Yeah, because conservative Democrats would NEVER vote for a conservative candidate, right? My parish in Louisiana is about 70% Democrat and has voted for the Republican presidential candidate overwhelmingly since 1980. The majority of the local government is Democrat, and the local representative is a Republican.
In many rural areas, political party affiliation has more to do with the dispensation of favors than any ideology.
The whole issue with Rorshach for me was.... I did NOT expect some freckle faced redhead to be the badass. They need a nerd or pop culture icon to be Rorshach... like Ralphie or Richie from Happy Days or Screech.;)
And if you believe that, I've got some cabanas in Siberia to sell you.
Can't tell you how many morons would rather be out of work for 4-5 months than take 10 bucks less an hour to fit within a budget. When I was a recruiter, we'd work with W2 or corp to corp consultants, but it made absolutely no difference to us other than the paperwork. The $125 an hour that a corp to corp guy got was the same that he got when he decided to go W2 on his next assignment.
When considering contracting, you also have to figure down time in addition to lost benefits. Also, make sure that they consulting firm or body shop you're working with is paying you a decent wage.
When I was a recruiter, the company that I worked for charged a minimum of a 70% markup for contract work. Were our consultants getting decent wages? Of course they were. We submitted them at the rate that they wanted plus our markup on top. Did we deserve the markup? Of course we did. Phone banks, software, computers, office space, salaries, etc. don't pay for themselves, and consultants rarely understand the intensity of the workplace. Think Boiler Room. I placed dozens of consultants in the year that I worked, and not once did I ever use Dice or Monster for anything other than resumes. I wanted less competition for open spots, and I did that by networking.
However, I also had instances where consultants would complain to me that other companies had come to them and offered rates at much less than they were used to.
My advice is this: NEVER undersell yourself. If I'm a recruiter, I'm going to ask you what you made on your previous jobs and what you did on your previous jobs and who you reported to because I want to (a) build a work history, (b) have references ready for you, and (c) network your contacts. If you tell me you made $55 bucks on your last job, I'm going to see if you'll take $50 on your next. Contract recruiters get paid on the percentage of the spread. Perm recruiters negotiate the spread on the front end and then make a percentage of the salary.
Re:how is that different from other companies
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 1
How did you manage to only make 8 bucks an hour? I made over 10 an hour as a stocker in a Winn-Dixie when I was going to school, and I lived in rural Louisiana.
The problem isn't exclusively the domain of CSI. It's with entertainment in general.
What we have is entertainment that mimics bite sized portions of real life. Now, all television shows do this to a degree, but many of them are sitcoms that deal with familial situations, and since these situations are familiar to us, we can discount what we watch on the boob tube.
CSI and other dramas are foreign in nature. We aren't forensic examiners, detectives, or doctors. We don't see all the long hours and the paperwork in these shows. They don't make for good tv. What these shows do is create a crop of new armchair experts who observe processes on an entertainment program and demand that it translate to real life.
This used to be the sole venue for sports fanatics who would berate their coaches and players for perceived lack of execution on the field (and even today, people will judge athletes against ridiculous things like Madden scores instead of production on the field). Then it became political as news coverage of political issues came about. You don't need to know the issues, all you need to do is swallow the slogans. Eventually, it stretched into documentaries, live tv, and then dramas. And so on and so forth.
We've gone to the point where we medicate ourselves based on the commercials we like. Can't get it up but want to throw a ball through a tire? Buy Levitra. Are you too lazy and fat to exercise like a normal human being? Thumb stomach surgery. Who needs doctors? We have commercials and the Discovery Health network!
This can only be good in the long run, though. Right after I unveil my Red Hot Poker(tm) contact lens remover and Pocket Landmine, that is. All I need is celebrity endorsements. Just ask California!
Dick Morris, Clinton flunkie, is one of the biggest proponents of the Patriot Act. Perhaps because he knows that the media would be up the administration's ass in a second if they abused it (hell, they've managed to use false documents and thoroughly unconfirmed information already). Or because he knows that it's already aided the intelligence community in stopping terrorist activity in New York.
