Indian payments versus American payments

The CEO is an Idiot. Tell him to get his numbers right about India.

In India running price for a top of the line Programmer will be is 10,000$. If he were to pay an India company 45000$ a year they would have got 10 programmers.

Cannot help but feel the ignorance of white man.

Yours digitally,
Hakim

Hawaii Talks

Aloha! mates,

While reading the article you linked to about Indian salaries for American programmers, a statement near the end caught my eye:

"What if other companies begin taking the same approach -- offering Indian-style wages to American workers? On the positive site, we could begin to solve our job-creation problems. But on the negative side, America's standard of living would inevitably decline" (my emphasis).

I think the good Mr. Gumpert must surely be joking! Can he really believe that forcing arguably overpaid workers to compete for their jobs on equal terms (not really, considering the patriot factor) is going to force the population of the whole nation to learn to live on less? Puh-leeze! Certainly, working for a salary that is still more than many equally - if not more - worthy occupations command (think educators) is far better for our nation's standard of living than having a whole lot of jobless techies (with limited practical skills outside of their chosen professions) living off of unemployment benefits. I personally know several programmers, animators, etc., that are scraping-by working at bars, auto-unlocking services, or just collecting unemployment benefits, who would gladly take the "low" wages for a job that they have spent many years training for and enjoy.

Lower wages for some is still better for our economy than holding out for salaries that just aren't there. Now if our guys start offering skills again that can't be provided outside of our country then perhaps they can once again command the high salaries that some have become accustomed to. Until then, they may just have to live off what they can get like the rest of us and be glad that they are still considered worthy of employment.

Just my two-cents. Love your site, Mike!

Steven G. Riggs

Moenig Takks

About your article...

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13109

I live in Orlando, Florida but used to live in Michigan and am a top level programmer with over 18 years of programming experience. Actually I am a Systems Analyst (a step above a programmer) and I have worked at quite a few companies both in Michigan and Florida. From my experience, an entry level programmer (one just out of college) usually gets paid anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000. And an experienced programmer will start out getting paid anywhere from $45,000 to $55,000. You have to work at a very generous company for a very long time before you get paid over $60,000, at least from myself and my friends (other programmers) experience.

$45,000 is an Indian salary for a begginning programmer? Wow!! I thought they got paid about $2.00 an hour not $22.00 an hour. I just may have to move to India. :-)

Hardware Websites

Mike,

After reading both http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13094 and http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13110 people should get a better sense on techsites. Compliments on your awesome article as well…However, I just want to add my two cents on tech sites.

Personally after running SubZeroTech for over 2 years, it hasn't been as much fun as one might think. Dealing with both school and reviewing items doesn't work out as easily as many people may think. The first year I've spent countless hours reviewing items at night thus interfering with sleep time then waking up after the few hours of sleep to get that o so important education. At one point when I was running the site by myself, it gets really stressful. Sorting news, posting news, trying to get stuff to review then actually reviewing them. Yes they sound easy but in all honesty it is not. It is HIGHLY time consuming as Wil said and most of your free time gets thrown into keeping the site afloat.

The roughest part is keeping the site hosted, keeping your sponsors happy enough to a point where you don't spoil them but also where they don't tell you to just ‘shove it' but yet not letting them bully you around. Many people think advertising is a gold mine, yea those are the people who never dealt with the costs of running a web site. People do not understand the costs you deal with in hosting fees. SubZeroTech is kept afloat by a dedicated server that costs quite a hefty penny each month and advertising does NOT cover that cost. That money comes out of the pockets of yours truly. Everyone who thinks tech sites can become a gold mine through advertising needs to get their heads straight.

Oh sure you get the free products to review, some of these products you get to keep but sometimes you ship them back to the companies who loaned it to you to review. Then reviewing these products is not a one night thing, anyone who's dealt with reviewing would understand that benchmarking is not as easy as it seems. First you gotta isolate all variables, usually a clean format consuming an hour or two of your time would do that. Then you gotta actually run all these benchmarks at different settings repeatedly. I'm so sick of 3dMark2001 that I cannot bear to look at it run or even have it run on my own personal rig anymore.

Many people also neglect to put some time and effort into their web designs. Php-nuke or a post-nuke template is a great place to start but come on, change the theme fix things up. SubZeroTech's design took countless weeks of hard work and all nighters to complete and we still think it has longs way to go before it'll be good. So what makes you think that a 5 minute upload of a template code would make your site perfect?

If you really want to start another tech site, please be sure you can devote all your free time to the site, if you think you'll still have time to go drinking with the friends or smoking up (to those who do so) and still run a decent site then you should just take your money and time and invest it elsewhere. In it for the free products? Think again, you'll spend so much time reviewing and swapping parts in and out of machines that you won't have time to enjoy those products. Be prepared to make sacrifices in your life, if you can't sacrifice some time and a hobby or two (i.e. gaming all night) then crush your dreams of starting a site right this instance. Success won't come overnight; it takes time, hard work and dedication.

