Hi All. Directions needed... (2 Viewers)

[prabha_friend]

All i know in my life is computer, computer, computer only. Is there a degree or equivalent qualification only on computer languages available in India? I want to go out of India and be at a better place where all my talents can be appreciated. Thank You.
With Hope,
Prabhakaran

 

[Isaac]

How close are you to Hyderabad ?

 

[prabha_friend]

How close are you to Hyderabad ?

A night's journey on a Train...

 

[Isaac]

Hmm, ok. Well it's just a thought, but many American (and other countries) companies have a good presence there. In every large company I have worked for (MUFG banking, Wells Fargo, Apria and others) they hire in Hyderabad for tech talent of all types. There are so many jobs concentrated there it's just something to think about. Even my current company, which is <10k employees, just opened a new office in Hyderabad. Everyone is opening offices there, I would apply to all of them if it's possible.

99% of my experience has shown me that those companies value "experience" greater than "college degree or certification". In fact, in all my tech jobs, I have virtually never been asked - maybe one time - about degrees or certifications. It's always about # of years experience in a certain thing, along with some brief testing questions to verify the truth of my answer. I hope this encourages you at least a little.

I'm sure there are places other than Hyderabad like this too, that's just the one I know of - and it's constantly expanding, expanding, expanding.

Many USA companies are starting to slow their pace of sponsoring work visas to come work inside USA (Google, Amazon, just started cancelling many of theirs) - however, working a very good job with American or UK company from still living inside India is a very good chance most especially if you can gain experience in:

• SQL Server
• Oracle
• DBA or db developer
• Tableau
• PowerBI
• Python
• Any other programming language
• Perhaps Access to some extent as well

 

[prabha_friend]

I have 15 years of Experience in Ms Office Automation but the problem is I got a bit old for Indian Jobs (Reaching 40) in next month. (As per HR feedback)

 

[prabha_friend]

I will take that catch in the 'Field'

 

[Isaac]

Understood. Well, the best I can say is if you want to get sponsored visa to work in another country, from the job postings I see, and taking into account your interests and experiences, my personal opinion is that making sure you are proficient in querying SQL Server to include stored procedures and trying to optimize could be enough to get you that job. Oracle is very well paid, but (I think) a harder learning curve for an MS Office background. If you can sell your self as a sql server dev, you can eventually get your "foot in the door" at a place like Wells Fargo, they are constantly hiring for database jobs and in some cases I have seen well paying ($50/hr) jobs that mostly required high Excel automation and Access skills there too.

Pour over the Indeed postings that are offering Visa or sponsorship (it's a search filter) to get an idea

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I got a bit old for Indian Jobs (Reaching 40)

For any company that considers 40 as "old" you do not want to work there anyway. That kind of talk is used by companies that want to exploit (translation: overwork and underpay) kids who don't know their true market value. It's a red flag waving vigorously to tell you to stay away.

 

[Isaac]

I agree! if it were me I would love to hire the wisdom and experience that older people bring. the main thing kids bring is they are more flexible and malleable, but that's small potatoes compared to wisdom and experience

 

[Isaac]

Come to think of it, there are quite a few things I deliberately say in interviews so that if they have a negative reaction, I can conclude "that's fine - then I didn't want to work there anyway".

Couple of mine are:

• "although i'm willing to step up in an occasional emergency after-hours, I generally take the approach that my goal is to get my job done in 40 hours"

• "on the spectrum of quick 'n dirty, or slow and cautious and researched......I'm more toward the slow end of the spectrum, preferring to carefully research and test the code I'm using, and prefer an environment where that is valued and allowed" (understanding that occasionally, quick 'n dirty may be appropriate - occasionally)

If they have a questionable reaction to either of those things, then it's a place I'll hate working and probably quit or get fired.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Your skillset is more aligned with small companies rather than large and probably wouldn't qualify you for an H1b visa into the US. Have you considered looking for work as a consultant where you can work for yourself? Sometimes you can get a start by finding a placement firm that places people with your skillset. Pick a medium sized city where you might like to live and see what you can find. In the US, most cities have groups of small business people who get together for a meeting and lunch or dinner every month. Look for groups like this and offer to give a presentation on a tool that their businesses might find useful. You may need to create one to present It doesn't have to be fancy. It just needs to solve a problem that small businesses are probably doing manually and would like to automate. Maybe something that tracks customer complaints or on a more upbeat note, employee rewards. Talk to your friends. Talk to your spouses friends. Talk to your parents friends. Someone will give you an idea of a useful tool that you can build.

