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IBM Adding Almost 19,000 Jobs
cyngus writes "IBM has announced they will add 18,800 jobs worldwide in 2004. They say about a third will be in North America. I don't know how many they have added this year so far. After the new hires IBM will employ about 330,000 people worldwide." More good news for the unemployed techie. Although things are far from the halcyon days of dot-com yesteryear, it's good to see companies doing better.
RTFA^H^H^H^H Ah, nevermind!
IBM prefers to hire engineers, preferably 4.0 GPA engineers.
Well, about a third would be in North America, which is about 6,000 jobs. I would figure that most of those would be in the U.S., with maybe a few in Canada. This leaves a range of about 12,000 - 14,000 jobs outside of the U.S., and I'm leaning toward 12,000 in that estimate.
It was not that long ago IBM was laying people off...
u 072701s1.shtml / 31/ibm-layoffs.htm
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/projects/ibm/b
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/2002/05
But best to have a job for a year or two than not one at all.
it's good to see companies doing better
:)
Being an employed-almost-techie(analyst), I would say that it seems a serious trend since maybe 12-18 months that companies are making more and more investment in IT.
Hope this will last!
Montreal - Best city to live in!
Based on the article summary: 18800 * 2/3 = 12533 non-US jobs
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I guess open source does create jobs! Well, in terms of linux support services. I think a huge area of growth is going to be people with solid knowledge and experience helping companies switch to linux and other open source software.
Interesting, it appears most of the jobs are consulting related. Polish up your Linux skills boys and get those resumes up to date.
Hopefully some of these jobs are entry level positions for recent graduates, or internships and cooperative education positions.
CS is a good idea, for the right person.
You have to understand that a university degree is going to become a part of you, and hopefully refine talent you allready have. Once that matter becomes clear it should be a hard time convincing you why not to start a four-year degree, depending of course on how expensive it is to acquire. I pray you use something other than Microsoft Windows?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Go IBM, we're counting on you all the way!
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Ready. Set. Code.
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Didn't they lay of 50,000 over the past 5 years? So 50,000 american jobs leave. 18,000 jobs come back, but only 6,000 american? "Lift your chin up so I can punch you in the face."
Was it 50,000 american jobs that were lost?
There was a time when some people would look down on the idea of working for IBM because they seemed stuffy and out of step with the market. Now they're a hot spot for job seekers again
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
They say about a third will be in North America.
Stop outsourcing our great Indian jobs to North Americans!
Note its North America for that 1/3, not all will necessarily be in the US.
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
The significance isn't so much the amount; it's that they are hiring. Companies do not hire massive amounts of new employees if future outlook is grim. IBM obviously thinks things are going good and that the economy is done throwing up, and that's good news.
Okay, this is getting tiring. Why is it that every story that has the word job anywhere has to contain "dot.com hay day" of the late 90's. I know that Tech's been in a slump but it seems kind of useless to keep hanging on to that short 5 year period.
Get over it people.
**watches troll mods fly**
I started a contract job @ IBM just last week, Linux cluster work. In RTP btw.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Or jobs they pick up from outsourcing deals? If schlotsky house of bacon outsources its IT dept to IBM, and transfers 500 employees to IBM, that aint job creation, but it is increasing IBM's headcount.
Don't go study CS thinking about jobs. You should do CS if you like computer theory, math, programming and alikes. A good job will be a consequence of your higher level of knowledge.
nice! I'm starting studies towards Computer Science Degree (4 years Bachlors) in 2 weeks.
Won't somebody please think of the Karma!
Neat, can you make any with doctype declarations? In otherwords, your HTML resume fails w3c validation.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Maybe you were thinking about this and just added a zero?
I realize that it's very important to the Kerry campaign to emphasize that (1) the economy is not doing well despite the tax cuts and (2) the war in Iraq is not doing well and should never have happened, but (1) won't fly and (2) is debatable.
Don't blame me -- I'm voting for Nader.
Because I live in MA.
everything in moderation
And of those 6K jobs, I'd wager most will be sales, marketing, or support roles with the actual development happening offshore.
Just a guess.....
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Major in marketing, business, or communication. Minor in CS if you insist.
;-)
..... as quickly as you can, grasshopper....
Geek skills can be learned, business speak and marketing wonkedness (yep, just made that up) cannot be learned because they are unrelated to the actual "Business" and "Marketing" techniques that work. They must, therefore, be taught in believed in along the lines of other religious zealotry.
I leave it to you to figure out which parts of this message are pure sarcasm and which are serious.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
As a quote goes on bash.org: " There was a 23% drop in temperature. That's almost 25%! ... That was one of the most worthless comments I've ever heard."
IBM has announced they will add 18,800 jobs worldwide in 2004. They say about a third will be in North America.
And they are all lawyers to fight SCO.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Ahem,
That first interview is normally conducted by HR. The second, if you progress that far, is often handled by the direct department you would actually work in. In fact, if you consider the telephone interview, most of us actually endure this process three times.
Storming out of interviews is a poor way to put food on the table or flesh out that resume. Please, use more caution in the future. You have a lot of skilled and experienced competitors who are willing to suffer the idiocy of an HR drone for a short period.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
I know from personal experience that IBM employ a LOT of people that are only there because of IBM's previous "Redeploy, not redundancy" policy. I worked in teams where hundreds of people spent their day printing out online forms, then typing them into another online form.
It seemed that they were creating jobs just to keep people there, when I was pushing for working smarter, and laying off 70% of the staff.
I wasn't popular.
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
No, the original poster is playing hype games. It was under 10,000 US jobs that have been lost.
No matter how good you are, you still have to get your foot in the door. If nobody's hiring in your field, or they're looking for qualifications you don't have, you're still screwed. Alas, the idea of hiring somebody that will learn new things and grow into the job never occurs to too many companies today. They want you to be skilled in everything they need before you get there. Of course, if you are that skilled, you're probably looking for a job that needs more than just those skills. What they seem to end up with is somebody that can just squeek by on the qualifications enough to BS their way through the interview. Once they've done that, they think they don't need to learn anything more, so the company ends up with staff that's on the edge of incompetence.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
my dad works for ibm and is currently training his brazillian replacement in boulder colorado. and he has worked for ibm for 25 years. too bad those 19,000 jobs are going to be created outside the U.S.
>For heaven sakes when looking for IT applicants don't send somebody from HR.
Um... you do realize that one of HR jobs is to interview IT applicants?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Get a degree in Computer Engineering instead. You'll be able to get almost any job a CS guy can get, plus you'll have a shot at engineering jobs. I recently graduated with a CS major, and it sucks. Of the people who graduated from my school in CS this year, 7 out of 19 looking for jobs actually found them. Of the people who graduated from my school in CE this year, 9 out of 12 looking for jobs found them.
In the summary it says that about 1/3 of the new jobs will be in North America. I suppose they could mean Mexico or Canada, but I think that the meaning is clear enough.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Lou Gerstner took over?
I disagree. Most of them are over the edge.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
HR is good for managing employee benefits, doing all the paperwork involved with a hire and so forth. When it comes to actually interviewing a person for a technical position, its crucial that (at least one of) the interviewers himself has at least a basic background in that subject. Its pretty much impossible for a nontechie to differentiate between a mediocre programmer and a great programmer.
On the other hand, a generic HR person is perfectly capable of judging general people and communication skills of applicants.
If you want to do 4 years of school and start a career, I strongly advise you to focus on software engineering. Take as little mathematics as possible and focus on business and more software engineering.
I was a mathematics & computer science double major in my undergrad years and I was all but unemployable with my BS degrees. To work in software development, you need to show experience working in... software development, go figure. I had academic experience working in computation, graph theory, programming language concepts, algorithm analysis, and all sorts of mathematics that were pretty exotic at the undergrad level in CS. That's all fantastic, but what the hell type of job did that qualify me for? Basically nothing.
