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Finding an employer who will pay you...

You make it sound so impossible. However...

Today's Going Pay Rate for a Kernel Developer:
* Excellent
* $110K
* Market
* Open
* $110K-$125K
* Competetive
* Open
* Competetive
* Market
* $80K-$95K

And that's just 10 of 56. And look at some of the salaries! And look at the fact that, it would seem, Linux is beginning to be used everywhere. Therefore, it would seem one might look forward to a long, lucrative career as a Kernel hack. No?

Finding an employer who will pay you...

You make it sound so impossible. However...

Today's Going Pay Rate for a Kernel Developer:
* Excellent
* $110K
* Market
* Open
* $110K-$125K
* Competetive
* Open
* Competetive
* Market
* $80K-$95K

And that's just 10 of 56. And look at some of the salaries! And look at the fact that, it would seem, Linux is beginning to be used everywhere. Therefore, it would seem one might look forward to a long, lucrative career as a Kernel hack. No?

I beg to differ you idiot. Before posting so authoritatively why don't you do some homework? While its hard to find concrete evidence that shows which language has market dominance, there are some hints out there:

Doing a search for jobs here will show you that there are 4268 jobs with "Java" in their descriptions with only 366 jobs matching "C#" and 17 jobs matching ".NET"

This shows a graph of the languages in use on sourceforge.

...evidence of .NETs stunning market presence can be seen at your local bookshop: Already there are probably 2x the number of .NET books than there are Java books (seriously, go take a look).

Oh yeah clown? The only thing "stunning" here is your lunacy. Why don't you go take a look at the bookstore and search "Java Programming" then ".NET programming?" I get 601 books for .NET and 1463 for Java. That is over 2x more books for Java.

What bothers me even more than Microsoft's shitty products and nonexistant business ethics is that they have a slew of retarded users who can't provide even a shred of supporting evidence to back the claims they make. Its always stupid shit like "I use MS because no one ever got fired for it" or, "... because fonts look ugly in X". In this case you have an guy pulling shit out of ass that is not even true.

What in the hell was it in his post that prompted you to mod him up so much SlashdotXP?

Ebay is advertising for a Risk Analyst; it must be the tight labor market that's keeping them from filling this position.

Or talk to an international head hunter like Robert Half. Most of the big job sites like Dice and Monster have listings for other countries as well.
Also try talking to HR at Fortune 500 companies which have offices overseas. They're usually thrilled to find knowledgeable people who actually want to travel.

This link shows all the telecommuting jobs on dice.com. Lot of telesales and technology recruiter type jobs, but not many real jobs.

From the premier site for fruitless technical job searching

Mysql: 49 hits
Postgresql: 2 hits

Oracle: 4595 hits

One could argue that the people that post on DICE are dumber than most, but there still doesn't seem to be much of a market for mysql and postgresql.

I take comfort in knowing that there is somebody else out there who is having the exact same life experience as I am.... I just hope yours turns out better. Regardless, here is my story, I hope you can gain at least some wisdom from it.

I graduated with a BS in CS in May 1999. I started my career immediately out of school hacking C++ for a fortune 500. I left after a few months to join a start-up embedded systems company. At the time, I felt that this was my ticket to fortune and glory (after all, when I joined this start up in the middle of 2000, the Dow had just hit it's all time high. It seemed every 20 year old with a CS degree moving to Mountain View or San Jose was becoming a paper millionaire). When I interviewed with them, the Engineering VP reassured me that I was going to become financially secure after the IPO from all of the stock options they were waving in my face. So in my naive enthusiasm I jumped at it (wouldn't you?).

6 months pass, I show up to work one brisk Monday morning in November of 2000, only to be told that I had been laid-off along with all the other engineers and marketing people. They weren't able to secure any more venture capital, and the seed money had dried up. When I started, I was employee number 12, during that 6 month period they ballooned up to 40-something (I lost count) just before the lay-offs.

