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IT Job Hiring Slumps
snydeq writes The IT job hiring bump earlier this year wasn't sustained in July and August, when numbers slumped considerably, InfoWorld reports. 'So much for the light at the end of the IT jobs tunnel. According to job data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as analyzed by Janco Associates, the IT professional job market has all but lost the head of steam it built up earlier this year. A mere 3,400 IT jobs were added in August, down from 4,600 added for July and way down from the 13,800 added in April of this year. Overall, IT hiring in 2014 got off to a weak start, then surged, only to stumble again.' Anybody out there finding the IT job market discouraging of late and care to share their experiences?
...or the standards of computer science education in Western countries could improve? We could start with insisting all CS students learn a close-to-the-metal language like C, and not graduating JavaScript specialists.
And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"? It's pretty few and far between in practice. Besides, only bad programmers are reliant on the first language they learn. Good ones can pick up the best one for the job at hand fast. Are you stuck using the first language you learned? I learned the ropes using BASIC but I haven't touched it since. It really doesn't matter.
And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"?
The important ones. Like, developing software for control units in vehicles.
I said "how many". Not "what kind". There aren't that many jobs developing vehicle control units. Maybe in 20 years when self-driving cars fully take off.
Indian programmers are just as good and even if they are not, they cost less than 1/5th of an American programmer.
I've yet to see one project with a majority of Indian programmers that produced quality software without going over budget after half the code had to be rewritten by real programmers. Besides, salaries in India are going up FAST. Even if it hypothetically is 1/5 for now, it won't be for long.
The peak times for jobs seem to be autumn and winter - everyone is on vacation over the summer. No one does anything. Anyone still around is covering for the people on vacation. Interviews and hiring are really low priorities. This fall, people will start thinking about next year's projects.
Because there is more to programming than stringifying bits of code in an endless cycle of mindless repetition. I have seen my fair share of Indianand Chinese programming style, and while it produces code that works for one particular instance of a problem, it uterly fails to deliver on much desired attributes, like extensibility or even simple readabili. In other words, if it works don't touch it.
Unfortunately, a lot more employers are demanding quick-and-dirty JavaScript-style solutions than rigorous close-to-the-metal C solutions.
Because getting a pretty UI up in a hurry makes it look "done", but making something with quality takes time without "doing anything" that PHBs and users can see.
Actually if you look at the innovations in the IT sector there really have not been much lately. The first decade of the millenium saw a rapid expansion of web services which actually delivered never before seen services (from the mass market point of view at least).
Of course you could say that Facebook and such are just iterative refinements of the previous attempts such as MySpace but in my opinion the last few years have seen nothing but small refinements and even these coming only from the big players. No new disruptive tech, nothing new on the web (file sharing, social networks, everything has just stalled). Even the gadgets are more or less the same and it is hard to see an Apple iWatch or VR goggles really expand the IT sector. You actually do not need hire a lot of people to refine old stuff and small start ups rarely go on a hiring spree untill they have got some serious funding which would require something innovative and that is just the problem.
I would expect a Computer Science student to learn and have real programming experience with languages from all major paradigms (imperative, OO, functional, logical, parallel, ...). For "close to the metal" they should actually learn to code in assembly. But I agree C is also good to know, because the performance-sensitive parts of many applications are still written in C and not a higher language. But I personally have never gotten around to doing a lot of C because pointer arithmetic hurts my brain.
Sorry to crush your expectations but most graduates learn to /actually/ code during the first few years of their first job. If they learn at all, that is. Academic assignments are still just puzzles that are outdated and/or detached from reality and teamwork exercises don't work when only one person in each team is interested in working.
rigorous close-to-the-metal C solutions
That's a contradictio in adiecto. Close to the metal is never rigorous. To write programs in a rigorous way means to write them in the most concise and abstract form that fits the problem, and leave implementation details to the compiler/libraries. For that you need a higher language.
IT Job Hiring in the USA Slumps
FTFY
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
Refutation: OS kernels.
I suppose more girls need to learn programming.
Programming is only a tool to learn other concepts which are basics of the CS/Software Engineering curricula, like algorithms, data structures and much more stuff which are not programming. If what you want is to learn programming, study something else.
What employers demand should not dictate what universities teach.
Otherwise we are quite literally giving a bunch of people McDonald's certifications and telling them that's an education.
In Ireland, an Indian guy told me that Irish people don'g get the jobs in IT in Ireland "because they['re] not strong in IT".
I'm pretty sure I, as one of the only ~20 of an original ~80 in our course met the standard. No standards problem there, no skills lacking. I learned to program in C++, Java, Perl, mainly didn't remember much of the Caml I learned. I never got the opportunity to even interview for a programming job in Ireland - that's right - interview. My final year project was in Java and I was very proficient in Java before the end. The difference I think is, IDE's and big libraries and API's weren't stressed enough.
Never got a sniff of a programming job.
Rumours are dangerous things...
My advice: Change your name to Ahmed Kumar and confess yourself as a freelance expert in every acronym, make training videos with a native Indian accent, and make a portfolio of do-nothing applications of programming on your CV and watch the calls come flooding in.
If that's the case we should all go and learn Scada because of, you know, nuclear plants and that sort of stuff which are more important to me than a stupid car that can't drive in heavy rain.
If companies were greatly limited in how they can hire foreign workers and even outsource. With the news that all net job growth since 2000 went to immigrants the real question is how many H1Bs are actually doing exceptional work versus simply being cheaper? I bet if we outright eliminated the H1B visa and added some padding to the O visa (exceptionally talented, rare skill sets) we could free up several hundred thousand jobs that should be going to Americans.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit noted that when his local government in Tennessee cracked down on immigration violations, suddenly businesses that relied on low and unskilled workers had to find ways to entice young black workers at legal wages to take them. Guess what? Black unemployment dropped even though not a whole lot of jobs were actually created--if any. It was simply a political matter of forcing businesses to obey the law (imagine that).
The solution is aggressive immigration control, especially deportation of most immigrants at this point. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter. We don't need them. Our country is demonstrably not better off with them, especially the lower skilled ones (in fact anyone who supports mass immigration of lower skilled/unskilled immigrants implicitly hates the black and lower class white communities).
Was that a joke? Bring in more H1B visa workers?
I work for a very large corporation that has more than 10k Indian workers in our Indian office. We have systematically replaced standard IT workers with Indian contractors for years. They receive no real benefits and are clock launchers in many cases. If you give them a list of things to do they generally can accomplish them but do not go the extra step to collaborate and work to common goals because frankly they don't share common goals. The best parallel I can come up with is we now have McDonald's IT. If you order off the menu you might get something you can use fast but don't expect great food or a chef in the kitchen. The result is the impact to our teams that are left and are critical to running the business. The impact is so great in my area that we have built and continue to build up small internal IT teams to share amoung ourselves and run our own infrastructure and we call these teams DEVOPS. How crazy is that?
there are always people in third world countries who will do the same work as you for peanuts.
I remember spending hours untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code. One application used a 2,000 character url string that passed the administrator user name and password in plain text. Cheaper does not mean better. People over there can work for peanuts because they live in cardboard ghettos. Maybe we want our people to have indoor sanitation, running water and electricity.
Maybe we should be considering trade barriers instead of feeling like we need to compete with starvation wages in every third world hell hole on the planet.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Why not both? Can you not learn compiler theory in pretty much any language? Why not use a language that maximizes employability?
