Category: Archive

Isn’t it obvious that having an employee in many cases is cheaper for a company? So why even hire these expensive IT contractors?

1. Skill set. In the hot market it’s hard to hire a person with specific skills, especially if your company does not offer competitive salaries. So what do you have to do to meet deadlines of this new project? You hire a contractor knowing that even though you’ll pay more (comparing to an employee) for the same set of skills, it’s a temp solution that will let you complete the project.

2. Short time needs. Would you marry a carpenter if you need to replace your kitchen cabinets? Why not? But when your toilet starts leaking, divorce the carpenter and marry a plumber… You may not need a person with specific skills for a long time, so why bringing him/her on board as an employee? With consultans, you do not need to go through this ugly divorce procedure. A separation can be done in a heartbeat.

3. Benefits. I hope there are companies that share their savings with employees who do not use their benefits. For example, a family is using the wife’s medical insurance, and the husband does not use this benefit in his firm. IMO, his company should increase his pay for, say half of the amount it saves on group medical insurance.

4. Managers want to sleep well at night. There are consultants and … consultants. Some of them are hired for a routine coding, while another ones just for being season developers. Smart development managers are keeping seasoned and overqualified consultants just in case. If something goes wrong, these consultants will either offer a proper solution, or fix the problem quickly. These managers realize, that they could have gotten a person for the same job for a lot less money, but they bite the bullet just to sleep well at might.

5. A second opinion. Say a new developer managers comes into an IT shop with establised and known superstar-developers, authorities and other bullies. This manager wants to find out if the code of the current application is written efficiently, using progressive technologies and patterns. How to do this quietly without becoming an enemy of the entire team? Hire a consultant and ask him/her to do a code review and offer some improvements, if needed. In the “worst case scenario “, this consultant won’t find anything wrong, but a negative result is also a result…The manager will have peace of mind. If this code review will find some pain points in the code, it’ll help the manager to address them without being a bad cop.

6. Offshore consultants. Is this a good idea to hire offshore consultants? Yes, but if you are hiring this person because of his/her skills, and not just because it’s cheaper. In the second case you’ll wind up paying more by the end of the project. While in general, I am not too happy with the way the outsourcing is done, currently I work with a very good developer who is located in India. I’ve interviewed him for the job, I liked him, and he does a very good job. If he decides to quit, I may hire another offshore person, but only if this guy has the proper skills. His/her rate will still be a little cheaper than in USA, but I’m not looking to hire nine women to give a birth to my child in one month. It’s only the 21th century, and our medicine did not figure out how to do this yet.

I’m sure, you can find more reasons for hiring consultants or just contractors. Feel free to add some to my list.

Disclaimer: I am a contractor

During the job interview a perspective employer evaluates you and visa versa. During this short visit you need to figure out how this employer treats its employees. This is when FTSC can help.

While you may not have a chance to talk to people working for this potential employer, you definitely can visit their toilets. FTSC stands for flushable toilet seat covers. The rest is simple: enter one cabin, and see if the box on the wall has a supply of FTSC. If it “s empty, do not jump into conclusions just yet… Open the door to the next cabin if it’s not locked (sorry for this level of details, but I often write functional specs for programmers). If the box in the second cabin is also empty, it “s a really bad sign. This means that this employer does not really care about their employees. If they save on FTSC, expect long working hours, little bonuses and small salary increases. This does not mean that you should not accept their offer, but this insider “s info can help you in negotiating your base salary and other perks.

Have a good weekend :))

P.S. To make more educated decision, you can also check the soap containers and paper towel dispensers

All technical presentations from JavaOne 2006 are available for download at

http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/sessions/main_session_pdfs.jsp

and presentations with audio are here (must register, but it’s free):

http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/

There is not too many obviously smart people among us, and when you run into one of them, enjoy the moment.

This week I had a chance to spend a half an hour with Dr. Kolawa, the founder of Parasoft.

I met him about first time about a a year ago and had a priviledge to write an article together. He’s a founder and a CEO of a 300 people company, and many people believe that he’s selling software to help you with testing your programs.

Dr. Kolawa showed me his suite of products in action. It’s much more than just help with testing. His family of products helps development managers (who care) to move to the 22st century style of project development and management. If you properly use his tools, you can produce a tremendous amount of clean code with half of the workforce you have today. But his software is not a magic wand: you have to use it properly.

If you are tired of being a firefighter, want to be a better manager and really care about the quality of your software, call Parasoft and ask for an appointment with Dr. Kolawa. He travels a lot, and the chances are that he’ll be coming to a town near you. Talk to this guy, enjoy this conversation, buy his software, but be smart. As Jon Kern put it, “A fool with a tool is still a fool “.

