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Technology Sectors that are Hot or Heating Up Now?
unemployedCoder-in-retraining asks: "As a recently "leisured" programmer, I'm very interested in trying to turn misfortune into opportunity. This means using this career discontinuity to bone up on the latest-n-greatest in the hot sectors of the industry, to offer a better chance of a finding another great job. Of course, then one asks: 'What's Hot?' The Telco/Switching sector seems to have flatlined (Nortel and Lucent as examples). Cable and DSL access device and service development seems to be struggling. Wireless 3G networks seem to be having a hard time in North America. And yet, we here that a recovery is underway and that the technology sector as a whole is picking up again. So I ask you: 'Where?' In what sectors? What are the most important new technologies to learn to enhance employability? Somewhere, somebody is hiring or will be soon. What do I and other victims of the slowdown have to know to 'get back in the saddle' in the near future?"
By the time you figure out what's hot and train for it, it won't be hot any more. Just do what you like to do, do it well, and put yourself in a position where somebody will recognize you for it. Chasing trends will only exhaust you.
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
Sounds more like a thermodynamics problem
not that I can tell if the technology is any good, but if I lock you up for 10 days with 5 managers and a horse, both you and the horse will come out with eye-stare, mumbling '.NET is cool, .NET is the way to go...'
this assumes offcourse that all 5 managers are as brainwashed as possible, but that's probably the easiest part.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Porn has always made money, and always will. So if your morals are OK with it, go be a gearhead for a porn site or publisher.
I don't remember who said it, but I once read a quote that was along the lines of "The whole of computer science is nothing more than methods for increasing the efficiency of generating, storing, transmitting, viewing, and enjoying pornography." Heh.
Or, to update the recurrent slashjoke:
Where I'm working (large financial institution) they're starting to look into AI as a means of predicting market movement and trends. One could see this as becoming key in other areas as well. Any field that tries to predict chaos or long-term trends could potentially be looking into this.
Of course, there's the danger you'll invent a supercomputer that takes of the world and sends killer robots back in time to kill the leader of the resistance. This naturally would lead to his psychotic mother trying to kill you and you ultimately sacrificing yourself to save the future. Something to think about.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Good times or bad times, the adult industry is unaffected. And they are always the first ones to adopt new tech...
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
I've been reading the book Next (my father reccomended it. He's a businessman so it's at that level. It did have some interesting stuff though, like explaining the conflicts of interest that most financial advisers are involved in and how you can get more accurate estimates of profits just by reducing their estimates by 10%.
So that can help to explain why what you're hearing isn't matching up with reality.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Short one: If we knew, we'd be doing it.
/. subjects seem to get most attention. I consider these subjects "hot". Do this with various other publications, and since we all have seen how satire foresees reality, start with the onion ;)
Longer one:
I can't tell you what...but you can start using your imagination trying to find something that people would use frequently.
And now for some brainstorming:
Whatever you do, a good marketing dpt. will make it look better. This is sad.
Not "one" thing there is. Ok, yoda speak, but what i want to get to is that people need to fill gaps in the business...some people do this...some people do that... coding is fun , ok, but if everone only coded, it'd be dull.
Look which
storm's out.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
There are always open and varried opportunities in the ever strong field of technical support!
"Survival of the fittest Max, and we've got the fucking gun!" - Pi
I'm hearing good things about the Web-net Intersites.
It's Thursday, already ?!
Maybe you'd be better off doing what you like, and quit chasing buzzwords.
but any time you spend learning Microsoft stuff (.net framework, mcse, c#, etc.) will repay itself a thousand times over.
I have heard the economy is starting to pick up again for months, yet no real signs of improvements show up. Probably the same for the job market for some time.
My advice: lay back, have a beer, meet new people and do interesting things with them, and when cash runs out go flip some burgers or something. In a few years time, when things look better, they'll come running for you again.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Just look at the stock market. Biotech is the future, my friend. In the new annual ranking of the Nasdaq 100 index--made up of the 100 largest nonfinancial companies ranked by market capitalization--seven of the 13 companies added were in biotech. The new entrants include such familiar names as ImClone Systems (IMCL ), Cephalon (CEPH ), Sepracor (SEPR ), and Invitrogen (IVGN ); they replace 13 faltering tech, telecom, and Internet outfits, including onetime stars CMGI (CMGI ), 3Com (COMS ), and Palm (PALM ). All told, biotech companies now represent 12.7% of the market capitalization of all the companies in the index, nearly triple the share they held only two years ago.
Sounds an awful lot like the Internet bubble all over again, I know. And in one sense, it is: The high market capitalization of many of these stocks suggests that investors are paying a lot in anticipation of future earnings that may never materialize. It costs tens of millions of dollars and can take five to 15 years to get a drug from the test tube to the clinic--and many drugs simply don't make it.
In several ways, however, this boom is different. The industry is more mature than it was a decade ago, when it last rose and fell. New alliances, new products, and new financing should combine to produce lasting growth in this once-turbulent field. There are some 300 biotech products in Phase III testing, the final stage of human experimentation before seeking Food & Drug Administration approval. The FDA issued 32 approvals for biotech drugs in 2000, a 45% increase over 1999. Sales of biotech products rose from $16.1 billion in 1999 to $18.1 billion in 2000, an increase of 12%. And there were 22 profitable biotechs in 1999, up from 17 in 1997. In addition, there is a distinct lack of bearded linux hippies in biotech, making it a much more attractive market segment to the general public.
Furthermore, unlike many Internet companies, the biotech companies are targeting clear and existing markets. Many Internet companies devised products without knowing whether there were markets for them. Others, such as Yahoo!, aimed for ad revenues that proved far smaller than hoped. Biotech companies don't have that problem: A drug for arthritis or cancer, say, has a huge market. If their drugs work, the biotechs will make money.
Excitement in biotech will likely get another boost when the climate for initial public offerings improves. There are 50-100 biotech companies waiting to go public, says Oronsky. That's where casual investors should be especially careful. Some of today's most promising biotechs will undoubtedly fall short of the hype. Unfortunately, that's one way this boom won't differ much from the last.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
don't know what sectors I would chase... I
honestly doubt if I would chase sectors at all.
as for technologies, as trite as it might sound the two to pursue are probably the same damned ones people have been tyalking about for the last five years, Java and XML. both are only going to become more ingrained and widespread as companies in all industries continue to pull their various services and offerings together.
-rt
i know it sounds like a trendy buzz-word but i think it's here to stay and some seriously cool stuff will start to happen soon (look at Google).
at any rate, if you can walk into a potential employer and say 'I can convert your current software into a remote API for access by your clients in a multitude of languages' I think you have a pretty good shot at a job. at least, this is what I would be trying to learn if I had time.
Oh, and being able to throw around 'SOAP' and '.NET' a lot doesn't hurt too much either ;)
I've found that small company's are usually looking for some technology. It's worked great for me. I've been able to outsource graphics to people I know that are looking for jobs, and there is always a ton of programming to do. You just have to create a position for yourself when you step in the door.
IsMyJobHotorNot.com
Using IT to crunch the genome, protiens, protien-folding, creating treaments by targeting specific molecular recpetor sites, etc. Definitely the next hot area and mostly wide-open from an IT perspective.
Security, this is the big one now
I'm impressed with Envivio's business, more capable MPEG-4 software. (No, I don't work for them.)
New technologies, languages, platforms, etc will come and go over the course of your career, but there will ALWAYS be a need for the Network and PC Administrators.
I'm a Network Administrator and haven't had a problem finding a job in the last 10 years. I was laid off in late 2000, and found a new job within 3 weeks.
Just get a well rounded understanding of Windows, Linux, Telecommunications, security, etc., and you'll probably always be able to get a job. You probably won't be making a 6 figure salary, but I'm more than comfortable making less than that.
load "windows7"
This may be the next big thing, but right now most of what the usual geek could get into seems mostly hype. What I am talking about is the field of Bioinformatics. From what I understand, Bioinformatics is basically "data mining of biotech databases" - more or less. I know there are a few books available on the subject (including one by Oreilly). The main problems with "breaking into the scene" is most positions, when offered, require you to have some kind of science degree (biology related, generally) - even though it is just data-mining. I tend to wonder if it is because you really have to know the terminology behind the data you are looking through (maybe), or if it is just such a young field that the employers thinks they need such people right now.
It is something I would like to get into: I live in Phoenix, and the city is trying to get something going here called the "International Genomics Commission" (IGC - the "C" part I am hazy on) - basically a huge research lab for biotech, etc - so far, it is seemingly being sucessful. Anyhow, I haven't got a chance in hell of possibly getting onboard "early", so to speak, because not only do I not have a degree in any bio science area, but I don't have a degree at all (ok, I take that back, I do have an Associates, but from a tech school - read: Near Worthless). All I do have is 10+ years of professional experience in software development and database applications - but I am not sure that will count for much, at least at this point in time.
Another area to consider: Alternative Energy Research - I am not talking solar, etc - but more on funky engine and prime mover designs, etc - I am seeing more of this stuff crop up all over the place.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Do what you want. What are you interested in? You don't want to wind up in a job you hate.
Use the time to get an in-depth understanding and knowledge of whatever the hell you want. If you get good enough at it, you'll be hired for that, and you'll enjoy it a lot more than if you become the equivalent of a Y2K bug programmer.
and see what gets the hits.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Try Northrop Grumman / Lockeed Martin / Boeing, etc
as for the pure, pure computer area -- i think people are returning to the "core business". (chip wise)
LCD is another area;
wireless is picking up a little steam (look at how many DSL routers there are!), as well as other marginal stuff -- HDTV, PDA, etc...
cellphone and pda integration is considered to be inevitable by some -- so cellphones are not "flatlining", they are just not exploding as they were before.
at the same time digital imaging (cameras / miniDV camcorders) are sparking a huge thing within flash market -- look how the size have doubled time and again: imagine how much $$ of R&D / engineering went into that
home entertainment (xbox / ps2 / cube) is also kinda hot -- sony expect to sell a LOT of ps2s by christmas -- and ppl are gearing up for that too.
there are a couple more -- can't think of them off the top my head though
My life in the land of the rising sun.
