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IT Jobs To Drop In 2009
ruphus13 writes "A new Goldman Sachs IT report recently released states that IT jobs will be dramatically reduced in 2009, starting with contract and offshore developers. From the article: 'Sharp reductions likely in contract staff, professional services and hardware, and almost no investment in cloud computing.' The article goes on to say 'The CIOs indicated that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. Following these two are cost-cutting, application integration, and data center consolidation. At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open-source software, content management and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey) — less than 2% of the respondents said cloud computing was a priority.' Postulating a 'pointy haired boss' problem, an analyst goes on to say, '[Grid computing, Open Source and Cloud computing] require a technical understanding to get to their importance. I don't think C-level executives and managers have that understanding.' But they do control the paychecks ..."
A lot of IT is an expense without adequate ROI. Huge IT support staffs were a consequence of poor products, badly implemented systems, a glut of unnecessary purchases, etc. While some IT functions will always need on-site support, better-designed systems and software (including middleware) should make it possible to reduce IT staffing costs.
Think of all the other functions that have disappeared over the past century: typing pools, filing clerks, huge mail rooms. The armies of help desk types will go the same way.
that offshore jobs will go first. They're cheaper than local jobs.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
If there was ever a semi-mindless task that brings home the bacon, integration is it.
Make this work with that and that work with this.
Ok.
*scratches ass*
*does it*
*gets paid then laid*
I didn't see any reasons backing up these postulations. Especially the downturn in contractors. Is this yet another case of these companies reporting something just so they can report something?
but, will they really drop globally ?
AND, since, our area, i.t., is a field that is kinda the originator of the concept of telecommuting, wont many i.t. people in u.s. be able to find work overseas, working through telecommuting ?
i dare not say demand for i.t. people will go down worldwide. its kinda impossible, since i.t. revolution is on full steam right now - we, as a civilization, are little far from trying to integrate our toilets to computers and internet.
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Grid computing, Open Source and Cloud computing] require a technical understanding to get to their importance. I don't think C-level executives and managers have that understanding.
In my country, we have a saying: "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" In this case, the milk is open source software and the cow is the developer.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Plainly, they just "don't get it". Hah! Remember that one?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Now that mosix is dead, what sorts of "general use' open source 'clouds' exist now?
I also can see a legit use for root kits like this, just make all your PC"s appear like a VM server and spread the load around.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This doesn't surprise me too much. There's been a bad recession on the horizon for quite some time now, and it looks like it's coming home to roost.
For the first time since I graduated college, I'm not getting called for interviews, even for positions which I'm eminently qualified. It's getting tougher for people to find jobs, regardless of what they do. I've heard Republicans say that we're going to be in the worst recession since the Great Depression - which means that we're probably in quite a bit of trouble.
Perhaps I'm speculating a little too much here, but I'll bet the money that would have gone for IT salaries, etc... is now going into the coffers of the oil companies. Because our economy is so dependent upon oil for everything we do from growing crops to power generation to transportion, any rise in the price of oil is going to have a ripple effect.
Perhaps GW and Co saw peak oil coming and thought if we could just take Iraq, that we'd have enough oil. Perhaps they didn't understand that the loss of Iraq's oil on the world market would drive up prices - or maybe they did...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I'm sorry, but it's hard to take your message seriously when your company name is Pund-IT. From the name, I think you'd have been better off with Pun-dit. Or Pwnd-IT, which is pretty much what a lot of consultants are going to be feeling like next year.
At any rate, anyone who has been around business through a down-cycle or two would know that this is common sense. New programs, new ways of doing things, are saved for when the budget Gods are feeling generous with surpluses, not when eveyone is tightening their belts. There are, of course, exceptions to this... but anyone who thought that, in general, discretionary spending would increase over the next year really needs to have their head examined.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Can't speak for the US, but in the UK we're ideal for economic downturns.
We don't cost holiday, pension, bonuses or sick pay, we don't have loads of employment law red tape and we can be brought in for specific projects and timeframes and tend to come with much shorter notice periods.