Either way, you aren't going to get anyone much to the left of Ashcroft to replace him. And, should Rumsfeld resign, you will almost certainly get someone to the right of him. Even the Dems were kissing his ass when Bush appointed him.
This is just silly. Shouldn't have to work for so little money? Then perhaps they should pick up a skill which would make them worth more to their employers. The employers tend to give things called raises to employees who show that they're worth keeping.
The government shouldn't be in the business of picking up the slack of people who aren't skilled enough to get decent jobs. It already pays for their entire freaking education through high school including work study programs and grants.
This just proves to me that there are still a ton of stupid liberals in this country (there have to be at least some of you who can go two minutes without utilizing a catch phrase). Bush was the first president in history to be hounded by special interest groups EVEN BEFORE he took the oath. When 9/11 happened, the first thing the Dems sought to do was to figure out a way to demean Bush so that he wouldn't be able to own the issue. And he's just supposed to tolerate this bullshit?
What has Bush done? Well, if you claim he's been pissing on Democrats, it seems to get the job done. He helped to increase congressional power during his midterm election, and did it again with his re-election. As a matter of fact, pissing on Democrats as a way to gain power has worked for every Republican since Reagan. Try to keep up.
So go ahead, be angry, you see yourselves as doves, when the rest of us see you as the asses you really are. And watch out for the yellow rain, lest you lose the rest of the Senate seats that the Yellow Dogs hold precariously. You're only 6 from being given a canoe and a map of Shit Creek for you to start traversing.
Looking at Louisiana alone, I can tell you that the blue corridor that runs up the Mississippi River from Orleans parish northward is one of the poorest areas in the nation, and sucks up most of the welfare money in the state.
I'll put you on the same level as your average Klan member... you complain about something you know nothing about. "We're different! We're better! Really!"
For every talk-radio listening right-winger in the red states, there's an NPR listening leftist loser in the blue states who not only has to pay triple just to live there, but also gets his ass taxed off to high-heaven just so the state can make budget. You get spoonfed by a bunch of clowns who get paid huge bucks to entertain you and you call it culture. You hang out with a bunch of lock-stepped thinking buffoons and call yourselves intellectuals.
Criticizing someone's culture without experiencing it first-hand? You know nothing of diversity.
The jobs are out there
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The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
There's a difference between "I can't find a job," which is what many unemployed people say, and "I can't find the job that I want," which is what they actually mean.
People seem to have grown so accustomed to getting everything their way that they have forgotten that the world isn't the rosy little wonderland they want it to be. The only people sitting at home unemployed in this economy are the ones without the balls to find a job and succeed at it while waiting for the right opportunity.
I find most of the "outraged" comments here absolutely hilarious. The people showing the outrage are either a bunch of college students who don't have jobs or software developers who signed their rights to be paid an hourly rate a long time ago when they took exempt positions.
Both of my sisters are RNs. It is standard practice at their hospitals to work 36 hours a week and get paid for 40. Depending on when during the day they work, they get paid extra just for working a different shift. They get paid double time and a half to work during emergencies like Hurricane Ivan (they had a lock down and paid them while they slept for two nights as well) or during holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. They get free car detailing, free health care, free offsetting payments on their 401ks (IOW, upon request, they pay the normal tax free portion AND the matching amount), free gyms, free massages, and free vacations.
In short, you are whining about the "rights" of the most coddled group of hourly employees on the entire friggin planet. They already expect to get paid more for just about everything that isn't totally within the norm for them. All the hospitals are doing is making it a little easier to keep operating costs down.
There are some nurses with enough tenure at hospitals that they take advantage of the system and demand that they only work a nightly weekend shift. This means that the hospital still has to pay them the double shift differential AND give them full time benefits. Implementing the system has the benefit of almost eliminating this practice, since there will always be younger nurses making less who can benefit from the extra experience on some of the busiest nights of the week.
I find very few that are very engrossing for me anymore. The last adventure game I really enjoyed (if you could even call it that) was Metroid Prime, which I suspect has as much to do with the nostalgia factor as the gameplay. I have an inkling to play Prince of Persia, but almost no desire to play another RPG simply because the stories are not engrossing and MMORPGs for the same reason.