It did virtually assure me a seat in graduate school, where I was working toward a graduate degree in computation. I dropped out of graduate school for a career that met all my "reasonably ideal" criteria for post-undergrad school, though, so my Master's remains unfinished to date.
Anyway, I advise that you do NOT focus in "computer science", but rather in software development. It is INCREDIBLY more employable with a 4 year degree.
so not only did he not RTFA, he did not read the summary.
it's an all new low.
next time, i won't even bother reading the topic.
>I would figure that most of those would be in the U.S., with maybe a few in Canada.
I would count on Canada getting more than just a few.
Same timezone. Same "accent". Same quality (or lack of) education standard. Same work ethic. Lower salaries.
And IBM can say, in this time of outsourcing sensitivity, "We added new jobs IN *cough*north AMERICA!"
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
In fact, if all you do is drink beer and play hockey, I'd question your ability to actually produce shit. Piss, certainly. But shit? Something to ponder.
do nothing all day long, leech off the dole and make your redneck family starve in your kkk trailer park
Yeah, you show him how not to use insulting stereotypes!
Ah, but master, how can the fish learn that it swims not in water as simple sense would dictate, but in a thick morass of syrupy make-work whose properties change as quickly the fashions of MBAspeak?
You speak in riddles, master. The fish does not learn this, rather it believes lies. All the tish in the ocean have to also believe these lies for their system of stupidity to work, dysfunctionally though it may. This is why market wonkery cannot be learned, it can only be believed.
I hope some of them will be employed in Germany. We can need them! ;)
But it's really impressive... employing 330k employers... wow, respect!
My Blog: "sum it up - News, emotions and science"
from experience, dell mentioned that they would close their corporate support.
/ popups/lou.dobbs.tonight/exporting.america/framese t.exclude.html
fact check : they did not. they sent a press release, but the call center offshore continued to grow. brilliant PR. make the folks think they keep jobs in america
microsoft : reported that they wuold add 5000 jobs in R & D last year
fact check : they added 3500 offshore
ibm: most of these jobs are marketing , support and admin jobs. all most all our development, qa, project management jobs have gone.
list of companies exporting jobs, after getting subsidies from tax payers: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight
Your lack of knowledge makes me skeptical of your post... I mean, IBM hiring Computer Science guys? IBM /IS/ CS guys. Their entire business model is writing software, sold on their own hardware, and cashing in on big support and customization contracts... 3 of those 4 things(OS/software development, Hardware design/development, Software customization) are the core of CS. Supporting software and hardware isn't far off.
IBM plans to end the year with more than 330,000 employees, the largest number since 1991.
So it's impossible that they laid off 50,000 in the past 5 years... if it were true, then 1991 wouldn't be the highest with 330,000!
If adding these 18,800 jobs brings them to 330,000, then they must've been at ~311,000 before this announcement. Adding to that your 50,000 in layoffs would imply that IBM had ~360,000 employees at some point in the past 5 years, which isn't possible!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
I just quit there. I was treated better in blue collar assembly lines than I was at IBM.
IBM gets business and charges less because they pigeonhole everyone. If you do websphere, thats all you do.
If you do email, thats all you do. It's like working a government job.
It was exactly like the military. If the process says to do the wrong thing, do it anyway.
It's mindless.
Better than unemployment, but not by a whole lot.
...excuse me while I brush off my IMS skillz. Hierarchical Database, what?! DBD, PSB, w00t! Holla...
he sed
next time, i won't even bother reading the topic.
by all means, rush right on in screaming FP !!!!!!!
music lover since 1969
What school did you go to that had so few CS majors? Why do you feel your degree sucks? And why don't you have a job?
I would advise you to apply next summer and catch the fun.
sorry officer, left my sig in my other computer.
I know from experience, that at least 1,000 of these jobs belong to "rebadged" employees. I was layed off from a large Fortune 500 company that "rebadged" 1,000 of it's software development staff to IBM. Basically, these 1,000 employees were given the choice of excepting a job with IBM to work on what they were currently working on as an IBM employee or take a severence package. The company I worked for basically sold more that 98% of it's development staff to IBM. Therefore at least 1,000 jobs were NOT created. They were just shifted from one company to another. Although this is supposed to be a 2 year contract, there is no guarantee that these jobs will not move off shore after the contract expires.
The USA is pricing itself out of the market. The USD has to devalue by about 50% for the country to be competitive again. I'm not complaining though - the overvalued USD is GOOD for the REST of the world and there are many more people in the rest of the world...
Oh well, what the hell...
Isn't IBM in the business of helping other companies outsource work?
Business must be good...
John
I dream in binary.
Yeh, and have you checked out the job websites lately? There are more job websites today, than there are actual open jobs. As far as listings, let's see, we have:
.NET. Always a favorite of the job search critic, somewhat more uncommon than traditionally believed. I have a few good ones saved, maybe we should have a contest (would need a way to weed out forgeries)?
1) The Beta Tech/ITT covert spam. You have to read it twice, to understand that after paying them $4500 for a 3 month course, they'll help with job placement.
2) Work at Home! Christ, this scam has to be 40 years old now, haven't they already used up all the idiots?
3) The staffing agency mining for leads. Even I get fooled by these. Recruiter calls me, asks me if I know the names and numbers of all the managers involved in the last 6 big projects I've been in for Fortune 100s. He needs them as references, and no, my coworkers won't do. And yes, as soon as I can get those references, he has a job for me. Haha.
4) The "we have to post this publically, before we can use our H1-B". Usually identifiable by the cryptic description, even by the standards of the buzzword elite.
5) The "must have security clearance". Ok, maybe these are legitimate, but if they all insist on pre-existing clearance, aren't they all chasing after the same 20 people who actually have it and are in this line of work? And if they're so damn rare, how about offering more than $15-17 an hour?
6) The "let's look like a big company" PR blitz. 30 listings at once, all of them paid up extra so that the posting date rolls forward (can't even tell if they're stale or not, as if that matters). Sure, they might hire 2 of those people, but they post the rest knowing full well they'll never hire them.
7) The "let's see if we can get a $90,000 a year expert for $35,000" job listing. My personal favorite. Not that I'm the $90,000 a year expert, just that they probably aren't successful often. Some comfort there.
8) Outright spam. The "apply now" link will take you to viagra, porn, or every once in awhile a MLM scheme. They show up even on Monster, though to its credit, they get nailed within a few hours, near as I can tell. Seeing a disturbing number of these types of listings though.
9) The "let's make you jump through 30 hoops to email your resume" listing. Usually climaxes with them insisting I take my resume that I've carefully crafted and formatted over the years, and strip it down to plaintext and then upload it in a webform textarea. Thanks. Not like you'll read it anyway?
10) The impossible experience listing. 20 years of linux, 7 years of
But never worry, with so many job listings, the economy is surely picking up.
For the most part, disregard most the replies here. It sounds like a number of people have been suffering for the last few years. It tends to produce a jaded outlook.
CS, CE, and EE will be needed here for years to come. If you stay with CS, no problem. But, you need to consider getting a master no matter what you do. While my generation excells with a Bachelors, yours will require a master or PhD to stay in the industry.
Rather than looking at IBM and other companies to hire you, I suggest starting your own company. You will be going to school with some talented people. Meet them and try to get something going. If you can can try to hook up with a salesman. Likewise, read Business for dummies. It will get you started. Consider doing something in the OSS world, but with a consideration to how to make a buck at it. Think Yahoo or Google. Or see what industries that you know and has MS software develoed for, but not for Linux. Develop something but think through the license and how to make money.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Low? Yes. New? No.
