"More Americans are getting college degrees than they were about a decade ago, but skills in reading and analyzing data among the well-educated have dropped significantly, according to a national report on literacy released Thursday.
When adults with higher-education degrees were asked to compare the viewpoints in two newspaper editorials, for example, or interpret a table about blood pressure, less than half could do it successfully."
Great. Should give the people harping about the US being a wonderful place, something to think about.
Of course, I hope I would do better at reading comprehension than an above-mentioned illiterate - but you never know.
Dec 17, 2005
Dec 15, 2005
Age of Empires!
Finally got the CDs that I had ordered online - Age of Empires 3 and Need for Speed : Most Wanted! Mmmmm... you can bet there won't be any long posts here for a while.
The sad part of this story is that I finally find my PC specs out of date. Are people willing to donate towards a new 7800GTX 512 for me? :P
The sad part of this story is that I finally find my PC specs out of date. Are people willing to donate towards a new 7800GTX 512 for me? :P
Dec 13, 2005
Visitors
Yup, the ones who come to my blog. I track them thru that little picture down at the bottom of the page. And I always find the statistics fascinating.
For one, not many of my own friends and relatives know of this blog. So most of the hits I get are from the one guy who knows about it and from random surfers and more importantly, redirects from search engines. Now, if there is one thing that this blog lacks it's a theme (that is why the term "Rambling" appears in the title, duh). So there is absolutely nothing here that would actually interest a person who is searching for something specific. Unless he is searching for me.
Some of the searches are reasonable, people looking for information and reviews about the M6805, or searching for games and widescreen er.. screens.
But then there was this guy who's looking for "measures to reduce job hopping". Dude, if you're going through blogs looking for how to stop your employees from leaving, you have bigger problems than job hoppers. One solution always works, pay them more :)
Another person is looking for "optical zoom on cellphones". Nope, there isn't. Actually, I did see one cellphone a long time ago that had an optical zoom lens, but that was a prototype. Optical zoom would probably eat up a lot of power, make the phone bulky and also costlier. So there.
To the guy looking for "Philips India DVD 3007", it's a good model, but there's isn't much to choose from between brands. Get the cheapest one you can find that has all the features that you are likely to use.
"Bangalore traffic"? The less said about it, the better. Why were you searching for it in the first place?
And then Chaos has put up a rant about the name change. From Bangalore to Benga-loo-roo. I wholeheartedly support it since I don't live there any more. It might prompt more people to leave and maybe, just maybe, some, ahem, interesting people might migrate up north.
For one, not many of my own friends and relatives know of this blog. So most of the hits I get are from the one guy who knows about it and from random surfers and more importantly, redirects from search engines. Now, if there is one thing that this blog lacks it's a theme (that is why the term "Rambling" appears in the title, duh). So there is absolutely nothing here that would actually interest a person who is searching for something specific. Unless he is searching for me.
Some of the searches are reasonable, people looking for information and reviews about the M6805, or searching for games and widescreen er.. screens.
But then there was this guy who's looking for "measures to reduce job hopping". Dude, if you're going through blogs looking for how to stop your employees from leaving, you have bigger problems than job hoppers. One solution always works, pay them more :)
Another person is looking for "optical zoom on cellphones". Nope, there isn't. Actually, I did see one cellphone a long time ago that had an optical zoom lens, but that was a prototype. Optical zoom would probably eat up a lot of power, make the phone bulky and also costlier. So there.
To the guy looking for "Philips India DVD 3007", it's a good model, but there's isn't much to choose from between brands. Get the cheapest one you can find that has all the features that you are likely to use.
"Bangalore traffic"? The less said about it, the better. Why were you searching for it in the first place?
And then Chaos has put up a rant about the name change. From Bangalore to Benga-loo-roo. I wholeheartedly support it since I don't live there any more. It might prompt more people to leave and maybe, just maybe, some, ahem, interesting people might migrate up north.
Dec 8, 2005
Dec 7, 2005
Rats!
"The 'brain', grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida."
Enough said!
Enough said!
Dec 6, 2005
Traffic woes
Yup. Traffic woes. Those who have heard me raving about the traffic conditions out here as compared to good ol' Bangalore would be surprised. But of course woes are relative.
After months of more or less empty roads, I faced my first big traffic jam today morning. Had to spend about 30 minutes in one place, then managed to get out and cut across a sandy road and then vrooooom :) Not too bad, was it?
The other crib I have is about people not respecting traffic signals. How much intelligence does it take to stop if you see a red light and traffic coming from the opposite direction?
After months of more or less empty roads, I faced my first big traffic jam today morning. Had to spend about 30 minutes in one place, then managed to get out and cut across a sandy road and then vrooooom :) Not too bad, was it?
The other crib I have is about people not respecting traffic signals. How much intelligence does it take to stop if you see a red light and traffic coming from the opposite direction?
