stevefct
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:48 am
Post subject: Re: double concentration question |
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Drew wrote:
| Quote: |
Hi All:
I'm going to be finishing a Masters Degree in Computer
Science/Information Technology soon.
The degree program has two concentrations available...CS and IT.
I will be doing the IT concentration.
My question is this. How valuable or worthwhile would a double
concentration be?
To go ahead and do the CS concentration, I would only need 2
additional classes. It would have been 3, but one I have already
taken as an IT elective. I would also need to do another Master's
Project or a Masters Thesis. The school requires a closure exercise
(project, exam, or thesis) for each concentration.
Would doing the extra classes and excercise for the double
concentration be a worthwhile thing? Or would it mostly just me
something I did for my own knowledge type thing?
Just wondered what the thoughts were on double concentrations. I'm
assuming the degree is the big thing and not so much the
concentration? I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts!
Thanks!
Drew
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Drew read this post from a newsgroup for professional computer people.
Don't expect any professors to tell you the truth about the field. God
forbid if they lose students, they just end up looking for jobs
themselves.
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I'm tired of the same propaganda arguments of "outsourcing is good for
America" and "leads to more innovation". When are you people going to
stop
being so gullible?
(I've added Camel Prasad to my killfile)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=3&u=/latime
sts/20040829/ts_latimes/officeoftomorrowhasanaddressinindia
Office of Tomorrow Has an Address in India
Sun Aug 29, 7:55 AM ET Add Top Stories - Los Angeles Times to My Yahoo!
By David Streitfeld Times Staff Writer
MADRAS, India - Task by task, function by function, the American office
is
being hollowed out and reconstituted in places like this, a makeshift
facility on the sixth floor of a shopping arcade.
OfficeTiger Ltd., one of the most prominent and aggressive of a new
breed of
outsourcing companies, has hired 2,000 Indians, most of them young and
all
of them relentlessly gung-ho.
They work as typists, researchers, librarians, claims processors,
proofreaders, accountants and graphic designers. Their clients are U.S.
brokerage firms, investment banks, law firms and even copy shops.
The Indians take on jobs both big - 100-page investment reports
requiring
weeks of work - and small. Iayaraja Marimuthu, for instance, is
designing a
program for next month's wedding of Ann and John, a Texas couple
proclaiming
their joy in being "together for life." It will take him less than an
hour.
Outsourcing, which started with U.S. firms laying off software
programmers
and call center workers and hiring cheaper employees overseas, is now
stretching to encompass almost any kind of work that is done on a
computer
and is orderly and repetitive in structure. That's a vast category that
stretches from copy editing to financial analysis to tax preparation.
Just as voice mail reduced the need for receptionists and word
processors
transformed the traditional role of secretaries, outsourcing is
beginning to
reshape the American office, eliminating some jobs and redefining
others.
Its proponents say it will lift the burden of tedious chores from
millions
of office workers, giving them more time to spend on challenging and
creative enterprises.
"We're allowing employees to delve deeper, to learn more, to push the
boundaries of what had been standard work," says OfficeTiger's American
co-founder, Joe Sigelman.
That's one side of the argument.
But for other employees, outsourcing means the permanent threat of
dismissal
in favor of someone who can do the same job for one-tenth the salary.
It also means revamping the methods of entering certain professions,
including law and finance. There's a time-honored tradition in those
fields
of making new associates do the drudgery. It teaches them the subject
and
winnows the number of aspirants to the truly dedicated. That won't
happen if
the drudgery is shipped elsewhere.
Some economists say outsourcing is so pervasive that it helps explain
why
the U.S. economy is doing a poor job of creating employment. Analysts
expected a net increase of 200,000 positions in July, but payroll growth
totaled 32,000. The August employment report will be released Friday.
Sigelman said he was doing his best to keep American corporate hiring
down.
"We hope to be leading the move of white-collar jobs from the U.S.," he
told
the Economic Times, an Indian paper, in December.
Although many Indian firms, as well as American multinationals, are
setting
themselves up as outsourcers, OfficeTiger is particularly striking
because
it has come so far so quickly on so little.
Founded four years ago by two New Yorkers in their early 30s who had no
expertise in the Internet, bureaucracy in India or even starting a
business,
the firm says it will have revenue of $40 million this year. Eight of
the
best-known financial firms in New York and London have signed on as
clients.
Most started tentatively, with just a few employees doing data
processing.
But they rapidly scaled up, moving more jobs and more complex jobs.
Stock
market analysts are among the latest to see their work realigned.
Among other things, associate analysts prepare information on possible
corporate acquisition targets. They go to databases, pull documents and
put
numbers into templates that can compare the company with its
competitors.
"Once you've done it a couple of times, it's highly repetitive," says an
OfficeTiger client, an executive with a New York investment bank. "You
can't
be an idiot, but you don't have to be Albert Einstein."
