Re:I wouldn't mind Apple if it wasn't for ...
on
Steve Jobs' Grand Vision
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"1. the whole personality cult surrounding Steve Jobs (face it - Steve Wozniak is the real genius)"
What, exactly, do you mean by "Real?"
There is more than one kind of genius, and all kinds are very real. There is genius in mathemeticians who focus only on esoteric theories, there is genius in engineers who only solve real problems they can feel, and there is genius in Ella Fitzgerald's singing.
The genius of Dali's art is very different in kind from the genius of a certain Finnish student coming up with the right code for the world, but who would say that Linus Torvalds is no genius?
Not all genius is necessarily what you might consider to be good. There is a genius in Bill Gates' domination of markets, in George W. Bush's political mastery, in Osama Bin Laden's sheer survival skills and leadership abilities.
Both Wozniak and Jobs are geniuses, in their own way. Wozniak is the engineering genius, and Jobs is the marketing and management genius.
And neither one is really less of a genius than the other.
"Lord of the Rings was such a fluke because there's no way that should have gotten done, or done as well as it was, via the Hollywood system. Because Hollywood crushes creativity, it eschews original thought, and it despises anything it can't reference as something else."
I agree with you in principle... the LOTR is a bad example.
What's new OR original OR creative about adapting a successful book into a movie? Especially a series of books as successful as LOTR? I mean, this was original maybe fifty years ago.
The Matrix and Star Wars were both highly derivative. Star Trek was forced down the throats of movie studios by a pre-existing TV series fan base.
Disproving good hard science takes a bit longer. Not just because of the effort involved, but because of the inertia of supposedly rational scientific thinkers -- just ask Barry Marshall:
The peer response showed the same scepticism that greeted Warren's initial observations, and for a number of years the majority of the medical profession dismissed the hypothesis. Despite this, the Perth team continued to gather evidence of their theory, dramatically in one case. Deciding that the best way to prove the findings was to show exactly what happened when infected with H. pylori, Marshall swallowed a culture of the bacterium. A week later, he began suffering acute symptoms of gastritis, and biopsies revealed that he had developed both infection with H. pylori and severe acute gastritis. Fortunately, the sequel was a successful case of "Physician, heal thyself"!
If this has been in use since the 1980s, and if it has prevented the formation of hail as it claims, then the evidence should be available for people to see. And if that evidence shows that it does, in fact, prevent hail formation, then there's obviously something working.
Given the number of years this has been in service in New Zealand and the like, it should be possible to find evidence of it working or not working -- through the absence or presence of hail in the general region where the device is used, along with the absence or presence of hail in the local area immediately near where the device is (with some accounting for the effect of wind blowing hail one way or the other).
Not all things that work in ways that science doesn't understand are pseudoscience, and not all commonly-accepted scientific principles are not. The "hard" part of hard science is where we constantly re-evaluate our own view of how things work.
In short, give this a chance. I can understand people being fooled in the short run, but since people have used things like this since the 80's, they must keep using 'em for some reason. Maybe they don't work and the folks just want to get their money's worth! But until you go to the source of the data and examine it critically, how can you know, regardless of how good your understanding of current science is?
Totally. Wouldn't have even clicked on the article, 'cept I half-expected to see a Rush reference in there somewhere.
Nope.
When my car was stolen Nov 2002 about the only thing the thieves DIDN'T take was my "Vapor Trails" CD. Not only were they criminals, they had bad taste in music, too.
They even took the chrome Bevo I had off the back of my car. Are you kidding me? What kind of sick fuck steals a man's Bevo?
[Bevo = logo for the University of Texas, a silhouette of a longhorn cow head]
The article is talking only about non-overdriven signals when it talks about how it looks on an oscilloscope. If you overdrive the signal to create distortion, such as what guitar amplifiers (like the parent poster's Crate amp) do on their "dirty" channels, and look at THAT signal on your oscilloscope, it is how I said it is: Transistors clip square, and Tubes clip sawtooth.
Well, technically, a vacuum tube does the same thing as a transistor, so the smaller, lighter, cheaper, cooler, and usually more reliable transistor should have replaced the vacuum tube, right?
Do you ever ask yourself -why- vacuum tubes sound better? There's a specific reason.
See, in a guitar amp, what you really want to do is overdrive the sound, creating distortion. That's the nice fuzz sound. When the signal is overdriven, the semiconductor clips off the top of the sound wave.
Vacuum tubes and transistors clip sound waves differently. In a transistor, the clip stays high until the signal drops, causing a square-shaped clip. In a vacuum tube, the signal drops after the clip, creating a sawtooth-shaped clip.
Brass and strings have sawtooth-shaped waveforms. Computers make square-shaped waveforms. So most people "like" the sound of a sawtooth better. So people like the vacuum tube sound better.