I'll take one!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
What's even more interesting is how much money did the company lose in firing and re-hiring. How much expertise walked out the door with a nice redundancy payout and years of built up knowledge. Unless they lost only their least talented or least satisfied employees, this is a wasteful practice that can only erode the quality of the company.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Umm..I hate to break this to ya but Software Engineering is one hell of a lot more than learning to write code. You WILL need a good many of those CS skills (not so much the theory but the application of the theory). Take Math thru Calculus 2 and take Statistics and Discrete Math skip the rest you will rarely need it, and if you do then you can likely learn enough of it OJT to get by. And get some classes BESIDES CS/Math and the basics, expand your mind learn to think in abstractions, learn about art, music and literature it will open your mind to the non-Geek world and make you a better employee. Plus chicks like guys who can talk about something other than computers ;)
IF all you want to do is be a code jockey, then go to a Tech/Vocational College, learn Java and maybe VB and get to work. You can get your degree in something like business going part-time nights/weekends. The work experience will be invaluable plus you won't be broke all the time ;) The downside is you have to compete for your job with the guys in India and other places, so don't expect good pay or a longterm job.
Just my .02 worth.
your children will be sold to the Soylent factory
Methinks you read too much Swift, and watch too much dodgy sci-fi.
So just keep your mouth shut and vote for Kerry...
If I were American, I would vote for Kodos...
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
If you love computer science / mathematics / problem solving, then go for CS. There will be plenty of time later to round up your skills on the job with business knowledge later.
I am currently an IBM employee. I started as a co-op in 1997 and came on full time in 2000. They still hire CS majors - but they can afford to more selective nowadays due to the current economic climate.
As far as majoring in a non-technical field and then being able to "learn" tech on the job - that's a joke. Most people that try to do that never truly understanding the technical details and struggle in a real technical environment like IBM. IBM won't hire you for a technical job if you don't have a technical degree.
As for the company, I would definitely recommend working for IBM if you are a major in any technical degree. They have some of the best and brightest and the scope of the company's work is very broad = lot's of opportunity to explore various technical challenges. They also have great benefits and pay very competitively...
Boeing seems to make headlings of Boeing Hires 10000 for Program X and when Program X is over or cancelled it promptly fires 10000.
IGS makes IT a project based employement opportunity for most and long term career for few.
I've known way too many CS guys that can't write and have to be kept hidden from meetings.
If data structures don't make sense to you, no amount of study is every going to make you good enough to be competitive. A minor will give you the background without focusing on technologies that will be obsolete by the time you finish.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Many of the jobs IBM will add in 2004 are simply employees from other companies being "rebadged" to IBM in outsourcing deals. Sprint is an example of this. Approximately 1100 Sprint IT workers will become IBM employees in the next few months in a billion dollar outsourcing deal. IBM adds 1100 employees, but they're not previously unemployed tech workers.
Yea? HR Beats Trickery.
Yup, Hungry Losers.
Hardly A New Demographic.
Im not your parent, but thanks for the edutainment.
Yes, but a Linux Solutions Sales Engineer with 1 year of experience makes a better Linux Solutions Sales Engineer than an AIX Printing Software Programmer with 10 years of experience.
The firings likely represented mostly positions that were becoming less in demand, and the hirings represent ones that are becoming more in demand. Experience and knowledge aren't just scalar quantities.
IBM hires people with any kind of degree. They seem to look for the quality of your mind rather than knowledge and then stuff u with all needed knowledge through OJT.
Back in 2002, when I was conducting my own frantic just-been-laid-off-have-a-kid-on-the-way job search, I found a listing demanding 10 years of experience developing J2EE applications.
It was beautiful. Brought a tear to my eye.
You Americans are just a bunch of selfish assholes (and I mean in general ok, I have American friends and I don't think everyone in the US is like this but it is a general sentiment)
;)
Yea yea yea, get your own IBM. We already broke this one in, and it wasn't easy. With all the anti-trust suits in the 80s, the DOS boondogle that created Microsoft, lack of software for OS/2. Hell, we FINALLY got them house trained, and you want to take them away? It took half a century to get them here, embracing open source, contributing to the community, beating up SCO after it pushed us down in the school yard...
We loved them back when they were as evil as any other company, but its easy to love them now. So yes, we are selfish about it, for good reason. Maybe you should instead vote for your government to lower taxes and offer tax incentives for companies to be created and grow in your OWN country, instead of laying claim to our companies.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I was with you right up to:
.doc? JPGs? Animated GIFs?
insisting I take my resume that I've carefully crafted and formatted over the years, and strip it down to plaintext and then upload it in a webform textarea.
What kind of resume do you have that's hard to represent in text? MS Word
Not to be mean, but maybe that's you're problem. Resumes are about content, not form or presentation. Or at least mine is. And I'm doing well and hassled by recruiters weekly.
everything in moderation
Comments like this make me wonder if the parent poster either really screwed up and got fired from IBM or just hates big succesfully companies.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
And why can't we give these companies what they want? Let's gather up the extreme cases of desired skill mixtures and delineate how prospective job seekers can obtain these skills without having to spend years at work or school. The Internet is very useful for informing people how to become an expert in any particular field of tech as long as the basic education background is already in place.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Software engineering is a HELL OF A LOT OF MATH! There's no getting around that. Besides, getting experience in business and software engineering are polar opposites. I don't see how you were unemployable with a math and CS degree. I think you just weren't looking at the right companies. Places like Symantec are always hiring, especially with the current emphasis on security. If a 4 year CS degree leaves you unemployable, I don't see how a masters would make it any better. Unless you're doing highly specialized development, a masters won't be worth the time or money.
It is msword, I'm ashamed to say. I've got a few bullets, its 2 column, non-standard layout. No animated gif's or anything, only graphics on it at all are 2 gray bezier lines in the background, as a border. Pretty restrained, or so I tell myself.. it's not HTML blink tags or anything. But at least it's better than the template resumes you see everywhere.
Certainly, the reaction of those HR droids that have seen it isn't negative. While I'm sure it might be tossed in the garbage can quite often, it's the general "let's throw away 950 of our 1000 responses" stuff.
As for content, there was a time when I had less than I liked, not so much the case today. Even now though, my "content" would hardly stand out... how can it, I have little choice where I work, most of the time. I could be one of hundreds or thousands easily... and a slightly pretty resume was one of the few things I could do to stand out. I'd toss up a link to it, to show you how it's not this garrish "hey I just learned about html and colored fonts" freakshow, but it has my personal info in it.
In conclusion, if your "content" is so godlike in its impressiveness, more power to you.
What? no, i'm absolutly unbiased and verified my facts.
see what happens when you write an article too fast? it should have read:
cyngus writes "IBM has announced they will add 18,800 jobs worldwide in 2004. They say about a third will be in North America. I don't know how many they have added this year so far. After the new hires IBM will employ about 330,000 people THIRD worldwide." More good news for the unemployed techie in. Although things are far from the halcyon days of dot-com yesteryear, it's good to see companies doing better.
"why you tattoring fan sucked doo belly - i have to go buy something to strike you with... excuse me."
Uh, sure it is. (I'm rolling my eyes.)
Now, if you're engineering software with an obviously mathematical bent, then yeah, there's a lot of mathematics involved. In general, however, the abstract/modern algebra courses I took where we redefine "number system" to be any arbitrary collection of elements related by extraordinarily generic "arithmetic operators" isn't going to help you produce a better payroll application. I'm quite certain that the "HELL OF A LOT OF MATH" you're talking about doesn't very often require using roots of unity or designing new and never-before-seen graph algorithms. Sure, sure, I readily admit that in particular fields relating to those subjects, they'll be used, but I strongly doubt that much lambda calculus went into desiging Microsoft's Outlook.