Plus the public sector loves us.
We'll see a freeze in rates, maybe even a reduction, but if anything economic downturns signal a bad time for those in permie jobs.
Bob the permie coder might be on half my hourly rate, but if he's only got three months work in a year he's going to cost you more than twice as much as bringing me in for 3 months.
in tomorrows news: Internet to be shut down in 2009. Related jobs cut. $$$ saved.
There are companies who aren't constrained by money as much as by electricity. There are colos with plenty of space, yet do not have the juice to feed racks and racks of units. Asking individual servers to do more, and looking at green solutions not so much for the environment but for making the most out of the least juice makes a lot of sense when your potential growth is constrained by available resources. In these cases there's no threat to jobs, if anything it's the opposite, allowing for growth by making the most of what until recently has been essentially squandered.
Loose lips lose spit.
...more free time to develop open source programs?
Your guess is as good as mine.
The same thing will happen again. If there is going to be a tough time (and we're certainly talking ourselves into it) then all it means is that new stuff will be delayed a bit. However, during that time we'll be able to filter out all the froth and hype, leaving us to get on with the good stuff when the money returns.
It's not the end of the world, just be patient.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Until someone with the correct technical understanding can actually go to their manager and (with a straight face) say, "I'll use cloud computing to solve this problem because that'll save us money and time" there's no real reason to expect anyone to get it.
Successful blue-sky projects are mostly run by strong companies in good economic times. So, not so likely right now. Someone who's playing with their own money could well take advantage of this lack of understanding or vision or whatever, but that's not really a bad thing. Unless you're stuck in cubicle land and still want to play with the latest, coolest buzzwords.
cogito ergo dubito
If you are a seasoned IT professional or somebody who is starting out, things are looking bright for you as long as you have what it takes to be an engineer. I welcome any sort of clean up or a downturn in IT economy because most of the time it means that the bottom of the IT-wannabes will be laid off. This will benefit everybody in the long run.
First of all, engineering, unlike being a pizza delivery person, requires some knowledge and a certain set of analytical skills that one is born with. You can train people to deliver pizzas and punch cards, but it is hard to train people to resolve problems or come up with elaborate solutions. While books and schools may help, you either get it or not from the very beginning. Downturn in IT will mean that people who were there just for the sake of it, will probably lose their jobs or move on. This is great for the folks who -- while being good peole -- are simply not suited for jobs in the field of information technology.
While we all cry about off-shore development labs and cheap labor around the world, we are forgetting one thing: Americans are cheap now. Due to the falling dollar it makes less sense to run costly operations overseas. With China, India and Russia on the rise, people in those countries may see little in jobs and environments that make them work for the global companies (aka capitalist pigs).I would not be too concerned about wages if I were you. In fact, bad conditions in the U.S. sent many people who are currently employed via visas overseasas. Several friends of mine have moved back to their home countries alrady because "There is nothing to do in the U.S." This happens because while U.S. economy may go down, the world's economy is still expanding and there are plenty of things that have to be done in Moscow, Mumbai and Beijing. Good fore those who go back home and establish companies there. Good for the rest of us who are here.
And finally the loss of IT jobs should not be seen as the judgement day. I found that many people with engineering and business skills are more than capable of starting their own businesses and running their own shows. If you do not belong to the first group of people -- the ones who were not doing anything productive -- and you're not on a visa -- and you cannot go back home to start something new -- use the settlement to start something new. Many large companies are losing business because of the bad decisions that were made across the corporate ladder. A bust is only a bust if you think this way. In reality, it is a great opportunity for improvement for those of us who would like to grab the bull by its horns.
Software development isn't something you do as a businessperson because you want to pay for people to work on computers - it's something you do because you want something made or done.
Businesses will still want things made, and they will still want things done, because they are still going to be responding to a changing market, and they still want to be able to make new stuff, or change the stuff they currently make.