MOSFET transistors are now being used in solid-state audio equipment because they, too, have a sawtooth clip when they distort. Now note that this only matters if you actually overdrive the sound; folks who think a tube amp that isn't distorting sounds better than a solid-state amp are probably imagining things. But your Crate sounds better than my solid-state pedal because of the way the semiconductors in 'em clip.
I think you make some interesting points that are worth discussing. Largely, I agree with you, and I think you're on the right track. I do agree that Globalization is not a force of nature and that corporations are largely a product of politics, and for the very reasons you gave.
Now you say you think US wages and the wages in the rest of the world will equalize. Which US wages are you talking about? What I make here in San Diego is very different from what I'd be making in Amarillo, Texas -- because Amarillo is not as desirable of a place to live as San Diego, regardless of the businesses there. It doesn't have as many people producing things. It doesn't have the natural resources of San Diego, either. It doesn't have the human resources. Because of that, the cost of living and salaries for the same job are different. We don't even have salary parity within the USA, because of all of these different factors. Given that, how can the whole world achieve parity? Eventually places like Delhi and Shanghai will be as expensive to live and have as high of salaries as places like San Diego, San Francisco, and New York, yes. But other places will never reach parity, because they don't have the resources.
You also say that the threat is to the entire software industry. You seem to imply that the entire software industry will disappear. Now despite the "threat" of Japan, cars are still made in the USA. In fact, a lot of these Japanese auto makers are making cars right here in the USA! But the US auto industry hasn't disappeared. In fact, last I checked, US companies Ford and GM were the #3 and #1 largest corporations in the world. And they still make cars here on our soil.
I do expect the software industry to take a hit. I'm not surprised; what happened in the 90's was an anomaly. The gravy train was never going to last forever. Merely having a CS degree was never going to be a ticket to job security for the future. On the other hand, managing offshore workers takes a lot of planning and very careful management -- and even with that, even with the best talent, projects are more likely to fail than projects all managed on one site. Offshore outsourcing is ludicrously unrealistic for smaller companies as well -- someone above very rightly chided me for having a perspective based on having worked only in small companies.
So in the end, it seems to me that the software industry won't disappear in the US, even under the most pessimistic circumstances -- even if we end up with legislation that promotes outsourcing. What's more, when we don't even have parity within an individual state, the idea of salary parity throughout the world is a block away from the intersection of Silly Street and Ridiculous Road.
You're basically right about politics and the economy. My point is not to say that they aren't involved, but rather to suggest that the typical political responses (trade restrictions) end up making things worse, and we all end up still not having jobs even if they work because we spent our time trying to change the system instead of trying to get another job.
Politics and the economy affect us, but the best thing to do -- and in a sense, the best way we can make our political statements -- is by focusing on adapting our skills to what the jobs we want really do need.
"... and are you actually trying to claim that politics has no influence on the US/world economy?"
No, I'm saying that adjusting to the realities of the economy is more important.
I admit I'm a "nerd before nerd was cool" snob. But there are a large number of people on this thread and elsewhere who seem to believe that they are entitled to a job because they have a CS/MIS/EE degree. In fact, the degree just gives you a license to hunt. It is -- and always has been -- a necessary but not sufficient condition to having a successful career in IT/IS/engineering. Even having programmed for most of my life, and being very skilled at it, my contributions are not obvious to those in charge if I don't point them out to them. And that is my responsibility to point out my value, and no one else's.
No job is guaranteed, other than Judgeships and Tenured Professorships. The rest of us have to pull our heads away from the computer every now and then and observe the industry trends, and continually re-mold ourselves.
"If you want to sit there and wait for your job to be shipped overseas, go for it, but some people just might be interested in preventing it from happening in the first place."
At that point, it's not "my" job any more, is it? It will be someone else's job. The key is to already not be in that job by the time it becomes someone else's -- to have someone else already in line for it.
Thanks! Actually, the Dale Carnegie course totally changed my life. That right there probably did more to change my personal life and career than anything.
"I could rattle off a ream of job-protecting legislation that has made America and the world a better place, but your true-believing Panglossian ass would simply deny it. "
Then rattle off the ream and make me deny it: Name a tariff or trade restriction that has re-created a destroyed job.
"Anti-trust laws were designed to protect not just marketplace competition but to prevent the loss of jobs that would occur with total consolidation."
That is correct. It also isn't what we're talking about; what we're talking about here are trade restrictions and tariffs.
"Go jack off to your copy of the Fountainhead."
I only read "Atlas Shrugged" and I thought it was basically lame. Perhaps you should read what I wrote, rather than what you thought I wrote?
Carl R. Boll, "Executive Jobs Unlimited." Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
Actually Carnegie's book should be first in that list.