Unless you're doing highly specialized development, a masters won't be worth the time or money.
Could have sworn I said I was working on a Master's in computation. I'd be surprised if more than 20% of Slashdot's readership really knows what that field actually is.
I'm glad we agree, though I may have explained it poorly.
I did focus on the theory rather than the application of the theory and I would not recommend that to anyone. The mathematics courses you list certainly do not meet my criteria for "much math", in fact I'd consider Calc 2 the bare minimum for anyone in any science and discrete math the minimum for anyone in a remotely mathematical field.
I was talking more about abstract algebra, number theory, probability (which is not statistics), linear algebra (which is interesting and easy but not terribly useful to most in CS), and algorithms or numerical analysis. These are all fascinating fields (in some geek's opinion) but in my experience, they are not going to help you secure a stable career. They might open some doors in some specialized fields, but those doors are opened for a lot of fresh-out-of-college people and they're probably going to hire someone with actual software engineering experience before hiring someone with course credits in mathematics. That's just my experience, though.
In retrospect, I wish I had spent less time learning about formal languages, NP-completeness, algorithm analysis, and mathematics topics I mentioned before and more time learning about software project management, using someone else's APIs, and the software development industry. The fact is that there are a few hard to get jobs that are truly specific to abstract computer science and mathematics but there are tons of jobs available for developing software.
It all worked out for me in the end, but I'm working only indirectly in the CS industry and I spent 2.5 very nervous years worrying about how I was going to eat and repay my loans while earning $9 an hour.
Geek skills can be learned, business speak and marketing wonkedness (yep, just made that up) cannot be learned because they are unrelated to the actual "Business" and "Marketing" techniques that work.
I know many successful small business owners (and don't forget that many of mega-corps started out as small businesses) who have great "Business" and "Marketing" techniques without college degrees. Granted, most of the skills I use at work were on my own but the college experience has nevertheless valuable because I was "forced" to take certain classes degree requirements that turned out to be useful later, and it was also a good opportunity to network and socialize.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Software development experience can be gained by working on an open source project. Also there are plenty of Internet forums where people discuss situations existing in software development serving business interests.
Then what is really the problem? The symptom is the apparent waste of a good education of advanced computer and mathematic theory. Essentially business goals are not advanced enough. One of the reasons for this I think is not an education system that is so good that it becomes a waste, but actually an education system that strives to look good but does not demand enough. We need schools to show us how to make use of the advanced theory to solve advanced problems. Schools have to force students to solve advanced problems, not just make a quick presentation and pat them on the back for demonstrating a bit of understanding by answering a moderately difficult question on a final exam.
It's about time students feel they will go forth to invent rather than have enough skills to obtain a job, buy a house, and raise a family. Almost everything a middle class person touches has been produced by a machine. Soon all the services that are done by people will be done by machines. What is left for people to do? Those who do not do better than machines will find that an owner of capital will deem the machines more worthy. In other words, people will lose jobs unless they are willing to use their heads.
The culture of North America doesn't appear very oriented to inventiveness. Popular TV shows don't pressure people to set higher goals. The literature hardly shows any path from theory to practice or theory to advanced theory.
When I go on a journey to a faraway place I consult a map on how to get from here to there. Why can't this analogy be applied to negotiating a learning curve? Instead, anyone who wants to gain advanced knowledge does so by running through a maze search algorithm. Enter a branch, find a dead end or a not-too-promising state and backtrack. This kind of chaos exists because people who have found their way through the maze are too busy with new mazes to put many signposts in the old mazes.
Even though maze handling is a necessary skill for anyone who wants to achieve something great, it ends up turning off a lot of people. Then they pressure schools to just gloss over some advanced theory for the sake of completeness without caring for true understanding and appreciation. So we end up complaining of all the wasted years in school doing things irrelevant to the demands of business.
Businesses don't really demand anything difficult. They want a bit of management skill, but only a bit. They don't really want advanced theories because that means risk. This risk exists because schools haven't bothered to show students how to be good problem solvers. No wonder businesses just want to make money and avoid problems. The trouble for people is there are some businesses that will take risks by producing machines that will displace the people.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I strongly second this. I have a post a little further down the page about my thoughts regarding a 4 year degree in CS.
This was exactly my experience after graduating in 2002 with a BS in both Mathematics and Computer Science. Yes, I double majored and my transcript gives me a BS in both majors.
I couldn't even get a "No" back from 90% of the places to which I sent a resume. I got a "Yes" back from every school to which I applied for graduate school, though.
As look would have it, I found a nice career job at the end of my first year of grad school and left school in a heartbeat, but this was over 2 years after I graduated from undergrad. It's hard to payback those student loans while making $9 an hour.
Hehe, looks like I type with a Canadian accent?
Einstein, there is more than one country in North America.
You're missing the point. When they ask you to post your resume in cleartext on a website, it means they think you're mildly interesting. They want to index you in a searchable database so they can charge someone else to find your resume. It usually means there is no position at all -- just a scam to waste your time and help them along at your expense.
Knowing about software engineering early will help you get a job, but you'd learn that anyway, and I seriously doubt any undergraduate level course is ever going to teach you as much about CM or any other S/W process as actually doing it day in and day out will.
And once you get out of college, you will never get another real chance to learn how and why things work.
In college you can learn how and why algorithms work, and not just how to cookbook them into code, which is what you learn in a S/W engineering course.
Lay that foundation right, and you can eventually be a high-priced consultant that comes in to clean up all the dorked up and slow and utterly unmaintainable but oh-so-academically-correct C++ super-object-oriented code that all those college grads with S/W engineering degrees write...
Keep in mind that when scholtzky house of bacon outsources its IT dept to IBM it transfers 500 American jobs to IBM and IBM often has the former employees of scholtzky house of bacon train their offshore replacements in India. I wonder what the typical situation is for most of those former employees in terms of job security, pay and benefits, better or worse than before they were outsourced? What percentage of these outsourced employees will loose their positions when their jobs are offshored?
It makes me wonder how many of these so called 6000 new American jobs could actually be a temporary phenomenon caused by the now lucrative business process outsourcing and offshoring market that IBM is actively involved in....
This all sounds to me more like a self serving corporate propaganda blurb disguised as a serious business analysis of the US labor market. I think it is shameful that corporate press releases like this are often made into headline stories without much analysis or commentary of the message.
\ Take as little mathematics as possible and focus on business
\ and more software engineering.
I somewhat disagree. Most important is to take things that will
make you employable. And here I agree, if you want to get more
likely to be employable add some business training to your index.
Take Software Project Managment, Software Law, Business courses.
But do not skip on science either. I see people who did courses
like programming language concepts get jobs more easily? why? They
can learn any new language faster with formal traning on grammar.
A job requires some language you dont know? Write it to your resume
dont say in resume that you are expert, but that you know it and
used it. When they call for interview you will have few days to
brush up on the language. If you pass interview then you have
additional week or more to start coding. Enough time to learn.
Same thing with algorithm analysis. Not that you will have tons of
algorithms to write, but your code will be that much leaner and
cleaner. Even things like graph theory, descrete maths, formal
logic, all greatly help in abstraction.
If you cannot abstract algorithms, how well do you think you can
abstract a problem to a project to a proper, clean, workable
sollution?
So overall:
1. take programming, take things you like, but dont forget that
hard science, maths, will push you to your limits, and thats
good
2. take business like stuff for your electives. Ignore the
enticing sci/fi literature study class, and take project
managment, requirements gathering/analysis, project
design/architecture. Also, this is as good time as any to
fix your language (spoken/written, not programming) skills.
Doing this right will save you from tech writting classes.
this is ofcourse dependant on the outcome of the next few years
and the industry. There are many different prospects, currently
most accepted is that jobs will be outsourced, so your only
chance to survive is to be a manager of the outsource resource.