Software may be expensive to develop and test, but it's still one of the cheapest things you can mass produce, and one of the cheapest ways you can modify an existing product line to expand your market.
The emphasis will certainly be on return on investment - and there will be very nice plans on exactly how to spend the least possible, but the moment the competition has a feature that looks to harm the product line, *gasp* - suddenly the design for the product will have to be retrofitted, testing will have to be expanded, or the product release cycle will have to be accelerated to get that new feature in!
I completely understand this survey though - while companies do care if they end up spending more than they initially estimated, they just need to estimate low costs now, thanks to economic pressures to show the illusion of fiscal improvement and concern for the shareholder's resources.
So to show productivity when all you have are plans, you plan to make better features, spend less, and beat the competition - then ask for more money when you have more to show, which would only go to waste if you stopped now.
What this illusion accomplishes is a bit backwards though - there simply won't be as much open planning of large software project, and more emergency dollars and small contracts. You end up spending much more - much like the shift towards low cost estimates, but then using contractors and emergency spending in the Iraq war. It's the way the game tends to be played in poorly planned business and government - and it's very alluring if you only care about a small set of things going into it.
Ryan Fenton
Someone in the media said I.T. jobs are going to drop next year? They *MUST* be able to tell the future! =p
On a serious note, I'm glad I.T. jobs are going to decrease. Hopefully it will align with I.T. jobs demanding more expertise and more actual work getting done, instead of having a "cloud" (or "grid", if you will) of Windows-only support drones reading scripts to you over the phone while you try to get support for a purchased product.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Goldman Sachs IT, eh? Yesterday it was Gartner. These are guys with funded track records of largely failure, IMHO. I wouldn't give them much creedence. The industry is ripe and rife with change, be it the blossoming of mobiles/cells to the enormous competitiveness of online commerce platforms, incredible changes in entertainment delivery systems, etc.
There's a small problem in the US economy that will actually be improved no matter who is elected US president, as it always is a honeymoon between investors and the new government every four years. And it's very likely that with a new regime will come a drastic cut in oil prices.... further spurring money back into tech, where we've made the most gains in the past few decades.
Gotta love a doom sayer; it's done so they can by the stock cheaper now, then sell it higher later. This is called capitalism, and the propaganda is called marketing.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Seriously....I look in the paper and it's filled with ads for drivers. That and health care professionals. And as I would rather stick a pencil in my eye than work in health care, I figure my misanthropic ways would be better shifted toward driving.
I'm 46 and have to basically totally switch careers as there are just aren't any jobs in my profession anymore. It's over saturated. I hardly ever see an ad for IT or anything related in my area. As scary as it sounds, changing directions even this far into life may not be a bad idea.
Even with fuel prices sky-high, trucking will be with us for a while as lets face it....everything within your eyesight right now reading these words was all delivered or transported some way via a truck (unless you're looking out your window at a tree or something).
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Or possible these things just have no business value. I know that grid and cloud computing have no interest for me or my employer - computing power isn't the problem, it is cheap and plentiful.
Making applications with business value is the hard part, that requires smart people, which are scarce. Not just programmers, but management that can articulate what is needed, and a front-line of users who can spear head the adoption of better practices. That is the hard part. Partitioning resources, especially in a virtualized environment, isn't rocket science for most businesses.
Maybe these priorities are right on the money.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
C - Level executives realize that the technology needed to make the experience persistent for their end users when using cloud computing is iffy at best. Ask our friends using Google Mail, GDocs and me.com how that is going Maybe once there is a cloud of 4G wireless covering the US with enough redundancies.
Well, I think I should prepare to jump the IT ship pretty soon. My friend, with whom we were in this IT sector, jumped to the health-care field.
His Bachelor's and two Masters degrees in the IT sector at age 37 helped him get admission into one of the most coveted Nursing courses. He now practices as a nurse manager, earning close to US$80K. This does not include part-time work which he has to run away from.
