Friday, March 04, 2005

X-Men

No, I am not talking about the mutant superheros from your Marvel comic books. The X-Men that I am talking about are from country X. On the surface, the impressive skills that they put on their resumes will make almost anyone's jaw drop. Some people know them by another alias, Ah X.

I believe that, anyone who have worked with the X-Men can concur that the truth is far from what it seems. Let me just relate to you my experience working with these X-men. Most that came, have Master degree. Yes a Master degree. But wait.... its not a Master degree in Computer Science. You might say, "That's okay, they have their Computer Science degree to back them up". Opps.. sorry to inform you this.. Most of them also don't have a CS degree too. In fact, its not even any degree remotely related to IT. They either have some sort of engineering degree or a science degree.

So why did so many companies acquire their services then? This is the biggest mystery of the 21st century. The funny thing is a lot of people look highly on the X-Men and most of these people are usually in some high management level position and love to employ these X-Men. Perhaps they think that the X-Men really have mutant skills which the locals don't have.

When you ask those management people why they would go for the X-Men, the usual answers would be there are a ready pool of highly skilled programmers available during the crunch period and they are cost effective. I say these management people don't have a clue on what they are talking about. Ready pool, yes. Highly skill, hmm... Cost effective? These X-Men usually do their costing in USD. How cost effective can they be? To a US company which do their business in USD, X-Men are cost effective but not to a country where the currency exchange is peg 3.8 to the USD.

Let me give an example, a so call "highly skilled" X-Men with an MBA and a degree in Physics who knows shit about Java will probably set you back 5-7K a month. The vast number of jobless IT fresh graduates who are begging for a job will set you back average 2K. By my calculation, I can get 3 IT fresh graduate for the price of 1 "highly skilled" X-Men. I get 3 pairs of hands cracking on the codes. Although these 3 pairs of hands are not as "highly skilled", neither are the X-Men. So would you rather have 3 pairs of hands coding or 1 pair of hands coding?

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

WELL SAID!!!I have to totally agree that it is the truth! I've experienced it several times myself. Things are not what they seem in this mind-boggling mysterious x-men... Give me a local anytime and we'll mould them to become the real deal rather than talk-only-dunno-how-to-do pieces of shit!

whistler said...

I agree with you. The government recognizes they are expert in the IT sector; loosen the rules to allow X-Men entering to the country, but who advertise X-Men as highly skilled professional? I much respect this advertising company! Should somebody tell the government: the majority of the X-Men are suck! X-Men are poor in problem solving skill.

We should grow the local IT industry and not helping the X-County to become another silicon valley!