One word: forensics. Between Enronesque corporate investigations, the kiddie porn scares, and the emphasis on "cyber security," there's lots of opportunity there. But don't do it unless you have the stomach to be the guy that helps put some teenager playing with a website in prison, because at the end of the day, that's what the computer crime "units" seem to enjoy most.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I would argue small business, based on what I have seeing. Big business has jumpe on the e-commerce bandwagon, but for the most part small busniesses have not yet really touched its potential.
I am not in the consulting industry, but I believe there is quite a lot of business to be had by aproaching the right small companies with the right plans. If I were "leisured" at the moment, which I am not, in addition to looking for a real job, I would aproach some small businesses in my area with "solutions" to get started in e-commerce, or e-customer service. My mechanic, who can barely use a mouse has just setup a site, and plans to offer information about his high quality used car inventory. If you had a simple turnkey site for a market like that, there is a decent living to be had. Now kep in mind, you probably cannot charge the $95 an hour you used to get. However, there are many low end turn key systems to be sold. 40 dealers/mechanics at $1000 a site would be the equivilent of an entry to mid level programmer in my market. How many small mechanics, or used car dealers are there in your area? Used cars are just an example, I am sure you can come up with more on your own. It helps if you have an "in" with at least one business of the type you intend to go after to get your foot in the door.
Anyway, if I had a few weeks ahead of me where my employment was uncertain, I'd identify a market like that, and go after it. This is also a market where open source can be used to your advantage if you approach the situation correctly.
Hope I have gotten some thoughts going,
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Well .NET is built upon XML so if you really want to leverage that bubble I would start with it first. Basically XML provides a "standard" way to describe "hyper" data, similar to the way HTML provides a "standard" way to define hyperlinked documents. It's very useful and is bound to grow in significance over the next few years(like it's not already). Before you know it you will be sending XML keys from your PDA to your car to ask it to run the config for you vs. your SO. By the time you open the door, the car will be running, environmental controls will be adjusting to your desired settings and your favorite tunes will cue up just in time! Your car will respond with an XML health diagnostic and some notes left from SO about the burger wrappers in the rear seat ...
I see lots of growth in Web services and entertainment. There are lots of companies transitioning to membership based models now, and that generates a lot of work to build those subscription systems and management tools.
I just hired four new developers at my company, so I will give you some pointers for actually getting in the door once you have found a company to interview for:
#1 - Accept the fact you'll most likely make less money than your last position. Times have changed in most markets. I hired for four positions and had 150 resumes (not counting the throw them in the trash right away kind). Lots of people I interviewed were looking for salaries that were gone with the 1999 dot com frenzy. Don't mentioned your MBA or Masters in CompSci fifty times, either.
#2 - Don't accept less money than you're worth. With #1 being said, don't short sell yourself either. Companies are getting away with murder when they hire right now because the market is so bad for those out of work. You want to come across as someone who is WORTH every penny you ask for. How to do this? Focus on things at your previous jobs that increased efficiency or saved your company money. As an example, someone I hired told me about how they cut their company's bandwidth costs by 30% by installing a proxy that used mod_gzip on everything going out. Companies will pay for people who will not only save them money, but FIND them ways to save even more money.
#3 - Be assertive, but not forceful. People who call me every two days to follow-up annoy the heck out of me. It sends a signal that you're desparate and don't have other options. Definately send an E-mail thanking the person for an interview with a couple BRIEF thoughts. If you call back more than once and don't hear back, don't waste your time chasing the job.
#4 - Focus on MY needs, not yours. I don't want to hear about how you are really heavily involved in open source, or have this web site you help maintain on the side that gets uber traffic. Things like that spell distraction to me. Review the Web site or product catalog of the company you are going to interview for. Do a Google search and read recent press on the company. Try to get an idea of what challenges the company is facing and apply your past project experience directly to that.
#5 - Dress and act appropriately. Don't show up in a suit unless it's an executive position and you're in an area of the country that requires it. Being overdressed makes you look out of place, and tells me you haven't been in circulation or interviewed much. Comb your hair, take out those nose rings (unless you're a graphics person, haha), and ask questions. If you don't understand something you're asked, say so. Nothing is worse than watching someone try to fake their way through an answer.
#6 - Base the business on the numbers and the market, not the Herman Miller chairs. Our office isn't super deluxe. It's pretty spartan, just a couple floors of cubes and Costco desks, tables, etc. But we're profitable for over a year, have over three million users, have positive growth, and have been in business on the net for over six years. You won't find a good job that will last if a company spends more on their office than their payroll.
#7 - Avoid the startup...This one is more of my personal experience, but most people I know are sick of hearing about startups. Hearing someone works at a startup in most cases sends up warning signs. You're better off working for a smaller, established company that is challenged by it's growth and needs quality people. You'll learn a lot more when you don't have to worry if your paycheck will be coming next month.
Just some thoughts from the front lines of a smallish Internet company in Seattle...Hope this helps!
Case
Bioinformatics.
Just north of Washington DC area there are almost 200 companies that are working in the bioinformatics area s. Subject knowledge is good of course but even better is knowledge of Perl. O'Reilly even has 2 books Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics and Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills
Then there are companies that are doing lots of work regarding facial recognition.
Hope this helps.
You can modify the date/time format in your preferences.
You can relax now.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
As a 12 month veteran (tech unemployment) i'd say learn what interests you want to pursue, but keep an eye on what skills you can sell for a reasonable living.
btw the industry had improved slightly, however we're starting to see a nose-dive again.
Type in something rude, turn up the volume and have fun!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/27/00252
Much of the comments from that story apply here.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
People are starving for inexpensive, easy to setup, wireless. Some day we'll be able to just slap a $20 antenna on any suburban rooftop and log onto a network. Until then, there are a lot of people looking for "solutions". Move fast if this excites you. Entrepreneurs are already moving on it.
If this doesn't turn you on, exploit fears of terrorism. That could include surveillance, security, privacy issues, encryption... anything spook-related.
Of course, you'll be lucky to get something you actually like in this economy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have been following Digital Identity; Digital Identity World: Identity is Center
They have a collection of white papers and editorials. Particularly see Why Identity Now?
I can't guarantee it is the next big thing, but it's close enough to pay close attention.
This sig is self referential.
Even though M$ is doing to well with their X-Box, video game makers are doing great. They have three new consoles to develop for. They Geforce3's are also becoming mass market. That means developers can pull off tricks with the progamable pixel pipeline that they couldn't do with the fixed function pipeline.
That's where the real money is
hahahaha that's funny
The field here is wide open. Lots of university biology departments are spinning off companies to make innovative new sensors, so you can get involved there. Or you can go and manage a Beowulf cluster for a big drug firm. Or anything in between.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I know a good weekend project would be for some experienced users to help me setup my VPN in #linuxhelp on irc.enterthegame.com or they can reply and tell me what IRC chan they want to use or if they would prefer email, icq, msn, aim, etc.
Basically I need to give people relatively secure (encrypted would be best) access to our locale network. How I was looking at doing this was using the linux box as the router/firewall. I basically need to have the remote PC be given IP addresses and work like they are on the network locally (either via DHCP or I can simply assign them static local IPs, 10.0.0.x).
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Why not take this time to go back and fill in holes in your knowledge? Maybe you don't know how to do x in a language you use regularly, or you can set something up but can't secure it. This is going to be far more productive in the long run.
Most of these technologies are so new it is going to be very hard to come across as an 'expert' in these fields because no-one has had enough real-world experience of them yet. Consolidate what you know.
Actually, the xml-ized smart car will eventually replace the SO completely.
Information security is probably the hottest segment of the market right now. Penetration testing, intrusion detection, common criteria. There are a ton of different things that you can do in the field, and there's LOTS of demand. Plus, since there are a lot of positions as government contractors available you have a bit more job security than you would have as a contractor for the commercial market.
Concentrate on technique and avoid the so-called experts. In 1990, I was working in an all-Unix shop when I noticed that our "architects" and "gurus" starting getting Windows 3.1 desktops. They all assured me that programming Unix was a dead-end and that I had better start learning WIN32 APIs or be out of a job. I never took their advice and have still managed to stay employed. Be flexible however, and don't pigeon hole yourself into a single commercial framework (e.g. SAP, Oracle, .NET, etc.) Look at all of the people who thought they'd be set for life doing PowerBuilder, Gupta, or VINES network admin.
Get into security. The goverment will throw money at you.
Plastics
(* Yahoo!, aimed for ad revenues that proved far smaller than hoped. *)
Yahoo just seems to be making stupid decisions. I see almost *no* subject-based targeting in their geocities ads. I don't remember a single computer-related ad in my IT-related websites (such as my anti-OO site). It is already classified as a computer-related site in their system.
Further, they are killing thier own "children". They are starting to "clean up" older sites that have not changed, regardless of the number of visitors.
The cost of storing and transmitting webpages will continue to drop over time. (The only cost that might rise is content disputes, like DMCA stuff.)
Thus these two factors:
1. Better targeting ads
2. Continuous drop in storage and transmission costs
Should make things like Geocities viable. True, #2 is long-term, but they could do #1 now.
Table-ized A.I.
Information security! Not just antivirus, but actual data and network security. Learning how to configure and deploy SECURED web, mail, ftp servers on as many platforms as possible will make you infinately valuable to any company. Learning how to manage Windows security policies will make you valuable as well. Even if it IS mostly due to media-induced infoparanoia (oh no! Those evil h4X0rS are going to 0wN my .jpg files!) the information security field is booming. Companies simply can't find enough people who are diligent and knowledgeable enough to protect their systems. Salaries in that area continue to climb. I'm one of the lucky ones who jumped on the infosec ship early. :)
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
And yet, we here that a recovery is underway and that the technology sector as a whole is picking up again.
What do I and other victims of the slowdown have to know to 'get back in the saddle' in the near future?"
I'm not trying to be mean, but learning the difference between 'hear' and 'here' is pretty important. As someone who can and does hire people, I wouldn't take a second look at someone who didn't know the difference and made such a poor mistake in their writing. Being employable has less to do with a laundry list of skills than it does with being intelligent and flexible. This is especially true now despite common sense: many employers need to get by with less staff so they tend to look for people who are articulate, clever, experienced, and lastly, skilled.
Walmat's real hot right now. They give you a uniform and everything.
Oh sorry, you meant coding?
...like GNU Enterprise.
