Posts by sugerbear

IT recruiters warn over migration caps

I cant fail !

Spot on. You cant let them flounder because if you do then you fail your own objectives. And failing objectives can lead to you being given the boot (underperformance). All perfectly legal and saves the company the expense of having to lay you off.

So you have a stark choice of stumbling through and succeeding (ie working late, weekends for no overtime, constant code reviews, direction and rewrites), finding another job or hanging around for the redundancy.

I chose the latter, but only because the job was making me so miserable that I felt it was the best option for me (worked for 15 years in IT). Productivity is never measured just the end result is important and the sooner that all UK tech are out of a job and the results of real outsourcing can be felt by management* the better.

There are plenty of other 'fads' that will go the way of outsourcing.

* funny how senior management are never outsourced...

In other news, company complains they cant make money anymore

Well there is a suprise.. a company that gets money for recruiting workers to come to the uk moans that they wont be able to carry on making money at the expense of the existing workforce.

I have no problem with uk companies employing tech workers from india when they reside in india, but when they are allowed to work in the uk with the obvious effects that has on the uk work force (ie we dont need you when we can employ someone on half your salary) it annoys the hell out of me.

One of the reasons I lost my last job was for the reason above, cheap workers with little experience and understanding of the uk but it was ok because the uk workers would firefight most of the problems and do most of the design work for them. So to management it had the appearance of working when in fact it wasn't.

Its about time the government realised that there are plenty of IT tech workers out there who can do the job, they just cant compete with an unlevel playing field.

Korean bank dumps Unix boxen for mainframes

Right tool for the right job

Suprising that people think mainframes are more expensive, windows fanboys never account for the hidden cost in their systems, downtime to the business, support costs etc. Worked on mainframes for years and can only think of one occasion where there was any down time, and that was because we were running an unsupported version of IMS. Never had to worry about disks breaking, cpu's frying etc that was all done on the fly and invisibly to the end user. If there is a problem with the mainframe it will call the IBM support engineers and he will be on site to replace the part in real time.

Despite what any of the windows fanboys might say, mainframes are used because they are reliable. They dont have downtime, run 24x7 and have failover systems that you simply dont get in windows systems. Yes google runs on a vast array of utility pc boxes but if google stops working for a short while you wont be stuck at the tesco checkout with your weekly shopping wondering why your card payment has been declined.

Use the right tool for the job.