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No More Suits; IT Worker Shortage Will End Soon
I was up at Andover Corporate HQ Tuesday. It's 400 miles from my home office, so I don't get there often. This time, for no particular reason, I happened to notice that while Andover has plenty of administrative and marketing and other suit-type people floating around the office doing whatever those people do, none of them wear suits to work any more!
But there was still a clothing division between the execs and the workers: ironing. The programmers, artists, writers, and hardware wranglers wore basic, simple, unpressed t-shirts and jeans or other working-type pants, while the biggies over in admin-land all looked like they spent significant time and energy getting their casual outfits to look "just right" before they came to work.
After I realized what was happening at Andover, fashion-wise, I called some friends who work in other new media and tech companies and asked them if the same thing was going on in their offices. To a man and women, they said it was. Nowadays, there are no suits in tech companies unless network TV cameras are there and rolling, and often not even then.
From now on, in the interests of journalistic accuracy and linguistic precision, I am going to refer to the executives formerly known as suits as "Its," an acronym for "Ironed T-Shirts."
"Yeah, I had a great idea but the Its were too clueless to figure it out!" is an example of how you might use Its in a normal workday sentence. Feel free to do so. I have not copyrighted the word. It's now yours as much as mine to mess up, mispell, or whatever else you like to do to words in your spare time.
The IT Worker "Shortage" Will End. Soon.
Once upon a time, back when the world was young and "engineer" was a word used to describe hairy-eared men who designed real, physical things and programmers were looked down upon as glorified typists, the U.S. had an "engineering shortage." All through the late 60s and early 70s publications like the Wall Street Journal ran article after article about how America's potential economic growth was being stifled by a shortage of engineers and technicians. Business-owned politicians loosened visa restrictions for engineers and technicians from other countries because of this supposed shortage, engineering salaries shot up, and suits (which is what Its were called back then) constantly whined about the impossibility of managing their arrogant techies, all of whom knew they could find other jobs in seconds and, therefore, demanded all kinds of perqs, up to and including free coffee and sodas, in-house gyms, flextime hours, and so on.
You could take any of those 60s or 70s WSJ stories about the "engineering shortage," change a few words in them, and run them today as panic pieces about how it's impossible to find competent programmers and sysadmins at reasonable salaries, and how when you do scare up a few of these rare beasts, they won't hew to the corporate line and respect corporate authority and salute their MBA bosses like good little workers. Indeed, the WSJ may actually be changing words in those old stories and rerunning them. Who would know?
But those of you beyond a certain age will recall that, one day, all those formerly high-rolling engineers were suddenly seeking exciting new careers in convenience stores, service stations, and fast food outlets that didn't pay enough to cover the mortgages on their nice suburban houses, which suddenly became hard to sell because there weren't enough other engineers with good jobs available to buy them. The economies in places like the Boston suburbs and Silicon Valley and other "high-tech capitals" tanked. Life was rough, and a lot of people (including me) got burned hard and ended up with scars that they/we carry to this day.
All good things come to an end. Right now, yes, it's good to be the king (or at least the Network Administrator). But remember what happened to Louis XVI when the rabble got fed up with paying for his high living and decided to take him down a peg.
And does anyone here remember the oil crisis of 1973? I sure do. The U.S. seemed to be spending all of its money importing Arab oil, which climbed to nearly $50 per barrel at one point when OPEC [the Organization of Petrolem-Exporting Countries] got especially feisty. If this trend went on, economic pundits said, the Arabs would own America (and most of Europe) outright within a decade or two. By extrapolating then-current trends and drawing them as lines on colorful charts, this thesis was easy to display on TV shows, on newspaper front pages and in slideshows at business conferences so that everyone could get nice and worried about it.
But last I looked, OPEC was just about dead and oil was selling in the $10 - $20 per barrel range. The danger of predictions made through extrapolations is that something always seems to come along that messes them up. In the case of oil, it was a major change in consumption patterns. Oil got too expensive, so we (the oil-importing countries) simply stopped using so much of it. The most visible example of this change: what we call a "full-sized American car" today wouldn't be a pimple on the bumper of, say, a 1970 Buick Electra.
Believe me, somewhere in a secret cavern beneath the Wharton School of Business (which is to finance as Stanford is to Computer Science) or someplace similar, teams of fiery-eyed MBA candidates are plotting to take down today's computer professionals as hard as OPEC, engineers, and Louis XVI all got slammed in their respective days.
So enjoy the ride while it lasts. It's great fun. But don't take out a 30-year mortgage based on it. Something - it could be genetic algorithms or some other new, less labor-intensive programming methodology or it could be an overall economic downturn that ripples through the high-tech industries and brings Internet growth to halt the same way the construction-driven economic boom in Austin, TX in the early 80s collapsed in on itself when a comparatively small number of construction workers lost their jobs and couldn't afford to buy houses, which led to even less housing demand, and so on all the way down - will throw a lot of high-tech workers out in the street. I have no more idea than anyone else of what the proximate cause of the next tech-industry recession will be, but I guarantee that it will come. One always does.
Indeed, if this thoughtful article from Linux Journal has any truth to it, today's shortage of computer professionals may be as false as many people thought the 70s oil shortage was, so it may already be time for IT workers to start doing a little financial hunkering-down, especially if they're over 30 and unwilling to work slave-length workweeks.
Is Slashdot a Magazine?
I have always considered Slashdot an online magazine. And I have always respected the American Society of Magazine Editors [ASME] and believe their stringent code of ethics should apply as much to online publications as to those printed on paper. So I decided to join. $225 a year, and Andover'll pay for it anyway, so why not?
But guess what? This august body still only accepts members from print magazines. As a purely online editor, I'm apparently not worthy. Which means, by extension, that you, as an online reader, are not as worthy as a print magazine reader. No big deal. I find it more amusing than alarming - for you and me, at least. But this is sad for the ASME; it is freezing out the most vital, highest-growth part of the periodical news business when, instead, traditional publishers' and editors' organizations should be courting us online people in order to assure their own future survival.
Here is the last paragraph of my e-mail response to the turndown I sent to arhodes@MAGAZINE.ORG:
Depending on your reckoning, the 21st century starts in either ~3 or ~15 months. If ASME decides to enter it at some point, please let me know. I'll be there, waiting for you to catch up. ;)- Robin "roblimo" Miller
Elkridge, Maryland, USA
10 October 1999, noon EDT
I thought Geeks were supposed to be mature adults. Oh well.
I liked it. Engineering recessions come and go. It happens in other businesses too: the old companies get fat and lazy, new technologies come along. But is a new recession likely soon? Certainly some sector of geekdom will take a hit. I just hope it's in Visual Basic programming and NT administration. I think there's a bright future for cgi, thin client, gtk, linux, etc.
... if you can write like that, then you're not too old.
And don't worry, Roblimo
who needs em anyways.......
I hate that commercial
There isn't. Supply and demand baby.
The ITS and IS's (ironed socks) will
*always* cry shortage when they can't
pay minimum wage.
So what do they do? Amidst the "shortage"
they neatly sidestep the majority of available
citizen candidates and hire...indians...Who
will telecommute for 2 dollars an hour or, will
work for very little here in the states.
You see the indians everywhere now. This
is why. Did the suits get their bill? The nerd-killing bill?
So Roblimo, you are correct. And the method
is cheap foreign labor.
I'm sorry if this article seems xenophobic
but it's true! I have *firsthand* knowledge of
a huge tech employer who has telecommuting
indians on the payroll for the cushy payrate
of..drumroll please...2 dollars an hour.
Those who could barely speak were brought here
for probably half(or less) the payrate of
a US worker.
Folks, the greasy wheels are turning.
Ive been saying that the IT jobs are going to change in the future, but just like anything else, who knows what it will really hold. I can learn from older folks past, but what is to say the period it takes for job markets to change. Surely, if there is another depression, recession, etc things will change. True it seems one always hits now and again, but will it really hit the people that are the 'lifesblood' of the future?? I surely think that I can truthfully say that IT will be one of the most important fields ever in history. But only parts of it. I dont think there will be any more demand for e-commerce developers past the next 5 years more than there is a need for McDonalds workers. If you want to get a stranglehold on a market, making an impact by developing new technologies -- not simply using them -- would be the first choice.
Isn't it sad that people insist on everything, the Internet included, being built on an economic foundation when it is all to apparent that economies never last.
I have never worked at a place where there was a scarcity of good engineers willing to work market rates. What I do see as a problem everywhere is incompetency at the management level. So many buzzword spouting, turf-protecting, accounting department programmed "suits", "iron t-shirts", "PHBS" just don't have a freaking clue how to implement a solution correctly, easily and efficiently. If some the officers had actully spent some time in the foxholes, their armies would win a few more wars. Hey, American business, wanna do better? Give the alpha geek a no-questions-asked budget.
Hmm... When I went to RIT about 3 years ago, they were teaching NT indeed, but they were also teaching *all* about TCP/IP - examining each layer and going into the labs, sniffing packets and actually seeing what an ARP conversation looks like, exactly what happens when you do a traceroute (does anyone here know without having to look it up?), etc... They also had a segment of a class take a detailed look at Ethernet and Token Ring. No UNIX you say? Bullshit. Plenty of UNIX being taught at RIT. Ever see the Solaris/SGI lab? At last count (3 years ago) there were upwards of 50 UNIX boxes in there and they were expanding! Sorry dude but you made a broad judgement based on a narrow bit of experience and it is just plain wrong. AC
I think this post has the quote-of-the-year in it. "Just knowing how to write printf("Hello world.\n"); is not going to help you much when you've been given a core dump, the source code, no way to reproduce the problem, and were told to figure out what happened, and to fix it. "
Whether there's a shortage or not where's the best place to find IT jobs on the web that are actually hiring. Whether you have to wear a suit or not, you still have to go in to those "cathedrals" to work. What are the best IT jobs sites that offer more the "bazaar", work-at-home, settings?
Why not? I've read and heard the words "propellerhead" and "techies" used by "suits" to refer to us.
I just want to be a monkey who wears a suit. I know, I'll go to business school! -- Futurama
Get a clue
You're right.... in some sense, it does pump out Microsoft drones. The IT program is designed to produce multimedia people and general computer flunkies. It isn't a program for serious geeks.
Most IT people (at RIT) will admit that they aren't good programmers. The really good programmers are in CS or SE. The hardware wizards are in CE or EE. The business analysts are in MIS. IT is for the in between people that can do the pointy-clicky stuff but not much else.
I too am disgusted by the growth of the IT department. The program is designed to be easy. For a while they were accepting everybody who applied. IT majors now comprise more than 10% of the whole school. I'm not saying that all IT majors are idiots, just that idiots can get by and possibly even thrive in IT.
With the program changes that IT has made in the last few years, a student can graduate from IT without ever taking a real programming class (I don't consider VB to be a realy programming class.) I took the first two C++ classes offered by the IT department and they were both complete jokes. The worst thing was, most of the IT majors in the class were struggling!
The other programs I mentioned, on the other hand, are all really great programs. If you don't mind the snowy winters and mediocre schol spirit, RIT is a great school.
We went to war to protect Kuwait...we still pump billions into the Gulf economy...uh Katz, where exactly did the OPEC countries "lose power". Some countries over there don't tax their cicitzens at all.
Wharton better work on that one before they figure out how to dethrone the techies.
OK, it seems a little wrong to be focusing on what to call "suits" and what to call "techies" when we have something like the H1-B bearing down on the Information Technology profession. I almost believe someone put those two articles together to see which issue we would focus on. We are about to get "played"...and in a big way. Unless, we stand up collectively and recognize that the quality of other programmers does affect how you will be perceived by non-programmers (and how effectively you program). Hence, Y2K...if things go insanely wrong...guess who will get blamed? So, like the BAR association or the medical profession there must be more stringent criteria for CALLING one's self a programmer and programming for critical infrastructure applications (and I am not talking about web-site design). I mean honestly...you don't see Miller freaking out about the shortage of Doctors or Lawyers. No, because it has been well established that individuals in the medical and law professions are talented, rare, and require significant education. Why should programmers be any different? There is a significant political aspect of this issue that we cannot afford to ignore. Time to grow some teeth!!!!
From what I observe in CS college courses nowadays as compared to 20 years ago, most of the programming courses are not C/C++ Java, pascal or any of the standard languages, but are more about how to write "macros" for MSofts Office products and learning how to click and edit a Word document. Back when I was going thru school, learning how to use a compiler, editor or any other tool is what you did on your own time to get the homework/project done. You concentrated more in subject matter rather than spending class time on how to use tool/products to get the assignment done!
Umm, you went into the war not to protect the Kuwaitis, but to protect Joe Sixpack from having to shell out 3 bucks for a gallon of gas. Exxon and Texaco should be proud of the 120,000 Iraqi casualties. Bosnia and Kosovo operations were accomplished with a purpose of protecting innocent people, not the Gulf War..
I'm a junior at the CS program at SUNY Albany (thank G-d the CS dept is all *nix). I was horrified when I heard from a friend that a well known neiboring college (RPI) CS dept switched to MS VC++/NT/95/98. I do not have any confirmation of this, but I use to think that RPI was a mostly *nix school (or now maybe only the EE dept.)
Another good school pumping out MS drones :(
At least the SUNY systems colleges' CS depts use *nix (or at least Albany and Buffalo).
It is an opec distribution crackdown that has brought the price from about $10 to $20. The opec heads are not meeting again until march so many people think the price of oil is going to keep rising at least in the short term. Also the amount of oil currently in stock is about 290 million barrels - the lowest it has ever been is 270 million. OPEC is powerful. [I just bought shares in a small oil company that's raking it in since the prices rose...]
Cum on dude tak a logic class..
Links? Cool posting of the day!
If it makes you feel better to believe that immigrant programmers are less competent then go ahead. But it's not true. They are like any group of programmers - skills vary by individual.
Check out the statistics presented in "The Resurrection of the American Programmer" for more evidence. The author argues that the quality of code produced in foreign countries is often better than that of US programmers.
Also, the article Rob refers to "Is There an 'Alarming' Shortage of IT Workers?" cites 'inhumane working conditions' as a reason not to support more H1-B workers. This is a bit of a stretch considering that it is still a dramatic improvement, not to mention a 200%-500% pay increase.
I don't support increasing the number of H1-B workers allowed to work in the US, but for obviously $elfish reasons.
I'm not a fan by any means of wearing suits, but until we can learn to manage the money properly, it looks as if the suits will always be around. Now if we can only convince these same suits that a college degree is not necessary to do cable pulls and installing software, more of us "professionals" can get entry levels jobs in MIS departments and launch sucessful careers.
I'm not a fan by any means of wearing suits, but until we can learn to manage the money properly, it looks as if the suits will always be around.
Now if we can only convince these same suits that a college degree is not necessary to do cable pulls and installing software, more of us "professionals" can get entry levels jobs in MIS departments and launch sucessful careers.
It won't be long before just about anyone can do a decent job as a sysadmin, web master, db developer, etc. This constitutes 90-some-odd percent of the industry. Mainstream applications will become commoditized; there's not that much more one can add to a word processor, spreadsheet or web browser. The only jobs left will be in things like embedded. At the same time, we are getting huge numbers of people majoring in CS, wanting to make huge amounts of money in the industry. Bye bye shortage.
My boss wears slacks, unironed shirt with collar, and pocket protector.
Hey man.. i was looking at your postings after I saw someone naming you as a moderator suckup.. How true! This is most excellent.
i think it should be pronounced like michael palin at the start of those monty python sketches where is the ragged hermit type and he stumbles up to the camera and says, "It's" then they cut him off with the music.
Actually, there really is not a shortage of technical professionals, either currently or in the past. Rather, there are not enough qualified technical professionals willing to work at the market rate. This is much different than a shortage, a situation where demand cannot be satisfied at ANY price. Given that there is no shortage now, it's not about to end. The real question, then, is "Is supply and/or demand going to shift in such a way as to lower the market salary for technical professionals?" What might cause this? -Alternative jobs for technical professionals (TPs). So long as TPs have well-paying alternatives, they can simply shift jobs as wages start to fall, thus allowing supply and demand to equalize without ever falling too much. IMHO, this will prevent the wage level from tumbling far. -Training more and more TPs in the developed countries. This will increase supply, but I don't think that this will be a significant factor in the next five years. -Technology allowing more TPs in developing countries to provide services currently provided by locals. This has the most potential to affect the wage level in developed countries. But there are offsetting effects: -foreigners may do the boring, less productive work, raising the productivity of locals. -many foreigners working may raise demand for TPs in developing countries. These are just a few of the things that might affect the wage level in the future. Overall, I wouldn't expect the wage level to fall much at all, except perhaps in extremely high priced areas such as the Valley.
It's not so surprising. As any good autocratic tyrant worth his (or her) salt knows, the downtrodden masses become really dangerous not when the ol' iron boot crushes them harder, but rather when it eases. Then the great unwashed begin to preoccupy themselves with notions of improving their wretched lives - and the most effective ways of realizing these notions. Poor ol' Louis pretty much cut off his own head by failing to be a bastard. It's not a French thing, it's a pretty general fire-wielding-monkey thing. :)
Nope, you got it wrong. Americans are the hardest working people on the planet, period. Also, what "labor shortage"? There's no labor shortage, there's a good management shortage to direct the readily avaiable labor there is out there. As for loyalty, why do American companies fire engineers when the reach 40? Do American workers owe these companies loyalty?
Look, I'm tired of this "foreigners work harder than Americans" crap. This is just not true. Americans work harder than anybody else. Period. Ask any economist who studies this stuff.
I'm a web app developer, and I can tell you, I'm sure as hell not seeing any IT shortage. But then again, my speciality is ASP/MTS, and that shit is RAGING. I just bought a new Harley, and the money's not slowing down, it's picking up. Anyone who thinks that IT is slowing down either lacks the skills, or lacks the foresight to see what technologies are gonna be hot. There are ALWAYS going to be a lot of high-paying IT jobs, but not in all areas.
regardless of why the us went to kuwait, the result was the kuwaiti are still sitting pretty.
I'm curious what makes this Romanization preferable to the more common Hussein. Is that name actually supposed to be pronounced "hoo-SAW-yin"?
(Sorry, even if I knew enough International Phonetic Alphabet to write that, that part of Unicode probably wouldn't work over the Web yet.)
Well, where I come from they don't wear suits either. So we call them "Pointy-Hairs" after Dilbert's boss.
I suppose they'd turn down Bill Joy as "too inexperienced with Java". I love it.
Was there really more to starting NIS than knowing which section of which manual to read?
Pre-packaged solutions, new languages, or productivity tools will never reduce the need for programmers because, while they tackle the jobs they're designed for, they open to door up for more complex tasks to be tackled. Throughout my long career, I've notice a phenomenon that I call the the "4 Month Project Theory": no matter how much technology you have in your arsenal, projects are envisioned that will take 4 months to complete.
I, and people I know (in seattle.wa.us, in case it matters), seem to use it differently - for us it describes people who are more impressed by how you look (ooh, shiny!) than what you can do and/or people who spend more time impressing the easily impressed than accomplishing something.
- The GNU Manifesto
Er, yeah, it would be tragic if society ran out os sow eggs.
There was a great article one of the IEEE publications about a decade ago the surveyed over a 1000 engineers and managers at all levels, from project and group leaders on up to vice-presidents and CEOs. One half of the group was asked to rate the people that work for them. The other have was asked to rate the people they work for. To no ones surprise, what was revealed was essentially this: the managers thought the managed were morons, and the managed thought the managers were morons. Also, this obsession with dressing like a geek or not like a geek is only going to lock you into a stereotype. Do yourselves a favor and dress reasonably well or that stereotype is going to sink you into a world of few women and lots of masturbation. Have you ever noticed how all the hot chicks in sales and marketing laugh when you're around?
Hmm. Do you mean Frame-Relay with ANSI LMI or Cisco (well... Gang-of-Four) LMI?
/. and/or packet loss? Is it a routing loop somewhere? I guess it could be assymetrical routing, but really there is nothing wrong with assymetrical routing (or is there?). Wait!@# I know. It could be route flapping problems. Are you sure you wanted those MEDs? Better set localpref on that route. Actually, really, it's simply just that the Internet doesn't scale. /. doesn't have the 20 private-peering points with multiple OC-48's it needs. So, what they need is a bunch of network engineers to make the impossible happen. This involves intricate configuration and design.
Are you talking about E.165 or NSAP addressing on ATM that will be automagically configured? Which version of UNI are we talking about?
Are you talking about Ethernet, like the Ethernet developed at Xerox PARC? Or the Ethernet like as in the IEEE 802.3 Committee? Does this include the "Ethernet" from the 802.1 committee and the 802.2 committee? Cause well, it if doesn't, then it's a totally different thing. Is this Ethernet on a Layer 1 Switch or a Layer 2 Bridge? Or is it a Layer 2 Switch?
Or, for that matter: why are you getting such terrible latency to
Sun has multiple times stated that you "Don't need to configure anything or tune ANYTHING with Solaris". Right.
This is *TECHNOLOGY* we are talking about people. Until people stop wanting to use the Internet, we are going to keep building it. And once we are done building it (that'll be the day), we are going to have to maintain it. Telco's and Broadcasting Companies aren't done building out their networks, but they don't have the demand that the Internet does. Their networks are PRETTY MUCH done and are being replaced by the Internet.
But I don't fear losing my job because it gets automated. I more fear something else replacing the Internet. But, hell, the way I see it is that most or all of the Telco's are NO LONGER voice-only companies. They are Internet Companies, here to reap the same profits (if not more) than all these ISP's already did. And the Broadcasting Companies are starting to realize that they are going to have to do the same thing.
I don't work in a suburban Detriot Car-Manufacturing company. I don't work for Boeing or the Aerospace Industry. If I was currently working at a Telco or Broadcasting Company, I would either become an Internet person, or I would get an Internet job. And hopefully, I will be smart enough to realize that EVENTUALLY the technology that replaces the Internet will be my next goal.
The GPL doesn't attack programmers' livelihoods, it attacks the business model of companies that invest in proprietary software and expect to sell it over and over. The solution is to get paid for writing software rather than peddling it.
SMB: Used in Windows filesharing. I believe it is System Multi-Block, but I'm not for certain. (Dock 1 point)
Server Message Block, I believe. Protocol used in Windows networking.
VAX: An older type of time-shared operating system, allowing for multiple users and logins. To my knowledge, does not decode as an acronym.
The VAX, introduced in 1977 by Digital, was a minicomputer, not an OS. The VAX used the VMS operating system, although I think UNIX might have been available for it too (not sure).
No. TRACERT.EXE, on the other hand... I find this quite ironic.
This article is full of racist/xenophobic statments. From the foreigners/asians that work in the IT industry to "Arabs". Do you know that OPEC is not just Arabs, Iran is not an Arab country, neither are Venezuela, Ecuador, or Mexico all members of OPEC. Please get you facts straight and try not to be Racist or Xenophobic otherwise you sound just like all the other assholes on Slashdot, I know this post will be moderated down because it critisizes Slashdot but oh well.