The companies say there aren't enough IT workers. The IT workers say there aren't enough jobs. It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.
As someone who educates CS students, I see the whole spectrum. There are lots of students who seriously have no interest in learning the material. All they care about is getting a diploma. Where I teach, those students don't make it all the way through the program, due to a combination of poor grades and being caught cheating. But when I was getting my undergrad degree, I was always angry about the fact that employers couldn't distinguish my A's from those of people who didn't actually learn the material.
Not surprisingly, supply and demand is a factor here. With low numbers of CS students, standards have to be lowered to keep the tuition revenue going. As the student population grows beyond capacity, schools are able to be more selective based on SAT scores, high school GPAs, and weed-out courses.
I've been keeping my eye on the job market, at least for my area, for the last five years. Which is how long it's been since I lost my good job, as a network admin, and have had to scramble to fill the gap. I spent an entire year being told I was overqualified, to much experience, or underqualified, not having a bachelors degree, for the small number of positions available. In the end with nothing coming up I did what made the most sense and went back to school for a bachelors degree as that was something I got told every time they decided I was underqualified.
To start like almost always happens no credits carried over from my associates degree to my bachelors degree, so I've had to start from scratch. I haven't really learned much of anything I hadn't before during this process and if anything some of my technical skills have withered from not being used. I took a student employee job with the IT department at the university, because at least they were happy to have someone competent but as a student employee I have a fixed wage at minimum wage and no more than 15 hours of work per week. It looked like I might get a full time job with them last year when one of the admins left, but the powers that be decided their was no money to replace a person who had been paid from a specific grant (so they wanted to free up that money to go elsewhere while the grant still calls for that position to be paid). It's my last year here and I now have five years of looking at the market.
The market in my region has been stagnant. A few companies are hiring in my region, but with questions about whether you are on an H1b or not and sky high requirements for those positions... I know I'm not the one they want. If I apply anyways I get near instant feedback they I'm not qualified for their position even when I meet all the stated requirements. I would move, but I simply can't afford that and most companies don't seem interested in talking to me if I don't live within a hundred miles of them. Even that isn't a perfect fix anyways... Their seems to be a half a dozen US cities with insane amounts of IT industry activity, about 30 with sustained IT activity, and the rest of the top 100 cities (one of which I live by) are anemic for IT and always have been. I could never seriously afford to live in any of those cities so many of us in IT work in: San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. I wouldn't be hired by Google or the others anyways, they prefer fresh young talent and I'm in my mid-30s now.
I'm looking into non-traditional computer related fields, because that is pretty much my last hope to have something when I'm done.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I think thats the best way for me to deal with this issue right now.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Actually lots, if you want to be successful, none if you just draw down a salary until you're found out (aka playing "confirmation bias' and losing)
Plenty of developers sit on their arse developing fuck all, and wait until your org decides to gets rid of its programmers since they're shit.
Only bad programmers think that JavaScript/other web languages are actually good and best tools for moving into the future.
Remember those dudes that were working on that processor that could run JavaScript natively, or whatever? WHAT'S THE POINT OF THAT? Bad programmers that insist on their first language, for WHATEVER reason. That kind of takes what you said and strengthens beaverdownunder's argument.
The age-old fallacy that what specifics you teach people has any correlation to their future careers.
If you're a programmer, the language does not matter. It's literally that simple. You could WRITE your own language if it came to it.
If you're not, learning some language that's a passing fad is hardly worth worrying about compared to one that went out with the Ark.
In the same way that all my science classes taught me that Pluto was a planet, all my CS classes taught me about languages from the 60's that aren't in use any more. Literally, by the time you get to the workplace the language does not matter. It's like a car mechanic who's repaired some Fords in the past... it won't help him much on the new Fords or on other models if he can't use the underlying skills instead of the rote teaching.
Course languages should not be chosen to suit employers who - generally speaking - by the time those students graduate will be demanding something else. They should be chosen to promote understanding and completeness and practicality (I'm not saying we should all teach a language that doesn't exist outside of academia, for example). Just for the simple matter of students being able to obtain a compiler and get to grips with it at home, if nothing else.
But saying that business should dictate the languages taught is nonsensical. Things used in business are generally a BAD IDEA. We know they are. Because they are quick, cheap and dirty. That shouldn't be the basis of an education, especially when - as you hint at - it's the theory that matters.
For the record, I have been "officially" taught BBC BASIC, Visual Basic 3.0 and Java. And I have a degree in CS. Only one of those is close to a useful language any more, and that's the one being ridiculed in the previous article for it's use in the world's most popular brand of smartphones nowadays. If anything keeps me in a job, it's C, SQL, and the ability to quickly read example code from any language (PHP, Ruby, Perl, VB, C#, you name it) and knock up something that works by knowing that they are all pretty much the same at the bottom.
Course languages have almost zero correlation to future success. Business is already suspicious of people who do a 3-year CS degree and then tell you they can program anything in Java. It honestly doesn't matter what the language is, so business shouldn't be dictating it.
Non developer positions are having issues.
Finding developers is getting more and more difficult.
Devops is growing.
Maybe time to learn to code and not just click away at control panels?
-- $G
... the economy of US is not booming
No matter if one can write high level code or whatnots, it still gonna be linked to the economy
People do not hire IT workers just because they have too much money - people hire IT workers because their companies have IT problems to be solved
And ... this is the kicker ... when the economy is not expanding, companies don't see their profit jumps, and when that happen, they will start looking for ways to save money, and one way to save money is to NOT hiring
The spending power of the people inside the U. S. of A. ain't booming - plus, the US exports also not growing leaps and bounds either
Face it, the economy of the United States of America hasn't been in too great a shape since the 1990's, and the future sure ain't look so bright
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... there simply aren't enough experienced developers to fill demand. Any experienced Ruby/Rails developers who move to Melbourne can pick and choose who to work for at the moment. Same wages, better standard of living (assuming most readers are from US/UK). Any takers?
Work smarter, not harder.
The Indians in Ireland aren't strong in IT either.
The strong Irish and strong Indians get the fuck out of their respective I* countries. The detritus are left.
That's all you are, it's all I am and it's all I've been. The drive for the bottom dollar has gotten even more intense in the last decade than ever. Managers, CEO's CTO's, shareholders, taxpayers, regardless - the primary focus is money.
The ONLY IT workers they give e a shit about are the well dressed, smart talking (and genuinely smart) guys who waltz in consulting on how to reduce costs. (ie: you MAKE them money, you're income, not expense!) If you can charge a business 700 to 1500 a day for 6 to 18 months, but in the end of your project they get to fire 3/4 of a team of 100 people then you're _exactly_ what they're after.
I write this unfortunately as a primary support person over the years, maybe due to lazyness, apathy, people skills, depression, personality? Who knows - but I never became a creator always a supporter. I fixed things but I never designed stuff, so now things are breaking less and less, things are finally being designed exceptionally well. Plus there's ways to minimise the impact if things do break. At least in the support area, you are fucked, be it level 1 2 or 3.
They do still need some support people but less and those people generally already have their jobs. So, if you know how to replace systems, "send shit to the cloud" - you're in, save carefully though, because eventually every business will be "on the cloud" and your consulting gig, moving people to the cloud will dry up too.