I also spent a LOT of time at UC San Diego's excellent Career Services Center, attending seminars, and also getting one-on-one advice from the career counselors there. A good career counselor can work wonders.
I'd like to throw some kindness your way, good sir. I've been flaming like crazy today and you seem like a good person who probably deserves it.
If it makes you feel any better, I didn't start working until 1999. I left that job early to try and catch the startup craze six months later.
Six months later, I was laid off as the telecom bubble finally began to burst.
I looked, and I found another job, also at a startup.
Six months later, 9/11 happened, investors pulled out, and again, there were layoffs.
I was lucky this time to find another job. Another startup. Like you, I was constantly told that I was expendable and that I should feel damned lucky that I had that job. This one made it a whole year and a half before budget cuts saw me out the door once again.
I am now on my fourth startup.
I haven't seen the big bucks of the dot-com boom either. I missed 'em. Don't believe the "salary survey" shit; salaries have dropped like a brick, and it'll take time for those old surveys to reflect the change.
My attitude is the result of having been through a hellish four years. I don't blame the companies. I'm not being Randian and saying they should follow their own self-interest. Rather, I'm saying that they WILL follow their own self-interest, whether they ought to or not. I'm realizing that I have to market myself. That I have to be aware of my industry. And what's also going on is that the economy is definitely improving; look at the market indices since April climb steadily for one thing. And I see that the mail from my "job search" agents, once a slow trickle, is now a daily torrent. Just last week, I had to turn down TWO offers that landed right in my lap.
What I'm trying to say here is that your experience doesn't sound all that different from mine. And there are definite strong indicators that, despite what certain desperate presidential hopefuls are trying to claim, that things look like they're getting better.
But most importantly, I hope things go better for you. The lessons of my recent past were learned the hard way, but they are not new things that I just pulled out of my ass. I truly believe that if you follow them, like me and others before me, things will change for the better for you.
And maybe you and I might become millionaires with the next big thing!
"What a self-centered crap, what a horrible waste of my time to read it. Open your fucking eyes nitwit."
Sure! You go first.
You know, there's a moral to my little self-centered diatribe there at the end, about how you can survive and have a good career despite any industry ups and downs. This isn't random bullshit I made up, either. This is advice that is time-tested and WORKS. This is advice that you will find in books fifty years old, and even older.
Something else you'll find in those 50 year old books and older is that legislation designed to "protect" jobs ALWAYS MAKES THE SITUATION WORSE. Always. Not one job has ever been brought back by government intervention that wouldn't have come back on its own. Not one. And in the case where it comes back on its own, protectionist legislation slows its return.
Go back to your witch doctors and animal sacrifices! See if you can draw a protectionist pentagram out of lobbyists' blood on the ground and ward off the evil demon Indian Outsourcing spirit, and resurrect the zombie of your lost job from the cold, uncaring earth.
Or, you can read about steps that have actually worked in the past and deal with your career realistically and without hysteria.
I think the point you're missing is that we're not talking about a doctor updating his skills. We're not taking about programmers unwilling to learn a new languages. We're talking about saying to IT to go study chemistry since there are no more IT jobs.
As I suggested in another post, nobody ever learned anything useful about IT by going to college.
Everything I know about IT (as opposed to Software Engineering, my "real" job) I learned because I had to get a program working. Or because I wanted to play LAN games. Or because I wanted my own web server running at my apartment. I didn't go to fucking school! I installed the damned thing and learned how to use the following ludicrously useful Linux command:
man -k and the following ludicrously useful web site:
http://www.google.com/:)
I mean, people are talking like college is the only way to learn a skill. College is not only NOT the only way to learn a skill, it's a SUCK-ASS way to learn a skill. College is where you go to become educated, not to become a skilled laborer! Even doctors don't really start becoming doctors until residency, which lasts as long, if not longer, than medical school. Only after that are they able to start their own practices. Lawyers have to do that, too. And so did I, working tech support until I had my degree.
so i guess what i'm basically saying here is...
um...
"school interferes with our education" --Mark Twain
It's about economics. If I have to spend money to make less money than I spent, then I'm not ahead of the game. Get it?
Of course I get it. What I don't understand is why you get it, and yet you keep doing what you're doing.
See, I make more than I've spent on education, and yet I'm constantly keeping up. In fact, I'm constantly -ahead-. What's more, I'm costing my boss less than I'm creating for him.
I wouldn't expect a doctor to go back to medical school every 7 years.
Doctors don't ever STOP going to medical school. They are constantly reading journals and attending conferences to learn how to do what they do better. They're constantly talking to their peers to learn new things. Of course, it's possible that new technology may make a specialty technique obsolete. If so, it's the doctor's job to keep constantly appraised of the new technology and techniques so that he can adapt his skills to a new area.
