Re: gEDA-user: OT?: Altium (Protel) Relocates From Sydney Australia to Shanghai China
Yea, I second the last part of the. If you have a large library of parts done in a particular tool you will have to redraft all of them. That is not good. On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:19 AM, ge...@igor2.repo.hu wrote: On Sat, Apr 09, 2011 at 10:51:00AM -0400, Bob Paddock wrote: snip The developers always wanted to know the fastest way to do something and had no interest in learning the best way to do something. Lately I had the chance to work together with professional software developers from multiple different western countries, and I have to tell you it is not china-specific. I think it's a generic big-company problem that you will see all around the world. Those developers work for money, not for joy, so fastest way is the only way for them, especially combined with the pressure from the management to deliver at deadline _and_ save cost (do it with less developers). In the end the company did ship Cellphones that some how did work. Is that all that maters? I hope not... Is this one company representative of all development in China? I hope not... because of the above, in that big-copmpany environment it's very common to use duct tape all around. If there is a requirement and some well defined method that will be used to tes if the requirement is met at the end, you can be almost sure the developer will implement something that will work only for that one test case and will ignore the general idea behind th erequirement or the test case. This how sleep(1) kind of fixes end up in network code. I don't say it's because those developers are stupid or even inexperienced. It's more like the whole company culture. If you want to make things properly in such an environment, it will take more time and the feedback will not be cool, you made some really robust, reusable code but next time please spend less on the golden knobs and concentrate on the task. Thus the best developers either leave after a while (either to other company or promoted to management) or they will start following the lazy methods knowing that it's not good, but i have no choice. Hopefully this will drive a lot more interest to gEDA and PCB. Honestly, I doubt. At the end once the user got used to whichever tool, he won't switch easily even if quality starts to go down. Regards, Tibor ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user -- http://evanfoss.googlepages.com/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: OT?: Altium (Protel) Relocates From Sydney Australia to Shanghai China
On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Evan Foss evanf...@gmail.com wrote: Yea, I second the last part of the. If you have a large library of parts done in a particular tool you will have to redraft all of them. That is not good. On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:19 AM, ge...@igor2.repo.hu wrote: On Sat, Apr 09, 2011 at 10:51:00AM -0400, Bob Paddock wrote: snip The developers always wanted to know the fastest way to do something and had no interest in learning the best way to do something. Lately I had the chance to work together with professional software developers from multiple different western countries, and I have to tell you it is not china-specific. I think it's a generic big-company problem that you will see all around the world. Those developers work for money, not for joy, so fastest way is the only way for them, especially combined with the pressure from the management to deliver at deadline _and_ save cost (do it with less developers). In the end the company did ship Cellphones that some how did work. Is that all that maters? I hope not... Is this one company representative of all development in China? I hope not... because of the above, in that big-copmpany environment it's very common to use duct tape all around. If there is a requirement and some well defined method that will be used to tes if the requirement is met at the end, you can be almost sure the developer will implement something that will work only for that one test case and will ignore the general idea behind th erequirement or the test case. This how sleep(1) kind of fixes end up in network code. I don't say it's because those developers are stupid or even inexperienced. It's more like the whole company culture. If you want to make things properly in such an environment, it will take more time and the feedback will not be cool, you made some really robust, reusable code but next time please spend less on the golden knobs and concentrate on the task. Thus the best developers either leave after a while (either to other company or promoted to management) or they will start following the lazy methods knowing that it's not good, but i have no choice. Hopefully this will drive a lot more interest to gEDA and PCB. Honestly, I doubt. At the end once the user got used to whichever tool, he won't switch easily even if quality starts to go down. Regards, Tibor ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user -- http://evanfoss.googlepages.com/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user Altium have some great ideas but their execution is dire. They also spread themselves very thin by trying to encapsulate the whole embedded dev (Processor/FPGA) process into one tool, personally I think this was a huge mistake. As they've been loosing money for the last 10 years I cant say the move to China is shocking but I cant see it helping their execution woes. They're also hampered by a massive legacy code base in Delphi which essentially has no eco-system any more. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
gEDA-user: OT?: Altium (Protel) Relocates From Sydney Australia to Shanghai China
I know several people here use Altium and/or Protel, such as when the Day Job forces us to do so, anyway though you might find of interest that Altium has announced they are moving the company to Shanghai China. Former Altium employ David L. Jones of EEBlog http://www.eevblog.com/ confirms this: They [Altium] are moving, lock stock and barrel, to China, and as a result, a whole bunch of people were made redundant or laid off...I don't know the exact numbers, but it's a lot,...The idea is to move all their RD to China, and pretty much start again. -- David L. Jones of as quoted here http://www.theamphour.com/2011/04/05/the-chinese-clairvoyancy/ . Press Release: http://www.noodls.com/view/35AEF71FED0C4035C1F9EA872525988B2CCC323E News : http://pcdandf.blogspot.com/2011/04/altium-on-move.html http://www.electronicsnews.com.au/news/altium-relocates-from-sydney-to-shanghai The press release says: Altium plans to expand its RD team over time by drawing on the talent pool in China. I spent some time with someone who had been doing some consulting for a company in China that developed Cellphones. His description of the development process in China was, ammm, unkind. His description went something like this: The Chinese developers had no access to Internet. They had no idea what good code should look like [Sadly, from seeing code on Internet, it seems like a lot of people that do have Internet don't get know either]. After a new developer gained some experience they were promoted to management, and a new inexperienced developer was brought in to replace him [No evidence to support there are any female developers involved here. Are females smart enough to stay out of this field or they are never born with the 'Knack' (Dilbert[TM] reference)?]. Any developer that wanted to keep doing development, because they enjoyed it, was seen as lazy by the culture from not getting promoted to management. The developers always wanted to know the fastest way to do something and had no interest in learning the best way to do something. In the end the company did ship Cellphones that some how did work. Is that all that maters? I hope not... Is this one company representative of all development in China? I hope not... Hopefully this will drive a lot more interest to gEDA and PCB. -- http://blog.softwaresafety.net/ http://www.designer-iii.com/ http://www.wearablesmartsensors.com/ ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
