people i travel with to and from office are software developers. yesterday i found out that all of them joined from the same firm. I thought it was a really good large-scale poach and told them that. And they said that it was actually a “build operate transfer” model, a la what we see in developmental projects.
They were all employees of firm X who were initially engaged in building a project for firm Y. Once the product was made, they stayed on at Y maintaining it for a while. And soon, they will shift from X’s payroll to Y’s! An aghast me was then told that this kind of a thing is really common, and firms like X actually operated on this model.
Build, operate, transfer. Build a team. Train them. Operate the client’s systems. Transfer the employees. Awesome!
On a related note, i figured out that software developers package themselves according to the programming language they are most comfortable in “I am a Java coder” or “I am a C coder”. When they figured out that i have a degree in Comp Sci, the first thing they asked was the number of programming languages i know.
For an “outsider” like me, it’s so damn counterintuitive. Despite having done most of my programming in java, i can’t code in java without a book and the APIs handy. I believe as long as you are comfortable with the concept of procedural programming, you can program in any damn thing easily. It’s more about the understanding of concepts rather than the knowledge of a language – the latter can always be tackled with a book in hand.
interesting how the industry works!