Have you ever thought of what’s the most popular business application ever? Is there any statistics by Gartner-Shmartner?

May be there is, may be there is not, but I have my own opinion (as usual). Ready? The most popular business application is Microsoft Excel. Lots of business users request, understand and feel comfortable with this spreadsheet tool.

Try to offer them a nicely created report…Nay…Just give it to me in Excel format. Ad-hoc report? Most likely they want it in Excel. You can even write database queries against any database that has an ODBC driver right from Excel.

Some more advanced users write complex formula for the what-if scenarios. Some of the users have become para-programmers and maintain secret databases in a form of a spreadsheet. They will resist fiercely if their IT department will try to take away this database and merge the data with a real DBMS. The Generation X.

Excel is probably the most popular Microsoft’s product after Windows. So Microsoft was peacefully resting on its laurels, but

Google came from behind with Google Spreadsheets: shareable spreadsheets on the Web. Today they made available just a limited test version of the product. Can this product be considered a serious punch into Microsoft’s face? Microsoft does not seem to be scared.

Two large ships met in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The first one had an IBM’s flag and was going from the USA to India. The other one was heading from India to America under the Apple’s flag. The passengers of both ships where standing on the decks showing coo-coo signs to each other :))

Dear software vendors,

When you send a crew to present your product at a technical conference, do let your technical experts answer questions from the audience alone. They tend to easily get involved into a geeky discussions with their peers from the audience, which may hurt your product sales. Tech. experts need marketing support badly.

I’ve been watching a technical presentation of one of the AJAX frameworks. The presenter knew his stuff and did a good job explaining the features of their software. Then, during Q/A session, people started asking questions. The first question was how this particular framework adresses the AJAX security issues. The technical presenter honestly answered that it did not. I assume, that the other presenter (more of a marketing kind of guy) did not like such an answer. So when the next person have asked a question of how their AJAX tool would handle existing and future compatinility issues of the Web browser, the marketing guy realized, that the presentation may go in the wrong direction, and he took the mike. This time, instead of getting a straight technical answer, we’ve received a 5-min spiel about how the community will communicate and put a pressure on Web browser vendors, so these guys will address the compatibility issues in a timely manner, and besides, that these vendors are on the appropriate committes already…

I do not think that such a fuzzy answer has satisfied anyone in the audience, but I’m sure the marketing guy believed that he did a good job of dodging away from a slippery question. Did he really? I’d be much more satisfied hearing the actual issues and ways to deal with them from a technical people…So if you really need to find some answers, talk to the technical presenter after the presentation – these guys are usually very good, open and will gladly to share with you everything relevant to the subject.

Political correct answers during technical events suck. I wonder if a high school math teacher does not like the answer

to a problem, would s/he give a politically correct answer instead?

Yes, straight answers can damage the image of you product. During one of the panels at JavaOne 2006, a creator of one AJAX framework said that some features are not not finished yet, but it’s just a matter of his time availability?!? Do you want to use a software that depends on one person’s time availability? I would not take such mom-an-pop products seriously.

Here’s my message: if you are presenting your software, be honest but try not to damage your own product’s reputation. Is this an oxymoron?

During JavaOne I was interviewed by a Java Champion from Brazil Bruno Souza and then I’ve interviewed him. Both of these interviews were improvised, the sound quality of this podcast could have been better, but …it is what it is. The photo of Java Champions at JavaOne is located over here. On this photo Bruno is the guy wrapped into a Brazilian flag. Brazil is the rising star in the Java community, and I won’t be surprised if next year’s JavaOne will play soccer.

More interviews with Java Champions can be found over here and these are some photos of JCs.

After my first year of blogging I’ve decided to run through all the entries, statistics and some of my favorite blogs. These are the results:

1. I wrote 124 blog entries during the year. I usually write at 6AM before going to work.

2. As per blog-city statistics, during the month of May my blog had about 20K hits. I’m not exactly sure what the “hit ” means, but the number of them steadily grows.

