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Oracle Finally Decides To Stop Prolonging the Inevitable, Begins Hardware Layoffs (theregister.co.uk)
Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: Oracle is starting layoffs that will hit its hardware division, The Register has learned. Current and some soon-to-be former staffers have whispered that the database giant is shipping out packages containing the paperwork for ending their employment. The workers have received alerts from FedEx that the packages, which will need to be signed for, are en route for a September 1 delivery. "One of my co-workers emailed that he received a notification from FedEx of a label created by Oracle America, Inc," writes one anonymous employee. "I just checked and a label has been created for my home address. This is in the US. Looks like Friday is it for Sparc MicroElectronics." The layoffs are hardly a surprise, given the performance of Oracle's hardware unit as of late. In the last financial year, Oracle reported hardware revenues of $4.15bn. By comparison, in 2016 the unit logged hardware revenues of $4.67bn. In 2015 it was $5.2bn, and 2014 saw $5.37bn.
Well, they should have seen it coming!
Of course, this is terrible news for the people losing their jobs. Nobody wants to have their livelihood taken away. But in other ways this is a good thing.
It shows the tremendous work these people did in creating extremely powerful hardware. But we're also seeing improvements on the software side, too. Virtual machines and cloud computing have vastly increased the utilization of the hardware we do have. It's no longer a case of a company having 20,000 servers, and collectively they're idle 85% of the time. Now the same company has perhaps 1,500 powerful physical servers running 20,000 VMs, and the physical hardware is idle only 5% of the time.
The switch to VMs has also put more focus on writing efficient code, and using efficient programming languages like C++, Go and especially Rust. Native, highly optimized binaries are back in favor, after we've seen the alleged benefits of just-in-time compilation never pan out. Fewer computing resources, and much less energy, is needed to run this highly-optimized software written in efficient and effective modern programming languages.
This vast increase in efficiency, both at the hardware and software level, will unfortunately mean that some people will become unemployed. But the overall effect is a net win for society, the economy, and the environment. We're now doing a lot more with a lot less.
Oracle Linux: you squandered solaris, one of the great operating systems of our time, and did everything you could to make it a complete pain in the ass to own. Now you expect to slap an Oracle sticker on RedHat Linux/CentOS and ancicipate people will care? You do know that all the well-defined chicanery in the oracle unbreakable linux distro is easily recreated in any distribution a customer could desire, right? and that these distributions dwarf your kernel contributions and community? if customers choose to do 'oracle' in say, Arch or centos, they not only get to skip the 5 hours on the phone with your tech support, but they get to skip the outrageous quarterly fees for the privilege.
MySQL: Shes dead, jim. All your best and brightest jumped ship a long long time ago to projects like Maria and Percona and now the only people who still use mysql are the ones that havent migrated off redhat 5 yet. In short, the customers that are either transitioning to windows or hired someone to move them to something else.
zfs: now this ones a bit of a controversy but stick with me here. What sun did to ZFS was great, but its licensing was crippled intentionally. You've had every opportunity as its owner to do something about that and you havent. There isnt much indication you will, so why not GPL or BSD it fully and concentrate on what you do best: shaking down customers for license fees. In the absence of competent licensing ZFS has been attacked on all sides from Redhats LFS and resurgent life support commits to the XFS tree, as well as BTRFS, which already handles disk pools, dedup, and cow and in a few months will handle multi device raid. So if you take any interest in ZFS stop hobbling the community.
oracle cloud: no one has heard of this, its hardly advertised, and is dwarfed by ec3 and other more competitive providers. just...stop.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The EE degree isn't the problem. It's taking out student loans to get a MBA and not being able to find a job to pay off the student loans. I have several friends who graduated with EE in the 1990's, decided to get their MBA after getting laid off during the Great Recession, and now do IT support because they can't find a higher paying job. It's a bit of shock to go from $200K per year to $50K per year.
I had a meeting with my manager and someone from HR the last time I was laid off.
You're telling me they announce lay offs by mail? What happens if I ignore the delivery?
Seems like a bad way to deliver bad news...
What is better? To have one person making $200K per year paying $48K in taxes to support four persons barely surviving on $12K per year or four persons making $50K per year?
#DeleteFacebook
Something smells about that number.
So all the analysts put Oracle in the 'others' category, not enough revenue to even break out.