"Object Linking and Embedding." Actually a pretty clever notion - an object can embed (contain a copy of) others or link ("contain" by reference) to them, and links can be to other objects' containees as well as standalone files. Competitors include OpenDoc (which may or may not still be viable) and HTML's OBJECT element and "data:" URL scheme (which are definitely not yet widely implemented).
...and unfortunate as it may be for some people's jobs, it also sounds very good. We're going back to the late 80's again! At least, the bits of the late 80's untouched by the stain of the IBM compatible. The days when there was a similar classification of machines, just a bit more limited spread.
:-)
Want something cheap for the occasional game and to play around with very basic programming? Get a C64 or a Sinclair Spectrum (please, don't mention that cloned piece of "Timex Sinclair" crap again. It's an insult to disciples of Sir Clive such as myself!!
Want something even simpler and cheaper just for games and nothing else? NES or Master System for you then.
Or a more expensive machine, for the occasional game or a few other more complex slot-in-and-run programs, with a fixed (officially, at least) operating system and circuitry? Atari ST or Commodore Amiga will see you right.
(Note I mentioned two machines in each one... one more expensive and capable, the other slightly cheaper and basic, offering some further choice. But bear in mind the extra unique features each had to offer and the other less successfull machines).
This PC obsession with all of it's semi-compatible (though it's not so bad any more) hardware has gotta stop. And soon. Sure, an AMD Athlon 700mhz is all very lovely and makes my eyes turn green, but I'd still prefer my computer to be of that "toaster" variety, such as seen with the commodore, sinclair and atari machines. They were fairly cheap. You could buy one with the same name, and you'd know you're getting something the same as everyone else. And not officially upgradable, so programmers are sensibly kept in check by the hardware whilst exploring it's outer limits, and you don't have to worry about your machine becoming obsolete. And it worked straight away out of the box, like a laptop does. Plug computer to power socket, plug TV and mouse to computer, and you're away.... ahh, those were the days. You should see some of the stuff they got the NES (around 92-93) and Atari ST (94-95) to do in the "end days" before PCs and Playstations took over *completely*. Absolutely stunning (near Snes-level Kirby and PC-equalling version of Elite II respectively) considering the more-than-a-decade-old hardware in them. Somewhere in Russia, people are still programming for the spectrum as well. There's a company selling their own slightly upgraded but completely compatible versions, and you can get a copy of Mortal Kombat Four which will run on it.
With any luck, the playstation 2 and dreamcast will be the "toaster computers" of the next generation, and all luck to them I say. Just so long as they have a PC emulator so I can get a nostalgia burst every now and then.
[[[ooh, wierd, it's just submitted itself twice and added loads of
:-)
html tags automatically and I didnt even get to add my name. Poo.
Eddy_Hitler@Yahoo.com]]]
...and unfortunate as it may be for some people's jobs, it also sounds very good. We're going back to the late 80's again! At least, the bits of the late 80's untouched by the stain of the IBM compatible. The days when there was a similar classification of machines, just a bit more limited spread.
Want something cheap for the occasional game and to play around with very basic programming? Get a C64 or a Sinclair Spectrum (please, don't mention that cloned piece of "Timex Sinclair" crap again. It's an insult to disciples of Sir Clive such as myself!!
Want something even simpler and cheaper just for games and nothing else? NES or Master System for you then.
Or a more expensive machine, for the occasional game or a few other more complex slot-in-and-run programs, with a fixed (officially, at least) operating system and circuitry? Atari ST or Commodore Amiga will see you right.
(Note I mentioned two machines in each one... one more expensive and capable, the other slightly cheaper and basic, offering some further choice. But bear in mind the extra unique features each had to offer and the other less successfull machines).
This PC obsession with all of it's semi-compatible (though it's not so bad any more) hardware has gotta stop. And soon. Sure, an AMD Athlon 700mhz is all very lovely and makes my eyes turn green, but I'd still prefer my computer to be of that "toaster" variety, such as seen with the commodore, sinclair and atari machines. They were fairly cheap. You could buy one with the same name, and you'd know you're getting something the same as everyone else. And not officially upgradable, so programmers are sensibly kept in check by the hardware whilst exploring it's outer limits, and you don't have to worry about your machine becoming obsolete. And it worked straight away out of the box, like a laptop does. Plug computer to power socket, plug TV and mouse to computer, and you're away.... ahh, those were the days. You should see some of the stuff they got the NES (around 92-93) and Atari ST (94-95) to do in the "end days" before PCs and Playstations took over *completely*. Absolutely stunning (near Snes-level Kirby and PC-equalling version of Elite II respectively) considering the more-than-a-decade-old hardware in them. Somewhere in Russia, people are still programming for the spectrum as well. There's a company selling their own slightly upgraded but completely compatible versions, and you can get a copy of Mortal Kombat Four which will run on it.
With any luck, the playstation 2 and dreamcast will be the "toaster computers" of the next generation, and all luck to them I say. Just so long as they have a PC emulator so I can get a nostalgia burst every now and then.
Actually I find that after a certain point, salary expectation becomes inversely proportional to skills.
Good points all. One reason for the demise of traditional clothing is that it was developed for unheated European buildings. That worked fine so long as the bulk of the population lived in places like New York or Boston that have serious winters. Now that the population has moved south and west, traditional clothing's usefulness is much less. Ever tried wearing a suit in July, in Houston? Ever walked three blocks in same?
I'm attending a small (student pop: 2500) liberal arts college as a CS major, and my first CS class consisting of C programing resulted in a 70% drop-out rate for freshmen CS majors. The first semester of sophmore CS classes resulted in another 20-30% drop rate, and now we're just left with the hard core computer geeks (plus one wanna-be who won't last the year IMHO). The major went from 100+ student to around 20 in about a year. This happens year after year at my college. When this many people are getting scared off by simple C/C++ programing, I'm not too worried about running into a glut of good programers when I hit the job market.
Actually it will end if not because of physical limits then because of thermodynamic limits. people will also stop being so mystified by the whole thing. Like aerospace engineering in the recent past
Sorry, you (and the lantern) got it wrong. I am also a CIS major at Ohio State (where I also grade a course). The true statistic is that 25 % of the Engineering majors are planning to go into CIS. Check out the osu newsgroups for more info. It is still a large number of CIS majors, but nowhere near 10,000 premajors.
I think that's the real problem. I do contract work for one of the largest temp agency/head hunters (they don't claim to be head hunters but when you "look under the hood" that's where they make most of their money) in the US, and they spend a great amount of effort in studing lifestyles of potential hires. For example, we look at sleeping patterns. If we have someone drive by their house at 2 AM and the lights are on, then the person if probably a work-a-holic. Same with asking their neighbors. If no one knows him, then he's probably a good candidate for a sheat-shop. Many of the companies I deal with complain profusely about not being able to find someone. I have trouble sometimes not laughing. For every technical job we have, we have more than 10 educated/competent people on our list looking for one. What's the problem? Most of the companies are looking for a few good hires to work rediculous hours for very little pay. When they hire degreed EE's for Burning out your engineers through stock option pyramid scams in order to cash out on an IPO is not a sustainable practice.
Amen. Spoken like someone who has truly been there. I've worked my ass off in two companies that had IPO's. Afterwards, I was left with a large empty feeling. I worked so hard in both cases for less than $5,000 in money made from the options. I could have gotten a job at Wal-Mart and made much more per hour, than I did writting a program to do OSPF routing under OSF/1 or for working for a software company that built an e-commerce system for one of the largest textile companies in the world. Both times, I got screwed. Forget that. Now I'm taking advantage of the clueless companies who churn through hapless engineers. Because I was one of the people who worked over 100 hour work weeks in both college and on lame jobs, I can usually spot those who do to.
Chicago's in the midwest too, and UNIX system admins with *one* year experience are in demand here too.
:)
As far as "something will end the shortage", yeah...something will end the bull market in stocks too...and something will end my life...and yours...the trick is knowing when/why/how!
If you think the dumbing down is bad in the Java world...try looking at some shops where VB is in common use.
Yeuch.
Probably because this is our field and building TVs and making shoes while being respectable jobs are not ours. People only really begin to complain when something affects them.
This is for foreign TA's or professors in any University in the world whether American or not. I must say that I believe no matter how great a teacher your colleagues or you think you are if you can not convey your thoughts so that your students can understand them then you don't belong in the profession.
"FACT-IS-FACT and sometimes hard to swallow."
This is to the Middle Eastern block in the assisted student programs. This attitude you have towards women doesn't fly in this country. I have seen too many Middle Eastern men in University Labs pushing around women and generally treating them like SHIT!!!!! A woman's role in the Middle East is not the role of a woman in the US. Treat them with respect or start packing your bags because in this country they will sue your ass off. When they are done with you, you won't have a cent to your name.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman's scorn!"
THESE VIEWS ARE IN NO WAY RACIALLY MOTIVATED. ALSO, YES I AM A MAN AND YES I WAS ARGUEING WOMENS RIGHTS.
Now, now... I enjoy a CRT-bathed life of no exercise, junk food, and frequent and prodigious dating of Mrs Palmer and her five lovely daughters, but I do NOT have zits. So careful of those rash generalisations there buddy.
I can understand your frustration with the way companies just keep their under-qualified employees. I'm sure you would agree that under-qualified people are found in both the 'employees', and the 'contractors'. Where I work, it seems that the Dilbert cartoon is all too true. They have hired contractors to do coding - who have turned out completely incapable, and who end up with upper-management type positions because we're paying them so much - and they can't do anything! The idiot types lurk in every corner of geekdom today. But in my opinion, that just makes me (a competent developer) look better. Always look on the bright side of life!
how about eye-teezers? itzrs
There is a shortage in high quality software developers. I quit my job last spring at a medium size software firm. Anyways I've been doing part time contracting for about 6 months and have decided to re-enter the job market. I sent my resume to a couple places and they all offered me jobs. All complaining that good programmers were impossible to find. Shit I work in Tahoe now and they can't get hardly anyone to move here even though it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. This could change if less venture money is dumped into technology. I guess if tech stocks crash we may have a problem. But I'm pretty optimistic right now about this industry.
No one has any monopoly on intelligence, or unfortunately, stupidity. I once worked tech support indirectly for a certain computer company whose product is famous for its prominent black and white boxes. We got a lot of luser asian indians on the phone, and certainly no less proportionally than the share of any other particular group. My 'favorite' was the printer that "wasn't out of ink because it was only 6 months old." To verify something from farther on up the thread hierarchy, there is indeed a world full of people who must be repeatedly told from time to time which way the 3 1/2" "hard disk" goes into the slot on the front of the computer, and other things you'd think would be a one-time deal at worst. It's easier to do a complete system format and reinstall from the ground up tha it is to educate most people on what to do in the event the CDROM 'autorun' quits working in Windows. In dealing primarily with to-some-extent-techically saavy people, it becomes a welcome luxury to assume everyone can figure out a certain amount on their own, but you forget it's not true on the 'outside'. It scares me that we let some of these people vote.
Ok I'm an '97 RIT CS grad. The IT dept at RIT is a fucking joke. It is a way to make more money for the school. The real software department is CS. Ok I'm about to tell a "when I was your age we used walk through 10 feet of snow story." But when I was CS there was a programming class like none I have ever heard of. It was called Data Organization and Management (or DOOM for short). DOM was a weed out class that amounted to writing about 10,000 lines of Modula-2 database style code in 10 weeks. The requirements where quite strict. And to pass the class the instructors would run a rigorous set of shell scripts against your code and the output had to match exactly. It was one of the most grueling 10 weeks in programming in my life, but to me it proved that anyone who graduated from the program was a decent programmer. RIT's CS dept has one of the best maintained Unix networks I have ever used. I've worked with people from many different schools, and I'd choose RIT grads over most. When it comes to practical work, RIT excels. Although I'd never want to be associated with most people who live in the CS house. No offense.
This point -- accellerant change -- has been argued before; at least, since Achulean points and Gutenberg. But, Rob's on point -- You've got a handle on what Cybernomics is? Please, tell us! Have you heard or seen a valid (um, that's logically supported statements) denoting same? Seems there's a good deal of commentary about adequate modeling where e-commerce (emerce?) is concerned.
Anyway, could be that the remaining query, vivid margin mechanical limitations utilizing submicron fabrication, is a realm where programmers and even glass makers are useless. Not for want of craft, but lack of...well, imagination.
We've lived with and upon a self-reinforcing environs since the Xerox Concession. If much of the commentary is accurate -- Only computer skills connote the learnt! -- has microprocessing outlived, rather overreached the utility limitation(s) of the computing environ? Are those of us working in microprocessing, in general, so secure in our wield of bits that we're not capable of believing ourselves Horantus obstenant?
One of the strange ideas in civilization may concern knowledge bases, e.g., hunter/gatherer's 'kits', Inuit kinds' of snow denotation, Aboriginal dream topologies (read dream carpets), Micronesian star charts and navigation skills. When humankind -- yes, 'tis a world-wide scheme woven -- confronts yet another challenge to adaptation, skill sets', and ability, I would care to imagine that consideration over the double latte might of occasion fall towards epistemology, creativity, foresight, and wonder at Universe.
Uh..... Win95 installs just fine on my 486! Of course, installing it on an Intel Pentium computer that CAME WITH WIN95 Preinstalled is another thing.
After having to FDISK and FORMAT last time, I gave up, and installed NT Workstation 4.0. EVERY piece of hardware (except the winmodem) installed just fine THE FIRST TIME! Hmmmmm.......
I was also able to convince WIN98 to install, but it took lots of coaxing.....
On a homemade AMD with all CHEAP parts, I have been able to install WIN95, WIN98, NT Server, DOS, and Linux Slackware, with little trouble.
so....operating systems that don't claim to be plug 'n 'play actually ARE????
Some aspects of Java are like that - certain features you might intuitively expect to work unless you expend effort learning they don't.
Dress shirts tend to use stiffer fabric; not much is more comfortable than a soft contton tee (with the possible exception of silk, if you don't overheat in it). I've never worn slacks I could sit comfortably in (either the waist slips or the crotch balloons out, usually both). And ties are simultaneously irritating, accident-prone, and pointless.
... and in McDonalds. Programmers at least do real job ;-)
Firstly OPEC is not dead. Oil prices rose substantially over the last year due to OPEC decisions.
Secondly stupid Americans are driving SUVs just like they were driving large cars back in 73-74, and they're just as vulnerable to the oil price increasing dramatically.
Thirdly the more interesting lesson (IMHO) of the French Revolution and similar is that the standard pattern for these things is that the wealthy absolutely refuse to accept taxation, even though it is apparent to everyone that the burden of taxation on the poor is unsustainable.
Compare that to the structure of taxation in the US (and the ways the current Republican party wants to change it) and draw your own conclusions.
I agree completely with your central point---lotsa money for computer programmers will not last. However I think you need to be a little more careful with your discussion of the points you throw in to support your thesis.
There's no way you can have a meritocracy in this enviornment, so I don't see it getting any better.
Indians (or other foreigners, especially from poorer countries) may not be genetically superior to Americans. But here is the thing:
(1) There is a massive filtering process going on---the guy who gets to college (especially US college) from India or China is probably extremely smart. Not always---maybe he just has good connections, but that will show in his US college grades.
(2) These guys (like myself, a foreigner) have a hell of an incentive to study in school as the only ticket out of their country.
(3) These guys (again like myself) grow up in a culture where one is pushed harder in school, where one is given real homework, where one does not watch TV 3 hrs a day and develop attention-deficit-disorder by age 10.
Yes there are smart Americans---but if one has to gamble with limited information, my gamble is on the foreign kid who had to work 5 times as hard to get to the same position as the US kid.
Sure this will happen.
Consider Hollywood and advertising---those are real havens for artists aren't they?
Sure, if you have some facility with drawing or a witty turn of phrase you'll have a job, but don't kid yourself into believing that
(a) you will produce art or
(b) that there will be some surge in demand for these jobs beyond the current numbers.
The US only needs so many movies, TV shows and ads a year and I suspect we're pretty much at those limits.
I live and work in Austin. At least here, the techie shortage is real. Any geek with a pulse can get a high paying job - in a blink. I do concur that there will be a recession of some sort, where the tech industries will be forced to slough off their less productive members of their technical staff and outsource more of their operations to ASPs and the like. The world as a whole, however; has more or less enslaved itself to technology. As a result the truly talented "geeks of the realm" shall continue to prosper.
There's nothing wrong with American kids.
Yes, Computer Science House is pretty cool. I lived there in '87 and '88. In 87 we got a VAX 11/782 (Jake and Elwood). They ran BSD. There were some pretty smart people there. Some were builing a workstation from the not yet released Clipper chip (Fairchild semi/Intergraph). Others were porting Mach to the Clipper. It was CSH that made me decide on RIT instead of Clarkson.
>Although I'd never want to be associated with >most people who live in the CS house. Say that to my face buddy! ;-) --RIT, CS, CSH, Class of 1991.
Let's see a statistical breakdown of
Ironed Clothing, or Adherence to Schedules,
related to Marital Status. I believe this
can explain quite a bit.
what a grandiloquent pontification of eschewed verboseness.
Lot's of folks have posted praise and/or criticisms to Rob's impending IT industry worker flood, and I have to say that for better or worse... does it matter? I love working on computers, and as long as I can make a reasonable salary and maintain a reasonable standard of life... I really don't care, except to consider the benefits of such an occurance. I've become apathetic as to accomplishing much in the workplace due to working with the would be next generation psuedo-techie management pukes who bury ur ass in paperwork to avoid any type of accomplishment they can't comprehend. I'm sitting at my desk right now, beginning my paperwork for the week... as I work for a govt. contractor, this process will very likely take all of today and into tommorow. My boss is an ex-assembly line manager who got promoted into the IS group because of his astounding feats of suction, and he is ABSOLUTELY clueless. To make it worse, there's some kind of sick new middle-management envy, since for our group the folks managing actually are not privy to the techies salary info. This leads to their notion that we out-earn them, which could very possibly be correct. This leads to the hover-factor, during which the managers spends days at a time looking over your shoulder so that they can eventually claim, in those meetings they love, to be technically qualified... all of this which brings me to my point regarding the topic: I'LL TRADE A LOWER SALARY AND/OR A FLOODED INDUSTRY IF THE FLIES GO AWAY WITH THE MONEY. When I was much younger, PC's were basically a new concept in the workplace, and I had a lot of fun working with other very intelligent folks on interesting projects. We didn't make much money, say $40k a year tops and we worked 80 hour weeks, but generally the management was comprised of other computer people who had moved up through the ranks, in other words technically competent management. My theory is that the true assholes of the world will always follow their greed, so let the accounting industry or banking or ANYTHING take the brunt of it for awhile. Then maybe next time I go for an interview, I'll find something other than just another cube farm.
I agree but in a different sense. I think as a whole, a good American computer scientist will beat any good foreign computer scientist at programming. When I hear the "Indians work harder" bullshit I cringe. Not because I am an American, but because in school I notice that the while Indian students might sit in front of a machine longer, the product isn't as good and they are missing something essential that I find in Americans.
Call it creativity, breadth. Indians who were schooled in India learned by wrote memory (I've been told that by several Indian students), so they do not make a habit of exploring connections between important ideas. They are very goal oriented, but if you give them program specs they will be dilligent and will do a very good job of pruducing rather uninspired code -- which can mean that it lacks critical attributes not in the specs such as scalablity, coherent code design and general elegance (which is important for maintainability). Chinese students are even worse.
So in my opinion Americans work better than Indians. Which undermines the typical use of the phrase "Indians work harder."
By the way, if America produces code at a slower rate than the European countries, it is probably due to our software cycles, not slower programmers.
I really, really agree. I have been working with systems since I was 16. I am 29. I get 4+ calls a week from the pimps and the positions all start at $80/hr+. And I don't do very much dba stuff and almost no ERP stuff, yet I am beating off the headhunters with a stick. I do see a serious oversupply of MCSEs, but that is a different market for a whole variety of reasons -- namely that they are helpless without the tools. I am not.
.mpg, then computers are not seen as seriously as they should be). The uptime of most systems in the vast majority of large companies sucks. So do the userland apps (Windows). We are coming to a fork in the road -- and NCs are just the entering wedge of the serious recentralization that is coming hard and fast. You *must* have good people here. We will probably have a few really high profile failures (there have been some low-profile $50,000,000+ losses, many due to NT, but nothing on the front page of the WSJ, yet) to pound the message in and make people include systems security in a basic valuation of a company (and, just possibly, an audit).
A few points:
1. The tech shortage is real -- there are plenty of people who can point and click, very few who can lock down a UNIX network. One of the major drivers for web-enabled, remotely administered ERP are the same as for outsourcing accounting over the last ten years (and far earlier, with small businesses and bookkeepers): you *must* do it right or you will be screwed and doing it right is expensive. To give you an example, we are only just now seeing anything other that basic flat file "databases" move into small businesses anywhere in the US and that entire market has at least fifteen years of growth and it will be pricey -- it will happen as soon as ADSL (or something) is common. This is the equivalent of the bookkeeper servicing thirty or more small accounts. It allowed small businesses to have the quality of accounting that a large firm could have. This is only now being seen as essential. Someone has to run these things and this is a huge and growing market. Also, not to damn with faint praise, but a lot of Fortune 500 companies' systems are adequate, and a lot of that is because of the people. I don't see a looming crash in the serious sysadmin market.
2. There is still a huge amount of fat that can be cut out of most large companies -- a solid local system will (like above) become essential (yes, it is right now, but I would say that as long as the major concern of senior execs is whether or not they can play the "Uga Chaga" dancing baby
3. We aren't even getting into ERP applications -- the best estimates that I have seen on SAP consultants catching up with demand is that at the current rate they will be close in seven or eight years. And that is assuming that SAP/Baan/etc. growth stays steady. All of these companies are looking at the smaller markets -- hence a strong interest in Linux. They will grow more, not less, and the backlod will be even greater.
4. Engineers suffered from the dumbing down of American industry in the '80s. I very clearly recall people saying things like "We can outsource our industrial capacity and focus on services." No you can't, bubba, not unless you want your contry to fall apart. What happened that put engineers out of work had far more to do with the economic adjustments during the first and second terms of the Reagan administration to the first major reversal of state control and expansion since Truman -- the market was responding to the financial possibilities, and it is far easier to leverage and outsource (and far, far faster) than it is to retool (literally). CEOs could sell off assets a lot faster than they could rebuild to become compeditive with the Japanese, especially with the Japanese cost of capital being close to zero all through the '80s, so, in the interests of keeping jobs, to keep off the raiders, to prevent greenmail, to provide something like a positive return on investment to very impatient shareholders, the CEOs dismembered their companies and spoke of a "post-industrial" economy. As people have figured out, that kind BS belongs in literary criticism. When applies to the real world it causes all sorts of problems. But it had close to nothing to do with a surplus of engineers or a lack of need, but rather the effects of two generations of B-School grads who didn't know a damned thing about manufacturing. But that is another rant.
