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Even Programmers Get the Job Search Blues
Andrew Leonard writes "Seems to me that Slashdotters might be interested in Salon's cover story today about the tightening job market for programmers. DISCLAIMER: I edited and assigned this story, so I am not an impartial advocate. But I still think it's pretty good." Andrew's right - it is a good story. Things are changing right now - but I'd still rather be a programmer then most other jobs right now.
Open source programmers create general-purpose tools. Company employees get paid to use these tools to produce solutions to company-specific problems and needs.
Thanks to open source, companies can get more return on their IT investment and therefore will put more money into staffing.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Why? Because I've got the maturity and social skills to back my technical skills, and some seriously broad-based troubleshooting skills.
That's the main point I wanted to contest. You seemed to say that simply because you were older, you had the above attributes. You know as well as I do, that this is simply not true.
Quite a few friends of mine could rightly argue that they are more mature than their older counterparts on many occasions. People are different, period. I won't work for any company that uses my age against me. So far, it hasn't been an issue. But the person who started this thread (not hiring under 25) proves my point. Age does not mean level-headedness, maturity, or knowledge. Experience is useless unless you take the time to learn from it.
That said, I've outcoded people twice my age and set up coding reviews and standardization along with documentation systems that everyone has liked so far. The Oracle DBA I replaced had a penchant for riding Harleys and smearing Donuts on the screen of our project leader, along with womanizing and so on. He was twice my age, and if you even try to argue he had a higher level of maturity, I'd laugh in your face. I did all of this just after I turned 22. If anyone said I was a less capable employee than our last DBA, I would have promptly tried to prove them wrong. If that didn't work, I'd quit.
I don't care if that's how the world is, or how most employers think. I know what's right, and I'll stick by my guns.
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Hey iso,
;-)
Just wanted to say hello from Cowtown to another raver
Frankly writing Chess program does not require a lot of hard core skills; all you have to come up with is decent search algorithm ( alpha beta with cutoffs will do ) and you are set.
The hard part is to come up with decent database of moves. You need somebody with expert skills in Chess.
Thers's always your local McDonald's ;>
Um, how could you go bankrupt and expect to keep your home?
I came back to work after New Years' to find that the VP of R&D was fired from his position. It didn't take long after this for the company to reorganize things. Several programmers were let go, including myself.
"Well," I thought, "this should be no biggie...I'm a Java developer, with solid SQL and HTML skills. I should find a job in no time."
It took me two months to find new work.
Why? Because the major employer in my area (Intel) is not hiring, and a whole bunch of start-ups are laying off programmers. As a result, Java people with 5 years of experience are having to settle for jobs that they are vastly overqualified for, or to relocate to the Bay Area. Having had only two years' Java experience, and only academic experience in other languages (C++ and C), I was stuck facing a very difficult market indeed.
What saved me was persistence (I really wanted this job and I kept bugging the HR person until I got an interview), a strong math background, and enthusiasm for the technology that this particular company is working with.
This experience has taught me never to rely on what I learn from my job again. If I'm doing Java development, I should be programming open source software in C++. If I'm doing C++ development, I should be practising my Java skills (and maybe contributing new libraries to the language). If I'm doing web development, I should be doing documentation on the side. Etc. Even if you're good at what you do, be ready to do something else very quickly. Java could be passing fad; Linux someday a bad memory for the Microsofties. Or Windows could go the way of the dodo bird, and many MCSEs will find themselves screwed. You just don't know. There are no sure things in this sector.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
But unlike them I'm qualified. :)
I agree with others on here...good qualified people are finding work. I did, and am happy. It just took a bit longer than usual this time.
Well, fuck 'em. I'm not interviewing anyone under 25.
My company does not have a foosball table. We do not give everyone a state-of-the-art laptop and a top-of-the-line desktop machine. We don't have frequent scheduled "team building" junkets. And finally, we will not pay you what Viant paid you for six months before they laid you off. I'm not wasting my time interviewing another "bright kid" only to find them shocked and dismayed that we aren't throwing cash and prizes at them.
We do offer the opportunity to work in Perl and Java coding next-generation telecommunications products. We are open-source friendly, if not a bit zealous. We value ingenuity and innovation, not buzzwords and technopolitics. We are only one or two quarters away from being the first company to be profitable in our market space, so our stock options will actually be worth something when they vest. Unfortunately, anyone who wasn't in the job market before 1998 doesn't understand that not all jobs are cool and doesn't believe that stock options will ever make them money.
I'm all about living in castles in the sky; I just know you have to build them first. If you're still looking for VCs to buy one for you, then get the fuck out of my resume inbox.
yep, it's a happy little symbiotic relationship we produce: kind of like the host-parasite, but in cubicles. but hey, it's a living, right?
- j
Commercial real estate has been in a free fall. Last spring, if you wanted to be in SOMA, some people were paying as much as $9-$12/sq ft a month. Currently, small space in SOMA is going for $1.75-$2.50/sq ft. a month, and is constantly being reduced.
Flats may take longer to go down, but here in potrero hill I've seen several 2 bedroom places with views going for the $2000-$2200 range, which i don't think yuo could have found six months ago at all. While It's lagged a bit, I know a bunch of people leaving the city currently. I wouldn't be suprised if another 9 months takes a lot of residential rent down by another $500 or more.
Well we can only hope
but...a lawyer? for chrissakes man, turn back before it's too late!
I've interviewed a lot of people over the last three months and what amazes me about this process is that so many highly educated people have clearly never read a resume book or studied the literature on job interviews and how to ace them. It isn't enough to be a good programmer and to know just enough C++ or java to get by. If you don't know how to sell yourself you're going to have a very hard time of it.
Things likely to cause an interview to go badly:
1. Don't write a resume over two pages. I won't read it. The people I work with won't read it. The people I live with won't read it. When my boss is screeing candidates he looks at hundreds of resumes. You can bet he isn't reading anything more than the first paragraph or two.
2. Don't swear on a stack of bibles that you know C++ if you don't. I can't tell you how many times I've interviewed somebody with eight years of experience in C++ who can't tell me what STL is. Don't claim Object Oriented knowledge without first finding out how to read a UML diagram. It's the tools of the trade and if you don't know them I will find out.
3. Don't bring your cell phone into the interview. It shows a lack of respect for the people who are taking time out of their day to talk to you. When I see a cell phone I ask myself: If that rings, is he going to answer it?
4. Smile. If you don't look friendly people will remember you in a negative view.
5. Don't lay down in the chair. Nuff said.
6. Take a breath mint. If I can smell your breath across the table I am certainly not going to want to sit next to you for six hours working on a problem.
I know there are a lot of engineers and technical people looking for work, and there might be more before there are fewer. Remember that you are trying to sell yourself to work with these people.
One more thing. Don't claim expertease on a language, tool, or platform unless you can build it, write it, or design it. Everybody I know is an expert at something and I guarantee that I can find somebody who knows your subject better than you do. It is better to claim to be proficient but to know where you need work. That's honest and it won't get you into trouble.
Beware the wood elf!!!
One engineer I work with was fed up with his law firm not letting him work on technology cases like he wanted, so he became an engineer. With a bit more school, I have no doubt I could do the reverse.
That's exactly what I'm doing; taking my still-damp BS in Comp. Sci, and going to law school. And I get some really funny looks, everytime someone hears about it....
Real programmers (guilty!) dont work, they hax0r banks and credit cards.
P2P is not going to open up many new investment horizons. Napster was created to skirt copyright laws so that Napster didn't have to be the one violating the law. Now that it looks like that's not going to fly with the courts, I don't think that there's going to be much of any money made in P2P.
go to college kid.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
But REAL ENGINEERS, with degrees, and experience actually SHIPPING real products that have made it out to the market, will be snatched up in an instant.
The guy in the Salon article was a Web monkey, without any real skills to begin with.
Don't be silly. Unemployment in many countries (including the US) is at or near all-time low. It's never been easier to find a job (except maybe a year ago, which is irrelevant since that was an aberration).
Now you are being silly and confusing aggregate statistics with what it's like for an individual to get a job. The unemployment rate acts as one of a number of factors that help you judge the state of a regional economy, but it doesn't effect your job prospects much. It's not like you can walk into an office and say:
"Sir, the unemployment rate today is 4.1%. You have gone and not hired 20 out of the last 20 applicants. If you do not hire me, I will have to report you to the authorities, as you will have violated the unemployment rate."
-Andrew
nope, a recession is when you're out of a job and a depression is when i'm out of a job
"Weasling out of work is important to learn; it is what separates humans from animals. Except for weasels."
Several questions come to mind:
* How are your grades? Yes, I know, grades are not all that important in The Grander Scheme of Life, but during "slow" job market times if you have decent (B-ish or better) grades, and particularly if your GPA in your major/minor is good, this can at least get your resume a second look.
* Do you have any previous experience? If you've had previous internships, this should help your case tremendously. If not, any relevant experience can be spun into the proper context. (For example, have you done any programming, web design, sys admin, etc anywhere on campus, either paid or volunteer? Feature this experience prominently on your resume.)
Also, have you considered doing an internship *after* you graduate? Even in slower economic times, many companies are willing to hire interns. It's a win-win: you gain valuable experience, and the company gets to "try you out" without the initial commitment. If you play your cards right, and do well, often these internships will turn into permanent positions.
There's always the graduate school option too. Going for a Masters for a couple of years is not a bad thing; in fact, in many cases it can improve your standing in the job market. If you do go, try to intern or get some other practical experience along the way.
Above all, be patient. Companies need good technical people, even (especially) now. Keep looking and you'll find something good eventually.
Good luck!
Dr. Stress
Woah! Perl Entry level? Where in the world did you see that at ANY pay level? I'm serious!
ErikZ
eazolan@davesworld.net
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Actually, they have paid me to install, customize and smooth the rough edges off of several open source applications. And they'll keep doing it as long as my selection of applications is appropriate and cost-effective. Open source is my ally. FUD is my enemy
My wife is like Unix. Lots of commands. Lots of arguments.
it's like the microsoft support guy at my last job said: "microsoft employees aren't allowed to look at open source because of the severe licensing restrictions."
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
:)
I don't know who said it, but it's in the Slashdot cookie file somewhere
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
grep "lotsamoney" jobs
Now I just have to figure out how to finish school and work full time. I've got two years in, I checked the other day and I'm two GE classes short of an A.S. is math.
Ahh, A nice legally binding electronic signature...
There are jobs out there. I didn't have a real hard time finding one, it's just fewer than before. I don't totally blame it on the flood of paper certified admins because there are fewer high end jobs too.
My point is, I think you'll see the jobs and salaries evaporate before the rent goes down. One will always lag behind the other.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
If you read the article the gist of it is you can't know vbscript/javascript and expect to get a good job. It takes skills to pay the bills, The days of everybody and their mom getting a programming job because they could run frontpage and read are over....
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?mode_u=off&mod e_w=on&site=www.ebay.com&submit=Examine
That link is current as of right now.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
You must be kidding me...?
If less is charged for software, less money is made on software; less money exists to pay people working with it.
Of cause, the marketplace for programmers will not shrink to zero but it will be allot smaller than today.
Companies will never hire more programmers because they have more money, you must have some problem with your view on reality. They hire them because programming has do be done and want someone to do it.
In a few years there will be allot of people willing to do it for free (or for very little) and then it makes no sense what so ever to PAY people to do programming.
This country is attracting great brains. That's why you are going back to Europe.
Your post gives the impression that you are an obnoxious person and probably socially inept, too. Otherwise you could have used your network of contacts to land yourself a good job and sponsorship. If you are so good, someone among your acquaintances would have referred you.
