Reading all these comments...there seems to be a common theme that "There is no shortage of IT workers, just a shortage of good ones."
Why is that? I'm really asking because I don't know. Why are the majority of practitioners of our profession bad? This doesn't happen with other professions does it? (doctor, lawyer, etc.)
>> Yes same mess in medicine, most are business people now, exception do their work properly but they become so rare that
>> they are in trouble and frequently event ejected by their incompetent colleagues , I hope you have nothing serious
>> and or believe in homeopathy or exotic medicines
I have a couple of theories:
1) Working in IT requires constant learning and keeping up on the latest technologies. People who already work 60 hours a week and have families just don't have time to keep their skills current. They trust their companies to keep them trained, and the companies let them down.
>> Yes explosive complexity is one source , but the real problem is MONEY driven business where profitability surpass
>> any others arguments
2) There is no consistent college preparation and certification like there is for every other professional field. I'm a software developer who has a Computer Science degree, but most other developers have MIS degrees, Math degrees, Engineering degrees, no degree, etc. Lots of people who are clever "coders" are actually poor overall software developers.
>> I am sure even a Computer Science degree is inadequate
>> Did you had extensive our explaining you the rigor of software development
>> And sorry probably most IT people would not have an IQ of 120 that is probably the minimum for this type of job
>> Or why would they take so systematically illogical decisions?
Anyone have other clues?
>> There are probably many others reasons
>> One is marketing that spend so much money to mislead the people, and those guys are well paid
>> Logic they all succeed in their job, probably it is easy to mislead people
Just one example of missing IT people, naturally others domains will expose similar pathologies
Who knows how to program a multicores processor effectively?
Maybe many will say : me , haha
But effectively means you know to extract more than 10% of peak flops on real codes , or peak integers:-)
Did you pass the test?
Did you use a tool to measure, Oh by the way you don't know such tool , back luck , sure you miss the test
Probably you are so good you think you don't need such tool, oh YES I see
Then now the industry is in trouble because 8 cores will be there next year, and there are
cell processor, CUDA and FPGA and many exotic things that very few know how to exploit seriously, even the real experts
Meanwhile the potential is enormous, some will do fundamental breakthroughs, but many will have trouble to stay in competition
And you think the industry has no problem?
There are plenty IT people, some are old and most are incapable to sustain the Moore Law of complexity of their environment
some are young and don't care too much about technologies and details and have difficulties to apprehend this complexity with
inadequate training they received in their expensive high scholl
But many claim they have the magic intelligent tool that will save the industry, probably one day a monkey with right tool wil lbe a good IT expert:-)
How many developers use a memory leak checker?
How many use state of the art tools to analyze their production?
But this is not a problem since poor quality means you will sell expensive support:-)
Support done by people that have quasi no clue on the products they support
All the industry works like that, exceptions are rare, normal since definition of what is an exception:-)
Everybody is trained to accept very poor quality software products where people waste a huge proportion of their day
to adapt to the software they use that some name "tools" , simply ridiculous
Then how many IT experts the planet require?
And many do we have?
No choice we are obliged to put the recruiting bar very low since years, and naturally the recruited incompetent elements
jump in managment position where it's easier to hide and take the bad decisions on political reasons and not on rationals,
then no hope to get out of this mess:-) OOPS
But this is a LOT fun:-)
I suppose your company wants to hire good developers, because stars you cannot recruit them
And I doubt you can use them efficiently, I have the chance to know many stars,some you probably can call superstars, no company exploit the potential of any of them seriously:-)
The companies clearly see those guys solve problems others cannot, but they don't even think to push the limits of those guys
The superstars are rarely the people you see of the photographies, there are exceptions:-)
And don't think about recruiting them, the stars are already working on something they like too much to abandon it : sorry
Stars don't need help to find their way, they have clear vision of what they want to do and not do
Stars will never put their CV is the WEB in the middle of that noise "polite form", this is totally illogical
I would not recruit somebody that is so desperate to publish his CV on the WEB, when his peers should find him a direct entry to the best projects
Then you still think you have some very interesting project that require exceptional developers, find some entry in the network
Experts know each others and can recommend many friends, ask for some ranking from 1 to 100, shoot for 95
And in middle of those experts there are some gems, your talent is to find them, but you have done only 10% of the task
Good luck
By the way , if you look for talents why you have not made a clear description of the talents you are looking for ?