I think that good people will do fine. Bad people will have to do something else.
And I think that there are an awful lot of high-paid sysadmins (the real ones, not the kiddies) who are tucking the money away as fast as they can. The remember living on canned ravioli not too long ago. It makes you tight with a buck. I know I am. I made $260,000 last year and my SO made $320,000 (she does Oracle Financials). We have a paid-for house, trusts, insurance, lots of money in the market (for the long haul), three paid-for cars (all new -- as we kept the last ones we had for more than ten years these should last too), and a house full of large and useless dogs (yes, they are paid for too). We have been earning a lot for about seven years now, and we have close to a million in the bank. Both of us went through that real estate crash in Austin in the '80s that roblimo alludes to -- it was to us the way the Depression was to our grandparents. And all of our friends feel the same -- every one of us saves a lot of money. I suspect that a lot of MCSEs will lose the nice house in the suburbs, but the UNIX guys will still have the house (or apartment)(and the guns)(and the really big, spikey clubs).
So, perhaps the sysadmin is a dinosaur, ignoring the little mammals in the form of Zero Administration et al that are becoming more and more numerous, but I don't think so. I think that the suits (of which there seem to be a lot of, still, in the rest of the US)(I really, really chuckled when he suggested that that was the norm -- California is still considered seriously weird for lax dress codes by EVERYONE ELSE, EVERYWHERE)(dude.) are the dinosaurs and that we (UNIX sysadmins who have had time to focus on business processes for the last ten+ years) are the mammals.
Consider this -- I am paranoid and had the experience of my parents losing everything in Austin (cars, homes, boats). I just paid cash for a house. How confident am I?
Granted you might be correct about general IT "professionals" who think they learned how to program with their "Learn ___ in ___ days" books, but if you compare the MD to the computer science PhD, then you shouldn't be so sure. Of course, doctor and lawyers will always be emminently important to society no doubt. But there are many, many problems critical for business and commerce which have still not tapped the richness of real computer science. For example if you walked into a meeting with your boss and co-workers and said
"Guys, I think I have a strong characterization of the profit maximization problem. Unfortunately, it sound like a Steiner tree problem, which is NP-complete. I can prove it, but I thought I would get the ball rolling by coding up an epsilon-approximation algorithm so we can begin boosting our revenue right now."
you would be the most important person in the company.
I do believe that all CS programs should weed out the fakers by their third year. This way the department can benefit from the tuition and they can keep the fickle out of the industry.
I think the tech shortage will end real soon for the following reasons: 1. Once Y2K is over, there will be a lot of people who are working on that, who will need jobs in other parts of the technology community. They will fill the gap. 2. I am currently a junior in college. And it seems that more and more engineers are leaning towards computer science as a major. It is becoming the default major... "I don't know what to do, so I'll do CS." At my school, CS is already the biggest engineering major. My sister is a freshman at a school in Boston and almost everyone she is coming across is doing computer science. I guess the prospects of money are driving the unpassionate or the undecided towards CS. 3. Immigration: Which has already been addressed. But as the son of an Indian immigrant, anyone who can, wants to get out of countries like India. Those who are intelligent enough, hard working enough, or wealthy enough will do so. Exclude the 3rd group, and you have many thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of qualified foreigners coming in and getting jobs... don't get me wrong - I think immigration is a good thing and is very important, but it will contribute to the end of teh shortage. 4. In my opinion (as is all of this), the required work to be done will decrease. Right now we are sort of at the same point America was about 100 years ago during industrialization. There was a rush to build factories, rail roads, etc. The same is now. However, once everything gets built a lot of the work will end. Sure, we can always strive to make things faster or more efficient, but there won't be as much new stuff. Anyway, this is IMHO.
Umm, yeah. The problem *is* that the uppity tech workers want more that $8/hr. Seriously. I work in Austin and things here suck and aren't getting much better. Yet there is allegedly a tech "shortage." The "shortage" is of people willing to work slave hours for $12-20/hr when they could drive up the road to Dallas or Ft. Worth or over to Houston and make THREE TIMES AS MUCH.
And don't get me started on the Indians. If you have them as a boss, you are in for some serious pain if you aren't also Indian (or, apparently, their find of Indian from there part of India). I have a lot of friends, some of whom are Indian, who will not under any circumstances work for an Indian.
I am just tired of being told that I should be happy to have a job, which is the whole attitude. One last semester, and I am out of here to someplace where there isn't a "shortage."
Well, yes, but it is nice that we get paid well these days. I went for several years after school just happy to be doing fun stuff until I realized that I could have been paid twice as much. Grrrr ... So now I am doing the same stuff and making $110,000 a year. Don't forget the cash, man. It lets you retire someday and quit on the spot if you would rather not compromise your principles.
Uche, I wholely agree with you. But even more pressing to me than Roblimo's errors is the fear that Slashdot has fallen to lowest-common-denominator status. I also considered Slashdot as a place for specialists. That is, I understood the term "nerd" to refer to people who actually know quite a bit about computers, computer science, and related fields --- and wanted to know more. But the quality of Slashdot has been compromised by essayists like John Katz (with whom I sympathize) and posters who either think that geekdoom is a chic club which will give them identity or whose ability is marginal at best. I'm looking forward to your essay Uche, I think it would be welcomed here by the real nerds.
But unlike you Uche, with your admirable tone, I do intend to be harsh. Fakers make me sick.
It's likely to happen because we will be getting a lot of foreign talent here very soon, and if this happens it is very wise for anyone in the IT industry to read this and have a change of career plan just in case (though the other up and coming industry, biotechnology, is one hell of a hard one for people to get into). I wanted to be a computer engineer but the market for that blew up right under my feet. Fortunately I was so much into software that I jumped ship fairly easily. It's happened before. In this economy it's smart to keep an ear on the ground. :)
I don't think that this will happen. The temp/contract/pimping market is too good. For example, I could be doing something like that (working 80 hours a week for $40,000 a year) but instead I am doing contract UNIX work for $40 an hour and should make $120,000 this year for my 60 hours a week. I don't see that I had any job security before, so this is no change.
I think that a lot of people have come to the same conclusion, and I think that the move to doing that sort of work is just starting. As people have pointed out above and below here, there is no shortage of GOOD people. So, more and more I think that the good people will walk.
Yeah, the UNIX posers. We have started calling them "red hats" here (I am not trying to get flamed -- what they all seem to have in common is that they have installed Red Hat).
On the other claw, I have found that a solid Debian or Slack background is very hopeful. From a serious understanding you can move to Solaris and HP-UX and AIX pretty easily.
This is simply not a serious argument. As they say in French, comparison is not reason. If these are the intellectual standards of electronic magazines, then it's reasonable to be cautious about giving their editors the same status as those of traditional publications.
I wouldn't claim, of course, that all print publications have perfect standards. But one may assume that the set of checks and reviews enforced by many of them would have caught the article before it reached publication.
If you want admission to the club, you should first raise your standards.
I have seen the CASE tools come and go. A big Oracle project still looks like $1,000,000 per inch in the final binder.
I have seen Visual Basic come out, to make everything easy and better. Nope, and not just because it doesn't work half the time.
I have seen the menace of the Indian COBOL wizards come and mostly go.
I rember an old joke that went "UNIX is efficient, but so is wiping your ass with a belt sander." The reply was "You can always just use your hand -- easy, natural, visual, and even a child can do it, just like Windows NT."
Hard stuff is hard because it is hard. No matter how good the tools get, you still have to have some clue application on the front end. The clues aren't being generated any faster than before, not here, not abroad, and not in the form of CASE tools.
The issue that has not yet been resolved is one of the quality of software. Some of us who have been in the industry a little longer feel that it is far better to have $5 and a map to the grocery than a half-baked loaf. When companies figure out that it is a very bad idea to reinvent the wheel in HR every two years in another incompatible and unstable VB/Access/Excell monstrosity, the market then will make this one look loose, but it will ONLY be favoring qualified people.
Well, I work here in Houston and I frequently walk over to corporate from the data center (Polk and Fannin, where everybody who is anybody has everybody and the Mariott regularly gives everyone food poisoning). I do this in all weather -- it is easier than traffic. So it is hot. So what. Sometimes it is cool. Sometimes it is raining.
I still look a lot better in a suit than in a t-shirt and jeans and when I have to speak to VPs all the time I would rather not be the worst dressed person in the room.
Sheesh.. In Silicon Valley it seems anyone who can find the Start bar can make 50k easy. Not to say education is a crock..the aforementioned 50k kids are going to be bummed when their 45 & haven't advanced. Thats why you gotta start your own company..
I'm there, bro. 6 years, Solaris, SunOS, HP/UX and NEXTSTEP/OpenStep. Loved it then, hating it now.
Just did 3 weeks in the data center in Singapore, which was OK though.
However, I'm about to go back to business school and leverage my stellar resume, but from the whiteboard, not the keyboard.
Me @ 25: Woo, SysAdmin rocks!
Me @ 32: Geez, I'm such a loser for still being a SysAdmin...
UNIX all the way though, baby.
JAFG
Guess it makes morons harder to spot though.
But it is not surprising that people dress down
to geek level now when they have inherited the
world.
End of it-worker shortage? I'm not a sys-admin
but it seems a lot of their time is spent on
helping clueless users. As long as people are
as stupid as they are today when it comes to
computers it-workers will be in high demand.
Rob, usually love your stuff, and your "chronological advantage" over a lot of the less experienced element out there.
/is/ possible, but frankly, your rationale is like someone in the 30's saying that if the economy slowed down, they'd be able to get rid of the new fangled "telephone" they'd just got in their office - return to the good old days, etc. Not very likely.
/profile/ of non-suit employment can change [hopefully MCSE's get real jobs] but this net thing's only just started. Don't write it off yet.
But not today. The "Internet Economy" go down the toilet? It
The Net's changing everything, as you kind of admit with your comments on ASME. Sure, the
In the late 80s, people said that programmers would be put out of work with all the new application generators. Why pay a programmer to write a program when I user can just paint a program.
Now computers will be programming themself???
Companies are claiming that there is such a programmer shortage, so that that the visa limits must be increased. Many employers will say, if you don't have X number of years of XXX, then we can't even look at you. In 1988 I was called by a headhunter looking for someone with more than 10 years of DOS programming experience.
It's always going to change and people will keep saying this sort of thing all the time.
Injured worker wins against Mattel!
The 'fear factor' plainly shows. There is another reason to go to college, you know. I have met a lot more geeks in college than I do, say , working in IT departments. We want a guarantee. Yeah, Ive been coding assembly since I was 15. Yeah, Ive been doing production level stuff for years now. So What?? I think every good *engineer* must have went to school, and a good one to boot. I doubt that many of the 'well known' programmers have done half of what the geeks from good golleges have done. But your right about one thing -- goingto college wont make you good. Me and the fellow geeks notice this all the time. So we breeze through each course, bored to tears because we have actually applied bits bytes and boolean math to real world already. But what going to (a GOOD) college WILL do is make a good GEEK a whole lot BETTER. What job makes you build assemblers, linkers, compilers, documentation, and every data construct ever known to man within 2 years?? sounds more valuable to learn that doind SQL and perl all day.
I live and work in NYC. I am both the system administrator and MIS director for a fast growing company. I have observed there is not actually a labour shortage. Certainly finding qualified workers in computer industries is much more difficult than in other fields, but not because of a lack of people, the problem is the wrong philosophy.
Most companies in NYC fall into two catagories. There are the companies who think only the young are qualified for computer work, and there are the companies who are so entrained in corporate doctorine they believe those with several years of experience must get pay raises in scale with the initial abnormally high salaries, it is cheaper to hire or retire them so younger cheaper workers can be hired, (regardless of qualification.)
The reason for the complaining to Congress about a lack of qualified workers is to create an influx of younger workers so big business can make all the old people retire. All of the retired computer industry workers I have been exposed to are very intelligent and versatile geeks, yet they are living off of social security because no one will hire them.
If business made an attempt at hiring and maintaining qualified employees instead of cheap / young employees there would be no labour shortage, nor would we have the wide spread unemployment of the older generation. With the increased job security wages would actually decrease, and thanks to focuses on skilled employees company productivity and efficency would increase.
[I am a 23 year old hacker and management in one package. Take it for what is is worth.]
This is amazing. Now the bad science and math skills of most American UG's ( and it's true... I have been a TA for quite some time now ) is blamed on the foreign TA's now. What about the crappy American high school system which ( to throw out a random example) requires students to buy expensive graphical calculators to do basic math and many can't even use a calculator to,say, add one fraction to another. I know many Americans are frustrated that so many of the high paying technical jobs have been taken by the Indians. But don't forget that Indians are right at the center of the whole booming tech/net economy too. Check out a roster of, say, the top 100 new tech companies started last year and look up the list of founding employees. About forty percent of them are started by Indians ( At least that was the statistic for two years ago) Then go through their stock prices. This is what Indians have contibuted to the general prosperity of US in the last year alone.
So stop this borderline racist/xenophobic talk right now and get down to improve your high school system so that it actually teaches something to the students ( the non-asian-origin students that is... the asian kids can extract the maximum out of even this crappy system )
Rob, please show me one print magazine whose articles are riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Slashdot is not a magazine, and you are not an editor. Which is not to say that there isn't some interesting reading on slashdot. But personally, as an IT pro with a liberal arts background, I am embarassed by the level of writing I see here. Why not clean it up?
Argh, mind just went blank and erased what I was going to say.. sorta like yahoo mail likes to do... :) oh yes, I remember.
:D After the oil crisis faded, the cars from the States ballooned again (slowly) whilst "we" decided to protect against possible future repeats by keeping our vehicle sizes about the same. And I think, somehow, that We The Europeans have the better cars for it... You, sir. Do you think that the Lincoln Town Car is really suited to the town? Or the highway for that matter, in simulations I've tried featuring that model it's got 4.8 litres but can only make 73mph - what a fucking waste. And I mean that profanity most sincerely. Plus it looks like a box. Even Volvo and Fiat (long time fans of the straight edge and right-angle) have learned by now that boxiness sucks ass.
:D Anyone care to follow me? For I am the shepherd.... bwahahahahaa!
First, the car thing. It's a kinda wierd hierarchy. Modern American car is to 70's Buick as Modern European Car is to Modern American Car. A pimple on the bumper.
Maybe such automobilic difference is another follow-the-sheep example in relation to the other things you were talking about! Now we've just got to work out who's the sheep and who's the mountain goat..
[The preceeding text unashamedly inspired by Quentin Wilson's full-page, four-column rant in "Top Gear" magazine]
Well now that I've filtered out the casual browsers and those who read every article religiously to the end, I'd like to say something about the IT worker stuff as well. Like some other poster mentioned (I think s/he was the one originally mentioning the Sheep Effect as well), most of my careers advisors at school, and indeed my parents for a while, were actively encouraging me to get into computers and the associated businesses because "that's where the money is, that's where there's a shortage of workers, that's the thing you really enjoy". Too bad that many programmers I've heard about get a fairly average wage, and I really only tinker about with PCs because they break down so much and I'm the only person in the family who reads the manual... oops, digressing. I meant -- too bad that these guys first spotted the trend two or three years ago. I'm going to university now. It'll be three and a half years from now minimum, probably four and a half, before I'm out the other end and looking for a job, starting low of course. Working my way up would take a while as well. Do they think that there's going to be anywhere near as many jobs left in four, five years time (that's seven to eight after the trend emerged)? By then a large amount of the positions will be filled by A) People who noticed the trend at the same time as my parents/advisors, but were actually preparing for Uni at the time, and B) other people who went on a quick 6 or 12-month course and went straight for the jobs.
I know the score, I'm not dumb... I'm aiming for a Biology or a broader-based Natural Science degree, as I enjoy the subject, don't know anything about the state of the market at the moment (hopefully a steady growth, especially in the pharmaceutical departments), and by then everyone will have flocked to I.T... (damn, forgot my important third point and had to stick weak point number four in instead)
Whoops, it's getting late. Better stop this once-weekly net session before I hallucinate too many words.
Tahrey@Yahoo.com
Someday somebody's gonna invent a router or wide area switch that all you have to do is plug your little desktop appliance into and it configures itself instantly with no intervention on the part of anybody. Whether it's FR, ATM, ethernet or anything else, it will just sense it and configure itself accordingly. All the technology is built in at the factory. No need for hordes of wireheads and CCIE's to maintain the technology in the field. Appliances, just appliances.
The information carried on these mediums like television and radio is still important, but the underlying technology is trivial to most of us.
Engineers at TV and radio stations don't make a hell of a lot of money and I bet their numbers decrease every year due to further advances in automation technology.
Computer and network geeks are headed down the same path eventually, it's inevitable.
Bret Aguilar baa@relaypoint.net
I think you're right on the money.
There are _way_ too many inexperienced & incapable developers in this industry, often pulled in due to the incredible demand for _any_ developers. There is also a lack of experienced engineering management, w/ marketing or product management people taking their place. Too many of us have to fight to get responsible engineering practices put into play in our workplaces. How many times have you had to explain to engineering management the need for version control systems (ie CVS), bug tracking systems, source code commenting, and proper requirements specifications?
The funny part here is that Java, which has been an enabling force for software development (especially OOD), has also made it easier for those w/o any software engineering background to get jobs as developers. Too many of the above-mentioned battles take place because of Java-only, non-engineering types who don't know about their shortcomings.
Working in the ecommerce industry, focused on Java/Corba/Unix, I can say competent developers are indeed hard to find. You can't hire them, you can't find them and they do charge a high hourly rate.
I charge a high hourly rate and I still get 3 contacts a week wanting me to fly to Kansas City, Seatle or Montreal to do Java/Corba development.
The problem I find is that most of us high paid consultants is that we stir up some sort of jealousy in the corporate converted crew. These converts are COBOL/Mainframe or VB/VC++ guys 'retrained' in the ways of distributed computing. They still think procedurally and structure their OO applications as such. They have a hard time understanding multi-threaded issues and are still scared to move forward into new technologies (such as XML or using COS service like Naming, Trading or Properties).
Or there is the young crowd with no direct experience developing large scale systems that make snap judgements and write a new service to handle some new fucntionality. Forget logical partitioning of the application or requirements. Forget real knowledege even, they can talk the talk so they must be bright and know what they are talking about. Bullshit! They are inexperienced, so get their noses out of your asses management!
This coupled with incompetent recruiters makes things even more complicated for us competent consultants. I get a call, 'Hey, you know Java right?' me: yes I do. recruiter: Well, I have this great JavaScript position me: click.
It is generally thought that Indians, or other foreigners are generally brigther than their american conterparts. Obvisouly this is flawed. Just because one is an Indian doesn't mean they can walk the walk. They are like the rest of us. Some idiots, some extremely competent. The real difference is that I'll charge you for overtime, because it is the law that I get paid for what I work, while they don't, in general. (I'm not singling out Indians in this case, and, yes, I have Indian friends - I also know a couple of idiot Indians).
Another point is is that management inforces incompetence. The Its allow for underperformers to continue under performing. 'Hell, we are a big corporation, he/she is a nice person, let them ride the system' Forget they can't tell you what requirements are met by their code, they can't tell you a damn thing about their code except that it works (sometimes) and they sit on their ass soaking up the $.
Once the corporation (pick one) gets a hold of me, I tend to work my ass off (60 hour weeks) and get more and more responsibilities because I'm the only one in the whole freaking group that can do it. Finally I get burnt out (generally 6 months) and terminate my contract.
You better pay me for what I'm worth or I just won't work for you. I don't give a damn if I make more that your CEO, I'm making you money, giving you what you want, not sitting on my ass surfing the net every 30 seconds, or talkin in the hall, or in the cube next door. I'm producing, I am the critical path for all of your assignments because your people can't do the work. Your success depends on me. Pay me what I'm worth or I'll go to your competition.
We can discuss the exact excesses of French Monarchs later; Lou the 16th may have been agreat guy, but last I heard he didn't turn Versailles into public housing and cut off funds to his horde of freeloading nobles and cut taxes on the workers or anything like that; he was just *nicer* about ripping off the peasants than his predecessors had been.
Besides, as you all probably figured out, I was thinking about the Mel Brooks pastiche, not real French kings. ;-)
- Robin "it's good to be the writer" Miller
2. The "no current shortage of tech workers" thought was in the Linux Journal article. Hit the link. My personal feeling is that the tech industries are in the midst of a boom similar to one driven by construction, and those always end hard! "Those who don't study history are dommed to repeat it" & all that. But I'm no smarter than any other so-called pundit and I do not claim inspiration from [your favorite deity here]. I just toss out debating points, and try not to take myself too seriously.
3. I don't care much whether or not the ASME decides online editors should be allowed to join. It doesn't affect me (or you) one way or the other. I just feel a little sad for *them* is all. There are plenty of fine associations for online journalists and editors where I'd be more at home anyway.
As far as feeling ornery today, you're not alone. So am I - as you probably noticed. ;)
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
What ends "consruction booms" isn't usually a stop to the economic activity that created them, but rather a flattening of the growth curve that turns previous extrapolations sour.
Note that I do not claim to know *what* phenomenon, either economic, social or technological, will end the current computer & Internet boom, just that something or other will.
All booms end. And shortly before they do, all the people doing well during them come up with many reasons why this boom is different from all previous ones, and will continue on, unlike any that have gone before. And the people who make the "this will go on forever" predictions are always wrong. Every time.
Any number of unpredictable changes, from the sudden emergence of a new religion or attractive but dangerous social philosophy to a climatic disaster, could cause the computer and Internet industries to stop growing or even to contract.
By definition, "unpredictible" events can't be predicted. The only prognostication you can sanely make about them is that there will always be one sooner or later.
Or, don't get complacent. This universe is not a kind and gentle place. It has a strong tendency to deliver major upside-the-head smacks to anyone in it who displays too much hubris.
- Robin
What is one way that things are changing? VB, JavaBeans, and other RAD tools. I've talked to a lot of people and they aren't looking for too many highly trained programmers, they want a lot of people that can slap some components together with Visual Basic or Visual Cafe. Sure they need a few smart ones for architecture and a few other tasks, but they want to turn out a product quick not make the best product they can make.
I think that attitude will bite some companies that want to be around for a long time. If their RAD tool disappears that'll hurt. Maintence may become a problem too. If the system architect gets hit by a bus you're screwed.
Anyway there will probably always be a place for the good programmers and sysadmins, even if the shortage goes away. I don't foresee the shortage ending really soon now, but I also don't expect it to last forever. I know my old college CS department doubled in size with one freshman class when I was a senior. That was only a couple years ago.
--
?