(I'm almost to the point of the story) So my roommate was also hacking code for them (he was writing Linux device drives and such, he had much cooler tasks than I did) and laid off that same morning. So we headed back to our apartment, played some Counter-Strike to cool off, and tried to figure out where we go from here... That's when we had the idea to start our own software consulting company. We had both worked with consultants, and we both felt that we were as competent and experienced as any consultant we had worked with. So we got out selves a lawyer and an accountant and started Treknetix Software out of our apartment. Our plan was to just write anything for money, then as we get settled in, we would find a specialty to focus on. Well, it turned out, finding clients is at least ten times more difficult than actually engineering a software system. We ended up getting a few contracts, mostly web work. We did a lot of LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) sites. It was during this time that I migrated completely away from Windows and to Linux %100 of the time. But we just weren't getting enough work to pay for rent and lunch meat each month. Slowly, I started to dig into my savings to support myself. I kept telling myself that I'd just borrow from saving now, and everything will be all right after things start really picking up. Well, of course they never did.

With only $14 to my name, I moved back home with mom and dad at the end of 2001. I created a resume, and started applying for jobs like mad. When that didn't work, I went to professional recruitment firms... my college's career office.... local networking events.... nothing worked. I tried all the "best practices" for finding work, namely, treat it like a full time job. Spend at least 8 hours a day looking into positions and sending out resumes. My roommate went off to graduate school... I think I'm going to follow, there is just no work to be had.

Do I regret starting Treknetix? No way! I learned so much about working with non-engineering managers. I've really broken out of that "anti-social" programmer mold from my experience working with clients. This is a good thing. Now only if I could apply this somewhere else.... (bitter anyone?)

My advice to you. Try it. But, if you can, move somewhere you don't have to pay rent, or get married to a rich girl first. DON'T TRY TO LIVE OFF YOUR SAVINGS! I can't stress this enough. That's the only regret I have since graduating college. I should have moved home immediately after the layoff.

This has gone on longer than I would have liked. So to make a long story short: SOMEBODY HIRE ME!!

http://resumes.dice.com/thomasmis

Someone posted on the accu-general@accu.org list a few weeks ago (the Association of C and C++ Users) that he'd been studying the demand for various job skills at employment websites in the U.K.

Suprisingly he found that the demand for C++ programmers was dramatically higher than that for Java programmers, and further that the pay scales offerred for Java programmers were very low.

This is in sharp contrast to the situation at the height of Tulipomania. Sometime in 2000 someone lamented on a post to a C++ newsgroup or list or something that it appeared that the hourly rates available to Java consultants was twice as much as those available to C++ consultants - as much as $250/hour. This despite the fact that C++ is a much more difficult language to master.

I think one thing this indicates is that the market for web server programming has fallen off the edge of the earth. But I'm not sure what all those C++ programmers are being hired for.

News of this study came as a relief to me because I've been doing mostly C++ the last few years, and although I know Java I haven't really put much effort into it. At some points I wondered if I had made a big mistake. But I've gotten very good at programming in C++, and enjoy it a great deal now, and in fact I'm finding demand for my consulting work is starting to pick up noticably.

I don't know how the U.K. results could apply to other countries, but you could check it for the U.S. by searching for various job skills at DICE and counting the number of hits you get for each.

You could do this more systematically by having a robot browse each of the job descriptions on DICE and scraping keywords and payrates out of each of them.

I can't post a link to the ACCU archive because the archives are only available to ACCU members and I'm afraid I let my membership lapse. :-/

The easiest way to see the relationship between certificates and jobs is to do
a search on dice with a tech skill and x flavor
of certificate, then compare the same search without x certificate. I get about
1 certificate job listed for every 20 jobs. Certificates do, however; drive up
the prices of training.

1. Stop giving it away for free, or just provide the source under a different license than the GPL; for example, make the software available for free, but you only get the source if you *buy* the product. Of course, then you'll lose the advantage of "many eyeballs", <troll>but hey, who audits all that code anyway?</troll>
2. Ask for donations. By all accounts, Mandrake and TransGaming are doing reasonably well with this approach. (See my other post below.)
3. Do the coding, not to get paid directly, but in order to increase your chances of getting a better-paying job. There was a very interesting study linked a few months ago on /., analyzing the countries and backgrounds of contributors to GNOME. The observation was that a disproportionate percentage of open source contributors are from countries that have developing IT industries, not established ones, so his conclusion was that the coders were contributing in order to develop their skills and establish their reputations.