This fella makes close to US$145K. I envy him. Guys, the health-care field is booming. Reports say nurses are in short supply and this will be the case for another three decades!
I am seriously considering jumping ship before it's too late.
Question is: Am I wrong?
>>>C-level executives and managers do not have that understanding This kind of geek bone headedness is what irritates me sometimes. Have you ever thought that they think about the actual prohibitive maintenance cost (instead of the *insert uber-geek cutting edge stuff*) involved in these things?
Or we could see a rebound propelled by technological innovation in green power and technologies.
But speaking from personal experience the oil companies are spending on IT. Now if they'd only spend on exploration or R&D.
Open-source shall finally be getting more developers. I mean, KDE 4 might actually get some people to use all those hip-new-technologies-and-APIs-that-no-one-has-used-yet-but-are-awesome-anyway.
The statements that Cloud Computing, grid computing, and open source software are not priorities is ludicrous. These are tools that are used to solve problems. It's like saying a hammer is a priority rather than building a house. No C?O will ever say that these are priorities while they may say that virtualization is a priority because it is often considered a project to virtualize as much as possible for DR and to cut costs. If spending on IT does dip we all know that only the bottom 10% will get their walking papers. I would assume that Charles King will be one of them.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
This doesn't surprise me too much. There's been a bad recession on the horizon for quite some time now, and it looks like it's coming home to roost.
I wonder if your exact area of expertise or geographic location is a factor in that? I haven't been looking for work in months and still get occasional calls to see if I am looking for work. (The most recent one was just last week, and they were looking for a 1-2 year commitment.) I've heard of some people having a hard time, and others are up to their eyeballs in work.
My sister is in the higher-ups of a large healthcare corporation, and she has just told me a few weeks ago that they are actually short of IT personnel and are going to start hiring them straight out of college, when normally they would require previous work experience. Then again, Goldman Sachs seems to talk their own books, not to say they aren't a great firm...but, they aren't always right but seem to cause a significant short term impact on markets.
Except C++ (like Java) is just a real horrendous language. I absolutely loathe C++.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I worry that I might be pushed off the ship at some point not far from now. Since I must have some form of income to survive in today's America, I thought that being pro-active and NOT being reactionary is better, when the inevitable happens.
By the way, I agree with you that happiness is not money - how can it be? For many, including yourself I guess, money is an important part of happiness.
If you can be really happy with zero income, accept my apologies.
me and my colleagues actually are telecommuting.
i kinda own my own business though. but, judging from the possibilities available in dev communities around the net, i can say that there are decent number of telecommuting jobs for many programming positions. provided that you can prove experience and track record. elance is one.
what i think is, many people who always worked in corporate culture either dont know where to look telecommuting jobs, or look down when they find them.
Read radical news here
What would the world be like without Google?
Well, it would have a few more dissidents.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It is taking fewer and fewer people to do jobs that used to take more people to do them. Cuts in the overall number of IT jobs will continue for quite awhile. This is especially true in front line jobs like IT support and Help Desk. The former are fewer because hardware has become more redundant and commoditized; it's easy to just plop a new box down or have your redundant drives/servers take over the load while you get around to fixing it. The latter are fewer because more and more organizations are moving towards 'self healing' and 'self help' type support models.
Cloud computing is not the same thing as Service Oriented Architecture in the same way that the interstate highway system isn't the same thing as an automobile.
than the five gazillion Indian and Chinese IT workers?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I work in Healthcare IT. Sometimes when I think I have stress to deal with I walk to a patient care floor and watch what the nurses do for a living. I have seen a nurse changing a mans diarhea filled diaper in one bed while the patient in the other bed began to vomit violently. She helped both patients clean themselves with a smile telling them not to worry about the mess. This often helps me realize how much I love working in IT.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
So you're saying that cloud computing is infrastructure to support SOA?
