Salaries way up in Asian IT, articles pointing to brain drain

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Something that has piqued my interest in the last year are trends for technology professionals overseas, especially Asia. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I believe it’s important to have an understanding of where the worlds employment markets are…

ZDNet Asia is more frequently featuring stories of significant salary hikes and movement. Local papers and blogs describe brain drain between Asian countries.

This is all interesting because in the dot com bubble days of the late 90’s until about 2003, articles pointed to a brain drain of talent from Asia to the US. Now we’re seeing talent shortages there as countries attempt to equalize the ex/im of intelligent personel. It would make sense that if salaries rise beyond what American firms are willing to pay, we’ll see a reverse brain drain.

Installing tile – real developers do it themselves

Tiling 19 Tiling 8 Tiling 15

Tiling... Done! iFlickr IMG_0444.JPG

This weekend my wife and I got an early start Friday to finish off our bathroom’s tile. I’ve been photo-blogging it to Flickr and periodically putting up notes on Twitter. The last couple weekends have been similar, doing plumbing, floor tile, prep work, etc.

Though there is so much to do (more blog posts, tons of iofy priorities, and building in a certain web service), this is still satisfying work… Something everyone 1/2 interested in real estate should do at least once. I’m a software engineer and dev team manager because I love to build things. I think other developers should feel this way too.

More pics after the jump…

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iofy is hiring

iofy

We need a PHP programmer to join the dev team at iofy corporation. This is a full-time, based in Philadelphia, position.

The corporate version of the ad is on Craig’s List (also available after the jump).

If you’ve read this far you’ve probably laughed your ass off double-taked, “Philadelphia!?” … You’re right to do so. But seriously, we’ve grown in to a fast and agile web technology company in the heart of 19112.

Our work environment makes for a great life experience. We hire intelligent people capable of solving problems and enhancing the skills of those around them. People working at iofy are treated very well, with plenty of snacks and gadgets to keep mind and body entertained. The challenges we address both answer a need to paying partners and expand the knowledge of our teams.

In case you haven’t been following my blog, iofy builds web services to deliver media on the web. We harness our own services with AJAX and client applications on nearly every platform.

Drop a note with your resume and a unique statement of talent to developer@iofy.com if you’re the right fit. We love smart people.

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iofy account management – Really Simple Development

 

iofy software

My dev team is prepping the release of our REST / RSS / JavaScript based account management this week. It marks the completion of building, then harnessing, a suite of RESTful RSS 2.0 feed based web services. The idea has been “avoid people wasting time, working on stuff they suck at focus developers on code they enjoy and excel at.”

We had problems with our 1.0 account management. User interfaces were tied too tightly to the back end. Heavy hitting framework and server programmers were working out UI kinks while artistic graphic designers were figuring out database calls. This was a huge waste. The site looked heinous and didn’t work the way we wanted it to.

Graphic designers don’t think in OO, let alone big-O. Server programmers don’t communicate visually.

Serial

It seems easy to fix, right? Just have heavy hitters do hard stuff and then have graphic designers make it look pretty? Make it look pretty first, then tie in the hard stuff? Not exactly. It requires a lot of planning and effort to coordinate and manage people’s time like that. It also requires serial development where people are waiting before they can start. All of which is a waste – this needs to be automatic and parallel. Don’t waste time trying to manage this if it can be done for you.

Enter REST. Enter RSS.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) came first. Dave Winer, back in ’98, grew it from XML. It allows for simplified packaging of data. One can package and list blog entries, offer an MP3 playlist, send table-of-contents information, or transport code via codecast. At iofy we use it as a container to package web service responses.

RESTful development is also based on simplicity (here’s a great doc on REST). Get things done in an HTTP packaged call. With a very simple request in JavaScript, the web service is queried and you’ve got an RSS feed as a response. Our designers have their functionality via web services. Our server coders don’t touch the front end.

The server developers make the RSS feeds. This makes them happy and gives them time to build the critical server components. The graphic designers use JavaScript to call iofy’s RESTful Web Services API (link coming Monday). We use jQuery as our base JavaScript library. It’s damned fast to dev.

This simplified my project management. Tasks became clearly defined. In the beginning I was worried the approach would put a wedge between roles, but it worked in reverse. People understood the importance of their own functions and became reliant on each other for success.

Parallel Development.

Parallel

While the design team determined a desired look and feel, the back end team planned architecture and database schema. As feeds were developed and APIs took shape, so did the layout of the site. When feeds became ready for harnessing, pages were ready. Management of the nitty-gritty became unnecessary.

We launch account management this week. You too can harness it in your language of choice (we’ll provide JavaScript code which lets you do this simply by dropping some .js on your page and a script on your server). iofy’s services are controllable from your own site.

iofy’s development team builds client software, web sites, and web services powering audiobook content delivery. We move content securely from server, to client, to iPod, and SD chip. 

Brain-drain prediction due to asian success

Pic of IT walking awayI’m reading more and more about IT in Asia having trouble retaining technically competent employees. Salaries are growing to impressive levels. In Singapore, salaries are closing in on Silicon Valley levels. With the present competition for talent growth in that country, salaries will soon be greater there.

<prediction>We won’t be looking at an all-out brain-drain, but with the present economic climate in the US and the present growth in Asia, we’re looking at some movement of IT in the next five years.</prediction>