The fact that it's not really a direct comparison (because a RH box contains the identical GPL'ed bits to the free downloadable version, and StarOffice is a closed-source version that presumably has some value-add above and beyond the free OpenOffice) only makes your question more intriguing: why do people pay for the RH box when you can get it for free?

Now, I've never bought a RedHat box, but I have bought a Mandrake box. Let's look at what I get by buying that Mandrake box:
- All the same free bits as the downloadable version, but on a nice high-quality CD
- Some additional commercial applications / demos
- A nicely printed and bound manual (invaluable for when you're installing on a clean machine - you can't exactly go online for help during the install!)
- A technical support number
- The satisfaction of putting your money where your mouth is, by directly supporting a worthy effort

Now, let's look at what I might get by buying the StarOffice box:
- Mostly the same bits as the freely downloadable version, but possibly with some changes that might have improved it, or might have added some bugs - I can't know for sure, since it's closed-source
- Possibly some more filters or fonts or something, but I can't tell for sure, since it's closed-source
- the ADABAS database, which may or may not be more or less functional than (say) MySQL, but I can't tell for sure, since it's closed-source
- A nicely printed and bound manual, which isn't quite as indispensable during the install as Mandrake's
- A technical support number (?)
- A vague sense of guilt that somehow Sun is freeloading off the efforts of the OpenOffice team to make a quick buck and advance its vendetta against MS.

I think you can see that Mandrake's (and by extension, Red Hat's) "value proposition" (i.e what they say you'll get if you buy the product) is much clearer than Sun's.

That being said, I still think that Sun charging is a boon for StarOffice. Why? Because, for better or worse, many (if not most) people consider something that you pay for is necessarily more valuable than something you get for free. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but it's not entirely unreasonable - there are a number of consumer laws (IANAL&PWNB) that automatically provide certain guarantees of quality for items that you purchase, regardless of any included slip of paper that claims "as is, no warranty, etc. etc."

But even more to the point (and still on-topic!), as ESR and RMS actually agree, the main "value proposition" in Open Source isn't free (gratis) versus $$, it's open versus closed, or as RMS would say, free vs. non-free. To use one of OSS's more common examples, if I had the choice between two otherwise identical vehicles, but one had the hood welded shut, I wouldn't buy the "closed-engine" version unless it were significantly cheaper. That holds even though I'm completely mechanically disinclined, and don't have even the remotest interest in tinkering with a vehicle! Why? Because I have a brother-in-law who's very good with cars, and I know I can ask for his help if I need it.
Let me make the analogy more clear: as far as vehicles go, "closed-source" is actually a negative value for me, even if I have no real interest in ever looking at the "source"; just having that option is enough.

All that said, I'm probably going to "buy" StarOffice after all -- I'm going to join the Mandrake Silver Club, even though I just downloaded and burned the 8.2 ISO's, and currently, the only tangible difference between the Standard membership and the Silver membership is the ability to download SO6. I haven't done it yet, since I'm out of work and broke at the moment (shameless self-promotion), but I will in the next month or so. Why? Primarily because of that last item in the checklist above; I want to put my money where my mouth is and support worthy software development. How about you?

I still prefer using dice.com, because of its advanced search options. It it looks like (from my own search parameters) all of the jobs that are listed on AJB are also on dice; plus dice has a lot more listings.

Now IDEA, there is a seriously *great* app for developer productivity. I love it. It's the first development environment that has kept me from XEmacs/JDE for more than a couple weeks. Unfortunately, it's not free. I've been riding along on EAP and eval licenses for a couple months, and my last eval license is about to expire. I'm out of work, so don't have the US$200 to cough up for a license, but you can bet I will as soon as I can.

cheers,
Chris
ICQ UIN#21740987
http://resumes.dice.com/objectnetworks

It runs on linux, but looks like ass, and is slow. It runs and looks *great* on win2k, though.

Until the very latest devel builds, it was a Motif app (*gag*). They've just started work on a GTK+ version, but it's broooooken. In lots of ways.

I intend to start working/playing with it, but I'm not a C guy, I'm a Java guy, and can't contribute much to the core of the editor, I'm afraid.