Even my desire to play sports games is somewhat limited. I prefer arcade games over simulation in almost all isntances. For example, I like NFL Street over Madden simply because it's easy to pick up and play.
I play fighting games somewhat, but am not willing to dedicate the time to master all the movesets and characters.... certainly not enough for 3d games, anyway. I prefer the 2D Capcom and SNK games.
MAME and the rest of the emulators are wonderful in the regard that there are a ton of great games out there which you can grab a quick game or two. Money Puzzle Exchanger, Puzzle Bobble, Tetris Attack, Windjammers, NBA Jam, Punchout, Ping Pong, etc.... all of them are great for short term entertainment.
I'd even go so far as to say that if you can't make a good game that requires short time spans to play, you have no business whatsoever trying to design large, complex games.
... the discovery of fire may spawn cooks! Oh, the horror! Cooked food! Why can't it be like the old days when people dined on raw flesh and they liked it? That's it, we're moving the family to Japan. Oh, the neanderthalality of it all!
Computer Science has more to do with mathematics than MIS. MIS students can't program worth a damn. 4 year degrees are supposed to take 4 years to complete....
And people wonder why we're losing jobs to Indians. Look, I have a CS degree. I'm also a recruiter. I know both sides.
The sad fact of the matter is that CS grads are not qualified for most positions and won't get more than a glance by most recruiters. Voila, in the real world, money is the bottom line, and I'm not going to make money off of a pimple faced geek who thinks that configuring Enlightenment to run transparent windows on a Linux box is the epitome of coolness.
You want to get a job when you graduate? Prepare earlier. Get an internship. Do some real research. If you're looking to get a certification, save your money. Certs mean NOTHING without experience (although Oracle and Cisco certs can get your foot in the door). Learn how to write resumes and prepare for interviews. If you do all that, you might have a chance at landing a job.
Even still, you'll be bringing a knife to a gunfight. I know PhDs who have gotten grants from NASA to develop algorithms who can't find work right now. Sooner or later, geeks will learn that the only reason they're employed is to facilitate business. Instead of getting that MS in CS, get an MBA. Pay to get trained by some of the corporations that produce the software that most companies use. SAP. Peoplesoft. Oracle. Webmethods. Lawson. JDEdwards. Manugistics. You've already spent thousands on a piece of paper that says you labored through a bunch of classes. Spend a few grand more and position yourself to make A LOT of money so that you can spend time doing what you like.
Very few people get to write software from scratch nowadays. You'll be much happier in the long run if you get a job that pays well and is well respected than one that you think you'll like but gets you treated like a spare.
Your life is what you make of it, but the world is what it is. Successful people make it work to their advantage.
As for me, I'm working a day job making a nice living (and if you resent recruiters, you have no idea how risky the job is), and do some remote consulting from home on the weekends. Going back to school with a fat wallet in the fall to get an MBA/JD. I'll be much happier working 45 hours a week at 300 bucks an hour as a financial planner/estate planner while coding on the side than working 45 hours a week for someone else to maintain their code.
What a lot of geeks don't understand is that the tech economy as a whole has matured. Remember in school when you learned how to create an optimization tree for the first time and wondered why you had to sit through that crap?
Well, what makes you think that someone is going to pay you to rewrite software that has already been packaged in a neat little box in each flavor of the business world?
Suppose I create a portal intranet to tie in my HR and financials. I now have at my fingertips the ability to pull up an employee's file, view their performance history, view my budget, and give them a raise. Suddenly, the spares in the HR and Accounting departments aren't needed anymore. If I buy this functionality from a vendor, then I don't even need a full time IT staff. I can hire a consultant to install and configure the software for me and a kid off the street to support it.
The tech economy isn't about tech anymore. It's about applying utilizing technology to streamline business practices. Streamlining business practices is also about cutting costs, which means cutting dead weight, which means cutting techies and a bunch of other people loose.