I have seen many technically competent candidates being passed over for employment because they had too much of an ego or were unable to communicate on a social level.
I have also seen many good foreigners being supported by their American contacts (professors in college, fellow students or coworkers). But first they had to prove their worth; Americans won't support you if they think you would make a bad employee.
Please go back to Europe.
I disagree.
Programming has gotten allot easier, whilst the programs themselves have gotten more complex.
Back in the day, there was no such thing as open source. So seeing other people's code was a rare thing. People were not very open to sharing code either. As well, to program something well you needed a dash of assembler here and there. When I tell young programmers I wrote my own 32 bit protected mode extender for dos, in 100% assembler on a 386 they look at me funny. That level of knowledge and understanding of the computer and processor are no longer needed to make complex programs.
I look at programs made in Visual Basic, that are very nice. Impressive even. When I see the source code and how to create it, it makes me laugh because it is all so easy. The programming languages, and availability of other peoples code has made programming in itself much easier. Its the programs that are more complex, and they are more complex because its easier to program, and we have more resources to play with.
Learning a new programming language 20 years ago, was going through god awful books written by people who should have never written pamphlets let alone books. Manually typing out thousands of lines of code examples in backs of books, and doing a whole boatload of guess work. Or reading a engineers book about a processor and extrapolating programming information from it. Now I can just download someone else's source code and learn from it. I learned Turbo Pascal (long time ago) from just looking at other people's programs. I felt like I was cheating. Like I wasn't really 'learning' the language. But that is how people learn languages now, because they can. That wasn't there before.
Its not just gotten easier, its gotten WAY easier.
ideal; model tiny; codeseg; org 100h; start: cli; hlt; ret; ENDS; END start
Ahh the delusions of youth...
-JS (who remembers job hunting in '93)
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
in the words of the Wassup! guys: true, true.
GRE doesn't use a port. GRE is a protocol on top of IP, such as TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc. I'm pretty sure the protocol identifier is 47 (i.e, GRE is protocol 47 in the TCP/IP protocol suite). I believe GRE is the IP Tunneling protocol MS used under another name, which of course I've forgotten now.
Buildings have already been solved. You have your 8 foot ceiling, your door and entryway, your bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms. Each of these has a certain standard size +- 20%. Most of archetecture is really interior decorating. Programming would be similar to architecture if all programming jobs were e-commerce websites with a shopping cart and a relational database of products with an inventory of 1000-2000 items, and which could handle 100 - 200 simultaneous users.
It's a fact of life that people get pushed into bankrupcy -- they might lose their job, have a kid unexpectedly, have a spouse die, get injured and miss work, or a thousand other possibilities unrelated to just overextending themselves.
The new bill on just passed by the House puts credit card companies at the front of the line -- right after child support (although that's an amendment, originally child support was second) -- in a bankrupcy. People will lose their homes, their primary modes of transportation, health care, and even *go hungry* because the credit companies will, by law, have to come first; before paying the heating bill, before buying groceries.
These huge credit companies do just fine, and they have existing ways to protect themselves -- credit reports and credit ratings, reposessions, and they *do* get some reimbusement in the case of a bankrupcy. They make huge profits now, and this will just make those profits even bigger and do so at the expense of hurting real live people.
I can't decide if you're a troll, an inexperienced kid whose never known someone fallen on hard times, or just some asshole who thinks that MBNA and Citibank need additional protection at the cost of human misery. Whichever you are, you make me sick.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I have over 7 years of c experience and am haveing a hell of a time finding a job. Does anyone know about any jobs in Ca. morganglake@netscape.com
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." -Steve Wozniak
I agree with the majority here that real programmers will survive, and I speak from experience. I got my first co-op job in 1982 in programming ( '82 was the middle of a recession in Canada), and survived at least two more economical downturns (I'm losing count at this point).
I was never out of work for more than a couple of months at a time, and that's because I'm really picky about where I work.
Right now I've got a good gig, but they've already had one round of lay-offs, and if the numbers don't look good soon, they'll probably have another. In which case, I might be looking again, but I don't think it will be for long. I've built some fairly complex systems in my time and kept my skills up to date, and that seems to be what counts. Just my two cents (or 1.33 U.S.)
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
That had to be intentional on his part - notice it's the last sentance of every paragraph. Nice.
I think it was rather nice of Salon to let one of the unemployed Techies they interviewed make use of their office computers so he could print out his resume.
no offense mate, but there are MILLIONS of people who code Java, SQL, and HTML. i'm an engineering director and i immediately 86 any resume that doesn't have anything beyond Java, SQL, or HTML. why? because most Java only programmers don't really understand computers all that well, they don't understand memory management, file management, load issues, etc. note, i didn't say ALL. but most. i hire software engineers not java programmers. i hire folks who can code in any language because they understand what's going on. i hire folks that understand computer science theory and software hackery.
my team currently codes in perl, C, java, SQL, HTML, Javascript, i.e. whatever is needed for the tasks at hand.
--
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Disneyland has hew job openenings in Fantasyland....
--- Every day I am forced to add another to the list of people who can kiss my ass...
you are learned and wise, sir.
BSCS in May 01
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
But finding a job is another matter. The people who receive your resume generally don't know a thing about you, so they'll likely judge you entirely on the buzzwords that you include. Then, if you get an interview, your chance of being hired is based largely on whether they like your personality (and maybe even appearance) better than other candidates.
First off, it's "recession", not "ression".
Second, if you want to make a point, take off the anti-establishment hat and speak like an adult. You're in your 40s according to your web site; act like it.
Third, exactly what does Bush's tax cut have to do with technology companies not wanting to hire programmers? The slump in the tech sector started long before Clinton left office. Bush's tax cut proposal has as much to do with the tech slump as my cat's litterbox.
The tech slump is caused by a lot of over zealous hiring and hype in the 1999-2000 time frame. What we're seeing is a coming back to Earth for techies. It's not pretty, but so what? Consider it a correction.
And stop blaming Bush for every stinkin' thing that you don't like... I'm not a Bush fan either, but I don't blame him for everything going wrong with our economy. I consider this more the fallout from phony Clinton-era tech euphoria than anything else.
The other thing that everyone is guilty of is throwing things on their resume they have marginal experience with. The medical profession has gotten very good at having strict specialties... and that's something the computer industry needs to work on. Looking at IT/IS resumes would make you believe everyone is an expert at every buzzword. Even more -- everyone can manage a team of 15 and implement with the best of them. It just doesn't add up.
I believe that is the core problem really -- IT/IS resumes are in the majority so grossly overstated or inspecific that the person hiring off them has to create arbitrary filters. And one of them is to knock off the list anyone junior grade. I'm guilty of that, but at the end of the day if the junior grade asks for as much compensation as the rest of the crowd....
Math has a lot to do with programming, especially if you analyze algorithms and optimize them. This is how you discover that, for large arrays of values, Quicksort is way faster than insertion sort, which is faster than bubble sort, and why. (Check out this site for a demo.) This is how you find really clever ways to speed up multiplying really huge matrices, and when the payoff is big enough to warrant using the "clever" algorithm.
Granted, you don't need the piece of paper (i.e., the degree) to have the mathematical knowledge. But the degree is a credential that lets other people know that you know what you're talking about, to some extent. It's a yardstick, however flawed it might be. This is why many employers in my area are now eschewing self-taught programmers for those with real Comp Sci (or related) degrees.
On a personal note, I have noticed that many self-taught programmers feel they are somehow superior to those who actually busted their chops learning things like compiler theory. They often sneer at those of us who wasted our time getting that piece of paper. But you know what? Those of us from theory land often have this knack for finding better ways of doing things, and we even (gasp!) have some very nice skills at creating good abstraction frameworks. The down side is, we sometimes don't follow-through issues to their logical conclusion. After all, in academia, as long as something works, you've proven that it's doable in theory. No sense wasting time making it better, when you could be pursuing your next big problem to solve.
To speak to the original point, I think there will always be room in this world for the highly skilled programmer, someone who has both a theoretical foundation and the industry experience to make it practical.
Not only that, but have you seen some of their code? Sheesh! I find it *extremely* rare to find good HTML code anywhere.
And how many of those website cracks have been due to a poorly-written CGI?
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
The laws of statics don't change over time; technology does. If gravity's pull doubled every 18 months, you'd have a lot of "legacy" buildings crashing to the ground.
Yeah, or maybe we'll just see more corporate consolidation and an increase in the gap between rich and poor (with an attendant middle-east conflict to distract people from the reality.)
sometimes a picture IS worth a thousand words
HTML isn't programming. It's "declaring" or "writing", but not programming. You don't need the discipline, the logical thought process, or the math skills you do for procedural/functional programming.
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
No kiddding. Companies, especially big corporations will fire you for no particular reason, especially if you're younger than most of your peers. Your qualifications and skill don't count for shit with the corporations. I speak from experience here.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Our company recently hired an excellent programmer from overseas on a H1-B. We are giving him a normal software engineers pay and doing our best to make him comfortable here in the US.
We hired him before the job market loosened up when we were having no luck finding anyone with talent.
Just because some unethical people are taking advantage doesn't mean everyone is. IMO we should encourage any talent from other contries to move here. It might mean some competition for jobs, but we are better off with as much hardworking talent as we can find.
As a college student expecting to graduate with a bachelors in computer science this May, I'm rather worried about the tightening job market. Sure, experienced geeks may be able to ride this out, but I'm finding that companies that would previously hire almost anyone are getting really picky now when they recruit at universities. I've had some real difficulties and I'm worried that I may remain unemployed after I graduate.
Any ideas on scaring up more job opportunities?
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
We would love to hire more people, but it is darn hard - few people have the level of talent and self control needed to do what we do. We know they exist, because we do hire them when we find them, but people with our skill set are rare, even in the DotComImplosion. We also know how hard it is to find them, because we have had open job requisitions since I started. There is more work than people to do it right.
I do have sympathy for the unemployed programmers who were hoping to get by on HTML and Perl. Unemployment is not fun at all. It is, though, a clear sign that it is time to learn new skills. I try to read a new tech book every few months, and at least a few good tech papers every month, and I always feel that I am behind. I am aghast at people I have met who seem to feel that they can get by with only a current set of skills. Especially if those skills are only the ones currently hyped.
So, am I sympathetic? YES! Do I have a pancea? No! The best I can suggest is to stay current, and remember that no job is forever, just like the lack of one.
Scott
--- scott_ellsworth@alumni.hmc.edu Java, Databases, and Software Magic
Are you aware just how easily you can mess up a simple sentence? People routinely make spelink erors that reeders ignor. Wreck grammar they also do. Your brain simply adjusts. Lets see a compiler do it.
Another problem is the use of colloquialisms, how the hell is the compiler going to understand what I mean by "how the hell", or even "blue collar".
Still, it would be kind of fun to program in sick puns and haiku
FORTH - the Yoda of computer languages
Get over it. I graduated in 92, when the economy really sucked. This is nothing. I was lucky to get a job, and after the economy took off, I had enough experience to be really valuable.
When I kept hearing these stories on how much new hires were making and the Prima Donna attitudes, it sickened me. Well, the party is over, and you got screwed. It is nothing new, and your story is nowhere near the worst.
Find a decent job, maybe not one that gives you a new BMW, but wait. In 4 years, when the economy is good, you will have a solid amount of experience.
Then you can cash in.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
> Um, how could you go bankrupt and expect to keep your home?