Conceptually, it's brilliant, and the greatest thing since sliced kielbasa.

cheers,
Chris
http://resumes.dice.com/objectnetworks

Anyway, the contract programmer has to be the best deal I've had. I got burnt out of the salary position and am now making a very good living contracting out.

First off, use an agency. Until you get your name and contracting experience out they are your best bet. They know more people than you ever could.

Don't count on telecommuting until you have proven yourself to a company, in whatever way they want. Sometimes this sucks, othertimes it's quite easy.

Be fierce with your money, keep in mind that if you are going through an agency plan on them getting 30% of your pay for every hour of work you do (You make $70, they make $30 and bill the client $100 per hour). Make them work for you, not the other way around. Never let them forget that you are their client, and it's their responsibility to keep you happy as well as the corporate client. Make them pay you well, not what you think you are worth. You will get more.

Also, use the internet resources as much as possible. dice.com is my personal favorite, as well as most of the recruiters I know.

Don't ever expect overtime, if you do you will be disappointed. You will work 8 hours and only 8 hours, most people dont want to pay for your overtime work. Nor holidays, expect to be forced to take that day off without compensation -- while this is technically illegal under an agency (see FLSA actions for hourly employees) it is the common practice.

Definitely pursue the contracting thing, it's the best thing I ever did. While it may not be right for you, I wish you the best of luck.

And an organization that forces everyone into the same little mold is so doomed as to be almost pitiable. Almost. Not everyone is their most productive *exactly* between 8:30AM and 5:00PM. Not everyone does their best work in a suit and tie, or even "business casual" (cough, excuse me while I conform) or in a cube farm with loudmouthed inconsiderate salespeople around them. Some of the big companies are trying really hard to get it, to understand that you can't cram people into a mold. I'm a contractor working for one of them -- they're trying. There's a lounge, foosball table, there are outings frequently, hours are _very_ flexible, people are bringing their kids into work... someone down the hall just threw a party for what appeared to be a child's birthday. Now _THAT_ is impressive. Little, inexpensive things like that (ok, so 15 employees stopped working for an hour, but in the long run they're much happier and much more productive as a result) are actually wise investments for an organization.

Of course, they treat contractors like shit, but what company doesn't? The contractors get the shitwork that none of the perm staff want.

BTW: the URL in my profile is dead. I am also looking for a permanent position (I'm SO sick of contracting, money isn't everything) in the Nashua, NH area. resume here.

As a fellow of conscience, though, I must attempt to dissuade you from this path. SCO may be cheap, but Linux and BSD are free and come with tons of apps (in the distros and ports, respectively). By contrast, if you want emacs (or gcc, or anything) on SCO, you're either buying a CD of precompiled GNU stuff from SCO or you're compiling it yourself. If you need a Linux/BSD CD, you can get one for under $5 from cheapbytes.com or myriad other vendors. If you absolutely must learn the quirks of a proprietary OS, do yourself a favor and pick up Solaris for Intel, which is also available for about $20 (to students, developers, and home users), without the SCO enfeeblements. Furthermore, Sun is liable to remain financially solvent for the period of time it takes you to attain proficiency with their system.

Ask yourself "Why am I doing this?" If your aim is masochistic self-gratification, then I cannot recommend a better solution than an SVR3-based proprietary Intel UNIX that "features" Open DeathTrap. However, if you want to be productive or have fun, Linux or BSD will suit you much better. (Bear in mind that most free software is developed on either Linux or BSD -- even though most stuff is portable, you're much more likely to have luck getting random stuff to run on a free unix. That's not FUD; just pragmatism.)

Perhaps you think that mad SCO skills will make you an employable, in-demand UNIX pimp. However, if you thought that, you'd be horribly wrong. A quick dice.com search revealed 578 jobs with the keyword "SCO". That might seem like a lot until you see that dice has 6,195 "Linux" positions and over 15,000 "Solaris" jobs in its database. (A quick vgrep of these results also reveals that Linux or Solaris nerds are paid a lot better than SCO Acheivers.)

There's also that little matter of the vultures circling around SCO, as any number of /. articles will attest.

In any case, good luck picking up the UNIX skills (wherever you choose to hone them). The community is great, and you're in for a fun ride!