This is just how IT has gone, let alone the impact of the shitty financial industry and governments fucking up the economy(ies) internationally, gloablisation means move shit to where it's cheapest - and a lot more shit can be moved easier now. We had a good run on the gravy train but that shit is finished now.
I'm estimating a 35 -> 45% pay drop from the job I've just been given the heave ho-from to my next one (assuming I'm lucky enough, I'm hearing an average of 200 applicants per job in my city) I should've damn well become a plumber or electrician. YEah they need to re-train now and then too but you sure as shit can't outsource it to XYZ country.
Could you please point out the benefit for US American programmers of a job they don't get hired for being in the US compared to a job they can't get hired for abroad?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, it would make my job so much easier. It's kinda hard to explain to someone who has no idea what he's doing (i.e. someone who never saw ASM or C) why buffer overflows are BAD, why (and most of all how!) to avoid them.
Security would be a much easier job if "programmers" (I'll use the term very loosely here now) didn't stare blankly at you if you tried to tell them that garbage collection isn't just the term I use for the bus that takes them back home from work.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As an Australian, I'm not seeing many C jobs. I wish.
Big companies like Facebook and Microsoft are waiting to see how many H1Bs Obama gives them when he does an end run around Congress on immigration later this year.
Kids, that number is going to be larger than 0. You have no one to blame but yourself if you voted for this mess.
iirc Automotive Linux [ http://automotive.linuxfoundat... ] is HTML5/Javascript on the frontend...
Actually, compiler theory is a great example of a language you can't easily learn in any language. The small lightweight structures it generates, and the referentially transparent transformations that you run those structures through lend it strongly to being done with functional languages, and if not, very close to the metal languages like C. Heavy weight OO languages tend to end up just causing you to write 3 tons of boiler plate, rather than actually learning the theory.
Almost, but not quite.
Fad languages exist and in the short term they matter. No-one has quite found the right solution for websites, for example, and thus new 'improved' languages/platforms/whatever keep appearing. All of these are fads, but websites exists, and website developers have jobs.
Think of pure maths versus applied maths.
All job markets are local. I don't care so much about what the top-line number is for IT jobs. I care about what the market is for my specific skill set in the area where I happen to live. Obviously if the national number plummets then that trend will eventually be replicated in the majority of individual markets, but from the summary of this article it doesn't sound like we're talking about the number "plummeting".
At the moment, for my specific skill set and in the specific area where I live, the job market is about as good as its ever been. If I were to lose my job tomorrow my chances of acquiring another one reasonably quickly would be better than during any of the other times I've been jobless.
I think in the business context cheaper is almost always "better". I've dealt with reams of horrible code also, but at the end of the day most people just want a product that looks like it works. They don't have the technical experience to determine whether it was well built or not, just how it behaves on the surface under ideal conditions.
Programming as a profession is getting priced out. First they came for Support, then IT, etc. DevOps will eventually fall to the wayside of automation which is the whole purpose of the job. Programming will get eaten away. There will be high level consulting and architectural jobs for a while, but anything else is a losing proposition.
You two seem to be using different definitions of "rigorous". He's using it in terms of mathematical rigor. You're using it to describe things that are tricky and difficult and where there's little margin for error.
I say that since one of our more "productive" guys produces nothing but quick and dirty garbage.(Which seems great until you look at the code and see how much of a pain it is to maintain.) Lets see, it's slow because parts of it are On^2 but he claims it's linear in speed. (My guess is the only order he knows of is linear.) Nearly everything is spelled incorrectly and a huge percentage of the classes have names that don't actually match what they do. There's constant attempts to re-invent the wheel which end up not working as well as the built in ones.(I mean doing property sheets and pages from scratch?) But hey, he gets his code out "quick" and it's other guys that are the problem when we can't add features as quickly as management wants.
I am hiring; can't fill the positions and I won't use foreign workers... Why can I not find anyone - Taking a school degree is not enough or a rubber stamp seen on TV class or learn Java in one hour...
What have _you_ done - where is your Git...
What meetup groups do you attend regularly...
Why does your linkedin endorsements are knitting and you have no tech endorsements
If your sitting at home unemployed - what personal coding projects have you done while your off work?
None?
NEXT!
I'd like to push back against this. I'll agree that the specifics of what one learns in university, assuming we're talking about someone who got a Math/Physics/CS/Engineering degree, likely aren't predictive of long-term career success. That said, subject matter can be decently predictive in terms of short-term success. If I'm looking to hire a junior Java developer, say, and I have two candidates in front of me who appear to be equally hard-working, intelligent, sociable, etc. but one exhibits high Java proficiency and the other has never seen a line of Java then I'm going with the former. Your skill set does matter when it comes to getting a job. Your point is that anybody who's a decent dev. can ramp up on almost any technology. I agree. But not every employer is willing to pay for the lag-time for you to ramp up. Especially if you're competing with other candidates who are already ramped up.
I think you underestimate the market for engine control, exhaust aftertreatment and safety systems.
My advice: Change your name to Ahmed Kumar and confess yourself as a freelance expert in every acronym, make training videos with a native Indian accent, and make a portfolio of do-nothing applications of programming on your CV and watch the calls come flooding in.
Since changing my name to Prabduphada Lackshiminaryanha I've got IT job offers from all over. Amazing for ahigh school dropout who knows nothing about computers.
Most of the comments and discussion in this thread seems to be geared towards programming and development as most /. discussions do. There is more people in "IT" than that. The hardware and tier employees, system administrators, network engineers, security engineers, infrastructure, and specific disciplines like SAN, visualization, SQL, SRM, DR, Exchange, messaging, voice etc.
From my experience, there is always more people looking for a job in the late spring and early summer. Bonuses if any in my industry are usually paid in the second quarter (if you're not there, no bonus for you), and people with families like to move in the summer if possible and are looking for a different job.
I;ve had a open position for 6 months I've been trying to fill. The market for for people with "converged IT experience" is big right now. Someone with a decent level of VMWare, SAN, DR, and Windows server experience are hard to find. So are really good Cisco people. I've got a lot of resumes with a lot of the key words in them but too many people think they are experienced with something because they used it once or were a small part of a project and they may have had a hand in it for a small part. Very frustrating. Just for reference, at least in downtown Chicago and NYC, a person with 5+ years of well rounded senior level person with VMWare, some SAN, and Windows is going for $130K. A "good" Cisco guy starts at about $140k.
If this is accurate, then it sounds like your former employer was massively overpaying you and was smart to let you go. They can hire a new you for 35-40% less.
Yes but remember that programming is mostly about eliminating other jobs. So it does have a cannibalizing effect but in general everybody else has it much worse.
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The market slumps because there's a whole lot of people that show experience companies do not want.
My project at a huge company just finished, so I started looking for another one: I interviewed in six places, got six offers in two weeks, 2 paying as much as my old job, 4 paying from 10 to 20% more. 4 were from companies in town, 2 were bay area companies asking for telecomutting. The salary that pays for an OK experienced programmer in the bay pays more than an architect makes in the midwest, and it's hard to hire in the bay if you are not a big name, so companies are starting to look outside for quality candidates.
But that's the thing, an applicant need a resume proving that you learn new skills quickly, and that he is working on tools that are growing in adoption, like languages with functional programming elements. The cost of a bad hire is just very high, it's just too risky to get someone that has a good probability of not working out.
