Should your programmers be local?

Emergency Federal web search legislation

Perry Gregg — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 14:36:59 +0000

Squint. Take a dekko. Look in the direction of your next search results. See what you want? Maybe. Yes. No. Let’s say yes. Now look at what you didn’t want. Still squinting?. Now imagine the pile of what you do not want growing. Search isn’t working. Hear the dirge. Go back to what you want. What assurance do you have that it is correct for what you intend. Come on, crowd wisdom is great but really what assurance do you have that it is what it purports to be?

You can’t continue to categorize a growing pile of garbage and call it valuable. And Google you are keeping this recorded going back in time now? Good luck. [Not to pick on Google too much, there are a few other enterprises around the world keeping this mare's nest in buckets too. It'll be obsolete soon.] We must go into the heap and improve the quality. Clean it up. Pre-sort. Validate what is in the mound.

To make the web work there has to be legislation. Information standards. Congress can you hear me? And if our US government won’t do it, maybe India, China, this is more something you would do better than us. We invented it this mishmash of data, we think it can do no wrong.

Putting information into people’s heads world wide is serious business. Folks believe the search results. What will go wrong if we don’t do our best to put organic quality data in our bodies?

Internet homesteading — IH

Perry Gregg — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:33:52 +0000

Pick up and move your web business to the cheapest per acre locations in the United States. Here is raw discussion of where these spots are.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/homest/msg011501598164.html

Utilize off-shore remote teams for technical talent. Take a friend or two and some significant others so you can procreate. Do it for the good of the country. What will spring up? When Silicon Valley was at its point of greatest potential farm and unused land was all you could see. Relocate resources from places of lower value to one of higher value. Monetize the transaction. Wealth at its root is an idea, pure thought.

There are darn good people in the hills and the deserts with the remainder experts you need located around the globe. Visualize. Test, Verify. Smell it. Go away, reach out, on-line team build, convert.

Topiary temporary internet TTI

Perry Gregg — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:46:51 +0000

Extra drama here to make a point. How important on the internet is it to have your own remote team of coders ready to pounce?

You tell me. What business is formed on this premise. At night while you sleep they sneak on to your computers. Your business, your home, any machine left with the power on connected and a hard drive is fair game. Unless you forcibly block them with an incantation you probably don’t even know about, they copy everything they want in certain directories and take it off to servers of their own.

They then reserve the right to sell access for advertising to your data that they copied forever going forward. No matter how much they make, unless you invoke another magical incantation, you’ll never see a cent. You’ll never know how much this business makes off of you. In turn they give away free services so your lulled into complacency and you’ll believe their brand — gees what nice people and a company this is, I get free email and access to data stolen from others.

Sound familiar? If you have know idea what I am talking about. Go back to sleep. This message is not for you. If I have your attention then now you’d better start considering in a world where the richest computer players are these cats, what does your business and family need to do to keep up with the Joneses? Could you use a remote team of engineers developing code for you at the right price point just to interface to the beast and gain economic advantage for yourself? Where do companies like the thieves above get their best programmers? Why temporary in the subject line? Well now that you know, how long will even the big cats on the block last before they need to engineer their way to another advantage of moving resources from one location to another of greater value …

Mobile custom you

Perry Gregg — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:54:10 +0000

Just an example. Field your friends with your own trademark mobile web services. Is tweeting you? Does the Facebook wall fit your metrics for friend communication.

Are you starting to feel caged in by your LinkedIn profile? It is the paper resume trap all over again. Isn’t it? Can Yahoo and Google free email really be the repository of record for your life’s emails? Come on.

Everybody who is anybody is going to have their own software development team. Beyond your own web site pointing to a profile, everything on your John Doe site should be custom designed by you. Your standards and beliefs to interface with the world! Regardless of your vertical interests it is “custom or die” for those at the top. Are you connected enough to have encountered your negative social network?

See Malcolm Gladwell’s site. He needs to go deeper with this design from his brother. Will you be one of the first to have your friends in your SN via a BB, Android, iPhone, iPad app your’s and your’s alone? Investments, dating, you name it — look into the world crystal ball hiring your own remote programmers can do for you.

If you own a vacation house why not your own download code package? What opportunities would you realize with this path? The world is too complicated to navigate with default 3rd party services alone. What will ignoring this cost you?

Foreign direct investment in emerging markets

Perry Gregg — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:17:29 +0000

http://mkqpreview1.qdweb.net/Economic_Studies/Productivity_Performance/The_truth_about_foreign_direct_investment_in_emerging_markets_1386

Unemployed UK youths should be sent to India for IT training

Perry Gregg — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 19:13:02 +0000

http://m.economictimes.com/PDAET/articleshow/6583962.cms

"I know, students from many Asian countries (Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Burma, Nepal, Bangladesh, Russia, Africa ) who come to India for higher studies in IT."

