best at accomplishing a project weren’t so good at cultivating a team or handling interpersonal problems.

Networking invaded IT departments in force by the 1980’s. Management didn’t have a clue about it, but they were told they needed it and threw money the direction they were told to throw it. The systems analyst got saddled with this task. At first it was fun working with new technology, but once management learned it cost money every month they started wanting to “cut costs”. The Systems Analyst as we knew them disappeared by the mid to late 1980’s. The title still existed for a while, but then it morphed into various “network” or “communications” titles. Basically, they became saddled with the task of chopping telecommunications costs while keeping everything talking. Not a fun job at all.

Who designed the systems written from the 1990’s through today? The short answer is nobody. Worthless pick and point GUI tools washed into the market. Shiny new buzzwords were coined to say “hacking” in as sexy a manner as possible. Some of these buzzwords were “Rapid Applications Development”, “Extreme Programming” and “Iterative Design”. There were far too many count. Every new PC product or 4GL which came onto the market felt compelled to coin yet another phrase for hacking. The lone voice of sanity at the few “design” meetings which actually happened was the DBA. They couldn’t fix the system, but they could enforce good database design on a system which got rid of at least some hacking.

Some companies had a few people left in upper management who actually understood technology and saw this trend for the train wreck it is. They started bringing in consultants who had actually worked on systems design. The consultants were somewhat short legged when they hit the ground running due to the fact they didn’t know who in each department actually did the work. A corporate structure chart will tell you who is in charge of getting the work done in a given department, but it won’t tell you who actually understands how to do it. In order to design a really good system you have to talk to the people actually doing the work. Don’t expect their managers to have a clue.

Managers who actually understood how IT was supposed to work were quickly moved to other departments doing tasks they knew nothing about so they would flounder about like the rest of upper management. This paved the way for the invasion of more PC servers running Microsoft Windows and Linux with even more thrown together hacks. Sprinkle in the fad of “rightsizing” and you pretty much have the 1990’s. Systems analysts got shoved into networking or systems management and nobody actually designed applications.

Now we approach 2010 and “off-shoring” is all the rage just like “rightsizing” was in the 1990’s. The Y2K wall pointed out to the known universe that “rightsizing” was the most asinine concept published to date. It was put into place pretty much so upper management could commit rape-pillage-and-plunder in the form of artificially inflated stock options and bonuses. Waiting until 1998 to start trying to sweep up the problem nearly bankrupted quite a few companies.

Can you guess what wall is going to slam down on the “off-shoring” debacle? That’s right! A wall created by the MBA’s themselves, the mythical Business Analyst. These people need to be what the original Systems Analyst was and “off-shoring” ensures that you cannot create one. Even if you try to hang onto a token few actual citizens from your IT department, they are not going to do the design for people who cannot even speak their language. I don’t care what country you are in or what country you are “off-shoring” to, the situation is the same. Even if you get one to stay they will be far less effective without the comradery of a local IT department to bounce ideas off of or ask questions.

You might remember that I said most of the really great Systems Analysts weren’t so good at solving “people problems” on a team. They were phenomenal at design and accomplishing projects, but the interpersonal thing wasn’t usually their strong suit. Now, once they do the analysis, 100% of the job is managing the “off-shore” team. IT people aren’t flocking to this. They are taking jobs with their former companies competitors who haven’t ridden this train off the cliff.

Now, we have a shiny new class of MBA at the company, the Business Analyst. They don’t have the tiniest shred of knowledge about the history of IT. Ninety percent of a Systems Analyst job was knowing the history, both of the industry and of the company. Not the history published for investors, but the history of what used to get done at each location and why.

Please allow me to relay a story to you. It is a story which is being repeated all across the globe from what I can see. Let me also state that any resemblance to persons or projects which may have crossed my path in the past is strictly coincidental.

The company in this story decides to bring in an MBA with “the right credentials” (they graduated from the same college as one of the managers). This shiny new MBA has learned all of the MBA tricks of things to say when they are clueless to make it sound like those actually doing the work don’t have a clue. They also have taken that one day/week course and got the little piece of paper certifying them to manage an IT department.

It is decided that this new MBA should be groomed to one day take over the IT department. They decide to give him a department’s first “off-shoring” project. This project has been highly publicized for all of the costs that will be cut. It will be a real career builder! Upper management has already signed a contract with an “off-shoring” firm, so the body shop has been chosen for him.

