Re: Oracle or DB2

El - Fatih wrote:

> >No one would think of going into surgery with a dozen low paid (mediocre)
> >surgeons rather than one highly paid specialist. You wouldn't go into court
> to
> >face a murder charge with a dozen less-expensive recnet law school
> graduates
> >trying to get their first experience when you could have one very expensive
> >expert. When it comes to databases ... for reasons well beyond the bounds
> of
> >rationality ... there seems to be some unwritten rule that says "We can
> afford
> >ten beginning-intermediate developers but we can't afford to pay $200K to
> an
> >expert." And that is clearly nonsense. The expert will get the job done.
> >
> >Rant over!
> >
> >Daniel Morgan
>
> Yes you have a right. Bua, the price is not mesurement of knowledge. There
> are many guys from India or Pakistan etc. and they would work for 64k but
> they know more than an expert who has salary about 140-200k. I would always
> take 3 good foreign guys than one expensive american guy.

Right now a major US corporation I have worked with is doing just that. They just brought in about 40 developers from TATA in India. In about two years they will discover that they have created an absolute disaster, will terminate the contract, and go back on the market looking for Americans.

Is it because the American programmers are better than the Indian ones? No! Quite likely, as a group, they are less experienced. But what the Indian programmers can not do from thousands of miles away is walk into someone's office and ask them to explain a poorly worded specification. What they can not do is go out into the factory, observe something being done, and understand the process. What they can not do is understand the nuances of American English usage. What they do not have is the cultural knowledge of how Americans think and know what is wanted even though it is not part of a written specification. They will do an excellent job of delivering precisely what has been requested of them ... and it won't work.

Any idiot can bang code and quite a few prove it every day. To write a decent application requires business savvy. The ability to understand accounting, distribution, manufacturing, JIT, QC, and hundreds of other acronyms. And those developers that get the big dollars are being paid not just to know how to write SELECT field1 || field2 rather than SELECT field1, field2 ... they are being paid to know when.

Daniel Morgan Received on Fri May 31 2002 - 17:31:43 CEST