Category — As the Tera Flops

You remember Gwen, the IT Project Manager who was having difficulty recruiting experienced software developers? I caught up with her on the weekend and am happy to report that she has found herself some developers. In fact, she found one group of ace engineers who had worked together before and were on the lookout for more work. She was excited, she said. An opportunity like that, with an established team who have experience, knowledge and a proven record of working well together is a PM’s dream come true. She recommended them for hiring. And got turned down.

Since the last time I met up with Gwen, her situation has changed significantly in one regard. She has a new boss. Let’s call him…Phil. And she doesn’t like Phil very much. You see, Phil’s a liar.

When he was interviewing for the position of Gwen’s boss, Phil told the team that he had worked for a number of high-profile companies. Equivalent examples would be Google and IBM. The problem was, his CV never mentioned such work, only one stint with a largish player more than five years previously. A far cry from the sharp and far-sighted IT strategist he was trying to pitch to Gwen’s company. After he left the interview, Gwen checked up on him via the intertubes. He had also said that he was currently on contract with a particular local company to help the team meet some deadlines. But, on his public profile, he claimed to be a “Senior Director” at the company, not a contractor. And, the next morning, his title had changed…to Chief Technology Officer for that company. I know this is true because I saw the print-outs Gwen had made of his profile, one in the afternoon and another one the following morning. Looking at the timestamps on the printed pages, I could see that Contractor Phil had magically morphed to Senior Director and then CTO in less than 24 hours!

Because the Hiring Manager, now Gwen’s boss’s boss, thought Phil was fantastic, he was hired. And swiftly started doing things that proved to Gwen that, instead of being a high-level strategist, he was nothing more than a smooth-talking two-bit coder.

Gwen is a Project Manager, right? Below her, she has several Team Leads. Below the Team Leads are Senior Software Developers. The Seniors guide the regular Software Developers. And there are even two Junior Software Developers. It’s a standard structure for IT projects.

Phil was hired for his connections. (At that level, that’s really all anyone is hired for, which explains the dismal state of IT in the world today. That and the huge influx of badly-educated Indian software engineers. (*) And yes, I’ve managed them, and a whole lot of friends have also managed them, so I know of what I speak.)

It was Phil’s stated job to set up meetings with several very influential government/business leaders in Singapore in a bid to drum up more business. Makes sense, right? So what does Phil do?

He terminates the agreement with the company’s first ever customer. He didn’t want to talk to them, never met them, and sent emails instead to all the parties saying that he “didn’t believe a continuing relationship” offered any “benefits” to anyone any more. So what happened to all of Gwen’s developers, who were busy working on extending said customer’s functionality? She tells me she’s got them investigating some esoteric problems on database interrogation techniques and real-time processing while she waits for the work to roll in.

But, the work isn’t going to roll in. Because Phil isn’t interested in meeting any important business leaders. Instead, he spends his time asking developers for their code and then questioning them as to why they are solving a problem in a particular way.

Contractor oops! I mean CTO Phil is quite representative of a lot of managers in Singapore and, no doubt, Malaysia. They don’t have the skillz to fill the job they’ve been hired for, so the company ends up paying for an exceedingly expensive code reviewer (if they even know that much) who still gets shown up from time to time by the Senior Developers and, through his incompetence, manages to actively hamper the company’s business. Phil obviously knows he’s out of his depth, hence his reluctance to do anything that someone of his position should be doing, and is frightfully insecure as a result. While he spends his working day calculating the average wait time for each developer at the coffee machine on the floor (I’m not making this up; Gwen’s tone of voice was rather dry as she related this), hiring decisions and business meetings are left to dangle in the breeze. Gwen tells me he took one look at the CVs for the group of developers Gwen and her team had interviewed earlier, and flatly refused to approve their hiring.

“They’re too good,” she told me. “Better than him. I’ll never get them.”

You could make the argument that, as there’s no work coming in, maybe it’s just as well that team didn’t get hired, but that’s not really the point. Meanwhile Phil’s boss visits from overseas every month, they spend days snugly cloistered in the office, and then Grand Poobah jets out again. Gwen says she used to have some respect for Grand Poobah once, but now it’s all gone.