There are two kinds of bankrupcy, speaking generally: in one case, you turn over all of your assets to a trustee (sometimes with an exception made for clothing, sentimental goods, & other items of negligble value -- this depends on the state or local jurisdiction), who thens sells everything off, pays the debts, & turns any cash left over back to you; in the other, you find a trustee who legally shelters you from debt collectors, arranges a payment schedule, & you get to keep your home, your car, yor computer & the other stuff you need to live your life.
Credit companies don't like the second arrangement because it means they usually have to forego much of the interest the creditor owes on the principal. Even if the creditor is injured, loses her or his job in a down economy, or otherwise had to declare bankrupcy due to no fault of her/his own -- & is a responsible borrower.
I guess they'd rather fatten their bottom line, & save the responsible corporate citizen image for commercials.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
It depends on the language. C took me a lot more, but it is worth more time.
Pascal, PHP or ActionScript (Flash) took me less than one week. Of course I need the manual with me for some time, but I can perfectly work with the new language after one week.
The point is that I don't think that knowing C++ or Perl is important. What is important is how you think, how you get a problem and see how to build a computer program to solve it. The language is mostly sintaxis.
So the whole point of all that bile was to call me an idiot? Considering you don't have any data, you are showing thinking of the quality I am attributing to the low-clue IT crowd.
I suspect you know this, too. Of the two groups (talented versus untalented) in the original post, it's pretty obvious with which one you are identifying.
As far as unions go, I am resistant to them. Bureaucracies replace intelligence with rules. If systems administration were highly unionized, for example, I would probably have never gotten into it. Now, it is pretty apparent that you wouldn't consider that a loss, but I can assure you that my prior employers would.
*disclaimer: this is not flamebait*
It's obviously not a very good business plan. In the case of RedHat, they seem to be doing ok, as long as they can continue selling service plans and making *some* money off of adspace on their website. Other open source dependant companies (VALinux would be the obvious example) are quickly realizing that the profit potential is small, and shrinking fast. I personally believe that the failure of the Linux companies is due to too many programmers in key positions, instead of MBA's and economists.
*disclaimer: graphic sig below*
(Please moderate on the content of my comment, not on my sig.)
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
I work for a "dot.com" in the midwest and we are in Chapter 11 and things don't look good. The job market in Louisville is tight too. Hopefully the histeria caused by the recent slide on the Stock Market and the economy in general dies down soon.
Perhaps this is because we (as a species) have much more experience building buildings. I'm sure that humans have been building structures of some sort for our entire span of existance. We're talking a good couple of millenia anyway.
The 50 or 60 years that we've been writing programs seems quite pale in comparison to the many years that we've been building structures. That's an awful lot of experience to contend with. And yes, back in the beginning I'm sure many buildings crashed down. They probably even took some architect-type-people down with them in some ironic twist of engineering Darwinism, but I digress :-)
One of the design goals of Cobol was that it be readable by non-programmers, so that one's PHB could review the code. Obviously they were ahead of the curve back then.
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
We're still looking for experienced PHP/SQL developers in the Bay Area. If you're interested, email me at jdonagher@intacct.com.
Wow. That's the funniest thing I read today.
A.S. ? Do you mean B.S. ?
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
2b = b
; 2b=b;2=1
if you divide both sides by b then
2 = 1
--
but since you obviously failed algebra, I'll let you figure out the REAL problem (hint: watch where the common factor is divided out about halfway through - the common factor removed is a-b).
:P
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a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I never got to see this product, but I imagine telling one of these things: "I'd like a word-processor. And it's got to handle footnotes. It better be able to import .png's too, or you'll be heading out /dev/null!"
Where do you live? Are you looking nationally or regionally? I could see why there aren't many sysadmin jobs in Moosebreath, Saskatchewan, but if you're in or looking in new england, dallas/huston, california or washington you shouldn't have any problems.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
If things are getting easier, then why does it seem that code is getting worse and more bugs are turning up? Things are still hard to do. As we figure out how to do one thing easily, another problem comes along. Saying that computer science is easier due to advancements is like saying any other science is easier. Physics has come a long way in 50 years but is it easier? Some would say it's a lot harder.
Someday, sentient computer intelligences may be able to write their own code. Someday humans may be able to do the same with genetics. Those days are far off, though so until then programming will be tricky, pointers will be a pain, and schools will have far less graduating CS majors than freshmen ones.
-- soldack
Hmm... out of work just out of college? Didn't you do an internship? Great way to get a first job, especially if you do well.
All is not lost if you haven't. Throw up a web page. If you're "damn good" at the languages you mentioned put up some code samples of the projects you weened yourself on. Make the page nice and thoughtful, and be sure to include a resume. Point prospective employers to it.
In the mean time, take advantage of this time to learn/do whatever it is you have an itch for. Write some open source, learn a new language, or tackle that big project you've dreamed of and never had time for. Some of the biggest names in the industry (who wrote winamp again?) Spent a summer or more sleeping on a relatives couch whilst they perfected their trademark project(s).
If you're single, and able to "leech" someone, I greatly envy you, I always wish for some time to get back to writing what I want for fun, rather than what someone else decides they want in order to put food on the table.
You can't divide by b. It might be 0 and you can't divide by 0. Just solve the equation and find out that b=0, NOT 2=1.
0x or or snor perron?!
...is that, IIRC, it is illegal to call yourself any kind of "engineer" unless that profession has been officially recognized as such, has a test to take, has an across-the-board group of people to decide what the qualifications are, has a code of conduct, etc.
Sort of like the various Professional Engineer exams, the Society's code of ethics with the stainless steel ring, etc, here in America. Except that there, if you don't go through that and call yourself an engineer, you're on the wrong side of the law.
Actually, I think the steel pinky ring thing came from Canada in the first place.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You have it backwards. The reason Open Source is doing so well is all the programmers sitting around bored because "real" work has been hard to get for a couple of years. (Matloff mentions ways in which the industry's been shooting itself in the foot with H-1Bs but this is one he missed. Or at least he had in October; I haven't read it lately.)
The short term reasons for this are of cause others but in the long run open source will make most programmers loose their jobs.
I did a search on Dice and now found more Solaris admin jobs than Linux ones in Silicon Valley. Thats a change.
not that I do, but it was nice to think that I could;)
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Luckily I am in Chicago. This article shows the states with the most IT jobs:
http://www.itworld.com/Career/1830/CWSTO56227/
haha. Man, that sucks. Not to make light of your situation or anything, but that sounds like it came right out of a Dilbert comic.
You *really* have to work on your trolling skills. Unless that post was sarcasm, in which case I take back my laughter.
Oh yeah, and it's "lose".
Blar.
I agree with your point about languages getting more high level, but I don't think your point about teenagers programming is valid.
i think you might have missed his point. you're right that high school kids do have greater access to computers, but when i was in high school there was no way you would be taught programming unless you had a good background in mathematics - beyond what they normally taught in high school. the reason why i didn't try to learn any programming languages besides basic was because in my day, advanced levels of calculus were required to get you past the starting gate.
now there's very little mathematics or engineering requirement to programming. i think that was his point.
The end result id natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
Of course, this is far off, but we can see the effects of the easyness of programming in the modern age even now. You used to need a mathematics degree and be a top flight academic to be a programmer, back in the beginning. Now, high school kids can enter the programming world, and get jobs. This means that the market is filling up with people skilled in the various high level languages.
I think that things can only become worse - there is a great reallignment happening in the world of programming, as it becomes more of a blue collar environment, and sheds it's elitist image.
I think that the increasing franchise of programming, which is at last being grasped by the common man, can only be a good thing.
--
About the only raw HTML I still write is in these Slashdot input boxes.
When a machine learns your job, what are you going to do? - a popular 1970s bus poster.
"Natural language" compilers are a noble effort. It's nice that we want non-technical individuals to be able to understand what's going on under the hood, and products like Visual Basic and other rapid prototyping apps have a place in the world. But will they ever replace line-by-line programming? Not likely.
Someone came out a year or two ago and said "all hail the wonderous Internet." Many companies become overnight succeeses without actually doing much other than contributing to the hype bandwagon. Now everyone has seen these companies for what they are, they are pulling the funding. What was so hot is now back to normal and progressing as it was before it got hyped like mad.
; 2b=b;2=1
I say wait a month or two and let these companies recede from the net. They were never really wanted anyway and they never did much either.
How does this affect employment? Once the companies that were in it for the cash are gone, better jobs will be available as other sectors realize what the Internet can do for them. P2P is opening up new horizons already and there is no telling what will come next. Computers and Networks are still in their infancy. Getting rid of the crap companies is one step closer to maturing the online world.
With better companies doing business online we'll have better job opportinities that are (1) more challenging and (2) more rewarding to the people in the positions. More money? maybe. I think we'll start seeing those level out to average (or moderatly high) income levels - and not the absurd levels they have been in the past.
Or something like that.
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a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
You can get a netscape e-mail for free.... BTW, if you see anyone with a msn.com e-mail don't automagically assume they work for microsoft ;)
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Call these guys:
http://www.mybizoffice.com/
Although it doesn't talk about it on their website, they provide sponorships for people who find their own jobs. You will have to work as a contractor where MyBizOffice is your employer of record, but doesn't actually provide you with a job, you still have to find it yourself. But, one of the many benefits that mybizoffice provides is that even when you change who you are actually doing work for, you keep the same visa sponorship as well as benefits like health insurance and retirement.
I use them myself, but not for visa sponorship because I don't need it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If you're good at what you do, then you don't have to worry about getting fired. If you're good at doing what you do, then you don't have to worry about being rehired. I'm good at what I do, so I'm not worried. It's not like I'm living under the sea.
Tight markets come and go. The fellows in charge decide they want it one way, and tomorrow they'll want it some other way. Yesterday, the craze was growing your workforce as fast as possible: just look at Yahoo and Amazon.com. Today, it's downsizing again. Tomorrow, it'll be back to growing the workforce. It's the circle of life.
If you're worried, then put your mind at ease. That is, if you're one of the few qualified employees. You have to be willing to put in long hours for not a lot of glory, and you have to be quick on your toes. If you want, my company is hiring. Be our guest.
And don't overlook training. Skills are important; they're what separates you from the rest of the pool. Learn that extra language. Study up on that extra system. You never know when you'll need it for the next great job. You never know when you'll run into that next great employer tomorrow. It's a small world after all.
BRAVISSIMO!!!!
FINALLY someone defends the art and craft of writing lean, mean, clean bare-metal HTML.
Today I spent about a half-hour explaining to the CEO/President of an IT trade school why her school's site -- which has SERIOUS flaws in it like links to files on the computer on which the site was written -- is a poor marketing tool. Why the hell do you expect your Webmaster program to be taken seriously if your damn site won't work???
Anyway it points out a huge bug in FrontPage. FrontPage will blissfully put file:/// links instead of relative links if you don't pay attention to the code behind the file. Yeah, the page works on your desktop, but once you move it to the server you are SOL.
I have never had any use for WYSIWYG proggies anyway. It means double work for me. I know what the HTML does, and it is just as easy for me to code an intricate tabular layout in BBEdit as it is to do it in Dreamweaver and have to pick up after its "eccentricities" later.
I submit that quality HTML, that is viewable by just about any browser you can throw at it, requires as much skill to write than scripting or even programming languages require. It requires a different way of looking at things, one that is as much aesthetic as functional. It's only going to get more crucial as sites transition from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0.
I am no less a geek because I'm a web person. Yeah, the gold rush is over, and yeah, I'm looking to branch out beyond just building sites. I did that non-stop from July, 1996 to October 2000. It's going to require retraining but I'm not afraid of that. However, I don't see my HTML skills going the way of GWBASIC any time soon. The Web isn't going to just fold up and disappear.
