Threading on SOME operating systems works properly (e.g., OS/2 2.0 and later). It makes a fairly large difference in the "feel" of an application when it can spin off threads to handle the UI in the foreground while other stuff is being done in the background.
Too many people only have experience with broken threading models, which is sad...
Just relax, pull out that old copy of UT or TA or NFS III or Madden 2001, and ignore all of the gnashing of teeth by the hardware vendors. If it's fun, it's good. Who says it also has to be high tech?
I had a bit over 13 years of experience as a programmer/analyst when I was laid off in January 2002, mainly weird languages like Fortran and assembler and various macro languages, but also with some decent experience in C, Perl, Pascal, REXX, and a number of other more mainstream languages, experience with RDMSs like Sybase, as well as a LOT of medium- and large-scale applications design and high-pressure support experience.
I got nothing at all except one 8-month contract at the end of 2002 and a six-layer interview in Seattle in the spring of 2003 until I hit the jackpot and got a pair of out-of-town job offers at the same time in the fall of 2004.
I think I had a grand total of five (5) interviews in total during that time, and three of those were for positions outside the Minneapolis area.
I think one of the main reasons I had such a hard time was the fact that I was laid off a few months after 300-400 or so other experienced folks were laid off from my ex-employer (Northwest Airlines), so the marketplace was chock full of experienced UNIX and IBM mainframe people (the two most likely places for me to find employment) well before I found out that I was also in a position to have to find work.
I thought I had dodged the axe already by surviving the large initial wave of layoffs, but I was wrong.
A second reason was the fact that people tended to focus on the Fortran on my resume, so I ended up removing that and only stressing the UNIX-related things I had done and worked with when applying for such positions. It didn't do me any good.
A third reason was the fact that, because it was very much an employer's market in the Twin Cities at that point in time (and it still is), companies seemed to be looking for very VERY specific things. I rarely got interviews as a programmer because companies wanted people with not only TECHNICAL skills but also specific INDUSTRY experience with medical products, or with insurance-specific EDIFACT formats, or with some specific image format, or even with company-specific internal products in several cases, and that ended up weeking me out early (in many cases I called HR to try to obtain some info about why I couldn't get an interview, and I heard all kinds of things along those lines).
I was also told on several occasions that I was overqualified for a programming position or a PC tech support position -- that they were looking for someone with 3-5 years of experience, and that they felt my 13 years made me too expensive (hey, a pay cut would have been FINE with me!), or made me a risk to leave later.
Etc.
As I said in another thread, I still know a few folks who are bouncing from contract to contract, and it's been almost five years now for those people. They *still* don't have a permanent (non contract) position.
You've apparently had it easy. My first layoff was back in 1993, and that wasn't so bad. Took me around ten months to find work that time. This last one was a LOT rougher. I didn't expect to have to look for almost three years, either. It's a good thing I had taken the time to prepare myself financially beforehand. If I had been completely unprepared, we'd be a lot worse off today...
Hey, I worked for an airline until the beginning of 2002, and I saw a lot of the same thing happening.
Yeah, it sucks.
I personally had just bought a house a year before my layoff, and we had just gone into a little bit of additional debt to buy various household things, something that shouldn't have been a big deal (I figured it'd take us 2-3 years to pay it off and we'd be gravy).
All of a sudden the airline industry hid a little bump, which wasn't that alarming by itself, but then the happenings of 9/11 sent the entire airline industry into a tailspin.
Who could have predicted that in 2000? Or that so many folks who had 10, 15, 20 or more years of decent IT experience at the airline would be dropped like hot potatos across the entire org chart? Whole teams were axed just because they were working on "nonessential" projects.
I understand the airlines' need to trim costs and such, but it's still a tremendous shock to me how suddenly things hit.
I ended up slowly making my way thourgh it, and my wife and I are in a different part of the country now licking our wounds and starting over, but it seemed like a nightmare when it was happening.
The problem that *I* ran into during a lengthy unemployment stint was talking to *anybody*.
It seems that most companies weed most candidates out well before the interview stage, so I only had a half-dozen or so interviews all told. Actually, I think the number of interviews that weren't consulting firms or job-hunting agencies numbered precisely five, though I may be forgetting one or two. I don't think so, though.