However, Cisco is the last 'big enough' vendor, and they seemed to have turned in under 4 billion in revenue on the server business.
But in any event, companies like IBM, Cisco, and Oracle are too profit obsessed to really live in a hardware business filled with competitors living with sub 10% margins.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The thing that shocks me most about this article and comments is how few people understand the difference between revenue and profit.
Revenue is not profit. It is not money that comes in that you get to keep. Profit is what you get to keep. Profit is revenue minus all of your costs.
One important metric withing a large company is called "return on capital." Capital is the amount of money you have invested in property, building, tools, and other things that keep the revenue coming in. The return on capital is the amount of profit made for every dollar of capital invested.
If the return on capital is too low, it makes sense to sell the capital and invest it in something that has a higher profit. That is what Oracle is doing. Their return on capital on all of the resources committed to hardware development is too low, and they would generate more shareholder value investing that capital in some other revenue-generating activity.
People are not part of capital. They are part of cash flow. But, it makes no sense to sell the capital that the people use to generate cash flow first, so the people are the first to go. This frees up cash flow to make investors happy while the capital is revested elsewhere.
This is all basic stuff that I _thought_ they taught in 9th grade economics class. Guess I was wrong ..
I have heard of other companies doing this funny accounting and failing before. Typically they do not account for sales they wouldn't do otherwise had the hardware not been there. So they should, IMHO, account for the SPARC hardware sales and services, Solaris OS sales and services, and Solaris OS dependent applications (e.g. Solaris Oracle DB) sales and services which they are in the position of being able to account.
Otherwise they might be cutting something they think doesn't make them a profit, and end up throwing the baby with the bathwater. Fact is hardware today doesn't cost as much as it used to. With 3rd party foundry services, you only need a CPU design team, which can be as few as like a dozen people or even less. Most of the cost will actually be in taping out first silicon, i.e. creating the masks to fab the first prototype, actually.
retiring on a total savings of *maybe* half a million at best at age 30 or so (after taxes and at least some semblance of living expenses)? Yeah that isn't going to pan out...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Had Sun open sourced Solaris sooner perhaps Linux would never have gotten a foothold in the market. Then again they would have also lost their competitive advantage. So being this late in the game, I think they would have been better off keeping the kernel on internal development, and switching all the tools to as many open source components as they could, much like Apple did.
As long as they designed the hardware to have higher RAS, or density, than what can be achieved with off the shelf x86 solutions, I think they would have had a market. Unfortunately Oracle simply does not understand the hardware market, and late stage Sun didn't understand the market, period.
Oracle should just focus on their services division, like the cloud services, and task their hardware division to produce hardware that works well in that environment, and then sell that product to the wider market to people who prefer to have everything in house.
If they were making 200K a year, modestly saving should have had them retired in 5 years.
That only works if you retire to Mexico, build a mansion (by local standards), marry an underage sweet thing and bequeath all your possessions to the village.
The EE degree isn't the problem. It's taking out student loans to get a MBA and not being able to find a job to pay off the student loans. I have several friends who graduated with EE in the 1990's, decided to get their MBA after getting laid off during the Great Recession, and now do IT support because they can't find a higher paying job. It's a bit of shock to go from $200K per year to $50K per year.
No. It's going to schools in other cities without consideration of costs, which causes ppl to take loans more than necessary, for pursuing fields of study that cannot possibly provide the necessary ROI.
If someone is going to get $80K in students loans, it better be for pursuing post-grad education at, say, a prestigious medical school. It should not be for getting a BA degree in psychology from an unknown but expensive private school (the later happens a lot.)
Most people could do well to pursue the first two years at cheaper, local community colleges and then transfer to (also local) universities. With the right grades people can do this with just pell grants or a scholarship combined with very minimal student loans.
Hell, most people would do well with getting a technical AS/AAS degree or a technical certificate at a community college and call it quits. I've never seen a good HVAC specialist or master plumber/electrician or 2-year degree nurse being out of work or saddled with impossible loans.
What I want to know is who is still buying new SPARC servers in 2017? Almost everyone moved off to either commodity Intel hardware or Amazon/Azure/Google/IBM cloud instances years ago.
Now that Obama is gone and his policies are going in the dust bin of history, we are seeing 3% growth rate in the economy.
We're getting 3% growth because of Obama's policies. Trump policies, if anything ever gets passed by the Republican congress, won't go into effect until next year.