The goal of a professional doctor is to make people well, not to make money doing some specific technique with some given equipment. When Lasik becomes supplanted by better methods, where will the Lasik labs go? Do you care? You shouldn't, and neither should one care about someone else's lost web-servlet job.
You seem to imply an equation: Training = expensive classes. But that's inaccurate; school training, in fact, sucks ass. School is good for "book learning," but it's not a wonderful place to learn how to code.
You learn how to code by writing code, reading man pages, and taking on new projects that might ask you to do something you didn't know how to do before -- a new language, a new system, a new technique. I giggle at people who call themselves "XYZ programmers," where XYZ is some system/language/machine/framework. And what will you be when XYZ is no longer useful or as efficient as some other system/language/machine/framework? Jobless and grouchy!
I stand by my comment that you don't have the attitude of a professional. For a professional, learning doesn't stop when the work begins, and work doesn't stop to take classes. You read journals, and you keep informed about your industry. You do new things. That is how you learn -- not by going to Big University Degree Program or something.
CS degrees were largely useless to begin with, other than as a way to say, "Hey, look, I've been to a college." If you don't know how to learn new things, and don't actively desire to constantly do so, you don't belong in the industry in the first place.
You may implement fair trade policies. You may implement trade restrictions. You can declare war on India. You can vote Democrat. You can vote Green. You can vote Libertarian. You can enact a law that forces all US companies to use only US Citizens for all software engineering labor, to force them to use only foreign labor, or anything in-between. You can make it all free, or all restricted.
The reason businesses choose to hire cheap programmers is because that is how much they are willing to pay. If you artificially try to raise that price, they will not hire programmers at the higher price; the projects will simply go away.
You will not make your job come back. It is gone FOREVER. It is a dead issue. Politics and greed are simply irrelevant; this is the reality you must face and deal with constructively, by looking for ways to adapt your skills.
A brief aside:
I have little sympathy for the millions of my fellow Americans who charged into the gold rush of computers in the 90's who now have no jobs. I did not choose this lifestyle because I had dollar signs in my eyes. I chose it because it is who I am and have always been.
I am fortunate that people are willing to continue to pay me to do something which I enjoy and do well. But I am not so naive to think that this will always be the case; I am mostly concerned with whether or not I am providing more value to my employer than I cost. If I fail to do so, then it is up to me to find new ways to be productive.
And I'm lucky in that my employer actually asked me to provide weekly status reports. Imagine that -- he actually ASKED me to do something which I really wanted to do anyway: Once a week, I remind my bosses how I am contributing more value to him than he is having to pay me. And by doing so, he is happy because he feels he is getting a bargain, and I am happy because I am well-paid, enjoying my job, and likely to keep it.
But there's more than that. I'm also keeping up on the industries we're in, and the trends in those industries. And I am using that to get advance warning of what skills I will need to brush up on, and the likelihood of my company succeeding in certain areas, and most importantly, when the project I am is in danger of becoming cancelled by the company.
My resume' is a marvel of marketing: It tells an employer not just that I have skills, but that I do this because I enjoy it, have always enjoyed it, and have a history of seeking to make value for my employers.
I don't have to like doing this. I just have to do it. That is part of being a professional. That is part of adapting to reality.
This is how you deal with a down job market constructively! You can go ahead and do your superstitious lobbying and your arcane petitions to the witch doctors in Congress to somehow magically summon your long-dead, buried, and decomposed job from the grave. There is no evidence that such mythical sorcery has ever managed to successfully resurrect a job, and it's not for a lack of trying!
Fuck politics. Instead, market yourself well. Learn about the industry you work in. Make your goal to produce more value than you cost. Do these things, and you never need worry about having a job, regardless of what you do or where you do it.
Sooner or later America will realize this and legislation will be put into place to stop it.
Or, the problem will correct itself.
I hope that Americans are wise enough not to do something so foolish as to enact legislation to stop outsourcing. Unfortunately, people are that stupid.
I have nothing again'st people making a living, but lets see how your tune changes when they start outsourcing journalist jobs...
Given the monopoly of journalism here and the excellent command of English many Indians have, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised (or saddened) to see that happen.
Because this "learn more and keep up" crap is stupid.
Would you like to have a physician work on you who had 20 years' worth of experience? Now, would you like him to operate on you using the same techniques he used 20 years ago, instead of using more modern equipment? "Learn more and keep up" is the way of the professional life.
I already know what I need to know to do my job.
You know how to do a job that no longer exists.
So my choices are spend more money going to school or get a service job.
Judging from your statements above, I would suggest getting the service job. Your comments do not demonstrate the attitude necessary to be a professional. I state this not as an insult but as a simple matter of fact.
Well, forgive me if I'm not as self depreciating as you are, but I feel as though I have *plenty* of right to bitch about my job going over seas. What's with this hippy 'let the rest of the world succeed while destroying ourselves' attitude? Why must I sacrifice my job for someone from another nation?