What are your projects ?
Propose a nice laptop to any person that give a successful pointer to the talent you are looking assuming you recruit him : 2K$ for such a talent is pretty cheap
There is nothing fundamentally new and effective
First no indication of performance, but probably as many others similar solutions can solve
effectivelly only DGEMM,FFT,and crypto, sorry for all others thousands algos no future for you.
The number one problem you need to solve to pretend to be 100 times more rapid
is to increase bandwidths by 100 and Amdhall Law works against you.
My bottleck is the network or the disk and if I could look at the memory bus, the memory
Then do you deliver 100Gbytes of network?
5GB/s disks?
600GB/s memory dimms?
In fact you need all that since I stress all that on my home PC.
My 2 CPUs are iddle 99% of time, and when not idle they consume only 10% of the cycles in average.
Now, maybe you want me to buy this machine, and give the cycles to SETI@home.
A real alternative is that you made a major breakthrough in compiler technology.
But without massive data flow, I dont see what new problem you can solve assuming you made
a breakthrought at least on the 3 algos I cited above.
Then next times in place of photos of protos that prove nothing, please offer diagrams of the
architecture and details on bandwidth paths, latency,... and explain where is the innovation
For people interested on massive multicores look at what INTEL is doing this is more serious
and they try somewhat to solve the memory bandwidth issue. This is horribly hard problem
and this can ONLY be solved with massive investments and research that only very few large
companies can do it, all others will disappear because there is no market for a processor that
cost more than 10$ since we plan to have 32 on a motherboard.
Who can develop that in 32nm?
Again this is NOT just hardware this is even more a software problem.
How many people know to program effectivelly 2 Woodcrest?
How many people will be capable to extract more than 1% of that future massive multicores?
Does Windows effectivelly use multicores? and why not?
Then what is the market for massive multicores?
There is a chance that Moore Law become ineffective not because it can not deliver the promise
of doubling the number of transistors every 2 years but because it is useless to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading all these comments...there seems to be a common theme that "There is no shortage of IT workers, just a shortage of good ones." Why is that? I'm really asking because I don't know. Why are the majority of practitioners of our profession bad? This doesn't happen with other professions does it? (doctor, lawyer, etc.) >> Yes same mess in medicine, most are business people now, exception do their work properly but they become so rare that >> they are in trouble and frequently event ejected by their incompetent colleagues , I hope you have nothing serious >> and or believe in homeopathy or exotic medicines I have a couple of theories: 1) Working in IT requires constant learning and keeping up on the latest technologies. People who already work 60 hours a week and have families just don't have time to keep their skills current. They trust their companies to keep them trained, and the companies let them down. >> Yes explosive complexity is one source , but the real problem is MONEY driven business where profitability surpass >> any others arguments 2) There is no consistent college preparation and certification like there is for every other professional field. I'm a software developer who has a Computer Science degree, but most other developers have MIS degrees, Math degrees, Engineering degrees, no degree, etc. Lots of people who are clever "coders" are actually poor overall software developers. >> I am sure even a Computer Science degree is inadequate >> Did you had extensive our explaining you the rigor of software development >> And sorry probably most IT people would not have an IQ of 120 that is probably the minimum for this type of job >> Or why would they take so systematically illogical decisions? Anyone have other clues? >> There are probably many others reasons >> One is marketing that spend so much money to mislead the people, and those guys are well paid >> Logic they all succeed in their job, probably it is easy to mislead people
Just one example of missing IT people, naturally others domains will expose similar pathologies Who knows how to program a multicores processor effectively? Maybe many will say : me , haha But effectively means you know to extract more than 10% of peak flops on real codes , or peak integers :-)
Did you pass the test?
Did you use a tool to measure, Oh by the way you don't know such tool , back luck , sure you miss the test
Probably you are so good you think you don't need such tool, oh YES I see
Then now the industry is in trouble because 8 cores will be there next year, and there are
cell processor, CUDA and FPGA and many exotic things that very few know how to exploit seriously, even the real experts
Meanwhile the potential is enormous, some will do fundamental breakthroughs, but many will have trouble to stay in competition
And you think the industry has no problem?
