RE: OT -- Boston Globe job listings

One of the truly dog eat dog aspects of this is that the Indians, in some areas, are unable to compete with the Chinese and so they themselves are being outsourced.

I don't think any amount of complaining from DBA ranks will make the slightest bit of difference to the average collection of greedy, stupid executives that are pervasive in industry. If business people ever had ethics that extended beyond profit margins they certainly show no evidence of that today. And Sturgeon's law shows that you are likely to be dealing with the least competent greedy people.

I'm afflicted by a sensitivity to historical irony. In the 60's and 70's the literature complained that corporate executives had insufficient incentives to perform well because their compensation did not vary with the corporation's stock performance. In addition, there was general consensus that accounting staff were too conservative to meet the creative financing requirements of modern corporations. We certainly changed all that. Declining emphasis on character aligned with stock based compensation plans and "creative" MBAs in CFO slots certainly did produce some interesting corporate performance. I live and work in Houston and the examples I have in mind are Enron, Dynergy, Reliant......

I suspect that the only thing that will moderate this is some expensive offshore project failures that cause executive blood to be shed. The remarks in another post about the cultural problems inherent in turning specs into good applications without end-user input and testing are right on target. Unfortunately, it will be years before academia catches on.

Allan

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 11:09 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

When I worked for Oracle's custom development group I worked on a large conversion project that employed about 350 consultants (150 from Oracle). They had a number of foreign consultants on the project. About 1 in 10 had technical skills that were above mediocre, but they worked cheap. The code they produced was a mess and we at Oracle wondered how much time / money would have to be spent after the fact to clean up what the company got on the cheap. You get what you pay for. I have dealt with offshore technical Oracle staff and have found them to be cheap in cost but very poor overall in the quality of what they delivered. Companies will wake up to this sooner or later.

Ken

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 10:59 AM

> <inline>
>
> > But now I keep seeing
> > articles about how much development work is being sent overseas. Has

> > anyone seen that affect Oracle DBA work yet?
>
> Huge discussions going on here at work about that very subject. So
> far,

no one has come up with a reasonable argument for keeping the jobs in-house. At the gut level it 'feels' like we should keep the jobs in-house and that would be an overall benefit to the economy, too. However, the financial argument of should I pay 75K - 120K a year for US based DBAs or pay 45K - 80K for offshore talent is hard to beat. The money ranges I gave are contract employee/job shop type of quotes, IOW, a 75K US position would be for a junior DBA that is actually getting 35K-40K and so on up the skill range.
>
> v/r
>
> Stephen S. Wolfe, GS-11, DAFC
> Data Services Manager
> stephen.wolfe_at_macdill.af.mil
> (813) 827-9974 DSN 651-9974
>
>
> >
> > Dennis Williams
> > DBA
> > Lifetouch, Inc.
> > dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com <mailto:dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com>
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 9:14 AM
> > To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> >
> >
> > I don't think it has as much to do with no available positions
> > (although that is part of the answer) as most medium to large
> > companies don't use newspaper ads anymore. They are using the
> > internet (especially for technical jobs) and are signed up with
> > Monster, BrassRing, etc. to do their recruiting for them from their
> > own company web sites. I've seen this definite shift here in the
> > Minneapolis / St. Paul, MN area over the past couple of years. Most

> > of these companies also provide e-mail service that sends you an
> > email when a job is posted that meets your specs. So, why waste
> > your time on newspaper ads that only appear every Sunday?
> >
> > My $0.02 worth,
> >
> > Ken Janusz, CPIM
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com>
> > Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 6:34 AM
> >
> >
> > > I've been keeping an eye on the Boston Globe's Oracle DBA job
> > > postings,
> > two
> > > years ago it wasn't uncommon to see eight or more per week,
> > now I tend
> > > to see one or two, or none.
> > >
> > > For a while they also announced big IT job fairs, I don't
> > know if they
> > still
> > > do that or how successful they now are.
> > >
> > > The market has really shrunk in two years!
> > >
> > > There can't be a huge glut of DBAs out there looking for
> > work... It
> > > must
> > be
> > > a reduction in demand because companies are not making big
> > > infrastructure changes anymore.
> > >
> > > Patrice.
> > > --
> > > Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> > > --
> > > Author: Boivin, Patrice J
> > > INET: BoivinP_at_mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca
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