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http://www.msgeek.org/
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
"I'm considering downshifting to sys admin if I can't find a programming position."
Thats it buddy, your quota's going down!
As Hemos said, being a programmer is still a better position to be in than a lot of other jobs right now. If you can program, there's work for you now, and with the 'digital revolution', it seems there always will be.
Yeah, the pay might start to slide downhill, the perks may fade away, but the need for good programmers isn't going away; the competition is just getting tougher.
terradot, growing awareness
...and that's a good thing.
The technology boom created a massive industry filled with people with little or no programming experience being thrown into large-scale projects. The (predictable) results are just now beginning to be discovered -- witness the recent SlashDot article about e-commerce sites that get price info on the client side.
Unfortunately for a lot of people, a maturing industry makes jobs obsolete pretty fast. HTML skills are no longer in as much demand because software is now available that does a pretty fair job of markup. The "soft" technology industry is being rendered obsolete by maturing technology (e.g., XML for markup)
Hopefully, this will act increase the standards of the programming field.
Not that it doesn't seriously suck to be unemployed, but that's capitalism for you. Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.
/spm
... you sound like one of the marketing people in my company who thinks he can program by draggin UI controls in Visual Basic.
Sorry, but it's not happening any time soon. There will always be a need for people with a deep understanding of how to solve problems with computers.
- sigs are for wimps.
I work for a VB house, and now, MAYBE, we can hire some good programmers - maybe.
Yep, I've seen those 1 year of VB guys too, and we wouldn't hire them either.
GOOD work CAN be done in any language, and the basics are the same in all of them. ALL the Sr guys in our group can do C and or C++ and HAVE, we all do at least some SQL work, and some are full fleged DBAs in their own right.
There were too many programmers out there (and I'll admit, way to many of them we "VB Programmers") who thought they could program because they could write "Hello, World", and had taken the shrink wrap off the box.
With 10+ years of various experience (DOS Basic, DOS C, MASM, VB,C++, T-SQL, XML etc) including design from the ground up of some "Non-trivial" systems, I'm not TOO worried. I'm being a bit cautious in buying a new house, but that's about it
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
i saw the article yesterday and laughed as i read it.
i mean, the bay area gold rush is over. you're not going to get those $150/hr html consulting gigs anymore. The job market is tight. but not too tight. a quick search on hotjobs.com shows a ton of job openings. and even though craigslist doesn't have hundreds of postings a day in the prgrammer / sysadmin area, they ususally have 4 or 5 new ones every day. i have more friends at companies that are doing well than i have friends who have been layed off, and everyone i know has at least one "backup" job in case their current employer folds. and the people in the article are web designers (of which there are too many period) and asp/vb programmers? give me a break. if you've got a few years of c/c++ experience, you'll land something really quick. the people that are having the worst time are the corporate/middle management folks, who have no tech skills whatsoever, and the "i studied cs in college but i've never done any practical coding before" types.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
It's not that bad, actually. If you know C/C++, or have decent Unix admin skills, you can get a job in about 2 days in New England.
It does mean that you can't read "Learn VB in 24 hours" and expect to be making 150k tommorow. I do build and release work, as I love pain a great deal, so I know *I'm* never going to be out of work for too long...
What it boils down to in the end is the same thing it always has; make some contacts in the industry, don't screw up your first job TOO badly, and you're probably ok.
I still laugh at a person who interviewed for a junior programmer slot at one of my old companies (this was during the dot-com frenzy) with about a year of VB and a 6 week C++ class, claiming they needed 100k to even consider the offer. Those kind of people are out of work these days, and thank the gods for that. I just wish the welfare system had a "maximum hubris" limit...
But again, technology isn't going anywhere, so if you actually have "The skills to pay the bills", you don't have anything to worry about.
It would be a lot easier to stop this bankruptcy bill than it will be to undo it though. I recommend contacting your Senator.
>If PacMan had affected us as kids we'd be running
> around in dark rooms, munching pills and
> listening to electronic music
You know, that makes my life make a lot more sense.
A lot of people have CTS or RSD which makes it painful to hold down shift while pressing another key. Don't be so quick to criticize.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
Try saying that with a Computer Engineering PhD specialized in Networks.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
Well, that's the question of the hour, now, isn't it?
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
My boss mentioned that we're still hiring one more "senior programmer" and that about 3 months ago he would get a resume about about once a week. now he gets to many, and is being very selective.
Tight(er) job market, at least in Austin, TX.
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
You don't really get to the important point of the article until the last page. The people who are in trouble are the people who know HTML, ie. the people who have no skills. If you know how to program and can program well I wouldn't worry too much. The only thing you have to differently now is differentiate yourself from the computer retards that seem to have infiltrated the tech sector.
The only thing this deflation has done was get rid of some of the free loaders. The real producers have and will always have job offers awaiting.
Uh, no. A computer capable of dealing with natural language will make the same errors dealing with its ambiguities as people do. The idea it'll produce "perfect code" in short order is silly.
I'm reminded of how the very first programmers were so surprised that their programs didn't work right the first time and had to go through test and repair cycling. It's a nice fantasy that it'll produce perfect code the first time; but it's just a fantasy.
Oh yeah, then there's the formal proving thingy that was a fad a few years ago. You'd write program A and feed it to program B which would tell you whether A did what you wanted. Beautiful idea! The reality is you have to tell B precisely what A is supposed to do, which amounts to reimplementing A as C... and then the best that B can tell you is that A and C are equivalent. You still are unsure A or C do what you want. And of course Turing threw an awful wrench into such ideas by pointing out that B will never finish in some cases - making this an instance of the idea being provable pie-in-the-sky...
Nope. Sorry. Natural language is a nice idea, and I think we will have useful natural-language channels to computers one day... but not for robust programming.
I'm pretty sure it's software.
Bzzt! Sorry, wrong. The only way that will happen is if we suddenly get artificial consciousness (AI) that understands what we're trying to tell it. Otherwise, that will just bring bad, horribly inefficient programs into the industry (like is happening already to a great extent).
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Credit ratings aren't a means of protection, they're a means of risk management. That doesn't forego the need to regain get the principal it lends out.
The point is that YOU, yes, YOU have a responsibility to ensure you don't become endebted to the point that you go hungry. And we have somewhat of a safety net in welfare in case you fall too hard, but it's not a very good safety net.
Don't whine about how evil creditors are for wanting their money back. That's stupid. It has nothing to do with excessive profit, it has everything to do with their responsibility as creditors. Debt forgiveness is acceptable but shouldn't be the norm.
-Stu
(Score: 5, Naive)
I guess we might as well live in in a barter economy, this money stuff causes so much suffering...
Get real please. Human suffering happens. It happens a lot less than in times past, we can work to minimize it, but one can't get rid of it.
-Stu
I've been there too. The company that owned the company that I worked for got taken over, and there was an immediate 15% head count cut.
I'd just finished a project, so in my group it was me. My manager and his manager left at the same time (and had some choice about it), I'd been thinking it was time for a change (though I was thinking of moving within the company), lots of co-workers told me they thought the choice of who went was poor, and I found a new job immediately, so it could have been a lot worse, but it was still a shock.
The company I worked for after that went into receivership, even though we had a product with good reviews and our (very very few) customers thought it was good. We _knew_ our marketing skills sucked, but there were partnerships that were supposed to work around that. We almost got bought at one point, but the VP who wanted to develop an in-house solution won out over the one who wanted to buy one in (us). Then someone else was talking about buying us, but when they got bought themselves it became clear they didn't have much money anyway.
Something like boo.com's losses could have kept us going for another 10 to 15 *years*, but we didn't have that kind of backing.
So no, doing a good job personally doesn't mean the job won't go.
--
rant
All this ameritrade, etrade, etc., personal web trading accounts are destroying the market. There's a reason stocks used to be traded via brokers in the past, as a buffer to prevent large numbers of uninformed, but panicked individuals from causing the very problems they fear by all simultaneously dumping their stock. The explosion of the net in 94 dumped millions of idiot moron "investors" into the market. Now that they make up a sizeable chink of all investing, their stupid actions just fucks up the market for all of us. IMO, individuals should be barred from directly trading stocks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Horseshit....
-- The Hollow Man
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
Among other interesting things, the author points out that the focus is going to shift from 'becoming wealthy' to 'becoming good people' -- which is actually rather pleasant to contemplate.
Isn't this what people said the 1990s were going to be like during the bad economic times at the beginning of the decade?
"No more soulless pursuit of wealth like the 1980s, oh no.. We'll be kinder and gentler in the 1990s because we're all poor"
Then bring on a good stock market bubble and you get arrogant newly-minted millionaires, venture capital being thrown at kindergarden-grade ideas, champagne bubblebaths, etc. etc.
My grandfather (a business owner for 40+ years) often says that we need a recession ever few years to weed out the weak and poorly-managed companies. Can't say that I disagree.
Oh I agree with you re:talent. I think competition is wonderful, and I'll compete toe to toe with anyone.
However, your H1-B person *cannot vote with his feet* if he becomes unhappy with your company. It sounds like you folks are really great, but not everyone is, and once someone is here, if they want to get a green card it is very difficult for them to change jobs.
On the whole, business would do better if it could pay employees $.01/hour, demand that they work 16 hours a day until age 65, and then shoot them. (pay for your own bullet please.) For most business with low-skill employees, this would be wonderful for the bottom line and the stockholders.
The less power that workers have to leave, the more power that businesses have over them.
Give an H1-B person the same right to move around and work for anyone they choose that any citizen has, and I'm all for the program. As far as I am concerned, there should be no immigration restrictions. Humans -- FREE humans -- are our best resource.
But it is hard to compete on a cost basis with people in leg irons.
Andrew Leonard may be the one needed job hunting advice soon...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Many people who ARE good at what they do could be equally good at other things. One engineer I work with was fed up with his law firm not letting him work on technology cases like he wanted, so he became an engineer. With a bit more school, I have no doubt I could do the reverse. Or move into a different tech niche than I'm in. If you know how to learn, and care enough to do it, you can move where the tides take you.
Actually, I'm a little glad the market is getting less frenzied. I was starting to get a bit annoyed that people who thought GRE used port 47 were making 6 figures.
I agree with your point about languages getting more high level, but I don't think your point about teenagers programming is valid. I believe that this is because computers are cheaper and more available then they were say 25 years ago (when things were programmed in assembler). Back when that was the case, computers were very expensive, and getting time on them required more clearance than carrying the nuclear football.
One more thing: We still need to learn to program as well as we build buildings. Buildings don't crash to the ground a lot. For some reason, programs do, and we don't understand why. Until we reach a level in programming where we truly understand the architecture of systems, we won't have your average joe programming.
Just my two cents.
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
...
I think that the increasing franchise of programming, which is at last being grasped by the common man, can only be a good thing.
So what is it? Good or bad?
...
UID over 47? Beware.
Yes, as a matter of fact - my UID is greater by a factor of roughly 300. Sorry if this offends your senior status...
--
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Been unemployed for 3 weeks. Nothing on the horizon. Planning to go back to school for a PhD.
Software is more a matter of getting used to the idea of working only 9 months a year and programming is just too easy for people to do.
But you should think about EE instead of CS just the same. With PC's sitting on shelves gathering dust and mobile appliances flying off the shelves you need to focus on designing hardware.
Well, according to existing law, yes. However, the credit companies have big, big sticks they can hit you with. Bad debt NEVER goes away. It gets bought by the credit reporting agencies, and they dutifully report the debt as delinquent FOREVER. So you can't ever get credit again unless you declare bankruptcy, and if this bill goes through, not even then.
Of course there will be some abuse. But the cost of preventing that abuse is going to be tragic.