As this work, too, gets shifted to India, the executive predicts that
there
will be "fewer but happier analysts. They'll be doing more brainpower
work."
The process is already moving beyond the associates.
Vinitha Venkat is an OfficeTiger manager whose team assembles data for a
Wall Street brokerage firm that declined to be named. She and a
colleague
are going to New York, where they will enroll in the broker's analyst
training program.
"I'm waiting for them to send everything to us," says Venkat, 27. "I
don't
think it will take that long."
During the flush times at the end of the 1990s, when it seemed the
dot-com
boom would go on forever, any young person with an ounce of ambition
wanted
to start his own company.
Sigelman and Randy Altschuler, best friends since their first day at
Princeton University, had good jobs on Wall Street - Sigelman with
Goldman
Sachs, Altschuler at Blackstone Group - but dreamed of setting out on
their
own. The eureka moment came one evening when they were both waiting for
documents to come back from the word-processing pool.
Junior investment bankers have to do this a lot, and it's one of the
more
frustrating parts of the job. They live by the presentations they make
for
their bosses and clients, and every word must be checked and
double-checked.
If too many documents are submitted at once, the wait can be
interminable,
like it was that evening.
To fill the time, the friends were chatting on the phone, as they often
did.
Then their impatience and ambition merged, and they started talking
about
using technology to create an off-site support center to process
documents.
Sigelman and Altschuler scraped the initial funding together. Then they
got
lucky: The tech stock bubble burst. Financial firms shrank, and then
shrank
some more.
"The recession forced people to push the issue of outsourcing faster and
further than they would have in a boom," says Peter Lowes, an
outsourcing
specialist with consulting firm Deloitte & Touche. "Now that there's a
recovery, there's no slowdown. In fact, it's accelerated."
*
At Odds Over Numbers
How many jobs are being transferred is a matter of dispute. In the
government's first effort to come up with an official tally of jobs sent
outside the U.S., it concluded a mere 4,633 employees in the first
quarter
were laid off because their jobs were moved to another country.
Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach thinks such numbers greatly
understate the job shift. "A new force has come into play that is now
altering the fundamental relationship between domestic demand and
domestic
employment in the United States," Roach recently told clients.
He termed it "global labor arbitrage" - the high-tech "efficiency
tactics"
that allow U.S. companies "to substitute high-wage domestic workers with
like-quality, low-wage foreign workers in goods-producing and
services-providing functions alike."
Roach sums up: "Subpar job creation in the U.S. could well be here to
stay."
Part of the reason it's difficult to measure the effect of outsourcing
is
because nearly every company doing it, including all but one client of
OfficeTiger, declines to be publicly named. Some sense of the speed with
which companies warm to the process can be seen in the announcements of
Reuters, the financial news giant.
Late last year, Reuters said it would send 200 data-processing jobs to
India. In February, it said it would hire six Indian journalists to do
basic
financial analysis of U.S. companies, a move a Reuters executive said
would
"free up" journalists in the West. Three weeks ago, Reuters said it
would
cut 20 journalism jobs in unspecified high-cost locations and hire 40
journalists in India to do their work and more.
Editorial work in the form of copy editing is already an Indian fixture.
A
few blocks from OfficeTiger is Alden Prepress Services, a division of an
English printer that dates to 1832. Alden prepares for publication
dozens of
U.S. and European journals, including Foot and Ankle Surgery, the
Journal of
Molecular Biology and the International Journal of Fatigue.
Alden began in India five years ago with five employees, and now has 100
editors and 270 other employees. They review articles for consistency
and
intelligibility, and query authors by e-mail if there's a question they
can't straighten out on their own. Alden then typesets the material and
transmits the finished journal to the printer.
This means that the editors of, say, Pain, the official journal of the
Seattle-based International Assn. for the Study of Pain, can concentrate
on
finding the best articles. Alden recently announced it would expand its
Madras staff by 60% this year.
Examples like these are why business forecasters are forced to keep
updating
their calculations. Forrester Research just boosted its estimate of the
number of jobs that will be outsourced by the end of 2005 by nearly 50%,
to
830,000 from 558,000. In one year, 43 financial multinational companies
quintupled the number of offshore workers they employed to 1,500, a
survey
by Deloitte Research found.
Over the longer term, Celent Communications, a consulting firm,
calculates
that 2.3 million financial jobs are at risk. Researchers at UC Berkeley
think that as many as 14 million jobs of all types are vulnerable.
In reaction to such numbers, measures are being proposed to limit
outsourcing. Last week, both houses of the California Legislature passed
a
bill that would prevent the state from hiring contractors that use
outsourced workers. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (news - web sites) has
not
said whether he will sign it.
"I hate it when Americans lose jobs, obviously," says OfficeTiger's
Altschuler, who works out of New York. "I'm an American, and think
that's
terrible."