Regards,

Lucas Wong
~SubZeroTech

Money Takks

I have been hiring and supervising programmers for 20 years. My guys get $800 per week, 2 or more weeks off, rights to work at home a day or two a week if they want to, and a work environment where they are respected. They can leave work without question at any time for any personal reason, like taking care of the needs of their families. They also get long term job security, which has LOTS of benefits. I can easily get top notch guys on this basis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a steady $800/week job with allowances like that in the US of A.

These programmers are the envy of other programmers around town who cannot get regular employment, who make $85 an hour for two or three days every month, maybe. They have much better self esteem than the programmers who cannot find work at $85 an hour. They also spend their days learning how to be even better programmers, dealing with real challenges, creating real achievements and having valuable access to the vast library of tools and the books that come with the job.

A job like the kind my company offers makes a programmer look very good on a credit application and a programmer with a steady job will, all other things being equal, have the benefit of living a much, much better life because of a good credit rating that a steady job makes possible. A good credit history and rating is very hard to get or to maintain when you don't have a steady job.

My wife is a nurse in a neo natal intensive care unit for 35 years now. She makes $30 an hour, about ten times what she made when she started out in 1968. So let's be real. The average starting programmer should be happy making $12 an hour. After a programmer has been at it for a few years then that should increase by 50% or 100%. After a decade or two a programmer should be worth $30 an hour. Programming is just a job. It's not any more unique than any other job. From that assumptive starting point reality can enter into the value of programmer wages and all the useless boogiemen which make up the delusions of the unemployed would-be $85 / hour programmers can be banished, thus bringing these people back to earth, some of them for their first visit.

Name, address supplied

Hardware Web Sites

Mike,

I love your site. I read it daily for humor, for information, and probably because I'm addicted and I need my fix. Your site, as I understand it, is one of the few sites that it so well read that you can actually make a difference when you print something. That is why I was so disappointed in Hardware sites reviewed: Part II. Your comments regarding the first four sites listed had absolutely no value to anyone, not even you yourself. Had you been bold, and produced a true and objective review, you would have shown your integrity, and maybe helped the sites by giving them a good kick in the bottom. Had you straight out prostituted yourself and given priase to the sites, you might have at least built up some repoir with them, and given them a few more page hits. Here are what I figure are the best lines from those first four:

Tom's: "The site needs a re-design guys." - wow, what an epiphany.

Anandtech: "His mum was accompanying him to interviews because he was a minor." - I don't even know what to say here. This has absolutely nothing to do with how good the site is, and this is the most informative line it the bit on him, other that he's going to be a doctor.

HardOCP: " We used to like HardOCP. We probably still would if we ever looked at it." - O.K. this is just infuriating, the article is suposed to be a review of a website that you never look at? WTF !!!!

Hexus: " The good "doctor" David Ross seems to be havering over whether his site is a news or a review site." - This is a good first sentence to a review about a website, unfortunately, the review is over two sentences later!

You finally start to print something worth reading with Dan's data. You still need to back yourself up with a little more than three sentences per site. Otherwise, the article should have been titled "A few words on hardware review sites"

By the way, I like the white text on the gray background.

My opinion of theInquirer: A+ My opinion of this article: D but minus a letter grade since you should know better = F, plus a letter grade for the Sudhian comment (which I'm still laughing about, hilarious) = D

You may hear all kinds of crap from whiners and cry-babies every day, though, I don't consider myself to be either.

Love,
Jay

Your Effing Tabloid

A great article....NOT

I'm not even sure what compelled me to venture so deep into the world of journalism so bad it makes tabloids seem like Shakespeare. Surely enough though I stumbled upon your recent article "reviewing" hardware sites. I'm not quite sure what baffled me the most: the rampant and undesguised bias (for instance, stating someone ignoring you as a motive for not liking his site), the thorough lack of detail (not more than a poorly strung-together paragraph for each site) or the sheer and boundless ignorance presented in your article. Perhaps one of the more amusing parts of the 2 minute read was the blatant hypocrisy in criticizing some of these sites' designs when, in fact, compared to The Inquirer's slipshod excuse for a website, almost all of the hardware sites are brilliantly designed.

Perhaps, if you spent more time researching your material and thoroughly reading through the sites, it might have been possible to produce a, how do i put this, "not-a-retarded-piece-of-crap article". All this being said, keep up the good work.

Alex Weber

Trusted Reviews

"Trusted Reviews Unutterably and irredeemably dull and plodding."

I even checked "Unutterable" in the dictionary, "inexpressible, beyond description".

I (and of course Riyad, Lars, Jalal and a team of respected journalists) have put so much effort into this project that to receive a zero out of ten mark is really demoralising.

I have already received e-mails from a couple of my friends asking me what I have done to upset you? They have also pointed out that we are the only website in your article without a link.

I understand (as you mentioned) that there are issues between you and theregister however as your know these are nothing to do with me or my company. So far more than 100 websites (including theregister) have taken content from TrustedReviews.com, you are also very welcome to work with us as I said to you when we last spoke.

Honestly Mike, do you really think that TrustedReviews.com is 0 out of 10 or ultimately are issues which really are nothing to do with me clouding your judgement? [No, Ed. It is boring.]

Kind regards,

Hugh Chappell
TrustedReviews.com