The cult is not the university, it's the belief that you have to pay an outrageous amount of money for it. You do know that in many parts of the world you get higher education for free or for a very, very modest fee, right?
No wonder you're a virgin and have no hope of a female friend, probably ever.
What does my sexuality have to do with the topic being discussed? Or were you just making snide remark because you have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion?
Some got pissed - which I couldn't understand why.
One friend is mad at me for making more money than him in IT support. Never mind that I never took out student loans for my education and I've been working in IT Support for many years longer than him. Having in an EE and MBA doesn't mean squat in IT support when you don't have a track record of getting the work done.
10 people to design a CPU? That hasn't been true for decades, unless you want to design a tiny CPU with uncompetitive performance.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
And a nepotic or incestuously cozy relationship with the Oracle Salesguys.
I actually knew someone in the medical tech field whose company had a few dozen sparc servers left a few years ago. They even had a few later model sun/oracle fire servers as storage arrays.
However their last big licensing/sales renegotiation resulted in them getting Oracle x86_64 storage appliances instead and pulling out all of their sparc hardware, over concerns exactly like this.
Guess this is proof they made the prudent choice.
Honestly though, sparc was killed by oracles mismanagement rather than any performance limitations. If they hadn't kept trying to charge a 'big iron' premium and had priced their silicon slightly more competitively between Intel and IBM they could have retained or increased marketshare. But leaving their roadmaps hanging, charging fresh out the fab prices for multiple year old silicon without revisions, you name it, and it is no wonder Oracle's hardware sales have dwindled. If the customer doesn't trust that you'll be there in 10 years it is a bad bet to throw all in, especially on premium priced hardware requiring proprietary software.
Today I learned that Oracle apparently has (had?) a hardware division. I'm amazed it's lasted this long, honestly. As crappy as their overpriced, proprietary software is, I can't imagine *also* trusting them with hardware. Sucks to be one of the workers, for sure, but you have to expect it when you choose to work for such a monolith. The faster we get to Oracle's demise, the better for everyone.
No one is buying SPARC. Solaris is fading away. OpenOffice is forked and everyone runs the fork. About the only thing of value Oracle has after buying Sun is Java; $7.4 billion for a language they can't really monetize. ZFS I suppose... another thing 90% of its users don't pay for.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Since when do people get fired via FedEx? I mean it's fitting for Oracle because it really seems like the single most expensive way of doing something.
Yet while Obama was around things were bad for 8 years. Real bad.
Thanks to the Republicans who spent eight years dragging their feet. They're still dragging their feet because it's easier to say "no" but saying "yes" requires compromises. Not with the Democrats, but with themselves.
The real argument is that they have been on a consistent decline, and are attempting to increase profitability by decreasing costs. In a downward spiral that's usually the harbinger of an eventual end since a decrease in personnel usually leads to a decrease in sales and profit, which begets a vicious cycle.
If they're lucky, they'll be able to trim some fat and stave off the shutdown, but given the declining revenue ... the writing is on the wall despite the stunning numbers involved (4 BILLION? Oracle can't figure out how to make a profit on 4 BILLION in sales?!?!).
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Of course, essentially supporting an entire processor architecture by yourself is very high operational expense nowadays. And I suspect they are including some sort of revenue that is not strictly hardware, because that number is higher than the analysts say most other vendors make, but do not consider Oracle as having enough server revenue to track).
So assuming you aren't too crazy on volume (and I'm pretty sure they don't have much volume), 4 billion should leave a healthy amount of operational expense to make a respectable enough x86 type product in conjunction with the likes of Intel, AMI, Broadcom, et al, but not so much if you are rolling a lot of your own stuff as Oracle pretty much has to do to support SPARC.
Of course if they had, say 4 billion revenue on 40 million servers sold, well that would be a pretty extreme loss (100 dollars is not going to cover the material cost of a server).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Impartial observer here: you brought sexuality into this by discussing underage lovers.
Well, it was their decision and now they have to live with the consequences.
Impartial observer here: you brought sexuality into this by discussing underage lovers.
You must be new around here. I don't have underage lovers. Everyone on Slashdot knows that I'm a 48-year-old virgin. Why they have a problem with that I have no clue. As for my comment, I've heard stories of engineers retiring at 50, moving to Mexico and marrying underage girls. Since I work with ex-military, the Philippines is a popular retirement spot for marrying underage girls as well. It's all about getting the most bang for your retirement dollars.