He makes the standard argument in favor of outsourcing, one endorsed by
many
economists: "If you put up barriers to save jobs, the exact opposite
will
happen. As companies get less profitable, more Americans will lose
jobs."
Outsourcing, however, isn't only about money. Proponents say it's often
about quality, too, which would make them even more unhappy to see
protectionist barriers enacted.
Allen & Overy, a large English law firm, has 74 people working for it
full
time at OfficeTiger, which allowed it to lay off 50 people back home
this
year. Yet the firm's head of operational services, Steven Chernikeeff,
says
the firm "didn't come here for cost cutting. The main driver was getting
a
better value for the money. When we advertise for document processors in
England, we don't get people with master's degrees. And they've got
passion
for their work here. You don't always see that in the West."
India has so many educated people and so few office jobs that people
often
do outsourcing work they're overqualified for. And they're happy to do
so.
Unemployed and poorly paid lawyers and paralegals are eager to come to
work
for OfficeTiger to type revisions of Allen & Overy's legal briefs.
Because
these employees have legal training, it also makes sense for OfficeTiger
to
try to get some assignments doing more complicated legal work.
"I have a friend who's a lawyer in the States who says appeals cost
$30,000
because of all the work that needs to be done in researching precedents.
All
that could be done here," says OfficeTiger executive Lou Fox.
The first lawyer to successfully outsource to India the actual writing
of a
brief will either make a handsome profit or be able to undercut the
competition to win a lot of business. To get a slice of this business,
OfficeTiger formed an alliance in June with a New York legal consulting
company.
Fox contends that just about every corporate job has elements that can
be
outsourced, even if part of it - litigating in a courtroom, making a
sales
call - must be done in person. Outsourcing is inevitable, he says.
"There's
going to be a big job shift. Geography doesn't make a difference
anymore."
Madras is a perpetually humid city on India's southeastern coast with a
population of 6 million. Unlike Bangalore or Hyderabad or other
high-tech
centers, it's a conservative place where traditional Indian life holds
sway.
Grown children live with their parents. Arranged marriages are the rule.
A
new couple moves in with his folks. Only watchmen work at night.
"My mom used to call me, 'When are you coming home?' " says Vidhyavathy
Munnuswemy, a manager on an investment banking team.
To a cynical American's ears, employees like the 25-year-old Munnuswemy
sound unbelievable.
How many people in the U.S. would say, "For three years, I didn't go on
vacation; I didn't feel like it," as she does?
This sort of zeal is widespread at Indian outsourcing companies, if
little
understood. At Wipro, one of the biggest companies, the phenomenon has a
nickname: the Hafim generation, after slang for a drug. The Hafims act
as if
they're drugged, as if they take enthusiasm pills every morning.
It can't be the ambience that is making them this way. OfficeTiger's
offices
are high-tech, with rooms accessible only by electronic card swipes. The
chairs would flunk any ergonomic test. There are three shifts, which
means
no one can personalize his desk, and no natural light. Not many clocks,
either. Sigelman compares it approvingly to a casino: It's a place
without
distractions.
This is Munnuswemy's life, all night long. Her college dreams of being
an
aeronautical engineer are forgotten. "The more you work, the more you
enjoy
it," she says. "Well, except for drinking and dancing, but it would be
boring to do that every day."
Of course, the company's been good to her too. She won't reveal her
salary
but starting wages are $1,000 a month, and she's moved far beyond that.
With
her savings and a loan, she's buying a $90,000 apartment for herself and
her
parents. It's bigger than the place the family has now, with a pool and
security.
Still, the passionate attachment to the outsourcing companies by their
employees goes far beyond the money.
"In New York, people do this work as a means to an end - housewives,
students, actors," says OfficeTiger executive Lonnie Sapp, an American.
"It's a quick way to make a buck. Here, they're not driven by the
paycheck."
*
Prestige and money
Part of it is the appeal of working, even indirectly, for a brand-name
corporation, a mark of high achievement here. Another is the sense that
the
rigid Indian business culture, where rising through the ranks is a
glacial
process, is being broken up. If you choose to work hard, you'll get
somewhere - and will make good money too.
"I took a pay cut to come here," says Sangeetha Ravi, an OfficeTiger
administrator. "Now I'm making twice as much as I was, and it's only
been a
year and a half."
The last time OfficeTiger ran a help-wanted ad - it intends to double in
size to 4,000 people by the end of next year - it received 1,500
applications for 15 jobs.
It sounds ideal, this setup, the beginning of a long-term relationship.
Yet
perhaps part of the urgency among the OfficeTiger employees is that they
know how suddenly this romance could end, how soon they could be like
the
American workers no one wants.
"OfficeTiger is not about India," Sigelman says. "It's about scouring
the
world to find the best cross-section of value and talent."
The company is opening an office in Sri Lanka, its first in South Asia
outside India.
There will be others. Sigelman is keeping a particular eye on China.
After
all, they're learning English there.
"In five years," he says, "all this may change." |
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