Dude, I have seen people using Excel to write letters!

I've seen senior accountants use pocket calculators to sum columns of numbers in Excel.

Their only concern is how to be the best human being possible to ensure a pleasureable eternity after death.

I've met a lot of "Christians" over they years whose only concern was being seen to be conforming to their social group's (church friends) idea of "good" (i.e. dogmatic, small-minded, selfish and ignorant) in order to be accepted by that social group, many of whom were labouring under the misapprehension that what they were doing was Christian.

You won't catch me spending eternity in the company of these people.

Responsibilities may include fixing mistakes from outsourced testing, and going to India to handhold them through the testing process.

...If there's anyone left from the original team with the knowledge.

Testing is one of those "costs" that PHBs and Bean-Counters love to cut continually since, to them, it is only cost that could be diverted to profit. They don't understand the importance of testing. After all, if the engineers (who are now a commodity) are doing their jobs properly, everything should be perfect and there should be no need to test things thoroughly, right? In the mean time, the testing that is done can be carried out by inexperienced and under-qualified people that have never done it before since they are cheaper.

I was looking for work recently, too, and got lots of calls from recruiters looking for Software Test Engineers.

I've worked very hard to get to being a developer, so I resisted and eventually got a better paying and infinitely more stimulating development job.

Software Test Engineers are sort-of developers, but the emphasis is on understanding requirement to be able to implement a "test matrix" that will (perhaps exhaustively) exercise a system (hardware and software as a whole) through all of the "use cases" that a user might be expected to do i.e. how J Random Luser will use the product.

Practically, this means implementing hundreds (or maybe thousands) of automated tests driven from something like Fitness. If you're lucky, you'll get to implement your test cases in something like Ruby. If you're unlucky, it might be C#...

It's quite a skilled job. You need to know a bit of statistics (statistical significance, confidence levels, variance and all that), about Combinatorial Testing (test coverage) and a bit about scripting and good software design. You would also need to understand the difference between white- grey- and black-box tests and when they are appropriate.

There are two ways in, from being a "tester" upwards or sideways from being a developer. (Note I didn't say "down." It's a skiled job, but I've done it for a few weeks for the experience and I got bored quickly).

In the spirit of cost-cutting, most Western companies are offshoring their testing. For example, Xerox just got rid of their manual and automated test to HCL in India. McAfee have done the same.

Stick to development unless you're starving/about to have your house repossessed or want a little extra experience on the side (which is a good thing for your CV as long as you don't make it your whole life).

One last thing: clueless recruiters see "Test-Driven Development" on your CV and think, "Aha! A software tester!" I had hundreds of phone calls under that misapprehension. (They also don't know what a kernel is (Windows and Linux both have one so they must be the same, right?) or the difference between C, C++ and C#...)

For shortly it will bear the burden of millions upon millions of lines of FORTRAN written in Perl.

I'm safe for now, but a lot of my former colleagues are not.

It's sad that a lot of once-great companies are run this way, by people out of touch with reality, I think that everyone should know what really happens in these situations.

I had many younger (and not so much younger) colleagues who believed the propaganda that both sides fed them, and have maybe left it a little late to look for new jobs. Some still believe that they have a future there.

This is no way to run a business. It can only end in disaster. I'm particularly vexed that many Western companies are run this way, and that CEOs, VPs and PHBs keep making these crazy decisions despite the two decades or so of history there are now. This affects peoples' jobs, their investments, their pensions and the economy in which they live. It affects us all.

I have written about this so that people can hopefully learn from it.

A fork is not a rewrite.

If Sony want to have their cake and eat it, they are free to develop their own busybox-like suite of tools, on their own dime, and they can probably cannibalise some BSD code to get off to a flying start.

It's been a long time since I had time to browse any of the code repositories out there, but last time I looked, the BSD people (Free, Net, Open, ...) all had their own BSD-licensed unixy command-line tools.

Goodness, me, unless I'm mistaken, that stuff's been about for longer than GNU. (My beard is getting grey so forgive me if I'm rambling inanely).

Heck, if you want "real unix" tools, Sun released the official source under the CDDL a few years back.

OK, I know busybox is a very small reimplementation, but as I tried to point out first, it's enough to get Sony off to a flying start...

Although- knowing Britain- the unions will somehow get involved and tripple the costs- and then it will never get built- or the Germans will build it instead.

No, there will be a hostile take-over of the company by a greedy and corrupt competitor or venture capital firm that will asset-strip the company, pay the new board of directors vast salaries, bonuses and share issues, meanwhile radically cutting back the workforce and letting the company fail.

The bankrupt remains of the company will then be sold off to the Chinese.

Practically no one is in a union any more because they're too scared of being labelled as a Militant.