Category — As the Tera Flops

What I’m about to describe is an emotive issue for me, so I’ll try to be as careful as possible to obviate those people who are wont to call me hysterical over this issue.

It should come as no surprise that people in professional fields talk, not only to one another, but to those in related fields. And that talk revolves around how their respective industries are going at the present moment. For me, I’m interested in IT. And the buzz around that industry hasn’t been so good.

The kneejerk reaction has been to blame the Indians. (Sorry, was that supposed to be a secret?) After all, you have a lower-cost, high-ish skilled engineering population and the capitalist mirage of outsourcing, although I do agree with a reader from The Register who said that, for example, Western engineering graduates tend — on average — to be quite good, with a few who are completely useless, while Indian engineering graduates tend — on average — to be quite mediocre, with a few excellent ones. (And, for the record, since I agree with that summation, I’ll say that I’ve been working with/managing Indian engineering teams, local and Indian-based, for 9+ years, as well as having spoken to other non-Indian project managers of Indian teams. Yes, we talk about you all the time.) For myself, it’s taken a few years but I’ve changed my mind about how I view Indian engineers.

Firstly, while an English-speaking engineering graduate from a Western country may justifiably feel threatened by the influx of Indian engineers into every English-speaking corner of the world, I don’t. That’s because I’m not an engineering graduate. I cleared that fence two decades ago. Thus, in any given job situation, I’m presuming that I’m competing against people with a similar range of skill sets and past experience and — under those circumstances — I’m quite confident about my own abilities.

The problem is, getting to that competition line (the interview) in the first place. And the people who are stopping me from reaching that point are not the Indians.

It’s a strange quirk of fate that you don’t actually have to know anything about IT in order to work in that industry. Of course, to be a chef in a five-star hotel, you have to have qualifications and experience; and to be a surgeon at a large hospital, you have to have qualifications and experience. But to be an IT manager, you don’t. You can be a carpenter and be an IT manager. An historian. An economist. You can profess your complete ignorance of the difference between OLAP and OLTP and still get a Project Manager position. And, for a segment of us in IT, that’s a bitter pill indeed.

You see, the segment of IT I’m referring to contains those people who spent the necessary years learning about computers, and software, and hardware, and pure mathematics, and nasty things like that. We know reverse Polish notation, fifth normal forms, the difference between pre-test and post-test loops, and the trials and tribulations of the Entity-Relationship Diagram. We got our hands dirty coding various colours of Assembler, know how to solve the Eight Queens problem using recursion, the eccentricities of various languages and operating systems, and can even craft jokes in Fortran-77. Or COBOL, if you’d prefer. Or even Perl.

And this same segment of people have also been keeping abreast of technology since their initial degree, learning about DMZs, Java beans, OOLs, project management techniques, Web 2.0 apps, and so on. So, can you then imagine one such person talking to a peer and coming to the swift realisation that that person, not only wouldn’t recognise a fragment of C++ code if it appeared in printout in front of them, but that they don’t think they need to! Merde! That’s like letting someone who’s never ever julienned carrots by hand into a professional hotel kitchen.

In any other supposed professional industry, if you don’t know the basics, you can’t come in. In IT, it seems it’s enough if you (a) are a superb athlete, (b) were an executive assistant to a manager, or (c) randomly picked a job ad and the hiring manager liked you. Other IT geeks and I have heard all three, as well as many others.

Do you know how frustrating it is to ask an Operations Manager, “why are you co-locating Servers A and B on the same physical machine?” and have him say, “I don’t really know. What are the two servers again? I’ll go ask someone.” Or ask to what degree a database has been normalised, and meet a blank stare. “Normalised? What’s that?”

These are the people that colleagues like myself are losing jobs to. And it would be no more than a blackly comical streak in our lives, except we often have to deal with these people on a frequent basis. And they don’t know what our questions mean, and often do little more than regurgitate information they barely understand, like the Communications Officer on Galaxy Quest. And yet we are expected to treat them as highly competent peers. Bite much? You bet.

One of the perennial problems in IT is getting staff who are skilled in the work they’re supposed to do. Since outsourcing has gained momentum, this problem has become worse because, quite simply and in my opinion, the quality of IT engineering graduates from India (and I name them because they’re the biggest outsourcing country) has been sub-standard, to say the least. I may be stating this quite baldly, but I’m not the only one saying such things.

As a regular reader of UK IT online paper, The Register, I often come across comments along the lines of US engineering graduates being quite good, with a few failures, while Indian engineering graduates are quite mediocre, with a few standouts. I also remember reading comments from one poster saying that, after his UK technical team had interviewed and rejected all the technical staff handling an outsourced project in India, future interviews followed two paths: (a) a third person would be present and the phone (now in speakerphone mode) would be muted after each question was asked; after a long pause, the phone would be unmuted and the interviewee would then answer the question correctly; and (b) the technical team was forced to hand over the interview questions, after which all future interviewees recited identical answers to every one of those questions, as if perhaps reading from a sheet of paper.

I find the lack of subtlety inherent in these two scenarios to be both blackly hilarious and mundanely characteristic, even if I do sympathise with the UK interviewer and his team. And, in case anyone’s interested, I find UK and European engineers (that is, engineers who have graduated from UK/European institutions) to be the best I’ve ever worked with — professional, courteous, dedicated. It’s always a joy to mull over a problem with them.

Because I’m in the IT world, I tend to get caught up in the myopia that all things bad only happen in IT-World. I forget that there are other professions that also have to put up with the bane of outsourcing. And so it’s timely that Jeremy Scahill reminds me of it once more. The title of his article is “KBR Was Paid $83 Million in Bonuses for Work That Electrocuted US Soldiers” and you can find it here. I won’t go through all the details, but here’s what caught my attention:

Eric Peters, a Master Electrician who worked for KBR in Iraq as recently as 2009 said that 50% of the KBR managed buildings he saw were not properly wired …. [Peters]  estimated that at least half of the electricians hired by KBR –many of them cheaper-costing Third Country Nationals … would not have been hired to work in the US. … [Workers] from countries such as India, Bangladesh and Bosnia — are estimated to do some 60% of the electrical work for KBR in Iraq. Peters charged that KBR allowed trainees to take notes in to certification tests, making it very easy to be cleared for work [my emphasis --ed.].

Imagine this. You’re driving along an unknown track of a road. And you stop someone to ask about the conditions ahead, and they tell you that the conditions ahead are great, the road is dry and it widens out before too long. Cheered, you continue along your way, only to discover, two hundred metres further along, that your car is now mired to its axles in sticky mud and your cellphone is out of service range. You’re sitting on a clump of damp grass, your legs covered with caking mud, wondering what the hell you’re going to do, when you spy another car coming around the corner. Before you have a chance to do, or say, anything, the second car bogs itself the exact same way you have. And your first reaction, because nothing else seems adequate, is to laugh.

That’s how I feel right now.