A similar thing happened in the 80s when "Desktop Publishing" came into being. Suddenly, with a Mac Plus and a copy of Pagemaker, anyone could be a typographer and layout designer. Or could they?
Once the dust settled and the "desktop publishing" industry matured, those of us who were duffers learned that documents with 75 different fonts really didn't look all that good, and companies whose output really mattered (magazines, advertizers, etc.) still employed real layout designers.
I expect the same thing to happen with the web. Sure, just about anybody can make a web page these days. How many people are making really good ones?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Rob put out a good article for us to consider. He didn't say that he *knew* what the next big thing was, just that his instincts told him there would be one. We'll see if he's right. Genetic algorithms aren't widely talked about or understood, and therefore it's a good candidate for someone to think it might be The Next Big Thing. Sort of like AI was. (I'm still waiting for Cyc to be finished... :)
:)
And yes, sometimes terms evolve. But sometimes people want to use more relevant terms. And I thought 'Its' was pretty accurate and clever, and not a bad introduction, either.
Also, I think Rob was pretty correct about the engineers, too. My girlfriend wants to be one, and it'll probably be harder for her to find work than it will be for me (as a programmer), so I'd be willing to get a job near wherever she can. If this ever changes, I'm sure we can take care of ourselves, but it's a good thing to consider. Putting aside some money for a rainy day isn't a bad practice.
The problem with Jon Katz was he never even figured out how to talk to most of the population. Even his choice of diction was generally inappropriate for this forum. Now, if he wanted to write for Wired...
And although we *have* picky specialists here at slashdot, it's really for the computer enthusiast, like Byte was originally, or more generally anyone interested in "News For Nerds". It'd be nice having a specialist answering questions, or chiming in on "Ask Slashdot", but for something like this, I'd rather have a journalist speculate on a social phenomenon, or a historical trend. Also, I don't trust economists, because I know enough about statistics to not trust future predictions. Unless you find an important trend that people have apparently overlooked, you probably won't get anymore insight, either.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
DOW Dress-Oblivious Workers. Us.
Remember the proverb: The DOW that can be ironed is not the DOW.
Absolute baloney. I'm a sysadmin: I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, and I only know scripting languages. (Shell script, apple script, perl...you get the gist.)
I am surrounded on all sides by genius programmers who eat, drink, sleep and breathe C++. They make jokes entirely in algorthyms. They also wouldn't know a logical volume manager from a poisonous snake.
True story: an entire company full of programmers, young and hungry GenX'ers, old and savy baby boomers...twenty experienced and smart people. And they could not, for the life of them, figure out how to get a Sun workstation, with the latest version of solaris, running NIS. They spent the better part of a month arguing with Sun, trying to understand what the people on the newsgroups told them, and they eventually just gave it up as a bad job.
My first day, I walk into the computer room, and walk out fifteen minutes later with a properly confugured workstation. I even added a spare SCSI disk they had laying around to it.
I can only conclude that there are two orders of geeks: those who make the toys, and those who get to play with them. One cannot exist without the other, and neither has any clue how the other side works it's black magick.
SoupIsGood Food
We had some doubts there, but at least this suckup piece reaffirms Slashdot's ownership by Andover. See, everyone back east wears a suit and short circuits when productivity takes over formality. Got forbid the grey and blue of formalware get replaced by the green and yellow of power computing. There are too many companies who aren't Andover to do away with the word "suit" Instead of renaming them ITS let's instead create a new category for just Andover.
Yes, in 1995 anyone could be a programmer. Today your BS must be in an engineering field to even get looked at. The best coders at today's database firms are answering phones by day and hacking the software of tomorrow by night. The surplus of genious isn't in the future. It's right now.
Whatever. Maybe there's a shortage of suits because it's so damn hot but you have better luck getting oil out of a water spout than a programming job in Fl*rida. No entrepreneurs. No venture capitol. Just a lot of unemployment.
I found quite interesting your article... even if Katz missed the point again ;)
/. content.
However I'd like to add some comments:
Suites, Its, scmhmits, who cares?
Are you trying to coin a new term? Not worthy, indeed. Suits are far from extintion. Good for you and Andover that you have its. But Andover and your friends aren't the whole Corporate America, are they?
While you can see some dressing codes more relaxed than a year ago, some companies (both client and service providers) ask even developers to keep on some dressing codes.
It's not that I agree on that: I feel that any company that ask you to use 'Armani like' dressing can also ask you to wear 'Mao like' dressing anytime, I find it outrageous... however that's the way it works yet.
Using Its will be also confusing with a lot of more meaningful words and acronyms... nobody will use it. I encourage you to try a different word, original, non-acronym, meaning 'suit escapees' or something you like.
On IT shortage:
We live in a closed system called Earth, like it or not. As far as I know, we still can't hire martian developers. Yet.
However, as most people, you look in the american-centric way, being as guilt as ASME for overlooking a world wide web... or a World Wide economy.
Maybe IT shortage will finish in *United States*, however it has triggered a boom on foreign IT salaries trying to compete with american offers. That's good, of course, because encourages a world market and somehow leverages humongous salary differences among world salaries.
When I tried to enroll some friends (yes, we have a 'hire your friend' bonus), some of them accepted, but a lot of them also got significative pay raises at home. Having half of the world's developers in US doesn't mean that corporations over the world don't have to compete, so don't miss the point. Global Economy is the word.
So the guys on the cavern will have also to account for world economy impact... maybe you got cheaper IT people, but paying increases abroad made your cup of cofee slightly more expensive because Colombian companies had to pay a little more to their developers to keep them at home. I certainly hope that Wharton School of Bussines take that into account, since you seem to forgot it.
And, please: ideas and software development aren't oil. You can't compare both concepts (a natural resource and a human resource) in such an easy way.
Sooner or later there won't be oil. And if in some point of time we humans are out of ideas, then it will be time to call a Vogon fleet to clean this place.
And last, but not least, has anyone called your attention about being rude with your e-mail? Jesux case didn't make you look good at all, and your last paragraph also made me doubt... maybe it's time to go back to engineering or refine your style a little.
I hope this won't be moderated to flamebait... I really try to call your attention on some points and keep high
Don't worry. We have long been developing safeguards that will ensure the security of our respective jobs. I'm thinking of inventions like C, C++ and Perl. ;)
Jokes aside, here are my two cents on the ``IT people shortage''. The problem is the availability of useful statistics that can be used to understand the problem, if it exists.
There is much diversity in jobs related to computing. You could be creating a web page, debugging an embedded OS, fixing some COBOL code on a mainframe, or gluing some SQL queries to a graphical interface and in all cases be called an IT worker. To lump these kinds of people into one category and declare a shortage of them is a big mistake.
What if the alleged shortage exists because so many small to mid size businesses business need eight dollar an hour VB monkeys and HTML jockeys. It could be that the shortage can be attributed to the dramatic surge in the use of inexpensive PC's? These platforms comes with an inadequate OS and inappropriate applications that require endless tweaking, tailoring, and propping up with wooden sticks. Sure you can get the core middleware from a vendor, but making it all work for the business requires labor. Thousands of little companies are reinventing the same thing in-house. Also the dramatic rise of the internet has created opportunities, but many of these are menial work that is looked down upon by a real software developer---for example, the mindless work of cranking out HTML and web related scripts in order to create cheesy web sites. From what I hear, jobs are dull, often stressful and underpaid. People that know how to do them don't want to do them, hence shortage.
The question is, how relevant is a labor shortage in a particular area of computing to someone who has not interest in that area?
The way I see it jobs that are are at greatest risk are jobs that involve very narrowly defined set of skills. For example, if all you know is how to customize some particular proprietary software package, your job will disappear along with that software package. One year there may be a shortage of people whose resumes bear acronyms relevant to that package, the next year, those who don't retrain are gone. But the change which brought that about was ultimately due to changes brought about by real developers.
It was not my intention to knock RIT in general, I have several friends there majoring in Computer Engineering and Computer Science. I am just saying that the IT program there is characteristic of IT progams elsewhere, and there are alot of people with these degrees that just learn NT and TCP/IP and not Unix or much real meat behind computing and technology. You have to hand it to Microsoft, teach the kids NT and they will stick with it even if it is buggy and unstable in the workplace.
I live in Buffalo, NY and I am a freshman at SUNY Buffalo majoring in Computer Engineering. Last year I was horrified when I visited what is supposed to be one of the best technology schools in the region, RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), teaching a corse in IT. They were just teaching them Oracle and NT. 5 years at a top notch college to be an NT drone. I see people with less knowledge than I, who have such degrees, making top notch salaries as system administrators. I think that you are correct, a shortage will come to an end, and it will be the shortage in such people. Those that will survive the shortage will be those who have unix and linux expertiece and will be able make the transition from NT to Unix when Windows 2000 isn't what everybody thinks that it will be. I think that Unix people, that real programmers who know their stuff, Web designers, and engineers taking computers and finding new and provocative ways of using them to make the work of industry and commerce easier will still be in short suppy as long as colleges keep churning out glorified MSCEs. Then again that is just my opinion and I could be wrong.
First of all: Most of the people I know -- and I'm a junior in an excellent engineering-oriented university -- really don't know what they want to do. So when you're pressured to declare a major at the end of sophomore year, and you have no clue, and everyone tells you that you need to make money -- engineering seems like a surer bet than most anything else. Other safety-net fields are prelaw and premed.
:-)
:-)
:-)
My point exactly. You don't know what you want to do so you'll spend (I'm guessing here) close to $10,000.00 a year to find out? I'm not directly attacking you, but rather the mentality that has become ingrained into youth these days: Go to university or you'll never be successful.
I've convinced myself to slog through a major in Managerial Studies so that I have some sort of marketable job skills after I graduate.
Managerial studies can still be applied in the literary field, can it not? Perhaps it is not 'pure' but you could take that and hone it closer towards what you'd call a wonderful career? Same with business studies on the whole... I don't believe anyone goes into any kind of business field without some other kind of passion to apply those newfound business skills to.
I may not like it as well as something purely literature-oriented, but when it means the difference between 20K a year and 50K a year, preference becomes pretty irrelevant -- at least, it does when you're my age (20).
Are you expecting the $50k/yr as soon as you graduate? Unless you really know what you're doing, I can't see anyone getting that, at least not for more than a single year before being 'found out'. I started at around $20k but have reached $50k in 3 years by doing what comes naturally. And for some of the knowledge I possess, I'm still underpaid but the atmosphere where I work is worth the monetary 'hit'.
I thought when I was a kid that I could have my dream job and be well compensated for it. But unfortunately, society does not believe that contemporary art and literature are worth money.
At least not while the author/artist is living.
It sucks, but maturity, I have found, involves accepting that life sucks, dreams usually don't come true, and The Man will win in the end.
Hmmm... perhaps I'm not exactly mature then... I do have a kickass career doing what I love and I still do believe that the world is what you make of it. And I did it (actually still am doing it) without a university education.
It's sad, however, to think that accepting that the struggle is futile is what our youth are living these days. Then again I have been accused of being stubbron, pig-headed and insensitive in the past.
... and I keep saying "today's youth"... I'm 23 but I feel so much older.
Great first feature. It's exactly the kind of thinking that you point out that gets people in trouble and exactly why I never listened to the guidance councellors in school.
"Get thee into computers! Programming! We nEeD you there!" they practically screamed at me.
I headed into electronics instead. Not just digital electroncis which is what they are screaming everyone wants, but rather the hard stuff. Analog. RF. Magnetics. I still program, but it's certainly not applications programming. A little web stuff here and there to make things available but that's it. Embedded systems design is quite different than app design. Bugs (hardware especially) are a lot costlier and as such people aren't as ready to jump into the field unless they really know what they're doing. Why worry about doing as perfect a job as you can in the time alloted when you can do as good as necessary and release a patch later on?
Actually I take that back... it's not becuase they could do a better job, but rather because they probably can't. You need to have a knack, a passion, for programming rather than just be trained in it to do a good job and most programmers, IT professionals, web designers, etc. just don't have that 'edge'.
So back to what causes this. What happens when there's a shortage of position 'x'? All the sheep run for it and then by the time they've got their training there's a surplus and all those skills they spent years in school for (and for most, gathering tidy loans for) are now not so much in demand as they once were. The bills are coming in and the high-paying job isn't there so what do the sheep do? Listen to the guidance councellors again and when they say there's a shortage of position 'y', blindly repeat the cycle.
Education isn't bad. I'm not saying that. But most kids these days are taking the words of a fortune teller and basing their future on it instead of finding out for themselves and/or persuing what would be right for them. Worse than that, the fortune teller has a perogative to get as many students into university as possible to make the school stats look better. Who cares if they don't need to go. College is thought of as "for people too dumb to get into univeristy" in Canada, which is sad. Get in, get skilled, get out. Get a job and make some money so that if you want to really get into the field, now go to university and learn all you possibly can, if you have to go to university at all.
Sorry about that, but whenever I think of school that's all that comes to mind. People going into computers and IT and web design because everyone is telling them to. They aren't particularly skilled or have a knack for it, but by God they're gonna make some serious cake doing it. Until they find out everyone was thinking the same thing and they've surplussed themselves and the fancy cars and big houses don't have anything supporting them anymore.
It only takes about 15 seconds to tell someone: "Side with the label goes on top, metal part goes in first." THERE. That wasn't so hard, now was it? Now he/she knows.
Nope. This is the wrong way to explain it, because they might come across a PC with the fdd on its side. "Angled corner to the eject button" is the correct way :-)
dylan
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Heck no. Aside from the fact that IT workers tend to be raging individualists, unions work against the very principles that make IT jobs fun in the first place.
-Mars
Considering what programming is - describing how to do things - its not plausable that an automatic way of doing it will ever be developed, at least not for anything interesting. If you can do it automatically, its not really programming.
To put it another way, programming is inherantly less automatable than the tasks that are being programmed. As long as there are activities that can't be done automatically, there will be a superset of programs to do those things that can't be written automatically.
I wondered about you when you came aboard /.
;)
But the History of the World, Part I references, plus the extremely cool session at AWE, have convinced me you're a cool guy
But that was Louis XVI.
:)
Louis XIV was the Sun King. He was an absolute monarch who finally managed to get the nobles under control (which Louis XIII, of Muketeer and Cardinal Richelieu fame, had never managed to do).
Louis XV was an even more extreme successor. His famous quote was, "After me, the deluge", and he lived like he believed it.
Louis XVI was a genuinely nice guy who was not totally unamenable to reforms towards a more constitutional monarchy. But the rabble cut his head off anyway. Honestly, I'm a fluent French speaker, and I don't understand the French either
Now consider the fact that due to the increased salaries many people who otherwise wouldn't have chosen computer science are going into that field. For the sake of argument, let's call those people 'opportunists'. Now there are two possibilities:
One way to analyze this problem is to consider what these opportunists would have done if computing salaries weren't sufficient to draw them into that field. Let us suppose that the opportunists would largely have chosen engineering, math, physics, etc. if not for the increased salaries. I know quite a few outstanding programmers who came from those fields, so if this is indeed the case we might well be on our way to seeing an end to the shortage of developers. On the other hand, suppose the opportunists would have largely chosen management, finance, etc. if not for the increased salaries. While I admit the evidence is largely anecdotal, I personally don't know anyone from those backgrounds that I would consider a top notch developer, and I know a lot of developers. Certainly, I believe we would all agree that in general, a person with a math/science background is more likely to be a great programmer than a person with a business background (though of course, there are always exceptions to the general rule).
So the questions is, which set of people is more likely to answer "money" when asked: "What is your primary motivation when choosing a profession?".
I believe it is far more likey that the business folks would list money as their primary motivation. What people often do not realize is how rare the talent for programming is, in general. Throwing more bodies at the problem (particularly bodies that come from a group not known for its history of producing quatlity programmers) won't change that.
The only thing that could ultimately change the situation is economics - if the demand for new software falls, the shortage of skilled developers would be diminished. I think this would only occur via an economic downturn as computers are an integrated part of our lives and businesses and that integration will only increase.
Anyway, that's my take - flame away.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
1. Where I work (and in my position before my current one), you see a lot of suits actually wearing suits. They're not gone yet, by a long shot. I suspect Andover's not your typical tech company.
2. Was the reason there's not really a shortage of tech workers in that article somewhere? If there was, I missed it.
3. If they want to be a journal for print magazine editors, that's their business. I've got my doubts that hurling insults at them is going to change their minds.
Guess I'm just feeling ornery today.
---
Consult, v. t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
Software industryis different. S/w engg never write s/w without bugs. Try to find out how many people today are still fixing bugs and enhancing software in the 1970's and 80's. You will be surprised. The problem with this industry is that there is no good proven quality standards being followed. More than 50% jobs today are maintenance related.
If you want to survive in this industry you have to be on the bleeding edge of technology. Good enggs just cannot afford to do a 9-5 job and go home , They have to do extra reading to keep up with the new technology. People who dont keep up with technology are the ones who will bet left behind. I usually classify technology in two branches :
- Hard. This one takes a lot of time to learn and you got to have solid grasp of concepts to be working in this area. example writing protocol software, OS's etc.
- Soft. This one is easy to leanr. You dont really need a BS degree. A six month course is all that you need. This technology can get outdated easily..but it is also easy to learn similar new soft tech existing at that point in time. example html, perl etc.
I havent got time to organize my thoughts...but a last thought is..if we really predict that the world is going to see major technological advances next century and I am sure there will be many related to new internet technologies (access, interface) I dont really see a point where the glut os s/w engg will end.
CP
But last I looked, OPEC was just about dead and oil was selling in the $10 - $20 per
barrel range. (...) Oil got too expensive, so we (the oil-importing countries) simply stopped using so much of it.
The end of the oil crisis had nothing to do with us using less oil. Oil/energy consumption continues to grow. High oil prices made it worthwhile for oil importing countries to start off shore oil production, and buy oil from more diverse (i.e. not all middle eastern) sources, which reduced the control OPEC countries had on oil price, and caused the prices to drop.
Although I dont have any evidence for this, I am convinced that the death (or hybernation?) of OPEC is Saudi-Arabia's secret payment to the US for fixing the Saddam Hussayn problem.
You did a fine job on your feature, Roblimo.
I thought your piece was very though provoking and "to the point", which is difficult to find in today's modern media. While I don't necessarily agree with you in the fact that the current tech shortage is a falacy, I do agree with you on some of the other points you make.
I also found your discussion of a number of topics particularly interesting. I am all about getting to the meat of the matter and cutting out as much verbiage as possible. It was refreshing to see so much content is so little space.
For what it's worth, I think Slashdot (and many other fine online publications out there (although Wired is certainly questionable these days)) has every right to be called a magazine. Good luck on your attempts to gain the respect and peer acceptance Slashdot rightfully deserves.
Please grace us with another feature soon!
- Froggy
There's a major, major factor that you're missing. Until the early/mid eighties, there were very few tools for engineers to use. Everything was done on paper, the only real 'tools' were calculators, lookup tables, and (in the real early days) slide-rules. Because of this, companies employed *scores* of engineers. My dad has told me stories from one of the engineering departments he worked in. There was row after row of engineers with their desks/drafting boards. My dad worked in a group that designed in-house test equipment... that group alone had around 20 engineers. Contrast that with the situation today: he has one other engineer working for him (admittedly, they're horribly short-staffed). I design engine computers for one of the Big Three (I'm actually employed by Motorola), and we have about 5 engineers on two different product teams.
Ironically, what changed much of that is what (indirectly) created the current IT shortage: the computer. Instead of manually changing a paper schematic, it's now done electronically. Design tools are much better, you can simulate your design without building it, etc., etc.
Another major factor in the reduction of engineering force is what today's technology is capable of. My dad designed a 6502 based embedded system in the mid 80s... he put over a man year into it. I've designed an engine computer that has approximately the same functionality (though, a lot more horsepower obviously) using a PowerPC derivative, and I've got maybe 2 man months into the actual design (if even that much). Most of this is because most of what I need is already in the micro I'm using... my dad had to use discrete circuits all over the place.
So, how does this tie into IT and programming?
Ask yourself this; how good are the tools you're using? Are they really all that good, compared to what they potential might be? Of course it's difficult to answer such a forward looking question, but I think that the tools will continue to get better... *much* better. Technology will probably keep improving too. 5 years ago, the idea of doing a time-critical embedded system using C code was revolutionary, if not unheard of. But this is exactly what our customer will be using on this PowerPC engine computer. Of course, there are countless other examples.
BTW, I find it interesting that after the 'layoff culture' of the 80s that it's now very difficult to find engineers. It will be interesting to see how any IT trends affect engineering trends.
Yes, excellent article, and I wholeheartedly agree. My view of the IT shortage is that some of it is purely artificial. Look at the job ads online or in print. Companies want to hire people with very specific skills for today, with no view toward the future. The companies make money with IT types, but generally lose nothing if they're not around.
I'm a mathematician/computer type. I keep my skills "up to date", and stay clear of management positions. The money is steady and good. Middle managers are expendable, but the pawns such as myself are still actually employable.
Graham
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
Us and them [not the Pink Floyd song]
Su and Its
Super Users and Irons T Shirts
Was that intended Roblimo? ;-)
Graham
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
Re unemployed hardware engineers: this happened mostly because the Defense Department procurement budget was gutted by the Bush/Clinton administrations and the pre-11/94 Democrat congress. So far the post-11/94 Republican congress has failed to correct the damage, courtesy of Clinton's veto pen. Decimate the biggest market for those engineers and yes, salaries and employability go all to hell. Throw in the technophobic attitudes towards nuclear power for good measure. (Had an interesting conversation with a disgruntaled nuke-tech a while back...)
Re don't spend the future: ditto. I'm keeping my debt level in check, even tho the U.S. federal tax code is rigged to encourage massive mortgage debt (best tax deduction on the books). All these folks with their heavily mortgaged McMansions and nice debt-fueled stock portfolios are going to look real stupid when/if the market tanks and their debt level doesn't. (This is what Greenspan is really worried about when he talks about "irrational exuberance", but he hasn't found the right words. Nuking the deductions in favor of a dramatically lower tax rate, as the Flat Tax proposed by Steve Forbes does would correct this serious economic instability.) I'm not saying don't have a little fun, and certainly not saying don't buy stocks, just watch that debt!
At the moment I guess it depends were you are. Here in the Midwest it's almost impossible to even get your resume looked at with less than five years experience.
You ever tried to get five years experience as a System Administrator when everyone wants five years system administration experience before they will even hire you?
Maybe you can't see the end yet but around here it is fairly obvious.
Minne-snow-da: Winter is comming...
The story was Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Probably many more with the same theme, but that was Vonnegut's breakthrough novel. It's also the one that really got him labeled as a SF writer because it was rather ahead of the times in 1952 or so. But as many in Detroit could tell you in the late '70's or '80's, it was fairly accurate.