You didn't sacrifice your job. Your job disappeared, and no amount of wishing, screaming, arguing, protesting, legislating, hoping, lobbying, letter-writing, bribing, petitioning, imagining, discussing, complaining, worrying, fretting, bothering, sign-writing, stalking, or planning will bring it back.
Slashdot Mirror
"1. the whole personality cult surrounding Steve Jobs (face it - Steve Wozniak is the real genius)"
What, exactly, do you mean by "Real?"
There is more than one kind of genius, and all kinds are very real. There is genius in mathemeticians who focus only on esoteric theories, there is genius in engineers who only solve real problems they can feel, and there is genius in Ella Fitzgerald's singing.
The genius of Dali's art is very different in kind from the genius of a certain Finnish student coming up with the right code for the world, but who would say that Linus Torvalds is no genius?
Not all genius is necessarily what you might consider to be good. There is a genius in Bill Gates' domination of markets, in George W. Bush's political mastery, in Osama Bin Laden's sheer survival skills and leadership abilities.
Both Wozniak and Jobs are geniuses, in their own way. Wozniak is the engineering genius, and Jobs is the marketing and management genius.
And neither one is really less of a genius than the other.
"Lord of the Rings was such a fluke because there's no way that should have gotten done, or done as well as it was, via the Hollywood system. Because Hollywood crushes creativity, it eschews original thought, and it despises anything it can't reference as something else."
I agree with you in principle... the LOTR is a bad example.
What's new OR original OR creative about adapting a successful book into a movie? Especially a series of books as successful as LOTR? I mean, this was original maybe fifty years ago.
The Matrix and Star Wars were both highly derivative. Star Trek was forced down the throats of movie studios by a pre-existing TV series fan base.
Disproving good hard science takes a bit longer. Not just because of the effort involved, but because of the inertia of supposedly rational scientific thinkers -- just ask Barry Marshall:
If this has been in use since the 1980s, and if it has prevented the formation of hail as it claims, then the evidence should be available for people to see. And if that evidence shows that it does, in fact, prevent hail formation, then there's obviously something working.
Given the number of years this has been in service in New Zealand and the like, it should be possible to find evidence of it working or not working -- through the absence or presence of hail in the general region where the device is used, along with the absence or presence of hail in the local area immediately near where the device is (with some accounting for the effect of wind blowing hail one way or the other).
Not all things that work in ways that science doesn't understand are pseudoscience, and not all commonly-accepted scientific principles are not. The "hard" part of hard science is where we constantly re-evaluate our own view of how things work.
In short, give this a chance. I can understand people being fooled in the short run, but since people have used things like this since the 80's, they must keep using 'em for some reason. Maybe they don't work and the folks just want to get their money's worth! But until you go to the source of the data and examine it critically, how can you know, regardless of how good your understanding of current science is?
Totally. Wouldn't have even clicked on the article, 'cept I half-expected to see a Rush reference in there somewhere.
Nope.
When my car was stolen Nov 2002 about the only thing the thieves DIDN'T take was my "Vapor Trails" CD. Not only were they criminals, they had bad taste in music, too.
They even took the chrome Bevo I had off the back of my car. Are you kidding me? What kind of sick fuck steals a man's Bevo?
[Bevo = logo for the University of Texas, a silhouette of a longhorn cow head]
If you've been a Mac user for the past few years, it IS kinda unexpected. :)
<Triumph>I keed! I keed!</Triumph>
The article is talking only about non-overdriven signals when it talks about how it looks on an oscilloscope. If you overdrive the signal to create distortion, such as what guitar amplifiers (like the parent poster's Crate amp) do on their "dirty" channels, and look at THAT signal on your oscilloscope, it is how I said it is: Transistors clip square, and Tubes clip sawtooth.
Well, technically, a vacuum tube does the same thing as a transistor, so the smaller, lighter, cheaper, cooler, and usually more reliable transistor should have replaced the vacuum tube, right?
Do you ever ask yourself -why- vacuum tubes sound better? There's a specific reason.
See, in a guitar amp, what you really want to do is overdrive the sound, creating distortion. That's the nice fuzz sound. When the signal is overdriven, the semiconductor clips off the top of the sound wave.
Vacuum tubes and transistors clip sound waves differently. In a transistor, the clip stays high until the signal drops, causing a square-shaped clip. In a vacuum tube, the signal drops after the clip, creating a sawtooth-shaped clip.
Brass and strings have sawtooth-shaped waveforms. Computers make square-shaped waveforms. So most people "like" the sound of a sawtooth better. So people like the vacuum tube sound better.
