Slashdot Mirror

Reading comments like this frustrates me. I attended a year of law school before realizing what apparently took you six years in getting a Ph.D. There actually *aren't* as many law jobs as you seem to think; consider this article from the Wall Street Journal. From the article:

The legal profession is really two professions: the elite lawyers and everyone else. Most of the former start out at big law firms. Many of the latter never find gainful legal employment. Instead, they work at jobs that might be characterized as "quasi-legal": paralegals, clerks, administrators, doing work for which they probably never needed a J.D.

Although hard data about the nature of these jobs are difficult to come by (and rely on self-reporting, which is inherently unreliable), the mean salary for graduates of top 10 law schools is $135,000 while it is $60,000 for "tier three" schools. It's certainly possible that tier-three graduates tend to gravitate toward lower-paying public-interest and government jobs, but this lower salary may also reflect the nonlegal nature of many of these jobs and the fact that these graduates are settling for anything that will pay the bills.

Consider also this article from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It says: "Competition for job openings should be keen because of the large number of students graduating from law school each year."

The point I'm trying to make is that there is no shortage of lawyers; there is a shortage of brilliant lawyers. For that matter, there's a shortage of brilliance in just about every field conceivable. Do you really think it's easy to go into $100K of debt to go to three additional years of school with a rapacious, hard-working group just to graduate into a profession where 60+ hour weeks is the norm, not the anomaly? Too many of the recent law grads I know tell me they wish they'd done the same thing I do.

The real truth is that the brilliant people in any field -- law, science, math -- are the ones who love their job and hence it doesn't seem like work to them and hence they're willing to go mentally further than the drudges.

All you people who are grousing at the recommendations that people do what they love should keep this in mind when you're telling people to go to law school and the like.

To the OP: This isn't directed exclusively against you, although I think you'll benefit from realizing that you're experiencing a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" effect. Were you quitting a job in the firm rat race, you might have the same opinion about law as you presently do about your Ph.D. But maybe not -- you could always go to law school; patent lawyers genuinely are in short supply, so you could always try that. Granted, being in school till you're 35 may not appeal, but I saw people doing it. This assumes you think you'll be passionate about the law, because if you aren't, the same burnout factors affecting you today will affect you tomorrow.

In 1997 about 150,000 women held non-traditional jobs in the construction industry, Women and Nontraditional Occupations Production and craft work, operators and so on.

But there isn't much incentive for women to enter a market where wages are depressed:

Women posted a net increase of 1.7 million jobs paying above the median salary, while men gained a net increase of just over 220,000...according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report for the years 2000-2005. Women outpaced men in obtaining work that pays in the top quarter of all jobs, primarily positions in the health-care, financial and managerial fields... At the end of 2005, 1.1 million more of those jobs were held by women, while 200,000 fewer men held such jobs as widespread layoffs cut manufacturing employment. But the wage gap persists...
During the study period...the number of construction jobs grew by nearly one million. Though construction is often thought of as providing higher-earning jobs, the report showed construction work accounted for many of the new, lower-paying jobs filled by men.
Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said an increase in unskilled, immigrant labor might explain the downward trend in construction wages. Women Outpace Men In Number of New Jobs

Building an Emergency Operations Center on Groove and SharePoint

Groove {is} used by legions of organizations from GlaxoSmithKline to the U.S. Army. Being able to edit documents and then return them to a shared folder in one go is great. So is the fact that what you have on your computer is synchronized with other team members in real-time so, should your Internet connection be cut for whatever reason, the version will be updated when you come back online. And all this is done via encrypted files, making it very hard for an outsider to intercept and read them. Why Is the Internet So Unfriendly To Those Who Work in Teams?

Just by chance I was looking into similar information just hours earlier today and happened upon similar solutions offered by the WSJ. The most useful site in my option was payscale. It offered really detailed information about many interesting things, like salaries of recent graduates of my college in a variety of fields (assuming that these students are telling the truth, and gave me pretty good insight into what the career I am heading into should pay.

he expressed the opinion that the best way to get a raise was to jump from job to job

Now, mentioning that while interviewing is in bad taste, but it's actually pretty well established that job-hopping increases salaries. (Yes, those reports are essentially anecdotal; I'm unable to find the survey that report similar results right at the moment, but I recall that they're out there.

According to this report SGI spends more than 50000 dollars every weekend to fly its CEO around the country to play Golf. That could explain the bankruptcy. I wonder why the bankruptcy laws dont require the entire board of directors and CXO grade of officers to be forced into personal bankruptcy when their company goes bust. Right now the way bankruptcy laws are structured its profitable for CEO,CFO ,CTO etc to actually loot the company, run it into the ground and then apply for bankruptcy and use that as an excuse to loot the pension fund.