 

[ColinEssex]

Have you considered looking for work as a consultant where you can work for yourself?

In the NHS (National Health Service) we used to get what are laughingly called 'outside consultants'. Everyone hated them, they hardly scratched the surface of their task and rarely achieved a result. At that time the so called 'IT consultants' brought in charged £500 per day. As this was much more than we earned in IT, we hated them, never spoke to them or helped them even if we knew the solution they were looking for.
Basically, we made their work life very difficult, especially if the 'expert' was female. Being an outside consultant is the biggest scam going and costs the company big money they could use more sensibly. So beware of the permanent workers reactions.
Col

 

[Pat Hartman]

especially if the 'expert' was female

We've always known what you are.

 

[ColinEssex]

We've always known what you are.

Ditto

 

[Isaac]

In the NHS (National Health Service) we used to get what are laughingly called 'outside consultants'. Everyone hated them, they hardly scratched the surface of their task and rarely achieved a result. At that time the so called 'IT consultants' brought in charged £500 per day. As this was much more than we earned in IT, we hated them, never spoke to them or helped them even if we knew the solution they were looking for.
Basically, we made their work life very difficult, especially if the 'expert' was female. Being an outside consultant is the biggest scam going and costs the company big money they could use more sensibly. So beware of the permanent workers reactions.
Col

if you're talking about an Access dev that comes into a small business to create some database systems for it, then I wouldn't agree - we've all proven that works, and can work well.

On the other hand, a little bit of what he said rings true when I think of a company I worked for that handled Medicare and Medicaid implementations. We hired a consulting company called Gorman from D.C. to come in and fix all of our awful problems that resulted in 2 and 3-star ratings from CMS. Those people were paid an absolutely obscene amount of money - I am not sure but one of the consultants I know made ENORMOUS money, guy called Dick, very nice and great guy. After they left, the company was much the same, although I think they did try to implement smart stuff.

 

[ColinEssex]

I wasn't talking about Access developers because that was mine and Ally's job and we had that under control. I was referring to so called IT consultants who could hardly switch on a computer. It didn't really affect me, but our permanent IT staff were as I described in their attitude. I remember one in particular who looked at porn most of the day.
Col

 

[prabha_friend]

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Have to admit, Col, that I have met "outside consultants" from time to time and have not been impressed.

Once, about 45 years ago, we hired a team of programming consultants to work on a DEC VAX/VMS project. DEC said that this was an experienced team who really knew VMS. (Or at least, that's what the contract said.) Up front they made it quite clear: They didn't want us to touch the machine they were using, wouldn't even let us do backups. I was nominally the system admin, but once I installed VMS and did the patching to get it up to date, I was only there as a standby resource because they were going to do it all.

Came the day that because the leading consultant didn't understand the utilities he was using (with a wildcard file specification from the root folder), he essentially made all of the first-level file folders look like non-folder files. Fortunately, he did this on the user/development disk, not the system disk. He hadn't actually deleted anything; he had just made the directory files unrecognizable to the file system for all private user folders.. Which meant that nobody could find the files that they had worked on and hadn't backed up for the last six weeks. Potentially about 48-50 person-weeks of coding by their best estimates.

They came to us and asked if we had run a backup even though we weren't supposed to do so. We hadn't. Panic set in. At least two members of the elite team were in tears. There was much consternation in their set-aside work area. Discussions got very loud. Recriminations flew fast and furious to all concerned.

After they tried a lot of suggestions (none of which proved useful), they asked me if there was ANY way I could undo what they did. (At this time, I carefully hid my laughter at a lowly standby System Admin having to bail out the specialist team.) I wrote a script using DCL, the command language of VMS, to directly interact with and patch the file system one directory at a time as a batch job. The patching required not only a little bit of bit-twiddling for each file, but also some checksum recomputation in two different slots per directory file. Took 2 hours to write, 15 minutes to test and verify, and 15 more minutes to do the production run, so that within about 2 1/2 hours everyone had recovered every file. All files present and accounted for, nothing missing.

Shortly thereafer, the project lead consultant/supervisor had a LONG talk in private with our company president, who reminded him who was paying the bills for his team. Shortly after that, we had a schedule of daily incremental backups and weekly full backups for "their" machine.

That wasn't the only run-in I ever had with their consultants, but the other time is another story I'll save for later.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I think you'll find that the Big Eight and the biggest consulting firms were the ones who charged outrageous fees and provided less than optimal results. I made a lot of money cleaning up after Arthur Anderson.