[geeks] Bad monster. No donut.

[Phil Stracchino]

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Fri, 10 Nov 2006 @ 17:00 -0500, Nadine said:
>> There are certain types of IT jobs that have been off-shored.  High
>> level systems administration is not one of them, contrary to popular
>> belief.  The jobs that are gone are jobs that were scut work in the
>> first place -- e.g. help desk call centers and the like.
> 
> What about the programming jobs?  A lot of them went too, and they were
> certainly not "scut work".
> 
> I don't think things like microprocessor design are "scut work" either,
> do you?

My first wife is a technical writer, and a damned good one with a lot of
engineering knowledge.  Her job became immensely harder when a lot of
the positions she had to work with - both other, junior tech writers and
engineers working on the product - were offshored to India.  One of the
major reasons it became so much harder was because she would say "This
needs to be changed" or "I need more information on what's happening
here", and would get ignored ... because the people in India who needed
to act on that had traditionally Indian mores, and felt it was beneath
them to do anything at the request of a woman.  So they'd refuse to do
it, and then when the next meeting came up, they'd lie and say they'd
done it, and it must be her fault that she didn't have it.

Those positions were not scut work.  But scut work is all the people it
was offshored to were fit for.


-- 
 Same geek, same site, new location
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-429-0220
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater