Stand By Me
Well what have I been up to lately? Not much, which should be a relief to regular Dave-Blog readers since this entry will be uncharacteristically short. I am still waiting to hear back from Google about if I made it to the final stage of the hiring process, which they keep on telling me I will get my answer at the end of the day (which they have been saying for the past couple days). So yeah I am a bit frustrated since I can't really move on until I know where I am going. It makes planning hard. It also leaves me in limbo right now wondering what will happen. So yeah, I am on stand by right now, not knowing when or where the great plane to the future will go to. Yes I know that was a horrible cliche. But hopefully, the answer should arrive soon. But I have been occuplying my time with some stuff, including going to Poker Night at apete's place. Surprisingly, I did actually finish in the money so I doubled up my five dollar buy in plus drinking some of the Oberon's that I brought to apete's aparty a few weeks back but ended up too drunk to drink.Another thing I have been up to is going to Target (thanks to the lovely gift card from DJ and Cheng). One thing I picked up was the World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, which you can't avoid hearing about if you go to any business school. So I wanted to check out what the whole hub-bub was about. My impression is: I've heard it already. You see the World is Flat heavily discusses the role of globalization, outsourcing, information technology, and collaboration in the new world economy. Seeing that I just spent the last two years studying information, collaboration, and technology, alot of this stuff I already heard about. Plus a great deal is about supply-chaining, business process outsourcing, and other things that were almost verbatim from the Enterprise Systems Strategy class I took this past fall. Which leaves me with the sneaking suspicision that either Friedman cribbed alot from the professor of that class, or the professor cribbed alot from Friedman. I am leading toward the former, since I know one of the TAs and he said much of the class material had not changed since 2003. One of the invited lectures for that class was PV Kannan from this company called 24/7 Customer who is also mentioned in book. Plus there is a whole discussion about collaborative work, online communities, and the greater need to optimize technology for human use. Friedman tackles the whole issue of technology outsourcing and the emergence of the new middle class jobs that cannot be outsourced (jobs/people he calls "The Untouchables"). Take heard my fellow HCI grads because he says this:
It's all about combining the best of what computers can do with the best of what humans can do, and then constantly reintegrating the new best practices the humans are innovating back into the system to make the whole - the machines and the people - that much more productive. There are lots of new middle jobs in that loop.
Sounds very HCIish to me. So my fellow HCI grads, in your next job interview just say, "Thomas Friedman, author of the New York Times best seller, The World is Flat, says that I am untouchable - Booyah Bee-otch!" Seriously, it is nice to know that at least somebody affirms my decision to switch into HCI because I came to the same conclusions. HCIish work is alot harder to outsource than the QA and business analyst work I was doing before I came to SI. It is also good to feel ahead of the loop about this stuff and it only took me two years and thousands of dollars to do it! Oh vay!
Hopefully by my next entry I will know a little more about where I will be headed. Until then, peace.
5 comments:
During a dinner at CHI with about 10 non-Indian HCI students from Michigan, Rasika told us that all of our HCI jobs are going to India in a few years! ;)
I hope you hear some good news pretty soon from the Big G.
Who are you gonna believe? Some middle aged journalist from Maryland who only knows about technology from talking to different people or someone who is actually from India and has worked in the industry there?
Pssh, I think the answer is obvious. I'll start listening to Rasika when she writes her own book or starts her own blog. She can call it The World is Pressurized
hahaha how about The World is Pressurized so You don't Have to be - Just Be Sweet!
I actually disagree with her sentiment. There is no way ALL the jobs will ever go to India or any other country whose citizens are willing to work for lower wages than Americans. If anyone listened to Bush's speech last night, which I surprisingly agreed on a lot of points with him, the nation's leaders are starting to realise that changes need to be made internally. You cannot levy huge taxes on businesses and expect them not to take their workers cheaper, no matter where they might be. I see a huge turn within the next decade to change this huge outflow of money from the U.S. We had the brain drain from other countries into America for the past few decades, and that's started turning around. So will this.
I can't read that book because Friedman promoted it way to much. After all the articles and interviews, I already knew what it said.
Everyone says "pressurize" in this part of Chennai (or at least all the English-speaking Brahmin that I have met do).
I don't think that they can move all the HCI jobs here - people interact with technology differently here, and so they will need HCI people here to develop products for this market, and people in the US to develop products for that market. I agree with Sylvie (!), things will balance out.
Hopefully, we will all be better off in the end.
Yup. Rest assured: as they say, we are considered "intellectual property", rather than "technology". You can't ship your brain off too far. I see how it costs so much money for my company to fly me around to test in different cities -- can you imagine the expense to fly a UE from India, because our target audience is here? I'd like to see how something like "remote testing" would work out -- but honestly the thought makes me apprehensive.... reminds me of all the Ishi stuff from MIT (remote meetings/eye contact). Could possibly work out but it'd have real interesting, for lack of better word, affect on the test, which can scew the results to say the least. (Then exactly, who is 'behind the glass'? What about making the participant feel at ease and at home....???)
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