3. Some people have subscribed to my blog so they receieve an email every time I publish an entry. I do not know who they are – subscriptions are anonymous

4. The following blog entry set up the record on the number of reads (I’m not sure why though): Java failure can lead to death

5. And these are my 10 blog entries that are a like more than others:

Why People in the USA are Polite and Smiley

My Upcoming vacation: JavaOne

Interviewing techniques: Give a second chance

Yakov’s Diet

Today’s morning commute

Eclipse to Borland: you can run but you can’t hide

Yakov on Joel I’ll meet Joel Spolsky in person next week at the conference in NYC

Russian Programmers

When computer programming will die out as a trade in the USA

Sun Microsystems must hire me. I’ll wait till they complete the announced layoffs…

Why do I blog? Because I like. I usually have my own opinion on everything that’s happening in the software industry, and since there are plenty of news every day, I just put my opinion on “paper ” without thinking twice. Some bloggers would say that they blog “to give back to the community “. What a BS! I do it for myself. Once in a while I write to promote my books, training, or whatever else. But I need you guys to read my blog. Please do so and leave your comments: I read each of them.

Have a great weekend!

I have arrived in the USA about fifteen years ago from a grim society, which is now called “the former Soviet Union rdquo;. One of the most pleasant surprises for me was the fact that people looked very friendly and always smiled to me. Yes, Sir (Sorry, I “m not a Sir, I just came from behind the iron curtain hellip;). Excuse me, Sir hellip;Even though I “m not knighted (after all these years of surviving, achievements, et al), it’s still much better when people call you Sir and smile to you on any occasion . It did not take me long time to figure out that people are the same everywhere: the amount of brainwashing differs slightly, but people are THE SAME. So why people in the USA smile to you in the offices, in the stores, and everywhere else? The answer is simple: mortgage. Yes, they smile to you not because they like the fact that during the last 15 minutes you keep asking these stupid questions about your insurance policy or this little item that lays on the very top shelf, “What is this for? Is this powerful? Noisy? Can it process any food? rdquo; This salesman will smile to you no matter what, because s/he has mortgage to pay, the car loan is due in two weeks and, thanks God, the older daughter was accepted to a $50K a year ivy league school. On top of this, an average American has $9300 unpaid balance on his/her credit cards. So they “d better smile to you, or else hellip; Two months out of job will put half of the USA population into deep depression: the bills are piling up so fast hellip;

Life was simple in the former Soviet Union: you do not have the money (and I mean the full payment), you do not a car. You do have the money (and I mean the full payment), you still do not have a car, because the cars were deficit. By the end of your life you might have been able to afford an apartment. Was this bad? Yes it was. But is it better when a 25-year old kid says, “I bought a house rdquo;. Excuse me, this is not your house. You put $5K down and live in a $200K house hellip;Keep dreaming hellip;This is the bank “s house, and because of this you will smile to me no matter what I say. Some of the USA newcomers are embarrassed to enter expensive looking stores here in Manhattan. Don “t be! Remember, their fancy looking salesmen have mortgages, and they will smile to you! When a $60K-a-year salesmen drives a $70K Mercedes, s/he “d better smile to you!

The worst part is that the majority of the population are getting on the hook so easily hellip; They are building credit history, apply for credit cards, and charge it like crazy. When a young guy with a $2K monthly income proposes to a girl he gives her a $10K engagement ring. Just to be cool, like everyone else. The credit card bills will come later, and he will make minimal payments while taking her to Hawaii for a honeymoon. The comes the bankruptcy. Chapter 11. Chapter 7. No worries, friendly and smiley lawyers are sitting right here in the bushes. They will calm and comfort you: “It’s not your fault, these bad guys from filthy rich banks have sent you all these attractive credit card offers. It’s their fault “. No, it’s YOUR fault. Do not borrow more than you can afford to pay back. Do not pay the minimum balance, do not make yourself poorer. Do not be a loser!

One of my colleagues recently said to me, ” I do not really need much money. I “m very happy to have a very small income, but work on the stuff I like rdquo;. Fine, I can respect this as long as your expenses match your income. Next day this guy tells me that he “s got an $180 traffic ticket because he lost his driver “s license and did not have time to renew it last week. After that, he plans a vacation that s/he can “t afford hellip; WTF is this? You do not want to work hard? Get rid of all your credit cards, stop smoking (it “s $5 a day), do not go to Starbucks that charges you $2 for something they call Tall Coffee. Do not buy this glass of blue slushy ice foam for $4 every day.

Have you been to Thailand? They have monks there. The monks do not have any income, but they live appropriate lifestyles. They wake up at five in the morning and walk on the streets taking food offerings from people, if any. The last food at noon. One orange robe. Is this fair? It’s their choice and their books are perfectly balanced: zero in, zero out. You do not need money? Fine, but be disciplined and strong! Otherwise, smile to me baby hellip;wider hellip;.wider hellip;and bend hellip;lower hellip;lower hellip;