Certifications are useless in most instances. The exceptions are (1) when the HR department screens resumes, (2) when you have two people with equivalent accomplishments and experience except the certs, and (3)when you're a fresh college grad who is certified in something that takes a lot of work to get.
I wouldn't hire a consultant to be a project manager if all he's done is post production support no matter how many project management certifications he holds. Certification means that you have knowledge, not that you can apply it.
People assume that it's all outsourcing that's cutting into their business.
It ain't.
About a hundred years ago, nails were hand cast. There were thousands of nail shops. A good shop could turn out a few thousand a day. Settlers would burn down their temporary housing after the winter to retrieve the nails from the wood. Then a guy came up with an idea to cut nails from sheet metal. Made a machine to do it. Suddenly, his shop can outproduce any others by 20-1. He sold all of his nails... business owners knew they wouldn't have to wait for him to produce more. His business expands. He drives down prices because it takes less than a quarter of the manpower to product the nails. The little shops shut down. They sure as heck didn't outsource the jobs. The nailmakers didn't sit at home for a year and whine on message boards about their dilemna; they learned a new skill and moved on.
Same thing happens in software development. Thousands of little shops or in-house development departments, banging out code by hand. Other companies got smart. They understood the general parameters of businesses, created software to handle these, and then created modules to handle specifics.
How many versions of word processors do you really expect to find in corporations? Sure, there's staroffice, but Word is the king.
In oil companies, SAP's IS-Oil module is king.
In academia, Peoplesoft's Academic Solutions group works the best.
Many companies use Oracle's application server 11i, especially for their financials.
Techies act like they're so downtrodden. The only thing that's happened is that they've been slapped with the cold reality of American business history.
Techies weren't there for the car factory workers, they weren't there for the clothing people, or the furniture people, and software developers really didn't care a great deal when hardware manufacturing jobs went overseas. So why should the rest of the country really care about us?
The industry has simply refined itself. A BS in CS is no longer enough. A MS might not be enough without other consideration.
I go through thousands of resume's a day. People with a BS in CS and a MA in business and training in one of the big ERP packages (JD Edwards, Lawson, SAP, Oracle, etc.) are not having a great deal of trouble finding work. They usually get to pick who they want to work for and what they want to get paid.
Some of them do programming, but they aren't programmers. Anyone can be a programmer. Lots of people can be good programmers. Not anybody can design a successful business system.
The market is doing precisely what it's designed to do.
Courses involving proprietary technology? I have no problem with that. Courses featuring proprietary technology? That's IT, not CS. You can learn Lisp, Fortran, etc, etc. in Programming Languages, which is pretty much a standard class.
You don't need a computer at college. They provide them for you. Using the ones at the school will make you less sedentary, less likely to mess around with things other than your assignments, and manage your time better.
Seriously, try it for a year while leaving your PC at home. Involve yourself with clubs, social activity, and extra studying in your spare time. Make enough friends and involve yourself in enough activities and the computer becomes nothing more than a tool to be used for assignments.
The cool thing about this is that the grower can tweak the grapes to yield a high quality product. And if others do it too, so what? The worst that can happen is that all the trolls who horde obscure Bordeaux wines for the prestige suddenly find their stock worth about a quarter of what it once was. Wine is meant for drinking anyway.
I'm privileged in that I get to sample a whole lot of the finer things in life for free or reduced cost as part of my job, but I'd be happy if people were able to get a really nice cab for $5 just as I would if they could be sampling Cohiba Robustos and Partagas Lusitanias from Cuba for the same price. Quality makes a huge difference, and more quality to more people is fine with me.
They hate the fact that the industry that supplies cars with the stuff they need to run doesn't support them politically.
They'll support the hydrogen industry until it turns out that the same oil companies start to crack the petroleum and benefit just the same, and then they'll turn sour on that industry too.
Funny that tobacco was never a problem for them either until Dixie left them hanging.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because conservative Democrats would NEVER vote for a conservative candidate, right? My parish in Louisiana is about 70% Democrat and has voted for the Republican presidential candidate overwhelmingly since 1980. The majority of the local government is Democrat, and the local representative is a Republican.
