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)
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"
Only if you're building a linked list using C. </bad CS joke>
Seriously though, how about a link to your profile/resume?
P.S. I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....
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 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.
http://vak.ru/doku.php/proj/pdp11/211bsd
(AT&T UNIX, RSX/11M, RSTS, RT11 and other images are also widely available)
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.
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.