~wog

As a fellow of conscience, though, I must attempt to dissuade you from this path. SCO may be cheap, but Linux and BSD are free and come with tons of apps (in the distros and ports, respectively). By contrast, if you want emacs (or gcc, or anything) on SCO, you're either buying a CD of precompiled GNU stuff from SCO or you're compiling it yourself. If you need a Linux/BSD CD, you can get one for under $5 from cheapbytes.com or myriad other vendors. If you absolutely must learn the quirks of a proprietary OS, do yourself a favor and pick up Solaris for Intel, which is also available for about $20 (to students, developers, and home users), without the SCO enfeeblements. Furthermore, Sun is liable to remain financially solvent for the period of time it takes you to attain proficiency with their system.

Ask yourself "Why am I doing this?" If your aim is masochistic self-gratification, then I cannot recommend a better solution than an SVR3-based proprietary Intel UNIX that "features" Open DeathTrap. However, if you want to be productive or have fun, Linux or BSD will suit you much better. (Bear in mind that most free software is developed on either Linux or BSD -- even though most stuff is portable, you're much more likely to have luck getting random stuff to run on a free unix. That's not FUD; just pragmatism.)

Perhaps you think that mad SCO skills will make you an employable, in-demand UNIX pimp. However, if you thought that, you'd be horribly wrong. A quick dice.com search revealed 578 jobs with the keyword "SCO". That might seem like a lot until you see that dice has 6,195 "Linux" positions and over 15,000 "Solaris" jobs in its database. (A quick vgrep of these results also reveals that Linux or Solaris nerds are paid a lot better than SCO Acheivers.)

There's also that little matter of the vultures circling around SCO, as any number of /. articles will attest.

In any case, good luck picking up the UNIX skills (wherever you choose to hone them). The community is great, and you're in for a fun ride!

~wog

As a fellow of conscience, though, I must attempt to dissuade you from this path. SCO may be cheap, but Linux and BSD are free and come with tons of apps (in the distros and ports, respectively). By contrast, if you want emacs (or gcc, or anything) on SCO, you're either buying a CD of precompiled GNU stuff from SCO or you're compiling it yourself. If you need a Linux/BSD CD, you can get one for under $5 from cheapbytes.com or myriad other vendors. If you absolutely must learn the quirks of a proprietary OS, do yourself a favor and pick up Solaris for Intel, which is also available for about $20 (to students, developers, and home users), without the SCO enfeeblements. Furthermore, Sun is liable to remain financially solvent for the period of time it takes you to attain proficiency with their system.

Ask yourself "Why am I doing this?" If your aim is masochistic self-gratification, then I cannot recommend a better solution than an SVR3-based proprietary Intel UNIX that "features" Open DeathTrap. However, if you want to be productive or have fun, Linux or BSD will suit you much better. (Bear in mind that most free software is developed on either Linux or BSD -- even though most stuff is portable, you're much more likely to have luck getting random stuff to run on a free unix. That's not FUD; just pragmatism.)

Perhaps you think that mad SCO skills will make you an employable, in-demand UNIX pimp. However, if you thought that, you'd be horribly wrong. A quick dice.com search revealed 578 jobs with the keyword "SCO". That might seem like a lot until you see that dice has 6,195 "Linux" positions and over 15,000 "Solaris" jobs in its database. (A quick vgrep of these results also reveals that Linux or Solaris nerds are paid a lot better than SCO Acheivers.)

There's also that little matter of the vultures circling around SCO, as any number of /. articles will attest.

In any case, good luck picking up the UNIX skills (wherever you choose to hone them). The community is great, and you're in for a fun ride!

~wog

I found an animated, no-cache, zero-age, self-reloading, web bug on dice.com that has a web bug at the bottom of the page (you can see it easily at the very end of the HTML source). The fact that it is animated, with no caching, and instant expire set causes it to keep reloading, which not only tells them where you visit, but also how long you leave the page up. And it's a f---ing obnoxious annoying 5086 bytes that keeps being downloaded over and over.

Block hitbox.com (all subdomain names, too) from your web proxies!
Maybe I should make this my new sig.

Link first sighted in NTK

However, at the end they recomend four job portals: Linux.com, Linux Today, User Friendly's GeekFinder and Linux.org.au. I agree with the first two, and (since I'm in North America) have no valid opinion on Linux.org.au.