In many rural areas, political party affiliation has more to do with the dispensation of favors than any ideology.
The whole issue with Rorshach for me was.... I did NOT expect some freckle faced redhead to be the badass. They need a nerd or pop culture icon to be Rorshach... like Ralphie or Richie from Happy Days or Screech. ;)
And if you believe that, I've got some cabanas in Siberia to sell you.
Can't tell you how many morons would rather be out of work for 4-5 months than take 10 bucks less an hour to fit within a budget. When I was a recruiter, we'd work with W2 or corp to corp consultants, but it made absolutely no difference to us other than the paperwork. The $125 an hour that a corp to corp guy got was the same that he got when he decided to go W2 on his next assignment.
When considering contracting, you also have to figure down time in addition to lost benefits. Also, make sure that they consulting firm or body shop you're working with is paying you a decent wage.
When I was a recruiter, the company that I worked for charged a minimum of a 70% markup for contract work. Were our consultants getting decent wages? Of course they were. We submitted them at the rate that they wanted plus our markup on top. Did we deserve the markup? Of course we did. Phone banks, software, computers, office space, salaries, etc. don't pay for themselves, and consultants rarely understand the intensity of the workplace. Think Boiler Room. I placed dozens of consultants in the year that I worked, and not once did I ever use Dice or Monster for anything other than resumes. I wanted less competition for open spots, and I did that by networking.
However, I also had instances where consultants would complain to me that other companies had come to them and offered rates at much less than they were used to.
My advice is this: NEVER undersell yourself. If I'm a recruiter, I'm going to ask you what you made on your previous jobs and what you did on your previous jobs and who you reported to because I want to (a) build a work history, (b) have references ready for you, and (c) network your contacts. If you tell me you made $55 bucks on your last job, I'm going to see if you'll take $50 on your next. Contract recruiters get paid on the percentage of the spread. Perm recruiters negotiate the spread on the front end and then make a percentage of the salary.
How did you manage to only make 8 bucks an hour? I made over 10 an hour as a stocker in a Winn-Dixie when I was going to school, and I lived in rural Louisiana.
The problem isn't exclusively the domain of CSI. It's with entertainment in general.
What we have is entertainment that mimics bite sized portions of real life. Now, all television shows do this to a degree, but many of them are sitcoms that deal with familial situations, and since these situations are familiar to us, we can discount what we watch on the boob tube.
CSI and other dramas are foreign in nature. We aren't forensic examiners, detectives, or doctors. We don't see all the long hours and the paperwork in these shows. They don't make for good tv. What these shows do is create a crop of new armchair experts who observe processes on an entertainment program and demand that it translate to real life.
This used to be the sole venue for sports fanatics who would berate their coaches and players for perceived lack of execution on the field (and even today, people will judge athletes against ridiculous things like Madden scores instead of production on the field). Then it became political as news coverage of political issues came about. You don't need to know the issues, all you need to do is swallow the slogans. Eventually, it stretched into documentaries, live tv, and then dramas. And so on and so forth.
We've gone to the point where we medicate ourselves based on the commercials we like. Can't get it up but want to throw a ball through a tire? Buy Levitra. Are you too lazy and fat to exercise like a normal human being? Thumb stomach surgery.
Who needs doctors? We have commercials and the Discovery Health network!
This can only be good in the long run, though. Right after I unveil my Red Hot Poker(tm) contact lens remover and Pocket Landmine, that is. All I need is celebrity endorsements. Just ask California!
That was a mistranslation, cuz the motto on the front gate of the US offices is: "Here you work for free."
Dick Morris, Clinton flunkie, is one of the biggest proponents of the Patriot Act. Perhaps because he knows that the media would be up the administration's ass in a second if they abused it (hell, they've managed to use false documents and thoroughly unconfirmed information already). Or because he knows that it's already aided the intelligence community in stopping terrorist activity in New York.
Either way, you aren't going to get anyone much to the left of Ashcroft to replace him. And, should Rumsfeld resign, you will almost certainly get someone to the right of him. Even the Dems were kissing his ass when Bush appointed him.
