Unfortunately they contracted to hire the company, not any specific resources, so the contracting company is doing the hiring.   We just get atempt to train them on application and business rules. Anyway, thanks for the forum.   A lot of sarcastic remarks from the developers (I guess it's the same all over), but a lot of good info too.

Yeah, we're seeing that already in the training.   It's been extended out twice already.   We told them it was going to take 8 months to a year, up front, but they don't listen.   The contract specified 3 months and has already been modified twice.

I'm not as worried about the company going away.   There's bigger problems with the economy if UPS dies.   450,000 more workers out of a job.   UPS manages there finances better than most, so I believe what ever they owe me I will get.

Well, they kept 1/2 our team, and I made that cut.   They kept us for our business and application knowledge.   For now they want us helping with requirements and testing on the back end and keep doing design work that we always did.   Unfortunately they won't tell us their long range plans for us.   My feeling is they don't know.   By the looks of things so far, they are just winging this whole thing and making it up as they go.

Well, we have separate pension and stock.   And we are partially vested in pension at 10 yrs and fully   at 25 yrs.   From what little I know about pensions, they are regulated and they owe me the portion I'm vested for even if they do away with pensions.   Of course like you say, they could give it to me in stock and then turn around and make me sell it.

Well, they haven't even bothered to tell us what career paths are available now, or even sat down with us individually and listened to our concerns.   The only thing we know is, the developer paths will start drying up.   UPS is already bloated at the mid-level manager position, so not sure what will be available there.   For now, giving direction to the offshore developers is our main task (training them now).   As far as skill go, I got started late and this is my only developer job, out of college.   I can hold my own in C/C++, but not sure of new stuff.   I taught myself .net (vb/c#), java and wcf, but not sure I could impress anyone in an interview.   I suck at web development.   I can force my way through it, but the results aren't pretty. So I guess that's why I'm apprehensive about leaving.   The stress and mgmt stupidity is starting to affect me outside work, as well as on the job (had it out with my manager last week, in a meeting.   I won that one, but it wasn't pretty), so I'm starting to think about looking elsewhere.

Yeah, my biggest problem is that I have 17 years into a 25 year pension.   Believe it or not UPS still offers old timers a pension.   My wife can't work for health problems, and the pension pays out until both of us die.   Just don't know if I can make it 9 more years the way things are going.   It just started this year and we're already wading knee deep in it...

Has anyone been through a cycle or outsourcing at their company?   UPS is in the process of outsourcing coding, unit testing and integration testing to India.   They are starting with 10% of projects as pilot phase.   For most of the developers on my project, that's the part of development that we enjoy.   We put up with requirement, testing and design meetings and tasks, just so we get to write code.   Just wandering what we have to look forward to, and if it is worth staying and waiting it out.   One of our best developers has left already and looks like others are testing the water.

You are right about the source.   I should have given credit.   Didn't remember where I got it from.   I should start putting the source in comments, in case it's needed again.   He has a number of other useful recursive SQL approaches to common problems also.

on any ANSI SQL-92 compliant DB the following should work... Create an SQL Function to parse variable length delimited list of values and create a temporary table in memory: <pre>CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[CteSplitString] (                @list   nvarchar(MAX),       @delim nchar(1) = ',' ) RETURNS TABLE AS RETURN (       WITH ctePos(lStartPos, lStopPos) AS       (             SELECT lStartPos = CONVERT(bigint, 1),                      lStopPos   = CHARINDEX(@delim COLLATE Slovenian_BIN2, @list + @delim)             UNION ALL             SELECT lStartPos = lStopPos + 1,                      lStopPos   = CHARINDEX(@delim COLLATE Slovenian_BIN2, @list + @delim, lStopPos + 1)             FROM   ctePos             WHERE   lStopPos > 0       )       SELECT LTRIM(RTRIM(SUBSTRING(@list, lStartPos, CASE WHEN lStopPos > 0                                                                                     THEN lStopPos - lStartPos                                                                                     ELSE 0                                                                                     END

on any ANSI SQL-92 compliant DB the following should work... Create an SQL Function to parse variable length delimited list of values and create a temporary table in memory: CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[CteSplitString] (          -- Add the parameters for the function here      @list   nvarchar(MAX),       @delim nchar(1) = ',' ) RETURNS TABLE AS RETURN (       WITH ctePos(lStartPos, lStopPos) AS       (             SELECT lStartPos = CONVERT(bigint, 1),                      lStopPos   = CHARINDEX(@delim COLLATE Slovenian_BIN2, @list + @delim)             UNION ALL             SELECT lStartPos = lStopPos + 1,                      lStopPos   = CHARINDEX(@delim COLLATE Slovenian_BIN2, @list + @delim, lStopPos + 1)             FROM   ctePos             WHERE   lStopPos > 0       )       SELECT LTRIM(RTRIM(SUBSTRING(@list, lStartPos, CASE WHEN lStopPos > 0                                                                                     THEN lStopPos - lStartPos                                                                                     ELSE 0