Dec 5, 2005
amBX
Interesting, it IS the next logical step. I won't comment on how effective something like this can be till I have experienced it for myself.
Dec 2, 2005
Nivida said...
... something or the other. This appeared in a newspaper article mentioning opinions of young people on something.
If you're like me, you read that as Nvidia said... :(
Yes, I need to get a life.
If you're like me, you read that as Nvidia said... :(
Yes, I need to get a life.
Survive Outsourcing again?
Steve Larrison actually responded to some flames I threw his way in my blog. To me, at least, it indicates that he is serious about his site and what he writes there.
>This guy makes the same assumption that many others do; but all that '3 jobs in 6 months' means is that this person was at one company for 6 months.
If you read the article I linked to, it is clear that the writer is talking about the benefits of serial job hopping.
The writer is speculating on how much is enough. One oft-talked-about problem in the Indian IT industry is the rising wage bill, like you mention, but it is also due to salary hikes every year, not only because people job-hop. The reason behind this could very well be that after all the wage hikes, it is still economical to get the work done in India or Indian workers are good enough to warrant such wages. What you choose to believe is up to you. But that still does not address the point that the writer in question may not be a chronic job hopper.
> "Regardless of what rate someone like the above author works at, an experienced person in the western world who isn't a serial job hopper is going to be a better value for any employer."
>>I could say the same after replacing western with Indian. What he is trying to do is to paint all non-western persons as non-serial-job-hoppers, stable employees, who are not out to jump ship at every opportunity they get.
I am doing nothing of the sort. I am just recognizing reality. Though Japanese people are not westerners, their culture promotes loyalty to a company, and company loyalty to employees.
No? The reality is what I wrote in response to your statement. The word "western" is unwarranted in what you said. Any person (western or otherwise) who does not switch jobs is probably better value for a company. There was absolutely no need for you to bring "the west vs. the rest" in that comment.
Try as you might, you can't deny the facts. And the facts are that Indian IT companies experience 30%+ annual turnover. Call centers experience 100%+ annual turnover.
Some jobs are hurt more by high turnover than others.
Agreed. I'm not denying the facts. But consider, if you will, the fact that the Indian culture of employment was similar to what you wrote about the Japanese (without going to the extremes that the Japanese are rumoured to). The word "attrition" did not exist till the IT industry came in (that's right, the "western" companies). If a company is willing to ignore my job-hopping past and also give me a substantial hike in salary while providing me with similar work and environment, is there any reason for me to not switch jobs? Companies actively send out recruiters to head-hunt, and most places are desperate to get people with some work experience. We have executives from "western" MNCs flying down to conduct interviews and accepting people with the job-hopping record that you put so nicely in numbers. Given such a tremendous opportunity, would you blame people for falling for it? And yet, I know good people who have worked in the same company for 10 years and more, out of sheer loyalty or maybe inertia.
Call centers are a different kettle of fish. I don't work in one (should I add, thank God?), but I do know that they employ a lot of young people who are in it only for the money. The ads for call center vacancies blatantly indicate how much a new recruit will earn. Possibly a lot of them leave to pursue higher studies, or a job higher up the value chain.
Applications developers bring more than just knowledge of a programming language to the table. If you have ever worked at a company for several years, you would know that the knowledge of a system gained overtime is invaluable. Productivity goes up once you understand a system and no longer have to do research to determine where a problem lies, or how to make an enhancement.
Yes, and that is the reason why domain specialists are so much in demand. If all you know is a programming language you wouldn't last too long in the industry, would you? But you cannot argue that a person requires complete knowledge of the system that he is working on to be productive. I still maintain that a few weeks or a couple of months should be enough for anyone who is half-way good in his domain to start working productively. (And for the hecklers, his = his/her everywhere in this blog.)
>And trying to portray Indians as job hopping opportunists.
The turnover numbers speak for themself.
I wouldn't say so. Only the bad numbers make news. Let's look at some other numbers: Nasscom in a report said the outsourcing industry was expected to face a shortage of 262,000 professionals by 2012. In such an environment, companies are going to do whatever they can to attract employees. And employees are going to be less tolerant of mistakes that their employers make. Here's more: Call centre professionals in India are well taken care of by the employers, compared to the United States, where the workers were treated like a 'commodity,' said an official of Communication Workers of America, the largest workers' union in the US. ... The delegation from the US, which visited call centres and IT firms in cities such as Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, said the system in India was much better. "We are very impressed by the welfare measures for the workers here," she said. Interesting? And, apparently, the attrition rate in the US call centre industry is in the range of 18-25%, and may even be as high as 40% according to some estimates. Perhaps Steve has the correct numbers, I couldn't find them summarized on the web.
>"and the simple fact that even though Americans cost 4 times as much as Indians, we typically produce more work per person."
