[discobay]

We employed Indian professionals on our project. They were over sold in most respects and had to do their best to live up to those cvs. In the end the pace got to them and they left. Same happened on projects in the U.K. where I have contacts. Worse there the code they left behind had to be revisited and rewritten. Not a blanket statement but needed to be said.

[Katanga]

Discobay

one thing I will agree is that you haveto pick them very carefully. Staff turnover is also much bigger.

Was your projects in the Financial services sector on some other ?

[discobay]

No it wasn't.

[discobay]

The U.K. project was housing/rates.

[dougp]

Originally Posted by Katanga

Doug

I am looking for people with the same skills !

do you fancy coming to work for us ?

Tell you what, you do six months for us, then I'll consider it.

[Katanga]

Dougp....I would but I don't cut code anymore.

Who do u work for ? What do you do ?

Happy to chat pvtly...

[nojetlag]

Pretty interesting thread, until now I thought there is basically no demand for developers in HKG. At least for foreigners. I'm looking for a job in HKG since a few weeks, however the market seemed closed to me. I found some very interesting job postings on jobserve.com, but over the time I got the impressions that they are not really existent. They are posted every few days, but already for several weeks. Meanwhile I got offers in Switzerland and the UK, however due to the fact that my girlfriend is based in Hong Kong I prefer to get a job there. Is my resume not in the proper format for the HKG market ? (http://www.nojetlag.de/resume) Or do I just look at the wrong places ?

best regards
andreas

[penguinsix]

There is a lot of competition from the mainland and India, but I'd second the previous posts about some of it being oversold. Our experiences have been generally negative with outsourced work. Great when you tell them "do this this this and this" but absolute crap when you say "we need a solution to this problem--figure it out." Zero creativity or problem solving ability--great at rote code creation.

That being said, you may find employers who are looking for an IT person "to solve problems" rather than to "write code". I think if you look for an IT position with a non-IT firm (i.e a bank or something) you may find your chances of a better wage position slightly higher.

On a practical note, I should mention that there is a pretty wide selection of IT manuals (in English) in Hong Kong, and there are plenty of threads about the availability of computers and other equipment. Really new manuals take about a month or two to arrive (for example, if a new upgrade to something came out, you would have more selection at relase date +1 month overseas than you would in HK, but you can get by).

[Katanga]

Andreas

I looked at your CV and I can see that you have a wide range of experience. If you want to target banks etc then you should tidy up your CV. People will look for:

1. what is your key languages. You seem to be too young to know Cobol !
2. are you a server side or GUI developer
3. what experience have you got of building high performing systems with fail-over, HA etc.

Most of your work seems to be based on DB and PC based systems which is going to be tough in Inv Banking.

[nojetlag]

Hello Katanga,

thank you very much for looking at my resume and giving me hints ;-).
Well actually the first 4 years of my IT career was in banking with IBM Mainframe, so the stock trading system was basically written in PL/1 (actually Delta PL/1) and Cobol (also Delta). I never thought I'm too young After that I did move into the Microsoft world.
I put my resume emphasis on .NET platform instead of a specific language, cause after all it's more or less syntax on a given platform like .NET. At the moment I work for a large IT consulting company which on the powerpoint slides has a clearly defined portfolio of things we do and things we don't do. However reality is we do everything that brings money So I never say no to a new challenge and therefore take what they ask me to do. Sure my major focus is database and Business Intelligence(due to the fact that this is my major customer), however at the end they ask for a solution in a given time and money frame and thats what I get rated at afterwards. So I do web, fat client in either C# (actually prefer C#) or VB.NET and if requested it is VBA in Excel for our internal departments Same goes for Server or GUI, what's requested will be done
High Availability Systems I never had the chance so far, but would be fun

I will work on my resume to make things more clear in the next few days. Do you have any good contacts to look for a job in HKG ?

best regards
andreas