I'm talking about this stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Since assembly or C (or C++ for that matter) are the main languages used today that can give you buffer overflow if used incorrectly, why are people letting programmers who have "never seen them before" work in these languages? It would seem a modicum of training might be needed to fill in the gap. Shouldn't employers who are worried about such things provide training in these areas if they need it? Oh, I see... It's all the contrac... uh, I mean employee's responsibility.
That is all.
http://developers.slashdot.org...
does Slashdot need irony and sarcasm categorys
No-one has quite found the right solution for websites...
And they never will until folks get it through their heads that, separation of concerns notwithstanding, needing to learn more than two or three disparate languages to make any software system is a bad idea. Just because the concerns are separated doesn't mean syntax and computational models need to be. Right now, to write a reasonable web page, you need to know HTML, CSS, and Javascript at a minimum. Take that all the way to the backend and you're probably adding Java (or Clojure, or node.js - yes, that's still Javascript, sue me - if you want to be all "up to date") and SQL to the mix. And I haven't even finished adding in persistence and UI frameworks and templating languages.
Then you get the situation that there's such a proliferation of the ancillary technology that employers who see anything from their technology stack missing from your resume and assume that the H1B who's lied on his resume about it is better qualified. We are building our own coffins with these new tools.
That is all.
they want H1-Bs because they don't have to _train_ them. The H1-Bs are no better (or worse) than local employees. The H1-Bs come over trained in very, very specific tech. e.g. not just JAVA but specific JAVA libraries & tool kits and how specific industries use them. They do this all on their own dime and their own time. You can't compete with that without taking a huge risk. If you spend 5 years learning the wrong tech you're entire careers is shot. So is thier's, btw, but there's plenty of them and we don't talk about the ones that don't make it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
From what I've read this has only accelerated since I saw it happening working over there in Mountain View. I finally found the right English word for the phenomenon of code.org and other astroturf campaigns about programmers in the U.S: "mendacity"
Your post is redundant, when it's a hirer's market at the moment. Very very few jobs can you leave one and get the same pay. Not when there's 200 applicants per job. Wages are in freefall over here (AU)
Where in God's good name did you get that idea? People over there that right code live in houses just like us. They have a sizable middle class (it's about the size of the United States Population). They're cheaper because there's 3/4 of a billion people living in poverty, which makes labor prices for their middle class much cheaper. They write spaghetti code because everybody does from time to time.
Whatever else you think they're not inferior to you. Stop thinking that. It plays into the hands of the big corps that want to use cheaper labor to drive your wages down. You won't see it as a threat until it's too late and you're working 70 hours a week to make ends meet. Start asking your politician why we're not putting up tariffs. Join a Union if you can and get into a voting bloc. Start protecting what you have or it will be taking away from you...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The GP poster was probably not being overpaid. It's just that in the current market and the high applicant/open-positions ratio, employers can low-ball on salary and desperate, unemployed IT folks will accept any offer.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Got my CDL and driving forklifts for a living. I make as much money as I used to, but work 20-25 hours a week more to do it. I'm loving the Hope and Change. Work is being Fundamentally Transformedà in the US.
Not redundant. "Obvious" perhaps. I'm not familiar with the situation in Australia, but I'd be surprised if you weren't exaggerating the 35-40% figure. If only because if it were true then I'd expect your employer to have laid you of earlier than they did. For instance, when the potential savings were 20% instead of 35-40%. Though it's entirely possible they're just incompetent.
I don't care what any lobbyist/shil/journalist tells you. IT is dying in the US. We've run out of 'bottom' to chase. The jobs can't be any lower skilled unless they descend literally to the level of button pushing zombie on par with a janitor. No hiring manager has the least interest in skills or what you accomplished before or what you think you can accomplish for them this time. The hiring manager's sole concern is to manage upward to his or her boss who grudgingly told them after two years they could back fill one slot out of 4 that went vacant and it has to be no higher than 75% of 'market rate'. So the hiring manager gets a contract drone who's out the door in 9-12 months. Sure quality suffers, but that's only relevant where quality mattered in the first place. Which is almost nowhere. Fixing that will be some other drone's assignment and they won't be able to get it done either. But again, who gives a shit?
We're defining "overpaid" differently. If an employer lets Joe go, who was earning N, and hires Bob for M, who is just as productive as Joe, then Joe was overpaid if M N. The employer was paying Joe more than necessary to acquire his labor output.
The next rising tide will come with the next economic system, at least in the West. Capitalism was the system of Industrial Age, and is defunct now that everything's getting automated (except in countries that a still industrializing), since ordinary folks no longer have ways to tap into it for reasonable income.
I wonder what the Information Age economic system will be called, and what equivalent to Communism will its inevitable abuses spawn?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"?
That's the wrong question.
The real question is "How many jobs need you to understand what the metal does when you write code in order for you to be any good". The answer is "almost all of them".
Sure, there are rapid application development (RAD) environments that allow you to create a TCP server in three lines of code with a scale out of 5,000..... assuming you don't actually want to do anything with each connecting client. If you do, the scale out suddenly drops to 5 unless you know what you're doing.
And here's the sore point - most programmers don't. They don't differentiate between capabilities given by their environment which are expensive and those that are cheap. They were never trained to think that the commands they operate have a cost, and that this cost needs to be weighed and considered.
So, yeah, CS studies are not the place to learn how to use RADs. Pick them up on your own later. You should learn about bare metal programming, about how a garbage collector is actually implemented and what are its costs, about the limits and capabilities of your compiler's optimizer. This way, if you end up using RADs, at least you will not be a shitty RAD programmer.
Shachar
Companies are outsourcing to India for dimes on the dollar.
That's what my company is doing. They have basically told us we won't be doing any in house development. My COO flat out told me they were going to using people from India because they can pay them a dime on the dollar. The whole line of people who are in any kind of development track all will have to take a "skills assessment" to see where their skills might best fit them elsewhere in the organization. All DBA and server administration work is being transferred as well. Guess what NO IT job is safe these days.... IT -IS- a dying field in the U.S. unless you want to work for dimes on the dollar... Maybe those striking fast food workers will find themselves outsourced by Indians as well.
They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
and they should also get off your lawn.
PS I'm older than you.
If this is accurate, then it sounds like your former employer was massively overpaying you and was smart to let you go. They can hire a new you for 35-40% less.
I'm not abrasion so quell that thought buddy. You are a fscking moron for the comment you made to the other person. Many of us have been laid-off as a cost-reduction strategy by short-sighted management. My salary has been on a steady decline for the past decade as a consequence of these "thought leaders" and "best and brightest." With over 2 decades professional experience and currently unemployed I feel as though I made a terrible mistake pursuing a career in many roles within IT. Maybe the universe was giving my a sign to avoid this fate before I really began. Unfortunately I ignore the universe and am paying dearly now.
Really they do javascript now? About 10 or so years ago when I finished my BSCS it was really still mostly kinda Pascal with a move towards C or possibly Java.
Either way the undergrad OS course we ended up implementing(over the course of homework assignments) a virtual CPU with a basic OS running on the virtual CPU executing various programs/tasks, which I thought was pretty good except that I was using a buggy Pascal compiler which made it all kinds of "fun". (As in I knew that the algorithms/code that I wrote should work, but for some reason it was giving spurious results which I ended up verifying(tediously) by walking through it by hand just to verify that.)