First of all, there is nothing any less "precise" in the term "suits" than in the word "tawdry". Not too many people buy their baubles at fetes of St. Audrey any more, bu the word remains, partly because it is aberrations like this that give human language its vibrancy. In several contexts "suits" has ceased to have any relevance to the dress of the referent. This is a good thing, even if you're not an etymologist. The phenomonon goes by several names, but in honor of the educational board of Kansas, let's call it "evolved terminology". When we try to stop the natural flow of language, we come up with abominations such as Roblimo's "its". I wonder whether Roblimo would junk the term "its" if the referents stopped wearing T-shirts.
On to more serious matters: it is pretty odd to paint engineers as a bunch of whimpering, over-privileged prima donnas (look another evolved term!), especially when you're putting MBAs on the other side of the fence. The immense bonuses and stock-options that are thrust at even mediocre businessmen in this economy is far more of a distortion than the perks of engineers. But, at least if you take the viewpoint of that august journal _The Economist_, both trends will continue as long as America continues along its asset-price inflation. When this bubble bursts, it will affect everyone: some over-privileged engineers and managers alike will find themselves pumping gas, and many unfortunale members of society will find themselves yanked under the poverty line.
This is pretty basic stuff, and it has nothing to do with the real or supposed shortage of engineers as much as it does with the distortions of the present economy: a lens that affects workers at all levels.
Of course, The Economist might be wrong and there might be a true miracle in productivity afoot. But in this case, Roblimo would _still_ be wrong (and more so because of his comparison to the mid-century recessions).
And as for the very idea of genetic algorithms replacing programmers. Please park this futuristic nonsense. GAs are a very deterministic way of harnessing implicit paralellism inheret in certain problem-spaces. They are not some form of dark voodoo. There is nothing in them that will make them sudden arbitrary problem-solvers.
I really don't like being so harsh, but it's the same issue that came up when Jon Katz started writing features. On a forum such as /., with so many picky specialists, it's probably better to be encouraging features from specialists rather than journalists. I don't consider /. to be a main-stream medium. Yes, I know it might be a bit hypocritical of me to say so when I haven't submitted a feature myself. I might just find the time to correct this.
--
Uche
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross" -- E.P.
It's important to distinguish between supervision and maintenance, on the one hand, and research and development, on the other.
Sure, system administration requires a high level of competency, but it is something which many people can learn to do with training and adequate experience. Let's be honest, this is glorified janitorial work most of the time, something that needs to be done, but doesn't require a whole lot of genius. There are exceptions, of course, but generally it requires only the understanding and use of tools which have been provided.
On the other hand, to develop a new product or tool requires significantly more skill. And it is a well known fact that top programmers are ten times as efficient (at least) as the rest. This has to do with a natural capability, something which cannot be taught or even learned through experience, you either have it or you don't.
For those who are in the first category, high salaries will not last forever, as the market will certainly supply an ever increasing number of people who are willing to learn the skills needed in order to board the gravy train. It's actually somewhat astonishing that so few people today have so little clue how to administer even their own desktop. I think more and more people are becoming clueful, but this is counterposed with the rapid increase in new users which have even less of a clue than the prior set. This trend is likely to continue for awhile, so there is some job security in the medium term, but eventually there will be some equilibrium and salaries will trend downward.
On the other hand, those who have skills which are innate, whose abilities cannot be reproduced by formal methods, will continue to remain highly prized and well compensated forever.
Peace and love, y'all
I am in complete agreement that the current booming market for people to develop new applications won't last forever. At some point IT will cease being a place where a skilled person has a non-zero chance of becoming a millionaire. There is one thing, however, that will keep the more skilled programmers paying the rent long after the businesses have their e-commerce in place. As poorly as this bodes for what I'll be doing with the rest of my life, I'm guessing that even after the gold rush is over we'll all be doing bug-fixes and maintainance (sp?) for the rest of our careers. People will become dependant upon the applications we're writing now. Unfortunately, for most applications there is a certain development life-cycle at the end of which is a decline in quality. The original programmers are gone, the new people doing the bug-fixes don't have as complete a grasp of the big picture as the original programmers, new bug-fixes are not quite as consistent with the original design as they could be, code-quality degenerates, maintainability degrades rapidly, and a new code base is required. The only way I'm going to be humping a gas-station job 25 years from now is if somewhere along the line people figure out how to write software that becomes perfect and then stays so. I don't see it happening. Don't get me wrong.. I'm investing and saving my money, as there's never any gaurantee that I wont' need it tommorrow.. I'm just not going to try looking for that next killer industry any time soon.
Last I looked oil was doing $22-$23 per barrel. Not $50, but definitely more then the mentioned range.
Tob
I have a 2 year degree and while I can't claim to be a "great programmer", I can say that I know a hell of a lot more than some people I've met with 4 year degrees. And unlike many here on Slashdot, I won't claim to have learned assembly when I was 3 years old either. :^)
I had an Apple ][ when I was a kid and messed around with it. I learned some BASIC and Pascal and even assembler, and I was pretty good at it. But I was a lot more into skateboards, punk-rock, chicks and beer :^) So I forgot about computers for about 12 years.
But then I got married and settled down and decided to go back to school and get a real job (being a vagabond is fun but there's no security in it :^). I remembered how much fun I used to have with that Apple and how I was one of the better programmers in my classes. So I went to the local community college and took the standard CS track which included VisualBasic but also Pascal, C, C++, algorithm analysis, systems analysis, unix, win32 with MFC, and x86 assembler.
I aced every class and graduated with a 4.0; they handed me a diploma and said great job! Summa Cum Laude! You ought to be proud.
And I've been working as a sysop / helpdesk operator ever since because, due to all the mouse-clicking, M$ worshipping ditto-heads that are come out of "IT" programs nowdays, nobody in their right mind would hire a programmer with a two year degree and no experience.
So if people are so desperate for IT workers, why am I making $8/hr and answering the goddamn phone all day while all my applications get rejected by hiring managers who want someone with 9 years professional C++ experience who will work 60 hour weeks for $36 grand / year ?
I work with a "programmer" who doesn't know the difference between ftp and telnet and thinks COBOL is really cool. And a network manager who couldn't write a DOS batch file to save her own life (I kid you not, I tried to debug one of her login scripts and she was MAKING THE SHIT UP AS SHE WENT ALONG! Really! I mean making up syntax and keywords out of thin air! The mind boggles...) And of course they both get paid a lot more than I do.
I wrote some robust, self-documenting Perl scripts to make the lioves of us operators easier and management is like, "Oh, that's nice."
I'm going back to school for a real degree but after seeing this culture of money grabbing scam artists and liars who pretend to be computer experts getting the good gigs while I waste away here, I'm having second thoughts about computers as a career, as much as I love to code.
Hmmm, maybe I'll be a plumber.
I just got done explaining that people who are only in it for the money will wind up competing with themselves - not people like you and I!!!
--
I have a friend that is more of a SW than HW guy, so no biggie.. but if you really want to be a geek, you gotta know both. And about your ignorance - hrmph. Most people can't fake it more than a few minutes at most.. and if there's ever any doubt, I wing a couple random acronyms by them and see what happens. Since you have a sw background, I'd probably throw GUI, API, OLE and FAT at you. :)
On your excuses part, formal education probably won't do you much good until college -- it's just a given. Best bets are to find semi-current books ( less than 3 years old ), and track down a few local gurus to help you out on the grey areas. QBASIC isn't programming *g*, and it's quite obvious you're a high school student... I'd guess frosh/sophomore. You're in the ballpark as far as your computer knowledge, I wouldn't fault yourself too much.. it sounds like you live somewhere that's still in the technological dark ages...
As for me having a touch of 'elitism', you're probably right. I have a strong aversion to stupid people - esp. ones that ask you the same questions over and over again instead of asking you once, clearing up any ambiguities they may have about the answer, and moving on. I don't like people who waste my time - I only got 24 hours each day to do something productive, and spending a couple hours of it helping some retard figure out which side up to put the floppy into the drive doesn't fit that definition.
--
Anyway, back to the issue of IT shortage - yeah.. right. I don't know about you, but I spent alot (and I mean *alot*) of time doing tech support. The vast majority of people may eventually become computer literate enough to send e-mail and browse the internet without having to call us someday.. but I can guarantee you there will always be the same percentage of people who actually enjoy testing the limits of computers. And 'geek posers' are very easy to see through.. just ask them what BIOS, EIDE, or PLL means. If you really want to be mean, go into 'raw Data mode' and start throwing out random tech terms like so:
Well, after I reconfigure SMB on a VAX to use my 8.4 Gb HDD instead of my old SCSI, I'm going to restart all the daemons, and then check for network connectivity using vi and a toothpick. :) If networkweek was still running bofh weekly's, I'd suggest the excuse-of-the-day as well.
Anyway, my point is that while lots of people will flock to the money to get into computers, it really won't affect those of us who *really know the technology, and enjoy working with it*. The wannabes will compete with themselves...
--
I started out in computers way back with an Atari 800, and my modern computing started with Windoze, but I quickly learned NT shortcomings for myself and when I was introduced to UNIX, Xwindows, and Unix-like systems, let's just say it was love at first sight. My main PC at home is a Linux SMP machine, my fav WM is XFCE.
I live in the NYC metro area (No. NJ), and I just laugh when I hear LANOP commercials on 770 WABC AM radio about how MCSE's are making so much money and about the shortages. I LOVE IT! I love it because as long as the general public knows so little about UNIX, UNIX people will be scarce and my salary will keep going up!
The avg salary I am seeing in this area for good UNIX admins is anywhere from upper US$50k to US$140k if you know UNIX and Oracle/SAP well. There are even Junior UNIX admin jobs from US$65k-US$80k/yr. I see many ads in the US$80-US$100k range for intermediate to advanced UNIX admins. Then again, just to live in this area comfortably you need to make close to $100k but that's another story. I live in Bergen County, NJ, which is one of the top 10 most expensive area in the US for Real Estate. Sucks.
Keep getting those MCSE's and keep me scarce is my motto.
==============================
Windows NT has crashed,
I am the Blue Screen of Death,
Take the 'Power-Nap' craze. Employers are actually setting up rooms for their employees to take 10, 15, 20 minute "power" naps. It refreshes them, and boosts their energy and productivity. Likewise, a lot of employers have figured out that techies, and programmers, and others are just NOT comfortable wearing suits to work. So? So that means they're busy concentrating on their discomfort, therefore they're not as productive. Ties feel restrictive, and suits are heavy and bulky. Get rid of that crap, and employees are happy.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Interestingly, the ASME site includes a set of guidelines for editors and publishers; of these guidelins, the ASME site says this: "In the interest of helping editors, publishers and advertisers maintain an industry-wide standard that helps preserve the distinction between advertising and editorial, ASME has expanded the guidelines to include Internet sites, custom publishing and marketing joint promotions."
Interesting that they are willing to expand their editing and publishing guidelines to include the net, but won't accept net-based publications into actual membership (and therefore, presumably, into the decision-making process about these guidelines).
Are you saying that CS workers will become like the medical and legal profession? The "wash-out" rate in CS/CSE/CE is about as high, I would guess. Perhaps it will lead to Bell curving senior classes to only pass the best.
We need something like a bar exam or such to weed out the CS majors that don't really understand networking/architecture/OS/etc and how they interact.
I know a person with a CS degree that can't write a simple program in ANSI C. It is funny. =)
"...there's always the typewriter, but if the pacemaker isn't put in properly there isn't much to fall back on)."
Who do you think writes the code for pacemakers and things like ABS? CS majors killed 5+ people from radiation overdoses from bad programming on an X-ray machine recectly. They make the storage of the varible for rate static. That one line of code killed people and harmed servral others.
I have some friends (well, quake clan members) who went to RPI, and they're all NT droids to the last. In fact, one of em started an ISP and was running it on NT...he was surprised when it went belly-up. "What, no shell account??"
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Recursion... I love it...
Yes, but whats that got to do with the price of tea in D'ni?
While most of the actual tech companies seem to have gone for a more relaxed dress code, the same is not yet true in IT departments of normal companies. As of about half a year ago, the insurance company I was working for still required men to wear a button down shirt, and tie. ( They had much more lax dress codes for females, but that is another debate for another time ).
During the time that I worked for them, my project group was moved to a facility of it's own, and the project team was allowed to wear just "business casual" (polo shirt and khakis for the most part). When one of the VP's got wind of this, he blew his stack and demanded that we comply with company dress code.
Needless to say, this same company does not have much luck with younger developers.
As far as there being no real shortage of tech workers... That may be what the stats say, but just last week I was at a job fair where companies looking for CS majors outnumbered the actual graduating students, almost 2-1 (and that's assuming that none of the students go to grad school). We may be heading for something worse, but it doesn't seem bleak yet...
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
If there really becomes a shortage and the the pay of the IT workers goes down. Wouldn't you expect the IT workers to unionize and drive the prices back up?
So stop this borderline racist/xenophobic talk right now and get down to improve your high school system so that it actually teaches something to the students ( the non-asian-origin students that is... the asian kids can extract the maximum out of even this crappy system )
Please tell me you were trying to be ironic in this last statement.
If not, then you need to go back and re-read the definition of "racism"; I don't see how your parenthetical comment is any less "racist" than the ones you're decrying.
Jay (=
LASCR - I should know this, but alas...
UART - Universal Asynchronous Receive and Transmit
CMOS - Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor
TTL - Transistor-transistor Logic
Schmitt - Gate lacking the separation between logical 0 and 1, instead switches smoothly at one voltage on the rising edge, another on the falling edge.
Open Collector - Gate at high impedance instead of 0 or 1
Totem-pole - process of creating a giant OR-gate with a bunch of chained open collector gates and a pull-up resistor
hFE - don't remember exactly, measures current ratios for BJTs
Vcc - Common Collector voltage - usually 5V for standard TTL. Don't know the rest.
10Brett-T
Oh, bother.
I remember a WSJ article a month (2 months?) ago that talked about how people are leaving the "hard" sciences in favor of technology, and how in the future, the world is going to need less HTML programmers... That and the last ask /., where "JD" said he was going to college in two years but only wants a trade school runs along the same (and equally depressing) lines. Personally, I see the need for good developers, requirements analysts, design architects and the like are going to go up. But as new software becomes more of a scripting process (under a component based system) then the demand for mediocre programmers will go down. The worst thing that anyone can do is allow themselves to stagnate. /ZL
Yes, you always hear the argument about throwing a bigger processor (or more hardware) at something in lieu of efficient programming. That kind of thinking can work if the character of the job stays the same, but it doesn't. The complexity of the jobs are changing and getting more complex, particularly with broadband and real time media delivery.
Just look at our desktop systems now. Applied to the kind of work being done five years ago they'd burn through the floor. So why does a 450 MHz machine still feel slow sometimes? (I must be getting old, becuase I still can't believe a machine rated in 100s of MHz could ever be slow). We aren't doing the same things we were five years ago.
Straight line approximations using boosted processor speeds will only go so far, but as the job gets more complex, the need for efficient programming can only increase.
IT tech shortage - No
Competent IT tech shortage - YES
I'm sorry, but every one of these IT events I have gone to (EXCLUDING Linux stuff) most of the other techs I meet are pretty worthless.. Being a Network Sysadmin takes alot more than a MCSE holder (knowing how to boot a computer takes more than that thing) a Competent Sysadmin needs to know how to deal with the Systems, servers, networks, hardware, special software that the general manager installed and dont work and isnt a part of the Corperate "package", how to make new cables, can crawl through celings running cables, deal with a laptop that takes down the network because of bad configurations, keep from killing employees because they wanted to show their co-worker this nice happy99.exe program someone sent them in email, can sweet talk a hard drive vendor to exchange a few out-of warranty hard drives, get a memory vendor to actually replace bad ram, trouble-shoot hardware(Sometimes to the chip level) can deal with the office worker that whines because you took away her PIII and replaced it with a PII (Note: change the dang sticker to shut them up) and finally do your job without spending a dime and fixing the mess the last 2 sysadmins left you......etc....
This is what a real sysadmin does, we are fire-fighters,paramedics, and magicians... and most of them that I have met(dont even get me started on hiring someone!) cant do this, and those that can... we already have jobs!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've heard the exact same words five years ago, when I started out in consulting -- man, we're getting killed by those consulting shops who bring over a dozen people from third-world nations on a work visa. They put them up in a rented house in the suburbs, pay them $10/hr to code, bill the client $40/hr, thus undercutting everyone else out there, but still make out a fortune.
Frankly, I always thought that this was merely a ploy by the headhunters to get me to knock down my consulting rate. I always thought that this was complete nonsense, and I still think that it's complete nonsense.
Since then, my consulting rate has tripled, despite all that doom and gloom. I don't know where you find those people, who will replace you for half your paycheck, and I don't really care. Frankly, I think they've been very helpful, if anything, because many times have I come in on a project, to find telltale fingerprints from shoddy programming work from people with unreadable names all over it.
The notion that any specific group of people has a disproportionate amount of geniuses seems to be quite absurd to me. The number of bright and intelligent people in third world nations is probably no more or no less than the number of bright and intelligent people in any other similar population sample. This stuff never concerned me, and gave me no reason to be concerned about.
--
Really?
Perhaps you should tell that to all the headhunters out there who keep filling up my answering machine, despite the fact that I have not sent out a single resume in almost three years.
The situation in IT is so out of whack, that everything you have learned about the job market, elsewhere, is thrown out the window.
--
Those are not headhunters that materialize out of thin air, randomly. Most of them are headhunters I have had, in fact, had contact years before.
The fact that these blokes, who I faxed a resume two years ago, call me kinda tell me that they have to really dig deep and hard to find anyone who's available.
--
This is pretty much my take on it. In addition to graduating with a comp-sci degree, I double-majored in mathematics. This is what I was referring to earlier -- you have to have a certain mind set, a way of thinking, in order to be a good programmer. I think it comes from being immersed heavily into logic and mathematics.
Towards the end of my freshman year I discovered, to my great surprise, that at the beginning of the year I got myself enrolled in an honors mathematics course due to a slight "mistake". That's a long story, but looking back on it, this was the best "mistake" I ever made.
--
I do not believe that the shortage of highly-qualified, high-skilled, programmers will end anytime soon.
Sure, there'll be plenty of people whose eyes glaze over while reading the classifieds and seeing the salaries and rates of computer programmers. They'll turn around, and say to their drinking buddy: "Hey, Zeke! Look how much computer programmers are being paid these days (burp)! I think I'm going to go and become a computer programmer!!! (hic)".
So, they'll go to some diploma mill, go through the motions, and, presto! New! From Spishak! It's "The Programmer In A Box!!!!!!" Instant ASP! Instant Perl! Instant C++!!
So, the great unwashed will be hired en masse by clueless companies who will think that they'll save a bundle by hiring these new programmers at entry-level salaries or rates. They'll tinker around, for a little while, and things will seem to be fine for some time. Then, everything starts to crash and burn, the environment at work starts to get a bit tense because all the problems, so the new programmers will split, and the companies will be left holding the bag.
Who do you think the companies will turn to, now?
Yup, meanwhile, the Programmer In A Box[tm] is busy running the scam at another clueless company.
I did not go to college and sign up for the comp-sci major because I wanted to make big bucks. In fact, when I was in school, programmers didn't really make that much money. They made a good buck, or two, but not that much. I became a programmer because that's what I really wanted to do.
Predictions that IT worker shortage will end soon are generally based upon the alleged scores of students signing up for computer science majors or computer schools, nationwide. My opinion is that the main attraction for most of these people is only the high salaries and rates that are being paid to highly qualified and skilled programmers.
Except that just the desire to earn big bucks will not make you a good programmer. There's a very good reason why good programmers make good money. Computer programming is a very mentally intensive job. To be a good computer programmer you not only have to know the computer language of choice. It also requires a certain mental discipline, I'd even say that it requires a certain way of thinking. Just knowing how to write printf("Hello world.\n"); is not going to help you much when you've been given a core dump, the source code, no way to reproduce the problem, and were told to figure out what happened, and to fix it.
I believe that very few of these people, who are looking in to cash in on the supposed IT worker shortage, are really prepared for the job. And I wish them luck. I really do. The more they screw up, the more money the rest of us will make, cleaning up their mess.
And even if I'm completely wrong, the bottom line is that we'll always have 10, 15, or more years of experience more than they will do. That cannot possibly ever change, so no matter how many bodies you'll throw into a computer science major, the number of people who already have decades of experience will never change.
... Man... /. needs a good spell checker and grammar checker.
--
What's wrong with just calling these people 'suits' -- everyone knows what that means and it is already in common usage.
Geeks are always in demand. They may have to change to stay on the ball and stay bleeding edge but this seems to be a geek strongpoint. Sure fakers and those who are to comfortable to stay on the edge will get rolled over one day but as long as there is a 'civilized' world there will be high paid geeks. Look around you, every single thing you own was designed by geeks at some point. Take an aerial view of your city - yes it was all designed by geeks too. Geeks hold all the real power in this world because if we ever went on a mass strike EVERYTHING would grind to a halt. Stop letting managers and politicians push you around. We can live without them but without us they would become savages or die. If anything is going to change the current system it'll be open source.. shifting the money away from the assembly line coding and into the service industry where it belongs. Code should be free but helping someone who can't read a manual is worth $$$. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Generally Universities have a better track record. My best employees both have 4-year degrees from a local University, and both of them have taken serious course studies in computational theory and the like.
Unfortunately, UVSC's course is also a 4-year program. It is nowhere the calibre of the local University.
My job training, although pretty good, is obviously going to be limited in certain areas. I've had to pick up what I can from my 2 college grads, and learn the rest on my own. Not an easy task.
Ok, I agree with a lot of the posts I've read so far on the "shortage" of IT professionals. What is the term money people use with regards to a market... artificially inflated?
That's how I view the high-tech job market right now. Last semester I was browsing through the CS/IS books at UVSC, where I go to school. What was the text being used for CS 425? Sam's Club "Teach yourself C++ in 21 Days." At UVSC, Discrete Mathematics is covered in 1 semester. And we only looked at about 5% of the textbook, which I paid a hefty $50 for.
I'm an IT manager for my company, and I've interviewed a lot of kids with 2 year associates degrees from various colleges. What do they learn? Crash course in Microsoft VB, ASP, Office, etc.
It seems that even our scholastic training (from many institutions) is superficial in this area, designed only to "artificially inflate" a job market.
Although there may be plenty of people out there pretending to be programmers and administrators, when was the last time you ran across a real programmer -- someone with real experience who actually understands the "whys" of programming?
True programmers transcend any specific language or platform. They don't break down in tears when they are asked to write something outside of their native Visual Basic.
Roblimo has solved the IT shortage by expanding the scope. Now, that term includes all of the ironed-tee shirt folks as well! Forget the threat from foreigners, it's the Its that are gonna fill the void!
"How can there be an IT shortage with all of these Its running around?"
"I dunno boss. Lemme get back to hotswapping these IDE drives."
[zap]
"Ouch! Now I gotta change my shirt..."