That's five interviews in 33 months. Out of over 1000 cover letters and customer resumes sent out.
Once I actually got into an interview situation, I did quite well (my first got me an eight-month contract even though I didn't know the platform in question at all, my second led to five subsequent interviews before the position was dropped for financial reasons (still a successful one from my perspective because the manager wanted to hire me), and the third and fourth both resulted in companies flying me across the country for in-person interviews and eventually making offers.
If personality or interviewing ability was one of the main things required for successful job hunting, then I'd have been hired almost immediately after being laid off. I've been told on numerous occasions that I interview well.
Here in Georgia it's US$300/week max (gross before state/federal/FICA which you will owe on that) for six months, and you may or may not have gotten any severance depending on your circumstances (most programmer severance packages I've seen are roughly 1 week of pay per past year of service).
Yup, I admit it. I did an 8-month contract in COBOL so I wouldn't lose the house (I needed the money and it was one of the 20 or so languages I'm fairly good with) because my various distributed skills (C/Sybase/Solaris/Linux/Tux) hadn't yet gotten me in the door anywhere, and because folks weren't interested in hiring me for PC support work.
See my posting about the Twin Cities job market.
Like so many hiring managers, however, you seem to assume that the last position one has held is the sole measurement of a person's skillset and experience, and you discount all of the other things which appeared on *two separate resumes* on my web site.
Good job. Although, to be fair, those aren't the resumes I would typically send out, since I almost always custom tailor them to the position at hand.
With the addition of the stuff I've been working on here over the past 18 months (mainly more perl, C++, MQ/WebSphere, Oracle, Tux, various XML generation/parsing stuff, and SOAP), I actually have some more current buzzwords to list, but it's just more of the same. It's only syntax, after all. The core competencies don't change.
At least you accurately illustrate why it's hard for someone to find a position. One isn't the sum of one's experiences, skills, or actual abilities at all anymore, at least in eyes of the job market, and your resume is only as good as your last formal position.
My resume is online. The URL is at the top of this posting. Judge based on that, not my sig. I reserve the right to mock you afterwards for making asinine assuptions.:-)
And as for the folks still looking for work -- take a look in the IT job market for the Minneapolis/St. Paul area over the past few years and then get back to me when you've discovered the actual employment situation up there.
The unions aren't killing the airlines. Government deregulation, high fuel prices, and the continued imposition of inane procedural requirements in the name of "security" are doing a job enough job of that by themselves.
Unions like the pilot's union seem unreasonsable but historically needed to be there to prevent business managers from cutting safety corners to lower costs. Were it not for the union, a pilot couldn't stand up and say "that isn't safe" without having their job put at serious risk. Same with flight dispatchers.
Some unions are more contentious than others, of course. Just look at the AMFA folks and NWA. The mechanics didn't have a very happy history there to begin with, but AMFA came in and made confrontation with management a formal platform.
Then again, they decided to contend themselves right out of a job in the end, so checks and balances eventually kick in even in those cases.
No sane company lays off competent, insanely friendly IT people.
Tell that to the airline industry. I can list *dozens* of such people who were laid off, some of them both extremely competent and friendly people who were also heavily experienced in a wide variety of areas.
Why? Because whole branches of the tree were lopped off post-9/11 without consideration for individual characteristics. Whole teams. Non-critical development groups. Paff! Gone.
I survived the first huge wave of layoffs at NWA in 2001, and I saw the whole rows of empty cubes just sitting where folks I knew and worked with for a decade had been just a few days earlier, and I never want to see anything that again.
Coders license? What would they test? Could they test my competence in SymStream? CALL? ED macros? IPF? TTS scripting? Liason scripting? 2200 MASM? MAPPER? Sure, I also use mainstream languages like perl and C++ in my job, but I write far more Fortran than I do C++, and it's a nonstandard dialect at that.
IT worker technical skillsets are so diverse that "licensing" would be an almost impossible task.
How long do you think it'll be before you can find another job? It was almost 33 months for me before I found something permanent the last time I lost a permanent job, and I know IT folks who were laid off post 9/11 who are STILL looking for work.