As people continue to see the light and increasingly prefer Free Software, and want to keep their data in a more open system, projects like this should skyrocket in use, and people that know them well should be more valuable.
why would you go poking around for employment advice
among the largest pool of unemployed rejects known
to internetdom?
I mean the coffee stuff! Coffee is always a "hot" trend (unless you like it cold =)
Buzzword compliance won't make you a better programmer, and if you go work for an employer that hires based on such then expect seriously inept coworkers.
If you have a good grounding in CS principles (algorithm efficiency, data structures - linked lists, trees, use of pointers) plus a couple of representative programming languages (C or C++, and perhaps some higher level language like perl or sh) and can go from a problem description to a clean design and readable, documented code - then technologies with new names are unimportant. If you don't, then you'll be playing catch-up all the days of your life and still be woefully bereft of "clue."
Take XML (as in "take my wife - please" :). It's just HTML except you get to invent the tags. There are some complications (W3C comes out with a new XML standard daily) but most of them can be ignored. Anyone that's read this paragraph can now put "XML" on their resume, but what's the point? Similarly, once you learn one structured or OOP or functional language, picking up another is easy; learn one RPC system (SUN RPC, CORBA, COM/DCOM, .NET) and the rest are, for the most part, isomorphic.
Here's an article that I wrote a little while ago that might be of assistance.
czth
wait, what part of all that requred xml, I'm confused?
I know whats cool and what will make you a million quickly. But you know what? I'm not telling. I'm going in it myself..
In other developments, I am writing a great book on the Tech Sector. Costs $300 but worth it. Buy two copies from me in case one gets lost.. Oh and also.. If you're deep in debt and need relief click here and here. Also Ive got great porn...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The Economist has been going on for months in a row about the end of capitalism as we know it and has even run articles in which The Economist of London's staff reporters have said things like-- perhaps capitalism was never appropriate for many parts of the world.
In case you hadn't heard, Taiwan's chip fabs have gone renegade and are pushing the ultimate limits of nanotechnology in a period of months rather than the twenty years drawn out schedule set by IBM. I'm talking about the 65nm fab being built in Singapore as we speak. See the last few months of EETimes if you want some scarry stories. Yeah, that was nanotech, it went by so fast you hardly even saw it, eh?
While investment bankers are being charged with corruption, Wall Street is below where it was before the Gulf War and Israel is loading nuclear cruise missles onto a fleet of submarines in an effort to beat India and Pakistan to the headlines of being the second nation in history to use nuclear weapons for offensive purposes.
Who is suggesting to you that things are suddenly going to rebound?
Oh, did I mention that Taiwan students have stopped attending the TOEFL in vast droves and are now going to grad school in mainland China instead of the US? So much for that strategic partnership. And you can guess what this is going to look like a few years down the road when the chips market has been totally commoditized and relocated to mainland China and Taiwan has de-facto reunified by popular consent from within Taiwan. Americans are going to be like --when did everything suddenly change? Well guess what, it's changing by the minute and much of it is the seeds of bitter fruit that we Americans have ourselves planted with decades of irresponsible government that has allowed the sickness of monopoly to put our economy in grave danger.
I suggest you look outside of anything that has to do with software or hardware for money. For entertainment though --hey don't touch that dial babe. PCs are the entertainment value of choice and value is what we're all going to need lots of.
He just wants to make millions.
There are three ways to do this, well four.
1. Inherit it.
2. Become an entertainer and make millions that way.
3. Start your own business or...
4. Real estate
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
or for gov't contractors. I am just out of school, and found a well-paying job with a bunch of old guys. There is going to be a lot of people retiring in this sector over the short term.
Oh, and the job is interesting.
One is, what are you going for? Is it more important to you to be working in a hot, even bleeding-edge, field, or does your situation call for more security? If the former, how long can you wait for the payoff? If you're looking for what'll be hot in the next year or two, I think that's very to predict. But if you're trying to prepare for five years from now, I'd be willing to bet that wireless is going to boom the next time the economy is really good. I was working for Metricom (Ricochet modems) when they went under, and most people seemed to be convinced that the major stockholders, WorldCom and Paul Allen, were not giving up, but retrenching. (In fact, my guess is that they found a neat accounting trick that allowed them to dump a billion dollars worth of debt and start over.) I sure think that someone's gonna do this, and make a lot of money. Being there at the right moment could be lucrative and exciting.
On the other hand, if you need security more than excitement for whatever reason, there are a number of choices. Someone's already mentioned support; doing that job well is difficult, and can be rewarding. Databases, networks, the backbone stuff isn't going away soon.
You're already ahead of the game with your attitude of trying to make use of the time. Good luck with your search!
> and put yourself in a position where somebody will recognize you for it.
Why the hell didn't I think of that?! 8 months of unemployment and the answer is that simple!
Studying what you like doesn't work unless what you like is a current "hot trend". I think this industry requires chasing hot trends, unless you are lucky enough to get "job security" (I heard about such a thing once in a magazine article).
Ratbert: "I'm going to interview successful people and write a book of their tips. I'll start with you, Dobert."
Dogbert: "Set your alarm clock to go off every hour. Keep a big vat of 'Jell-O' by the bed. When the alarm clock goes of, stick your head in the 'Jell-O' and yell, 'Boy, I'm tired!'"
Ratbert: "Thanks!"
Dogbert (thinking): "Beware the advice of successful people; they do not seek company."
Seven Years of Highly Defective People, p. 137.
I've got news for you. It ain't gonna happen.
What happened then was a stock market bubble. A bunch of greedy financial speculation in technology stocks that had the side effect of creating a nice job market for IT professionals. It had next to nothing to do with any technology; it could just as well have been tulip bulb stocks.
So what your saying is the reason I'm unemployed is because I'm doing things I DON'T like? I didn't know!
Easy to say when you HAVE a job.
The most versatile employees are axed last: the sys admin who can put up a web page showing disk usage stats and his schedule and task list (and keep it full) will keep his job over the one who doesn't.
The developer who knows an extra language the company wants to use/has bought a software package dependent on the language, etc--will keep his job longer. Also, productivity and experience counts.
Of course all things aren't always equal and never forget that while you may be a creative techie, work is still politics, may I recommend: The 48 Laws of Power (no, I'm not the author)
As for potential industries, I'd have to pick three: security, health care, and small businesses. Lot of people may say/think biotech, but it's already a crowded house with an uphill challenge. Even by the best estimates 1 in 10 biotech companies will survive/make anything. Pfizer has a hit with a boner pill and everyone thinks they're going to strike it rich. Zeesh! looks like nothing has been learned from the dot.com idiots.
peace,
Cooker
I currently for a software security company, and I believe security is a hot future.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The reason is quite simple. You are not solving computer problems, you are solving science problems. The payoff is getting drugs to market faster. Every day a drug is on the market can be $1 million a DAY in revenue.
The science behind drug discovery is fairly invovled, and time consuming to learn. On the contrary, it is pretty easy to learn to make a short program that solves a math problem.
It is not easy to learn to write a GOOD program. Generally the code used in informatics departments is slow, hard to maintain, poorly documented, leaks resources, and is prone to dump core on a large number of inputs.
The bottom line is that infomratics people solve science problems. A scientist can quickly become a passable programmer. As soon as they do that, drug companies don't care if they have to spend millions of dollars on hardwarwe to get things to run quickly. Informatics problems can be solved by scientists, they just usually don't write very good code to do it.
It would be great to have people that are good scientist and good programmers. But it is hard to teach programmers even the basic vocabulary they need to be able to talk to a scientist about what the problem to be solved is. If you can only have one, you have to take the scientist over the programmer.
XML is simply a data transmission format. Comma delimited format did not generate front-page news when it came out, so why should XML?
.NET, MS made a confusing mess. The advantage of VB was that it had a shorter learning curve than Java and its API's. Now that MS cloned Java, they also cloned the complexity of Java, it seems.
People trying to turn XML into databases and programming languages are missing the mark. XML does not do either of these particularly well. Databases are optimized to be databases, not optimized to fit a certain external format. That would be almost like optimizing a car engine to resemble a Peter Max drawing.
Regarding
All it will do is create a *new* market for K.I.S.S. True, MS might suck up that market also, but they still have to start from scratch and risk all the problems related to being overbearing and mean.
(Whether the Java approach is "better" in the long run to make up for the longer learning curve is another long, flameful debate. I personally think Sun's API's are rotting crap.)
Table-ized A.I.
I think the FBI probably needs someone to teach them how to use Google.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
And then apply for a job at
Atomirakennus Inc who might make the new finnish atomic power plant (=
Basically, find a module on CPAN that is neglected, or look for some idea that hasn't been done elsewhere, work on it and post it to the web, and get your claim to fame!
Another great idea is to help out with the CJAN (sourceforge has the project) and bone up on your Java skills, converting ideas from CPAN into Java and posting them on some kind of CJAN site. You'll
Some other ideas:
- Don't be afraid to brag on the resume,
- practice answering the top 50 interview questions believably, with good and truthful answers,
- post your resume on lots of job boards,
- create a kickin' homepage,
- find old documents like howto's that you've written that are generally usefull to everyone and post them on your page,
- don't forget to wax your car! It's summer!
-- KevinUnitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
is that they tend to cool off, and the hotter they are the faster (and farther) they cool. I would really recommend a more "tempid" area for work, as those jobs will be around for a while. Network administration may not be sexy, but I have yet to see a network that can manage itself.
I personally work in embedded systems development. While the pay may not be at the top of the curve, you will not find a more challenging area nor will you find a brighter group of developers. The best thing is that your skills are kept sharp for when the industry heats up again (i.e., You can do what on a 486 with 128K of memory?).
The dogcow says "Moof!"
CL -- it's the next big thing!!
Copy protection seems to be a growth industry at the moment.
john
I somewhat self-deprecatingly characterize myself as a wannabe, newbie programmer. This because although I've been on PCs since the early 80s, made friends with DOS, Basic, Visual Basic and, now, C, I've never worked in the field. My background is in com/economics with a strong history in humanities and more especially epistemology. I note the above to bore and to bait you. It seems for all the logic inherent in the exercise of programming few programmers seem to know how to conduct an analysis or an experiment. Even elementary statistics and probability courses would suggest an answer more immediately germane to the person who submitted the question. Asking what is hot without so much as a nod toward the history, proclivities and abilities of the person asking the question betrays a superficiality that deserves to be trolled. Read the title to my comment, research the meaning. If you can't get off first base try an old standard like A. Kaplan, 'Conduct of Inquiry', or, Fisher on conducting experiments. If nothing else you'll come away far ahead of the pack that sets up the hew and cry at /. and you'll have acquired a valuable asset: How to ask the right question.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The Hottest sector is the restaurant business my friend. Serving Hot food will always be hot. Computers or no computers : People gotta eat! So quit java and start a cafe instead.