OTOH I already had by BSEE by then, and had actual "close to the metal" experience obviously, but still for CS I thought it was decent... TBH I hope never to see assembly again in my life, even though I know that I will(and do), but one can always hope. i.e. there's always going to be places where asm stubs are needed, and specific cases where hand optimization is still better than compiler, and of course checking those buggy compiler code generation. (But by God it's tedious work...)
Also had hairy compiler design course which was a "beta" for the new grad compiler design course by a new prof, which I found out when I was in MSCE and tried to sign up for the grad compiler design course only to be told to get lost since it was going to be about the same that I had done as undergrad...
I was talking to a young, bright FBI agent last month and when I said that I was a software developer she said quite appropriately "aren't we all?"
I'm afraid that IT is becoming very much self serve and the few remaining Development/IT jobs are going to be very specialized and hardcore positions.
If you have a clown suit, you can go work for IRS IT.
What was moronic about it? The poster claimed he will only be able to command 35-40% of his previous salary when he finds a new job. Presumably his productivity will stay roughly constant, assuming he stays in the same industry. So the "market value" of all that he brings to the table is actually 35-40% of what his previous employer was paying him. Ergo his previous employer was overpaying him. If I can buy an identical car from two dealers, A and B, and they provide equivalent customer service, have identical policies, are equally convenient, etc., but A charges N and B charges N + $1000, then buying from B is "overpaying". Likewise if I can hire either A or B to perform a given task and A and B are such that they'll perform it equally well, but B costs 35-40% more than A, then hiring B is "overpaying" to have that task completed.
It may well be that your layoff was shortsighted. But how do you know? Is it possible the layoff was, in fact, the right move to make with respect to the business's short-term and long-term success?
If your salary has steadily declined then it's because your skill set has become comparatively less valuable over time. That's likely the result of a whole host of factors, and isn't necessarily caused by the employers in your industry acting contrary to their own self-interest (i.e. being short-sighted).
It is entirely possible you have, in fact, made a terrible mistake. And I don't say that to be mean. It absolutely sucks. But it is what it is. If I were in your shoes, the main question I'd be asking myself (and I'm sure you are) is: what can I do about it? Unless it's reasonable to expect that the trend will reverse, and it probably isn't, then it may be time to consider switching career tracks. Or, alternately, relocating to someplace your skill set is in higher demand. Obviously both of those are more easily said than done, but they're not impossible.
We're hiring, but can't find a single decent development manager. It's been 6 months. Why is it hard to find someone that doesn't list a million technologies and languages on a resume, but can't answer core fundamental technology questions. It's been 9 months to find a Unix System Administrator that's more than a command monkey.
Do NOT come to Indianapolis for IT!
Pay rates are low even adjusted for the cost of living (which is dirt cheap for a northern city) and IT workers get ZERO respect unless you are working for a profit center (you are doing IT staffing, contracting or are a programmer writing product to be sold).
Between H1Bs and large contracting pushing down rates and squeezing out locals at the big operations (Lilly, Sallie Mae, Allison, Caterpillar, etc.) about the only good place for IT long term is working for state or the federal government (which is even lower pay but you might actually get a career out of it)... although many of those jobs are being handed over to contractors, too.
About the only place I have heard pays well for IT is Angie's List and it's only for programmers... that company is a ticking time bomb, though. How they stay in business while loosing money every year they have existed is a miracle of a pyramid scheme.
I am the last of my friends that came out of college in the early nineties still in IT. The rest have moved on to various other careers (several became attorneys, two are doctors, and one crazy bastard is a deep water welder... he makes more than all of us).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I'm surprised to see so many comments like this...
Javascript is the language of choice for large swaths of the programming community for one good reason. its not because its fast. its not because it is easy. it's also not because people really really like the syntax. the reason is that it is the only programming language that RUNS NATIVELY IN EVERY BROWSER.
A processor that would run Javascript natively would be an incredible boon to any computer intended to display web content (most of them). That processor would be highly sought after, and would make almost everything faster.
Languages like C, Java, Scala... (whatever insert close-to-the-metal language here) are objectively faster, better at memory management, more neckbeardy to know... whatever. They are fantastic for what they get used for. THEY DON'T NATIVELY WORK ON THE WEB.
If another language can successfully take over for the anointed position that Javascript fell into, then we can toss out Javascript. Until then, you should give Javascript some respect.
Senator blasts Microsoft for hb1 push and firing 18000 workers
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kedfVAbXNy0
and here is a petition to stop the hb1
http://www.petition2congress.com/7637/abolish-h1b-visa-program/
If that's the case we should all go and learn Scada
SCADA is not a language.
Nice try, Jagdish
No, but it does need a spelling checker.
And Unicode, of course.
Get into security. Sure, they COULD outsource this... but rest assured your management will be paranoid enough not to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reading these comments I see a lot of frustration and anger. Rightfully so, in some cases, but I think everyone needs to understand a few things.
1. World is changing. Right now, there are millions of technically-literate, hard-working Polish and Chinese (as examples) ready to jump at the next opportunity. This wasn't the case 100 years ago because of wars, lack of global media, and education (among other reasons). Today, they know they can learn Java or C# and get a decent-paying job.
2. Who can blame them? The tribal part of me wants to say, "Keep the immigrants out!" because, by definition, more competition will lower my own wages. However, the global citizen in me says that, yes, I might make $10K less a year in five years, but at least some hard-working people will get a better life. Totally worth it, IMHO.
Please note that because the United States does not easy visas for high-skilled workers, the companies will outsource to India instead of hiring them out-right and bringing them and their families over to the United States. That means no income tax, Social Security tax, even though these folks are being hired by American firms indirectly.
3. If my post seems contradictory, it's meant to. Economics and immigration policy are very difficult to get right. There's a million ways to get it wrong, and only a few ways to do it right. Every country wants to get all the benefits and none of the costs, but it doesn't work that way.
150 years ago, raw sewage was flowing down the streets in NYC and London. Back then, if I told you I used Italian olive oil, drank French wine, and ate imported cheeses, you'd think I was a king! Nowadays I can get Greek feta for $5 a pound and get a bottle of French wine for $20.
Why? Globalization, that's why. My only message is that we have to start thinking and acting like members of the human race. Ask hard questions, don't take shit for granted, and look at the beautiful world around you. What do you want the world to look like another 150 years?
That's an age-old fallacy? A CS degree isn't supposed to train you in specific languages. It is about understanding concepts that you can apply to any language. It is up to the individual to apply those concepts in learning new languages.
The real problem is when an employer doesn't see language X on your resume. It doesn't matter that I have 20 years of experience and have picked up multiple languages as needed for a job, it puts you behind the 8 ball. It is sometimes tough to convince people you can still do the job.
IT Hiring is fucked permanently because we are susceptible to the fraudulent belief that Indian programmers are as good as their American counterparts. This ignorance pervades corporate IT hiring, whereupon outsourcing looks pretty cheap when compared to hiring a competent American. Alas, they fail to consider the risks because IT is an EXPENSE, not an INVESTMENT. #idiots
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It's easier here and now to "tap into Capitalism for reasonable income" than most times and places. Starting a business is still pretty straightforward - sure, health care requirement are more complex, and some industries just have to many regulations for small players, but that's not the norm. And here you don't have to worry about bribing all the right people, paying the police for protection and then paying the gang for protection, and so on.
Or if, like me, you like passive investing, it's trivially easy to invest online with only small amounts to start with now.
