On 22 April 2014 15:45, Sankaranarayanan, Vignesh
<[email protected]> wrote:

> I personally take offense to the "drone" bashing. Because I'm a "drone" now, 
> apparently.

I read this not as drone bashing, but as management bashing. The word
"drone" with its implication of idleness and other even less
appropriate functions is not well applied here, but it has come into
common use.

> All of these comments seem to be from the perspective of higher ups and folks 
> who've had - years-of experience on the
> mainframe. It simply isn't fair to expect the same depth of knowledge from a 
> (relatively) newcomer. Without a doubt, the
> technology that is mainframe, is massive. It's not sane to expect some 
> 100,000 manuals get cooked right into an IT
> professional, when most of the folks on this (& elsewhere) list have acquired 
> the knowledge over years of beating on
> their craft.

Indeed it isn't. And while I think you will find a friendly welcome
here for anyone who is able and willing to learn, things get a bit
tricky when inability is because of lack of time and/or opportunity
rather than of willingness or native intelligence.

> You ought to consider the conditions under which we're working/learning. When 
> a service provider takes up your IT
> infrastructure service support, there's a reason that it's achievable at just 
> x% of what it cost earlier. No points for
> figuring out where that money is cut out from.

Generally these outsourcing services are not sold as "we can charge
you less because we hire ill trained young Indians to replace your
experienced technical people"! They are more likely to be sold using a
combination of "wages for well trained technical people in India are
much lower than they are in US/Canada/UK/etc." and "your experienced
technical people are overpaid prima donnas who deserve some pain",
both of which arguments probably appeal to some extent to the C-suite
crowd who are not themselves likely to face being outsourced any time
soon.

But in fact, of course, the first claim is closer to the truth than
the latter, and the lack of appropriate training and opportunity is
largely disguised by the very distance and seen only in the long term
results.

I have noted that a number of the Indian participants on these lists
feel the need to give themselves a "Western" nom de plume (nom de
clavier?). I hope that this isn't from fear of not being welcomed, or
of being treated as a "drone", but I suspect it is.

Tony H.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to