Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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.
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.
Come on, give credit where credit's due.
The Step 1,2,3 joke is from a Southpark episode. Specifically, "The Underpants Gnomes".
The original joke was that the gnnomes buisness method was:
Step 1: Steal Underpants
Step 2: ??? (None of the gnomes could remember)
Step 3: Profit!!
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).
The web is dead.
I didn't create this tech but I am using it to replace shitty HTML+Jscript+prayers+sacrifices web-based interfaces. There are some other guys like XWT too but XWT is simple, straightfoward and fast. It essentially projects UIs -- do you forms locally (on the client machines) but all your business logic sits on a server where it belongs. Talkes XML-RPC and SOAP. Very cool. Way way way better than what I would call traditional "web services."
From what I understand, Bioinformatics is basically "data mining of biotech databases" - more or less.
:)
Not quite. That is a part of it, but there is more to it than that. For example, an experimental technique called microarray analysis was developed in 1998 for finding expression profiles for thousands of genes at once. Companies manufacture "chips" with thousands of spots on them, and each spot has a specific piece of probe DNA on it, chemically bound to the chip substrate. You take a biological sample with unknown mRNA, attach a dye to the mRNA, and expose the chip to your sample. The unknown dyed mRNA hybridizes only to the specific probe sequence that one spot on the chip has. You then rinse the chip, put it in a fluorescence scanner, and whammo, you know the intensity of mRNA concentration (i.e. the level of gene expression) in your sample for thousands of genes in the genome. Just doing this for one or two genes used to be a lot of work. Repeat this procedure with a bunch of chips (mitosis phase, day of treatment, patient, etc.) and you have an immense pile of expression profile data to sift through! But somewhere buried in there may be a good lead for a drug target that can be teased out with the right statistical algorithm. So a niche market exists for good gene expression analysis software, which is what my company makes. There exist only a few customers for software like this, but they're all biotech and pharmaceutical companies (and some universities) for whom the cost of the software is trivial. We have a large market share built up by word-of-mouth. So life is pretty good right now for us.
Bioinformatics doesn't automatically mean easy money. The field has already seen companies fail (e.g. DoubleTwist). And it seems like everyone and his brother is trying to form a dot-com style bioinformatics startup. I personally know two guys who are busy launching startups that are bound to fail. The time to start a bioinformatics startup was 1998-1999 during the dot-com boom. Now it's too late. Being in a trendy field won't save you if you have no product to sell.
I know there are a few books available on the subject (including one by Oreilly).
The O'Reilly book has some good information, but keep in mind it is mostly targeted toward the biotech researcher (the end-user) and not the programmer who is developing tools for biologists to use. It tells you how to use the software that's already out there. They have a Perl book out too, again targeted at biologists. There is a lot of string manipulation in bioinformatics. But there is also a lot of numerical analysis which is not exactly Perl's strong suit. In theory, a biologist who understands statistics well and knows how to do his own ANOVAs and clustering can probably do everything he needs to do with Perl and Excel. Thankfully for us, most of the people with expression data to analyze are not quite as industrious as that.
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.
First of all, like I said, it usually isn't just blind data-mining, there is also some intense numerical analysis. Second, if they've got a clueless HR dept. who demands that programmers have some sort of bio degree, they're completely Dilberted and going under soon anyway so it's no big loss to you. A general biology background is easy to pick up. If you skim through a college-level textbook and learn how DNA/RNA works, what open reading frames, promoters, and introns are, you're basically all set as far as that stuff is concerned. You'll still need to learn about how to interact with the messy public databases out there (GenBank, Homologene, UniGene, LocusLink, Gene Ontology, etc.) that suffer from missing or incomplete data and/or non-unique identifers. You also have to cope with the lack of data format standardization in the industry and the proliferation of oddball formats to be parsed. Familiarity with all that stuff is much more important, and a biology degree doesn't help you much with it. And good programmers are way too rare for us to be picky about who's got a bio degree. Of the programmers here, not a single one is a biologist (actually, all the programmers here have physics and EE backgrounds). If you interview here we won't even talk to you about biology. We ask people simple programming questions, like how to raise two to a small integer power (to generate a bit mask, for example). You'd be amazed at how many people immediately convert the 2 to floating point and call pow().
DC area. The tech firms (and the wind-down of the last administration) burned off a LOT of people in all sectors. Housing is, if not cheap, getting plentiful again, and I'm seeing many more jobs advertised than I was even six months ago. When I got roundfiled by a tech company right after 9/11, it took me about 4 months to find a job. Now I'm doing exactly what I did there - web design and graphics - full time for a university here in town. There are jobs out there.
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
Juneau or Anchorage Alaska. The state gov is almost always hiring tech workers (esp programers), and there's loads of private sector work too. The cost of living is a bit high though. Just my two cents.
Here are some links:i fieds-bi n/classifieds?portal=&temp_type=detail&property=JU NEAU+AK&classification=EMPLOYMENT&maxrec=30&date=t odayo bsByTi tle?OpenView
http://classifieds.juneauempire.com/class
http://notes3.state.ak.us/WA/postapps.nsf/J
Maskirovka