There are plenty IT people, some are old and most are incapable to sustain the Moore Law of complexity of their environment
some are young and don't care too much about technologies and details and have difficulties to apprehend this complexity with
inadequate training they received in their expensive high scholl
But many claim they have the magic intelligent tool that will save the industry, probably one day a monkey with right tool wil lbe a good IT expert :-)
How many developers use a memory leak checker?
How many use state of the art tools to analyze their production?
But this is not a problem since poor quality means you will sell expensive support :-)
Support done by people that have quasi no clue on the products they support
All the industry works like that, exceptions are rare, normal since definition of what is an exception :-)
Everybody is trained to accept very poor quality software products where people waste a huge proportion of their day
to adapt to the software they use that some name "tools" , simply ridiculous
Then how many IT experts the planet require?
And many do we have?
No choice we are obliged to put the recruiting bar very low since years, and naturally the recruited incompetent elements
jump in managment position where it's easier to hide and take the bad decisions on political reasons and not on rationals,
then no hope to get out of this mess :-) OOPS
But this is a LOT fun :-)
disassemble the 747, weigh each part, make the sum, reassemble the 747
I suppose your company wants to hire good developers, because stars you cannot recruit them And I doubt you can use them efficiently, I have the chance to know many stars,some you probably can call superstars, no company exploit the potential of any of them seriously :-)
The companies clearly see those guys solve problems others cannot, but they don't even think to push the limits of those guys
The superstars are rarely the people you see of the photographies, there are exceptions :-)
And don't think about recruiting them, the stars are already working on something they like too much to abandon it : sorry
Stars don't need help to find their way, they have clear vision of what they want to do and not do
Stars will never put their CV is the WEB in the middle of that noise "polite form", this is totally illogical
I would not recruit somebody that is so desperate to publish his CV on the WEB, when his peers should find him a direct entry to the best projects
Then you still think you have some very interesting project that require exceptional developers, find some entry in the network
Experts know each others and can recommend many friends, ask for some ranking from 1 to 100, shoot for 95
And in middle of those experts there are some gems, your talent is to find them, but you have done only 10% of the task
Good luck
By the way , if you look for talents why you have not made a clear description of the talents you are looking for ?
What are your projects ?
Propose a nice laptop to any person that give a successful pointer to the talent you are looking assuming you recruit him : 2K$ for such a talent is pretty cheap
There is nothing fundamentally new and effective First no indication of performance, but probably as many others similar solutions can solve effectivelly only DGEMM,FFT,and crypto, sorry for all others thousands algos no future for you. The number one problem you need to solve to pretend to be 100 times more rapid is to increase bandwidths by 100 and Amdhall Law works against you. My bottleck is the network or the disk and if I could look at the memory bus, the memory Then do you deliver 100Gbytes of network? 5GB/s disks? 600GB/s memory dimms? In fact you need all that since I stress all that on my home PC. My 2 CPUs are iddle 99% of time, and when not idle they consume only 10% of the cycles in average. Now, maybe you want me to buy this machine, and give the cycles to SETI@home. A real alternative is that you made a major breakthrough in compiler technology. But without massive data flow, I dont see what new problem you can solve assuming you made a breakthrought at least on the 3 algos I cited above. Then next times in place of photos of protos that prove nothing, please offer diagrams of the architecture and details on bandwidth paths, latency, ... and explain where is the innovation
For people interested on massive multicores look at what INTEL is doing this is more serious
and they try somewhat to solve the memory bandwidth issue. This is horribly hard problem
and this can ONLY be solved with massive investments and research that only very few large
companies can do it, all others will disappear because there is no market for a processor that
cost more than 10$ since we plan to have 32 on a motherboard.
Who can develop that in 32nm?
Again this is NOT just hardware this is even more a software problem.
How many people know to program effectivelly 2 Woodcrest?
How many people will be capable to extract more than 1% of that future massive multicores?
Does Windows effectivelly use multicores? and why not?
Then what is the market for massive multicores?
There is a chance that Moore Law become ineffective not because it can not deliver the promise
of doubling the number of transistors every 2 years but because it is useless to do it.