It isn't always a hop, skip, and jump to the next steady paycheck. That depends to some extent on skills and the ability ad advertise those skills to employers, but it also depends to a large extent on geographic location and local economic climate.
The public support window for OS/2 ended at the end of 2005.
The End of Service date for OS/2 is actually still pending (31 Dec 06), with individual contract support accounts continuing indefinitely. That's why SSI continues to get support from IBM for their eComStation customers.
Fear? The fact that the BSA has a reputation for levying six-digit fines probably plays a role, although how they could legally do that without involvement from the courts is somewhat beyond me.
The breaking down of a problem certainly uses analytical skills, and some types of coding do require knowledge of various algorithms and data structures and their relative performance (or hard math skills for that matter), but there are also important elements to being a "good" programmer which have little to do with math.
Writing clear and maintainable code, for example, is often more important than squeezing every last drop of performance out of it. Also, depending on the shop, the ability to write clear technical documentation is a huge plus.
There's more to (responsible) bit twiddling than simply twiddling bits.
Even folks like me, who tend to work in older langauges on systems which are less mainstream, can take advantage of the huge body of work that's out there. I might have to translate the algorithms I find to another language, and I certainly have to be careful about licensing issues in some cases, but there's no reason for me to have to create something out of thin air if the basic building blocks and floorplans are already created for me.
That would be why you keep all your old projects around.
That's easy to do until you're laid off and you no longer have legal access to most of your last decade's worth of work.
Of course, it isn't all that hard to build a new set of standard routines -- it just takes time, and since each employer is different there may have been a need to change some of that stuff to fit the new environment, anyway.
This does point out a disadvantage of working on internal/proprietary software, though.:-(
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Threading on SOME operating systems works properly (e.g., OS/2 2.0 and later). It makes a fairly large difference in the "feel" of an application when it can spin off threads to handle the UI in the foreground while other stuff is being done in the background.
Too many people only have experience with broken threading models, which is sad...
Just relax, pull out that old copy of UT or TA or NFS III or Madden 2001, and ignore all of the gnashing of teeth by the hardware vendors. If it's fun, it's good. Who says it also has to be high tech?
I was valuable to my customers, but HR made the decision to cut my position based on tenure.
Not much one can do about that.
Long layoffs are often just a case of bad timing.
I had a bit over 13 years of experience as a programmer/analyst when I was laid off in January 2002, mainly weird languages like Fortran and assembler and various macro languages, but also with some decent experience in C, Perl, Pascal, REXX, and a number of other more mainstream languages, experience with RDMSs like Sybase, as well as a LOT of medium- and large-scale applications design and high-pressure support experience.
I got nothing at all except one 8-month contract at the end of 2002 and a six-layer interview in Seattle in the spring of 2003 until I hit the jackpot and got a pair of out-of-town job offers at the same time in the fall of 2004.
I think I had a grand total of five (5) interviews in total during that time, and three of those were for positions outside the Minneapolis area.
I think one of the main reasons I had such a hard time was the fact that I was laid off a few months after 300-400 or so other experienced folks were laid off from my ex-employer (Northwest Airlines), so the marketplace was chock full of experienced UNIX and IBM mainframe people (the two most likely places for me to find employment) well before I found out that I was also in a position to have to find work.
I thought I had dodged the axe already by surviving the large initial wave of layoffs, but I was wrong.
A second reason was the fact that people tended to focus on the Fortran on my resume, so I ended up removing that and only stressing the UNIX-related things I had done and worked with when applying for such positions. It didn't do me any good.
A third reason was the fact that, because it was very much an employer's market in the Twin Cities at that point in time (and it still is), companies seemed to be looking for very VERY specific things.
I rarely got interviews as a programmer because companies wanted people with not only TECHNICAL skills but also specific INDUSTRY experience with medical products, or with insurance-specific EDIFACT formats, or with some specific image format, or even with company-specific internal products in several cases, and that ended up weeking me out early (in many cases I called HR to try to obtain some info about why I couldn't get an interview, and I heard all kinds of things along those lines).