Later,
- EB
Look at the number of "it professionals" it takes to keep up a large corporate NT network. I don't see demand going down. The MCSE certification costs big $$$. So MCSE's are going to want demand big $$$. Also, it is a full-time job just keeping up a proxy server, a mail server, a file server, a print server, and a web server. So I don't see demand going down for MCSE's unless one of two things happen (1) M$ writes better code ??? (2) Businesses stop using M$ products. Well, that is my M$ bashing for today...he he... The demand for M$ peons will always be there because of the product. How much they get paid is another story.
When I started programming, I was told: "If you take this job you will be committing yourself to this language forever." The language happedned to be called SPAN. It was written in a combination of Fortran II and 7094 assembler. Within five years that job was gone. Yet I still work for a version of the same company. I have learned about one new language every three years. I still think of myself as a programmer.
However, I no longer spend the majority of my time writing code. Nearly half, but it used to be every day and hang out nights in the computer center, whenever I wanted fast turnaround. I no longer expect to make a batch of changes on a paper form, transcribe them to a computer readable form, and then wait for a courier to carry the results back and forth. Nobody writes spreadsheets. etc.
Things have changed a lot. I feel that one must expect them to not only keep changing, but to continue to increase their rate of change. I must admit that the "programming" profession has already lasted 10 years longer than I predicted when I initially began to work in the field. And it doesn't look dead yet. I can't imagine the system that could take the instructions that I get and produce valid output from them. But I can imagine lots of "intermediate forms". By the time we have computers that can take a vague set of instructions ("Make a database to have it look like this report, and besure that the numbers are right. O, and first I need this report.") If computers can understand that, then programmers aren't the only ones that need to worry.
P.S.: Vernor Vinge has predicted that the technological singularity will occur before 2030, though not before 2005. An expected, though not strictly requried, component of this is cheap computers with human-equivalent cognition capacity. (I.e., they would be able to speak, hear, and understand a normal sentence as well as you could, among other skills). Do not be too quick to cheer or to weep.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
VAX does decode as an acronym: Virtual Address eXtension. It was invented at DEC (or invented by somebody else and used *heavily* by DEC. They called it an architecture, but it was more like a line of CPUs which were all more or less instruction set compatible. They were obsoleted by DEC's Alpha chips in the early 90's. The VAX computers all ran VMS, AFAIK.
I got my start in the PDP world (RSTS/E anybody?) then moved to VAX/VMS, then Alpha/VMS, then Sun Solaris. Why did I wait so long? 8)
I work at a real hardware company...I'm a hardware design engineer. The president and VP wear shirt & tie, but rarely a suit except for media appearances. The engineers wear whatever (from shorts/sandals/T-shirt to shirt & tie (only a few w/ties though), the management wears _nice_ shorts and golf shirts half the time, the rest of the time it's Its. Generalization works well for generals, I suppose...companies are reasonably unique.
ASME is the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, http://www.asme.org/ .
The last place to insist on the "corporate" look is Wall Street. You will show up at 8 p.m. promptly, in a nice suit, work past the point of exhaustion every day, produce lots of crap in a hurry, get paid six figures, and burn out in six months.
All so business guys (being paid seven figures) can move $$$ from point A to point B and take a percentage.
Wall Street does jump on the hottest technology (or technological fad) pretty fast. They had Solaris workstations years ago (on non-techies' desks, because that's what the applications were designed to run on; moving to NT now), used Smalltalk for a while, jumped to Java early. (Their business logic changes at whim, so they need really rapid application development.) It can be an interesting entry on your resume. Not mine, thanks.
(They also suck up 90% of the good technologists, and inflate salaries enormously, in Manhatten. When I was a manager at a Silicon Alley startup, that made recruting tough.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I don't beleive this will happen for IT workers for quite a long time. Case in point:
To be honest, I do believe the "hotspots" of IT today will slow down, I don't think it will all come to a grinding halt. There's still too much to be done since there is not very much existing infrastructure to build upon, and it's all still very primitive. (Some US president once said that "everything that could be invented, has been invented". Of course, he was far off, but I think that assuming that what we have now won't change quite a bit is equally short-sighted.) We essentially have to build the entire infrastructure from the ground up. The Internet is in it's infancy, and we're nearing the limit of our existing techniques for processor production, but the micro-processor is ANYTHING but the bottleneck in most of today's machine. There are many applications of technology waiting to happen, and only time will bring them to a reality.
I believe that the IT worker shortage is more due to the existance of an IT revolution, where competing industries that don't jump in on the race will be left in the dust.
The industrial revolution did eventually die off, but it DID take SEVERAL years. And look at the repercussions... no one saw all of the factories close down. It just became a WAY of LIFE, and I think that's what will eventually happen in the future, given time.
EIDE: Extended or (depending on who you talk to) Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics, as opposed to SCSI which had most of the smarts contained on the controller board.
PLL: Phase Locked Loop. Used in electronics to ensure a stable signal lock.
SMB: Used in Windows filesharing. I believe it is System Multi-Block, but I'm not for certain. (Dock 1 point)
VAX: An older type of time-shared operating system, allowing for multiple users and logins. To my knowledge, does not decode as an acronym.
HDD: Hard Disk Drive.
SCSI: Small Computer System Interface
vi: AKA VIsual editor (but you already got that one)
toothpick: A device for cleaning the dental instruments found on the human mandible (teeth).
Have fun, and keep learning. You'll get it, same as the rest of us did. (BTW: Someone, please feel free to correct me on any incorrect statements, as I'm sure you will)
Simple: One of the biggest problems with our country at large is the fact that we are simply not teaching what needs to be taught. I'm not a Linux guru by far (I can get a box up and running, stock install, in 5 minutes...including finding the CD and coercing a recalcitrant eth0 system into working, but that's another topic), but I firmly believe the computer educations we are providing to students is a joke. We teach them how to use PowerPoint, MS Windows, and nothing about how the PC actually works. My Comp. Lit. class in 8th grade (long time ago) focused on using IBM's Linkway to make cheesy presentations! Oh, how I'd hoped we'd be past this now, but we've since evolved into using the Office suite for everything.
This is great for breeding kids who like a point and click OS (don't get me wrong, I like it as well, and have to use Windows for work, but I still piddle with Linux daily) and who don't want to think about what the computer can actually do, but where's the challenge? Why not teach them about how the innards work with each other, how the hardware interacts with the software, even if its only on a rudimentary basis. A little knowledge is better than no knowledge at all.
I really can't be bothered, ironing my clothes that much - the next time I'm going to have to trail the tightrope behind our racks to check the Leds on our NTU's I'm going to get covered in dust. Or when I have to kneel down under the desk to check the power/network cable hasn't been knocked out of the wall I will find my clothes covered in dust and god knows what.
Now if I spent all day sitting in a chair, answering the phone, meeting with customers then obviously I would have to take a different approach, but you wouldn't find me checking the NTU LEDs again...
I guess that's the difference between management and "techies", we do the dirty work to get things working again. Who would we be trying to kid by turning up in a suit all the time. Don't get me wrong we should be the most valued members of the company.
While on the subject here's a humour-mail I got today which is (kinda) on-topic:
Translating Management Speak
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: That's very interesting.
TRANSLATION: I disagree.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: "I don't disagree."
TRANSLATION: "I disagree."
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: I don't totally disagree with you.
TRANSLATION: You may be right, but I don't care.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: You have to show some flexibility.
TRANSLATION: You have to do it whether you want to or not.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: We have an opportunity.
TRANSLATION: You have a problem.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: You obviously put a lot of work into this.
TRANSLATION: This is awful.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: In a perfect world.
TRANSLATION: Just get it working and get it out the door.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Help me to understand.
TRANSLATION: I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't think you do either.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: You just don't understand our business.
TRANSLATION: We don't understand our business.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: You need to see the big picture.
TRANSLATION: My boss thinks it's a good idea.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: My mind is made up. I am adamant on the subject. There is no room for discussion. But if you do want to discuss it further, my door is always open.
TRANSLATION: &%^$ you.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: I appreciate your contribution.
TRANSLATION: @#%* you!
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: We're going to follow a strict methodology here.
TRANSLATION: We're going to do it my way.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: I didn't understand the e-mail you said you sent. Can you give me a quick summary?
TRANSLATION: I still can't figure out how to start the e-mail program.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Cost of ownership has become a significant issue in desktop computing.
TRANSLATION: We want all of the benefits and none of the costs.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: We have to leverage our resources.
TRANSLATION: You're working weekends.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Individual contributor.
TRANSLATION: Employee who does real work.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Your project is on hold.
TRANSLATION: We've put a bullet in it.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Wrong answer.
TRANSLATION: You didn't tell me what I wanted to hear.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: You needed to be more proactive.
TRANSLATION: You should have protected me from myself.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: I'd like your buy-in on this.
TRANSLATION: I want someone else to blame when this thing bombs.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: We want you to be the executive champion of this project.
TRANSLATION: I want to be able to blame you for my mistakes.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: We need to syndicate this decision.
TRANSLATION: We need to spread the blame if it backfires.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: We have to put on our marketing hats.
TRANSLATION: We have to put ethics aside.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: It's not possible. It's impractical. It won't work.
TRANSLATION: I don't know how to do it.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: It's a no-brainer.
TRANSLATION: It's a perfect decision for me to handle.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: I'm glad you asked me that.
TRANSLATION: Public relations has written a carefully phrased answer.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: I see you involved your peers in developing your proposal.
TRANSLATION: One person couldn't possibly come up with something this stupid.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: There are larger issues at stake.
TRANSLATION: I've made up my mind so don't bother me with the facts.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: I'll never lie to you.
TRANSLATION: The truth will change frequently.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Our business is going through a paradigm shift.
TRANSLATION: We have no idea what we've been doing, but in the future we shall do something completely different.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Value-added.
TRANSLATION: Expensive.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: Human Resources.
TRANSLATION: A bulk commodity, like lentils or cinder blocks.
MANAGEMENT SPEAK: The upcoming reductions will benefit the vast majority of employees.
TRANSLATION: The upcoming reductions will benefit me.
A few good points, great first article... However, I'm not to wild about the "Its" word. Somehow it makes me think of the abrev IT, which is imho an awfull hypeword too, but nonetheless, I think it doesn't quite bring the right image to mind.
:-)
As for the ASME, I only have one thing to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA. Imbiciles... (With apologies to all imbiciles).
All in all, a very nice "Feature". And not even a bad first feature/first post pun
Yup, looking at it that way: You're right. Its it is.
This isn't about shibboleths, or proving that I'm bright and you're not. The point is, a working software engineer should recognize basic computer-science concepts. If you don't know what BNF is, or why an O(N^3) algorithm is bad news at the heart of your application, then you're going to be constantly reinventing the wheel, and a bumpy wheel at that.
Software is both an instinctive and an intellectual pursuit. Working engineers should be able to switch between modes as appropriate.
bukvich wrote
:-). It is a rather interesting idea, in the Middle Ages, guilds were organised to designate a certain level of skill, apprenticeship training and quality (old-style branding). Now while it may be expediant to import Indian doctors (according to another posting they did mention that Indians regarded doctors and engineers as good careers), would the average consumer trust them? While on paper they would be better, it is all too easy to discriminate. Until service industries like medicine become goegraphically independent (I don't see people shipping themselves to Central America for surgery just yet), there will be no real incentive to change the system.
One nitpick here: there isn't really a free market in surgery. The American Medical Association regulates the supply. They have a guild.
I did mention the magic words "pricing inelasticity" (ie can charge without regard to market forces) and "natural entry barriers" didn't I
If all those Asian/Indian firms start producing top-quality knock-down software clones with some serious marketing dollars behind them, then expect to see Silicon Valley screaming out for protection. Statistics-wise, not all the smarts are living in the US so sooner or later, another domineering force (perhaps in India? Malaysian Multimedia Supercorridor?) will arise and all those web-sites will relocate like magic and you can kiss your 6-figure income goodbye.
LL
The problem with technology is that it comes in waves and therefore everybody starts paddling furiously at the same time. Naturally this leads to a severe shortage of the fad-to-be, whether programming language, app or digital-whatsits. The only real shortage is that of management talent as companies without a clue are losing people left, right and centre to those firms which do appreciate and treat their people well instead of trying to hire the lowest cost fresh-out-of-college app-builder. Given a choice between 120 hour weeks paying $250K or 60 hours paying $100K what would people choose? Burning out your engineers through stock option pyramid scams in order to cash out on an IPO is not a sustainable practice. Like in any industry boom/busts occur but IT is a portable skillset and if you're willing to travel, there will always be more relaxed opportunities elsewhere.
:-). I recall this SF story (name escapes me at the moment) which invented a device that could immortalise a worker's assembly skills but once they've captured the performance of their best worker, they fired him. With increasing IP going into software, I wonder who else will be next on the firing block.
Part of the problem IMHO is the relentless hyping of certain technologies. Sure the internet will change things but it will still be around (and cheaper) 5, 10 years later. It's absurb to think new businesses won't still be created n years in the future. From what I understand, part of this is market priming in order to adopt the most expensive components now (and thus preserve fat profit margins) before it becomes a commodity.
Let's look carefully, people are paid (roughly) according to the value the market places on their labor, skills and talent. Society has deemed that a surgeon with megayears of specialist training is worth more than a janitor. Thus skills which are not easily acquired or substituted (e.g. high manual dexterity, intensive knowledge, or natural leadership) tend to be more highly rewarded. Oh and pick a field which is likely to be in long-term demand, pricing inelasticities and has natural barriers to entry. Plastic surgery sounds like a nice area
LL
Geez...this isn't exactly the kind of reading I like on a nice Sunday afternoon :) I am a geek (admittedly, tho, not yet 1/100000000000th as good as most of the people here) and am in Junior year of High School. I love coding, do it a lot, and it's just so cool...all these stories about how there're 20,000 unfilled jobs in Illinois (my state) are also cool, because they always made me feel secure that I could get a job doing what I love. I don't care about the money (I code now for free) but having the industry collapse would seriously SUCK! I wanna eventually do my coding in ASM and the like, not have some newbie writing crap scripts that do the same thing. How fun is that? (Although I don't believe a BASIC-like language will come around to even be CLOSE to ASM, the point is the same). There will always be techies, geeks who go deep into the code, I just don't want to have to worry all through college (which I'm gonna complete if for no other reason than to make my family proud) about whether or not I'll get a decent job or just be flipping virtual burgers all day...I guess my point is I like the security of knowing that I don't have to be a Carmack/Torvalds/Wall to get a decent job...
"McBane to base: Under attack by Commie Nazis!" -the Simpsons
I think the fact that "IT" or "Information technology" is such a hyped term in our world, and espesialy for MIS type people that it's perfict to describe the "Neo suits". Or perhaps to describe the clueless 'psudo-geeks' or 'psudo-hackers'.
These people are some of the most annoying people on the planet. While I don't have a problem with the term "information technology" the way I have a problem with MIS people, I think the fact that "its" corrosponds with "Ironed Teeshirts" and "information technlology" works well.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Now if you get technical, I can imagine many ways where this happens already but I am thinking artificial intelligence and neural-nets and stuff like that so that a programmer wouldn't be happening.
But really, Its? What is wrong with somwthing more pronouncable like iron-clads or smoothies? Ah well, I can't imagine calling someone a suit anytime soon either.
--
Code first, optimize later. Time = money. Big O notation doesn't matter for a huge number of problems. Optimization is an art, but knowing when to optimize is also just as important. A good consultant will save you money by *not* optimizing things that don't matter. It's the ones that have to get everything perfect you need to watch out for.
-- Virtual Windows Project
So can we keep getting smarter forever without a paradigm shift? We have been through the industrial revolution and now we're in the information revolution. What's next? Or more fundementally, what is intelligence?
I think what people call intelligence has a lot to do with the ability to concentrate. Are chronically distracted people intelligent? I've spoken to people who can't hold a conversation for 10 seconds! In other words, I don't think it's really important what you choose concentrate on, but if you can concentrate you'll probably be considered intelligent. After all, I think that people who concentrate a lot literally perceive more clearly.
Hypothetically, let's say you are a superstar programmer but then you see that the competition is getting too strong. You're no longer going to be able to bring in the big bucks. Let's say that another field opens up. If you can apply your skill in concentration to the new field then you'll be able to pick it up faster than anyone else. So, I don't think fundementally smart people need to worry about making money. They'll always be on top because they can perceive quicker and more clearly where the top is. However, let's imagine life speeds up a lot more and that paradigm shifts that used to take a generation now happen more often; Internet time reduced by another order of magnitude.
Might competition itself be made an object of concentration? Can the behavior of an ultimate competitor be boiled down into a simple description or diagram? If so, what would that mean?
Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think that everyone could have more wealth (be more satisfied) if folks were meticulous about avoiding the destruction of wealth. What really bugs me is when I'm having a good time and someone else barges in and does something stupid. "Gee, you've written such a nice piece of software. How about if I sell it and give you .05%? I want to build a new castle so I'll need my fair share (50%)." What's Gates going to do with all his money?
To sum it up:
...but pronounced "dow". Of course this would make us the ultimate thing in reality, hmmm.....
+&x
This article gets into a subject that I worry about myself. I am 28 and have never "been in" a tough economy and I think it will change someday, for high-tech workers, especially.
I do think that a select few will continue to be valuable in the future, through any economy, and those people are not these "programmer-in-a-box" people that I am reading about in these comments.
I think what makes a real programmer so much more valuable than a "progrmamer-in-a-box" is ingrained analysis, troubleshooting, and "osmosis-based" learning skills. In every job I have been at in the last decade, I have worked with people who like to play "hot-potato" with bugs, issues, and problems. It all eventually ends up in 1 or 2 persons laps, and those few people are the ones that will stay valuable, no matter what new technologies come down the pipe.
Real programmers can debug anybody's code, and don't mind doing it either. Real programmers can program in any language that a task requires and can usually deal with tasks outside of programming better than most people. For example, these skills come in handy when handling taxes, personal finance, fixing cars, dealing with electronics, handling emergencies, etc...
Also, just because one knows a language, doesn't mean that they can analyze a complex problem and implement an elegant solution in that language. If they were able to implement a solution, could they then debug that solution and maintain it? A real programmer doesn't need a class to learn any of these BUZZ-technologies like XML, Corba, ASP, etc... , just give me a few hours with a tight reference book to that language and a quick look at omeone elses source code, and I will be able to get the job done.
Everytime I see/hear someone say they're bored, I don't understand. It's very hard for me to become bored because I have an imagination. When the prof is reiterating stuff I already know, then I either ignore him and think about my own projects and ideas, or listen and take note of what everyone else supposedly now knows, or if I feel like being a prick, I correct the prof.
:)
I view school as a time to expand myself socially and ideologically, and justification to allocate time to learn a new skill. Say I want to learn low level x86 assembly. Well, I can't justify spending the time on that because of all my other projects, but if I'm in a class that requires this, then I can justify spending the time on it, and even go a little overboard
Mark
Your lack of boredom may come from your pre-occupation with your self.
;)
:)
:) ...
:)
That's right... People should be able to amuse themselves, and not have to be fed it like pablum. I'd rather be self-centered than be an entertainment consumer anyday. I think it's called creativity
Use your imagination to try to understand others being bored (since you claim being unfamiliar with this experience).
How wonderfully ironic. Use my imagination to simulate lacking one.
IT/IS requires you spending your time learning extra things whether or not they're assigned. If you continue this attitude past your schooling, technology will leave you behind.
Don't worry about me falling behind. I'm 19 and have years of experience coding real products for numerous companies, including my own. My core skills, all of which are predominantly self-taught, are: Java2, C/C++, Win32, Linux admin, x86 asm, VB( now you know I suck
I believe everyone who said they were bored also said they knew the course material before it was taught. I'm saying it's the same with me, but I don't get bored, and don't understand those who do.
I know I may be moderated for saying this, but you do sound like a prick.
Hehehe... I said that
When computers can manage themselves, and sysadmins are no longer needed, hence, reducing the IT crunch, I will only be too happy to become a fireman or something similar. I love sysadmining, but i'd much rather have a smarter computer who could deal with it's own problems.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
It's been my experience that the point at which you switch jobs is the *wrong* time to try to switch skill sets; when you're trying to negotiate salary and placement, you need to play to your current strengths.
Once you're in the door, though, then you start branching out. "Say, boss, I hear you're looking at doing the new system in Java. I've been looking at Java in my off time, might I take a crack at it?"
The manager is faced with a choice between looking for new talent with Java experience, and hoping that they turn out to be worth the exorbitant salary -- or using a known quantity, someone who already knows the company's business model, who might need to do some studying.
For most managers, this is a no-brainer; they go with the person they know. And voila, you've added to your skill set while staying gainfully employed.
The key is to avoid shops that specialize in a single technology, even if it's the current "hot" language or platform. (That's Perl now, right? I haven't been keeping score lately.)
In January of 1996, I was programming at an aerospace firm, using C, Oracle, and Pro*C. Two months later, I was working at a credit bureau, for a significantly higher salary -- using C, Oracle, and Pro*C.
If aerospace goes downhill, we can pack our bags and switch over the finance. If finance takes a downturn, it's off to the energy sector. (At least here in Houston it is.)
Of all the professions I can think of, only programming and accounting have such portable skill sets; and when a company goes out of business, the accountants are the last ones to be let go.
We have reason to worry about a general economic downturn, but no moreso than anyone else. Petroleum engineers, aerospace engineers, medical technicians, and others have to worry about downturns in specific sectors; but programmers abide, because Windows and Unix are everywhere.
Just keep your tools sharp and your resume up-to-date.
But the end of the enginering ride was economic blowout. Not some random thing that only effected enginers. The author was very misleading about this.
root@localbrain root>ps ax |grep thoughtd
Server Message Block, I believe. Protocol used in Windows networking.
IIRC, I think it's Session Message Block.
But then again, I could be wrong as well.
The end of the engineering shortage was caused by a couple of things. The problems in the Boston area were caused in part by companies moving to the sunbelt. There was certainly more of a shortage in Texas and Florida than Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
The other factor was the reduction in defense spending. Defense spending drove much of the technology research in the Boston area. After Vietnam, and continuing through the Carter administration, spending declined. The Reagan "buildup" was short lived, for the most part purchased weapons that had already been designed (i.e., B-1 bomber), and the research spending was more focused on SDI. The fall of the Soviet Union ended most of the remaining research.
As an Aerospace Engineering undergraduate student in the 1980's, I saw much of this first hand. Many students entered the Aerospace curriculum in '86/'87, and then the bottom fell out, leaving many who graduated from '88-'90 unable to find jobs, or losing the jobs they had.
Fortunately, commercial business in technology research started taking off in the early '80s, and has continued. We are in period of fundamental change, from the industrial age to the information age, and we are probably only about 25% of the way through the transformation. The tech worker shortage will not end any time soon. There is simply too much to be done.