Yea, like the compromises with the AHA? Oh wait, there weren't any. Democrats did that all on their own.
You mean the 200+ amendments that were sponsored or co-sponsored by Republicans that were included in the final bill? Since the Democrats had enough votes to pass the AHA, the Republicans voted "no" and ate their cake too.
The new administration signals a more promising environment for business, and it's showing in the stock market.
The eight-year-old bull market is starting to show its age. What's going to happen when the stock market corrects itself and the economy will goes into a long overdue recession in the next two years?
I'm building up a cash reserve in my brokerage account so I can buy stocks all the way down in the Pence recession.
There's cost and price.
To Intel, unit cost of a processor is exceedingly cheap. They however have massive operational expense to cover to get to that point. The price on top of that is still to a large extent the luxury of a vendor able to set their own margins, to some extent. Too high people won't upgrade, and if they get desperate enough go to AMD. On the desktop side, it no longer takes desperation to get people to not pay Intel because AMD is competitive in desktop. In the dual socket arena, Epyc has a lot of caveats to be the universal replacement for all Intel workloads, but it is compelling in some scenarios.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How long do you think it will take Red Hat to jack in ZFS once the license is compatible?
It would probably appear as a technology preview within a week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
Forget the amendments. The entire design was a compromise to win Republican votes. The Democrats wanted to set up a single payer system, and the Republicans nearly ruptured an aneurysm, so they walked it back to a design that the Republicans said they would be willing to vote for, and then they still didn't.
The Republican party are amazingly skilled manipulators. The Democrats compromise, allowing the Republicans to trick them into adding flaws into bills, and then the Republicans turn around and use the flaws that they introduced to help them attack "the Democrats' bills" so that once they gain enough power, they can put in something entirely different without having to compromise. It's utterly disgusting.
To be fair, the Democrats attempt this sort of manipulation, too, but they're nowhere near as good at it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You're so gone you can't comprehend how deviant this sounds.
I don't think you can comprehend how far up your ass you're riding your high horse.
This is not a rhetorical question I'd really like to know what sort of things you've seen where you think this is ok.
You're aware that are some states in the U.S. that allow underage marriage as young as 14 years old?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_marriage_in_the_United_States
From all the stories that I've heard, the families and the village elders gave their permissions for the marriage. The end result is not some deviant American banging an underage bride but the village getting everything he owns when he dies.
Your friend must be extremely creepy or something because a highschool dropout that can code fizzbuzz and get around in linux can make $5?,000 in silicon valley.
Nah... Just a bitter EE who made $200K per year, got laid off, took out $100K in student loans to get an MBA, and now makes $50K. Retirement looks bleak with $100K in student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
I wonder if this is part of the same group of friends you talked about earlier who wants to "get the most bang for their retirement buck" by moving to the 3rd world and buying a child bride.
I don't have any friends like that. I just have friends who have friends who are like that.
Jesus, even their layoff method is both bureaucratic, inefficient, and poorly handled...
Wait, don't tell me...let me guess.
Oracle HR runs on...Oracle?
Ellison is a fool. I don't care if he's rich.
First, when buying Sun, a legend in the industry and the origin of countless software and hardware technologies everyone now takes for granted, he decides to exterminate anything with the Sun name on it.
SunSolve.Sun.com, an enormous wealth of technical and debugging information, gone in an instant.
Docs.Sun.com, an even bigger wealth of research and documentation (ever gone through their Blueprint docs? Phenomenal)... also gone. Yes, they pretended to copy everything over to Oracle, but they didn't. The vast majority was purged, what was left was filled with perpetually broken links, and they ignored any requests for docs that other (remaining) docs referenced. The wealth of info lost here is astonishing.
When a group published the Blueprints, Oracle went after 'em and shut 'em down.
Idiotic.
Next shot at his own foot was to pull out of OpenSolaris without so much as an announcement.
OpenSolaris.org? Shut down and purged from existence. (I managed to grab a tarball of their Solaris AD integration that predates the mismatched crap in Solaris 11 and got it working in Solaris 10, and in Solaris 11... works better than their official solution).
By this time they were well into the self-destruction phase where they were treating Sun engineers like absolute crap under their boots, so they drove the majority of them out. When internet legends are leaving your company en masse, you've done something really, really stupid.