-Dracken
Oh wait - try Penna, Inna burnt down...
I think what he means is that since he can choose his path, that he should give something a try that he always wanted to do, but probably hasn't. It's easy to say when you have a job, but it would probably be a mistake to jump on a buzzword then end up doing something that sucks.
Plastics.
Considered harmful.
If we knew that, why would we tell the entire Slashdot community!! My God man, the whole robotics industry would suffer the Slashdot effect, extinguishing the heat under a 42+e7 ton pile of geek resumes.
"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."
As in this article from wired:s ex.html? pg=2
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/
I'm a network administrator with two certifications, one in security, and I've been out of work for four months.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
...to finally learn C.
Seriously.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm unemployed also. When I do find a job, it's more often some 2 month contract, than anything even remotely perm or fulltime. But even so, I'm not whoring myself around, trying to learn the latest buzzwords and act like it's something that makes me employable. The reason I chose this as a career, was because I love everything about IT. Not because I heard there were fat paychecks to be found.
So, in the meantime, I plan on continuing to learn the same things I've been teaching myself, and forget about whatever the latest crraze is with the pundits and industry rags.
And yes, maybe if you don't like IT, this indirectly translates to you being unemployed. Lord knows if I were hiring someone, I would rather have someone that liked doing the job they were being interviewed for...
The old fashioned business of putting software in a box and selling it.
If you're a tech person who enjoys writing, this seems to be a hot area at the moment. It requires the skills to...well...um...okay, so maybe even if you're completely unqualified you could get hired for this.
I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to gloat or to disrespect anyone. Surely everyone laid off from a tech job these days is having a tough time. (I know that I was very lucky to land a job in 3 weeks.) But in general I think Net Admins, being somewhat the "Jack of all trades" of the industry, have a better chance of staying employed or regaining employment quickly than the "specialists."
load "windows7"
IsMyJobHotorNot.com
The site seems to be slashdotted already. It's so bad the hostname is'nt even resolving.
Have a look at OSGi, the Open Services Gateway Initiative. This non-profit organisation works on open specifications for managed service delivery, and has broad industry support. There's a lot of information on the site, so it's certainly worth checking.
I heard the unemployment office was looking for bright talented software engineers to answer phones all day... seems they needed someone who spoke the same language as the guy at the other end of the phone.
You Missed One..
Steal
Just my 2c.
Look into NT engineering. They are always jobs posted on hotjobs.com for them. I was a Solaris Operator for Dow Jones but now that the bubble burst we were let go. Now it's almost impossible to find another unix job. There aren't any Linux jobs outside of programming which are all temp jobs or require a rediculous amount of experience(8-10 years). Don't believe me.. Go to hotjobs.com and look for Linux Jobs. The only one is for rackspace.com and they've been flooding that for 4 months now.
= lnux&a=v&p=s&l=on&z=m&q=l
Career for dummies:
Windows World:
Obtain A+ cert -> get job repairing PC's at Best buy or small pc shop ($10/hr)-> Obtain MCP and read up on MOUS objectives -> Get Job as Help Desk ($20/hr) -> Obtain MCSA + CCNA -> JR NT Engineer($25/hr) -> Obtain MCSE + CCNP -> SENIOR NT Engineer -> SQL Cert (oracle/sql)+ Visual Basic -> DBA (100,000/year) ->RETIRE
Unix World:
temp unix operator job ->learn Shell scripting/perl and veritas and earn SCSA->Look for underpaid SCSA admin jobs->(after a few years you realize that now the bubble has burst there is no demand for unix admins)-> go to windows
or
RHCE->troll slashdot->learn c and write free code ($0/hr)->go back to windows
Summary: The hotjobs of the future will be Supporting Microsoft products.
Graphical summary: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=c&c=msft&k=c1&t=1y&s
how about security type jobs?
... that weasel from Loonie Tunes that pissed Foghorn Leghorn all the time? I think he was always after the Next Big Thing.
...
Somebody ask him!
Insert image of googly eyed, drooling weasel
- SmartAs
'In pusuit of the greater good!
I suppose the rest of these recommendations are just as good. It's not a beautiful thing.
nuclear cruise missles onto a fleet of submarines in an effort to beat India and Pakistan to the headlines of being the second nation in history to
use nuclear weapons for offensive purposes.
Our use of the atomic bomb was defensive. They attacked us, remember? Or did your gov't schoolteachers tell you the US was the aggressor at Pearl Harbor. The Japs knew they were toast as the bombers went out. Read the book by Gordon Prange, At Dawn We Slept.
If Israel pops one, she'll be the first to use the atom bomb offensively.
As for the TOEFL, not much interesting in the US since NAFTA and GATT.
No, no -- not porn: PC/console games. Go look at how the stock prices of EA, Activision, etc. have done over the last few years compared to the rest of the tech industry. I'm working for a studio that's hired several new people pretty much every week for the last year or so.
If you're interested in engineering positions you need experience or to otherwise be pretty damn good. But good IT people and network people are needed too, especially with all the online stuff going on. Plus, it seems to be a trend that they throw a lot of people at a product to get it to ship date over the last six months of the cycle.
Plus, although it's fast moving and often stressful, it's damn fun a lot of the time. Give me coding explosions over database work any day of the week.
A.
I worked in consulting for 4 years and we avoided the small business customers for a very important reason. The problem with a small company is that they go through the same hesitation and concern over spending thousands of dollars that a big company would do over millions of dollars. You end up having to work just as hard for a substantially smaller return.
Now, that's as a consultant. Consulting implies a certain amount of custom work, which is what kills you in the smaller businesses. If you could develop some product that's useful to a lot of small businesses, then you might have some potential to make money at it. Think of something like quick books, a product that lots of small companies use, that's relatively cheap but is sold in large enough quantities to be profitable.
So, what you need to do is identify a need in the market. The trick is not inventing the next big thing, it is simply finding an unaddressed need. You've probably stumbled accross a few of these in your past work; meeting people who are doing things a complex way because they have no idea there's a better way. Find those things and provide solutions to them.
The thing that's different though in developing a product is that you, as the "leisured" programmer are taking on the risk of it. If you are billing somebody by the hour, if something goes wrong, you can still eat. If you make some product and nobody buys it, you are screwed. This means that, in addition to being able to develope software, you need to have the talent or be able to hire the talent necessary to sell your product to people.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Two words: Netware Six
If you have a hardware bent, look at VHDL or Verilog, the two most common hardware description languages. The use of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) is increasing, especially in the telecom industry.
There's more demand than people in this area from what I can tell. However, you do limit yourself mostly to medium and large sized companies with this, as small companies usually can't afford to get into it.
Simple answer: just finished a project with a Remote GUI written in Delphi over Http which connects to back-end Sql Server -> used Asta middleware from www.Astatech.com -> bloody brilliant and runs fast.
got a great GUI/DB front end with Delphi running to an Asta server, which updates the db
borland has a similar thing to Asta called Datasnap. This is all great technology, none of this browser-Javascript junk
Well, I sure hope you're right as far as the .NET == XML equation goes. I'm not experienced with .NET to judge it.
as far as the XML not good for databases or PLs, you're right too, but you're missing one more section : data exchange. XML is pretty good at that : you can dunk anything (dunkeable offcourse) into an XML and send it over. The reading side can undunk it and process. Tab delimited stinks at this. So XML is a big leap over tab if you look at it from that perspective.
About the KISS principles, well, the pure existance of MS is the only axiom that keeps KISS alive. If MS hadn't been here, we would never have had a need for KISS. MS incorporates MICM (mae it complex, moronic) into ANYTHING they build.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
If you have to ask...
And move into management. As a manager one said, "Details don't matter."
Learn how technology applies to businesses, then make that your business. In the world of business, people that understand technology and business issues are rare, valuable commodities. Managers who've got tech and business cred are more valuable that you'd ever understand.
Think of it this way: would you rather be the guy that hand-coded the unified password repository, or the guy who's team of people defined and implemented company-wide technology standards, and created a stable computing base for the next 10 years?
The answer, of course, is the first one!
But still, it's a much different feeling to say "Wal-Mart kicked the cr*p out of everyone because of the logistics system we came up with is the sh*t." than it is to say "I single-handedly delivered a php-based dynamic website in 2 weeks."
In short, ignore the technology, and concentrate on the business end. You'll be more useful, and you won't worry that your skills are eroding.
...is not from corrupt, ImClone-style insider trading, but from the long-term outlook for patented, exclusive medical therapies.
There's a large, general outrage at the overall cost of medical treatment and within specific socioeconomic groups HUGE outrage at the cost of perscription medicines. It's not felt (as much) by the middle class due to their generally good, employer-provided medical coverage.
However, I predict a time in the next 20 years when the cost of medical treatment across the board (doctors, hospitals, medicines, and so on) will be so high that political pressure will be brought to bear to severely regulate the costs associated with medical treatments if not to begin socializing medicine.
What's this got to do with biotech careers? Biotech right now is hot as a sector because of the promise of developing amazing new treatments that are proprietary, patentable and licensable for HUGE profits. However the money will dry up quickly if government begins to socialize medicine.
Well, XML and SOAP are the basis for the web services component of .NET, but .NET is also MS' too-late, feeble (bound to be low-quality before multiple service packs) attempt at creating an OO API for Windows that (supposedly) is easily accessible by any language (that is, any language compilable to their .NET IL; MS is foisting C#).
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
The computer game industry is worht more than the film industry worldwide, it is predicted that it will grow year on year for the next five and there is a specific lack of people who have experience or specific training (cause none really exists).
Downsides are that it is very competitive, only 10% of games released make money. It is very difficult to make headway in the industry unless you work for a publisher or a well established software house.
At least according to Active Media Research and the folks at MIT Technology Review:
Mobile Robotics: The Next Revolution
It's all ball bearings these days!