>>I take offense at that statement, Mr. Steve Larrison. There are lazy people and good people in all industries, in all cultures. Making such sweeping generalizations will only start a flame war - "Indians are typically more hard working, sincere and talented than Americans. And we are much less violent too."
There is no reason to be offended. Again, the numbers speak for themselves. Though the typical Indian software developer in India works for about 1/4 the rate of what someone in the United States charges, well run projects come in about 20% to 30% less than what you would pay to have the same project developed onshore.
But then a Gartner report says that outsourcing could even be more expensive than doing work in-house (from the "customer service industry" perspective). Oh well...
Tell me this, if all developers in a project being done in the "western" world were to take a salary cut of 50% would the project cost drop by exactly 50%? There are fixed costs, and even more importantly top management salaries to account for as well, I think. However, all this number crunching is totally beside the point, what counts most for a given company is whether the costs are reducing, and if they reduce by 20% to 30% there is no justification for not oursourcing. How much the Indian IT worker makes is a moot point, and perhaps it's up to the local industry to sort that issue out.
There are a variety of reasons for this. But the fact is that Americans produce more work per worker than people from any other nation. That's just part of the reason our GDP is the largest of any country in the world, and larger than the next 5 countries combined.
Indeed? More work in what terms? Dollars paid for doing that work? That just means Americans are, gasp, overpaid! Or did you mean to say that if I can write two thousand lines of quality code in a month, an average American in the same job would write ten thousand? Or that he could get the work done in 400 lines? Or in less than a week? With less coffee consumption? Or all of the above?
Larger than the next 5 countried combined? This sounded pretty intriguing to me...
Wow! Certainly larger than China and India combined. No mean feat, this, but larger than the next 5 countries combined?
Disclaimer: Numbers are from a simple google search, I have no proof of their accuracy and it seems they are from 2001. Hopefully things haven't changed so drastically since then :(
>This guy makes the same assumption that many others do; but all that '3 jobs in 6 months' means is that this person was at one company for 6 months.
If you read the article I linked to, it is clear that the writer is talking about the benefits of serial job hopping.
The writer is speculating on how much is enough. One oft-talked-about problem in the Indian IT industry is the rising wage bill, like you mention, but it is also due to salary hikes every year, not only because people job-hop. The reason behind this could very well be that after all the wage hikes, it is still economical to get the work done in India or Indian workers are good enough to warrant such wages. What you choose to believe is up to you. But that still does not address the point that the writer in question may not be a chronic job hopper.
> "Regardless of what rate someone like the above author works at, an experienced person in the western world who isn't a serial job hopper is going to be a better value for any employer."
>>I could say the same after replacing western with Indian. What he is trying to do is to paint all non-western persons as non-serial-job-hoppers, stable employees, who are not out to jump ship at every opportunity they get.
I am doing nothing of the sort. I am just recognizing reality. Though Japanese people are not westerners, their culture promotes loyalty to a company, and company loyalty to employees.
No? The reality is what I wrote in response to your statement. The word "western" is unwarranted in what you said. Any person (western or otherwise) who does not switch jobs is probably better value for a company. There was absolutely no need for you to bring "the west vs. the rest" in that comment.
Try as you might, you can't deny the facts. And the facts are that Indian IT companies experience 30%+ annual turnover. Call centers experience 100%+ annual turnover.
Some jobs are hurt more by high turnover than others.
Agreed. I'm not denying the facts. But consider, if you will, the fact that the Indian culture of employment was similar to what you wrote about the Japanese (without going to the extremes that the Japanese are rumoured to). The word "attrition" did not exist till the IT industry came in (that's right, the "western" companies). If a company is willing to ignore my job-hopping past and also give me a substantial hike in salary while providing me with similar work and environment, is there any reason for me to not switch jobs? Companies actively send out recruiters to head-hunt, and most places are desperate to get people with some work experience. We have executives from "western" MNCs flying down to conduct interviews and accepting people with the job-hopping record that you put so nicely in numbers. Given such a tremendous opportunity, would you blame people for falling for it? And yet, I know good people who have worked in the same company for 10 years and more, out of sheer loyalty or maybe inertia.
Call centers are a different kettle of fish. I don't work in one (should I add, thank God?), but I do know that they employ a lot of young people who are in it only for the money. The ads for call center vacancies blatantly indicate how much a new recruit will earn. Possibly a lot of them leave to pursue higher studies, or a job higher up the value chain.
Applications developers bring more than just knowledge of a programming language to the table. If you have ever worked at a company for several years, you would know that the knowledge of a system gained overtime is invaluable. Productivity goes up once you understand a system and no longer have to do research to determine where a problem lies, or how to make an enhancement.