This suits me just fine. Every couple years or so, the industry gets fat with those who don't really deserve their position, due to a variety of factors (dumb, lucky, know the boss etc)
The first to go will be the fat on the bone, which, as the subject line suggests, suits me just fine.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
My troll was better than your troll.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Companies with foresight and vision will investigate those technologies that can increase their productivity AND the bottom line profit. Patching the dam only keeps it from breaking until later. You have to build a better one at some point.
Grid computing works. It's used in science research quite effectively. Cloud computing is coming no matter what people want.
There was a time when companies had their own power production facilities, now they don't (for the most part). As networking becomes faster (both latency and bandwidth) it will become cheaper to run your software somewhere else than running it in your building.
Once you start outsourcing applications and virtual servers, you get by with a fraction of the number of people you had before. IT budgets can shrink, and there are fewer jobs.
Of course, that's exactly why IT managers hate it.
...and how important nurses are. They do great work.
And this really comes to the heart of everything. This country is full of good people doing good work, trying their best to play by the rules created by a system that does not care for its citizens anymore.
We're bleeding... and there's no nurse to help us.
Our country is a market, not a country. We have buying power, but it is running out fast. There is no real sign of turn around. Our only hopes is to force these companies to pay heavy tax penalties for employing over seas. After all, they are taking our dollars, and giving nothing in return. They need to be heavily penalized for raping our country.
If they do not give back the dollars through employing our people, then it is in our interest to force them to pay us heavy tax fines for taking our money.
I dont know about you, but my dollars should not be going to building a chinese empire. I would rather see my neighbors family living a quality life.
I contract for a defense and manufacturing company and previously they to were gung-ho about virtualization but virtualization was sold as a magic bullet that it is not and we're scaling it back after real-world experience.
It works for many things that are relatively low impact/low risk but if you try and virtualize a core business application - even something as simple as portal/sharepoint/app servers you very quickly realize the limitations & issues thereof.
What used to be a measure of ROI / Cost Benefit is now (rightly so) weighed against the expense of downtime. That "savings" of not having real iron and virtual servers isn't really a savings anymore. Enable APM and save more than virtualizing.
At least for IT workers in the USA, UK, Australia, and Canada.
Occam's razor: off-shore labor is a lot cheaper, therefore employers will off-shore every possible job. If you do your job sitting in front of a computer, then your job can probably be off-shored - if not now, then certainly in the near future.
Furthermore, the simple laws of supply and demand dictate that the few jobs that are not off-shored, will have a glut of qualified applicants. The experienced developers who have their jobs off-shored, will clearly try to leverage their existing training and experience into the few remaining IT jobs that can not be easily off-shored. This causes a glut, and drives down wages.
The IT worker glut may be increased even more by improved automation of information system maintenance, standardization of software, and non-IT specialists who are increasingly sophisticated with information technology.
There can be nothing to stop this devastating trend, due to the following:
1) Corrupt USA politicians
2) USA IT workers are not willing to organize (please note: I am not suggesting a union)
3) Influential corporations have effectively distorted the issues
So there you go, it's as simple as that.
IMO: this trend is presently in it's infancy. The present trend has very little to do with the present economic slump. In fact, when the US economy recovers, this trend will accelerate even faster. The present situation for US IT workers is much better now, than it will be five years from now.
You shouldn't be so proud of the fact that you're a stronger flavor of douche than someone else.
"It's his right to do so of course since it is his money". I think 2000+ years of human history has proven that given the chance a small group of individuals will hoard everything and leave the rest killing each other for scraps. Why should we let that happen? Why is it OK for Carly Fiori to buy a private plane when my single mom neighbor is about to loose her home because her ARM shot her payments way up?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
E.G.#1-> I remember telling a bunch of network techs, or rather, first asking them:
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
& not a one of them could...
We had this kid in my research lab who was a fabulous hacker and pretty solid scripter, but didn't know what a for loop was. One of the best programmers I know is self taught (which is the way a lot of people got into the field)). On the flip side, I've got classmates who are so lost on fundamentals that they don't know what an object is (seriously, one professor gives that question on exams and it kills students.)