MOSFET transistors are now being used in solid-state audio equipment because they, too, have a sawtooth clip when they distort. Now note that this only matters if you actually overdrive the sound; folks who think a tube amp that isn't distorting sounds better than a solid-state amp are probably imagining things. But your Crate sounds better than my solid-state pedal because of the way the semiconductors in 'em clip.
I don't. I like making money honestly. Part of that means not investing in companies like Philip Morris and SCO.
I think you make some interesting points that are worth discussing. Largely, I agree with you, and I think you're on the right track. I do agree that Globalization is not a force of nature and that corporations are largely a product of politics, and for the very reasons you gave.
Now you say you think US wages and the wages in the rest of the world will equalize. Which US wages are you talking about? What I make here in San Diego is very different from what I'd be making in Amarillo, Texas -- because Amarillo is not as desirable of a place to live as San Diego, regardless of the businesses there. It doesn't have as many people producing things. It doesn't have the natural resources of San Diego, either. It doesn't have the human resources. Because of that, the cost of living and salaries for the same job are different. We don't even have salary parity within the USA, because of all of these different factors. Given that, how can the whole world achieve parity? Eventually places like Delhi and Shanghai will be as expensive to live and have as high of salaries as places like San Diego, San Francisco, and New York, yes. But other places will never reach parity, because they don't have the resources.
You also say that the threat is to the entire software industry. You seem to imply that the entire software industry will disappear. Now despite the "threat" of Japan, cars are still made in the USA. In fact, a lot of these Japanese auto makers are making cars right here in the USA! But the US auto industry hasn't disappeared. In fact, last I checked, US companies Ford and GM were the #3 and #1 largest corporations in the world. And they still make cars here on our soil.
I do expect the software industry to take a hit. I'm not surprised; what happened in the 90's was an anomaly. The gravy train was never going to last forever. Merely having a CS degree was never going to be a ticket to job security for the future. On the other hand, managing offshore workers takes a lot of planning and very careful management -- and even with that, even with the best talent, projects are more likely to fail than projects all managed on one site. Offshore outsourcing is ludicrously unrealistic for smaller companies as well -- someone above very rightly chided me for having a perspective based on having worked only in small companies.
So in the end, it seems to me that the software industry won't disappear in the US, even under the most pessimistic circumstances -- even if we end up with legislation that promotes outsourcing. What's more, when we don't even have parity within an individual state, the idea of salary parity throughout the world is a block away from the intersection of Silly Street and Ridiculous Road.
You're basically right about politics and the economy. My point is not to say that they aren't involved, but rather to suggest that the typical political responses (trade restrictions) end up making things worse, and we all end up still not having jobs even if they work because we spent our time trying to change the system instead of trying to get another job.
Politics and the economy affect us, but the best thing to do -- and in a sense, the best way we can make our political statements -- is by focusing on adapting our skills to what the jobs we want really do need.
"... and are you actually trying to claim that politics has no influence on the US/world economy?"
No, I'm saying that adjusting to the realities of the economy is more important.
I admit I'm a "nerd before nerd was cool" snob. But there are a large number of people on this thread and elsewhere who seem to believe that they are entitled to a job because they have a CS/MIS/EE degree. In fact, the degree just gives you a license to hunt. It is -- and always has been -- a necessary but not sufficient condition to having a successful career in IT/IS/engineering. Even having programmed for most of my life, and being very skilled at it, my contributions are not obvious to those in charge if I don't point them out to them. And that is my responsibility to point out my value, and no one else's.
No job is guaranteed, other than Judgeships and Tenured Professorships. The rest of us have to pull our heads away from the computer every now and then and observe the industry trends, and continually re-mold ourselves.
"If you want to sit there and wait for your job to be shipped overseas, go for it, but some people just might be interested in preventing it from happening in the first place."
At that point, it's not "my" job any more, is it? It will be someone else's job. The key is to already not be in that job by the time it becomes someone else's -- to have someone else already in line for it.
Repeating it over and over doesn't make it true.
It is how it is; it cannot be otherwise.
Thanks! Actually, the Dale Carnegie course totally changed my life. That right there probably did more to change my personal life and career than anything.
This has nothing to do with Rand and her lame ideas. It has to do with thriving in a down economy -- AND in an "up" economy.
It has to do with choosing actions that are most likely to cause you to succeed.
"I could rattle off a ream of job-protecting legislation that has made America and the world a better place, but your true-believing Panglossian ass would simply deny it. "
Then rattle off the ream and make me deny it: Name a tariff or trade restriction that has re-created a destroyed job.
"Anti-trust laws were designed to protect not just marketplace competition but to prevent the loss of jobs that would occur with total consolidation."
That is correct. It also isn't what we're talking about; what we're talking about here are trade restrictions and tariffs.
"Go jack off to your copy of the Fountainhead."