(*) Back when I was a developer, there was a tactic used by Sales and Marketing that us coders used to call the “Mongolian Horde Principle”. The reasoning went like this: “You say it will take three people two years to code this system. Well, in that case, if you hire three hundred people, it should only take you a little more than one week to complete it. (Oh, and I sold the system last month and you’re due to install it at the customer site in three weeks.)” To update this method for the modern era, and mindful of the huge number of Indian so-called IT engineers in the marketplace, I suggest changing the name from “Mongolian Horde Principle” (which infers something theoretical in nature) to “Bangalore Mob Method”, which is how it’s currently implemented at innumerable IT projects around the world. The exact same reasoning applies. But hey, they’re cheap and that’s all that matters, right? If nobody cares about quality, why should you?

My bitch of a friend

I was sitting having a coffee with a friend in Singapore recently. Let’s call her Gwen. Gwen is in an enviable position for someone in IT. Her company recently won a large deal and she has the responsibility to ramp up a team of developers, negotiate deliverables and deliver the first phase of a system by the end of the year. I used to live for opportunities like that. Gwen, however, was rather glum.

“I’m going to get a reputation as a complete bitch,” she told me morosely, stirring her coffee.
“Why?”
“I have to build a team, right? Well, I went through about forty resumes last night.”
“And?”
We’re always told how high-tech Singapore is. How much more advanced it is compared to its neighbours, and how it always attracts only the best. Creative. Innovative. Fast. Tech. Dynamic. I was happy to pick Gwen’s brain because I was curious as to whether the facts lived up to the hype.
“Most of them are useless,” she told me.
I raised my eyebrows. “How so?”
“I’m after C++ developers,” she said. “They have to already know their stuff because we have our first deadline in a matter of months. I don’t have time to mollycoddle anyone.”
I nodded.
“Well, out of the forty resumes, seven have Computing degrees.” She frowned. “What’s that work out to? About fifteen percent?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, something like that.” I actually yearn for times when I don’t have to do any thinking and, as far as I was concerned, Gwen was going to be the one doing the heavy lifting in this conversation.
“The rest…,” she shook her head. “All I’m getting from India are civil engineers and all I’m getting from China are chemists and mathematicians. That doesn’t mean they’re not smart, but how would they like it if I tried to build a bridge or come up with a new malaria vaccine? I wouldn’t last a week! Yet, according to them, they’re now software developers.”
She sighed. “So what am I supposed to do now? If I employ a chemist to do programming, sure, they might be able to do some robot stuff but how will they know how to code their way out of a sticky problem? If I say to one of them, ‘okay, I want you to write a web app but what are you going to do to stop an SQL injection?’, they’re not going to know where to start.” She raised her voice. “Why are they even applying for a job which they’ve never trained for?”
“Eighty-five percent, huh?”
“Clueless,” she said. “In desperation, I interviewed several of them. They don’t even know what a left join is. And that’s not all. You should see the salaries they’re expecting.” She paused. “How much does it take to live in Singapore?”
“Well, obviously more than I have which is why we don’t live in Singapore,” I quipped.
But Gwen was impatient and waved away my feeble joke. “Right, right. But how much?”
“For a single professional? Maybe four thousand a month for a start, and that’s only if you can find an HDB flat to rent. For a family, you can’t do much with less than seven or eight. Not if you’re a foreigner.”
“And a good starting salary for an IT developer?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Good results at Uni. Maybe a year’s commercial experience. Six maybe for a junior?”
“That’s what I thought.” Although my confirmation seemed to make her even unhappier.
“Do you know how much they want?” she finally asked.
“Who? The Indians and Chinese?”
“Yeah.”
“Not a clue.”
“Two and a half to three.”
“Thousand a month?”
“Yep.”
“To live in Singapore?” I gaped at her. “Are they nuts?”
“You can see what happens, can’t you?” Gwen told me, sipping her coffee. “Some bridge builder or maths teacher comes along and says they’ll do C++ or Python or Java or whatever coding you want, and they want less than three a month for it. Who’s going to look that kind of gift horse in the mouth? It has a knock-on effect, though. Take me. What happens when it’s time to move on? There’s so much downward pressure on IT salaries that I’ll be earning less money with more experience as time goes on. And what about my project? HR only has to read over the same CVs to complain about how I’m only picking the expensive candidates.”
She stared at her coffee. “No matter which way I look at it, I lose. If I pick only the IT-qualified guys, I’m going to get reamed for running a too-expensive project. If I pick chemists, I’ll get reamed for missing our milestones. Either way, I end up looking like an absolute, incompetent bitch.”
I didn’t know what to say because Gwen was completely correct. All I could do was agree with her, but that would make her feel even worse.
“I’ll get another round of coffee,” I said and temporarily escaped.

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.