There are ofcourse other theories out there:
1. GPL/OSS wins (not so great coder)
learn to program, learn to write clean code. Your job will be
administration / setting up and or fixing / adding features to
already existing software. This customization has already
been happening, but not on the scale that we could expect with
GPL/OSS. Your business classes will only be half as good
2. GPL/OSS wins (good coder)
You could lead project, large companies would call you for
help, analyst, fix things FAST, you can ask for any wage.
If you are a good coder, you have nothing to worry anyways.
3. Everything is outsourced (but managers)
you will need to become manager that is a buffer/proxy between
the client and the outsourced programmers. That is unless you
too become outsourced. Business skills required as much as
programming
4. Everything is outsourced (period)
so your managorial job got outsourced too? You have few
choices, move to a country to which you got outsourced to
and work from there. This is perfect for immigrants, they
come back to their country with degree/language, and are the
buffer/proxy like above, but from the outsourced country
(cheaper living, but more bang for the buck, but not too
(viable for american native (2generations+)
--
/apz, blah, future is blah... future is bleak...
994,000 more and we'll be back to the employment levels we had in late '99.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
>Lower salaries.
Lower health care costs.
... hi bingo
IBM continues to layoff people, just a few months back they dumped around 4600. They mainly use contractors so they pay bad, no benefits, sick days, and on and on. They just bought a large outsourcing company in India. They keep cutting the retirement programs, stock purchase program and so on. Many they bring on are ITS a employee who is only allowed to work two years for company them have to leave. They are told they can go full time during the two years, but there are huge barriors they make it near impossible. IBM has turned into a services company and most of the services employees are contractors they treat like dirt. The managers make it very clear we are full-time you are contractor dirty. IBM isn't the company they once were.
And that also depends whether or not the IBM PR people count Mexico as North America.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Well, I didn't mean to hit a nerve or anything, but I guess I did. I have to say though, if you've spent as much time as it seems you have debating and justifying it to yourself, it's probably not what employers want to see.
And if you're ashamed to say it's msword, then why is it msword? How can you go into an interview holding something you're ashamed of?
Then again, maybe you're looking for work in graphic design or something, in which case what you describe may well indeed be "restrained."
But if it's a tech career you're after, please take no offense when I say, as someone who hires ASIC engineers, only the text matters.
And, FWIW, my resume is a list of tools (Silison Ensemble/SOC Encounter, Cadence Composer/Virtuoso, Dracula, Calibre, Magma, Primetime, HSPICE, etc.) programming languages (Perl, TCL, Lisp, C, -- in that order BTW) and tapeouts including gate counts, operating rates, IP, and respins (0).
Frankly, I'd rather you lie about experience (and make up for the lie by learning something new, because my interview will reveal unprepared lies) than include "bezier lines," "columns," and "bullets." Unless of course I were hiring graphic designers. Which I'm not.
But I am hiring ASIC engineers, so please do send me your resume if you're into it. ASCII only please.
everything in moderation
So, you know Linux? Big deal. Plenty of people know Linux. And the more popular it becomes, the more ubiquitous it will become. When everyone switches to Linux, everyone will know Linux just as much as you do. At that point, no company will pay you $120K for those skills. Remember, it also used to be that you could get a high paying job if you just knew HTML. Heaven knows those days are gone!
A good solid education in computer science is the best tool for getting a job. It tells employers many things: that you can set a difficult goal, that you can work hard for long hours with minimal reward, and that you can maintain your output in the face of the relentless BS that colleges, professors, classmates, relatives, and even friends throw at you. It also tells employers that I can write a business paper, put together a logical argument, understand the "big words" coming down from management, and respond appropriately. In general, it tells people I'm educated, especially since we all know the lack of education that goes on in high school.
On the skills side, a CS degree means that you know something about everything concerning a computer. This includes the hardware down to the transistor level, assembly code, compilers, and other low-level details. It also means you know high-level details like algorithms, discrete math, calculus, and more. If all you know is Linux, then any CS grad could drive a truck through the gaps in your knowledge.
On a side note, as a high school graduate with some tech skills, you would need a minimum of four years to learn all the things those CS grads already know. The majority of college students now take five or sixth years to pick up a degree. So, it might take you longer. However, it would probably take those same CS grads three months to pick up what you know.
You should start showing some respect to your future managers.
The problem is that during 2002, we were basically in a depression in the IT world. Now we are just in recession. In about 1-3 years, we will be back to ok levels (many areas are still in IT depression, but Texas, Florida, Ny, and Atlanta are getting lots of Federal Money, so recession). It will never be back to the levels of 1999. that was insane. I saw CIS getting paid close to the pay of CSers. In most schools, the MS CIS is well below the level of knowledge of a BS in CS.
Besides, if you think things are bad for you, I would guess that CIS is an absolute disaster area.
Btw, I do know about those loans. My first degree was in Micro-Bio/Genetic Engineering back in early 80's. Along came raygun, and the industry was largely targeted towards bio warfare. I did that for several years until I realized that I was not on the defense side, but was actively working on a weapon. After that I quit and got into programming and persued the BS CS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Williams picks IBM for business transformation
It's called outsourcing, that's how it works.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
...that you can work hard for long hours with minimal reward...
Are you sure you want to tell your employer that?
I hope there in the good old usa. :-) I am not a troll im just saying... Also while i am posting please let me fulfill my $ quota Micro$oft. There i am fucked up again, and posting on /.
http://www.DaveNet.biz/
Why do you feel your degree sucks? And why don't you have a job?
I don't have a job because my degree sucks, and I feel my degree sucks because I don't have a job :)
But seriously, I've made mistakes. I could have gone to a better school, I could have worked harder on my GPA. However, the stats kind of speak for themselves...you can't really say my inability to land an entry level programming job is all my fault if the other people in my major are struggling as well. Looking back on things, I feel like a CE would have been a better choice, because CS is just too academic.
Anyway, I do have a job...I just wish I had a programming job.
The problem is that during 2002, we were basically in a depression in the IT world. Now we are just in recession. In about 1-3 years, we will be back to ok levels
I pray that you are correct, but isn't that optimistic? Won't outsourcing continue to make programming jobs tougher to find? Personally, I wouldn't recommend CS to people unless they really like school. Get a CE instead, because that's harder to outsource, and they teach you more practical stuff so that you'll be more employable. They teach you a little bit of programming as well, so you'll still have a shot at programming jobs.
As for what you said about starting your own business, I think that's a good idea. I'm trying to start my own business as well. I've been planning it as a backup plan for years now. But I'd still recommend that people pick a more desirable major than CS right now...don't put yourself in my situation, where you have to go straight to the backup plan because you can't land a job.
By the way, back_pages, if you are reading this, thinks for backing up my point earlier in this thread. It scares me that you couldn't get employed EVEN when you had a double major. This is why I always read any slashdot story that concerns jobs...there's always valuable information to be found among the comments.
To anyone still in college, here's my advice: Unless you want to go to grad school, pick a major that you love AND teaches you a lot of practical things AND is hard to outsource. You have your whole life to learn things...use college to guarantee you a good job, so that you can afford to have the free time to study the subjects you want.
CS is an applied science, remember; it's all about application of math theory. Soft. eng. is great if you want to be a code monkey, but for serious design and next generation concepts, you will need the math. If you don't understand what makes one algorithm better than another, and how to design one from scratch, how can you code anything that hasn't been implemented before. I sure wouldn't want to see someone try to do highly scalable code or cluster software without heavy math...
The fun jobs use the math, excerise the heck out of your mind, are a lot of hard work, but are very rewarding! Science doesn't generally pay directly in money... it's the pursuit of knowledge and the rewards of discovery and creation.
Motorola employs 300 programmers here, in Poland.