I only read "Atlas Shrugged" and I thought it was basically lame. Perhaps you should read what I wrote, rather than what you thought I wrote?
Carl R. Boll, "Executive Jobs Unlimited."
Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
Actually Carnegie's book should be first in that list.
I also spent a LOT of time at UC San Diego's excellent Career Services Center, attending seminars, and also getting one-on-one advice from the career counselors there. A good career counselor can work wonders.
I'd like to throw some kindness your way, good sir. I've been flaming like crazy today and you seem like a good person who probably deserves it.
If it makes you feel any better, I didn't start working until 1999. I left that job early to try and catch the startup craze six months later.
Six months later, I was laid off as the telecom bubble finally began to burst.
I looked, and I found another job, also at a startup.
Six months later, 9/11 happened, investors pulled out, and again, there were layoffs.
I was lucky this time to find another job. Another startup. Like you, I was constantly told that I was expendable and that I should feel damned lucky that I had that job. This one made it a whole year and a half before budget cuts saw me out the door once again.
I am now on my fourth startup.
I haven't seen the big bucks of the dot-com boom either. I missed 'em. Don't believe the "salary survey" shit; salaries have dropped like a brick, and it'll take time for those old surveys to reflect the change.
My attitude is the result of having been through a hellish four years. I don't blame the companies. I'm not being Randian and saying they should follow their own self-interest. Rather, I'm saying that they WILL follow their own self-interest, whether they ought to or not. I'm realizing that I have to market myself. That I have to be aware of my industry. And what's also going on is that the economy is definitely improving; look at the market indices since April climb steadily for one thing. And I see that the mail from my "job search" agents, once a slow trickle, is now a daily torrent. Just last week, I had to turn down TWO offers that landed right in my lap.
What I'm trying to say here is that your experience doesn't sound all that different from mine. And there are definite strong indicators that, despite what certain desperate presidential hopefuls are trying to claim, that things look like they're getting better.
But most importantly, I hope things go better for you. The lessons of my recent past were learned the hard way, but they are not new things that I just pulled out of my ass. I truly believe that if you follow them, like me and others before me, things will change for the better for you.
And maybe you and I might become millionaires with the next big thing!
"You fckn troll... you sound like your about 16 years old, or totally clueless on the current situation."
:)
Priceless. Absolutely priceless.
"What a self-centered crap, what a horrible waste of my time to read it. Open your fucking eyes nitwit."
Sure! You go first.
You know, there's a moral to my little self-centered diatribe there at the end, about how you can survive and have a good career despite any industry ups and downs. This isn't random bullshit I made up, either. This is advice that is time-tested and WORKS. This is advice that you will find in books fifty years old, and even older.
Something else you'll find in those 50 year old books and older is that legislation designed to "protect" jobs ALWAYS MAKES THE SITUATION WORSE. Always. Not one job has ever been brought back by government intervention that wouldn't have come back on its own. Not one. And in the case where it comes back on its own, protectionist legislation slows its return.
Go back to your witch doctors and animal sacrifices! See if you can draw a protectionist pentagram out of lobbyists' blood on the ground and ward off the evil demon Indian Outsourcing spirit, and resurrect the zombie of your lost job from the cold, uncaring earth.
Or, you can read about steps that have actually worked in the past and deal with your career realistically and without hysteria.
As I suggested in another post, nobody ever learned anything useful about IT by going to college.
Everything I know about IT (as opposed to Software Engineering, my "real" job) I learned because I had to get a program working. Or because I wanted to play LAN games. Or because I wanted my own web server running at my apartment. I didn't go to fucking school! I installed the damned thing and learned how to use the following ludicrously useful Linux command:
man -k
and the following ludicrously useful web site:
http://www.google.com/
I mean, people are talking like college is the only way to learn a skill. College is not only NOT the only way to learn a skill, it's a SUCK-ASS way to learn a skill. College is where you go to become educated, not to become a skilled laborer! Even doctors don't really start becoming doctors until residency, which lasts as long, if not longer, than medical school. Only after that are they able to start their own practices. Lawyers have to do that, too. And so did I, working tech support until I had my degree.
so i guess what i'm basically saying here is...
um...
"school interferes with our education" --Mark Twain
^----that
Of course I get it. What I don't understand is why you get it, and yet you keep doing what you're doing.
See, I make more than I've spent on education, and yet I'm constantly keeping up. In fact, I'm constantly -ahead-. What's more, I'm costing my boss less than I'm creating for him.
Doctors don't ever STOP going to medical school. They are constantly reading journals and attending conferences to learn how to do what they do better. They're constantly talking to their peers to learn new things. Of course, it's possible that new technology may make a specialty technique obsolete. If so, it's the doctor's job to keep constantly appraised of the new technology and techniques so that he can adapt his skills to a new area.
