Hmmm. As you indicated, is has not been cheaper to outsource to (Western) Europe in the past. However, with the situation over there now, I am not sure. Especially for Eastern Europe. Maybe you can turn your immediate manager's ignorance to your advantage. Perhaps upper management really intended for you to take over management of these guys. Who knows? You could just assume that and see what happens. Just kind loosen the "training" relationship into a management role as appropriate. The best managers I know were not hired to be managers, they just got out front and led.

Ask. If you ask your boss what new responsibilities you will have and he/she avoids eye contact, gets nervous, is "not sure", etc. ...your new responsibility will be finding a new job. I have found that very few managers will look someone in the eye and outright lie to them. Not because they can't, but because most just don't care enough to put forth the effort. Even if you suspect you are on the way out, play it cool. Don't do anything to diminish the guilt they will feel (and more importantly, your severance package). If you are really concerned, quietly start looking for new opportunities, reach out to contacts at other companies, etc.

I suggest working through the highest priority items (or maybe just the items you feel like doing), slowly and carefully, commenting/documenting more than usual, for 8.00 hours a day. Nobody (rational) is going to fault you for not getting overwhelming work done when you already quit. You want to make sure your final work is your best. Once you are gone, you become the perfect person for your managers to blame for their own mistakes.

Wait! Even though we all believe (and our best testing indicates) that marketing people are useless wastes of air, you might want to try being "nice" to them, at least for a short time. Marketing people have something we programmers don't: The key to the closet where they keep the free stuff. :cool: Through careful experimentation (upon marketing and sales people) I have determined that treating them with even marginal respect can confuse them enough that you can get: - Graft your company is supposed to give to customers - Tickets to concerts and sporting events - Free stuff vendors give them, etc. NOTE: If no results are seen after ~20 minutes, immediately terminate the respectful attitude. No sense being a sucker. Good luck, and godspeed!

I knew someone who did that. His boss immediately offered him space in his own cube. After careful consideration, he decided to make due where he was.

They are taking advantage of you because you allow it. Don't take crap from MBAs! Fight back! SCRUM/Agile is very flexible set of guidelines. Every company's implementation is different. If you let the MBAs pick the implementation rules, they will naturally pick rules whcih best serve them. This worked for me: Study scrum/agile on your own. Find as many web sites/videos as you can with differing views and note the rules/practices which YOU like. Once you are an expert, use those sites as references to justify doing what you want and suggest process changes. Over time, you will become the "scrum expert" and can force the MBAs to obey your evil bidding. Once YOU are the acknowleged SCRUM expert, you don't need the external references. You will be able to make up new rules and proclaim them to be "process improvements". I am currently working on a "process improvement" which gets me a real office. :) Used properly, SCRUM can be a powerful tool which you can exploit to improve the working conditions of you and your fellow programmers. Good luck!

Early in the interview process... You never, ever, want to do anything which reflects negatively upon yourself when interviewing. You are just some loser off the street. They have little time invested in you and you are lucky to be there. Don't give them a reason to eliminate you early on. While interviewing, I would not ask any questions about money or benefits at all. Focus on the WORK, what they expect of you and how you are EXACTLY the right person to hire! The only questions you should be asking are ones which show how smart you are (or better yet, how smart they are). You will not need to ask many questions if you do your homework. Google the company. Find out what they do and how. Look on those web sites where people post feedback on their employer (i.e. Glassdoor), find employees (or ex-employees) you can trust to ask questions of (maybe friends or graduates of your school, through LinkedIn, etc.). AFTER the interview process, once you have an offer in hand, the game changes... The offer will answer many of your questions, you can now carefully and respectfully ask any which remain. Use the offer and the answers as a basis for negotiations. As others have wisely stated above, the company now has time and hopefully emotional investment in you. It becomes painful if they have to find another person. This gives you LEVERAGE. Good luck!

Oh no! I kept a bacon sandwich in that vault! This isn't happening... This isn't happening... Anyone know what sort of equipment they could have used to make the nice circular cuts in the concrete wall?

One of the most effective programmers I have worked with had a Geology degree. Some of the best code I have worked on was a huge software package written by a guy with a degree in Physics and no CS training at all. He sometimes did really strange things...but I typically come to value those as learning experiences. In some ways, learning the "proper" way to code things can be limiting. Lacking training, this guy would find ways to twist the language to get problems solved using language features which would never have occured to a CS grad. His code ended up being quite elegant.