I've got a good chance to get a job (passed the test, will be interviewed in monday). My chance job would be jr. software engineer (C,Perl,Linux) - is this worth a try? Does anyone here work for Motorola (or worked there in the past?) What are your impressions? Is this a good company for employees?
Right now I have a job in a small-to-medium-size private firm. The salary is acceptable, the work OK even if slightly boring, should I leave if they find me suitable for the job at (M)? What salary could I ask/expect? What specific conditions should I prepare to?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I don't know if I would recommend it to others or not, but one of the smartest things I've ever done in an interview situation is essentially the same thing the grandparent did - telling the mostly clueless HR person conducting the interview "To be honest, I don't think we have anything more to discuss" and walking out. I was voluntarily unemployed at the time, too, having resigned from my previous position without another one secured. (No, that wasn't a dumb move; I had my reasons and it turned out right.) What made me walk out was partly the clue level, or lack thereof; partly it was finding that their idea of an interview consisted not of an interview but of sitting down and taking a test (prime sign of a screwed-up corporate culture combined with a clue level low enough that no one can tell whether technical interviewees know what they are doing or not; I have never before encountered such a thing at a non-government job), and partly when she brought up that they were looking to pay about $25K per year (this was for a *nix admin job in LA). I already had my mind halfway out the door even before she mentioned that, and my feet got up and followed at that point.
:-)
Very shortly thereafter, I got a call from the company at which I am now very happily employed. It wasn't from HR. It was from the head of the development department, calling to set up a time for a telephone interview. That was then followed up with an in-person interview, and shortly thereafter, an offer letter. The first time I met, or even spoke with, anyone from HR was my first day on the job. That's how life ought to be.
And do you know what? Even our HR people have clue. I think they're great. Now how often do you hear anyone say that?
Less than a year into this job, I've moved up to be a team leader, and now I make hiring decisions myself. And we still do it the way it was meant to be: we find our own applicants, look at *all* resumes, interview the best out of those, and let HR know which one we want to hire. Then they send out an offer letter and a drug test packet.
I still shake my head when I think of that other place, and I'm so happy I walked out on them. I know that may seem like a rash move, but really, if a job is such a poor fit that you just couldn't stand working there (especially if what makes it a poor fit is clueslessness), unless you are literally staring hunger in the face and have nothing to fall back on, you're better of walking out. Even if you have to move in with you parents for a little while to save money while you job hunt, do it. It beats taking a horrible job at a horrible company. Those kind of jobs just bring you down. They bring your attitude down. They often even bring your skillset down. And they may bring your chances of getting a better job down, too.
Hold out if you can. Move if you have to. Get into a job that is right for you, at a company that is right for you (and for which you are right, too) and you will prosper. You'll love to go to work. Even when the hours are long (this weekend I will have my first full days off in about two months, woohoo!) it won't seem bad.
IBM Italy didn't confirm 11 employee after a two year "educational" contract last July.
h tm
Yes, It's the first time since 14 years...
(In Italian)
http://www.lomb.cgil.it/rsuibm/2004630.
How are these jobs to be gained?
Are they projections of the number of staff to be gained due to outsourcing deals.
If it is, what is the longterm prognosis for these staff, will they be offshored quickly?
Lies, Damned Lies and statistics.
Sometimes the numbers are not the whole truth.
Then they send out an offer letter and a drug test packet.
A drug test packet? Wow... What retard came up with that one?!
I wonder how much of that third that will be in North America will be foreign nationals brought in on L-1 visas. American companies with offices abroad are allowed under the L-1 visa program to transfer workers without any of the restrictions of the H1-B, most notably the prevailing wage restriction. So, all a company has to do is hire workers in India, transfer them to the US on L-1 Visas, and pay them the Indian wage. The L-1 visa was originally intended to allow MANAGEMENT personnel to transfer - and the law was passed specifically so that Toyota and Honda could come to the US and build car plants under the supervision of their own managers. Since the law was written so loosely, it has morphed into allowing companies to send over any workers they want. I think this should be a hot election issue this fall because for one it is very unfair to companies who do not have foreign offices and also because the intent of the L-1 visa is not to subvert American jobs. Its unintended effect has been for huge multinationals to circumvent immigration law and also for the US to lose jobs to cheap overseas labor.
ah, but read what I said -- the marketing and business classes from schools are decidedly different from the skills you need in business; the language and an undesrstanding of that background though, must be learned.
FWIW, I am both a small business owner and a developer.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Of course, that's just a sampling from the few pages of them I've looked at. I'm not going to go look through the almost 1000 jobs they have posted right now. Maybe on the last half, the ratios are reversed. But I doubt it.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
It implies that there were American's to take all the jobs that were sent overseas.
As for jobs that are marketing, support, or admin. These are all valid positions and should not be discounted just because you or someone else doesn't feel they are the right jobs. I know quite a few people who make a great living in marketing, let alone support or similar.
A lot of companies are overseas simply because to compete overseas you have to have a presence. A lot of people in the news industry ignore this requirement because it does not generate the headlines they desire, let alone drive their own agenda.
What it comes down to is that many people just need to grow up and realize that there are jobs worth taking and its up to them to do so. People, including the media, spend to much time dwelling on the actions of big corporations, many of who are truly multinational, because it makes them feel better when they can create a "Bad guy" instead of taking account of themselves. The majority of jobs in the US are not from big businesses but instead from the small business. Lastly too many people are upset they are offered only what they are worth and not what they think they are worth. Time to move past the selfish attitude and realize they are not the center of the universe.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Who do you think is more likely to hold on tightly for dear life to a job - someone with talent who can get another one after leaving, or deadwood that knows nothing else?
(Why, yes, I will be celebrating my 20th anniversary with IBM next year, why?)
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
I'm not exactly on topic with regards to the parent, but let me put my 2 cents in here:
... and I would like to work for you." He appreciated my initiative, and now I'm a happy employee.
Online sites are largely worthless for finding jobs. In "What Color Is Your Parachute", one of the best career-finding books out there, the author quotes that about 5% of people of those who try online services find their jobs there. The problem stems from the fact that anyone who's a member of the site can apply for the job, so you're just one resume in a gigantic stack. The key to finding a job is the personal connection.
The author also cites an importatnt statistic (which I can't recell off the top of my head): small business make up the lion's share of jobs in the US - at least 66% or something like that. So, not only are large organizations like IBM more difficult to get into without a personal contact because of buracracy and infuriating HR departments, they have less jobs than smaller companies! Also, smaller companies are less likely to offshore your job, especially if computing is their core business.
So instead of of trying Dice or Monster to get into IBM if you're unemployed, I would suggest getting a copy of a local business journal, finding some growing, privately owned companies, and calling them directly. You're MUCH more likely to be able to talk directly to the person who makes the hiring decision.
I did just that, left a message for my current boss and said "My name is
A lot of those jobs will be leveraged through their new contract with the Dow Chemical Company. see the following: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5294986.html
Well, no. History is on my side on this one. In the late 80's, our economy had slowed. The IT world suffered as well, and everybody swore that IT was a disaster and all this outsourcing of blue collar jobs was happening. Well, the economy rebounded and next boom started with the opening of the internet. What was interesting was that HUGE players swore up one side and down another that the internet would not win out over AOL/Compuserve/MSN (the upcoming closed MSN). Well, that battle is over. The new place will be OSS. Assuming that whatever admin comes in does not try to support MS, then OSS will be the big winner. So how to apply that? We have the largest number of small businesses that have not been tapped. In addition, they are forced to use MS and pay a huge price. Another area is the home. Europe, Japan, and North America is primed for residential software on Linux. You can even copy current stuff over in MS world and win big due to the fact that they have not moved over. If competitors to major software were to move to Linux now, then in about 5 years, they would be the major players.