Yes, and that is the reason why domain specialists are so much in demand. If all you know is a programming language you wouldn't last too long in the industry, would you? But you cannot argue that a person requires complete knowledge of the system that he is working on to be productive. I still maintain that a few weeks or a couple of months should be enough for anyone who is half-way good in his domain to start working productively. (And for the hecklers, his = his/her everywhere in this blog.)
>And trying to portray Indians as job hopping opportunists.
The turnover numbers speak for themself.
I wouldn't say so. Only the bad numbers make news. Let's look at some other numbers: Nasscom in a report said the outsourcing industry was expected to face a shortage of 262,000 professionals by 2012. In such an environment, companies are going to do whatever they can to attract employees. And employees are going to be less tolerant of mistakes that their employers make. Here's more: Call centre professionals in India are well taken care of by the employers, compared to the United States, where the workers were treated like a 'commodity,' said an official of Communication Workers of America, the largest workers' union in the US. ... The delegation from the US, which visited call centres and IT firms in cities such as Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, said the system in India was much better. "We are very impressed by the welfare measures for the workers here," she said. Interesting? And, apparently, the attrition rate in the US call centre industry is in the range of 18-25%, and may even be as high as 40% according to some estimates. Perhaps Steve has the correct numbers, I couldn't find them summarized on the web.
>"and the simple fact that even though Americans cost 4 times as much as Indians, we typically produce more work per person."
>>I take offense at that statement, Mr. Steve Larrison. There are lazy people and good people in all industries, in all cultures. Making such sweeping generalizations will only start a flame war - "Indians are typically more hard working, sincere and talented than Americans. And we are much less violent too."
There is no reason to be offended. Again, the numbers speak for themselves. Though the typical Indian software developer in India works for about 1/4 the rate of what someone in the United States charges, well run projects come in about 20% to 30% less than what you would pay to have the same project developed onshore.
But then a Gartner report says that outsourcing could even be more expensive than doing work in-house (from the "customer service industry" perspective). Oh well...
Tell me this, if all developers in a project being done in the "western" world were to take a salary cut of 50% would the project cost drop by exactly 50%? There are fixed costs, and even more importantly top management salaries to account for as well, I think. However, all this number crunching is totally beside the point, what counts most for a given company is whether the costs are reducing, and if they reduce by 20% to 30% there is no justification for not oursourcing. How much the Indian IT worker makes is a moot point, and perhaps it's up to the local industry to sort that issue out.
There are a variety of reasons for this. But the fact is that Americans produce more work per worker than people from any other nation. That's just part of the reason our GDP is the largest of any country in the world, and larger than the next 5 countries combined.
Indeed? More work in what terms? Dollars paid for doing that work? That just means Americans are, gasp, overpaid! Or did you mean to say that if I can write two thousand lines of quality code in a month, an average American in the same job would write ten thousand? Or that he could get the work done in 400 lines? Or in less than a week? With less coffee consumption? Or all of the above?
Larger than the next 5 countried combined? This sounded pretty intriguing to me...
Numbers are fun, right?
United States $ 11,750,000,000,000
India $ 3,319,000,000,000
China $ 7,262,000,000,000
Wow! Certainly larger than China and India combined. No mean feat, this, but larger than the next 5 countries combined?
Disclaimer: Numbers are from a simple google search, I have no proof of their accuracy and it seems they are from 2001. Hopefully things haven't changed so drastically since then :(
Nov 30, 2005
Popular science articles?
Rediff has another "article", this time on AMD, even though the title indicates something about a sub-10,000 rupees PC.
Quote: "For the uninitiated, most PCs are loaded with 32-bit chips, which means they can process 32 bits of data every second. AMD's 64 bit offering is not only four times faster, it offers more Random Access Memory (RAM), the instant memory that is needed to perform various tasks while the computer is on."
32 bits of data every second? 64 bit offering is 4 times faster? Offers more RAM?
That makes me wonder on how misleading the other articles in the media could be. On personal finance, for example. Or on health, or how to get a job in a call center.
"For the customer willing to listen to a story of finer algebraic detail, AMD has its "dual core technology" to talk about. This offers virtually two processors in one, which, working in conjunction, delivers more than twice the performance."
Right. Virtually two processors, more than twice the performance. Where do they find these writers?
Quote: "For the uninitiated, most PCs are loaded with 32-bit chips, which means they can process 32 bits of data every second. AMD's 64 bit offering is not only four times faster, it offers more Random Access Memory (RAM), the instant memory that is needed to perform various tasks while the computer is on."
32 bits of data every second? 64 bit offering is 4 times faster? Offers more RAM?
That makes me wonder on how misleading the other articles in the media could be. On personal finance, for example. Or on health, or how to get a job in a call center.
"For the customer willing to listen to a story of finer algebraic detail, AMD has its "dual core technology" to talk about. This offers virtually two processors in one, which, working in conjunction, delivers more than twice the performance."
Right. Virtually two processors, more than twice the performance. Where do they find these writers?
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