Maybe he is doing what he likes: chasing buzzwords.
XML solves some problems that CDF doesn't, like validation and extensibility. I can add a new field to an XML file without it affecting the receiver, try that with CDF ant the receiver gets very confused.
Then there are all the support facilities like SOAP and so on. They let me write a server like:
public class Adder {
public int sub(int a, int b) {
return a+b;
}
}
Drop that source code in a web service enabled application server and I can send a message to it uusing any SOAP cleint and get my sum back.
Try that with CDF.
Even things that don't work like facial recognition at airports will get a lot of money.
Yeah, honestly, the "appropriate" dress for an interview is always something I struggle with.
The best advice I ever got (from a recruiter) is to try to take a look at how their own people dress, in advance - and copy their style.
(If, for example, you see most of the employees dressing casually - with only management in a suit and tie, then you're probably fine just dressing up with a plain shirt and tie, and no suit. That is, unless you're applying for one of those management positions.)
Much depends on the age of the people interviewing you, IMHO. I've been to places where the dress was quite casual - but the management was made up of older people who expected that all interviewees would show up in a suit and tie, and freshly polished dress shoes. Anything less told them you weren't the type who "goes the extra mile" to make a good impression, and that was a negative.
I'm a mobile robotics person. That report sounds fishy to me. Sure the robotics people (Activmedia and MIT) are going to hype robotics as being the big thing in 5 years, they have a vested interest in that happening. I think they have been saying very similar things for at least 10 years, and as of yet there are very few mobile robotic household equipment. Sure, the solar lawnmower and indoor vaccum cleaner robots are around but I've never met anyone who was seriously interested in something like this. Sony has some of the new "entertainment" robots that are the closest thing, but they are still way expensive and not very useful.
I mean really, listen to the tone of this quote:
" In the next three to five years, intelligent networked mobile platforms and manipulators will permeate the fabric of our society just as computers do today."
Be wary of anyone advertising to know the future, especially when they predict enormous growth in their own sector of buisness.
That said, I do think there is a good future in mobile robotics in general, but if you're looking for "hot" jobs right now it's ridiculous to look for opportunities in that industry. I've yet to hear of a company aside from military robotics, Activmedia, or iRobot that needs genuine mobile robotics people. Sure there are AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) for factories and such, but that technology is so large that I don't think it stands a chance in the home market. (Maybe their software would be helpful though?).
Well, my $.02.
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
Railroads....not really high tech by todays standards, but it was once "the next big thing." Once there were a lot of railroad companies, then the bottom fell out. A lot of them went away, and a lot of jobs with them. The strong companies survived and went on.
Automobiles...there were once dozens of car companies in the US. Now there are but a handful, but those companies provide tens of thousands of jobs, many of them very high-skilled.
Calculators...The calculator revolution in the 1970's popped up after Intel produced, almost accidentally, the first microprocessor. Initially it was just going to be a calculator-on-a-chip, but later they realized just what they had produced was more than just something that they hoped one manufacturer would use to make calculators. The calculator business grew very big, very fast, and crashed about as quickly.
There is something, skill-wise, in each of those times that workers were able to adapt for later use. Just give it some time and you will notice the door opening for the next opportunity, even though they all appear to be closed for good right now.
I've been scanning the job postings on Monster.com and other sites, and one thing that comes up repeatedly is a need for JD Edwards or PeopleSoft administrators (with experience), or administrators for CRM (Customer Relations Management) packages.
Personally, I think both of these types of software packages are just "fads" right now - but they cost so much for corporations to implement that they easily justify hiring an additional person to keep them running.
If you're one of the few people lucky enough to have received some training (or hands-on experience designing forms or supporting) either ERP or CRM software, you're missing out right now if you don't leverage it to get a good-paying I.T. job for the next couple years. After that though, don't be surprised if this stuff fades away again.
My personal hope is that all the above will be developed as open source projects, but certainly, a good programming group with drive could make some very good money off these ideas as well.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
My grandfather once told me:
"Be an undertaker, kid. No matter how bad things get, you will always have customers."
Table-ized A.I.
And the Job market is also a sphere. Then if: dQ/dtA = -k(dT/dx) and k is positive... voila!
Buzzzt! Guess again NOT. Most things sell "by the trend". A lot of people made money programing Java when it was hotest, a lot of contractors will make huge revenues from companies adopting .net.
.net because their contractors or programming department will tell them they need it. And Microsoft will be leveraging their "hard earned" 40B plus their monopoly to make sure the argument wins.
The other day i was in a meeting with some CEO of a programming firm with many clients. What they do i follow the TREND. He claimed that ".net will require a lot of $$$ from companies adopting it, and that (they) will be ready for it! Huge profits to be made".
Believe me, you can make lots of money by just following the trend. Companies will adopt
This is just an example. The trend make you eat extra food. On the other hard, you have someone like me, which tries to make sense out of this. End result: they make money and do not help producitivity. I don't make much money and do save money. Yet, they are the heros during the "revolution" and they only care about me when they want to "cut costs".
It's really simple:
STEP 1: adopt whatever crap is on the IT mindshare at the moment. Adopt it fast and act as you believe it's true
STEP 2: PROFIT
STEP 3: PROFIT
unfinished: (adj.)
(* The reading side can undunk it and process. Tab delimited stinks at this. *)
I agree that delimited formats needed a few more protocols to make them more robust, such as a header, but unless something is heavily nested, delimited works quite well.
Do you have a specific problem with delimited formats that you can describe?
I am not saying that it is superior to XML, but XML is only an incrimental improvement at best. Not something to bet the farm on. Besides, XML is warmed-over static LISP by some accounts, and LISP existed in the 50's.
Fat ties will be back in style if you hold onto them long enuf.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm suprised no one mentioned yet... but the Fibre Channel industry is one of the few segments of the computer industry that is actually growing these days. (see here). Storage in general will probably grow (or at least not significantly decline) for a long, long time. A quick search on Monster shows a lot of jobs out there.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
(* I can add a new field to an XML file without it affecting the receiver, try that with CDF ant the receiver gets very confused.*)
No, just add it onto the end. How is the receiver not being able to handle more stuff at the end different than an XML reader not being able to handle a new tag? That is a bad reader, not a bad format.
I will agree that removing a field in XML is a little easier, but delimited format is already more compact, so you are still ahead size-wise if you leave an empty place-holder.
(* Drop that source code in a web service enabled application server and I can send a message to it uusing any SOAP cleint and get my sum back. Try that with CDF. *)
Send: 2, "+", 3
Receive: 5
Next!
Table-ized A.I.
Nano is BIG, or it will be. The question is, how many will it employ? As Bucky Fuller noted many years ago, mankind has an ever increasing ability to produce more and more, with ever less human labour. Everything we could possibly need, free or very cheap. I don't know what implications it all has for capitalism though...
Everything for everyone. There is no shortage of anything.
(* But in general I think Net Admins, being somewhat the "Jack of all trades" of the industry, have a better chance of staying employed or regaining employment quickly than the "specialists." *)
That is what all those Novell guys used to say.
Anyhow, what I predict is *remote* admin of networks. A hardware person might visit every week or so, but the rest will be done in network sweat-shops in India or China.
"If you can digitize it, we can outsource it!"
Table-ized A.I.
...is the defence industry. It is crystal clear that the western world is preparing for a war with anybody that will stand in the way of the new order. And this war is going to be done on land,sea,air and most importantly, space. If you want to know what the next hot buzzword will be, I say war.Unfortunately, killing people has always been one of the most profitable jobs around.
DRM is probably one of the hottest, most relevant areas of the tech industry right now.
Scary, ain't it?
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Imagine where mankind will be within 10-20-30-40 years.
n dex.ht m
Then figure out the tech required to get us there, and how it will create new "needs".
Some examples of where I think we're going:
We'll go to Mars.
Papermoney is going the way of the dodo.
Personal videophones.
Broadband access everywhere.
Asia will be the economic and cultural centre.
Pollution will be a severe problem.
Gene tech.
New technologies/problems
- Power generation. (personal. distributed.)
- New solutions to "the last mile" problem.
- Nanotech (nanotech appears to be a reality already)
- High bandwidth radiocommunications.
- Crypto
- Data mining
- Language barriers
Make your own predictions.
Or see:
http://www.bt.com/sphere/insights/pearson/i
Dag B
what's hot is not technology, it's applied technology. forget wireless, forget networking, forget systems, forget anything purely tech. look into science, medicine, engineering, etc. -- fields that produce something tangible that both investors and the general public can latch on to.
never happen kid.
people like people to be there for their problems and not recorded messages or
unanswered emails, no matter the outcome.
This combined with the fact that to most management and end users technology seems magical enough without remote fairy folk waving magic wands at their problems. There will always be space for a network/systems "guy" on staff.
I'm a network administrator with 6 certifications,4 yrs experience and
the ability to program in C, tcl/tk, the
shell/awk/sed, ad-nauseam.
I quit my job due to circumstances above
and beyond the call of duty.
Now it does not look like there will be
another for a while. TS/SCI cleared individuals are being snatched up here in this area however.
If you want to branch out, learn markup (XML, XSL, etc) thoroughly. You'll need to make a few mental gear changes, as it's not what programmers expect, but with the big swing towards using it as the de facto common carrier for machine-to-machine interchange, there are still a lot of systems need programming to accept it.
Nanotectonics
How is the receiver not being able to handle more stuff at the end different than an XML reader not being able to handle a new tag?
My first programming job included maintaining a perl script that processed a database table. The table had 97 data fields; the original programmer didn't know that he could extract the data into a hash, and reference the data using hash keys that matched the field names. The result was code that read something like:
$price = $row[17]*[$row[72]* sqrt($row[12] )
this meant a) the code was totally unreadable, and b) the only place you could add a field to the database was at the end. This is exactly the kind of programming structure that your CDF proposal leads to. If I were you I would worry that when I died and went to hell I might have to work on code like that.
Send: 2, "+", 3
Receive: 5
Where is the data typing that tells the server that you didn't mean to call add(string,string) and get 23?
> it would probably be a mistake to jump on a buzzword then end up doing something that sucks.
At this point, I would rather work at a tolerable job I am unhappy with than be unemployed.
> Lord knows if I were hiring someone, I would rather have someone that liked doing the job they were being interviewed for...