I was also told on several occasions that I was overqualified for a programming position or a PC tech support position -- that they were looking for someone with 3-5 years of experience, and that they felt my 13 years made me too expensive (hey, a pay cut would have been FINE with me!), or made me a risk to leave later.
Etc.
As I said in another thread, I still know a few folks who are bouncing from contract to contract, and it's been almost five years now for those people. They *still* don't have a permanent (non contract) position.
You've apparently had it easy. My first layoff was back in 1993, and that wasn't so bad. Took me around ten months to find work that time. This last one was a LOT rougher. I didn't expect to have to look for almost three years, either. It's a good thing I had taken the time to prepare myself financially beforehand. If I had been completely unprepared, we'd be a lot worse off today...
Hey, I worked for an airline until the beginning of 2002, and I saw a lot of the same thing happening.
Yeah, it sucks.
I personally had just bought a house a year before my layoff, and we had just gone into a little bit of additional debt to buy various household things, something that shouldn't have been a big deal (I figured it'd take us 2-3 years to pay it off and we'd be gravy).
All of a sudden the airline industry hid a little bump, which wasn't that alarming by itself, but then the happenings of 9/11 sent the entire airline industry into a tailspin.
Who could have predicted that in 2000? Or that so many folks who had 10, 15, 20 or more years of decent IT experience at the airline would be dropped like hot potatos across the entire org chart? Whole teams were axed just because they were working on "nonessential" projects.
I understand the airlines' need to trim costs and such, but it's still a tremendous shock to me how suddenly things hit.
I ended up slowly making my way thourgh it, and my wife and I are in a different part of the country now licking our wounds and starting over, but it seemed like a nightmare when it was happening.
No, it's not right. I agree. It sucks.
The problem that *I* ran into during a lengthy unemployment stint was talking to *anybody*.
It seems that most companies weed most candidates out well before the interview stage, so I only had a half-dozen or so interviews all told. Actually, I think the number of interviews that weren't consulting firms or job-hunting agencies numbered precisely five, though I may be forgetting one or two. I don't think so, though.
That's five interviews in 33 months. Out of over 1000 cover letters and customer resumes sent out.
Once I actually got into an interview situation, I did quite well (my first got me an eight-month contract even though I didn't know the platform in question at all, my second led to five subsequent interviews before the position was dropped for financial reasons (still a successful one from my perspective because the manager wanted to hire me), and the third and fourth both resulted in companies flying me across the country for in-person interviews and eventually making offers.
If personality or interviewing ability was one of the main things required for successful job hunting, then I'd have been hired almost immediately after being laid off. I've been told on numerous occasions that I interview well.
80% of your wage for six months? That'd be nice.
Here in Georgia it's US$300/week max (gross before state/federal/FICA which you will owe on that) for six months, and you may or may not have gotten any severance depending on your circumstances (most programmer severance packages I've seen are roughly 1 week of pay per past year of service).
Yup, I admit it. I did an 8-month contract in COBOL so I wouldn't lose the house (I needed the money and it was one of the 20 or so languages I'm fairly good with) because my various distributed skills (C/Sybase/Solaris/Linux/Tux) hadn't yet gotten me in the door anywhere, and because folks weren't interested in hiring me for PC support work.
See my posting about the Twin Cities job market.
Like so many hiring managers, however, you seem to assume that the last position one has held is the sole measurement of a person's skillset and experience, and you discount all of the other things which appeared on *two separate resumes* on my web site.
Good job. Although, to be fair, those aren't the resumes I would typically send out, since I almost always custom tailor them to the position at hand.
With the addition of the stuff I've been working on here over the past 18 months (mainly more perl, C++, MQ/WebSphere, Oracle, Tux, various XML generation/parsing stuff, and SOAP), I actually have some more current buzzwords to list, but it's just more of the same. It's only syntax, after all. The core competencies don't change.
At least you accurately illustrate why it's hard for someone to find a position. One isn't the sum of one's experiences, skills, or actual abilities at all anymore, at least in eyes of the job market, and your resume is only as good as your last formal position.
Everything else is discounted.
Kinda sad when you think about it.
What a fucking idiot.
