Need opinion on IT jobs in UK for HSMP

[NickNick]

Now the here's the kicker...

Its time that our universities started to actually teach something useful with regards to practical IT. We need our companies to start to ask our places of learning to churn out some of our code for us. (Look at Xen as a good example)
Actually go to the campus and teach undergrads how real projects are run, and in the process provide credit towards their degrees. Year 1 teach the language Year 2. Start to use that in the real world. Year 3 graduate as a programmer with practical skills...

I think they used to call it an apprenticeship... Cheaper than offshore (practically free) and invests in our own kids

Just in passing, this actually happens now, and you can apply to be one of those people "teaching" how a real world project is run at university. The Day rates aren't bad either.

[NotAllThere]

Backlight - you can have my place. I quit the UK years ago...

[bobspud]

I may well be wrong but hasn't the horse bolted already? I think the "toast" is already burnt. As Fred Bloggs mentioned the only viable alternative is to move up the skills hierarchy into ever smaller niches. Well in my opinion this may work for certain individuals but is no way sustainable for an entire industry.

Yes the decision to offshore has largely been based on cost factors in the past and yes there are companies that have been burnt when the true costs of outsourcing are taken into account. Do it properly and the cost savings and competitive advantage that may be available to mulinationals remains and hence they will continue to head in that direction imho.



To be honest I don't think the majority of FD's give two flying figs about a welkl written algorithm. They care about managing costs and risks!



That has not been my experience



But is more cost effective to be housed and maintained offshore surely?

Companies continue to outsource/onshore/offshore at rapid rates. It's been around for a sufficient lenght of time that the 'hidden' costs you refer to should be known to any management team with half a brain. So why do they do it? Simple economics and cost savings.

Having said that the cost advantages of outsourcing to India are reducing all the time. I read somewhere that the cost ratio from USA to India used to be 1:15, is now in the region of 1:3 and is expected to be 1:1 around 2015. The Indian outsourcers are wise to this and are setting up outsourcing centres further east, in Africa, Asia etc where the labour costs are lower than India. Just like UK IT folk moving up the skills ladder this is unlikely to be a successful long-term approach. So they are supplementing this approach with acquisitions. All over. Outsourcing has made for some very wealthy and cash rich organisations and as we all know in the global recession cash is king and these guys are just going to be buying up assets/market share.





Not a bad idea. The downside is that after you have done your degree and racked up a sizeable student loan, your career in programming is not going to pay very well for a long time.

[/quote]
This is getting mess so I will answer without faffing about with the quotes.

I have seen 5 large o/s projects of late. I got involved with all of them due to hardware performance issues. Best one was a very large finance co who had managed to buy some congnos code that would floor their HPSuperdome I don't mean sluggish I mean unusable. In the end we ended up buying m9000s (Now as Sun put it we don't expect to sell very many of these as no one except governments needs this much power) I did the sun mathematics with Mvalues and current user load and when they scaled to 50,000 users. They ended up with 5 fully populated m9000s plus front end servers (20 odd t2000 @ £64k a pop) This was without doubt due to the fact that the guys offshore could not write code. The customer knew it as well. I get the feeling that they later used my report and evidence to hit the idiots for the extra hardware costs

From experience hardware tends not to move offshore as customers already have data centers and not much would work by the time it got packed shipped and put back together at the other end. You have the other issue that india goes home at 3pm so you end up with Out of hours cover for most of your trading day...

On your point about getting a degree then not being paid much... Right now how are you getting a job in programming at all if the majority of work goes offshore and you don't have practical experience to get you started. I'm suggesting that by the time you graduate you already have a years worth of practical knowledge.

You seem to be thinking about this from the point of view "I am senior enough to be OK so I stop worrying about the new guys"

[oracleslave]

The customer knew it but did it anyway. And despite the horror stories they continue to do it in great numbers. Why? As I have explained above it must be cost and cost alone.

I am not a programmer and yes I do think I am senior enough so that I am unlikely to be off-shored so you are correct there. The point is that contractors are a select few in the IT industry as a whole so the fact that you/me have well paid jobs puts us in the minority from the start. I just think that the 'pool' of people who are going to be able to make good money from programming is going to diminish and again as I mentioned above the margins are shrinking and will I think continue to do so.