at every place i/ve worked (as a programmer), i/ve said at the interview that i had no interest in management, and was there any job path into more technical programming areas ? every manager said 'yes' at the interview, only to back off after i was hired, and to only offer promotions towards management. i/m on disability right now (epilepsy), but am looking back at the market, perhaps to jump back in. i will *not* go to any job that leads to management (and, well, i/d prefer a job that had *no* management !).
i think most people are looking at this in far too short sight. apple may have something up their sleeves that we have no idea of yet (just as they will have something come out (i think fairly soon) of their newton tech, which they kept when others offered to buy). we may not know for a few *years*. but they are pretty savvy on what they are doing.
as posted above, i was in the beginning of a switch to an erp system, that cost the state millions. even more fun - when we started out, it was all done on sybase. abt 2/3rds of the way thru (about the time i 'retired'), they decided to switch everything to oracle. oh, fun.
back in the days, we had the big boss of our IT dept (at a major university) who would bring in salesmen from every company that knocked on his door. he would without exception buy it, and give it to someone (often me) to create a wonderful new application in less than a week (with documentation, of course). this *never* worked, and i was often the scapegoat, since 'he saw the salesman build something just like it in his office'. later, as y2k approached, the financial systems decided they could not convert in time, so they went to an erp system (as eventually did the rest of the university/s systems). this was the biggest money pit i have ever seen. the yearly software licenses were in the millions, the staff tripled to deal w/ the problems, outside contractors were brought in at salaries twice ours. if anyone had given anyone at the university an accurate assessment of how much this costs (present tense), it would never have been done.
yes, the first myst was a hypercard stack, which is why it came out on the mac earlier than the pc. and why, if you had the developer/s hypercard, you cou find out different things (not that i remember that far back - i *do* remember deleting hypercard and seeing myst die a horrible death).
well, how old i am. in my first hardware course, we were supposed to make an 8008 play the stars and stripes. i *think* i got a squeak. first language ? mine was pascal, and i loved it. it very much provided a direction for the furure. c ? well, in those days, you don/t terminate your string correctly, you terminate the computer for the rest of the users. pascal at least would check for range errors you could easily get by in c. can not say i recommend java (and not c++, and *certainly* not any of the microsoft only languages). back in my school days, i was so interested in the language question i took all the courses i could - ada (run thru a lisp interpreter !), lisp, prolog, apl...when i retired, i ended up liking perl the best. but it is *not* a good place to start.
well, i am on disability, which pretty much happened when i could *not* quite remember everything (i have epilepsy, so there are obvious symptoms). i never could understand why anyone would want to get into management - the glory was in the code. i never fossilized my programming or learning, altho i know many who have. if i get out of disability, i *have* to go elsewhere, far away from programming, with its arbitrary deadlines and management flights of fancy. guns are never the answer. there is always more fun around the corner. hey, *apple still exists* !
not that i post that much here, but - this is the coolest thing iv/e seen in ages. *not that it applies to us as programmers*, but it does to our users. yes, i use terminal on my imac for programming, but not for seeing the result. i think someone out geeked the geeks here...
except, acourse, sometimes you don/t have a year to work on. mostly, programmers are slaves to the owners of their output. i doubt very highly one can learn what you need to know from a book, tho o/reilly have helped more than anyone could possibly expect.
i think it *very* important to know the machine level programming of what you are doing. i also think c++ is a disaster. if you can/t do it in c, think abt the alternatives. as someone who went to 'object oriented' thru smalltalk, where things made sense, c++ is c w/ even more errors built in. i/d much rather program in *any* assembler than c++. and may your god help you microsofties who think c# isn/t anything but outta tune.
the other thing i agree w/ here is that you *have* to understand how to communicate w/ your audience. no matter your environment, this is what keeps you in your job.
um, just to say, doesn/t mean i don/t have a bachelors. only it/s in ancient greek, latin and english. so acourse i became a computer programmer. obviously.
when i was first hired as a programmer (straight out of an ibm mainframe assembler course - no degree or anything), i was told that i was hired not so much for what i knew (which wasn/t exactly true - day one i was given a dump from an old dos/vse assembler program and 4 hrs to figure it out) as for the fact that i was interested in everything. in the 20-odd years i spent programming, i learned far more than i ever did in school. from assembler on dos/vse to assembler/cics on mvs to horrible batch cobol on mvs (which actually is an okay language for what it does) to perl and web programming on unix (and sql on sybase), the job went places no one could imagine. pretty much all you need to learn, really, is curiosity. and, yes, i have had people hired because they knew little abt the actual environment, but were curious enough to find out.
