Microsoft is about to open new development centre in Canada. What is interesting here it's business drivers. It is always interesting to see companies and people acting on their strategies as opposed to short-term tactics in pursuit of immediate ROI.

It is interesting how much talent Microsoft seeks to attract to new development centre. It is interesting if ROI analysis on this new Microsoft's investment will ever be done and we will be able to see it.

The study of offshore outsourcing industry by Goal Europe which I recently blogged about induced a whole bunch of news and blog posts quoting 47% outsourcing market growth in Ukraine. Currently Google gives 684 pages for "Ukraine GoalEurope" and blog search gives 36 references. Would be interesting to see who is interested in this news and who considers this information valuable enough to put it in their news line.

Thinking of possible approaches to class library interface design I reread the post by Martin Fowler titled Fluent Interface. Although I never tried out this approach in designing my own class libraries it looks like with modern IDE such interfaces will really be "fluent" with use of code completion. Now I'm trying to arrange some time to deeper research this topic. So far I've seen that such interfaces work great for Builder-like methods and stream-like operations. Would be interesting to see how good they are in regular development practice.

Recently when I got stuck in a traffic jam I noticed a man in a car nearby me. He had his window open so I could see everything inside his car.

You know, every car has seat belts to prevent drivers and passengers from hitting the steering wheel or other elements of the front panel in case of an emergency. Of course, you must fasten your seat belt when you are in car. To remind you that modern cars have a system to warn you when you did not fasten seat belt.

Unfortunately drivers' culture in Ukraine is still low and many see fastening seat belt as a sign of weakness and do not do that even in modern cars which produce that really painful sound to warn. But how can they drive with that sound in ears, you would ask. To get rid of the sound they put the belt through the back of the seat and fasten. This way the system thinks that the belt is ok while the driver is not fastened!

And so did the driver I saw. But he need to somehow ensure his safety, so he put some small icons which you often can see in cars in Ukraine on the front panel. How can it be that a man does nothing to ensure his own safety, but expect God to do everything for him?! I guess it is in post-soviet mentality of our nation. And over time we have to get out of belief that one does not really need to work hard to build his own success, but can expect havens to just give it to him. We must quit the habit of relying on somebody else instead of taking responsibility of our own lives.

So fasten seat belt and go ahead to your success!

What do you do when you receive a meeting request without agenda? Unless you are pretty confident (which is a rare case, except that you are the organizer) what is the goal of the meeting, decline it!

Meetings are necessary evil of teamwork - you want to share opinions within the team, but meetings distract you from other important things you've got to do. The key thing here is "they distract". You want to keep this distraction minimal, you want meetings to be focused and productive. And this is what agenda is all about. It helps to stay focused on the issues that need to be resolved by the team together and it allows everybody to do her homework by thinking out all of the agenda's items in advance. Meetings without agenda can take twice and trice as much time as the same meeting would take if the agenda was sent beforehand. This is especially true if the meeting is a conference call.

What would you do when you send meeting request next time?

No wonder that in developing countries like Ukraine IT ties to educational centers, because graduates usually do not have enough funds to move to another city and paying relocation bonuses is not common as companies want to keep their costs low. And Outsourcing to Ukraine 2007 Market Study by Goal Europe just confirms that. In Ukraine outsourcing companies are located mainly in traditional scientific centers which were able to preserve maturity and experience of scientific schools from Soviet times and amplify their potential by taking opportunities offered by modern world.

The report says

Some of the main reasons for deteriorating quality of education are low salaries of the teaching personnel and outdated theoretical knowledge, as well as the inflexibility of many universities in preventing the practitioners of software development from teaching additional courses in those universities.

Flexibility and willingness to take new opportunities are reasons why some universities take the lead while others are trying to get along with reputation they had in the past.

What surprises me a bit is that report says that there are around 30,000 graduates theoretically (good word, right?) suitable for software development jobs. When I did my own calculation, very inaccurate though, I came to conclusion that there are about 500 IT graduates each year in Dnipropetrovs'k and I can hardly believe that Dnipropetrovs'k produces only 1.6% of all IT graduates. Probably, we use different approaches to calculate the numbers. Anyway it will be interesting to see what other reports or studies say on this matter.

Goal Europe recently published a research study that indicates 47% outsourcing market growth in Ukraine in year 2006. As the market reached $246 million I believe that it will continue to increase this and coming years because Ukraine has several important advantages over China and India. Some of them outlined in the report are

• availability of highly-educated professionals;
• no or lesser time-zone difference with Europe and USA;
• less noticeable cultural difference

All of that combined with general orientation to Western world make Ukraine an attractive outsourcing destination.

Research indicates that there were 7639 professionals working in IT industry in 2006. This means that almost 10% of all Ukrainian developers are working at SoftServe because as we announced at the end of year 2006 that number of employees increased up to 700 people.

SoftServe continues its lead by achieving most competencies among IT companies in Ukraine. Microsoft also recognizes SoftServe's accomplishments by selecting the company among top finalists for the 2007 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award in Custom Development Solutions, Web Development.

Not only this distinguishes SoftServe from other outsourcing services providers in Eastern Europe and proves that the company is valuable partner for its clients, but also highlights that SoftServe great and exciting place to work at. Check out our vacancies.

I long thought if I want to publish these photos with kind permission of the author. First photo shows greatness of  local university by depicting a braindump of a student before exam on Software Engineering:

Unfortunately, exam was held in this auditorium (and, to my pity, such auditoriums are not uncommon):