What do you do?
- Thread starter Alkorin
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Kriptini
Vyemm Raider
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Mist, you said that most places around you pay the same rate. Have you tried negotiating a higher starting salary? With your experience and background, I don't think it'd be unreasonable for you to try to get some more dosh out of the gate, and if they don't cooperate, well you weren't going to go work for them anyways so who cares?
I dunno, it sounds to me like you have more power in this situation than you think.
I dunno, it sounds to me like you have more power in this situation than you think.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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Surprisingly, I am actually super well-liked by my coworkers, who all openly bitch about the job more than I do! I guess I successfully found a job where everyone is as salty and miserable as I am, huzzah. My boss tolerates my poor people-skills, because his aren't much better, and his boss adores me because I don't have a life and am willing to pick up infinite shifts, never call out, and I'm extremely punctual, responsible and conscientious.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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I'm not looking for an endgame goal. I am looking for something to pay the bills until I can finish a PhD in psychology or behavioral economics. I don't need a ton of money, again, I don't leave the house.
AladainAF
Best Rabbit
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For one of the first times I'm not gonna jump on Mist for this one. IT sucks now, and I think we all know it. It's been outsourced/farmed out to death and what little hasn't been has been internally outsourced by H1-B's, fully endorsed by our wonderful political heroes in Washington. I used to know tons of people in IT, now I know one guy, and he lives in a tiny town and works at a school district handling their IT for very small pay.
Mist, pick up some solid selenium coding skills and get into QA. While Software QA has also been mostly farmed out to india and china, all major companies that I know of still do not farm out the top tier positions (Sr SQA Engineering+) to India/China and rather keep it in house.
I guarantee you if you are a great coder of automated testing via selenium, testcomplete, HP Quality Center kinda stuff, you'll have no issues finding employment.
Mist, pick up some solid selenium coding skills and get into QA. While Software QA has also been mostly farmed out to india and china, all major companies that I know of still do not farm out the top tier positions (Sr SQA Engineering+) to India/China and rather keep it in house.
I guarantee you if you are a great coder of automated testing via selenium, testcomplete, HP Quality Center kinda stuff, you'll have no issues finding employment.
Frenzied Wombat
Potato del Grande
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Mist
REEEEeyore
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Look around, the world's not running out of crazy people. Growth market!
While I might pursue some clinical certification someday, no, I'm on the research track and my research is in educational technology and other education issues.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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Trying. It's basically what I'm already doing, except I remote admin 3000+ customer's PBXes, along with a bunch of other crap, for crap pay.
Frenzied Wombat
Potato del Grande
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I think this is a legacy trend. The whole "offshore" phenomena was really big as recent as five years ago, as CFO's and other people only concerned with the bottom line tried to move everything to India, but that trend has taken a severe reverse course over the last 5 years. Basically:
1) People realized that offshore skillset fucking sucked, and the business suffered as a result.
2) In the areas of coding and project management, I've never heard of a successful offshore engagement. Either the code was buggy as shit, communication between onshore/offshore sucked resulting in a poorly managed project, or entire fucking groups of coders in India would leave to another opportunity. Additionally, these foreign Indian IT people literally have no ability to apply intelligence and "think outside the box". They are literally coding automatons.
3) With cybersecurity now being a top issue, many industries can't risk offshoring a lot of work anymore.
Granted, technical support and very defined coding tasks are still offshored, but this is bottom feeder shit. A lot of companies I know that offshored all their IT ten years ago are now in the process of bringing it back onshore because the promises of lower costs turned out to be a myth once you factored in all the time you'd have to spend micromanaging Indians and dealing with lost productivity because of their shitty service and skillset.
IMHO, the whole push to put everything in the fucking Cloud is more of a threat to the common IT worker than offshoring is.
Frenzied Wombat
Potato del Grande
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It was more a reflection on the irony that those with psychological issues always seem to pursue degrees in psychology.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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I agree. The job I am in now is giving me a window into that. Some of our customers are starting to put shit in the Cloud, and then paying us to manage the shit they put in the cloud, deal with their cloud providers, etc.
This is similar to some of our other customers, who offshored a bunch of shit to the hajjis a few years back, then hired us to interface with those same hajjis once they got sick of dealing with them. They open a ticket with us, then we open a ticket with their own hajjis. It's such a clusterfuck.
Springbok
Karen
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Man I guess I just assumed everyone in IT had a stutter, limp or personality disorder! Ba dum dum
Cad
scientia potentia est
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We learned this back in the early 2000's... I remember being told to work with Symphony on mission critical, core-business stuff in like 2000-2001. We were told they had a team of 100 developers. (Our R&D team was like, 10.) The stuff they produced to us was utter garbage. We had to literally trash and rewrite everything they did. Our CTO had been installed by investors who were also investors in the overseas consulting group. So, we couldn't "fire" them. After that quarter the CTO left with a new bullet point on his resume "successfully integrated offshore consultants into a streamlined software development team through utilizing synergies" or some shit. Who knows. Offshoring quite literally hindered us rather than helped. Coming in for 9pm conference calls to india is stupid too.
Vinen
God is dead
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The only offshoring I have seen come remotely close to working was when a team was a part of the company and not contracted through a 3rd party company.
Even then it blows goats.
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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Our bios team was half US and half shanghai. It worked ok, but waiting 12 hours for a response to a simple question sucked dick. The other option was them staying in the office until 10pm their time.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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Chinese would probably be superior to Indian, depending on the culture of the particular Chinese. Indian developers are like robots. The few Chinese I've worked with were a little too deferring to authority but otherwise fine.
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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They liked to snatch up every task they could, we eventually had to split up the workload so that they had 2 server types and we had 2 (plus a new server which I took the lead on). They also liked to make sweeping design changes without consulting us.