BU SHI KE FOU

It's a Big World Out There.

September 2006

I'm set, next week, to interview the founders of Doostang, a new invitation-only job-networking service. Sounds like a pretty smart idea: they're using the Facebook approach of populating the site with alumni of well-known schools, whom they empower to hunt for jobs and candidates using a six-degrees-of-separation model. Members are permitted to invite friends to join the network, so eventually, the whole world will get to play. Sounds like an idea someone should immediately clone and start signing up alumni of big Chinese, Indian, Russian technical universities.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 03:43 PM  Permalink |

Jonathan Erickson's editorial, in the current issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal, delves into the topic of globalization. He writes:

"Putting aside inflammatory issues such as offshore jobs replacing domestic ones, there's undeniably a big jump in offshore programming resources. According to recent surveys from Evans Data and IDC, there are approximately 12 million professional developers worldwide, a number that's expected to grow to 17 million by 2009. Of that 5 million increase in developers, 3.2 million are expected to be in the Asia/Pacific and Europe/Middle East/Africa HASH(0x180c8d8), and 1.5 million in the Brazil/Russia/India/China HASH(0x180c8d8) (assuming I interpreted their data correctly)."

Erickson concludes the piece with a reference to an article written a while back by former DDJ Technical Editor Eugene Kim. It's a prescient piece: Kim discusses desiderata for collaborative programming tools that maps closely to some of the new stuff we've seen recently. Among our current favorites: a service from 6th Sense Analytics that wires up programmer desktops and toolkits for insightful, hassle-free project management and "active hours" monitoring (without getting all 'spyware' about it).

Posted by John Jainschigg at 02:00 PM  Permalink |