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Comment by smanek | Hacker News Reader

ITIL and Six Sigma? They're looking for the wrong skills.

If that's his complaint, he's right. I'm not going to waste my time memorizing a series of 'comprehensive checklists' in college. I doubt I know a single CS/Math student who has done more than peruse the Wikipedia article (or maybe read a book in their spare time if they're feeling particularly masochistic) on Six Sigma - and I like to think that I know many great students in the field (several who've worked for Google, Sun, NSA, Microsoft Research, etc).

There have been many times that I've said 'Damn, I wish I knew more about X.' In the last week alone X has included POMDPs, multi-dimensional interval trees, or functors. I have never, not once, wished I knew more about the management fad du jour.

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HCL (like Infosys, TCS Wipro etc) is a body shopper firm and has nothing much to do with "Computer Science" or the cool things you mention (multidimensional interval trees, POMDP etc). Mr Nayar is just saying that he thinks American Graduates don't have the kind of crap enterprise buzzword "skills" that he can sell to clueless managers at x $/hr. Mr Nayar and his firm wouldn't know what to do with someone who is really good at Computer Science or Math, because those are not the "markets" he addresses. I would imagine an American grad student would be happy to be unemployable (by Mr Nayar).

Really this is just a bodyshopper trying to justify why he isn't hiring costly Americans (vs cheap Indians). Of course he can't say "I am looking for cheap bodies to ship offshore and Americans are expensive", and still retian his job. These mumblings aren't worthy of being upset over.

Due Disclosure: I am Indian. I work in India (Bangalore to be precise), but I do work with POMDPs, MultiDimensional Interval Trees and so on ;-) (My latest project is in Robotic Vision and Navigation, for the Indian Defence Dept)

Very true. Obviously very less opportunity exists in India for the kind of stuff (you mention)that requires engineering bent of mind.

On the other hand there is a mass requirement for people who are expected to fix things. This gives to large percentage of software engineers who do not have a clue what "Engineering" is all about in "Software Engineering"

well said plinkplonk ! As an indian techie myself i have to second with you.

techie? what exactly are your skills, may I ask?

I agree. I have worked in Infosys after my graduation for 1.8 years before I quit and started my own firm. All these organisations are big thing in India, but what they do is nothing more than run big sweat-shops. Its unfortunate to see huge number of talented young Indians getting sucked into these firms. After 4 to 5 years working here, and they are useless to work anywhere else.

Indian , about to graduate in july , looking for some interesting engineering work [sorry for the plug, but as you mentioned Indian CS scene is non existent] related to algorithms , computer languages etc , pointers would be helpful...

pointers would be helpful

Only if you're building a linked list using C. </bad CS joke>

Seriously though, how about a link to your profile/resume?

http://www.scribd.com/share/upload/12956598/2l0290iidwvttefi... I hope this is useful , let me know if you require any thing else

I feel amazed that you wrote a PDP-11 assembler. How did you verify your code? Did you have a real PDP-11 machine or you tested it on an emulator?

P.S. I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....

I don't mean to distract from the thread and discussion...

I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....

I'm impressed. Name dropping and such usually doesn't work on me... but for some reason this does.

I am not an elite hacker. But the guy who told me this also impressed me. I used VAX-11 when I was in college 23 years ago. So I was equally amazed at that he keeps one for himself (employee discount from DEC, I guess) and he has a VT 320 to it.

I am just wondering the kid in India who said he wrote an assembler for PDP-11. I want to know did he verify the code? I wrote an x86 code generator in Ada and that is easy to verify with Linux on PC and I can say it worked. But PDP-11 is kind of hard.

pdp 11 emulators work extremely well. simh is one, supnik-11 is another. Here's a good guide on getting 2.11 BSD running on SIMH:

http://vak.ru/doku.php/proj/pdp11/211bsd

(AT&T UNIX, RSX/11M, RSTS, RT11 and other images are also widely available)

The best way to learn about management fad du jour is to be subjected to it. And the main, perhaps only, thing worth learning about it is that you want to avoid it.

I disagree. If they were a startup looking to develop some new technology or website then maybe six sigma and ITIL wouldn't come into play. But in looking for ways to manage an IT help desk for a company in which they could see thousands of help desk tickets per day, six sigma is the best and most well understood tool available today to help them reduce expenses and greatly improve processes. Six sigma is much more than a comprehensive checklist in this regard.

Plus, I think you're perhaps misunderstanding where his company is coming from. They're not necessarily looking for computer scientists to write code or design new systems in most cases. Instead, they're looking for information systems specialists to be able to quickly and efficiently solve IT issues for their customer, and managers of those specialists to ensure they do it as efficiently as possible.

Six sigma is a farce, and trying to manage people with a set of bastardized statistics horseshit as your polestar is failure personified. If you're managing a machine shop that mass produces gears you might have use for six sigma. Outside of manufacturing quality control six sigma is truly the badge of inept middle management.

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