The project is to replace a system used to track pricing from suppliers and provide pricing to various other parts of the company including actual customer retailers. This system has been in place so long it uses a hierarchical database as its core. Various other things were bolted onto it along the way. Some members of the department have batch jobs and scripts they run “out of their desk drawer” for job security.

All of the bad things like the desk drawer jobs are supposed to go away when this new system is in place. Since the “off-shore” team doesn’t have skill one if they can’t pick and point, a Web based Java interface is to be developed. The new system is to use a relational database from a big name vendor.

Many of you may remember in Book One where I mentioned “design sessions” where veins would pop out on foreheads and vile things would be said about ones relationship with close family members. While some people weren’t cut out for them or found them distasteful, there were a necessary part of proving an application design before writing one line of code. You don’t get that with “off-shoring”. Not one member of the “development team” had any more IT experience than our poor little MBA.

Lots of meetings were scheduled and notes were written. Our hapless little MBA was quite dutiful when it came to logging lots of hours and generating lots of paper. The MBA also paid way too much attention to one line uttered when they were given the project “should have no impact on systems this application was feeding”. All of those “desk drawer jobs” suddenly became “systems this application was feeding” once those who had them learned of this magic phrase.

Oh, don’t waste your laughter yet. The best is still to come.

Our little MBA dutifully transferred the structure of the hierarchical database to the relational database verbatim. Even used one of those nice drawing tools to make a picture representation of the database. He didn’t bother fixing the keys, or replicating data which was needed to access other databases and indexed files. All of the warts came forward. The DBA’s tried to politely get our little MBA to correct this design. He responded with all of the tricks and phrases they teach you in MBA school. The all time favorite was “You just don’t understand the data, it has to be that way”. The all time favorite come back was “I understand the difference between a relational and hierarchical database and if your tables match, I don’t have to understand the data. You’re screwed before you start.”

Some people should never be taught SQL. It sounds horrible to refuse knowledge to anyone that can pay for it or read, but once you encounter one of those people you won’t think the statement was horrible. Our little MBA is one of them. Somewhere in that day/week training class they taught our little MBA enough SQL to know select statements existed. That and one pick & point tool was all he knew about IT. The application needed to display on a single screen data which was contained in databases from more than one database vendor.

I told you not to waste all of your laughter.

People who came up through the ranks of IT think nothing of needing data from more than one vendor’s database. We do it all of the time. We choose a driver table or set of tables from the most restrictive and get a cursor. We feed the results of that cursor into a subroutine which uses it to drive queries against one or more of the other databases. This is not rocket science, it is what we do.

Our little MBA mandated that an unproven middleware product be installed which would let the “off-shore” team issue one SQL SELECT across all of the databases. Apparently the little MBA had clout, because it got installed over the protests of the DBAs. Laugh all you want. Not one person on the conference call with the “off-shore” team stood up and said “Listen idiot, we can do it without that.”

By now, you can all see that this train isn’t only off the track, it isn’t touching ground anywhere. I won’t bore you with the details of all the tragedies which followed. Suffice it to say the system was completed and installed. It did not meet one single requirement, but was papered over as an “off-shoring” success. The departments continued to use the old systems since absolutely nothing functioned. All of those who had job security with their “desk drawer jobs” still had it. When the system was used it had a tendency to publish the wrong prices to those who were most likely to buy costing the company untold financial loss.

This is not an isolated case.

Companies everywhere are trying to manufacture Business Analysts to specify things for the “off-shore” workers. Since management is in charge, they want MBA’s, not people who actually know what is going on. Train wrecks are happening everywhere and being redefined as successes when passed out for external consumption.

“Off-shoring” your IT work guaranties you will never manufacture an effective Business Analyst. If you managed to turn one of your IT staff into one before “off-shoring” everyone else’s jobs, you will never replace them. Effective Business Analysts evolve. They spend years walking around your company locations talking with people and finding out who does what. Yes, they work as a programmer while they are doing that, but they learn the entire business while plying their trade of developing software. The “off-shore” people will never do that. In a few short years your company will be jumping to a different country where IT talent can be bought for $1.00/day because the “independent” industry analysts told them to do it. None of the bodies you contract will have the ability to spend hours out of every day going out to the factory or other locations just talking with the people who actually generate your company’s revenue.

If your company has already “off-shored” more than 20% of its IT staff, it is already out of business, they just don’t know it yet. I’ve worked in IT lot of years. I have met a lot of IT people over those years. One in ten IT workers will tell you they have what it takes to be a Systems Analyst. They actually believe it. I have met at most four IT workers in my life time who actually were Systems Analyst material. Being able to see and solve the whole problem is a very rare skill.