I've seen far too many people get through their degrees through a combination of cheating, relying on partners, and cutting and pasting code to really trust it. One of the worst programmers I know has a 4.0; he writes hacks that work well enough, but that I wouldn't trust anywhere near production code (mostly 'cause I've seen it fail miserably in production code 'cause he didn't comprehend real time debugging.)
open source modern art: laser taggi
Everyone else had the same idea too, and big hospital management is having the same H1B ideas that everyone else had too. Engineering is a zero, which is a good reason for declining enrollment. Law has always been a crap shot as are most insurance/sales/bank cubicle jobs. Medicine still pays well and there are lots of employers. But guess what, the same kind of regional consolidation is taking over and the biggest hospitals have started to import H1B, aka slave, labor. Insurance companies are doing their part to force the same kind of throat/cost cutting all around. The downturn is only going to accelerate these trends. If we get another republican administration, Medicine will look like software, aviation or broadcast media.
Bottom line, keep doing what you do best. Trends will always betray you.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
'At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open-source software, content management and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey) â" less than 2% of the respondents said cloud computing was a priority.'
What the hell is "on-demand/utility" computing? The fact that it requires a "/" in the name is a total buzz kill. And both grid computing and open source software are concepts, not products, so they won't "buy" them obviously.
'The CIOs indicated that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities.'
My understanding is that _this_ is exactly what cloud computing is... or touts to be. And hence the buzz.
Your 12 servers virtualized = Your "Cloud"
Yes, it is still a foggy concept, but clearly this is the way to go, and what is driving the trend.
...is that they only asked Fortune 1000 CIOs. Where do the majority of IT people work? I'll give you a hint: it ain't in F1000 organizations. I'm an independent contractor working in the small business sector. My clients have 50, maybe 100 total employees, $1-$10 million in revenue and no programmers on staff. Yet they need, or want, custom systems built. I have to turn away business and I see no end in sight.
The U.S. economy continues it's long slide into oblivion as the decision makers at all levels fail to grasp the importance of investing in new technologies and methodologies over simply providing a return on shareholder investment.
You're all fucked. Good night.
"I have seen a nurse changing a mans diarhea filled diaper in one bed while the patient in the other bed began to vomit violently."
Sounds like my cube farm when the server crapped out over the weekend, but of course no monitoring, so apps hung up on Monday.
"Server virtualization" is an admission that system administration is badly designed. After all, you're not going to get any more work out of the machine than you would running multiple processes. Usually, you get less. Part of the problem is that Linux is still locked into the old UNIX user/group/everybody model of security, with an all-powerful "root". Virtualization is a way of working around that limitation.
OpenVZ and Linux-VServer are efforts to get around this problem by adding another level of administrative containerization. The performance is better, since you're not going through two layers of operating systems.
Many of the problems come from the fact that some major applications are coded as singletons. For example, Apache assumes there is only one instance of itself per machine. (Yes, this can be worked around, but it's not easy.) So do most mail handling programs. If you can install and run an application without running as "root", it probably doesn't need virtualization.
I'm not.
"Piter, too, is dead."
I just had a conference call with people from India like 10 minutes ago. On the phone I understand like
every second word or so.. and of course when they're needed, with the timeshift they're not available.
E.G.#1-> I remember telling a bunch of network techs, or rather, first asking them: "Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
Is that some kind of trick question or are you just making up bullshit? There is no correct answer to that question.
Football Odds
Buddy, nothing you can do, will ever be better than what I can do, period...
He's not your buddy, guy!
I usually read even long trogladite posts, but when they're filled with LOLBOLDCAPS I get bored quickly. I doubt many slashdotters have a PhD in English - but evidently, neither do you.
Are you perhaps on medication at the moment? Do you like building very large sandcastles and towers?
which is totally what she said
unfortunately the requirement of being able to making your value known is valid for every aspect of life, leave aside any profession.