This is just silly. Shouldn't have to work for so little money? Then perhaps they should pick up a skill which would make them worth more to their employers. The employers tend to give things called raises to employees who show that they're worth keeping.
The government shouldn't be in the business of picking up the slack of people who aren't skilled enough to get decent jobs. It already pays for their entire freaking education through high school including work study programs and grants.
Wow, a whole two issues. My, you're certainly a sharp one. I'm sure car salesmen love you.
"It's got wheels and doors. What else do you need?"
This just proves to me that there are still a ton of stupid liberals in this country (there have to be at least some of you who can go two minutes without utilizing a catch phrase). Bush was the first president in history to be hounded by special interest groups EVEN BEFORE he took the oath. When 9/11 happened, the first thing the Dems sought to do was to figure out a way to demean Bush so that he wouldn't be able to own the issue. And he's just supposed to tolerate this bullshit?
What has Bush done? Well, if you claim he's been pissing on Democrats, it seems to get the job done. He helped to increase congressional power during his midterm election, and did it again with his re-election. As a matter of fact, pissing on Democrats as a way to gain power has worked for every Republican since Reagan. Try to keep up.
So go ahead, be angry, you see yourselves as doves, when the rest of us see you as the asses you really are. And watch out for the yellow rain, lest you lose the rest of the Senate seats that the Yellow Dogs hold precariously. You're only 6 from being given a canoe and a map of Shit Creek for you to start traversing.
Looking at Louisiana alone, I can tell you that the blue corridor that runs up the Mississippi River from Orleans parish northward is one of the poorest areas in the nation, and sucks up most of the welfare money in the state.
The summary of it is that Bush supporters haven't seen the world lately.
Yeah, because why drink W's kool-aid when there are so many other flavors that Kerry wants you to drink?
I'll put you on the same level as your average Klan member... you complain about something you know nothing about. "We're different! We're better! Really!"
For every talk-radio listening right-winger in the red states, there's an NPR listening leftist loser in the blue states who not only has to pay triple just to live there, but also gets his ass taxed off to high-heaven just so the state can make budget. You get spoonfed by a bunch of clowns who get paid huge bucks to entertain you and you call it culture. You hang out with a bunch of lock-stepped thinking buffoons and call yourselves intellectuals.
Criticizing someone's culture without experiencing it first-hand? You know nothing of diversity.
There's a difference between "I can't find a job," which is what many unemployed people say, and "I can't find the job that I want," which is what they actually mean.
People seem to have grown so accustomed to getting everything their way that they have forgotten that the world isn't the rosy little wonderland they want it to be. The only people sitting at home unemployed in this economy are the ones without the balls to find a job and succeed at it while waiting for the right opportunity.
I find most of the "outraged" comments here absolutely hilarious. The people showing the outrage are either a bunch of college students who don't have jobs or software developers who signed their rights to be paid an hourly rate a long time ago when they took exempt positions.
Both of my sisters are RNs. It is standard practice at their hospitals to work 36 hours a week and get paid for 40. Depending on when during the day they work, they get paid extra just for working a different shift. They get paid double time and a half to work during emergencies like Hurricane Ivan (they had a lock down and paid them while they slept for two nights as well) or during holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. They get free car detailing, free health care, free offsetting payments on their 401ks (IOW, upon request, they pay the normal tax free portion AND the matching amount), free gyms, free massages, and free vacations.
In short, you are whining about the "rights" of the most coddled group of hourly employees on the entire friggin planet. They already expect to get paid more for just about everything that isn't totally within the norm for them. All the hospitals are doing is making it a little easier to keep operating costs down.
There are some nurses with enough tenure at hospitals that they take advantage of the system and demand that they only work a nightly weekend shift. This means that the hospital still has to pay them the double shift differential AND give them full time benefits. Implementing the system has the benefit of almost eliminating this practice, since there will always be younger nurses making less who can benefit from the extra experience on some of the busiest nights of the week.