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

This little tail should prove to be both entertaining, and a warning. No, I’m not going to give you enough details to identify the guilty parties. Indeed, by the end of it you should begin to realize the pool of guilty parties is quite large.

A firm with an existing contract to a vendor management firm decided to totally disregard that contract and buddy up with a few on-shore off-shore consulting firms to reap all of the benefits of $10/day labor. Oh, how upper management’s eyes gleamed when they thought of all the money which would no longer be squandered on competent technical staff and could be more appropriately directed into their bonus checks and stock options.

Once the brew-ha-ha settled down with the vendor management company, the mother ship docked and aliens spilled through the doors. Some say it was so bad you couldn’t turn on the lights in a conference room without seeing aliens scatter. There were only a few problems to be ironed out. The first problem was that much of the technical “talent” brought in couldn’t do anything if the platform wasn’t Windows, even then, their talent was dubious at best. The other problem was that to save the most money they needed to use the ones which were still back on the mother ship.

The IT groups which were using real technology spent pretty much all of their time bouncing unqualified aliens out the door. Resume’s for these individuals said they had 10+ years of experience on the selected platforms. Five minutes into the interview it was apparent the individual had 10 minutes of coaching prior to the interview.

Finally, the inevitable happened. One of the remote individuals received just enough coaching prior to their interview to get into the OpenVMS group. This individual claimed to have only seven years of experience on the platform, but had just finished working on it a few months earlier.

The person they would be working for spent one entire day on the phone just getting them to the point they could log in. They got one email from the individual the next day saying there was some kind of technical problem so they could only read paper documentation that day. The person didn’t log in the rest of the week. They were fired.

Oh how the on-shore off-shore company howled that this was some kind of conspiracy. Upper management saw the size of their bonus shrinking and mandated they person be given another chance. This time the person would be brought on-site for three weeks to work among everyone. (Careful readers will note that there is already a serious problem.)

One week later a date was set and the individual showed up on site early the following week. They were given another 10 hours of training and allowed to email questions to the group so others could respond. Two days into being on-site the individual asked a qualified consultant if there was a way to tell your current directory under OpenVMS like the Unix PWD command. (Technical readers will note there is a different serious problem here.)

By the level of the previous question, most of you can probably guess the work performed by the individual could not be used, saved, or fixed in any conceivable manner. The individual was let go just prior to the end of their three weeks on-site.

The entertaining part of this story is one for which the guy should get a medal of some kind. He managed to get fired twice from the same company by the same guy for the same job within two months. Things like that don’t happen often in the real world.

Our story has a sad part though. The individual was here doing work for a company and being paid by an on-shore off-shore consulting firm without any kind of work visa. You can’t get an H1-B inside of a week, but you can get a tourist visa. This isn’t an isolated case. From what I’ve seen every on-shore off-shore consulting company is circumventing the visa issue. They are hiring workers off-shore, paying them off-shore, but having them work on-shore, completely avoiding income tax and social security tax.

Student and vacation visa’s are being exploited beyond comprehension. Since the paper trail exists off-shore, the only way for the IRS to find these people and make the companies pay is to enlist the aid of INS. Sadly, the INS is far too busy raiding farms for undocumented minimum wage fruit pickers who aren’t taking a job away from anyone. They should be doing full armed raids at companies using on-shore off-shore workers and checking the visa status of every worker there. Why? Nobody grows up dreaming of being a minimum wage fruit picker. You don’t spend four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars going to college to become one. High School guidance councilors don’t say to a student “You scored very well on your SAT’s son, you should consider a career as a minimum wage fruit picker.”

No, the companies and people INS needs to focus on aren’t in the produce business. They are the current darlings of Wall Street, just like Enron was.

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

Some people say it is hard to turn down a free magazine with bathroom length articles. It’s not hard. It just requires you go to their Web site and tell them to stop sending it to you. The level of criminal activity at Information Week finally got high enough I had to block it from showing up at my doorstep anymore.

You see, I’m old enough to remember when MTV actually played music videos. I’m old enough to remember when CNN actually hired journalists instead of the paid political talking heads they now make us endure. In short, I’m old enough to have watched the progression of corruption from the beginning.

The dirty little secret in the IT industry has always been, companies launching new products pay “independent” research groups to market their new product. Depending upon the terms of the marketing, the research groups then paid to run articles in the free weekly trade press and paid big 6 consulting firms to market the products to upper management. It has happened since the beginning, and we’ve gotten pretty good at hiding the paper trail.