My resume is online. The URL is at the top of this posting. Judge based on that, not my sig. I reserve the right to mock you afterwards for making asinine assuptions. :-)
And as for the folks still looking for work -- take a look in the IT job market for the Minneapolis/St. Paul area over the past few years and then get back to me when you've discovered the actual employment situation up there.
The unions aren't killing the airlines. Government deregulation, high fuel prices, and the continued imposition of inane procedural requirements in the name of "security" are doing a job enough job of that by themselves.
Unions like the pilot's union seem unreasonsable but historically needed to be there to prevent business managers from cutting safety corners to lower costs. Were it not for the union, a pilot couldn't stand up and say "that isn't safe" without having their job put at serious risk. Same with flight dispatchers.
Some unions are more contentious than others, of course. Just look at the AMFA folks and NWA. The mechanics didn't have a very happy history there to begin with, but AMFA came in and made confrontation with management a formal platform.
Then again, they decided to contend themselves right out of a job in the end, so checks and balances eventually kick in even in those cases.
Tell that to the airline industry. I can list *dozens* of such people who were laid off, some of them both extremely competent and friendly people who were also heavily experienced in a wide variety of areas.
Why? Because whole branches of the tree were lopped off post-9/11 without consideration for individual characteristics. Whole teams. Non-critical development groups. Paff! Gone.
I survived the first huge wave of layoffs at NWA in 2001, and I saw the whole rows of empty cubes just sitting where folks I knew and worked with for a decade had been just a few days earlier, and I never want to see anything that again.
Coders license? What would they test? Could they test my competence in SymStream? CALL? ED macros? IPF? TTS scripting? Liason scripting? 2200 MASM? MAPPER? Sure, I also use mainstream languages like perl and C++ in my job, but I write far more Fortran than I do C++, and it's a nonstandard dialect at that.
IT worker technical skillsets are so diverse that "licensing" would be an almost impossible task.
How long do you think it'll be before you can find another job? It was almost 33 months for me before I found something permanent the last time I lost a permanent job, and I know IT folks who were laid off post 9/11 who are STILL looking for work.
It isn't always a hop, skip, and jump to the next steady paycheck. That depends to some extent on skills and the ability ad advertise those skills to employers, but it also depends to a large extent on geographic location and local economic climate.
The public support window for OS/2 ended at the end of 2005.
The End of Service date for OS/2 is actually still pending (31 Dec 06), with individual contract support accounts continuing indefinitely. That's why SSI continues to get support from IBM for their eComStation customers.
Like I said, real "wiskey"...
(I'm a fan of Scottish single-malts, preferably either very smooth or fairly peaty).
Why would they use the Linux kernel when the BSD kernel has a much better license from their perspective?
Perhaps, but how many people would stop using cell phones if they knew their location could be tracked when they're using one?
Yup. Bit rot. Happens all the time with unlicensed code. No, really...
Fear? The fact that the BSA has a reputation for levying six-digit fines probably plays a role, although how they could legally do that without involvement from the courts is somewhat beyond me.
Real "wiskey" is spelled with an "h"... And no "E"... Preferably a good single-malt. :-)
Yes. :-)
The breaking down of a problem certainly uses analytical skills, and some types of coding do require knowledge of various algorithms and data structures and their relative performance (or hard math skills for that matter), but there are also important elements to being a "good" programmer which have little to do with math.
Writing clear and maintainable code, for example, is often more important than squeezing every last drop of performance out of it. Also, depending on the shop, the ability to write clear technical documentation is a huge plus.
There's more to (responsible) bit twiddling than simply twiddling bits.
Even folks like me, who tend to work in older langauges on systems which are less mainstream, can take advantage of the huge body of work that's out there. I might have to translate the algorithms I find to another language, and I certainly have to be careful about licensing issues in some cases, but there's no reason for me to have to create something out of thin air if the basic building blocks and floorplans are already created for me.
:-)
I'm a programmer. I'm lazy by definition.
That's easy to do until you're laid off and you no longer have legal access to most of your last decade's worth of work.
Of course, it isn't all that hard to build a new set of standard routines -- it just takes time, and since each employer is different there may have been a need to change some of that stuff to fit the new environment, anyway.
This does point out a disadvantage of working on internal/proprietary software, though. :-(