The goal of a professional doctor is to make people well, not to make money doing some specific technique with some given equipment. When Lasik becomes supplanted by better methods, where will the Lasik labs go? Do you care? You shouldn't, and neither should one care about someone else's lost web-servlet job.
You seem to imply an equation: Training = expensive classes. But that's inaccurate; school training, in fact, sucks ass. School is good for "book learning," but it's not a wonderful place to learn how to code.
You learn how to code by writing code, reading man pages, and taking on new projects that might ask you to do something you didn't know how to do before -- a new language, a new system, a new technique. I giggle at people who call themselves "XYZ programmers," where XYZ is some system/language/machine/framework. And what will you be when XYZ is no longer useful or as efficient as some other system/language/machine/framework? Jobless and grouchy!
I stand by my comment that you don't have the attitude of a professional. For a professional, learning doesn't stop when the work begins, and work doesn't stop to take classes. You read journals, and you keep informed about your industry. You do new things. That is how you learn -- not by going to Big University Degree Program or something.
CS degrees were largely useless to begin with, other than as a way to say, "Hey, look, I've been to a college." If you don't know how to learn new things, and don't actively desire to constantly do so, you don't belong in the industry in the first place.
You may implement fair trade policies. You may implement trade restrictions. You can declare war on India. You can vote Democrat. You can vote Green. You can vote Libertarian. You can enact a law that forces all US companies to use only US Citizens for all software engineering labor, to force them to use only foreign labor, or anything in-between. You can make it all free, or all restricted.
The reason businesses choose to hire cheap programmers is because that is how much they are willing to pay. If you artificially try to raise that price, they will not hire programmers at the higher price; the projects will simply go away.
You will not make your job come back. It is gone FOREVER. It is a dead issue. Politics and greed are simply irrelevant; this is the reality you must face and deal with constructively, by looking for ways to adapt your skills.
A brief aside:
I have little sympathy for the millions of my fellow Americans who charged into the gold rush of computers in the 90's who now have no jobs. I did not choose this lifestyle because I had dollar signs in my eyes. I chose it because it is who I am and have always been.
I am fortunate that people are willing to continue to pay me to do something which I enjoy and do well. But I am not so naive to think that this will always be the case; I am mostly concerned with whether or not I am providing more value to my employer than I cost. If I fail to do so, then it is up to me to find new ways to be productive.
And I'm lucky in that my employer actually asked me to provide weekly status reports. Imagine that -- he actually ASKED me to do something which I really wanted to do anyway: Once a week, I remind my bosses how I am contributing more value to him than he is having to pay me. And by doing so, he is happy because he feels he is getting a bargain, and I am happy because I am well-paid, enjoying my job, and likely to keep it.
But there's more than that. I'm also keeping up on the industries we're in, and the trends in those industries. And I am using that to get advance warning of what skills I will need to brush up on, and the likelihood of my company succeeding in certain areas, and most importantly, when the project I am is in danger of becoming cancelled by the company.
My resume' is a marvel of marketing: It tells an employer not just that I have skills, but that I do this because I enjoy it, have always enjoyed it, and have a history of seeking to make value for my employers.
I don't have to like doing this. I just have to do it. That is part of being a professional. That is part of adapting to reality.
This is how you deal with a down job market constructively! You can go ahead and do your superstitious lobbying and your arcane petitions to the witch doctors in Congress to somehow magically summon your long-dead, buried, and decomposed job from the grave. There is no evidence that such mythical sorcery has ever managed to successfully resurrect a job, and it's not for a lack of trying!
Fuck politics. Instead, market yourself well. Learn about the industry you work in. Make your goal to produce more value than you cost. Do these things, and you never need worry about having a job, regardless of what you do or where you do it.
Or, the problem will correct itself.
I hope that Americans are wise enough not to do something so foolish as to enact legislation to stop outsourcing. Unfortunately, people are that stupid.
Given the monopoly of journalism here and the excellent command of English many Indians have, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised (or saddened) to see that happen.
Would you like to have a physician work on you who had 20 years' worth of experience? Now, would you like him to operate on you using the same techniques he used 20 years ago, instead of using more modern equipment? "Learn more and keep up" is the way of the professional life.
You know how to do a job that no longer exists.
Judging from your statements above, I would suggest getting the service job. Your comments do not demonstrate the attitude necessary to be a professional. I state this not as an insult but as a simple matter of fact.
This is how it is. It cannot be otherwise.
You didn't sacrifice your job. Your job disappeared, and no amount of wishing, screaming, arguing, protesting, legislating, hoping, lobbying, letter-writing, bribing, petitioning, imagining, discussing, complaining, worrying, fretting, bothering, sign-writing, stalking, or planning will bring it back.
Your best bet is to find another job.
This is how it is; it cannot be otherwise.