Recently the food superstore I usually visit to buy food for my family introduced new size of parcels that they sell at the check out. Generally it is a good idea to offer smaller (and thus cheaper) parcels for those who do not need large ones. But let's look at this new offer from another point of view. Earlier the dialog at the check out started with

— Do you need a parcel? — Yes, thank you. (or No, thank you.)

And now it goes as

— Do you need a parcel? — Yes. (or No, thank you. And that is ok.) — Large or small one? — Hm... Well... I guess, large one.

You see, now selling a parcel takes at least twice as much time as it did before. And the new offer that was aimed at increasing customer satisfaction those on the line are really irritated by the process of parcel selection.

In fact, the process is more than two times slower. The reason is that first question does not really require a decision from you. You kind of know beforehand whether you need the parcel. But the second question gives you choice and asks to decide. And that is where one really needs to take his time and think.

Generally speaking, choice is good when it adds real alternatives. And in that case the choice should be supported by effective decision making process so that overall efficiency is not affected.

"Ukraine IT outsourcing tops in Eastern Europe" article by BPOUkraine elaborates a little bit on recent Goal Europe report by giving some additional information. It is interesting that according to the data from Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative Ukrainian outsourcing market was about $600 million in Y2006, which is more than two times greater then the number reported by Goal Europe - $246 million. I tend to think that the truth is somewhere in between.

Also there is a typo in the article: it says that SoftServe has more that 200 employees, but in fact SoftServe employs more than 700 professionals in 6 development centers in different regions of Ukraine.

Just worth reading article about a man who had courage to bet on changing the world and win.

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.