Are there any sources for this, or are you using some folk knowledge with no evidence behind it? I did a fairly length search of PubMed for evidence even tangentially related to human multitasking and could find nothing on it.

"A guy who's been working on a 15-year-old application is a dinosaur."

At some point the IT industry is going to move beyond Java and it will be the COBOL of the IT industry. Your current boss will hire a new grad to replace you when he wants to use it (or when he is replaced) instead of giving you a 3-month course in whatever the new system is.

However, there will be a warning: When they start to teach the new system in CS courses and it begins to edge out Java then the handwriting is on the wall. A year later there will be an avalanche as the CS and IT courses all race to the new system. Java jobs will start getting scarcer.

The new system might be any of:

1. Verificationist math or correctness tech
2. Ruby
3. .NET 2, 3, or 4
4. Something else

I assume you mean this article? I noticed that type of responce quite frequently when I was job hunting.

Behind 'Shortage' of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy

= 9J =

Belo Corp - A media giant. They've been actively trying to find missing employees.

Harrah's Entertianment - Handing out checks for at least 90 days. Also note the independent confirmation of the "Evil Walmart" story.

Pinnacle Entertainment - Another casino that's investing $400 million to rebuild their casino. They're also retraining employees with construction job skills so that they can feel productive.

The funniest thing about that? Most office thermostats are placebos.

Actually, the Wall Street Journal (Career Journal) just published an article about how the office is becoming too much a of a distraction. For me, it's not "things" that distract, but rather people who distract -- too many people just walking up to my desk at random and breaking my concentration.

Well said - and apparently, office thermostats are quite often placebos, too. So much for that coworker who constantly fiddles with the controls...

I don't think that you can make a CEO think that way. If management is allowed to set its own compensation, management will always look out for number one. There is really no substitute for oversight from stockholders. And once that oversight is present, keeping your CEO motivated is exactly the same process as keeping the janitor motivated--though you might want to spend more effort on the one.

Most well-run companies do have good oversight of management. Think of yourself as just a stockholder for a moment. For example, imagine that you have a mid-life crisis tomorrow, and you decide to get someone else to run your company. You are still the major stock-holder, but you need to hire a CEO.

You certainly aren't going to allow your new CEO to give himself loans from the company slush fund. However, that doesn't mean that your worries about CEO over-compensation are gone, or even reduced. Your most likely problems are going to come from this sort of thing. (The one co-author Khurana in that article has written a book on the subject that is supposed to be very good that I have never read.)

There is a sort of artificial celebrity market out there at the moment. Part of the reason for the celebrity market goes back to the companies with bad oversight. The few places that allow management to run up compensation raise the price for everybody. However, that's only the demand side. The supply side comes from this type of thinking: "If you haven't been CEO of GE, we don't want you." Companies can easily overvalue a successful CEO, without truly evaluating how much that CEO can really do for them compared to a cheaper version without the celebrity status.

1. In the past five years college graduation rates for computer science have been relatively flat (addmissions are up though). This means that in a time of the biggest boom in IT jobs in history there hasn't been an increase in supply only an increase in demand.

1. Interns make real money. In other fields of endeavor people intern for free while Computer Science interns aren't only paid but sometimes get stock options (e.g. Cisco interns). From my experience $3000 ~ $4000 a month plus travel and housing expenses is fast becoming the norm. If this isn't an indication of shortage then what is?

1. Even with all the generous packages many companies are having difficulty finding
2. competent developers and are having to either relocate entire departments overseas or fill them with foreign born workers. The company I worked for this summer was having difficulty finding developers for their large scale, distributed applications and this has nothing to do with poor work conditions. Everybody there set their own hours (foreign or otherwise even interns), some telecommuted and showed up once a month to the office, the pay was generous (by indust ry standards) and the work was fun. Yet HR is constantly struggling to fill jobs and people are given several thousand dollar bonus for recommending friends.

1. There is a perception that the IT pool of workers has increased but this is primarily due to the fact that a ever since the 'net boom there has been an increasing pool of unskilled/semi-skilled workers (HTML jockeys, Javascript whizzes, SQL lords with no DBA knowledge, Visual Basic dukes) while the supply of
2. real developers has remained stagnant or dropped. Skim the resumes on Monster.com or Geekfinder or any of those other sites and the amount of people with the aforementioned trivial skills is large but those with experience in writing C/C++/Java, DBAing Oracle/DB2/Sybase, creating distributed components in COM/CORBA/EJB, etc is relatively small.