Another shot to his foot was to eliminate the free license for education and personal use... every University still teaching Solaris immediately switched to Linux. Now those entering the market are trained in Linux (and have a poor opinion of Solaris, much of which is beyond what is deserved). WTF did he think would happen?!?
As if he has infinite feet, he takes another shot and removes all entry-level SPARC servers... you used to be able to get a T2000 for ~$2k. After this *($# move, their cheapest hardware was ~$40k! If I had his ear, I'd tell him "listen dipwad, it didn't work for IBM or HP, why the heck do you think it'll work for you?" (in reference to his "we only want the richest customers" approach). If you're thinking "but IBM & HP are doing well...", you're missing my point. I'm talking about their Unix systems. I haven't seen AIX in many years, and I haven't seen HP/UX in at least 2 decades.
Fast forward... they're still (up to recently) putting amazing R&D into Solaris & SPARC, but they fail miserably to properly market them. Solaris 11 is nothing short of astonishing. I love Linux, but it's barely approaching Solaris 10 tech at this point... and Solaris 10 is archaic compared to Solaris 11. The newest SPARCs are absolute monsters, and are actually starting to get slightly more affordable again (I saw a 64-core, 256-thread, 64GB RAM entry level machine for $9k early this year), but when you go to their sales pitches, they can't let go of their grudge against IBM! Every single benchmark and price comparison is against IBM's AIX hardware (which they apparently actually still make). I asked about x86 comparisons, as it was pretty obvious by some of the numbers that they could actually compete against Xeon offerings (which was actually mentioned by Ellison!) and they got pissed like I was heckling them!
Morons, the lot of them, but this all boils back to Ellison's ego. He's a moron, plain and simple.
Free? There is no such thing as free. The US has a very cheap education system compared to Europe. In the US the costs are individual, in Europe they are socialized.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
And exactly what planet are you on? The two parties have policies that are virtually identical.
It rather depends on what the associated costs are, which is the point the "simplistic reply" was correctly making.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You need to look at the records, Republicans gained control of the House in 2011, they took the Senate in 2015. So Democrats had all three bodies from 2009 - 2011 and control of 2 from 2011-2015. Harry Reid refused to put any legislation through the Senate while he was in charge through 2015 so it wasn't the Republicans for the last 8 years dragging their feet, it was the Democrats and Harry Reid. Now for the last 8 months the Republicans haven't done jack, and I seriously doubt they will over the next 16 either.
Oracle always has layoffs around this time of the year. Sometimes they happen as early as July, or as late as December, but basically every group has to manage to a number that they get when the new FY begins, and the sooner they cut the headcount, the more people that they can keep. Oracle's hardware group has been cutting people every year around this time. Every. Single. Year. Sorry, no news here. Nothing to see. Move on.
Irix was a much friendlier player with Motif and made it look good and work well. As I'm still using the Irix filesystem in CentOS - there was certainly better technology in Irix than Solaris.
And Sun really couldn't challenge anyone on the high end until Cray was forced to give them the e10k. And why was Cray forced into this? Because SGI bought them.
Sun got SGI's table scraps. I will grant you that NFS and a number of other important technologies came from Solaris, but Irix was nothing to sneeze at.
Coming from somebody who's got so much 24% APY credit card debt that he needs a consolidation loan to have a hope of paying it off, you're not going to do shit, tubby.
I'll be debt free in three years, if not sooner. Suck it.
You're going to keep on flailing until you run out of money again, and then you're going to declare bankruptcy, because you're a lazy, dishonest, fraudulent piece of shit.
Maybe you're right. I got a paid off credit card. I could buy a new car with it and head off to Mexico to find a chica to marry.
You'll be one of the first people laid off when the "Pence recession" hits, and when you end up filing for bankruptcy again, any assets you have will be liquidated to pay off pennies on the dollar of your debt.
If all my assets were liquidated, I would still have enough cash to buy a new car and head off to Mexico to find a chica to marry.
and then costs will come down / a lot of joke classes will be gone.
No more $150K+ masters in medieval studies people.
Well Sun had no intention of open sourcing Solaris at all, it wasn't until it was clear that they were being killed by Linux that they decided to go open source in a last-ditch effort for survival. This was likely a particularly hard thing to swallow since the Sun president Jonathan Schwartz had previously been very critical of open source and GPL in particular, claiming that it was 'a tool allowing United States businesses to pillage developing countries of their intellectual property.', but again they really had no other options at that stage. Alas it was indeed to late.