Won't outsourcing continue to make programming jobs tougher to find?Jobs will not be like they were in late 90's, but it will not be like it has been for the last 2 to 3 years.
Personally, I wouldn't recommend CS to people unless they really like school. Get a CE instead, because that's harder to outsource, and they teach you more practical stuff so that you'll be more employable. They teach you a little bit of programming as well, so you'll still have a shot at programming jobs.That is probably not bad advice. Currently, I am working on 2 start-ups. The first does network monitoring. This is a pure CS degree. The 2'nd is tackling home devices. During this time, I have longed for better knowledge to develop some of these, but have had to depend on others. A CE degree would have helped immensily, but a CS allows me to handle the side of the idea. More importantly, when we get going, we will have more CS than CE.
Unless you want to go to grad school,...Personally, I think that everybody has to plan on going to grad school. If nothing else look at history (early 1900 only required read writing skills; by the 40's; an 8'th grade; by the 60's, High School; by the 80's a bachelors), or look at the fact that the only jobs that will not be outsourceable will be the company or land that you own. But you offer sage advice.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
18,800 x ~0.3 = ~5,600 jobs in the U.S.
Still good, but we could have done without the inflation.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
It's in MS Word because other than the ijits who want text in a html webform, all the others want MS word. Sending them a PDF is a bad idea, generally.
My resume doesn't do the skills/tools list, I'm convinced that tends to look tacky. Former jobs, then education, then certifications last.
Not a graphic designer, but not an asic engineer eiher. I generally do PC tech work, helpdesk, all lower rung stuff. Which means there are 500 asshats who are claiming they can do it also, can't, but will probably get away with it anyway, since this kind of work is only one step up from mouth breathing. The closest I get to designing ASICs is at home, when I play with a Xilinx CPLD.
Maybe I should lie though... just that I suck at it so bad. Maybe I wouldn't have spent 5 years doing this kind of shit work.
PS No Verilog, no ABEL? I guess the big stuff needs better tools.
As I understand it (from speaking to someone who's just seen it from the inside) the strategy is to aquire rather than recruit. So 6,000 people or so in North America will get their pay from a different company, they're not creating 6,000 new vacancies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
But doesn't burning any organic material produce CO2? It doesn't seem likely to me that non-oil combustion engines would produce significantly less CO2 and other greenhouse gases than oil does.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
IBM has been a friend of Linux and open source in general, true. Personally, I love Eclipse, and "Peace, Love, and Linux". I truly hope they stay a good friend of Linux.
But, IBM has a history of liking cheap/free labor a bit too much. In Nazi Germany, it was allegedly concentration camp slave labor. Open source, despite its many good attributes and good intentions, also provides IBM with free labor. Now IBM is running off to India and other places for cheap labor. I would love to say IBM has reformed since the bad old days. Recent behavior indicates that might not be as much the case as we would like.
Keep in mind that just because the jobs are in the US, they may not be open to US citizens. There is such a thing as an H1B visa.
When having a very big shark like IBM as your friend, keep a careful eye on them. They might just bite you.
"Ridiculous, you have no claim. I'll sue you for interfering with private enterprise."
Kumoyama, Happy Enterprises, "Mothra vs. Godzilla", 1964
During my stint at IBM for four years, I saw many people get laid off from one position only to have another position mysteriously open for them to fill. Nine times out of ten this position would simply be labeled as a ubiquitous "project manager" role, where the person would simply get in the way of progress, fill out mindless forms, and be a thorn in the sides of many people. I recall on one occasion a young woman who joined my team as a "project manager" solely for the fact that she was young, relatively attractive, and had some connections with her sisters, also employees of IBM. On one occasion I berated her in an e-mail because it was obvious that she had no qualifications for the position and she was asking for information that was completely irrelevant. My manager asked me why I took such a tone, since, "she needs time to get familiar with the position and gain those skills." Funny, I thought that someone actually had to have the knowledge to get the new job...
Anyway, my tirade aside, IBM suffers a great deal of bloat just due to its sheer size. I was glad to have other opportunities appear.
--Chag
Actually, to some degree it depends where you want to end up. If you prefer working for bigger organizations, the skills/tools list is a must to get past the first automated keyword search that all HR departments seem to be moving to.
You have to think about what you really want to do. You want to convince the hiring manager that you are the right person for a job. However, you first have to jump through a few hoops to get that interview. HR acts as a screening function, which is both good and bad.
For example, I work in our enterprise architect group. We have a mix of oldtimers with decades of experience but little in the way of formal education and some younger people (the youngest is about 35) with masters and PhDs. Most of the oldtimers have been with our company for at least 15 years.
I was an exception in many ways; I had only been with the company less than 6 years when I started working in enterprise architecture, I was younger than most at 39, and I didn't have a 4 year degree. I got the job based purely on my internal reputation.
I don't think I'd get past the HR screening process now, even if my boss wanted to re-hire me. Heck, I'm not sure any of the oldtimers would get past the HR screeing process now. Why? Because HR won't even look at a resume if it doesn't have a 4 year degree on it. Yet some of our best EA types are the ones who have grown up with the company and have seen all kinds of projects come and go.
So, if you have your skills/tools list built up, use it on your resume to get past the keyword search. If you don't like having one, add it as an appendix so it doesn't clutter up the body of your resume. If you don't have one at all, I strongly recommend putting one together. And as usual, don't lie. But don't sell yourself short when you're putting it together.
For example, I had some limited exposure to satellite communications gear at my last duty station. When I hit the civilian market, I listed it, but I was prepared to talk about what I had learned and where I thought I needed more education.
Then again, when I went for the job interview that got me hired here, I found when I went in that they preferred someone with some Token Ring experience. The whole company was wired with it at the time. My network background at that point was all WAN and Ethernet. I told them up front I had no TR experience at all, but I was willing to learn. Other than that, I was definitely qualified for the job.
They called the headhunter I was working with and told her that I had the job before I got home. My guess is that at least a couple of the other people that they had interviewed had tried to bullshit them and they knew it.
Yes, they are hiring, but it is not really additional jobs. For example, someone above mentioned the Sprint deal. Well, the IT people who are at Sprint and are lucky will become IBM employees. Those who are not lucky will be out of a job. To IBM, these are new hires. However, these are not additional jobs, but one company cutting payroll and hiring someone else to hire some of the people who got laid off.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
A friend of mine was a programmer at IBM. He said his stint there started with several weeks of training, and the first thing they said in training was 'we are going to de-program you, then we are going to reprogram you'. Meaning clean all the junk you learned in college out of your minds and build back up.
Well, does it mean anything that I'm trying to point an old Primestar satellite dish at 105W? Just discovered that the LNB has radial markings, think I'm supposed to adjust it for skew.
Or how about that I have about 90 TR ports here at home? I've got a few old Nubus/PDS Macs hooked up to it, haven't had the time to try and get my Sparcstation 2 to see it yet (can't find drivers for the card). Strangely, the PCMCIA token ring card on this linux laptop seems to work nicely, but the PCI card in my linux server barfs if it sees any network activity. But that same server has an ATM155 card, arcnet, localtalk, and a quad port ethernet. Still looking for a HIPPI card for it...
I can name the major components of an ethernet card, heck, just about any electronic component is recognizable to me (guys, ever wonder why ethernet always has a 20mhz osc/crystal but token ring will have 16/48/64mhz?). Take it all the way to the other end, at software... past few months I've been tinkering with adding some sort of rudimentary VINES support to linux, but since all I have is a copy of Banyan 6.0, might take awhile.
I'm designing my own transport protocol (just hope IANA doesn't steal 199 from me) and the routing protocol that it was meant for.
