Crappy Internet Banking with a fancy name?

Just read about an interesting OCBC internet banking incident that a friend had experience. My reaction was: "What else can you expect from a company from down south?". Although its not an IT company, but from experience typically you will find that

• The site will have fancy design and name which only support IE. I don't know, probably everybody down south only uses and know about IE? Firefox, isn't that the red panda?
  
• The application is most probably written by X-men. After all the bullshit that we read from the media, that they have a large pool of technically skill resources to take up any challenge; well, is in fact bullshit anyway. Assuming that 2%(just pluck it out of thin air, most likely too high) of their population are skilled software engineers, how many can each company there hire? So how do you make up for the shortage of skilled manpower? Engage the X-men! No doubt about it. They are the best!

Feeling Lost?

Yesterday a friend IM me and said "have u ever had the feeling that one day u wake up and suddenly u realize u're tired of doing things that u do everyday?".

Actually, I am more than tired, I don't know what I've been doing since end of 2002. Work sucks! What can I do? Joel Spolsky in his Hitting the High Notes article have answered the question.

"Sadly, this doesn't really apply in non-product software development. Internal, in-house software is rarely important enough to justify hiring rock stars. Nobody hires Dolly Parton to sing at weddings. That's why the most satisfying careers, if you're a software developer, are at actual software companies, not doing IT for some bank."

That means I need to look for a company that does product development. Sadly, most of the IT companies here doesn't do product development. The big MNCs are just body shop. Those pathetic MSC status companies are trying to compete with the MNC by becoming even cheaper body shop.

Sigh. I am still lost. The search goes on...

A Google of Malaysia?

Have you ever wonder will there be a local IT company as big or famous as Google in Malaysia? Let's face it, this will never happen! There will never be a Yahoo! or a BEA. Why? Companies like Google and Yahoo! was not started because they can make money. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't say "Hey, lets start a search engine company and make tons of money". They were doing research on search engine. The company was a product of their research. Not the other way round.

This is not the case with Malaysian IT companies, in fact all Asian IT companies. The owners are all money driven. Lets do a case study. The company I am working for is a good one. Its actually an MNC originated from a country with the Merlion as a national symbol. It has a framework which the management wants to sell as a product. The problem is this product is a total mess thanks to some Dumbass. The management doesn't want to pour money into fixing the blunders cause by Dumbass but wants to milk the product. In fact, I think the management fails to see a problem with the product.

If little money is spend on R&D to improve the product, how can it be sold? You maybe able to cheat one or two customers but you can't cheat everyone. People will find out that you are selling them rubbish. If this is the kind of attitude exhibit by local IT companies, then how can there be a homegrown Yahoo!

So if you want to create a giant like Google, you must be willing to do the work for free with no expectation of getting any money out of it. You must be not driven by Money. Money is not in the picture!

Never let just anybody be in charge

Never simply let anybody be in charge of your critical projects or products. Its a disaster ready to happen. If the person happens to be an X-Men, be prepared for bankruptcy! A fine example would be a J2EE product that the company I work for is trying sell.

The product started out as individual solutions to specific customers need. The management then realized that these individual solutions can be reused in myriads of projects, and so the product was born. They put this person (let's call him Dumbass) in charge of this new product's direction and implementation. FYI, Dumbass is not an X-Men but is no better. Dumbass has zero hands on experience in J2EE or even Java, just general knowledge. Worst of all Dumbass is a proud close minded stubborn SOB!

Since the product is actually a bundling of the various solutions developed over the years, the technology employed varies from BMP to CMP. The codes are also polluted by the X-Men. Instead of doing various refactoring to the code base to standardize the various techniques used and to better integrate the various solutions, Dumbass chose to concentrate on esoteric stuff.

Dumbass also came out with the idea of simplifying the API, which to be fair is a good idea, but the implementation is a joke. Instead of simplifying the existing API, another layer of remote Session Facade with the new API was bolted on, delegating calls to the existing API. Now, we all know how evil is a remote method call and a chatty application making lots of remote call is a big no no.

Dumbass was in charge of this product for a year and it is fubar. The product is slow, buggy and hard to maintain. Does your company have a Dumbass in charge of its critical products?

shit code

I've been talking a lot about X-Men producing crappy code, so today I like to give an example.
The project that I am involve in uses Struts. In Struts, a request is routed to the execute method of an Action class based on the struts-config mapping. This one particular action class written by an X-Men is horrible. This execute method is 700+ lines long. A lot of codes were duplicated and I suspect that it was copied and pasted which could have been extracted out into functions.

Looking at it will make you feel nausea, and to think that I've got to make some changes to it.
GD it!

Here is another classic.

if (collection == 0) {
statements;
}
statements;
for (e : collection ) {
statements;
}

It was not clear to me at first that the FOR loop was use as the ELSE part of the IF statement and got me really confused.

So this is the kind of quality work you get from a "highly skilled" X-Men. If you got one in your office, I say that your boss has been suckered into paying an astronomical amount of money which could've been your year end bonus.

Technorati Tags: java programming outsourcing

Exact Software vs DHL?

A friend of mine will be joining Exact Software which reminded me of the annoying SMSes sent by Jobstreet recently about the Exact walk-in interview. I don't know if Jobstreet is just spamming every registered users or Lina really thinks that I am qualify to work for the "other" side.

Anyway, that friend told me that Exact will be adding around 180 more head counts in this round of the recruitment to their current 200. Suddenly, I realized that Exact is big here. It is actually their Asia development center. So that made me think, if Exact can setup a development center here and their local staff are really doing the coding work, why can't DHL?

From what I gathered from the people that I know who work for DHL. Most of the coding work are outsourced either to local vendors or to the X-Men. Most of the DHL local employees are doing so call higher level value added work. Some people look at coding as grunt work, no value. Any Tom, Dick and Harry with basic programming skill can do the work. So the DHL staffs are then only responsible for producing requirement specification, coordinating and liaising with the vendor doing the actual coding work, testing and code review.

Beside producing the specs, I am not sure how higher level or value added the other responsibilities are. But its looks pretty darn boring to me. Testing and code review? X-Men written? You must be kidding me man! I won't even think about it even if DHL pays me 5 figures for allowance on top of the basic salary.

CMM Level 5? Who cares?! Once you are in, you will be there for good! I doubt you can get another job which can pay that kind of money for doing testing and code review. Unless of course you are in the management level, then that's a different story. Nevertheless, some people are quite happy with that kind of work and its good money.

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?

Technorati Tags: outsourcing + x-men

Its been a while...

Have not been blogging for quite sometime. I was tied up in a project at work. This project is typical of IT projects where most of the coding work are outsource. The outsourcing model that the company I work for opted is onsite outsourcing whereby the programmers will be onsite at the customers place to do the work. These programmers are from a country(lets call this country X) where most media reports would agree is the next silicon valley. Now these so call programmers from country X is giving me major brain damage. They come, they coded and they left. So after they left, we have to pickup the maintenance work. Boy, once you've seen the code that they produced, most will agree with me that they will never ever want to work with any of them.