First off, the fascist alt-left with their sock puppet accounts are out in force today.
Regarding your statement, sorry, but that is a flat out lie. Obama's policies gave us 1% per year for 8 years. The growth rate right now is partially forward looking by businesses, who are expecting Obamacare to be repealed, taxes to be cut, regulations to be rolled back, and in part due to actual EOs that have been rescinded by Trump. Regulations can stifle business even worse than taxes, something Obama never understood. Businesses operate in part on what is, and in part on projections and expectations. Now that they don't have to worry about the EPA raping them unexpectedly, the EEOC making up BS claims on them, Obama pulling another regulation out of his ass that costs them 10% off the top, they are starting to ramp up.
This is exactly because of Trump, just like the massive reduction in illegal immigration (70%) even though there has been no walls built yet, just the fact that Trump will be enforcing our laws on immigration and will be building a wall has resulted in massive reductions in illegal immigration, though not much on the ground has actually changed yet. http://www.washingtontimes.com...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Odd we should be mentioning this, but underage brides in the USA was one of the main stories on the BBC news app yesterday or possibly the day before. The thrust of the story was that their was a huge increase in it in recent years so much so that a number of states have recently brought in minimum ages of 18 for marriage.
Then again I live in Scotland that only brought in any sort of minimum age in the 1920's and even then it's 16 with on requirement for parental consent. (rest of UK it's 16 but parents have to consent). There is a reason why Lydia was though to be running off to Gretna with Mr. Whickham.
The things I'm saying match what the news outlets were saying while the ACA was being designed. Read that second paragraph again. The whole reason the ACA is a train wreck is because of concessions the Democrats made to the Republicans. This is all well-established fact. Anyone arguing against those facts need only spend two minutes doing a Google search of historical news articles to find out that their opinion is based on pure fantasy and lies.
One of us is spouting revisionist history, but it's not me. You've been lied to. Now go back to Fox News or Breitbart or whoever fed you that disinformation and tell them, "Stop with the fake news already."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Sorry, that is revisionist BS. The changes made to the ACA were to get Democrats to vote for it who were not alt-left nut jobs (there were some at that time). Most of those who did vote for it have since lost their seats anyway because the public didn't want that monstrosity in the first place.
Trying to blame Republicans for a Democrat authored bill voted for exclusively by Democrats is a nice trick though.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
The only reason that didn't happen was Obama shat all over the recovery with Obamacare and his pen and paper regulations.
The other problem was Obama being afraid to confront the anti-science wing of the party. That's why the stimulus was frittered away on 'shovel ready' (noncontroversial) construction projects rather than the kind of large-scale infrastructure that returns value for generations to come.
I guess they didn't have the foresight to look at job predictions. That can be found in the library. I was a EE in the 1980s and found in 1985 that there would be *NOTHING* for me when I graduated. Men with decades of experience were projected to be out of work so I switched.
Besides, I was a foreigner in my own school. Seemed to be nothing but Chinese students that had everything paid for them while they were here. Their best of the best. They were really bright.
I guess they didn't have the foresight to look at job predictions.
I had a roommate who took automotive design on the west coast because he liked cars, leaving him with $25K in student loans and no job prospects. That was in the late 90's. Automotive design might make sense today with Tesla HQ down the street. Fortunately, his wife to be was a career counselor and turned his six years as a grocery clerk into a logistics and warehouse career.
We have some people that are making us use Sun/Solaris crap. Even though we showed them it worked better under Linux. If they have no choice, they'll finally have to do what we told them years ago and switch.
How not to look too smug when they admit they must ditch Solaris.
I don't know what I'd do today. Too many people going to college. Just to get into anything medical, nutrition, dentistry, etc, you're look at a 4.0+ GPA or forgetabout it. So some people look at the bullshit liberal arts type stuff, that doesn't pay squat.
Think if I were doing it today I might go into automotive, or a trade like electrician or plumbing. Elevator Mechanic is a bit easier in that it's indoors and they make a lot of money but you have to be very bright to pass the test. Hardly any black people in it and they can't bitch because it's the Feds that set the standards, so they can't do anything about it (i.e. fuck them).