I find very few that are very engrossing for me anymore. The last adventure game I really enjoyed (if you could even call it that) was Metroid Prime, which I suspect has as much to do with the nostalgia factor as the gameplay. I have an inkling to play Prince of Persia, but almost no desire to play another RPG simply because the stories are not engrossing and MMORPGs for the same reason.
Even my desire to play sports games is somewhat limited. I prefer arcade games over simulation in almost all isntances. For example, I like NFL Street over Madden simply because it's easy to pick up and play.
I play fighting games somewhat, but am not willing to dedicate the time to master all the movesets and characters.... certainly not enough for 3d games, anyway. I prefer the 2D Capcom and SNK games.
MAME and the rest of the emulators are wonderful in the regard that there are a ton of great games out there which you can grab a quick game or two. Money Puzzle Exchanger, Puzzle Bobble, Tetris Attack, Windjammers, NBA Jam, Punchout, Ping Pong, etc.... all of them are great for short term entertainment.
I'd even go so far as to say that if you can't make a good game that requires short time spans to play, you have no business whatsoever trying to design large, complex games.
... the discovery of fire may spawn cooks! Oh, the horror! Cooked food! Why can't it be like the old days when people dined on raw flesh and they liked it? That's it, we're moving the family to Japan. Oh, the neanderthalality of it all!
Computer Science has more to do with mathematics than MIS. MIS students can't program worth a damn. 4 year degrees are supposed to take 4 years to complete....
And people wonder why we're losing jobs to Indians. Look, I have a CS degree. I'm also a recruiter. I know both sides.
The sad fact of the matter is that CS grads are not qualified for most positions and won't get more than a glance by most recruiters. Voila, in the real world, money is the bottom line, and I'm not going to make money off of a pimple faced geek who thinks that configuring Enlightenment to run transparent windows on a Linux box is the epitome of coolness.
You want to get a job when you graduate? Prepare earlier. Get an internship. Do some real research. If you're looking to get a certification, save your money. Certs mean NOTHING without experience (although Oracle and Cisco certs can get your foot in the door). Learn how to write resumes and prepare for interviews. If you do all that, you might have a chance at landing a job.
Even still, you'll be bringing a knife to a gunfight. I know PhDs who have gotten grants from NASA to develop algorithms who can't find work right now. Sooner or later, geeks will learn that the only reason they're employed is to facilitate business. Instead of getting that MS in CS, get an MBA. Pay to get trained by some of the corporations that produce the software that most companies use. SAP. Peoplesoft. Oracle. Webmethods. Lawson. JDEdwards. Manugistics. You've already spent thousands on a piece of paper that says you labored through a bunch of classes. Spend a few grand more and position yourself to make A LOT of money so that you can spend time doing what you like.
Very few people get to write software from scratch nowadays. You'll be much happier in the long run if you get a job that pays well and is well respected than one that you think you'll like but gets you treated like a spare.
Your life is what you make of it, but the world is what it is. Successful people make it work to their advantage.
As for me, I'm working a day job making a nice living (and if you resent recruiters, you have no idea how risky the job is), and do some remote consulting from home on the weekends. Going back to school with a fat wallet in the fall to get an MBA/JD. I'll be much happier working 45 hours a week at 300 bucks an hour as a financial planner/estate planner while coding on the side than working 45 hours a week for someone else to maintain their code.
What a lot of geeks don't understand is that the tech economy as a whole has matured. Remember in school when you learned how to create an optimization tree for the first time and wondered why you had to sit through that crap?
Well, what makes you think that someone is going to pay you to rewrite software that has already been packaged in a neat little box in each flavor of the business world?
Suppose I create a portal intranet to tie in my HR and financials. I now have at my fingertips the ability to pull up an employee's file, view their performance history, view my budget, and give them a raise. Suddenly, the spares in the HR and Accounting departments aren't needed anymore. If I buy this functionality from a vendor, then I don't even need a full time IT staff. I can hire a consultant to install and configure the software for me and a kid off the street to support it.
The tech economy isn't about tech anymore. It's about applying utilizing technology to streamline business practices. Streamlining business practices is also about cutting costs, which means cutting dead weight, which means cutting techies and a bunch of other people loose.