Read radical news here
We're delivering millions of dollars of savings every year through grid computing, as well as increasing our profits and the amount of capital we have on-hand to trade with. Believe me, grid computing isn't low on the priority list around here :)
For someone with a mere 16 years in industry, a degree in maths, and 26 years of programming, can you enlighten me as to the answer to this?
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
Either I'm parsing the question wrong or it's impossible. You could poll [2N] until you hit an exception but this doesn't work on machines/languages that simply crash when you access an array out-of-bounds. So what's the general solution?
You guys are so late. I just came back from a counseling where I took admission to an IT Engineering course. Now I'm unemployed before being eligible to be employed.
RutSum.com
Sounds to me like that guy with the 4.0 knows what he doesn't want to do with the degree and is learning the skills he needs to accomplish what is required. Get to know him, because wherever he ends up he'll probably end up being the boss.
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
Okay, I assume the language is C.
What does a raw "C" pointer give you?
If you're writing in kernel mode, the C-language [and its compiled implementations] won't even reliably throw a segmentation fault if you go past the end of the "malloc'ed" territory [otherwise strcpy() wouldn't be hax0rable to produce buffer overflows - although maybe the problem is that the kernel-ish aspects of strcpy() use an even more simplistic memory structure than what you get with malloc()].
If it were a file pointer, then you I guess you might be able to rely on EOF, but I don't know of any generalized "EOF" for malloc [at least not in old-school C - maybe one of the more recent ANSI standards has added something new that I don't know about].
All right, I admit, it's been a while since I wrote any "C".
In the old days, the standard was that "p" was an array pointer if and only if "p == &p" [for malloc'ed, or malloc-able, pointers, in general, "p != &p"].
Having said that, I vaguely remember that for character arrays, in some implementations of compiled "C", you could count on an extra eight bits of 0's [i.e. "00000000"] immediately at the end of the array, and if you could move the array pointer over by one and read that "zero byte" [without throwing a segmentation fault in user mode], then you'd know that you had hit the end of the [character] array.
But I don't know of anything in the ANSI or IEEE standards which states that e.g. a 32-bit int array ends in 32-bits worth of 0's [since that actually is a valid 32-bit int, namely "0" itself], nor have I ever heard that e.g. the 64-bit value of all 0's was reserved in IEEE 754 to signify the end of an array of 64-bit doubles.
I've wondered why. I work in vertical industry (energy), where believe it or not, we have trouble attracting attracting quality IT people.
He's one of my best friends, and he doesn't have the people (political) skills to become the boss (he's had a project forked over it) and he wants to go the academia route. Plus he's one of the people that cheat their ways to a degree; I know 'cause my poor textbooks have ended up in almost every boy's bathroom trashcan as a result. (And therefore I must stop lending him my books.)
Actually he's one of the many people that made me horribly disillusioned with the degree. He's great at some stuff, (even been published a few times) but it's all things he learned on his own/would've learned even without school 'cause he's a hardcore EE geek. Which is what I'm mostly finding, that either people get good at it 'cause they've got a passion for it or they stay mediocre. Though one the best compE people I know, a guy who really knows his stuff, once to go to law school 'cause it'll pay better.
open source modern art: laser taggi
That post was for the AC who is taking this all a little too seriously.
As a software development guy in the process of job hunting, I can't say that this has reflected my experience. The only reason I don't have a new job already is because I'm being super-picky.
Isn't much of the IT workforce due to retire in a few years? I think at my company 90% are eligible to retire within the next 5 years. We're aggressively hiring so that we won't be in trouble when they do start retiring.
Therefore, even if there are a large number of IT jobs cut next year, would the number of people retiring balance it out?
... you don;t have enough life or corporate experience to be a manager.
This is the problem with IT now. Companies pay peanuts for new people (please tell us, are you working 35 to 40 hours a week? No? Why I am not surprised) in order to exploit them doing a job for which they are not prepared.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have worked in several countries and if the only jobs are elsewhere I will pack and go.