Well, let me know when you are an employer. In the meantime, I'm going to try to bail my unemployed ass out of this dead-end industry...
So many years wasted.
Where can I get an IT job in the U.S.? Anyone? I have applied for EVERYTHING here in the Midwest (meaning ALL IT jobs I've come across and anything else in the newspaper, even bank tellers, secretary positions, retail stores (damn college degree), and I can't get anything).
I'm quite aware the Midwest is years behind the rest of the planet in everything except antique automotive storage techniques, but I am willing to relocate. Where should I go?
Not only is the direct military application area going to be hot these few years, but any of the incidentals... including internal and external espionage, signal processing, information crunching, profiling, and any other vaguely morally objectionable fields that use technology to get around due process... these are the fields that are in the process of receiving huge amounts of research money. At some point the companies doing this research will want to expand away from government projects, and I can guarantee that the information gathering and privacy invading technologies will be rather sought after by marketing firms and such.
-k
yours,
kbs
I see that others share my sentiment about this. The question is the wrong question. Learn and master the fundmentals. If you are into hardware, learn your electrical engineering. Master it. If it is software, learn the fundamentals of programming, systems design, algorithms, threading, etc. Learn a few fundamental languages (for the *nix world I'd say C, C++, Java, perl, shells, and then maybe some others that extend your world-view, such as lisp, scheme, and smalltalk). Learn how to express solutions for common problems in each of these languages.
I see so many programmers coming up these days whom I describe as "tool-junkies." They are programmers who know how to solve problems with one library collection, one integrated compiler suite, and nothing else (and, yes, I am referring mainly to Visual Studio, but there is a Java "tool-junkie" culture too -- Java programmers who can't work outside of their only IDE).
If you find yourself using a library without the slightest inkling of what must be happening in that library it should send warning flags up in your head. You should be able to write anything any other programmer could write. If you can't imagine how to even begin, you may be a tool-junkie. (Note that I am not saying you would have to write it as well as any other programmer -- obviously skills vary -- but you should have some idea how to tackle the problem, because you should have seen and solved something like it before. Genuinely new techniques are extremely rare. For the most part in programming you are making a symphony of familiar tropes, not breaking new ground.)
Learn fundamentals, not buzzwords, and maybe you won't find yourself looking for another job involuntarily.
You moderators are idiots. This is a news story printed in Business Week Magazine last december. Didn't it read more like a press piece than a /. comment? User 956 is not an insightful poster, he is a blatant plagarist. 4 moderators were either stupid or naive enough to believe that he was insightful when he posted this comment. Please, think before you moderate. I know I will get modded down for this* but I just had to say something.
*Standard 'I know I'll get modded down' to ensure that I get modded up
Enigma
There are amazing emerging technologies out there. The most recent is the semiconductor diode, an area of continuing study. But you'll probably want to get involved in emerging circuitry for AM radios. This will allow such things as stereophonic broadcasts on the AM band. To quote from a recent magazine, "Circuits will have to be designed to increase the bandwidth and cut the distortion, as well as to encode and decode the stereo information, in AM transmitters and receivers." (Electronic Design, May 27, 2002, page 26 "Flashback")
Analysts estimate that this technology will emerge as the most profitable market in the technology sector since the invention of the light bulb and the Negra Modelo bottling machine.
Ooooooooooh well.
just check out the all the latest buzz about it at www.thegridreport.com
I do not think "Funny" mods are subject to metamoderation. Is this true?
cpeterso
Excuse me, did it occur to you that I wrote the article?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The jobs are there but you have to work at finding them and getting one. Standing out solely on technical qualifications can be tough if you don't have 10 or more years real experience, so be the candidate they remember. Be polite, easy to talk to, interested, curious, eager.
I can't emphasize writing and speaking and good manners enough. If you come across as illiterate, uncomfortable, or socially handicapped (as so many geeks do), you are handicapped in the job market. The last time I interviewed candidates for a mid-level programmer job we had candidates show up unwashed, in skateboarder clothes; we had candidates who seemed uneasy around other humans; we had candidates who mumbled "I guess" and "I mean" and "You know what I'm saying" every few words, as if they had speech lessons from Eminem; we had candidates launch into scary (and irrelevant) anti-Microsoft or anti-Linux tirades that made us hope they weren't armed; we had candidates who obviously devoted too much time to body piercing and not enough to reading our job description.
Learn to write. Read outside your discipline. Practice speaking, composing your thoughts, talking to a group. Practice problem-solving skills. Practice debugging--SourceForge is overflowing with opportunities for working on real code. Don't wait to learn on-the-job: spend some time every day learning something new. Use Borders as a library with coffee.
Learn something about the businesses and industries that might hire you. Learn a little about accounting, inventory, logistics, sales, marketing, manufacturing, publishing, etc., so at least you know what the jargon means and what questions make sense.
Learn databases and SQL. Learn them really well. It takes a while but you have to start sometime. Most companies have databases old enough to have seen many industry trends come and go.
When job hunting you'll be competing with people who have the same stuff on their resume as you do, more or less. Stand out by presenting yourself well. Show some ability to string two thoughts together. Show enthusiasm about solving problems, debugging skanky old code, working as part of a team.
Job hunting is not like taking tests in school where the best student ranks at the top of their class. Employers usually make up their mind about you in the first few minutes (or first few seconds if you smell bad, dress like a slacker, or display poor manners). Take 20 Java programmers with equivalent experience and certifications and the one who makes the interviewers believe he will fit in will get the job.
Join a user's group, go to trade shows, network. Ask people you know who have jobs what kind of people their company needs. Get names of skilled recruiters and work with them--they aren't all dishonest scumbags. If you have time do volunteer work--you can meet people who can point you at full-time jobs.
The short-term bubble that burst and put so many techies on the street persuaded too many of them that growing unusual facial hair and learning Flash would set them up for a lifetime, or at least get them in a Volkswagen commercial. Sorry to break it to you, but employers have sobered up now.
Good luck.
Speaking from personal experience (at a company which develops software to run on it's own sequencing platform), in biotech, it's worth trying to be either 1) a good scientist who can communicate with the programmers or 2) a good programmer who can communicate with the scientists. I saw more wasted time/dollars fly by on projects simply because those of us in the science department couldn't communicate effectively with the coders in the software department. Not to mention the animosity that can develop between the equally large egos in both camps.
... Just from strictly personal opinions, of course.
It seems that bio-informatics as a discipline is still a difficult gamble. There is trouble in defining what it should be or do while big pharma just throws money at it in the hopes that it will pay off. The best bio-informatics arenas, IMHO, to be right now are either 1) clusters that are running folding or molecular (ie. drug-to-target) interaction simulations or 2) developing data collection (or other) apps for instrumentation (ie. sequencing platforms, HPLC, MS, robotics, etc.)
Me? Debunk an American myth? And take my life in my hands?
XML, SOAP (aka XML Protocol), WSDL (or something like it), UDDI (or something like it) are the place to start. Still an immature area so there will be more acronyms to "learn" in the future. Still a lot of "infrastructure" pieces needed for success and wide adoption.
Also sure to be hot and somewhat related is the Semantic Web. In many ways this is the way the Web should already be.
...knowlege of data warehousing and database performance issues including query optimization...because the databases are so large.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
Education is going online. MIT is pioneering this trend with OpenCourseWare, which aims to make all course materials available on the Web, free of charge.
Why is it important? Because it will turn the joke "Try finding some porn on the net (if you fail kill yourself inmediately)" into "Try finding some info about -your asignature here- (if you fail..)". And this is not just about "free information", it's a better way of learning.
Example: Have you ever been in class with 50 students writing down nearly identical notes? how often did you find enlightment there? I believe everyone should be able to learn at his own pace. That means grabbing the info, studying it, and then spending class time in a more valuable way. Plus it's more rewarding when you are in control of your own learning process.
Anyway, the opportunity is writing software to manage and play with that information. I'll give you an example..
Right now Im having fun feeding a chatterbot with my papers (just a matter of xml+xsl=aiml) so any student can go to my page and just say:
guest> okay. So, tell me again about the C# pointersbot> ok, what you wanna know?
guest> Well, pointers are legal there, right?
bot> Yeah, it's legal, but is ain't a hundred percent legal. I mean you just can't..
More valuable examples are left as an exercise for the reader.
Try COBOL, Linux/390 and/or Unix Systems Services on z/OS on S/390 boxes. COBOL because there's still a _lot_ of code out there; the other two because IBM and some of their customers believe in the consolidate-servers-on-big-iron theory. Getting into z/OS may have other advantages: people with systems progamming (install software and customize it, writing exit routines as necessary, and doing system admin work; in case that term is new) skills like me are retiring or don't have long to go. The industry will have a shortage of those skills pretty soon. Go to SHARE (http:\www.share.org) to find an organization of many companies with IBM technologies. While the canons of SHARE prevent recruiting/hiring practices while at the conference you can get an idea of what's going on, for sure - and at one time I know they were having discussions about what to do about the upcoming shortage.
Well, the average mainframe programmer is 55 years old,and nearly all major companies use IBM's z/OS (OS/390, MVS) for their major applications. The career opportunities are terrific. You don't even have to learn COBOL because modern mainframes run Linux, Web servers, etc. They have I/O bandwidth to die for, and they don't run anything made in Redmond. You could do worse.
"Handguns. Disposable handguns."
(* The result was code that read something like:
$price = $row[17]*[$row[72]* sqrt($row[12] ) *)
First of all, don't process it directly from the storage format. Make a translation table so that you *don't* have numbers in the code. You may have to do similar translations between XML field names and your own names anyhow, since the chances of them matching up 100 percent is probably nil unless you are starting from scratch.
(* Where is the data typing that tells the server that you didn't mean to call add(string,string) and get 23? *)
Put those rules in the table also. If you don't have a table-friendly language/environment, then I pitty you.
Table-ized A.I.
one word... Cobal (wide margin for tolerable there though)
(* never happen kid. people like people to be there for their problems and not recorded messages or unanswered emails, no matter the outcome. *)
Tell that to all the programmers *currently* losing jobs to India and China "outsourcers".
I am not saying that *all* will go, but even if 40 percent go, there would be a *glut* that may last a while.
Table-ized A.I.