IMO the abuse cost us far less.
"...and computer programming has become progressivley easier over the years."
Wrong, totally wrong. I've been programming since 1980 (FORTRAN, punch cards, yeah, I'm an old fart aren't I?)
Programs today are far more complex than they ever have been, and that trend will continue. Anyone who thinks that programmers need fewer skills and less experience than they did is living in la-la land.
He's not cocky; he's brutally frank. He'd be cocky if he classified himself as one of the "good performers". But read carefully... if you can :p... he does not do that.
What I am telling you is that the supply is too high because there are a lot of people who are not natively really techies. They came into this field not because they were interested in it, but because it paid a lot of money.
/. readers that would fit this category. I'm talking about the ones out vegetating in front of a TV or playing lawn darts or something... the idiots who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and simply should not be working in tech. I'm sure you've known any number of them.
There probably aren't many
So is that elitist? Yeah, a little. But I'm not excluding you specifically, particularly not because your salary has gone down. Your salary has gone down because there are too many techs. If you are delivering software on time and under budget, that just about automatically includes you in the 'clue' category.
And if your salary has gone down, and you have a good skill set and can sell yourself, get out there and do so. It's not like jobs have all dried up and blown away. You can probably do better if you are willing to relocate. Bad times are starting but they certainly aren't all the way here yet, and really talented people are still rare and precious.
As far as 'entitlement' goes, you are out of your mind. Nobody owes you a damn thing, and just because you made X number of dollars last year doesn't magically 'entitle' you to make X+1 dollars this year. Ultimately you are creating value for an employer. You must create more value than you consume in salary, benefits, and administrative overhead. On average, if you don't do that you won't stay employed. It's really up to you -- you have to figure out a way to create enough value for someone that they will pay you to do it. 'Entitlement'? Hardly.
And salaries won't fall to nil. They will drop some but they won't go to 0. If they did the supply of techs would also drop to 0 and so salaries would have to go back up. Ultimately a balance will be struck. It is likely to be a lot lower than it was during the last two years. But I think it will still be significantly higher than average, again simply because the *good* techs are hard to find.
Actually I think your grandfather is dead on the money. Recessions teach prudence and financial discipline. There are a lot of young people that have never seen a recession during their working lives. Many of them are in debt up to their eyebrows. (and hell, so are a lot of older people that should know better!)
Because it's been so long and people are so in debt, this recession is likely to be a doozy. For that reason I suspect that itulip.com is right about people starting to 'be good' instead of choosing to 'be wealthy'. The early 90s recession wasn't bad enough to really change behaviors. We haven't had a major economic problem since the late 70s.
And of course the prediction could be wrong. We may have fallen so far into greed and apathy that not even a profound recession can change it.
Well, you're wrong :). Being a "web programmer" professionally for 4+ years, I can say that yes, it's technically easier than JAVA, and moreso C/C++. But, technical syntax is only 20% of the puzzle. I know a lot of BSCS folks who've built lot's of code (mainly PHP and Perl) and the architecture is horrible, Yet, they've coded some very nice menu systems for Gnome! A good web programmer is more of a web architect. They understand Systems, Networking, RDBMS's, Middle Tier Applications (ASP/PHP/CFML/etc), AND html/JS/WML/etc.
Web development is not software development, and visa versa. They are different, and require different skillsets. The problem is the barrier of entry is lower on the web development front. This accounts for many of the amazingly gross network and web architectures found in companies today, but does not necessarily mean that web development is a "thin" career move. Personally, I'd rather focus on technologies that require less syntactical knowledge, as I learn things on a more creative and cognative level. After all, we are not made for the machine, rather, the machine is made for us.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Online investing accounts for a very small amount of total money invested in all stocks. Most money comes from corprate investing houses (Merril Lynch, Payne Webber, etc...).. The only real effect online investers have is attitude of the market. Their descions impact others in feeling only not the direct price of the stock.
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
That wouldn't surprise me, but I am repeating history I have learned from books and articles, rather than history I have lived through. If you were there at the time you may have some good points.
:-)
I was born in the late 60s -- was too young to be paying attention to engineer layoffs from Boeing.
The invention of the printing press didn't turn every man into an author, and VB doesn't turn PHBs into engineers.
Thank you! Yes, most anyone can learn HTML, Cold Fusion, or even ASP, but that doesn't make them good web developers!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Weren't the "engineers" -- thinking of McDonnell-Douglas here -- largely beaurocrats who grew fat on government military-industrial largesse, then were crestfallen to find that they really *weren't* engineers?
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
--
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The end result id natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
This is a LOOOOOONG way off, if it ever happens. Natural language isn't good enough to precisely express many problems. (That's why mathematicians and scientists have their own languages!) There are way too many ambiguities.
And even if it does come about, the skills programmers use (primarily thinking logically about a problem) will still be necessary for more advanced uses of computers. Programmers of some sort will always be in demand.
In many ways, I think programming these days is a lot like graphic design in the late '80s, early '90s. Graphic designers were freaked out when commoners got Macs and started putting their LaserWriters to use building fliers, magazines, and so on.
But the designers soon realized that no set of digital tools could replicate the trained eye, the native skill of a good designer. The same is true of programming. Look at the tools out there that supposedly automate web site development. They're a joke - they hamstring you and don't let you do anything out of the box at all.
For the same reason the average Microsoft Publisher-using John Q. Public isn't going to usurp a trained designer who uses Illustrator and knows how to squeeze the most out of it, no connect-the-dots programming tool will force skilled programmers out of their jobs.
No matter how far the technology advances, you have to be able to think a certain way in order to effectively program a computer. Sure, every Tom, Dick and Harry will someday be able to program their home to detect intruders, fire up the oven, and monitor the baby, but by then professional programmers will be busy making software that tells nanites how to scrub out a cancer patient's body.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Ooooh... and LOGO for those not familiar with it's awesome power.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
This is /. so some people will probably cringe, but if you're as good as you say you are then try Microsoft. Seriously.
Great place to work and they're always looking for smart, competent people. When you're fresh out of college I don't think they look for skills in specific technologies (beyond stuff like C++). The important things are your problem solving skills and your ability to learn quickly. For example, most interviewers don't care whether you code a solution in C, C++, or Java.
You sound like a good fit as a Software Design Engineer. Sponsorship shouldn't be a problem. You should interview, even if it's just for kicks.
Even if you don't heed my advice, look into some real companies and not some inane IT shops. If the interviewers aren't interested in your checkers and chess programs I'd consider that a bad sign.
Sun E10K and E4500 are more like it... Solid state disk DB cache and the good old Veritas-Oracle-Sun alliance. This info is current as of last year.
I doubt eBay would be presented at the VOS Initiative seminar if they weren't doing this. The attendees asked many questions to the eBay IT manager presenting his case. More details about VOS Initiative.
If you tout $CERTIFICATION or %CERTIFICATION% as your prime achievement on your resume, you are viewed as a paper professional.
I do a fair share of Windows work because my Suns just don't need that much attention :-)
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
If you're good at what you do, then you don't have to worry about getting fired. If you're good at doing what you do, then you don't have to worry about being rehired.
...anyone want to hire a good "utility outfielder" writer, editor, and design goob (tech writing gleefully accepted due to congenital insanity); researcher, trivia sorter and reporter, and general Geek-In-Training?
Oh, goodie. Does that dictum apply outside of programming as well, or is programming a special case? Right now, I wish I were a programmer; it would make finding work in my chosen field much easier. And I am good at what I do (which happens to be a lot of things -- I could be someone's indispensable employee if they'd just take the straightjacket off)...and I still can't find a bloody job.
No, I'm not on this thread to bitch, I'm here to see what other peoples' experiences are, job hunting and the lack thereof.
But in my personal opinion, getting a job is mostly a combination of being in the right place at the right time with the right credentials...and a hell of a lot of luck. Sometimes (as I found out when I got my last job) the luck comes first.
So...(pitch w/tongue in cheek)
?!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
It's interesting reading the responses so far - they seem to indicate that only the weak (unskilled) tech folks will be hurt by layoffs and well, since they aren't as smart as we all are, that's fine.
Sometimes it feels like an awfully cold world we live in.
Languages like Visual Basic, decidedly more "high-level," have failed to catch on for serious development. The reason, of course, is that "natural language compilers" will always fail as long as a computer can't intelligently optimize code itself. No computer today can do this, and I think it's a long, long way off.
Software engineering will never be a "blue-collar" environment, and certainly not because of natural language compilers. The invention of the printing press didn't turn every man into an author, and VB doesn't turn PHBs into engineers.
Ian Samuel
raise EYourNotAsSmartAsYouThink.Create('What language is this, Java boy?');
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
All the "old" programmers don't want us youngsters (highschool) taking their jobs. That's what this boils down to. It's a vicious rumor to keep people from taking CS, etc, in college and to push them into other fields. I'm not fooled, I'm going to be a CS guy and then go knock on a few doors and get some stock options, six-figure salary, and then drink champagne and code a few lines while laughing at the people who believed this.
Just kidding. Actually, I guessed this would happen at some point. With people reading about the above lifestyle in the news (massive stock options, work 3 hours a day to become a millionaire) many morons were bound to think they deserved a piece of the action. I don't know but I'm guessing that many people now aren't "cut out" to be a programmer. They just decided to make easy money, so they rushed through college, ready for people to throw money at them. Soon, people will probably stop rushing into CS. People who *like* to code will be doing it, and as long as you're good, jobs will be there. I plan to be good.
(I've taught myself some VB, and I'm working on C++ and planning to take a course at a nearby college this summer. As a *young* highschooler.)
By my logic, this means I can be a programmer and still get money thrown at me (or at least jobs). Cross your fingers for me.
No sig for you.
Great article -- thanks for the pointer.
In the 1970s, engineers were the same hot property that programmers were last year. During the grinding 1970s recession, times got very tough for them. Many of them lost their homes. Nobody but engineers could afford the payments, and there wasn't much work for engineers. Many of them ended up simply defaulting on their debts, walking away from houses where they owed more (sometimes a lot more) than what they could sell the house for.
It is no coincidence that the big financial companies are pushing through the bankruptcy legislation now. Their stories of abuse are foolish, but people are buying it. ("bankruptcy frauds" now joins "deadbeat dads" and "welfare moms" in the Archive for Scary Stories About Bad People and How We Shouldn't Let Those Bastards Get Away With It.)
They are not pushing through this legislation because of existing abuses. It is because the lenders have been irresponsible and want to make sure that We the People pay for their mistakes. It's a good step along the path back to debtor's prisons. (And if that doesn't scare you, go study your history books. See: "American Revolution, Causes Of.")
If you are a techie, don't set yourself up to rely on the extraordinary incomes of the last few years. Some of us will do fine and will continue to make good money, but many of us will not. Really good performers will always tend to do well -- but there are a lot of marginal people that have been brought into the industry by the 'gold rush' and it's going to take quite awhile to weed them out. Eventually they will go back to jobs which fit their talent levels better, but that's a ways off yet. There will probably be four or five years of tech oversupply.
Could be longer if industry keeps whining about the H1-Bs (aka indentured servants. See: "American Revolution, Causes Of.")
Everybody is mad about OO because it's a fundamentally different way about thinking how to solve problems (inasmuch as such can be). It's not about the code. If you rank yourself as the best in your university because you won programming contests, then IMHO that makes you very smart, but I'd never hire you (not that I'm in any position to hire). Just from the tidbid in that message, I get a bad vibe: - you're a mathematician-programmer rather then a designer However, your foreign exposure to me would be a great asset.