Certifications are useless in most instances. The exceptions are (1) when the HR department screens resumes, (2) when you have two people with equivalent accomplishments and experience except the certs, and (3)when you're a fresh college grad who is certified in something that takes a lot of work to get.
I wouldn't hire a consultant to be a project manager if all he's done is post production support no matter how many project management certifications he holds. Certification means that you have knowledge, not that you can apply it.
Wow, the tech boom is over. Whoopdee-friggin-do.
People assume that it's all outsourcing that's cutting into their business.
It ain't.
About a hundred years ago, nails were hand cast. There were thousands of nail shops. A good shop could turn out a few thousand a day. Settlers would burn down their temporary housing after the winter to retrieve the nails from the wood. Then a guy came up with an idea to cut nails from sheet metal. Made a machine to do it. Suddenly, his shop can outproduce any others by 20-1. He sold all of his nails... business owners knew they wouldn't have to wait for him to produce more. His business expands. He drives down prices because it takes less than a quarter of the manpower to product the nails. The little shops shut down. They sure as heck didn't outsource the jobs. The nailmakers didn't sit at home for a year and whine on message boards about their dilemna; they learned a new skill and moved on.
Same thing happens in software development. Thousands of little shops or in-house development departments, banging out code by hand. Other companies got smart. They understood the general parameters of businesses, created software to handle these, and then created modules to handle specifics.
How many versions of word processors do you really expect to find in corporations? Sure, there's staroffice, but Word is the king.
In oil companies, SAP's IS-Oil module is king.
In academia, Peoplesoft's Academic Solutions group works the best.
Many companies use Oracle's application server 11i, especially for their financials.
Techies act like they're so downtrodden. The only thing that's happened is that they've been slapped with the cold reality of American business history.
Techies weren't there for the car factory workers, they weren't there for the clothing people, or the furniture people, and software developers really didn't care a great deal when hardware manufacturing jobs went overseas. So why should the rest of the country really care about us?
The industry has simply refined itself. A BS in CS is no longer enough. A MS might not be enough without other consideration.
I go through thousands of resume's a day. People with a BS in CS and a MA in business and training in one of the big ERP packages (JD Edwards, Lawson, SAP, Oracle, etc.) are not having a great deal of trouble finding work. They usually get to pick who they want to work for and what they want to get paid.
Some of them do programming, but they aren't programmers. Anyone can be a programmer. Lots of people can be good programmers. Not anybody can design a successful business system.
The market is doing precisely what it's designed to do.
Courses involving proprietary technology? I have no problem with that. Courses featuring proprietary technology? That's IT, not CS. You can learn Lisp, Fortran, etc, etc. in Programming Languages, which is pretty much a standard class.
You don't need a computer at college. They provide them for you. Using the ones at the school will make you less sedentary, less likely to mess around with things other than your assignments, and manage your time better.
Seriously, try it for a year while leaving your PC at home. Involve yourself with clubs, social activity, and extra studying in your spare time. Make enough friends and involve yourself in enough activities and the computer becomes nothing more than a tool to be used for assignments.
The cool thing about this is that the grower can tweak the grapes to yield a high quality product. And if others do it too, so what? The worst that can happen is that all the trolls who horde obscure Bordeaux wines for the prestige suddenly find their stock worth about a quarter of what it once was. Wine is meant for drinking anyway.
I'm privileged in that I get to sample a whole lot of the finer things in life for free or reduced cost as part of my job, but I'd be happy if people were able to get a really nice cab for $5 just as I would if they could be sampling Cohiba Robustos and Partagas Lusitanias from Cuba for the same price. Quality makes a huge difference, and more quality to more people is fine with me.
Leftists don't hate cars.
They hate the fact that the industry that supplies cars with the stuff they need to run doesn't support them politically.
They'll support the hydrogen industry until it turns out that the same oil companies start to crack the petroleum and benefit just the same, and then they'll turn sour on that industry too.
Funny that tobacco was never a problem for them either until Dixie left them hanging.