In my experience (in the US), the school you graduated from matters to many companies, at least when they consider more junior engineers. Sometimes a company is enamored with a certain school's reputation, but more frequently it is simply their experience that they tend to get good people from a certain school so they stick with it. - My observation is that bigger companies tend to be more school-prejudiced than small ones. - Simply being further from your school may help. If they do not know your school, they cannot be prejudiced against it. - Try turning this to your advantage. Seek out a company where graduates from your school already work. Your degree will be a known and respected quantity there. Many schools have alumni offices which can help. As you get later in your career, your experience (and reputation) matters more and your school matters less. I hope that helps. Edit: Colin's suggestion of getting a master's degree (preferably from a more favored school)is an excellent one. Your most advanced degree tends to matter a lot more than the earlier ones.

We call them "mundanes".

At my first programming job, I worked on source code where many lines had comments which simply said "TEMPORAL". English was not the primary language of the original programmer. Now I am thinking I should go dig up that code. Maybe I was just too green to understand and it is exactly the code you need!

Thumbs up for HomeAway. I have used it a few times to find good deals on unique places away from the normal "tourist traps" and been very happy. These are typically just people who rent out their 2nd home or whatever, so sometimes they can be slow in responding to your emails and they may ask you to clean up a bit before you leave.

:( I loved the Stainless Steel Rat books as a kid. I am still waiting for my .75 cal handgun.

I just started using one on my PC at home. It is silent and does not get warm. The astoundingly short boot time alone was enough to convince me to use them from now on. My time has value, especially my time away from work! I had also heard that the MTBF was bad, but that was in the early days of the product. As far as I can tell, SSD MTBF is at least as good as a "normal" hard drive now. If you are concerned, add a normal hard drive in the system and use it as the "data drive" for applications and to keep periodic backups of the SSD. I had to do that because I was too cheap to buy a SSD big enough to hold the applications (games) I use on my personal computer.

My former classmates who became teachers were mostly "C" students who wanted their summers free. :doh:

I had to download and rebuild the source to get it to work on my machine, but it worked flawlessly to build my 4 biggest solutions, each having 2 to 25 projects. It cut my build time by about 80%, but I only spent a few minutes playing with it so far.

Pfft. My brother in law's PC was worse. He has two German Shepards and poor housekeeping skills, so his old HP PC was half full of dog fur and dust. Disgusting. For a real treat, open up a PC from an office where someone has been smoking for years. Everything is covered in yellow tar.

1. Grab the plastic trash bag from your trash can. 2. Go out to the parking lot 3. Put the bag over your mouth and let loose your foghorn belch into it. 4. Check for car alarms. 5. Seal the bag-o-belch, return to your desk and give it to your cube mate. Tell him it is a bag of "fresh air from outside" and encourage him to enjoy it. 6. Quickly walk away.

We are geeks, not sales people, we are not used to selling and negotiating, so we are not so good at "selling" ourselves, and employers take advantage of this. I wish I had more skill in this area. If the potential employers do not know you, if you are just another generic engineer and your productivity is unknown to them, then you are in a tough spot. They will want to stick with their typical salary for your degree+experience, etc. You can't argue that you are a "super awesome hard working programmer", because they don't really know you. On the other hand, by the time they make you an offer, they have invested some time into you, so you can usually get something out of them, even if it is not a big salary increase. There are other things to negotiate for besides money. Sometimes they just cannot negotiate on salary, but maybe they can give you more vacation time or a signing bonus, etc. - Read everything you can on the web about negotiating. I see some very good info from other people here. - Hit youtube. The videos may help to drive home things text would not. If you have time, search for "Sales Techniques", it is the same sort of thing. - If you can, practice. If you can get a friend (preferably a salesman or similar) to take you seriously, you could learn a lot in 15 minutes. - No matter what they offer at first, act disappointed. They will be reading your face, so immediately making them think you are not happy will put them in a position where they need to respond. - No matter what, I suggest refusing to give them an answer immediately, ask for "time to think about it". Hopefully they will interpret this as "time to do more interviews" and increase their offer. The only thing you are bringing to the table is...you. If they do not think you are willing to walk away, you have no leverage.