The ring is a great way to spot canuck engineers when they're over the border - most americans don't wear them, IIRC it's not as big a deal as it is here.
"Engineer" is protected by law here, like a legal or medical designation, and you can get in big doo-doo if you use the word anywhere w/o being a P.Eng. MCSE's aren't allowed to spell out what those letters mean, even, on business cards / course offerings here in New Brunswick.
..don't panic
In addition, a lot of the big wireless/networking infrastructure companies hire a lot of new grads, Nortel, Alcatel, etc.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
Need a CCNP?
Very true. As a CS-major, I took a Philosophy of Language course. I was very frustrated because there was never a definition of "Language". The entire course, textbook, professor, and every student except me, seemed to take it for granted that everyone knows what a natural language is. It's, you know, like, English or French or something. Closest definition I've ever heard was "a dialect plus an army". But then try to say what a dialect is oh recursive master.
Programs are much more difficult to over-design. If I want to avoid having problems with out-of-bound memory accesses, I have to over-design everywhere I do memory accesses. Add in all the other things that can go wrong (wrong point (but still my memory space), divide-by-zero, infinite loops, logical errors, unhandled system errors, etc.), and it's not as easy as it sounds. The `program as a building' analogy is bogus, IMNSHO. In a building, if a door falls off, the entire building doesn't collapse. In a program, if a routine does something bad, it does collapse (and hopefully only the program instead of the entire system).
Several of these problems can be solved if you don't care about CPU time. You can have strings be a class and it automagically realloc if it's longer than it was expecting, for example. Ignoring the out-of-memory/disk problem, which I imagine could be solved by a cache-local memory-local virtual memory-virtual memory in the sky (network) hierarchy (You want to allocate 5 yotta q-bytes? Here's your pointer!), you still have to handle conditions where the appropriate response is unclear, like unexpected end-of-file and hostname lookup failed.
BTW: I'm not saying designing buildings is easy. But you can change your structural requirements fairly easy to be twice as much as you truly need.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I re-coded the whole administration scripts set in Forth.
Why was this nasty ?
- because it didn't work ?
- because it took ages ?
So Why ?nope : t'was perfect
nope : only a week.
Because I knew they would renew me for *years*
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
That leaves Mojo Nation with the illegal content. The problem with illegal content from a business perspective is that if you are making money from people trading copyrighted material a la Napster, you will get sued for contributory infringement.
Also, it has seemed like that sort of thing (web programming) is something almost anyone can pick up on their own or in a one or two year program. The demand as the article said, is still out there for engineers, thing 4-5 years for a bachelors. With that much training you're more marketable.
Getting a job on little or no degree (diploma's included) seem to me as a starting point. Get the job, get working, save money, get a bachelor's in something, otherwise you're expendable.
But that's just my humble inexperienced position. Two more years and real world hear I come, then I get to learn how wrong I really am about everything :)
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
It's on IIS, which mean NT
And if you'll recall, all the site's downtime was due to Solaris, not NT
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
And you base this theory on what? The perfect understanding that people have when communicating using natural languages? Give me a break.
Artificial programming languages are never going to go away, because they are clear (to the computer) exactly what you mean. The evolution you are talking about in programming languages is making the languages clear to the people who use the computers. But there still needs to be a good mapping between the high level language used for programming and the low-level language the high level language is morphed into. This is why understanding pointers is important for Java programmers, even if you can't directly manipulate them in Java. I don't see English or Russian or even Esperanto being able to provide the same sort of mathematical mapping.
I do think you are right, though. Programmers are going to be the assembly line workers of the 21st century.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I'm wondering, as a unix admin/perl hacker, whether IT job cuts will help with more contractor gigs, since many companies / IT directors seem to prefer the casual contractor relationship to payroll taxes, insurance, benefits, etc..
I don't contract now, but I'm thinking maybe it's a good time to start..
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
Bah. I learned PHP in one night. What a loose fucking syntax that is. You can just do anything and it will work.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
I'm about to graduate from RPI and on the hunt in the Houston, TX area, finding the search to be very difficult. It seems that employers are looking for several years of experience, and the market, especially for fresh graduates, is no where near as hot as it was a year ago.
For perspective, I've worked solidly in programming positions since January 99, and have years of formal training in the major engineering languages (C,C++,Java). Toss in a good (3+) GPA, some OpenGL, ASP, VB, SQL, and XML, along with tons of leadership experience, and one would think I've done just about everything right. Even so, I'm sending out 10+ resumes a week, and barely getting anywhere. I've been picky though, avoiding VB&SQL jobs as often as possible. Starting to think it's time to give in and go for everything though...
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
Where did you get this idea? Scientists and mathematicians speak and write English like everyone else (except chemists speak German). They define new words but they don't often define new syntactical constructs.
I agree that increasing the popularity of programming is a good thing, but I don't even know where to start explaining what's wrong with your method.
First of all, natural language at what level? Clearly I can't just say to the computer "Hey, create me a report." It's going to need to know source data, selection criteria, subtotaling, etc.
Second of all, there are many many details that go into a "solution". Natural languages skate over these because we generally don't need to specify them. Not, I hasten to add, because everybody already knows about it (in which case just tell the computer and then it would know too). Natural language just isn't all that precise about some things. "I gave the boys two balls." How many boys? Two balls each or two balls total? Gave as a gift or just handed to them?
Programming languages aren't just regular languages with a lot of extra punctuation. Each "word" in a programming language has an exactly specified meaning and function. But natural languages have fluid meanings--even the parts of speech don't stand still! "You can verb any English noun" my friend used to say.
That precise, technical quality serves two functions. The one that's obvious to every programmer is that computers don't understand anything else. The other function is: algorithms themselves often (always?) need precise definitions. Sure, the computer can create a precise algorithm from a fuzzy natural language input--but is it the one meant?
This would all be obvious if you thought about what you were saying: You want a device that can take a natural language specification and output a working program, right? We already have that device--it's called a programmer. And how often does the programmer have to come back with questions? Pretty damn often. And how many people can successfully talk to a programmer such that the programmer outputs a program that the user wanted? Not very many--that's why we have "analysts" (and humor sites about stupid users).
It all boils down to this: At least 50% of people don't know what they want. At at least 50% of the people who do, don't know how to ask for it.
--
324006
I think it will help make computer science (and other similar) degrees more important. It will also increase the value of experience. Companies will now be a lot more carefull on who they hire. They are going to want to see more proof that the prospective developer can get the job done well. Things like college GPA (especially in you major) and performance at previous jobs will matter. Interviews will become more technical.
In the end it will probably be better for people that are good at what they do. The industry will see them as more important, find that they are rare, and be willing to pay even more for them. Although companies are going out of business, there are new opportunities elsewhere. DotComs may be dying off but all software development isn't. Code doesn't write itself and it will not for a long, long time. There are still problems that people want solved that require someone getting some kind of computer hardware to do things it wouldn't do all on its own.
-- soldack
I predict most commercial code will be written in India by 2010
=)
looks like kenny
What do you think the chances of someone who
a. Knows how to program(C++, Pascal, VB)
b. has coded a few very simple VB app and a few perl scripts on the job.
c. has no degree
d. has a year sys admin experience, mostly netware though(have a CNA)
Not good huh? That's what I thought...sigh
Ahh, A nice legally binding electronic signature...
if you mean kebabs, try Chelokebabi in Sunnyvale on El Camino.
Doesn't this really come down to recongnizable patterns ? The OO folk have been using patterns to express how things are built or at least could be built based upon repeatable patterns. Buildings certainly fall into this category. Software should as well. Thos that have found their way to places like "the gang of four book" and other patterns books will recognize that there really isn't any reason why software should be being built more shodily than most buildings.
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
You are partially right. Writing a chess program is not such a challenge, I agree. The challenge is to make it play well. Alpha-beta is very nice and if you put on top of it quiescence search, transposition tables, history heuristic and a few standard algorithms more, it will play as a low-medium amateur (ELO 2050, maybe). What is more important is to come up with a decent evaluation function, and that is a very, very hard task. You have to watch your program playing against others, understand why he is being defeated and improve your evaluation function to deal with that kind of situation. You also need to tune speed, use of ending databases, and of course a good opening library. The importance of a chess expert is overrated. My chess "expert" is under 2000 ELO and my program is over 2500. BTW, if you think that making a chess program is easy, why don't you make one and participate in the championships? It's a lot of fun!
I'm pretty sure heart surgeons and other skilled medical staff make more than that. I personally know a couple of doctors that made in excess of $1 mil a year, which $250/hr sure doesn't get you.
I provide what amounts to software architecture and design work. Most of the systems lately have been ecommerce or online banking and online billing. Java, xml, RDBMS, C++, no single point of failure, hot fail, etc... full systems.
I generally work with a team that I've done many other projects together with. We already know each other, and how we work, and we're able to start at something close to 100% at the start of the project... something that doesn't happen normally when you put together a team that hasn't worked before.
The people I work with are great, we've always managed to get the job done right and on time in the past. Getting the reputation of being able to deliver results is what bring clients in.
Really it's basically just the Andersen, KPMG, BCG or whoevere model, bring in the whole team and charge more for the sum of the parts. The only difference is it's pretty uncommon for you to be happy at the end of an andersen engagement.
What hospital? I'm going to print up a card, attach it to a necklace and wear it at all times, instructing EMTs in case of emergency not to take me there, no matter what.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
Heh, I am no Chess expert nor my intention is to underestimate skills needed to write decent Chess program.
Of course we are talking here about different ball game from your ussual GTK or C app found on freshmeat these days.
What I said was that making decent Chess program that will be able to defeat 90% people from general population is not that hard.
As for mathematics being required - not so. BUT, the kind of logical thinking that programming requires usually is found in people who at least found math easy/natural.
20 indian programmers == 12 european problem fixers
You got your equation all wrong.
12 european problem fixers = 12 oversexed, grunge-clothed punks working 35-hour weekends and still whining = probably 5 programmers of any national origin (including Indian) in any decently managed company in North America.
20 Indian programmers = Usually 20 motivated, skilled people who happen to have been born in a poor developing country with a much better education system than many countries in Europe.
Agreed.
:)
As a lab assistant in my college days (back shortly pre-'Internet Time', in 93) I had the dubious honour of hand holding first year students through basic pascal programming assignments. You could tell from day one who was going to make it. The way you did it was say, "OK, tell me, in english how you would accomplish this task..." and outline an analouge of the program they were required to write. The ones who would score A eventually would describe the process in detail using words like "while" and "for" natually. The ones who would score Bs eventually would describe it in fuzzier language, but still get the point across. When you got to the C level, the answers would get closer to "I would just sort them."
In every case I can remember my predictions bore out. I cannot imagine a natural language that would cope well with "Just sort them." as a program.
What it will do is allow people who may have poor rote memories and other LDs but have solidly logical minds (there are lots of them out there) play in the same field as programmers (I've since moved to Sys/Network admin/Team leader/manager jobs myself). More power to them. I still seriously doubt that there will be no demand for people who know lower level languages. I mean there's still a demand for good assembly language programmers, especially since they are usually the best C,C++ programmers since they understand the basics so well.
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
What the heck did a math degree every have to do with programming? How this post got rate "Interesting" I have no idea. Back in the old days it was not a matter of high level degrees, but access, because the computers were so expensive only a few could use them.
Today almost everyone who wants access can have a computer orders of magnitude faster than the original clunkers which were once solely the purvey of your "top flight academics". Thus it is a heck of a lot easier to learn how to program.
Granted, programming languages are getting simpler to use, but building a complex app in any language is still a very difficult endeavor. Languages like Java make it easy for novices to build simple apps, but writing a solid program with any thing over a few thousands lines of code and integrating your work with the work of others is still just about as hard in Java as it is an any other language.
