Comment by oldandtired | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldandtired | Hacker News Reader

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I find your comments about technical competency of Australians being less than elsewhere interesting. My own experience over the decades is the opposite. I have had to deal professionally with various fly-in gurus (from the US and Europe) and they have had little success in understanding how we implemented the projects we were involved in.

what was more ridiculous was the major discrepancy in pay. If US or European, then you were paid 3+ times the Australian rates. Yet you couldn't solve what we thought were simple problems.

There is no doubt that there are many who claim technological acumen here who have much less than they advertise. But there are many here who have much more technological acumen than what you find overseas.

The biggest problem is the extensive need to use buzzwords in the various technologically based industries. If you are not up with the latest buzzword craze, you are considered backward and inferior, even though those buzzwords are just a renaming of various "stuff" that has been around for decades.

Likewise - I spent 6 months back in 2004 working in the US office at a large company doing data management as part of a big team. I was the only person in the entire group who tried to understand how our whole team fit together and what my inputs and outputs in the data chain did - and why they needed what they needed. Everyone else was a narrow specialist in their little bit, and the project managers were specialist project managers who knew how to gantt, but didn't understand what we all did.

I'd been used to working in a smaller company where I HAD to understand everything because I was building tooling for the entire chain. Obviously I didn't know enough to do everyone else's job, but I understood what their job meant and what kind of problems they existed to solve.

> they have had little success in understanding how we implemented the projects we were involved in

I don't think I've ever had trouble helping people to grok the implementation/architecture/whatever of any system I've been involved in.

What I actually found was that they were unable to think outside of the box they were stuck in. They were in a position of "you can't do that" when the problem at hand required that "you need to do that" so find a way to do it.

I think one of the problems of today is the limited education that many in technical fields have. They are taught how to do something in one language or system and they do not get to see that other ways are possible in other languages and systems.

One of my former colleagues (from decades ago) was a brilliant programmer. We had a particularly pernicious problem to solve. He had spent some hours programming a solution around the problem and had written about half the code needed. In discussions with him, I brought up that old chestnut of Karnaugh Maps and Don't Cares. He had never heard of either. Once explained to him, he fixed the entire problem with 5 lines of code, throwing away all the previous work. He was very capable of thinking outside the box.

I have worked with many very capable Australian technical people over the years and they have been less valued than foreign people even though the Australians were vastly superior to their overseas counterparts.

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