[Submitted by email from a CEO expert in the software IT field]

10 million geniuses “BoPG”

Perry Gregg — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:37:07 +0000

BoPG — Bottom of the pyramid geniuses — “If there are 6.5 billion people in the world, that means 26 million geniuses total.” If 2.5 billion of those are BoP, then 10 million geniuses live on less than $2.50 a day. I’m not a huge fan of convergence test results as a work force talent predictor. For those who are, this argument thread continues.

Immixed software business not war

Perry Gregg — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 20:34:40 +0000

The macro future is determined at the micro level by individuals engaged in commerce. What we learn, how we treat each other is important, right? These coding contract engagements matter! Remote parties — “the further away the better”, daily scrums over Skype, WebEx, Gotomeeting creates grass root communities across borders. History will show globalization and what we did on-line in the trenches of small dealings as a greater force than weapons, bombs, torture, spying and governments. Your next contract, the further away the better, saves the world! Be a visionary for long term good in who you are willing to do business with.

Corollary to The secret cause of US software engineering job loss longanimity

Perry Gregg — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:58:14 +0000

Some top US programmers and IT workers got soured by these practices over this period. They moved to Texas, Montana, rural California (and other places) as consultants, to be acquired for your project ONLY as remote workers. If you are in the industry, you know who I am talking about. Many of these resources managed to maintain their relationships with the companies where they were originally employees. I know of one particular coder who was assigned to me at a very big company in San Francisco. He is a remote coder on my team management said. It took months before I figured out he lived 33 blocks from the office on the “far” side of the City. He just insisted on only attending meetings with remote tools. Like it or not, “remote” is part of our vocabulary here in the US.

The secret cause of US software engineering job loss longanimity

Perry Gregg — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 03:22:24 +0000

If you were in the software development trenches in the late 70s, 80s, 90s up through the internet bubble bursting you know the dirty insider reason why jobs have left the North American continent. Bad management. Driven by the extreme upper end of programming talent, US software managers (myself included) were told during these periods to handle our very best coders as if they were Gods. They could do no wrong. Managers would rotate until a combo was found that could deal with the company’s technical deities. VPs would be hired just to communicate to senior architects (in one case where I worked — that didn’t believe in furniture, in another case — who would spit in their hands clandestinely before they would shake hands with the CEO, yikes!). Tech directors of my era know. I was a software manager at one particular billion dollar database company in Silicon Valley where the top people would smoke pot in the office. I was allowed to crack down on these two guys with a compromise. Please do it in your offices with the doors closed was the end of the leash from our Engineering VP. Even legality didn’t matter. If the top architects threatened to quit we’d be whacked. [And I'm not talking about the aberration employees that were fired. I'm talking about the people who software engineering managers in the US used to fight the hardest to keep. The people who get the biggest raises, bonuses and were allowed to walk out the door and in the door at another top firm the next day.]

Over and over in my head I remember critical business times at technical firms in the US where we’d ask our best software people on the payroll, “could you do this particular project for the team?” There were many engineers with an excellent attitude and business sense. Thank goodness or we’d have collapsed by now. But too often the answer was no. I won’t do this and I won’t do that (it is boring) even though yes I will continue to keep depositing the check.

The legacy of those horrific practices are with us today. Where do you think Google’s “20% time” really came from? It is those same suck butt managers at the top of Google who really don’t know their technical salt hiring top talent thinking if I just get on a knee and kiss the ring, money will continue to descend from our most important division trees. How Google operates today is leading to our downfall tomorrow. Every week they keep this going they ruin the reputation of software engineers. The practice is unsustainable.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/googles-20-percent-time-in-action.html

What do you think managers around the world think when it comes time to consider hiring US based engineering talent versus elsewhere?

Managers purely outside this crazy softy practice, meet some of the US based coding talent — they get sick to their stomachs. They were probably taught in business school to have a professional yardstick that you measure resources by to decide if they should do business. Now with a flat world almost anyone can M&M (meet and measure) for free on Skype engineers from around the world. Look how decision-makers have voted now that they have options. It is taking decades. Polling results continue to trickle in.

P.S. And even the jobs that stay, companies would rather pay for talent with a better attitude to come here then hire home grown talent around the corner. If you are in the US today, take what is happening as a slap to the back of the head. Didn’t Plato say the worst of all deceptions is self-deception? Hey local coder dude (and “dude”-ette), you’re not that good! When your company succeeds engineering is not the only member of the team that is the proximate cause of the win.