Finally, while it is easy to be critical of immigration as a solution to the tech shortage, one only has to look at where these immigrants are coming from: Countries with high education standards, and a local economy that cannot provided the necessary jobs. This means India and the Orient. These are not sweat-shop workers, in many cases these people have advanced degrees, and are very good at what they do. They also have much better work ethics and stronger loyalty than the typical American worker. The real issue in the future will be whether they immigrate to America to pursue employment, or if major companies outsource entire development departments to front companies in India and Taiwan--which will happen if restrictions against immigration are put in place.
The best thing a young person can do is get a college degree, and earn a reputation as a serious person, one that your references will attest to. And realize these two fundamental facts of life:
No one owes you a job. You have to earn it.
You have to pay your dues in this world. Your boss' feel that they paid their dues, and expect the same of you. This may mean working as a contract worker for a year or two to gain a level of experience to apply for a higher position.
My company has over 1900 open positions. My boss spent six months trying to fill a position recently, inteviewing about 60 different people. But the only thing a boss likes less than filling a position is firing somebody. That means the boss has to have the utmost confidence that a person is the right person for the job.
While there may not be a shortage of web designers, MSCE sysadmins, or VB programmers, there is indeed a shortage of skilled programmers. Out of all of the engineers I have interviewed recently for an embedded networking position, there's very few engineers who stand out. With so few people in the United States graduating from college with a CIS or CE degree, it is becomming increasingly difficult to find qualified people. Many Silicon Valley companies I've seen or worked at are mostly employing people from other countries such as India, Taiwan, China, and so forth because that's where the good engineers are from. It really irks me to see many slashdotters complaining that they don't need a college education, but I bet many would fall flat on their face in an embedded environment. We don't need c00l d00dz who can wr1te c0de. We need engineers.
What was it, something like only 26,000 CIS/CE graduates in the United States last year, yet 340,000 positions open? I'm sorry, but many of these idiots who call themselves engineers arn't. Ask them about Big-O notation and they're lost. Ask them to write some basic algorithms during an interview and they're lost.
I recently interviewed an engineer from a well-known company and asked him to write an integer to ASCII conversion function. He managed to write something full of bugs. His response was that "the compiler will catch them and then I'll unit test it". Bzzzzzt, wrong answer. A good engineer will look through their code and double or triple check it if in doubt, since unit testing often misses things. When writing in an embedded system, such mistakes can be catestrophic in that if your code blows up due to a bad pointer or something the whole box crashes and it can be a nightmare to track the source.
Out of all of the engineers I've interviewed at my current employer, only one or two stood out. Many engineers may know how to do a few things very well but can't escape the box.
Due to our desparation to find good networking engineers we've been forced to go the H1B Visa route with a green-card sponsorship. It's expensive, legally. Other countries place a much higher status on engineering degrees than the United States. India, for example, holds engineering in the same esteem as doctors and lawyers.
In Silicon Valley, a good engineer will do very well, even considering the high cost of housing.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
On the whole "Its" thing, it's not going to work because the meanings for its letter triple, i-t-s, are way too confusing already. (Take the previous sentence, for example.) If choosing between its and it's is a brain-numbing challenge for most of us today, why make the problem worse by throwing another meaning into the mix?
May I suggest an another option:
Some notes:
So please consider DAW and DOW.
Cheers,
Tom
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
The CIS program I'm currently in is a 2yr program. Three years, if you add the co-op option. There is a 50-75% drop out rate between first and second year. I want to pass on an interesting exercise that one of my instructors did.
At the start of first year he asked us, Why we were in CIS. Most of the students, said for the money. At the start of 2nd year, he asked the same question, and no one said money.
As people have mentioned there will always be "Get A Peice Of Paper In ____" types of schools. Good schools will always be able to weed out the people who aren't serious about CS or IT.
Shawn
There seems to be no shortage of it workers here in NYC. But finding one who isn't dumber than dirt is the problem. It seems that anyone with a pulse can get an MCSE (in a class of 12, only I had worked in mis before), so the market is flooded with microdorks who wouldn't know a DOS prompt if it bit them in the butt.
On the up side, the people with real skills can make real money with out wearing a suit. The problem is getting the job in the first place. With so many morons fighting for you job, coupled with the fact that much hiring is done by HR people who know zip about computers...
I hear they're teaching kids how to use watercolors and colored pencils in kindegarten and gradeschool. Suppose all those Graphic Artists know about this? Bet they're counting THEIR days...
Honestly, this spawn reads like flamebait. The thread didn't say "foreigners work harder than Americans." If anything, people pointed out that Americans weren't the only IT workers to be had on the globe. To stear this converstation into a "who works harder" direction is just asking for nationalism and bigotry. There's enough of that noise to be had elsewhere. I don't see it contributing to anything here.
If its intent is pure information - minimal graphics are required. For example, I find a Open Source progect I'm curious about. I hit their progect's site. Many of these sites are very bare and offer more information than splash (to include an optional link to screenshots). Perfect. I'm there to find out about the progect, not see how many outputs of Photoshop plugins and script-fu can be strung togeather.
However, some site's entire purpose is graphics. When I head over to themes.org, I expect some snazz. And I get it. Its heavy on the graphics and layout. But, IMHO, its clean and slick. I'll take the performance hit for the flash. I'm there for eye candy to begin with.
Having said that, "art" has its limits. A bad layout destroys any reason to hit a site. This is only compounded if the images are huge and unweildy. This is where we get into the "100 font document" syndrome experienced in desktop publishing (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
The real "art" to web page design is the combination of technology and graphics to make a pleasant, easy to use interface to whatever information is being offered. The designer has to consider bandwidth restrictions, target audience's computer resource limitations, differences in browsers, etc, etc.
Almost anyone can slap something on a server that'll produce output. Not everyone can do it well.
There has never been an "IT worker shortage". There is a "shortage of IT workers at the salary we offer".
Reminds me of the joke about a company looking for a Java programmer who had 10 years of Java programming experience. They were willing to pay $40K/year.
Of course the sad part about this was that I first saw this joke a year back in the Los Angeles Times help wanted ads...
I dropped out of college because I couldn't stand being so excruciatingly bored...being addressed in the same audience as the dolts who decided upon, arrival, to major in comp sci because it was "cool" and had absolutely no clue. Even starting with 400 level courses my freshman year, it was basically an oral regurgitation of reference material. When you went to an English class, did the professor just read the dictionary aloud to you? College can stuff things into your head (which any intelligent person can do themselves), but it CAN'T /make/ you smarter, or make you pick up ideas faster, or make you intuitively understand something. Those are all gained from talent and experience (which college, in my experience, gives one absolutely NONE of). Why do I need to pay XX grand to have some professor regurgitate a book I can read for myself, or go on long diatribes on his "pet" topic? Boring waste of time. Anything I ever actually /learned/ I did on my /own/ initiative, not because somebody was trying to stuff facts in my head. BTW, I now work for the actual university I dropped out of (about a 1 month time period between dropping out and getting hired). And I'm valuable not because of the stuff I would have had stuffed in my head (all of which would pretty much be irrelevent anyway...things change so fast), but for my ability and willingness to learn and adapt, and creativeness. Having performed tedious, mundane and rote comp sci material does not help. College can expand your horizons, but only if you entered it with a narrow, closed mind in the first place.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
..it is actually over. Some people live there entire lives based on a fear of the future. After the great depression, many people took all their money and hid it around their houses. These people sometimes got ripped off by people who were robbing their houses, and their money would probably have been safer in the banks. I'm not going to drop out of USFs outdated, horribly taught computer science program because of this article. (Despite the fact that I have grown to truly hate the program, even though I'm getting average-to-good grades.) I think this is similar to people who figured Moore's law would eventually level out. Well, as far as I know it's still holding true. (Even if it isn't, it was still a truth for a lot longer than some people expected it to be.)
Of course, anyone who is really scared about this (and currently working in the industry) there is a solution, unionize. Do it now while there is a shortage, and management can't crush the new unions.
As to me, I'll wait and see. I already know enough to build connections and save money. (I'd be doing that no matter where I was working or what I was doing.) No one is safe, you know, no matter what industry they are in. If you work with computers, you should be doing it because you love it, or at least like it. I believe this about any career, money should be secondary (as long as you can make a living at it.) And don't spend your life living in fear, it isn't worth it.
Doomsday predictions should only be uttered along with solutions. Hey, if I ever think that the world is going to come to an end in a few years, I will at least write letters to all my congressmen suggesting we build colonies on Mars.
Hey, I went through college once, got my BA in English (at Rutgers) and ended up working in K-mart-type jobs for a long time before I decided to return to school. I'm doing better now than I was then (I still need my degree, unfortunately, so I can't say I'm doing great.) The reason why I didn't take computer science then was because it terrified me, I was used to being an A student (without no real effort) in High School, not struggling with the course material. So I took the "easy A" (for me) major, English, not because I liked Literature any better than computers but because I knew I would get great grades and keep my scholarship. (Incidentally, I think a lot of computer science professors at USF think that intimidating their students is the best way to make sure that only the best students actually stick with the program. They probably "break" a lot of good, enthusiastic kids who just can't take these professor's open hostility. I truly hate people with this philosophy of life, but it obviously drives a lot of people in positions of power.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Even here in Silicon Valley, where almost no one wears a suit, the term is used often to identify those who profit from others' designs and engineering, as opposed to those that do the design and engineering.
It is not always a term of derision. But it is almost often used in context of "us vs them". It is not very much different from the longhairs vs rednecks terms from the '60s. Very few of those who had shorter hair in the '60s fell into the stereotypes of what are now called rednecks. The term was coined because of stereotypes. The same thing is true today, with the "suits" stereotype.
I am a software developer, but I have worked with some very very sharp marketing, finance, and senior management folks who have made dreams come true for a lot of engineers.
I still call them "suits", because their function is to deal with the business realities that I choose not to work with. But I respect the good ones.
--dh
... a reason why kids don't pursue what makes them happy.
First of all: Most of the people I know -- and I'm a junior in an excellent engineering-oriented university -- really don't know what they want to do. So when you're pressured to declare a major at the end of sophomore year, and you have no clue, and everyone tells you that you need to make money -- engineering seems like a surer bet than most anything else. Other safety-net fields are prelaw and premed.
But I'm not an engineer. I'm an English major. It's really my only love. But one can't really get paid to read books -- the life of a New York editor sucks -- and my peers in my creative writing classes don't seem to appreciate what I write very much. I've convinced myself to slog through a major in Managerial Studies so that I have some sort of marketable job skills after I graduate.
But more to the point -- I'm schmoozing with tech companies. Even as a liberal arts major, I figure since I have some computer skills and enjoy that okay, why not parlay that into better money? I may not like it as well as something purely literature-oriented, but when it means the difference between 20K a year and 50K a year, preference becomes pretty irrelevant -- at least, it does when you're my age (20).
I thought when I was a kid that I could have my dream job and be well compensated for it. But unfortunately, society does not believe that contemporary art and literature are worth money. It sucks, but maturity, I have found, involves accepting that life sucks, dreams usually don't come true, and The Man will win in the end.
The principle of aggrandizement is the fundamental law of every government. - Frederick the Great
A quick look through the classifieds in a major city will show what kinds of sofware developers are in demand. 80% of the ads mention terms like HTML, Foxpro, Oracle, AS/400, and Visual Basic (especially Visual Basic). Of the jobs that seem to require more than "I read the manual last weekend" skills, there's a pretty even split between C/C++, COBOL, and Perl. Java edges them all out, but in many cases it's obvious that the copywriter meant "Javascript" and not the actual computer language.
So, yes, there are apparently a plethora of programming jobs, but they're easily fillable by high school students, not computer science majors. There's more than McDonalds these days, kids!
Ok, lets take your construction industry example, houses are very expensive to build, not just the labour, but also the materials as well, and the land on which they sit, which is why many people spend their whole lives paying for one. Now look at software, it might take a few million to put together, but it costs close to nothing to reproduce either on media or posted on the Net, and amortized over the number being shipped, means that many can enjoy the same product for a small cost, and so can enjoy hundreds, even thousands in their lifetime. As hardware increases in power and drops in price more possible products are created, and new classes of product emerge, so the number of tech people required increases. To say that the shortage is over would mean that the future would have to consist of companies going back to standalone machines, the userbase of the Net would be going down, and no one would be bothering to buy the latest version of Quake. This of course is complete and utter nonsense, we cant go back, only forward, and forward requires MORE people. As for genetic algorithms, who is going to program them? You cant just say heres a genetic algorithm and it solves all the worlds ills, you have to program what it is that is evolving, and they are still at a very early stage, and need a lot of computing resource to do anything above the simplist task, and the same goes for neural nets at the moment. The only way to ease the shortage is to encourage more people to take up tech carreers, and with things as they are in society, it doesnt look good. Also there is a huge difference between someone who can program and a real programmer who can solve problems and adapt in an increasingly changing environment, the later is much more useful than the former, and much rarer too.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I deeply dislike this term. When one calls a suit[1] a suit, one isn't accusing the suit in question of /wearing/ a suit, one is instead accusing em[2] of 'suitish behaviour[3]'. As long as it acts like a suit, a suit's still a suit even if it's buck naked.
[1]: Trivia: This word appears *seven* times in this post! Eight if you count "suitish"!
[2]: Spivak enhanced! Woohoo!
[3]: It may be less efficient, but I'm of the opinion that this word looks much better with the UK-english 'u' in. Comments anyone?
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
...they still haven't brought me a windoze box to use as my own personal MP3 server while I type away on my H-pucks (HP-UX) box.
Does anyone know their extension?
The following is a sig:
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who understand unary, and those who don't.
EXACTLY. I get hundreds of resumes a week from people looking for administration jobs. However, only about 1 out of every hundred is even remotely qualified. I can find you about a hundred reasonably qualified MCSE's in a week but Unix people are almost non-existant (There are plenty of Unix posers but they are easy to spot).
As for the industry as a whole... Just considering the companies I deal with on a regular basis, this tech boom is anything but over.
-sirket
I think that the geeks should start referring to themselves as "Zits" to contrast themselves from the Its - not because it's and acronym for anything, but because it's evocative of their skin-tone resulting from a CRT-bathed life of no exercise, junk food and frequent and prodigious masturbation.
Many of the comments I've read seem to be taking away the wrong point. *Of course* programming is difficult. *Of course* you can weed out the good programmers from the bad. But guess what? Engineering is difficult too! And some people are good at it while others aren't, just as with programming.
And that could be precisely the engine behind what Rob describes. Did the engineering profession disappear recently? Of course not. And programming won't go anywhere either. But there are probably fewer engineers out there today than there were then, and the ones that remain are probably the more skilled among them. (I have no numbers to support this, only anecdotes). There isn't as much money sloshing around for the reamaining engineers to grab either. What's to say that the bulk of today's coders won't be driven out as well, with only the very best remaining -- if even them?
I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that IT will go down the same way. Consider that much of the growth behind IT is the move to get businesses onto the internet, and to build the infrastructure to get people on at home at better speeds. In other words, we're in a building phase, much like countries went through when they joined the industrial revolution. But just as with that period, it will end. Eventually, there weren't as many new factories to build, the telegraph lines had been laid, the rivers all had steamboats, and while these things persisted, they slacked off. So it may be here. Eventually, the fiber optic lines and satellites will all be in place; the companies will have their E-Commerce(tm) departments up and running; and the opportunities for new entry will, not disappear, but diminish.
If you think this can't happen, you're delusional. Nothing lasts forever. We've got it good now, but something -- who knows what, who knows when or how soon -- will bring it all to an end. Plan for it. If you are not absolutely top notch, plan on a second career.
One of my professors got his undergrad degree in aerospace engineering -- he worked on the Apollo program and helped send people to the moon. In his domain, he was great -- but one day we stopped sending people to the moon, and he had to find a new job. For a while, he bought a bar & lived as a bartender. Now he's a professor. But he'll probably never send people to the moon again.
It's not pessimism guys, it's reality. Plan for it or get burned. Consider yourselves warned.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I started out playing with a commodore 64, Timex Sinclair and then finally I got my first XT. Times have changed so much since I added that 20 meg harddrive and V-20 processor upgrade to the XT, I'm almost ashamed to admit I build a PC occasionally.
:)
Wireless networking is barreling down on the wirepullers and they'll be if they lucky to even pull phone wire for another couple of years.
Embedded operating systems will become the norm very soon, even on desktop PCs'. You want to upgrade to Redhat 9? buy the chip and plug it in (alla nintendo cartridge) or download the file and flash it to your old chip or maybe just buy a new PC and pitch the old one. Or maybe the bulk of the os will sit on the net and we'll boot to the Internet.
PC's will become so cheap and they'll be sealed like the computers that run our cars and they'll be sold by people like Proctor Silex and will be on the shelves at Wall mart next to the toasters. Dell, gateway, and the other biggies might survive if they watch the trend closely enough and dump all their tech support people. Fred's computers won't... Fred will be unable to buy these toaster computers and a decent price and since there will be no serviceable parts they'll be gone.
The various Linux distributions will get weeded out and we'll see distros designed for a particular use like serving webpages, network file servers, email servers, desktops for graphics designers, desktops for accountants, distros for teachers, desktops for engineers etc.
When you buy that toaster PC you'll pick up the one that suits your needs.
The file server distro will run named and dchp and will be so easy to config from it's web-based wizards that a 3 year old could set it up. Plug in an accounting cpu box and the server will pick it up and away you go.
Most ISP's will be run out by the big big players and those of us who run a little web server will be out of business in 2 years because we won't be able to compete with the big companies who host billions of sites and have the coolest wizards in place to make e-commerce a snap etc.
If windows worked like it's supposed to I'd be out of a job. If Liunx does indeed take over and works as advertised and it get's as easy to admin as windows seems to be, then a huge segment of tech support people will be un-needed.
The very best of the best, will be offered jobs at the big big companies who're writing that accounting version of Linux or writing the cgi for those giant web farms. The only jobs left for the middle of the road dim-witted types like me might be to provide questionable web content. Everyone else will be pumping gas or asking if you'd like fries with that. Of course I could be wrong about everything
Given that we've making technological advances in leaps and bounds
(there's more computing power in your playstation than there was in the world thirty years ago)
why cant this trend continue forever?
(or at least more than 5 years?)
Unfortunately, that much experience is a liability, not an asset. Might as well stick a D for dinosaur label on your forehead.
Programmers are like professional athletes: if you perform, you can make great money as a free agent. But when you hit your late 30s or early 40s, it's time to think about how you're going to make a living for the rest of your life. Keeping your skills up-to-date is only half the battle... how others perceive you matters even more.
There comes a time when you can still get hired for exactly what you're getting paid to do now, but not for something new, even if you could easily pick it up in a few weeks, or even if you already know it because you learned it in your spare time (but it's not paid, working experience). That's the time to bail.
Don't you see the connection between the two paragraphs above?
People spend years developing highly specialized tech skills, and then the winds shift and they're left shipwrecked. Going into technology is just not an economically rational choice, especially (paradoxically) in a time of great technological change.
It's like evolution in nature: the most specialized species are the most successful... until the climate changes and they go extinct. The survivors are the generalists. Better to be a cockroach or a rat than a panda.
There are other professions out there where you're set for life... medicine, law, etc. Students aren't foolish or lazy... they just know which way the wind is blowing.
Headhunters harvest names and phone numbers the way spammers collect e-mail addresses. Everyone ends up on their list sooner or later, and it's no great honor. Do you really think sending or not sending resumes makes any difference? They have their methods...
And headhunters don't even care if you're suited to the job, and they're far too clueless to know one way or the other. A year after I left the profession, a headhunter tracked me down and wanted to set up an interview with a hotshot animation company just because I had a few animated GIFs on my webpage...
Taking pride in having your voice mail filled up by headhunters is like taking pride in having your e-mailbox filled up with "make money fast" offers.
Getting a call from a headhunter means nothing, and interviews are a dime a dozen. Getting a job offer to do exactly the same thing you're paid to do now is nice, but not exactly difficult in today's market.
Branching out into something new, cutting-edge, with the opportunity to learn and grow your skills... that's where it's at, that's the reason most of us became programmers in the first place. But that's where the doors start closing when you get older. Of course you keep up with new developments on your own time and initiative, but that's considered "hobby" experience... all dressed up and nowhere to go, stuck in your day job.
Why fight it? Stick a fork in yourself, you're done. Develop some business or entrepreneurial skills and get on with the rest of your life.
More accurately, there's a shortage of cheap AND good workers.
Interesting article that reveals the ugliness of the tech market. Nowadays people are so consumed with the quick easy money of earning an MCSE degree that no one takes time to stop and look at the reality of an over saturated market. The world doesn't need another Devry drop out who is out to make a fast buck, no the world needs people who eat and sleep computers who adjust as needed. Sure the market is due to crumble in the next coming years for computer pros but the ones left standing will be those who started with computers as a hobby and not a job.
In the 60s the engineer ruled now its the Nt admin, let us just hope that the next trend won't be the Red Hat certified professional in a box.
This article touches base on so many aspects that it is disturbing. Speak to any engineer turned computer hack or programmer, and if he or she tells you different they won't survive the next economic flux.
Ex Electrical Engineer
OPEC has a master plan for re-domination of the US and Europe; it's simple, yet stunningly effective. They call it the SUV, or, in some circles, the Monster Truck. The beauty of it is that while the Buick Electra undoubtedly competes with the Ford Expedition for sheer lack of miles per gallon, the Expedition uses far more raw materials in its contruction, being something like 4 times as tall. Now a lot of those materials are plastics, which are made from (all together now) OPEC oil. Those sneaky damned Arabs, I see we bomb em some more.
I realize that this isn't quite what you were getting at, but I think its a little too much to put undergraduate cs degrees on par with lawyers and doctors. The sheer amount of material that you absolutly must master (and not learn as you go along, as many of the really good cs majors seem to do) in the medical and legal professions put it them squarly in a different, higher catagory. Not to mention the fact that I think people in general rely much more heavily on doctors and lawyers than computer programs (I mean if the word processor doesn't work, c'est la vie, there's always the typewriter, but if the pacemaker isn't put in properly there isn't much to fall back on). I would think that a better comparison here would be between typical cs majors and registered nurses and legal assitants. The education levels and the understanding of the subject matter is about on par with each other.
-- Point? None! Cob.
is it "eye teez"?
or its, as in "It's a nice day today"?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
I code in C++ every day. I thought for about a second what makes my job hard. It certainly isn't anything that you can memorize (Design Patterns anyone?). I memorized the syntax long ago, but it's the logical flow that makes programming hard. On the simplest level the question is "Should I use a for or a while?". More complex things like "Where does this go in my class hierarchy?" cannot be answered my someone without experience, good training, and most importantly, a logical mind. Complex applications involve a lot of problems, and they have to be broken down accordingly.