The problem with Geek Finder is that it is really just a front for Dice.com. Unlike all the other resources mentioned, dice.com charges employers for listings, instead of being community-based and advertiser-supported.

Instead, I would recomend the following additional job portals, where I have actually posted jobs:

• Superexpert.com: not great, but it does host linux jobs.
• JustLinux: a smaller Linux portal, with a nice jobs page.
• Free Software Jobs Page: This is the GNU jobs page. It is strictly for free software jobs, so only hard-core open source jobs get posted there.

Crispin
-----
Crispin Cowan, CTO, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Free Hardened Linux Distribution
Jobs!

The average IT operations type job inside the Redmond Bubble is somewhere between 50K and 70K, DOE and certs., + stock and bennies. Cost of Living is not as high as the Valley or NY, but is higher than, say, the midwest (average apt. goes for $700/mo). Lots of work here too.

CHECK DICE! Lots of great jobs, easy to use. WWAAAYYY better than Monster.

Irish

schools that offer programming in languages like ColdFusion, ASP, JavaScript, Java, and Perl, along with courses like system administration, unix, databases, and networking.

First, almost all of those courses are offered at the school I'm currently (re-)attending. I'm taking Java and Unix System Administration. My professor is the head of the internet group at Wells Fargo Bank. The school is City College of San Francisco.

If you just want to learn those specific skills, check out your local community college, or just pick up a book and learn it on your own. At your age, you should have no problem picking up a new language or system from reading a book and playing with it on your own. (I didn't when I was your age.)

But, if you don't already understand the concepts, don't concentrate on learning a language. Learn the ideas behind it. If you don't understand the concepts, memorizing the syntax for Java, Perl, or even COBOL won't help you.

As others have said, get an education, not a skill.

But, when you ask about:

A College that deals with all computers all the time with cutting edge machines and cutting edge topics.

You're missing something. You can go to some place like MIT and learn all that really cool stuff like robotics and AI and all that, but when you get your Bachelors and start perusing DICE for jobs, you won't find too many of them out there.

Despite what another poster said, there are still an awful lot of COBOL jobs out there, as well as the newer stuff like Java. Not too many positions for people to design robots that can destroy other robots, at least not if you're fresh out of college.

So keep that in mind -- big uni's may have lots of really cool stuff, but they may not be what the real world is using.

On the other hand, there is a huge benefit to knowing more than just technical stuff. I can't begin to count the number of times the years spent hanging out in my dad's CPA office has helped me as a programmer.

Even stuff like literature and music help -- Having an extensive vocabulary and excellent grammar/spelling skills have helped make me a successful consultant, and my eclectic musical background has helped sharpen my logic skills.

So, to sum up, if you need specific skills, go to a community college. (I was having some trouble with learning Java on my own, (even after nearly 20 years in the business) but I am doing much better in the classroom setting.)

But, if you need a general education, both technically and otherwise, consider a four-year school. Concentrate on the concepts, and don't skimp on the other subjects.

You nailed it, man. Linux kiddies wake up! Go to www.dice.com
and see make you should be making.

• American Banker
• Americas Job Bank
• Black Enterprise
• Business Week
• Career Pulse
• CareerBuilder*
• CareerCity
• CareerExchange
• CareerMosaic
• Caree rPath
• CareerWeb
• CareerFuture
• CitySearch
• CNET
• Dallas Morning News
• DICE
• EDN
• Hispanic Online
• HotJobs
• Internet.com
• JobOptions
• Monster
• MSBET
• NationJob
• Phillips
• QuestLink
• SelectJobs
• Test and Measurement World
• USAToday
• WETA
• WomenConnect
• Yahoo

In terms of allowing people who want to work on particular projects and get paid for it, a la DICE, this is a great connecting project. In terms of being different from other systems which have been established, well, it has Mr. O'Reilly. Love him or hate him (or even be neutral towards him), he has a great way of linking open source projects to the corporate and government concerns which have a the money and desire to pay for them.

This won't be for everyone, but for those of us who want to be able to work on particular open-source projects and still be able to pay the rent (we can't all win MacArthur Genius Grants, people), this could be a big boon. Remember, Mr. O'Reilly == Corporate Acceptance.

K