"Capitalism" just means that the means of production are acquired by buying then, vs military conquest or cronyism. I expect that whatever's next will still be a kind of capitalism, just more "crowdsourced". If 3D printers ever mature, owning your chunk of the means of production will be easier still. Huge corporations make sense where economies of scale come into play, but that's mostly logistics these days not manufacturing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
what a crock of shit. i've never met a group of more deceitful thugs in my life as the gentlemen I've met from the sub-continent.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Spoken like a true Stockholm syndrome victim.
Javascript is an awful language, but it's all you have when it comes to web programming. Perhaps instead of trying to ram it further down everyone's throats and proclaim our love for the language, we should come up with a better alternative.
Want more IT jobs, make it hard work again:
- Bring back Windows NT.
- Make HDD's fail more
- Make network unstable
- Ensure PC hardware constantly fails
Its common sense, the issue is:
- Hardware has got more stable and reliable.
- Software has got alot easier to manage, mostly automated and alot more stable 24/7.
- Anyone can do it.
Scala.js...
Death to JavaScript ;)
>And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"?
Anybody who doesn't know how the underlying hardware works is pretty much on the same level as the crappy H1-Bs that /. so loves to deride.
I receive several job solicitations via phone, email or other means on a weekly basis. A lot of them are offering more than I am making at my current job. I usually ignore them. I ignore them either because I am not qualified for the particular job or because I a happy where I am at. The lack of hiring is either because people are happy where they are or are under qualified.
For those of you that say people are telling you that you are over qualified, they are BSing you. You are under qualified for the position they are hiring for. Any company will make an offer to a truly over qualified candidate. It is a bargain for them. You tell them you are over qualified when you deny the offer.
I've had to go through the process of hiring people several times. It is not in my best interest to not make an offer to an over qualified person. I have seen plenty of under qualified candidates. They either believe that if they have experience somewhere in the field that they should be qualified for any job in that field or they have come directly from college or some certification and were brainwashed into thinking they would make 100K+ with no experience. By no experience that also includes no passion. Just because you can pass a test does not mean you know how something works. There are a lot of people out there that pass the test but do not continue learning on their own. These are the worst and probably the ones that tend to think they are denied a job because they are over qualified. You are not over qualified! You have no experience, no self knowledge and can not progress with the company.
So to sum it up. The lack of hiring is because of the lack of truly qualified candidates.
Don't act like members of the human race! humans suck. Sound ridiculous? It kind of is. But it's not much worse than telling men to not be aggressive and violent against their natural inclinations. That doesn't work so well either, but we try... we don't evolve because we won't allow evolutionary pressures, artificial or natural.
Humans evolved to be petty tribal creatures living in small tribes. We are not evolving anymore and situations like our current global economics don't create evolutionary pressures -- at least not positive ones... If you are a smart ape you can do the majority of jobs in the world; that is, until robotics takes over (which is capable already and the transition is only beginning.) We are not competing for the best as much as we are competing for the most desperate. Manufacturing robotics won in the USA decades ago that is why worse-than-slave labor in the 3rd world was used-- because those desperate humans can still beat the robotics... until today. Now we shall see the transition as the desperate 3rd world people lose the last hold out position humans had against the robots (in manufacturing.) This isn't a new situation; technology transitions created similar situations in history.
Human nature is tribal. Tons of science to back that up. People are all Little Eichmanns as proven in countless studies of various situations, where tribalism is at the root of some of them. It doesn't take hardly anything to abstract consequences for one's actions which makes it so easy to do evil. If people would just seriously study and learn about the nature of EVIL they would avoid systems which promote it. You'd think religious types would actually learn about the "devil" and thereby learn something useful... even if it's fictional, it's metaphorical for emergent behaviors in humans.
Belief aside, we don't study to avoid situations that promote bad things - in large part because we falsely believe (without evidence) that people are responsible for such things; instead of realizing the environment is a much much larger factor. Naturally, in a society that prides itself on individualization they are going to be the most blind to the truth. (I live in the USA, which is so ironically conformist.)
You don't think about or really care about sweat shops making your clothes - it's too far removed and those people suffering are not in your tribe... if they were, you couldn't ignore the problem so easily (it's not exactly tribal based; however, if you felt more connected to those people you'd not ignore it as easily.) You steal tiny things from your employer, that is normal-- not even thought of as stealing. pencil etc. It's not a big deal; plenty of studies on that. Well, when you save $5 on some clothing your stealing from others in a similar "harmless" situation. Besides, just look at how sales motivate people - now undo the sale and increase prices -- that is what fair trade does; relying on the consumer's to police everything with their $$$ is beyond crazy and all the science backs that up. Shopping is all about the experience; you pay for that gratification and a few minutes when you unpack it at home, then it's all gone and you have to shop more to get that experience again... which has to have roots in hunting/gathering behavior. Most ads are about the experience; making you shop and only a minority are getting you to switch brands (that is right out of modern advertizing 101.) Anyhow-- the point is, all that increasingly advanced psychology is to get you lost in the shopping experience which goes a long way in masking any minor considerations like fair trade. A 10% off coupon works really well-- now if you have Chinese vs US products and you don't need a coupon... Hopefully my rambling is making some connection; there are many aspects to outcome.
Globalization is NOT a good thing and we have to stop portraying it as such. Now don't go to extremes and think we should have none of it; but like most things it has a range of options. We are too extreme on 1 side
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
all the talented, flexible, non-sociopathic programmers are currently employed.
So perhaps it's time for federal and state labor departments to figure out how to make better use of talented, flexible, underemployed programmers who happen to have mild psychopathy or sociopathy caused by Asperger-type autism spectrum disorder.
So cute, you think CS majors get taught programming languages. When my cousin was taking CS from one of the top 10 Unis in the world, he got to choose what language he wanted to use for any project work. Except when they were developing CPUs and programming ASM for these, they had to use whatever language the CPU software used.
I'm a java coder, 15+ years. I searched for a job a bit under a year ago and I can relate the following:
The problems:
-recruiters, HR people and management are often completely tech-illiterate, and it's very rare that someone with a clue interjects any sort of useful advice that would help in selecting a useful candidate for a position (for example, there aren't any people with 15 years of android development or GWT experience yet). A lot of this is driven by the fact that recruiters and HR people tend to come almost entirely out of the "pretty girl with non-STEM degree" part of the labor pool and the engineers and the HR types tend to avoid one another and have contempt for one another's roles.
-there is a modest supply of good coders, and a large supply of fair to horrible ones. Many of the horrible ones are amazingly productive, in the sense that they can quickly paint themselves into a corner and then knock down a wall so that painting project can continue uninterrupted. Either no one realizes until much later that those walls were important or everyone is too busy meeting the painting deadline in the first place to object.