I've wrestled with the question of whether just anyone can be a programmer for a long time. And I think that anyone can. But it takes a certain set of skills that you start developing at a very young age. You cannot deciede to be a Comp Sci major in college if you didn't deciede to do "something technical" in grade school. And you won't have done that unless it really interests you.
So anyone can write a 100 line perl script that does something useful. But you can't throw anyone at a large project (my project has about 800k lines, and I don't pretend to understand it all) and expect them to be productive, or even useful.
It's not rocket science, and it would go a long way to helping foster acceptance of OSS by people who were previously clueless. Not to mention the fact that communicating effectively with management makes you that much more valuable to those you work for.
While I'm all in favor of everybody learning to communicate better, I think you have to recognize what it means to be a geek. A geek is typically a specialist in some technological field. Communication may not be their strong suit.
A manager, particularly one who is described as a "Master of Business Administration", should have significant skills in the area of communication. If a manager's primary job is not to communicate with employees, both expectations and to learn about the business from them, then what is it?
That being said, I think that the typical geek is far more able to communicate with the typical MBA than the typical MBA is to perform the geek's job.
It's frustrating to me when managers claim that they can't communicate with their people. That's like geeks saying that they don't understand the technology their using. It's an admission of incompetence.
Look, I recognize that some geeks are EXTREMELY difficult to communicate with. In these cases, management needs to select or develop some geek interpreters among the technical staff. It's not acceptable to just give up and say that there are some geeks with whom you cannot communicated. If this were the case, how do you expect to set your expectations to these geeks?
Sorry for the rant, but I too am tired of seeing superior solutions passed over because those in the know could not or would not make a proper business case to management.
And I'm tired of management who expect me to do their job and "fire up excel" to prove to them that what I'm saying is correct. When technical people are excited about a given technology, it's management's job to get down with the techies and pull out the business case from the technical detail for utilizing this technology. Developing business cases is one of those communication skills that MBAs have gone to school for, after all.
One thing that I can't agree with at all is:
Believe me, somewhere in a secret cavern beneath the Wharton School of Business (which is to finance as Stanford is to Computer Science) or someplace similar, teams of fiery-eyed MBA candidates are plotting to take down today's computer professionals as hard as OPEC, engineers, and Louis XVI all got slammed in their respective days.
This is just paranoia. Maybe it's just meant to be funny, after all there's not really a secret cavern beneath the Wharton School. I don't believe that anybody "took down" OPEC and engineers in the '70s. I especially bristle at the comparison of MBA candidates to the downtrodden French peasants.
It's popular to believe that cabals worked behind the scenes to destory OPEC, but really, they did it to themselves. The poor countries in OPEC have never been able to resist the desire to profit at the expense of the rich. In addition, there have been important holdouts (like the North Sea) that has made the OPEC cartel less than dominant.
Engineers in the 70's were brought down by a bad economy and a marked decrease in defense/aerospace spending. They were not targetted by a cabal of management types who were jealous of their market successes. Heck, these same forces cost a lot of middle management their jobs in the 70's and 80's.
You can bet that the first to get hit by a downturn in the IT economy today would be the MBA type middle-management. Upper management would first get rid of as much management as possible before cutting into the "productive" IT workforce.
Having said all that, I do agree that any number of things can happen to cause IT workers to suffer similar fates to the Engineer's of the '70s. People shouldn't be smug and should be prepared. It may not be a conspiracy to "bring you down", but it feels the same when there's no work.
Being prepared for a downturn is not showing your loyalty and commitment by working 80 hour weeks. Quite the opposite. Don't believe that management will appreciate it when you end up burned out and overly specialized. The real things you can do to improve your marketability are to sharpen your skills in a wide array of technologies and learn to communicate better. Although I've not tried it, it might be that participating in Open Source projects in your "spare time" might be a good way to sharpen your skills and practice written communication. (Note to those who want to improve their Karma, always work in positive comments about Open Source and Linux is a good way, no matter how far afield from the subject at hand.)
Suits:
For the, uh, suits, its a mark of status. Consider the concept of the "power suit", or, even sillier, the "power tie". An anthropologist could have all sorts of fun with corporate power relationships.
IT Worker Shortage:
There has never been an "IT worker shortage". There is a "shortage of IT workers at the salary we offer". Raise the salaries and workers will come out of the woodwork. Hint -- look at housing prices. A mid-level worker should be able to buy a mid-priced house with no more than a 20 minute commute.
As to what the B-schools are up to, there are a number of obvious trends:
1. Foreign workers. They get paid less and are far more docile than domestic workers.
2. Overseas outsourcing. Move the whole operation to India or Russia. Even cheaper than #1, but they lose control over the workers.
3. The search for a magic "software engineering methadology" that will enable illiterate Malaysians to crank out top quality code for US$0.18/hour like they crank out sneakers.
Magazines:
Skroom. They're dinosaurs anyway.
In my first CS course, we had to crack a 32-bit RSA-encoded message given nothing but the underlying theory. Easily half the class didn't show up after the first week. As long as universities don't become programmer-in-a-box factories, we'll be ok.
Since over the last few days you've posted about as many articles as all other editors combined, I'd say you have taken on more than enough already.
Seastead this.
It's not gonna last? Ok, lets go back to what determines the levels of salary of any type of worker:
pA dX/dA
--- = -----
pB dX/dB
with A and B two resources, pA and pB their prices, and X the output. You can find this result in any first-term handbook on economics. I personally recommend "Economics", by Lipsey and Steiner.
The reasoning embodied in the formula is rather simple. The market will settle for that utilization level of resources at which the marginal productivity per dollar of the one resource will be equal to the marginal productivity per dollar of any other resource.
It is obvious that productivity is at the centre of the whole reasoning.
In terms of IT work, we can translate it as following: as long as paying out huge amounts to a few programmers to make the computers a particular task automatically is still cheaper than having a Mexican army of clerks trying to complete the same task manually, the company is better off shelling out big bucks to the IT staff.
So what's the gist? Well, as a programmer use tools that are particularly fit for the problem at hand, so that you can truly solve the problem in record time. The faster you become at solving a problem, the more money you will start making. For a starters, stay away from C++, Java and the like, on economic grounds. Any programming environment that forces you to focus on details that are not relevant to the problem at hand are simly eating into your salary.
..and they won't have to cut their ear off and die before getting noticed or paid.
"As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place new value on the one human ability that can't be automated: emotion. Imagination, myth, ritual -- the language of emotion -- will affect everything from our purchasing decisions to how well we work with others.. Ideas like quality, efficiency, and reliability will no longer sell products. In the end, I'll buy a phone because of its color, if that's what moves me."
"Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated. The wonderful news about the Network Economy is that it plays right into human strengths. Repetition, sequels, copies, and automation all tend toward the free, while the innovative, original, and imaginative all soar in value"
No offense, folks, but i41 can't wait until this communications revolution can more easily tap the creative potential of non-technical people (like yours flamebaitly true:*).
"job".. wrong word.. sorry. Today, Hollywood and advertising have a lock on a lot of compromised creative minds, agreed. Tomorrow, broadcasting decentralizes, artists are less compromised. We'll produce better art connecting directly with our audiences. Corporations will "own" us less and less. If we like to advertise, we'll be able to promote services, organizations, systems we actually believe in, and if we're convincing, we'll get paid. So commercial art will become less disgusting, more authentic, and far more effective.
:) Re: "artist".. obviously, programming software is an ART requiring imaginative creative intuitive intelligent intelligence. So is programming a radio show, editing a publication, or what have you, so long as it cuts out all non-essential noise brings into focus the most meaningful signal. We all realize dreams. That's our "job".
Re: Hollywood.. digital image capture is replacing film, computers are becoming affordable editing bays and the Net a far better distribution channel. So maybe "Hollywood" as we know it has reached its widest market, but artistic storytelling with sound/images hasn't. So don't kid yourself, yourself
N ot A G eek
I can not predict the future and I can't speak for entry level admins, but I doubt there will be an end to a shortage of senior computer techies.
Computer are becoming an integral part of every day life. Soon walking down the road you will be able to read email, browse the web and run apps from your personal computer over some sort of remote display X term or network app. How soon? Less than 5 years. The world needs programmers and geeky admins to make sure all these services are running and bug free.
Its highly unlikely that someone is going to write smart software to replace the average programmer, and even if they do, we'll always need someone to optimize and debug that "smart" software.
We can not dispute on average people are lazy and ignorant. Most people, 51%+, don't know anything, relatively speaking, about computers. Afterall, they are the reason AOL is doing so well. They couldn't possibly learn what it takes to take my job away. And the other half of the world, the professional, are trying to find a place that suits them, not all of them are going to become programmers or network admins.
There's even a huge difference between a sys admin and a network admin. Network professionals don't need to know the equipment that runs on their network, but they do need to know the various routing protocols, topology of their network and security issues. Sys admins need to know the hardware and software every peon in the company uses as well as what servers need to be in place. And there are faded lines between these positions and even really senior people who can fill both, but those are extremely rare, even in the silicon valley.
I bet it will be more competitive in the future, I will be forces to learn faster and work smarter. But without a major geological catastrophy, computers are not going to disappear off the face of the planet. Even a stock market crash couldn't put an end to computers. Look at the Y2k problems. If we didn't need them we would simply turn them off.
Saying there is a shortage of skilled workers in the hitech industry is like the NBA saying there is a shortage of players in the league. There isn't a shortage of players, there's just a shortage of _GOOD_ players.
actualy, it's more like, to further the socalist agenda of the democrates and the UN...same with that bit in Indonesia going on now...that govt. gave campaighn money to Clinton, too.
--bsDaemon
dfree@inna.net
"FreeBSD: The Power to Serve"
So, a couple of observations:
1. The engineer glut as I saw it was not caused by evil MBAs plotting in a basement, but by a shifting of national priorities away from defense work and toward social welfare programs.
2. Many of the affected engineers dug their own graves by becoming too specialized and failing to train outside their very narrow areas of expertise.
3. The next glut will happen when the money finds somewhere else to go, probably when the Internet is built to about 80% of wherever it is headed. That will not happen soon unless outside forces such as a financial depression or a war force a major priority shift. Of course, the sudden emergence of a new technology such as genetic engineering could cause a smaller reallocation of funds, but in that case the transition would be more gradual giving the more forward-looking engineers time to retrain.
4. At risk of repeating an overused line, engineering (and other) professionals need to take more responsibility for keeping their skills updated. The only place to get lifetime jobs with pensions will be at Wal-Mart or the Post Office as time goes by.
So I'm not so sure that the IT worker shortage will end "soon", but it will end eventually. Tech-Nerds had best be prepared to take advantage of the next wave when it comes, by keeping their focus a bit broader than the requirements of their current position and investing in their own skillset. Whining about H1Bs and foreign workers will not save you!
--Bill
However it is that you pronounce that, there will be a name-space collision with something important. Because of that, it's not going to stick.
This is slightly off-topic, so moderate down as appropriate.
I am a self-described geek, have an advanced degree, and am finishing up an MBA at one of the aforementioned satanic institutions, so take this FWIW.
The hostility that i'm seeing by techies to their PHB's really is (IMHO) about a communication gulf.
Many of my peers in business school are getting involved in high-tech, obviously because that's where the money is.
The more self-aware ones realize that they haven't got a clue about the underlying technologies, but they are making an attempt to learn. The M$ mentality still prevails, but the volume of people asking me about my linux boxen increases daily.
I think that many business-types would appreciate the techies in their companies giving them the scoop on the latest technologies. These people are not idiots, but you need to do it in a language that they understand. Money.
Want to use linux as a print server? Don't just tell your manager that Linux rules and NT is a bloated hog.
Intuitively, we believe that Linux is a superior solution. So prove it: fire up excel and do a little NPV analysis. Show them with numbers that your alternative is viable and fits with the goals of the business. In your model's assumptions, explain the merits of the technology as best you can.
It's not rocket science, and it would go a long way to helping foster acceptance of OSS by people who were previously clueless. Not to mention the fact that communicating effectively with management makes you that much more valuable to those you work for. [An important skill, if Roblimo's hypothesis is correct.]
Sorry for the rant, but I too am tired of seeing superior solutions passed over because those in the know could not or would not make a proper business case to management. To me, this is just as egregious as managemnent forcing IT guys to wear ties :)
docwolf
[tieless, wearing a mumu like homer.]
The fact is, regardless of ideals or licenses, people end up making money off their craft, in one way or another. Read the book Hackers by Steven Levy which tracks, among other things, the path that homegrown software took from being exchanged for free to being sold, marketed, and profited from. The idealism disappeared about the same time the greed kicked in, and that will continue to happen. It's a cycle, something which is apparent to me at least after reading that book. I highly reccomend it.
I've put a lot of thought to these topics lately, so here are a couple of thoughts...
/dev/null
Suits:
Well, on the West Coast that is most definitely true. Almost every kind of office has transitioned to "business casual," even the German-owned insurance company my father is a director at, which previously required ties of even the technical people. However, many of my friends have noted that on the East coast, the traditional dress has for the most part remained, and in fact that they have to dress up more when visiting East Coast offices. It's a culture difference for the most part. On the East Coast you have many companies which are older than every Slashdot reader - on the West Coast, there's been a boom, and culture changes with a boom like that. When was the last time you went into a tech company and they didn't have free sodas? Were you surprised?
IT shortage:
Here's what it boils down to. As a network engineer I can only speak as to the network portion, but examine the field. It's only been around for 30 years. Before 30 years ago, *there were no network engineers* (not counting telco engineers, who have laregly stayed with their telecom networks, and not transitioned to IP, though I have no doubt that will change...). We are second generation at best. We are one of the youngest industries around. So it only makes sense that there is a lack of trained professionals, or even of mechanisms for generating trained professionals. Secondly, examine the fact that there has been a higher growth rate for networks and the internet than probably almost any industry to date (perhaps excluding broadcast media such as TV, which grew almost as fast, I think... I don't have the facts to back this up, but it's not really important). Again, this means you have far too few people to run far too many networks.
Will this be true in 40 years? No, it will be a fully formed industry, with channels for training, set career paths, and A lot of very senior people. That's part of the key - in 20 years, I'm going to be damn senior as network people go. That's because I choose to learn constantly and develop. I'm not concerned.
Also, the fact that networks are for the most part a closed kind of community means there won't be a massive influx of people until schools start teaching it, and even then, we all know that schools often produce people with no practical technical knowledge at all. Most kids can't reasonably set up a routed network in their apartment or dorm. This makes the learning curve a bit more difficult to mount, as compared to system administration.
I think the sysadmin world is a little bit different. The main issue being that anyone can boot up a free UNIX on their home computer, or NT for that matter, and administrate it. They can learn enough from that to admin a small company's boxes, and maybe a large company's. There *will* be a glut in the market for sysadmins, because it's so easy to learn. However, as with everything, specialization is the key to preserving prosperity. Sendmail gods will still be sendmail gods. Security wizards will still be security wizards. But if you bill yourself as a UNIX system administrator, you might want to consider adding a specific specialization to your resume - you're a dime a dozen, from my observation.
flames to
email to grey@enigma.mips4.com
I think that article / essay brought up some pretty good points, mainly to always keep a conservative eye on the future, even if the present is looking rosy.
As a newly-minted graduate (Class of 1998, anyway), I'm way ahead of where I thought I'd ever be, in terms of present salary and happiness with my job. All of this because I got bored with my standard-fare CS classes and started messing around with HTML 3. Little did I know that in less than 2 yrs time, this skill would be the foundation of a new techie revolution.
Moving right along, the nature of the techie or geek (as it's so fashionable to call us now) is that we don't play with new tech toys entirely because of the salary -- it's because we ENJOY it. Enjoyment can be interpreted in any number of ways -- "challenging", "team-oriented", "interesting", "engaging" or "neat". That these fun new skills end up being the foundation of a new economic sector is pure happenstance. But the more toys a techie plays around with at any given time, the more their possible market value will increase in the future.
My final point: there will always be techies, and a solid economy to go with it. The nature of the tech may change, but as long as there are people fiddling with new languages and such before it goes mainstream, there will always be a hoppin' market for us. Cheers!
Why not start our own ASME, or more accurately, ASOME? (with the 'O' being thrown in for "online") Granted, I'm an idiot in the means as to how to do this of course, but I'd say between the editors/posters/readers of Slashdot, we've got enough online pull to get a couple of other big names aboard at least. Once the ball is rolling, who knows???
/. oughtta have an "article" section tho maybe? It's not all the time that I wanna read specifically news, and should have some way of distinguishing. The main difference being, articles wouldn't go out of date as quickly. Anyway, guess I'll get back to work now.
{include_ps.h)Nice article Rob. Very well written. I think maybe
Regarding the fate of the "web designer," if you know how to do the tricker website stuff, for instance:
basically the things that you need to know in order to set up and administrate an e-commerce site, then you will have a job for a long time to come, baring an e-commerce killing economic recession - which is far more likely to be the death of the IT boom IMHO Rob.
Did you mean 'hacker' or 'cracker'?
Do you know the diffrence? I don't think you do.
"The work leading to this course was motivated by wondering why, in software engineering, there are some people who are one or two orders of magnitude more useful than most people. If this was true of bricklayers, the building industry would be very keen to find out why. The problem of course, is that one can film a bricklayer, and later analyze what is happening at leisure. One cannot even see what great programmers do, and for some reason they cannot explain what the difference is themselves, although most of them wish they could.
We knew that the elements of industry best practice alone are not enough. Management commitment to investment and training are not enough. Innovative Quality programmes that explicitly include holistic concepts such as Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which much of the industry would consider too radical to experiment with are not enough. Years of experience are not enough, nor are years of academic study."
Another one:
"Software engineering is in a terrible pickle. The so-called `Software Crisis' was identified in 1968, but despite thirty years of effort, with hundreds of supposedly fundamental new concepts published, the general state of the industry is horrific. Projects run massively over-budget or collapse entirely in unrecoverable heaps. Estimating is a black art, and too many projects solve the customers' problems of yesterday, not today. The technical quality of most code is dreadful, leading to robustness problems in service and high maintenance costs. And yet within the industry there exist individuals and groups who enjoy staggering, repeatable successes. There are many ways of measuring the usefulness of programmers, but some are rated as over a hundred times more useful than most, by several methods of counting. If only the whole of the industry performed as well as the tiny minority of excellent workers, the economic benefits would be immense. If it were possible to write sophisticated, reliable software quickly and cheaply, the intelligence of society would increase, as everything from car sharing to realistic social security regulations became possible."
I noticed this for some tim now, here in CA.
If I'm talking to someone who claims to be a "techie" but has no wrinkles in there cloths, I'm out of there.
A bunch of us actually put this to the test for a couple of weeks, sure enough, the more wrinkled/ugly the outfit the more they knew.
Of course this will only last until someone who thinks there a geek finds out about it, then they won't iron there cloths so they can be a geek to..
Hello! I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die
the title geek is not something you give yourself, but something you get labeled as.
Hello! I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die
"Won't programmers starve?"
I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.
But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing.
The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much as now.
Restricting copying is not the only basis for business in software. It is the most common basis because it brings in the most money. If it were prohibited, or rejected by the customer, software business would move to other bases of organization which are now used less often. There are always numerous ways to organize any kind of business.
Probably programming will not be as lucrative on the new basis as it is now. But that is not an argument against the change. It is not considered an injustice that sales clerks make the salaries that they now do. If programmers made the same, that would not be an injustice either. (In practice they would still make considerably more than that.)
In truth, the situation could become even more dire than Stallman predicts. If the GPL makes it impossible for programmers to build on existing software and profit from their work, programmers will naturally be unemployed. The few that are left will do "grunt work" such as making minor tweaks to GPLed code. And, yes, they'll be young, cheap, or foreign labor.
It's time to change direction now. Open source is a good thing, but the GPL -- which attacks programmers' livelihoods -- is not.
-- Brett
Well, here's the thing: There's no way that many of these kiddies are going to make it through our CIS program. Why? A number of factors: 1) Universities are raising GPA requirements for potential CIS majors because CIS departments cannot accomodate the demand. 2) Many of these "potentials" think that they want to be programmers because they like Star Trek and they enjoy a good game of Quake. When they actually sit down to write a lab and it takes them 8 hours to finish it, they'll think twice. When they have to sit through a whole lecture on binary, or B-Trees, or regular expressions and finite automata, they'll think about it again. And some of them will drop.
I graded for the department for 4 quarters, and I watched a lot of kids walk away. So, there _will_ be a significant increase in CIS graduates, but it will not be to the degree we've been hearing. The colleges can't graduate that many, because the infrastructure isn't there in the depts., nor will that many potential students be able to cope with the very mathematical, very dry nature of the course work.
Or maybe, the Awesome World Editors Society of Online Magazines and E-zines.
Just a thought...
Well, I already said it up above in a reply-to-post (#34).....
We could call it AWESOME for Awe-inspiring World Editors Society of Online Magazines & E-zines, or something like that.
Or, AWESOME = 'AWE'some 'S'ociety of 'O'nline 'M'agazines & 'E'-zines. Kind of a GNU Not Unix thing (kind of).
Your lack of boredom may come from your pre-occupation with your self.
Use your imagination to try to understand others being bored (since you claim being unfamiliar with this experience).
IT/IS requires you spending your time learning extra things whether or not they're assigned. If you continue this attitude past your schooling, technology will leave you behind.
I know I may be moderated for saying this, but you do sound like a prick.
While I agree that there is not a lack of IT workers out there, I would have to say that the percentage of *skilled* IT workers is very small. I can't tell you how many times that I've talked to a highly-paid consultant about how I made some algorithm faster, get into big-O notation, and see his/her eyes start to glaze over. Unfortunately for someone like myself, who cares about the efficiency of their algorithms, the huge advances in processor speed have rendered such details unnecessary in most business applications. 90% of the code I review nowadays is just total cr*p, and it's due to the attitude that everything can be fixed by throwing more hardware at the problem. I'm beginning to feel like an old man (remember the old days...) and I'm only 29...
The real problem with Suits per se is the fundamental lack of understanding of the engineering mentality and perspective. Since most IS managers, it seems, have come out of business training with only a modicum of technical knowledge. Those few engineering managers who have both the technical savvy to herd cats in the traditional engineering sense and have the ability to speak the financial-babble of upper management should work together to promote that unique blend of skills that prevents the boneheaded Suitian behavior we so often associate with management. Perhaps Engineering Degrees with associated MBAs as a secondary training path. Engineers first, suits second. Of course, that probably would just produce alot of dangerous whores.
Well, I don't know about the States, but here in Germany most workplaces are still a fully suited environment. Often including all the techies!
:)
Admittedly, I spend most of my time working with the banks, a notorious Suit environment (though it is noticable that the women are often no-Suited!).
But when back in my companies offices, it's smart casual, so ironed T-Shirts for us techies too..
Then there's "Its", I suspect Monty Python might have a few words to say to you about that....
Later'ish
usagi