I do lots of things, that always look awkward on a resume, and I sound even more awkward trying to explain them to an HR droid. I mean, really. DO they care or think that it's relevant that I just posted a "wanted: 10ft Cband dish" on freecycle.org?
I'm resigned to the fact that I'll never be more than a lowly little PC technician. It just sucks that everyone makes it so damn hard to find even those jobs.
Oh, and for those of you who have done this repair, can anyone beat my 10m53s motherboard replacement on an iBook? This is without pinching any of the cables, or causing any damage...
Verilog (and VHDL) for sure. I didn't list them all, but those are pretty much a given.
ABEL is a definite no-no. I think that's pretty much limited to FPGA and basic state-machine design. Or at least that's the only place I've seen it (college.)
Why not go to school and get more degreeage. You sound fairly smart and curious (most PC techs can't spell CPLD, in my experience.) I think you may be shortchanging yourself.
everything in moderation
I was just commenting that IBM has spammed the databases with thousands of jobs, and that from a really quick sample, they were roughly 2/3 sales jobs, 1/3 installation jobs, and <1% programming jobs.
I was not implying anything about how likly it was for any individual to find a job using those engines, nor anything else about them. Only a quick point that dice lists over 1000 of the ~6000 jobs they say will be in the US, and their seeming lack of actual development work.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Unemployment and bad credit both = no chance in hell of college. Wish I knew what I wanted to do out of highschool, my SAT score pretty much guaranteed some kind of aid. Stupid guidance counselor pushed me towards nursing, lasted a little over a year.
If I were a hiring manager, yes, your personal experience would definitely interest me. You sound like the kind of guy that is all too rare nowadays; a Jack of all Trades that's extremely good at applying theory to practice.
The trouble is, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts you've never realized that's exactly what you're doing. You probably operate at an almost unconcious level on the theoretical side, and have a hard time explaining why exactly you chose the solution that you did for any problem.
Unfortunately, this makes you a tough sell to HR departments. You really do need to start thinking through how to better package your skillsets if you're looking for something that's more challenging than PC repair.
Besides, it looks like even board level repair of PCs is going to start drying up. We're going to see more and more of these $300 to $500 boxes coming out over the next few years. And the price will probably keep dropping. People will start treating them like throw aways here pretty quick. It really is time to think about a career move.
True that it's drying up, but I tend to do more rollouts. Which is exactly as hard as unboxing something, and plugging it into the wall. Some have been better, I was the guy chosen to do data migration on about 3500 laptops, mostly because I realized that when we could dump data over the network, you could pull the 2.5" out of a powerbook, and put it in the secondary HD bay of a IBM T20... all you needed was a HFS driver. The supposedly smart coworkers (who went on to more jobs at that place) were like "wait, macintosh and PC hard drives are the same?". I felt like slapping them.
BTW, Offtopic: for those of you that care (who knows, this might show up in a google search), to get 105W with a primestar dish, you must adjust the skew on the LNB itself. Loosen the 4 bolts, and twist it... + is counterclockwise, - is clockwise. Easy to miss, with the plastic cover the things have on them... now to restream my 2700, and tune in Nimiq1! Shame I only have the one linear... or I'd start working on my DirecPC modem. If you could sniff it, wait for someone to download an iso, it would be almost like spare bandwidth.
I would send you a private message, but I'm not sure if you can do that on slashdot? Anyway, here's the answer:
I'm working on a video game. I've been planning this for a long time. I have a 3d engine already written (although a lot of work still needs to be done on it). I'm currently working on the story, which is taking me a while because this is one of those games where story is pretty important, and I want this story to be as good as possible. Once I finish the engine and the game design (the hardest part of that being the story), then I have some investors who are willing to give me the money to hire some artistic talent. Once the art is done, I'll take the finished (or nearly finished) game to publishers. Hopefully they will like it and we will all make lots of money :)
That's why I said I was offtopic from your original post. I was really just taking an opportunity to rant about how to conduct a job search. :)
If you look at my posting history, a lot of my posts are about that, because I was sitting at home jobless and reading slashdot all day.
Go ahead guys, price yourself out of the market and act suprised when you don't have a job.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Unemployment and bad credit both = no chance in hell of college.
I hope I'm not out of line (or dragging this out too long) when I say -- that's not true. You can still get grants and loans (cheap loans, with lots of deferment time before you have to pay.) Credit is irrelevant to grant/loan approval for students.
I was unemployed with horrendous credit when I decided to get a GED (yes, I dropped out in 11th grade) and go back to school at 23. I think you had to be, at the time, 24 to avoid having your parental income counted in your assets when checking your ability to get grants (loans are practically unlimited, and the rate I pay now is less than 3%). Unless, as I did, you can establish that you've been living on your own/supporting yourself for 12+ months. Grants would have been enough if I'd have been willing to give up ganja and girls a bit more.
Go to a state school (cheap, lots of aid.) If you're a minority of any kind it's even easier (lots of scholarships available, many earmarked for minorities.) Suck it up and take the loans. It's worth it. If you manage to graduate (with a useful degree -- we're not talking English or History major here, I hope) you'll never notice the debt.
I lived OK (in an apt., off campus, at Univ. Florida) but nothing fancy for 4 years. I accrued about $18k in debt (for living expense and tuition that grants didn't cover) but it's the best $18k I ever spent. I pay $120ish a month for that now, which I don't even notice (making well into 6-figs.)
If you're older, mature, ready to learn and work hard, you'll own those classes and come out with a fat GPA and a nice entry-level salary (I started at $50k in '97, more than triple that now 7 years later.) It was worth it to me, and most of those I know that did it.
Contrast with out-of-high-school fuckoffs for whom mommy pays tuition and room/board. You've worked for a living and know what it's like. You've (presumably) got motivation. And very little to lose.
Please consider it.
If not, 's OK. It was fun talking to you. I've never met you but somehow I think you're a pretty cool person with something to offer the world and yourself. I don't think you're doing all you can. Which is fine, but may get boring for you. Just don't assume there are not other options -- I went to school with 45-year olds who kicked ass because of their motivation.
everything in moderation
Yes it does produce CO2.
But CO2 is actually in a cycle. The current problem is we are digging up oil from the ground, and adding CO2 to the atmosphere - increasing the percentage of CO2.
If, for example, you made a factory that harvests algae to make diesel (an algae plant would most likely be more an industrial than a farming process), guess where the carbon from the algae came from?
It comes from CO2 in the air. Plants (corn for alcohol, algae for biodiesel etc.) all get their carbon from the air. Therefore if you burn the products of plants you've just grown, although you're putting CO2 in the air, it's CO2 that was already in the air anyway because that's where the plant got it from.
We get our carbon from our food, but plants get their carbon from the air. If all we ever did was burn fuels that we got from plants we had just grown, the global CO2 content would never change as it'd be a closed cycle. The energy to do this is coming from the Sun (photosynthesis). Plants get their biomass from sunlight + CO2 in the air.
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We can give them what they want, and more important, what they need. Alas, HR is so stuck on changing "It would be nice if he had..." Into "Must have..." and they're so focussed on making exact matches that they can't see how somebody can become a perfect fit with a little patience. In most companies, today, HR rejects dozens of resumes from people the managers would be glad to get simply because they don't have the right "magic word."
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Funny you mention IBM and Nazi. The numbers tattooed on every Concentration Camp member's arms were actually IBM numbers linked to a punch card for each person.
I work for one of the companies on the list and I agree with the other posters that the list is misleading. To give you one example, ... we do contracts for British customers through our UK office and those contracts specify that we use British nationals whenever possible. We aren't outsourcing American jobs, we're complying with the British customers requests not to outsource their UK jobs to the US. Of course, finding this out would take too much time and it wouldn't be as splashy a story for CNN ... what ever happenned to real journalism ?