-the main needs of the companies (that aren't startups beginning to create new systems) are to bring in new coders who can learn the pile of spaghetti that the old programmers made. The main demand isn't so much that the new guys know the right way to do things, but to learn the system and fix problems without
a) upsetting the original engineers by mentioning the bubble sort you found in their code or pointing out the recursive code block that opens 100k database connections. Remember, management thinks the original engineers are miracle workers and has no conception that they have fake CS degrees from Bangalore and are making the system by cutting and pasting code from a java tutorial. All they know is that these guys deliver stuff quickly and they only cost 40k a year. You cost more than twice that and are complaining about stuff that management doesn't even understand. And all the guys they trust are saying the system is fine.
b) breaking preexisting code by fixing things that depends on the wrong behavior, the lack of encapsulation, creature uses of inheritance, non-threadsafe code, etc. Even a well designed system can be incredibly complex and the concept of engineers designing in overcomplexity for the purposes of job security are far from dead. The gwt/spring/hibernate system I'm currently working on has over half a dozen layers of abstraction between the GUI and the database.
c) trying to raise awareness or (god forbid) fix anything about the company culture that is producing bugs, horrible design and poor performance. About 99 percent of the time, the people you're telling about the problem caused it in the first place. They will quietly ensure that no one important hears what you said and then quietly plot to get rid of you for being a troublemaker.
Any engineer who wants to work in today's economy has to be aware of the huge amount of maintenance work and cultural inertia that will be in play at nearly every workplace. And even if you find an engineering department that doesn't have its head up its ass, good luck getting past HR to find them.
It's essentially random luck to find a job that doesn't suck these days.
All the comments here seem to be related to programming but IT is more than just that. We manage over 1,000 servers and can't seem to find a Unix admin in the area that is interested enough in Unix to dig into how things actually work. I mean, if your response to "how do you make a network interface persistent" is "first I click on the menu", we'll likely knock a point or two off. We've had prospective Unix admins admit they're afraid of soft links. We do a lot of scripting so telling me you don't know how to script is likely to knock a point or two off. And it'd be nice if you knew how to disable programs from starting up by understanding how the files are set up in /etc/rc* vs using chkconfig. Sure it works, but we're more than a Linux shop.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Programming is more than just writing code, it's about identifying the problem. Even if we get to the point of the actual design and coding to be automated, most people are too stupid to explain their problems, and "programmers" will still have a job identifying problems and describing them.
I think you underestimate the market for engine control, exhaust aftertreatment and safety systems.
I think you overestimate how much of that requires "close to the metal" programming. A few embedded engineers can write all the gnarly C code, with volatile pointers, etc., to interface with the hardware, and then wrap it up in a library that can be used by other programmers writing the high level code. Most programmers will never need to read a thermistor or use PWM to set a voltage.
The solution is aggressive immigration control, especially deportation of most immigrants at this point. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter.
So you want to deport legal immigrants :)
Ha ha... That's just stupid, by the very definition of legal..
government in Tennessee cracked down on immigration violations, suddenly businesses that relied on low and unskilled workers
Few IT jobs are occupied by low and unskilled workers... Why don't you take unenlightened anti-immigration rant somewhere else...
the real question is how many H1Bs are actually doing exceptional work versus simply being cheaper?
I'm an H1-B, relocated from Denmark, working in SF, and I can assure you that I'm not cheaper :)
.....we could free up several hundred thousand jobs that should be going to Americans.
If my H1-B was revoked I would move to an EU office for the same company, doing the same job, at approximately same salary.
My point is this, Silicon Valley can't be the tech hub, if people can't immigrate, in fact the hassle of getting a visas today is enough I wouldn't care if the company didn't hire paper pushers to do the work.
With respect to job availability, I see emails from recruiters trying to get me to go to a job interview every week...
It's not my impression that there is an abundance of skilled IT workers.
It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.
Spot on, I rarely meet people who deliver above and beyond...
:)
But I don't know if one skilled motivated superstar developer is worth 5 slow moving developers...
But I have experienced teams of two skilled devs, making things move faster than a team of 10 average developers
(Of course partially because of communication overhead, and lack of one single person having real responsibility).
But I am a middle aged white female software engineer. No one wants an old white lady on their team of 26 year old guys. This career is like modelling - at some point your brain is considered too old.
Where I work, when my code doesn't work, it means hundreds of other people not being able to work, and slowly running code means people sitting around not working while waiting, and means more people needed to work the call center. Not to mention more servers, which means more admins and power, and we have limited room in our datacenter.
Requirements: stable, fast, scalable, secure, quickly fixed, and new features added quickly, which also need to be stable and fast.
When these requirements are not met, the business loses money. I don't understand how other businesses can get away with low quality code, unless clients don't care either. Our clients are very picky and will quickly flood our call center the instant anything is slow or not working correctly. Maintaining a sub 10sec call-in queue time makes for an expensive call center. We don't make our customers wait.
If you learn compiler theory in C or a functional language you are not learning compiler theory, but how to write a compiler. Those are not the same skills.
What you use to learn compiler theory is BNF's and some way to abstract semantics. To test your skill at this you need tools which can take those as inputs and produce tokens, symbol tables etc. as you expect, and those tools can be written in anything - and at the stage when you are learning this and have to roll your own to learn *should not* be written in something like C.
With a 1 year learning curve before my employer breaks even on a new programming hire, they don't like replacing people. And that's just for the basic work. When it comes to new project work that is required to keep up with customer demand, that takes another few years. Programmers are an investment, unless all they know is writing code, but they're no more a "programmer" than someone playing Candy Crush is a "gamer", more like a "code monkey". If you're a one trick pony that can only write code, be prepared to be replaced.
The problem is, there's no separation of concerns.
Fred Brook's Chief Programmer Team concept was based on the idea of a set of specialists each with separate concerns. In modern projects that would mean something like 1 (or more) person(s) for the web page design, possibly another (maybe on loan) for the artwork, maybe even 1 JavaScript expert and at least one person on the backend for the business logic and database interactions. Plus someone to co-ordinate it, architect it and - the horror! someone to document it.
However, getting people who are really good together and getting them to work together is espensive. In the current climate, it's considered smarter to demand that one single person fulfill (and be expert in) all of the above functions. This actually can take longer, since there's no opportunity for parallelization, but since it's less people, it's cheaper. Bonus points for getting it done offshore.
Quality? Security? Pffft! We'll do that in 2.0. Or maybe 4.0. Or not.
I work for one of the top 5 suppliers for that stuff. And it's C code all the way here for anything that runs on these devices.
It doesn't interest me though :/ if anything I've found the majority of security people I've dealt with, technically incompetent and cause nothing but trouble. 9 times out of 10 they are over paranoid to the levels of extreme AND don't know shit about IT.
Furthermore, with the whole "send it to the cloud" philosophy, yep, even security people are being reduced. Who needs a team of 5 to 10 security people for desktops, servers, networks etc when a large portion of the infrastructure is now located off site and presumably X cloud provider will handle security?
Or engineer a powerful virus to take out some curry nigger populations like the Illuminati wants to do
If anything, "the cloud" was a godsend for IT. Nothing convinces a manager more quickly that outsourcing is a BAD idea than a few months of "the cloud" experience.
Even in the few cases where there is no data leak.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
[Shameless Plug] io2n.com
Capitalism didn't exist in most places and times, so naturally. But it's getting harder to get or keep a job, and if you have one, it pays less than it used to. Which is perfectly logical from Capitalism's point of view - why pay people when you can invest in machines? - but the lack of disposable cash is slowly strangling the entire system.
Starting a business is still pretty straightforward - sure, health care requirement are more complex, and some industries just have to many regulations for small players, but that's not the norm.
Starting a business is a matter of creating a legal entity. Now what are you going to produce, who are you going to sell to, and how are you going to afford the capital to get started? You can't compete with multi-billion dollar companies on price, quality doesn't matter to people already starved for disposable income, and while you could take a loan most new businesses fail - and the banks know it too.