So yes, the unwashed massed of 'programmers' whose expertise stops at the point of an applet or scripting single web pages are going to have a hard time find jobs in a tight economy, because there are so many of them - but those with the skills to engineer large, complex systems will always have a job.
-josh
I do fully agree with you, the reason I said 'Disclaimer: VB blows' was that I did not want to be seen as coming off as a VB advocate, I absolutely despise its language constructs and the efficiency of the code it generates (in particular string manipulation). I was intending to defend RAD tools in general, but the poster I replied to brought up VB, so I continued with that. I prefer Delphi :)
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
Honestly, the shortage of programmers that everyone talks about is the shortage for talent. I'm not dissing the guy in the article, he's probably a good programmer, but I honestly believe that people at a certain level of professional development really don't have to worry about being out of a job for more than a couple of weeks, if even.
Is talent born or grown? Difficult to say. People who start programming at an early age (say, age 7) often wind up becoming what we refer to as "talented". Maybe it was always in their bones, or maybe they just spent so much time with so many different / conflicting ways of using a computer that they have a way with the machine.
It's unfortunately my observation is that most CS grads generally don't seem to know their elbow from their arse in developing good, fast, maintainable software. They are either too biased (speed uber alles) or don't know what makes software maintainable (i.e. the four-star programmer mentality. ****foo = i_am_31337();). There are exceptions, of course.
Talented programmers blend a vast mix of knowledge about liberal arts, engineering, and computer science. We really can't stuff all this learning into a 4 year undergraduate degree.
-Stu
"HTML engineer" was the biggest myth of the last two years. Suddenly, if you had the attention span to read a book on HTML, you could get an $80k+ job inside the engineering department no problem. Here in san francisco, that was absolutely because there were hundreds of hopefully ecommerce shops run by MBA's with 0 technical knowledge. They would pile on the "engineers", who often with little experience would flounder... none of these companies were working very efficiently. Fast forward a year, and yeah, it's a lot harder to get that kind of job. People won't kiss your ass for having read a book and having designed your own homepage. You don't get a six figure signing bonus for knowing how to place images in tables. I know it's been said before, but good riddence. San Francisco had been torn apart by new money. $3000/mo 500 sq ft. flats. Overheard party circuit conversations about feeling sorry for the poor people "but honestly what do they expect". More mercedes benz automobiles than hondas. Honestly, you couldn't have lived in the bay area for the last three years and not been overwhelmed by it, even if you were part of the problem. I think what the salon article meant to say was "Tech Job Hunting returns to normal: Tough but fair". It may mean that with 2 years of experience you'll be struggling to sell yourself to a potential client. It may mean that what you got used to as a standard of living wasn't real. But as for a programmer with real experience and modern skills, there is most certainly work out there. I am both an engineering consultant and a staff member in an engineering consulting firm. While there is no doubt that demand has waned, My own services have stayed very much in demand and pricing hasn't dropped much from my peak of $250-$300/hr. I have found that those that we worked with with at least five years of coding are similarly in demand. We have also had some success placing other, but these rates have dropped significantly. At one point we were able to charge $110-$125 for QA, $125-$150 for design and $150-$200 for mid level programmers. These rates are now more like $40-$50 for QA, $50-$60 for design and $60-$90 for contract programming. I actually think $120k/year + overtime for doing HTML design is DAMN GOOD PAY. It'll just take a while before folks can swallow the bitter pill they have been handed. But when they do, they'll do just fine. Perhaps they won't be eatingf lunch at aqua anymore. Sleeper
Yeah, I know tons of kids who can write an n-tier CORBA-based application in C++ with DCOM interoperability and published XML interfaces to support SOAP. Right! Only if you consider forty-year-olds kids (I wish :-)
I have always said that in the near future everyone will have to program. Just like now everyone has to write English. However, that does not mean that everyone is a writer in the same way that Stephen King (or, Neal Stephenson, if you prefer) is a writer. There is a big difference. In fact, programming will get harder for those who make a living from it. Software systems are only getting more complex in part because they have to appear simple to the casual user.
It's always a sure sign a company is going down, though, when they start by laying off their marketing folks. I can think of at least three friends who worked at marketing positions who've been laid off in the past 6 months. I know what companies I'm not investing in!
Mmmm.. Donuts
The end result id natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
Yup. Exactly. When you (or anyone else) get good, like really good, at C++ or Java or whatever you will eventually get to a state where writing the code is just not difficult. Like, as easy as speaking. Pretty well all the software engineers I've worked with have got to this state. Then all that remains is to explain to the machine exactly what it is you want it to do. Like, exactly. This is almost immeasurably hard and is the chief cause of failure in software projects. Arguably the only cause of failure.
Natural language programming will, kinda obviosly (IMHO) not get around this fact.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I'm out of work right now (right out of college - doh) and I've been applying to every job that looks interesting for weeks. I may not be Alan Cox, but I'm not a neophyte who just picked up "Perl for Dummies". In fact I'm damn good at Perl, PHP, C, C++, and hell, I could probably pick up Ada or Smalltalk again if I had to. But no one will even call me back. Jobs that are listed on Monster, Dice, even companies' web sites turn out to be "on hold." What the hell am I doing wrong, or do I just need to quit being picky and go apply for those "experience in Microsoft Internet technology preferred" jobs? This is driving me nuts.
</rant>
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Natural language isn't good enough to precisely express many problems.
:)
Being a better way to express what I said. And shorter. And ironically proving the point in the process, kinda.
Hmmm, time for the blue pills obviously.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
This is a good article, but the downturn started in December. That was when it started to get more difficult. I have friends that think that they can make those same salaries that they used to make and they are still unemployed. I klooked for a lower salary and got a job. I am even making a little more than I was before I got laid off.
Of course normally when you leave a job an dgo to a new job you get a 20% pay increase, I only got about 3%. I am happy to be employed, but it took 6 weeks.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Damn. I've been watching too many Disney flicks with my kids:
Coincidence? Or Vast Media Conspiracy?
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
OTOH, I don't buy the magic self-programming computer. This sort of prognostication is much like the now-laughable predictions in the early 1950's by an MIT professor that "I think that within five years we will have computers that can think."
That is, the problem of "programming" the computer via natural language is so vast as to be nearly equivalent to the (now somewhat discredited) goal of "classic" AI to put a brain in a box (or rather, create a non-embodied AI). Why? Because "natural language" lacks precision and information. Anyone who's had to reconcile marketing "requirements" with engineering reality will realize the incredible disjoint here. In its most general form, you are creating a programmer AI who:
No, I believe that highly skilled humans will always remain a part of the "programming" process even in the distant future (unless/until the very notion of "human" itself is challenged, ala some Brin short stories in Otherness.) As knowledge and technology improve, the capabilities of end-users will increase... as will the capabilities of the highly skilled software creators. Such "programmers" will be empowered by ever more sophisticated knowledge of software architecture, HCI, algorithmics, and lessons of history... along with some powerful software tools. But in the end, it will be humans using tools to craft things that have value to the human experience.
"If you're good at what you do, then you don't have to worry about getting fired."
Wrongo.
I was laid off from AirFiber, a wireless optical networking company, a month ago. The reason I was selected? The crime of not being behind on the hardware. The rest of the company is behind on the release, my project is on schedule -- gee, the Link Acquisition folks must be overmanned -- fire the junior member!
The quality of your work has nothing to do with it.
Yes, there are jobs for people who are grunt programmers. They get paid less than degreed software designers, but their skills are just not the same. They also are the first to go when its time to trim staff. The person who can solve the problem at the design level and figure out the best plan of action is someone who gets kept.
Just another arguement for bothering to get all those funny letters after your name.
-- The Hollow Man
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
>> maybe we'll even see an end to the arrogence that we see around (including, and especially, here) that says poor people deserve it for being lazy, or any of the other BS that's easy to say 'cause you don't know anyone in a bad spot. <<
The problem is that the gov has no easy way to tell the difference between those who actually ARE lazy and those who are just down on their luck.
By somebody too lazy to use HTML.
Table-ized A.I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bzzt, wrong. Two big reasons. First is that programming is not about "telling the computer what you want it to do", unless you're writing trivial macros. It requires the ability to logically analyze a problem, examine how its pieces fit together, design data structures and procedural abstractions (or objects if you prefer that metaphor) that can solve the problem, and so on. Certainly toolkits, frameworks, and preexisting modules can make the implementation of many of these tasks easier (you don't have to write string-manipulation libraries from the ground up these days), but it doesn't make the analytical stages any simpler. People with the requisite skills to understand the actual dynamics of a difficult systems problem are going to continue to be very hard to find unless something drastic changes.
Second is that natural language is not only badly suited for this kind of task, but that most people employ natural language poorly. It's poorly suited because it's hugely imprecise and depends tremendously on context. Now, on the one hand you could argue "a truly intelligent computer will understand the context I mean and do what I want". But this is much, much harder than simply understanding natural language. Even humans are not very good at this task unless they share similar demographics/backgrounds/experience/culture. (Try holding a conversation on a complex topic with someone who speaks your language but is from a different culture, class, and part of the world. Alternately, try just telling your administrative assistant what you want him/her to do -- for a task you've never discussed before -- and see whether he/she does it the way you'd expect.)
It's worth noting that a large proportion of the population is, in practice, only marginally literate. They may be able to read and "write", but that doesn't mean they can express themselves coherently. I attended an Ivy League university and I can readily attest that a significant proportion of my supposedly elite peers had a hard time putting together a well-constructed paragraph, let alone a cogent essay. And even the best writers are likely to miss or leave out critical details; it's as hard to anticipate how to handle every possible exception case in writing as it is in code.
Perhaps speech recognition is the answer? Not likely. Just read a totally literal transcript of a conversation sometime and you will see what I mean. Human speech is ridiculously sloppy and imprecise, but we happen to be very good at using shared knowledge and cultural standards to correct for this.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
The real problem is all the dot coms with sucky ideas getting hundreds of million in VC simply because they were "dot com". Burn through that, stick the investors and closed the doors. Individuals have nothing to do with stock prices when etoys goes from like $100 a share to closed. $0 a share. Nothing. How many companies have done this to the market now?
Ah, I see the problem here.
You don't work in the software industry; you just make stuff up about it.
In point of fact, almost all programmers do not work on producing software for sale or distribution. They work or consult for organizations that are producing or maintaining custom software for specific purposes.
So yes, the spread of open-source tools and baseband software infrastructure means these people can be more productive for less money and therefore increase the rate of return per $$ spent on hiring them, and therefore economically rational employers will hire more of them and pay them more money.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Obviously, the market for programmers will not be zero, but it will be allot smaller.
Wait five years or so and we will se how many programmers that still laughs.
PS. With "this field" I meant software engineering as a profession.
I havn't seen a huge lack of jobs for programmers here in Dallas. In fact, if anyone is interested, a company I know if is looking for a JAVA/ASP team lead, the position pays 90k a year. If your interested email me at ron@razorvision.net
Seems like I am slipping into a dream within a dream.
Which is why you get things like the mars lander which couldn't decide between feet and meters?
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
The real answer is to keep up and stay profitable. Businesses love profitable. Don't think of them as employers, think of them as folks who will let you use their capital and resources to make both of you money. Everybody works for themselves, and always has. The business has needs and resources. You have needs and resources. These resources may interlock (you need money, they need code...)
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
So let me get this straight: This guy is getting paid ~$60k/year, and all he can do is complain that he's not being paid an over-inflated $110k/year?