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at every place i/ve worked (as a programmer), i/ve said at the interview that i had no interest in management, and was there any job path into more technical programming areas ? every manager said 'yes' at the interview, only to back off after i was hired, and to only offer promotions towards management. i/m on disability right now (epilepsy), but am looking back at the market, perhaps to jump back in. i will *not* go to any job that leads to management (and, well, i/d prefer a job that had *no* management !).
i think most people are looking at this in far too short sight. apple may have something up their sleeves that we have no idea of yet (just as they will have something come out (i think fairly soon) of their newton tech, which they kept when others offered to buy). we may not know for a few *years*. but they are pretty savvy on what they are doing.
as posted above, i was in the beginning of a switch to an erp system, that cost the state millions. even more fun - when we started out, it was all done on sybase. abt 2/3rds of the way thru (about the time i 'retired'), they decided to switch everything to oracle. oh, fun.
back in the days, we had the big boss of our IT dept (at a major university) who would bring in salesmen from every company that knocked on his door. he would without exception buy it, and give it to someone (often me) to create a wonderful new application in less than a week (with documentation, of course). this *never* worked, and i was often the scapegoat, since 'he saw the salesman build something just like it in his office'. later, as y2k approached, the financial systems decided they could not convert in time, so they went to an erp system (as eventually did the rest of the university/s systems). this was the biggest money pit i have ever seen. the yearly software licenses were in the millions, the staff tripled to deal w/ the problems, outside contractors were brought in at salaries twice ours. if anyone had given anyone at the university an accurate assessment of how much this costs (present tense), it would never have been done.
yes, the first myst was a hypercard stack, which is why it came out on the mac earlier than the pc. and why, if you had the developer/s hypercard, you cou find out different things (not that i remember that far back - i *do* remember deleting hypercard and seeing myst die a horrible death).
well, how old i am. in my first hardware course, we were supposed to make an 8008 play the stars and stripes. i *think* i got a squeak. first language ? mine was pascal, and i loved it. it very much provided a direction for the furure. c ? well, in those days, you don/t terminate your string correctly, you terminate the computer for the rest of the users. pascal at least would check for range errors you could easily get by in c. can not say i recommend java (and not c++, and *certainly* not any of the microsoft only languages). back in my school days, i was so interested in the language question i took all the courses i could - ada (run thru a lisp interpreter !), lisp, prolog, apl ...when i retired, i ended up liking perl the best. but it is *not* a good place to start.
well, i am on disability, which pretty much happened when i could *not* quite remember everything (i have epilepsy, so there are obvious symptoms). i never could understand why anyone would want to get into management - the glory was in the code. i never fossilized my programming or learning, altho i know many who have. if i get out of disability, i *have* to go elsewhere, far away from programming, with its arbitrary deadlines and management flights of fancy. guns are never the answer. there is always more fun around the corner. hey, *apple still exists* !
not that i post that much here, but - this is the coolest thing iv/e seen in ages. *not that it applies to us as programmers*, but it does to our users. yes, i use terminal on my imac for programming, but not for seeing the result. i think someone out geeked the geeks here...
and also forgotten;
'that is metric, right ?' (hello, nasa...)
except, acourse, sometimes you don/t have a year to work on. mostly, programmers are slaves to the owners of their output. i doubt very highly one can learn what you need to know from a book, tho o/reilly have helped more than anyone could possibly expect.
i think it *very* important to know the machine level programming of what you are doing. i also think c++ is a disaster. if you can/t do it in c, think
abt the alternatives. as someone who went to 'object oriented' thru smalltalk, where things made sense, c++ is c w/ even more errors built in. i/d much rather program in *any* assembler than c++. and may your god help you microsofties who think c# isn/t anything but outta tune.
the other thing i agree w/ here is that you *have* to understand how to communicate w/ your audience. no matter your environment, this is what keeps you in your job.
um, just to say, doesn/t mean i don/t have a bachelors. only it/s in ancient greek, latin and english. so acourse i became a computer programmer. obviously.
when i was first hired as a programmer (straight out of an ibm mainframe assembler course - no degree or anything), i was told that i was hired not so much for what i knew (which wasn/t exactly true - day one i was given a dump from an old dos/vse assembler program and 4 hrs to figure it out) as for the fact that i was interested in everything. in the 20-odd years i spent programming, i learned far more than i ever did in school. from assembler on dos/vse to assembler/cics on mvs to horrible batch cobol on mvs (which actually is an okay language for what it does) to perl and web programming on unix (and sql on sybase), the job went places no one could imagine. pretty much all you need to learn, really, is curiosity. and, yes, i have had people hired because they knew little abt the actual environment, but were curious enough to find out.