I'll make sure to tell one of my nineteen cambodians to post comments one your blog once I'm replaced.

And I'll get a second one to screw up the spelling of the commenting one.

Then, I'll be fully replaced.

I so second this emotion, though Rory. You should do a series. Even Scott Adams got started someplaced.

Just wanted to quickly point out, lazy people are lazy - that's just who they are. Stick 'em behind a desk for 40 hours a week, and what will they do? Be lazy, of course. I personally don't really blame them. Most of them just want a job to make money, pay the bills, and raise a family.

However, it is management's job to ensure these people stay out of positions that require productivity and skill; if they manage to get into such a position and fail to live up to the expectations, they need weeding out as soon as humanly possible. Microsoft evidently has learned this critical lesson; your organization is only as good as your people...

With the technical skill and talent left unemployed after "the crash," one would think there would be no room for unskilled leeches in the American software workforce.

Regardless, the skilled American guys demand more than the skilled offshore guys, so if it's going to come down to cost savings I guess it's unavoidable. At least mistakes are quite less expensive that way.

I have noticed that the MS Blogsphere slows down considerably on holidays and weekends, so everyone must be blogging and reading blogs @work.

Hillarious, and right on -- As usual, Rory. :)

hey rory, you forgot to include "listening to .NET Rocks"...

I don't think it's the lame-ass lazy bastards we should be worrying about, they can be fired no prob. I think we should be worrying about the legions of hamburger flippers fired for "not being up to the standard McDonalds expects" that are now "Web-designers" and "coders". I know talent was and is hard to find in this industry, but hiring those schmucks has only resulted in one thing: management thinking that everyone can code or "design the Web". Well, reality is, they can't. And unfortunately, the crap these @#$&*( deliver can just as easily be done in India, for about a tenth of the price. And that led to outsourcing. Now don't get me wrong, India has excellent coders, but they don't work for the average coding sweat shop nor are they paid that miserably.

Alan Cooper once said: "Today, web designers are called programmers, programmers are called engineers, engineers are called architects, and architects never get called." He was talking about title inflation, but it is the same: managers still don't know sh*t about software development. The "magicians" of old have been dethroned, but software development is still something that should be left to those who know what they are doing.

Spot on Rory.... Your comic even captured the subtleties of my lazy eye and my astounding head to bicep size ratio. ;)

Wolfgang -

"I don't think it's the lame-ass lazy bastards we should be worrying about"

Have you ever worked someplace where a "lame-ass lazy batard" managed to negotiate a year's pay for severance? That's just so they won't sue.

I'd worry about them.

Especially if I were doing the hiring. It can't make you look good to be the person who had to hire and then fire that person (allowing him/her to leave with tens of thousands of dollars).

Sadly, this reaches into just about every industry here in America for some reason.

I tend to think it's because America has become 'land of the lawsuits' or 'land of the "I don't really have to work or do anything to get outrageous sums of money"'. This is evident by the whiney sports players or actors wanting more money for their already grossly overpaid parts.

There shouldn't be any kind of lawsuit to merit being lazy at work. Of course lawyers can pretty much dig up anything anywhere but for the most part you can't really prove that the firing wasn't justifiable. The sad thing is that some lazy person would rather sue someone than actually get off their ass and work. I guess that's their mentality though. If they don't have to work, why bother? If I can make more just getting hired, do nothing, then sue their ass for firing me legitimately then why on earth would I need to work? I could just run around getting hired, fired, then start the lawsuit wagon rolling.

I guess it all comes back to just doing your job. If you're hired for a position, you should be able to fill it. If you can't, walk away. Don't lie so that you can get money and take some random company for however much money you're taking them for. You may be helping yourself out for all of 2 months but it really does nothing.

What really should be legal is that if you are hired for a position and you lied to get that position, (can't really even work in that field to save your life) you should have some kind of action taken against you. You lied to get the job, you can't do a damn thing in the position yet you still get your money. You then have the ability to sue the employer because YOU lied. You get fired because you can't deliver in your position (which is a very legal way to get fired) yet you are given the ability to challenge this in court while your employer can do nothing. I may be the only one thinking this is wrong but it is. Of course then there's the whole 'big business' backlash where corporations will pay judges to help award their case, or use some random shady practice to help them out.

This should also be true for such jobs as Congress, President, etc and are pretty much but you can lie and still BS your way through a term in politics (sadly). Apparently this is blatantly obvious because I notice a lot of politicians have no clue what in the hell they're talking about. I bet they're the same people depicted in this comic but instead of being confronted by an employer, they're confronted by the American public.

Bah I guess there's just no winning here. I wish I lived in a country where I could be protected as an employee but as an employer, I can also be protected from the lazy retardation that has become much of America's work force. Sad.

Ha ha! This is great!

Although I'm not against outsourcing at all, a friend of mine pointed out to me that not enough attention is paid to corporate inefficiency. How often do you see companies with policies that are disincentives to their goals?

He's worked for several consulting firms including a big 5 and on his last project, there was a 3 to 1 manager to programmer ratio. Bad programmers were promoted to managers to get them out of the way.

It seems that many companies see outsourcing as a Panacea when in fact, they'd be better served by improving their processes and increasing inefficiencies first.

Rory, perhaps you can draw a comic about bad managers. You have competition in that segment though:
http://haacked.europe.webmatrixhosting.net/images/dilbert_plans.gif

(disclaimer: I'm a software manager myself)

So very timely! I work for one of the "biggies"...not telling who...and we were just talking about outsourcing...now your comic is up in the lab as a reminder to us all.

To be honest, I haven't. But can they really do that? I thought American labor law was tough on the employee, not the employer? From what I hear, I thought firing people was easy, unless they're in a union. Am I wrong there?

Brendan-I'm happy I wasn't drinking anything when I read your comment as it would now be splattered all over my screen and keyboard. Very funny.

Is that *really* what it's like in America? Wow! Here in Europe we don't have lame-ass lazy developers (we've put them all to work as consultants). We're all hard working, hugely competent, well paid, intelligent and also very good looking to boot.

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American Coders Aren't Lazy...Beurocrats Are.

American Coders Aren't Lazy...Beurocrats Are.

Offshoring in the US