Oh, wait: he has to put a little effort into finding a job, now. It might take him a whole week of trying to get in touch with potential employers to find a job. Boo fucking hoo.
And what kind of idiot leeches Salon's office equipment because they want to "avoid a trip to Kinko's"? Didn't he just come off two years of $100/hour contracts and $100/year salaries? What an ass.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
What about loglan? Esperanto? Other artifical languages?
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Forth like you if honk then
--
Yea, once I tried writing for this writing job and they rejected my application for the job I applied for.
this is why i work in marketing: there's always a need for more bullshitters!
- j
I'm a final-semester college student who was searching for a job in networking or OS programming, and I was offered (on the phone) a job from Sun working on Solaris networking code.
The offer was supposed to be made "official" and I was to get it in the mail soon after, but within a few days of that phone conversation, a hiring freeze occured. I've been waiting since January now, and I'll probably take a different job (fortunately I have a good offer from another company). Had I interviewed a little sooner, I could have had this offer on paper.
The REAL nice jobs are much harder to get right now.
"Unless that post was sarcasm"
It certainly wasn't. When hordes of programmers are willing to work for nothing it will get hard to earn any money. Why hire people when you can get their job for free?
Take redhat as an example, sure, they hire some programmers, maybe 50 or so. But there are thousands developing Linux so if you divide the total salary (50*(some sum)) with a few thousand you don't get a very large number.
Stallman himself have said (search the gnu homepage) that programmers will get less paid because profits will go down because of free software.
It will be allot less. Have no doubt about it.
i guess this isnt any different from cnet's consistent scaremongering or flame-baiting as news, but seriously. is there anyone here who think that c/c++ coders cant get jobs?!
it all depends on who you consider to be programmers. are you one of those guys who puts "5 years of HTML programming experience" on your resume?! if so, maybe youre in trouble...
unc_
I ran into my headhunter, the one who set me up where I am now, on the street last week, and he confirms most of these notions. He said, "For senior people, no problem, but you'll need to be a bit less picky, and salaries are down a bit. But we have a lot of junior people and a lot of fodder."
So, to those posts about "Why should i bother with college?", this may be the answer. The expertise that a degree represents is better insurance against non-boom times.
mahlen
VIRGO (August 23-September 22)
You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to
your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while
making love. Virgos make good bus drivers.
This shouldn't be a big surprise. Just as any sector in the stock market has done in the past. It shouldn't be a shock that there are less jobs, the technology sector is just correcting itself after an over-expansion.
www.rose-hulman.edu/~castlebs
I don't think that online trading is the downfall of the market. The major investors still go through brokers and the miniscule amount of people trading online (relative to the rest of the traders) isn't going to cause the world to collapse. IMHO, the cause is that there was too much hype over dotcoms earlier. Previously, a company that was selling goat cheese on the web would be valued at millions just because it was on the web...also, all companies were being held to an insanely high level of expectations. A company was expected to perform at an ungodly high rate...and then when it performed at an amazing rate (which is lower than ungodly of course!) the stock price plummeted.
My .com failed...so I went searching about a month or so ago. I'm a skilled admin. I have 8 years experience with several good senior level consulting and engineering jobs behind me, so I'm not new to this. I work with NT (a lot), Linux (good bit), and Solaris (Some), as well as most network hardware. Over the last several years I've always had a huge response to putting out my resume.
Not this time. I got calls, some goood, some bad, but not nearly in the volume I had seen before. With everyone saying "recession" the market is really on hold for a while. Companies just aren't hiring right now.
I just took a contract position at a good company. I'm not doing as much UNIX or security work as I like but the pay is good and hopefully it will get me through this market downturn.
The people I feel bad for are those in lower level positions. I'm sure they will be hit the hardest when out there looking.
Wansu wrote:
....
> 36 years old and only making 110k a year?
You'd be surprised at how many good system programmers over 40 make less than $100k a year. It depends on what part of the country too. $100k isn't that high a figure in California but it is in North Carolina.
Indeed, since cost of living differs a lot. The Salary Calculator shows that a $110K salary in San Jose is the equivalent of a mere $67K in Durham, whereas a $110K job in Durham would have to become a whopping $170K job in San Jose to meet the same quality of life.
And a lot of people living in North Carolina would probably argue that you couldn't pay them twice that because the quality of life measured in non-dollar terms is much higher there. Never underestimate the nontangibles, like a nice home, more time with family, and so forth.
Another factor to consider is that with a slightly lower salary, often, comes a considerably greater sense of job security. If you're just earning for yourself, hey, go for the gold. But if you have a family, you prefer the steady work, the health insurance, the 401(k) that come with a settled job. Those, too, can be worth a lot more than their simple dollar value.
Anyway, I'm opposed to any snot snidely and snarkily commenting on 36-year-olds who "don't have their shit together", whatever that means. Not everybody follows the same path, and what should matter is how applicable your particular technical skills are. I couldn't stand helping end-users once I got past 30, so I boosted my skills. But this industry is full of round pegs and square holes [cubicles]. If he hasn't learned that by now
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
"You *really* have to work on your trolling skills"
Since are math trolling?
I was the best programmer in my university (acording to performance in contests). I am also a good mathematician. I am very flexible, can learn a new programming language in one week and I speak three languages.
I spent a year working in the USA and then my company ran out of money. I have been looking for another job for six weeks now, and I haven't had any interviews yet. I am getting tired and I am probably coming back to Europe.
What I see in the requirements of job openings is:
- Object Oriented Stuff.
- Experience with Sybase.
- Lots of experience with C++.
- Lots of experience with Perl.
- 5 years IT experience.
- SORRY, NO SPONSORSHIP.
If what they are really looking for is good programmers, they are asking for all the wrong things. Why do they need experience specifically with Sybase? Doesn't it use SQL? Why is everybody mad about object oriented crap? What if you are not a U.S. Citizen?
Since 1993, I've made a master level checkers program and a master level chess program in my spare time. But they don't consider that programming experience.
As I said before, I will probably come back to Europe. I thought this country was good at attracting great brains, but that was some time ago.
You should be worried if open source programmers develop the same things as you do without charging anything. Why pay you then?
Yes, as a matter of fact - my UID is greater by a factor of roughly 300. Sorry if this offends your senior status...
i'm sure this fellow was joking with that sig, but it is funny to see how much importance people put in silly little number like slashdot user numbers or karma (that is, karma after the +1 bonus).
i've been reading slashdot since very shortly after they were on slashdot.org. i was there when they implemented the user accounts, but i didn't bother getting one: there was no need when posting anonymously was always sufficient. in fact i always used to think the people who logged in were less interested in just joining the conversation and more interested in showing off and making a name for themselves. i created my user account only because most people (including moderators) were surfing at +1, and all the conversation was only had with the user account elite. the poor anonymous schmucks were almost completely igonred, regardless of the content of the message.
so at any rate, what i'm trying to say is don't trust anybody with a user number under 87585, as they're just a bunch of jackoff attention-seeking wangwarters.
- j
That's nothing compared to the flooding from open source programmers who don't charge at all for their work. The salaries in the field will go down substantially in the next five years.
I couldn't stand to see all the little trolls cry... besides, how else will they tunnel MPLS and have their gigE LANs be as baroque as ATM?
h tm
. tx t.html
http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/protocol/gre.
or the RFC itself,
http://www.kblabs.com/lab/lib/rfcs/1700/rfc1701
:-P
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
10 Get fired
20 bitch on slashdot
30 goto 10
40 end
Or rather programming used to attract these sort of people and it was a long standing myth that mathematics ability was essential to programming; perhaps if you're designing mathematical algorithms or doing theoritical computer science, but language ability is actually very important in programming combined with the ability to think logically which has nothing to do with mathematics.
The end result is natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
And who is going to write the software that makes all this possible? Another myth, that programmers will one day be unnecessary.
The initial rush for the market is done. The companies have fully functional sites. The venture capital is down to critical. Are you gonna hire a few semi-talented programmers for $120k/year? Of course not unless you've got huge unsolved problems! Especially not if you can buy the services from a consulting company with experience. That's simple risk management.
:)
The rush is over. We programmers are gonna have to learn to settle with an ok salary after a B.S. degree, at least for a few years until we've really proven ourselves. As a few of us are learning, you can't buy happiness anyhow.
Oh. And if you want a good job, don't just buzzword them to death. Sell yourself as a likeable, social person. That landed me a pretty sweet gig
Stop the brainwash
C and Java are de rigeur nowadays; good luck getting your resume looked at without it. CGI and Javascript are important to Web shops, particularly those who are writing Web-based applications (not applets, applications). FORTRAN just shows how long he's been around; not many people coming out of college today know FORTRAN.
Citing Basic as experience is semi-pathetic. But Visual Basic is an exception, because regardless of what you feel about it, Visual Basic is the most widely-used programming language in the world, right after COBOL.
So if this guy was sending a resume to a business that was developing Web-based applications, those skills would all point to a seasoned professional who'd been around the block a few times who knew the technologies I needed.
Just because you think a certain skill is a "fanboy" skill, that doesn't mean the applicant is a fanboy.
To give you an idea, here's a short list of my skills. No, I don't put them all on a resume, but by your logic, just by possessing them I'm a poseur.
- Programming Paradigms
- Functional (Scheme, ML)
- Procedural (C, Pascal)
- Object-Based and Object-Oriented (Ada83, Ada95, C++)
- Generic (C++, Ada95)
- Parallel (Compositional C++, Fortran/HPF)
- Programming Languages
- C, C++, Compositional C++, Java
- Pascal, Modula-2/3, Oberon
- COBOL, JCL
- FORTRAN, Fortran and Fortran/HPF
- Classic LISP, Scheme, ML
- Ada83, Ada95
- Markup Languages
- LaTeX (not raw TeX)
- SGML, HTML, XML
- Operating Systems
- MS-DOS 3.3-6.22, Windows 95/98/NT/2000
- AIX, BSDI, FreeBSD, SunOS 5.7/Solaris 7, Linux
- MVS
- BeOS
... Am I a poseur simply because I'm a competent, well-versed computer scientist?Or is your main objection to the applicant who lists C, Java, XML, JavaScript and CGI that he knows more than you do?
Also, pay attention to how you present yourself. You're not coming across as a professional engineer. Professional engineers are people who learn things and solve problems--not people who talk like a wanna-be member of the Wu Tang Clan and blindly condemn every bit of popular technology because it's not C.
Contrary to what you wrote, Real Programmers don't list only the things they're total experts at, and the one or two things they think will help them land their next job. That's a pretty foolish way to go job-shopping. What you do is you figure out where you want your next job to be, and you tailor your resume to fit that position. In today's market, the key skills are Java, XML and Web-based skills. I've got a company in London that's interested in talking to me about a job writing applications in UNIX. Their engineering team has been grilling me about my C++ and UNIX skills.
But if I hadn't put Java and XML on my resume, Management would have never given my resume to their engineering team and said "this guy might do, talk to him".
Well, people have been know to overestimate as well as underestimate the progress of technology in the future.
Check out this quote. I saw it on slashdot and then looked up the original:
Wroot
How about a natural language /. message before we start worrying about natural language programming?
Tim
I am a very experienced Unix/NT Systems Administrator. 1 year ago I had 3 offers after looking for 2 weeks. Now I have been looking for work for 3 months with no luck. I get almost no interviews, and the ones I get really suck. It seems that no one is hiring as of now, and I really need the work. I have an older resume online at http://www.digitalsanctuary.net/tim and my e-mail address is on there. If you want to offer me a job or get a copy of an updated resume just e-mail the address off that site.
I work in the Southern California area.