There is a law of unintended consquences about to play out in a really nasty way, and those beating the prescription drug price drums are the ones in the driver seat. Laws of unintended consequences are the nasty remanent to an otherwise well intentioned (but quite short sighted and singularly focussed) effort to alleviate a problem. The issue is that this one is going to cause far more and more painful problems than it will solve.
Here is the issue.
The sole reason that a pharma or a biotech is in business is to make profit. This means that they need to have an economic incentive to be in the game. If you think (quite incorrectly) that the government can do better at this, just ask the Russians who lived during the glory days of the workers paradise whether they preferred taking the theraputics created by their comrades, or those of the "corrupt" western regimes? The answer is interesting.
Short answer is that the Russian pharmas didnt have a process to go through like we have in the US to bring a drug to market. Many people died due to poor quality control, limited efficacy/dosing/tox studies, and so forth. As there was no profit motive for these people, they followed the maxim "you pretend to pay us, we pretend to work." Sho-nuff... people died from toxic medication.
Not all of it was bad, but there were some real doozies. Actually some antifungal stuff came out that was pretty good, but that appears to be more the exception than the rule.
And remember, there were strict price controls in place on the theraputics. Cant charge $3/pill. So the pharma couldnt make money. So the stuff rarely worked.
Is that a chill going up your spine?
I hope so.
When you take the profit motive away from these businesses, something interesting is going to happen. It has been demonstrated time and again where industries are socialized.
They become horribly inefficient, turning out poor product of limited selection.
Ask many of the Canadian's streaming across the border to pay for medical care out of their own pockets rather than use their own socialized system. Why are they doing it? If the socialized version of medicine worked so well, wouldnt the flow be the other direction?
So here we are with no more profit in drugs. Some interesting (unintended) side affects result. They include:
1) no more limited use medicine (also called Orphan Drugs). Companies make these in part because the government gives tax and other incentives to the pharmas. No profits, no incentives. You or a loved one has a rare form of a disease, well, you are shit out of luck now. Why? Well in part because the profits from the blockbuster drugs (viagra) help amortize the cost of those that do not make much money, but are developed (at huge cost) anyway. Clinical trials are not cheap.
2) fewer theraputics in pipeline. Clinicals cost money. Lots of money. 40% of the 800M$ pre-marketing budget for a promising theraputic. This is not chump change. You take away the profit motive, you now have a severely constrained zero sum game. You now have a much smaller bag of money to fund clinicals. And you know the gub'ment sure aint gonna relax (and they should not!!!) the regulations surrounding clinicals.
3) far fewer pharmas. Profit motive is history, an d who is left? The generics folks dont need to fund clinicals, R&D, etc. Not to knock them (they have a valid existance and rationale for their work, as the patents are supposed to give a fixed time monopoly). There will be fewer generics companies as well. There are about 25 pharmas today. About 3000 biotechs. With 0 profit, I could see the number of biotechs dropping precipitously. I could see the number of pharmas dropping to single digits. Low single digits. Look what happened in the airplane industry when profit was effectively removed. You have consolidation, and effectively a single or duo government contractor. No longer any real competition, hence the products can and do suck.
Don't think I am a shill for the pharma's. I hate having to pay $200 for a 2 month supply of Prilosec. But then again, I know that if I didnt, when I need a new theraputic in the future, it sure as hell would not be there.
Yeah, some in the industries trade groups will try to scare you. I am not in this industry, I do not discover drugs. I do help build computers that do. You take away these profits from these guys, and a whole helluvalotta people like me are going to start looking for new work. This has yet another unintended side effect, as the supply of new labor increases without demand increasing, the cost for this labor (e.g. what a company will be willing to pay in salary/benefits) drops. We are seeing that today with the people looking for work in the middle of this theoretically getting better economy.
There are a lot of people working in this industry. They are there to make money. Without that motive, what are they going to do?
Price controls on drugs are as stupid as price controls on medical care. This is truly an industry in which you get exactly what you pay for.
If you need a mechanism to deal with a large population of limited means to get the medications and healthcare they need, you can do that at the regional and national level. And there will not be as nasty unintended consequences. The moment the profit motive vanishes, you invite all manner of unintended side affects.
Until medicines can be designed for you and your illness (haplotyping, genotyping, etc) at a personalized level, and done safely in mass scale, you will likely have to simply bite the bullet.
The best way to lower prices BTW is to introduce more competition, to make the R&D process more efficient. It is really hard to turn a bunch-o-wetlab people into a production line... research does not happen on a schedule.
What should be done today is to stop any more pharma mergers. Large single entities are horribly inefficient. Tax and other incentives to work with other companies (smaller ones) should be given to encourage competition, cross fertilization, and so forth. The information about genomes, medicines, etc, should be shared and fully disclosed (IP is badly misued in this industry), and frankly, the patent system is in dire need of an overhaul. You can't patent life, there is prior art. But you can and should be able to patent molecules that you design to affect life, to a degree. This system is very badly abused now. It is broken, and it needs fixing. Moreover, companies should be encouraged (with appropriate tax abatements and so forth) to aid the problems of poor customers in need. This is the issue, not the cost. It often obscures the sociopolitical-economic circumstances of the groups affected.
It is easy for a government with crappy policies to cry foul and lay blame for its citizens problems with a third party. It is hard to admit culpability. I havent seen it happen. I am not holding my breath on it. If politicians actually focussed on causitive effects rather than symptoms, problems may be fixed.
For example, here in the US, some large fraction of seniors on social security have to chose between buying medicine, and eating or paying for their housing. The politicos immediately point the finger of blame at the cost of medicine. After all, $1200/month is quite a bit. Right? thats 14.4k$/year. So why not fix the problem, and not the symptom (a hopelessly broken medicaid/medicare system that pretends it is an HMO in terms of controlling its costs, yet rather significantly misses its mission). This is a solvable problem, one that can be solved, but it requires scrapping a non-working system for a simpler, transparent system that makes sure that people can get their needed medication, and do so without starving the person. Just requires leaning on the pharma's to take tax breaks from government held records of who got what rather than $$. Make it simple and transparent so that fraud, which plagues HUD and other to this day, cannot lurk here. Make it open, subject to review and full disclosure. None of this info is hidden.
Solve the problem.
Dont cut off your foot because you have a wart. Treat the wart (the causative affects) not just the symptoms, let the symptomatic be a side effect of the real solution.
Grab yourself a heaping helping of that gummint cheese. Bioinformaticians are in such huge demand right now that post-doc positions (routinely $26-32K for the first year in most other biology disciplines) are getting $60K+ in academic circles and $100K+ in industry.
YMMV of course.
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
Check out Slashdot -h tm l?tid=126
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/06/16/0210237.s
Anything Voice over IP is very hot and will only be hotter over the next five years. Ask anyone if they think they will be still be buying a PBX or Key system in five years...
No job and can code? - just sit home and write the next generation virus. The world needs new virus that destroy old systems so that people has to go out and buy new equipments and software.
:-)
Speaking as a bioinformaticist (non-PhD, but with significant academic experience), protein folding simulations are extraordinarily overhyped. The potential for computers in structural biology is immense- every protein structure published has been refined by computer simulation. The theory involved is quite sound and the results are considered excellent. However, this still requires a great deal of experimental work. Folding via computer is still in the realm of pure theory, and while some people can come up with reasonable guesses at very low resolutions for small proteins (which is already quite difficult), this is next to useless for drug design. You need to have a high-res structure (about 3 angstroms, less is better), and computers just can't do that.
It's not a matter of power so much as theory. A lot of people don't seem to understand this, which is why you can get lots of money to solve the folding problem. So sure, it's probably a good field to be in financially speaking. Scientifically speaking, it's comparable to AI in CS research- lots of big talk, few results. You'd be better off working on improving existing tools to help structural biologists, if you want to do something useful. You don't get to play with giant parallel machines, though.
http://www.arsc.edu/misc/vacancies/HPCProgAnalystI . tml
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
i here employers like people who can spell
Yes! Vindicated!
Well....
I'm living in a country thats hurting a lot more than the US from the tech sector bust and I'm still getting calls from people interested in my DSP skills. I'm currently working in a new area I call "Embedded Distributed Computing" which I think is going to get real hot, real soon.
Two words: Patent lawyer!
okay, I admit that I peed a pit too much on tab delims. For 95% of all jobs they'll do everything XML does, and faster.
But I do have some quite nasty nested stuff, with non-static iterations (ie : inside transmission repeaters the iterations can grow or shrink) and with pointer links to other nested structures.
you'll adimit that that is no beaf for tab delimited crunchers, right ?
but indeed, "Not something to bet the farm on"
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
verification is the biggest problem in all engineering (not scientific, there the problems are worse...) regimes, it grows exponentially with size (complexity) of system.
I worked at a company ( http://www.verisity.com , nasdaq VRST) addressing the verification problem for hardware-design. It is the best IPO for 2001 (yes, 2001 - when nasdaq plunged) and it has positive earnings ever since.
and I think they'll continue to be in demand, because whatever you do, you'll still need to debug
Working for necessity's mother.
Anyone in the tech field, looking for a new direction, look to education. Schools are clamoring for K-12 and secondary technology educators. You won't find yourself making 100K a year, but the rewards are tremendous. If you have your act together, your summers are for you alone to pursue side jobs and consulting gigs (otherwise you will find yourself in classes and working on the cirriculum you'd like to teach). There are also stipends for starting up things like robotics and computer clubs. These things are incredibly fun and satisfying, to the point that you almost don't miss a higher pay elsewhere. Good luck!
This is what I'm hearing a LOT from recruiters, and posted to sites like Monster and Headhunter. There's such a glut of IT workers in most markets that employers can pick and choose from local canidates. Something else I've noticed searching sites like headhunter and monster the fulltime/perm jobs out nunber contracts by almost 5:1
PLASTICS!!
I would tend to agree with the Anonymous Coward's posting. I work for a company that underwent a merger two years ago. The first thing they did was adopt the in-house IT from the smaller subsidiary that was merged into the larger company. The reason? The outsourced company would do things, but there would be a 'cost associated with that' mentality with them. Everything had a 'cost' if it went beyond the scope of ordinary duties. Couple that with an 'average' bandwidth of 32K, the fact that they used 'experts' at each site to do routine work (people who were employed to do other tasks, but were tapped to work on computer problems) and the 'experts' were spending most of their time not working on 'billable' projects, then you get complete dissatisfaction with the outsourcing.