Investing requires disposable income to begin with, and actually makes the systemic problem worse since it further lowers demand for end products.
Capitalism, as it's commonly used, also implies that production is demand-driven: people buy the products they want, this changes their relative profitability, which in turn shifts production resources to increase or decrease supply as needed. The problem is, as more and more people are made unemployed or fall into poverty despite having jobs, they no longer have the means (money) to communicate their desires, and the system breaks down. And to make matters worse, as demand slumps unemployment increases and wages fall, which drives demand down further, leading to a vicious circle - a tailspin, really.
The most painless way to fix the situation would be to institute an unconditional minimum income - citizen wage - to ensure demand stays up and even the unemployed can communicate their desires. However, as the prevailing ideal is still the "hero of labour" of the Industrial Era, this is unlikely to be politically feasible. Thus I suspect we'll be seeing a full-blown economic apocalypse - an utter collapse of Capitalism - before things start looking up.
Not really. It simply means "end products" will be electricity and ink-equivalent.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It seems that almost every job posting wants JavaScript, and I only rarely see one that mentions C.
We may know that, but try convincing the hiring manager of that. If the job is programming in language X, and you don't have Y years of experience in language X, your resume goes straight into the circular file.
I've yet to see a project handed off to Indian coders that wasn't a total disaster. It's common knowledge that Indians do nothing but lie, cheat, and steal, but by the time management figures this out it's too late, and they end up spending more money and time fixing/redoing everything here than if they just hired Americans to do it in the first place.
One application used a 2,000 character url string that passed the administrator user name and password in plain text.
So find out which US companies are using the Bangalore shops for their software and then start finding and selling zero day exploits in that software to the highest bidders.
...and then some. Sincerely, a classic asp developer who hung in there.
Capitalism didn't exist in most places and times, so naturally. But it's getting harder to get or keep a job, and if you have one, it pays less than it used to
Not every business cycle is a boom. We're just coming out of a ~15 year downturn, a bit worse than the one in the 70s, not as bad as the one in the 30s. It doesn't say much about capitalism, other than that it has business cycles.
The problem is, as more and more people are made unemployed or fall into poverty despite having jobs ... gimmie a wage for not working ... full-blown economic apocalypse - an utter collapse of Capitalism
You know, it's been hotter every month for the past 6 months - OMG it's the global warming, it will be 300 degrees in a decade! Either that or the seasons are cyclic, sort of like the economy. One of those.
The only serious economic issue we face is public debt. Life always seems better when you're living beyond you're means. Your standard of living is certainly higher while your running up credit card debt like crazy. The Boomers did that with the nation as a whole - running up the national debt like crazy (which did improve everyone's standard of living for a while, thus the misleading impression that they had it better). We'll be generations paying that binge off, with an appropriately lower standard of living to show for it. The US national debt is $150k per taxpayer now. That's going to be a drag on everything, and might well blow up. But that's the flaw in democracy, not capitalism.
"end products" will be electricity and ink-equivalent.
End products are what we use in daily life - doesn't matter where they're made. I expect some small measure of in-home "manufacturing", growing gradually over time. The feedstock for that will still be raw materials, however, despite being shipped to the end user.
The current revolution is in automating everything automatable, sending manufacturing jobs (and mindless clerical paper-shuffling jobs, and mindless service jobs) the way of farming jobs. Just like every previous technological step forward, it will be a good thing in the long run.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Perhaps you can help me out then. I fell in love with C (and to a somewhat lesser extent assembly) when I was learning to code. Fast foward to today and I'm stuck coding Java, where things are getting more and more abstract. I'm desperately looking to switch jobs before I end up pigeonholed into high-level coding for the rest of my life. Embedded development, systems programming, drivers, anything closer to the metal. So far I've only found one such position, but it was entry level (with an entry level salary), and I've been coding for 5-8 years. I'm willing to drop down to a junior position since I don't have any "real" experience doing low level work (although my degree is in Electrical and Computer Engineering and I spent a good portion of my college education tinkering with microcontrollers), but haven't had any luck even finding a single position like that. I'm in NJ near NYC, where most coding jobs tend towards the finance sector. Are you aware of any employers that have a presence in the NYC area (or are open to the possibility of remote work) that do low level work? The only things I can think of would be Qualcomm or any of the other phone-chip makers (but I know very little about phones)...
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Not only that, but understanding what's going on close to (or at) the metal gives you a much better intuitive understanding of what a high level language is doing. You can't really understand what an abstraction layer is doing unless you understand what it's abstracting away.
I've got a MS in Electrical Engineering, and my course track was computer architecture. So actually designing instruction set architectures, building the logical architecture to implement them and then laying out the transistors in Cadence. Once I understood that, programming really clicked for me and "made sense."
Of course today the only code I wrote (for a living) is SQL, which is about as abstract as you can get.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Could you please point out the benefit for US American programmers of a job they don't get hired for being in the US compared to a job they can't get hired for abroad?
A US job that they don't get hired for still:
1) reduces competition for other jobs
2) increases wage competition for skilled workers
Both of which benefit the person who did not get the local job.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
It's not necessarily a matter of convincing the manager. More often, it's a matter of getting through HR so your resume reaches the manager. The manager may be willing to pick somebody based on general aptitude and breadth of experience, but HR typically knows nothing about software development and only knows to filter on the obvious criteria.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
GE is in full swing hiring mode in IT :
Locations at our IT Tech Centers: Detroit metro, New Orleans, East Bay SF (San Ramon)
Need contemporary skill set - cloud services, contemporary infrastructure, and agile SW development. FastWorks mindset.
No shortage of great opportunities. IT hiring is very very good right now. Really depends on geo location.
The consumers should be dictating it.
If consumers love it when their software takes longer to bring to the market and developers spend more time doing the same plumbing they could have gotten automagically, then, sure, disregard the MBA's.
And if the consumers decide having things work "theoretically" (bc, you see, it is the theory that matters) is what matters to them and that's where they put their money, then sure, let the academics run the world.
But that isn't planet earth. Programmers get paid more money to DO than to TEACH, so, aside from the edge cases where some great programmers want to take a pay cut to teach (I've seen it happen in rare instances) then SW development in business should be calling the shots.
I do IT support work in Silicon Valley. While unemployed earlier this year, I interviewed for 60+ jobs that paid anywhere from $15 to $25 per hour. One recruiter told me that hiring companies will need to offer $30 per hour to keep workers from flocking to San Francisco. I normally make $25 per hour but accepted a job that pays $24 per hour with paid holidays and vacations.
That doesn't make any sense. How does it reduce competition if I bring in more people competing?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
the simple matter of students being able to obtain a compiler and get to grips with it at home, if nothing else.
I've taught computer programming courses at the college level.
Many of these students, who were in an IT program, did not have a computer at home.
That was at a private college; many of these students were drop-outs from other colleges.
Since then, I got to take a class at an esteemed state university which is actually a challenge to be accepted in.
I befriended a classmate who was clearly one of the leading students in our class on x86 (and x64) Asm.
I found out that he also didn't really have a computer of his at home. The person he lived with did, but he didn't.
He would get work done by going to the computer lab at the university.
Don't think that just because a person hasn't installed a compiler at home, then they aren't enthusiastic or knowledgeable about the industry. I had no clue about this guy, until I befriended him a bit and went to his house once. Some people are just from less fortunate (literally, less of a fortune) economic backgrounds.