Over the years this has lead most of corporate America to rack up some multi-million dollar project failures when marketed tool sets didn’t measure up. An interesting research project for a journalist would be to go through every back issue for the past 20 years and make a list of all the products which were marketed in this way. The darlings of Gartner and the other groups hyped to the stratosphere when they first came out. Then see just how many of those products are still around. Your list will get pretty long when you get to the era of PC based 4GL tools that were going to scale up to enterprise solutions. The scale pretty much stopped at the end of the PC network.

It didn’t take all that long for the independent analysts to start marketing the CIO’s they were paid to market in the same manner. With the marketing of CIO’s came the marketing of business policies. Probably the most blatant of these financial frauds was the marketing of “right sizing” just in-front of the Y2K bug becoming a hard deadline. Now, we have the IT shortage and the raising of the H1-B visa cap. Article after article supporting this and completely crossing the boundary of fraud. In the same year they are saying we don’t have enough IT people to fill the jobs the Department of Labor publishes that 93,000 IT jobs were lost in this country. You can’t physically lose jobs with a labor shortage, the jobs remain open and on the books. IT unemployment is still very high, yet article after article supporting the abuse known as H1-B.

Of course, once you have shed your last vestiges of ethics, it doesn’t take long until you have other creatures at the magazine (and some of the same ones) touting the virtues of excessive executive pay. Ah yes, Rob Preston has written articles which lead even the most casual of reader to question whether this animal was born with a soul. Lets hold the door wide open for terrorist operatives to enter this country en-mass, then let the executives who came up with this idea reap a 400 fold pay increase for sacrificing American lives.

What is really amazing is this magazine’s ability to completely ignore the sins of its past. Periodic drop ins from Ms. Stahl railing against child porn are a good indication of that. This magazine which was all too quick to jump behind the election campaign band wagon of “Information Superhighway” creating a global village. Yet the IT professionals were all asking where the global village council was when this investment scam was being launched on an unsuspecting public. Those same professionals who were worried about the drug cartels of the world being able to coordinate shipments in an untraceable manner (we didn’t know about the terrorist groups then), and those who informed all who would listen that there was no global age of consent. Only a Global Village Council could come up with these rules. Those rules needed to be in place prior to the thing being built. But who cares when you are being paid to inflate a stock bubble.

So, now we have every country trying to exert their own will on the Internet. We have porn peddlers in countries where the legal age is much less than 18 putting their porn on-line and Ms. Stahl railing against it. Had you actually listened to the industry you claim to represent, you would have stopped the election campaign which created this debacle. You would have pointed out that had either of the candidates touting this technology break through been named David Rhodes, they would both still be in prison today.

But, you weren’t paid to do that.

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

Many innovations, for all their progress, leave a sailboat of forgotten goodness behind. And in our race to innovate, we instinctively reject people who hold on to the past. We can’t know that they don’t have a point. Perhaps they’ve pointed out something timeless that we didn’t think about. Is there an innovation that can replace a hug from your mom? Ice cream on a summer day? Is a strip mall a worthy substitute for an open meadow, or the latest Gehry office tower for the Chrysler Building? The passion of creation leaves us partially blind; we’re focused so intently on what we’re making that we forget the good things already here, or that our innovations might leave behind.

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August 14, 2007 by roland.

What I heard the other day from a colleague isn’t the first time I had heard such a story. What is impressive is that all of the news media appears to be paid to ignore it.

His current place of employment has been bringing in a rash of H1-B workers because some in upper management believe cheaper is always better. Over the last couple of years, those managing the projects and doing the accounting have learned that cheaper is never better, and rarely even adequate. The line of failed projects has been getting kind of long.

Ah, but that is not the point of this story. This little company, like most every other company using H1-B workers these days, got paid a visit by Homeland Security. Seems one of their H1-B cheap labor units held very little respect for America or the sanctity of American life. The company got to put him on a plane with a one way ticket.

I wasn’t told whether this was a military/government transport, or a commercial passenger liner. I’m not surprised at the deportation. It has been happening on a pretty large scale from what I hear. I was rather shocked to hear they put a terrorist operative (suspected or otherwise) on a plane.

The part which should be a real eye opener for companies racking up project failures via H1-B labor was that it wasn’t INS which paid the call. I wonder if the managers involved are going to put on their resume “Hired terrorist operatives as a source of cheap labor and had the government deport them.”

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