The other issues would be:
1. Lack of familiarity with the American brand of English (in the case of outsourcing to Asia) resulting in communication problems.
2. Lack of the ability of the end-user to adequately communicate with technicians.
I'm a currently employed System/Network Administrator jack of all trades kind of guy. I have a couple of certs (A+, HP CZ {printers}, MCP) but my two biggest skills are communication and tenacity. I can converse with a blue-collar worker as easily as I can a Senior Executive. When a problem presents itself, I don't quit until I've either solved it, or discovered that it had no real solution.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Someone posted on the accu-general@accu.org list a few weeks ago (the Association of C and C++ Users) that he'd been studying the demand for various job skills at employment websites in the U.K.
Suprisingly he found that the demand for C++ programmers was dramatically higher than that for Java programmers, and further that the pay scales offerred for Java programmers were very low.
This is in sharp contrast to the situation at the height of Tulipomania. Sometime in 2000 someone lamented on a post to a C++ newsgroup or list or something that it appeared that the hourly rates available to Java consultants was twice as much as those available to C++ consultants - as much as $250/hour. This despite the fact that C++ is a much more difficult language to master.
I think one thing this indicates is that the market for web server programming has fallen off the edge of the earth. But I'm not sure what all those C++ programmers are being hired for.
News of this study came as a relief to me because I've been doing mostly C++ the last few years, and although I know Java I haven't really put much effort into it. At some points I wondered if I had made a big mistake. But I've gotten very good at programming in C++, and enjoy it a great deal now, and in fact I'm finding demand for my consulting work is starting to pick up noticably.
I don't know how the U.K. results could apply to other countries, but you could check it for the U.S. by searching for various job skills at DICE and counting the number of hits you get for each.
You could do this more systematically by having a robot browse each of the job descriptions on DICE and scraping keywords and payrates out of each of them.
I can't post a link to the ACCU archive because the archives are only available to ACCU members and I'm afraid I let my membership lapse. :-/
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
most everyone i know that lost their jobs in the .com crunch, is now working in the technical end of the medical field.
.com'ers.
:(
Baltimore is a big hopital town and that might have a lot to do with it.
it would seem that any field where technology can be enlisted to lower costs and improve productivity shows promise. There are still a lot of underutilized minds out there that could be coming up with creative solutions to old stagnant problems.
I've sliped into the generation end of the print on demand industry. The print inductry is nototious for utilizing tons of people to churn out a product that could be reasonably well automated. Our tech department is made of of %95 ex -
it seems everytime i get a new computer 12 times faster than my old one, i want to run a process that takes 15 times as long
(* But I do have some quite nasty nested stuff, with non-static iterations (ie : inside transmission repeaters the iterations can grow or shrink) and with pointer links to other nested structures....you'll adimit that that is no beaf for tab delimited crunchers, right ? *)
Use relational ID's or references. Every row should have a unique ID or key of some sort. You can simply reference instead of physically nest. Sounds like it is not even a tree anyhow, so you have no choice, except maybe to duplicate nodes to *force* it into a tree. Trees are an over-used structure anyhow. They don't scale when requirements turn them into graphs instead of trees. Unless you deal with a domain that naturally has trees in it, such "degeneration" is fairly likely over time because there is no tree-cop on duty in the real world.
Table-ized A.I.
(* Now this is a good example of eXtreme Programming. *)
He he.
IMO, XP is a result of object oriented technology not living up to its promise of scalling and simplicity. OO has only created armies of overpaid consultants with 50 different OO methodologies that either don't work, or simply map the world into the author's mind (but nobody else's).
(I will probably get tagged a "troll" for this. Oh well, I have a few points to blow this week.)
oop.ismad.com
Table-ized A.I.
(* I am just out of school, and found a well-paying job with a bunch of old guys. There is going to be a lot of people retiring in this sector over the short term. *)
What you don't realize is that the government discriminates against experienced people. You got the job probably because you have no experience. I am surprised there has not been huge lawsuits against age descrimination in gov orgs.
It happens because the unions protect people from competition (experience). Thus, it tends to hire graduates and interns and fill vacancies by moving up the existing employees.
Now, contracting for gov might be a different story. That is probably a better bet if you have experience.
Further, they are slow to process most positions. I am still getting rejection notices for positions I applied to almost a year ago. If you apply now, the economy may be shining again by the time something happens.
Table-ized A.I.
As the Russians say .NYET
nothing good has ever come from Microsoft!
try Java and relatives
Only use new stuff when it makes whatever easier/better/cheaper.
Before McDonalds - get food out of overcrowded fridge, secure children so they aren't harmed while cooking, prepare food, wash utensils, cook food, spend 1 hour cleaning up baked-on egg.
After McDonalds - drive up to window, give money, get food.
Before OOP - procedural FORTRAN-style stuff, VCs lose interest, refuse to give money to further software development.
After OOP - software companies get so much money from buzzword-mania that a bubble is created, they can outsource to third world countries and creating gigantic power stations and infrastructure (no other private businesses have paid for an entire national infrastructure, too high risk).
Well, After OOP might be a little exaggerated, but you can see that I'm getting at the fact that the big buzzword sell is important, unless you want to be a free software programmer on welfare. Even if OOP is just a buzzword-generating algorithm, it brought in the money Micro$oft-style so I'm not gonna complain. If my Manager tells me that OOP is the best thing in the world, I'll say, "Yeah great" then take a paycheck from him and call him "Sucker"
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Jesus, this is exactly why Open Source always looks so pathetic. Every time somebody solicits suggestions on job ideas, everybody jumps out of the woodwork with their pet project, saying 'w0rk on th1s!!!! we r00l!!!! we are gunna change teh world!!!!!!!!!!'
Pleae email me your log file; if this is a bug in XWT I'll fix it.
If you're using IE+Windows, your log file is called 'xwt-log.txt'; search your hard drive for it (including system folders on XP). If you're using any other browser/OS, your log file is on the java console; please cut and paste it into an email to adam at xwt dot org.
Yes, it did occur to me, but generally if an author is re-publishing his work he will give credit to the original publication. I would also suspect that the article in question is owned by Business Week, being a work for hire. Also, I reasoned that if you did write the article you are pretty sharp and would be able to write an original post that supported your thesis, rather than copying old work verbatim. These reasons plus your recently registered /. account led me to conclude that you did not write the article. Now my question: Did you write the article for Business Week? In your reply you didn't say you wrote it, you just asked me if the thought occured to me. I still maintain you are not the original author, and are therefore a plagarist. If I'm mistaken I apologize but I don't believe I'm mistaken.
Enigma
Dress and act as you are. Else would hurt your self and the industry in the long run.
Burn your bras and your suits!
hendridn says:
Applying to all those jobs would sure take a long time. I guess you didn't spend much time on each application. Did you just send in the same copy of your CV (Resume in USAian, I believe) to them all? A generic CV radiates laziness, even comtempt. The employer is looking for someone who can fill a particular role, which means a particular set of skills, some of which the employer will consider more important than others. If you send a generic CV, the employer will have to wade through distracting and irrelevant material to learn the information they want.
You don't want the employer to believe any of those things.
Your CV should show how you are suitable for that particular job. That means each job application could require a separate, taylor made, CV. Also, it is better to apply for a smaller number of jobs, placing more effort in each application, than to use a 'shotgun' approach.
I recommend an excellent book called What Color is Your Parachute?
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
That is not good enough. I need to log in just to see what year an article was written? Bah.
And they expect me to pay $5 per month for the privlege? Now THAT'S funny.
1.Decide who you want to make money for other than yourself. In other words, where do you want to apply your talent;
2.Find something that they need done in order to be successful, it doesn't have to be the leading-edge/latest-n-greatest but something that is fundamental to their success. It may not even be the first thing you would pick if you were doing something for fun;
3.Learn how to do that as well as you can.
4.As things change, transfer everything you learn in 3 to someone else and go to 2.
In short, if you respect the people you are working for and can fix/maintain something they need to be in business, you should be able to find and keep a job for as long as you want. And yes, this is a lot more difficult than I make it sound.
as for LCDs, i am actually refering to their driver chips; as LCDs become commodity, there will be a demand for people to program their functions, like OSD, etc. people will also be involved in the design, manufacture, and testing of these chips. while not a HUGE market, heh, it's a market.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
As for what YOU should do, that is a much too personal question to ask on /. since it depends on factors you cannot put up here. Find something you like, and make sure you can do it well. Don't just focus on that one thing, learn about the world, but master an area.
Then comes the job search -- as everyone knows, the most effective job skill is networking (people skills, not computer skills). Talk to everyone you know, everyone you ever worked with, and tell them what you want to do. A Good idea that has been successful for me is a 'networking card' that is like a mini-resume and contact info, pass it out to everyone (attach them to resumes you give out. Ask them to pass them on if they aren't interested in you.). They'll either throw it away or find someone else to give it to in order to prevent guilt.
At that point you will have something you enjoy (not neccessarily the 'future' of the industry, but the future is what we make it).
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I expect the war on terror to cost more than any other war..ever. Not to mention the intel consolidation (Homeland defense) and NMCI (remember that $9B contract). Every industry imaginable is represented in some part of the US government. Irregardless of what industry you enjoy, get a job with a government contractor. That will be your job security. 85% of contractor positions hold no government clearance requirements (up from 60% in 1998). And maybe you could get them to pay for an investigation. One more thing for your resume.
Navynasa
Space Cadet
The only problem is getting through their HR. (Horribly inept according to Engineers on the inside.)
With a Republican strong hold you can expect defense contracts to be strong for the next couple of years at least.
Just my
A couple of years ago, I knew people who wouldn't work for less than a certain amount. And that was often for mundane tasks like NT Administration or basic Web Design. While the market condoned that for a time, smaller organizations came to accept that new technologies were for Fortune 500 comapnies. The consequence is that many companies that would LOVE to expand their services onto the web or have applications developed assume it is out of their league. I work for a non-profit that has a small IT budget. If we could find someone who would actually work for us we have many projects we would do (web site enhancements, client tracking databases.) There are many opportunities with non-profits that could pay (relatively to their budgets). Not only is it work that has been overlooked, but it is work that people can feel good about.