I find mind boggling that US techies have problems to find a job.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In most of the languages that anyone actually uses, there's a function to return the length of the array, so that's the easiest. Otherwise, the other AC actually answered: (pythonish, non optimized, psuedocode)
i=0
k=0
end=a[k]
While end!=None:
midpt_val=unknown[i]
end=unknown[k]
i+=1
k+=2*i
midpt=i
open source modern art: laser taggi
Ah, I see. Ok.
I'm still not.
"Piter, too, is dead."
then what would you suggest?
rather, what do you prefer?
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
I am not a professional coder but I do know quite a bit and my guess is the answer is, "You can't. You just rant about it on /."
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
Either I'm parsing the question wrong or it's impossible. You could poll [2N] until you hit an exception
And by polling 2N until you hit an exception, you have discovered the total number of elements, and therefor have not found the midpoint without knowing that information.
Of course, once you find the midpoint by ANY means, you pretty much know the total number of elements.
So, yes, it's impossible. You can't solve the question posed before the comma without also violating the restriction imposed after the comma.
WTF? We were getting all the oil from Iraq we needed. Still, after the war, we will still be BUYING it. You need to understand that there are NO Iraqi oil companies. Just from the US, EU and Asia. So going to war over oil is a bad point. Besides, we get more oil from Quwait and Saudi Arabia so war with Iraq to "get oil" is a really bad plan.
--
My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
I live in Riverside California which is one of the top 3 areas hit by the housing bust and illegal immigration.
My parents live in Tampa Florida which is also one of the top 3 areas adversely effected by the same economic issues.
ITs really bad here in California. As an example a year ago craigslist had 15-20 jobs listed a day for the inland empire area of California. Today its about down to 5 or 6 jobs and most of them are "Work from HOME!" and other ripoffs rather than real jobs.
At the local Moreno Valley mall there are at least 6 places that are closed or having liquidation closings. Gotchalks and Toys R US are also closing in my area. Restaurants are hurting as people eat at home rather than go out. Both my wife and I were laid off a few months ago and I only received one call for an interview for a job 70 miles away. My inlaws were laid off as well and they own a cleaning company that went bankrupt as their clients decided to cut costs by having other employees clean their offices.
Where my parents live there are 4 houses on the block that were foreclosed on the people who left could not even afford to take their junk out of the house.
Your right its isolated. But when you have to pay $3,500 a month just to exist and your rent sky rockets after the APR kicks in your screwed and spending is the first thing you stop doing as you fight for your home.
http://saveie6.com/
I remember telling a bunch of network techs, or rather, first asking them: "Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements" & not a one of them could...
Perhaps next time you should ask a programmer, who is expected to know that kind of thing.
I hope you don't write cover letters the way you write slashdot comments. I wouldn't hire you just based on your lack of writing skills. I have a friend who thinks he's going to be a big swinging industry dick who writes like he's in junior high school, he's going nowhere fast. Every time he sends someone a communication he makes himself look like a complete idiot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
it will decrease, increase, then decrease again and then increase.. wait a minute goldman sachs is just stating the obvious, that things vary over time!
Dude! You are insane. I like it. Anyhow, I will read through it all and I will actually do the process but it is late here. I just figured I'd respond to let you know that you're a raving lunatic and I appreciate that if nothing else. I'm always willing to learn new things so don't get me wrong (and don't forget my quantifier about my only knowing some).
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Alright, I think (and don't quote me on this) that I can actually confirm *my* findings. I use a lot of open source PHP scripts that are full blown applications if you ask me. I admit that I had a head start because I know the project and, well, it *looks* like you're right. You are still as insane as you've ever been but I'm still as appreciative as always. My email is kgiii *at* kgiii *dot* info if you want yell at me some more.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Oh man that's some of the dumbest shit ever posted on slashdot. Your solution is 1) wrong, 2) ridiculously inefficient, 3) fails horribly in non-safe languages. My condolences to the people that have had to work with you.
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