I live in the Columbia/Ellicott City area, and I can tell you that it is not really a great place to live, so I do think the list is credible to me. The cost of living is extremely high - there are a ton of government workers and government contractors, so yes there a lot of tech jobs that pay more money than other areas of the country. I should know; I work in one. There are a lot of service based industries to serve all those people too - restaurants, strip malls, and every chain store you can imagine. But the extra salary does not begin to make up for the high cost of living - restaurants cost 10-20 more for a dinner for two, grocerries cost 20-50 me more than they did when I lived in PA. Taxes are a big pay killer - about 5% higher here than in PA for local taxes and let's not forget that my bigger salary is taxed high by the federal government too. Homes in Columbia/Ellicott City are out of reach for young professionals starting out in life. Oh and depite the rich service based industry I previously mentioned, restaurants are still packed, stores are always crowded, and the roads are clogged. The Federal government's Base Realignment and Closure will bring 20 some thousand new families to the area in the next few years, but Howard County (the county where Columbia/Ellicott City is) will not approve the necassary permits for new housing to accomdate the influx. It's a bit of a mess and it's not going to be get any better. The city may have ben hot 10 years ago, but is on the decline as far as quality of life goes. There are too many people chasing too few resources.
I remember reading somewhere that long hours such as 12/7 can really be determinental to a project not just because of burnout, but because employess tend to merge their home and work lives when they spent too much time at work. For example, if you don't see your wife/significant other/family, I would imagine you would probably be taking some work time to call them. If you have errands or business to tend to, you'll probably be making the phone calls from work, or surfing the web to shop for that gift for the birthday party you won't be able to attend.
Mandating the number of hours worked for a salaried employeee makes no sense. If they do not want to compensate you, then you need a results based system that shows the tasks to be completed and project milestones. If it takes someone 35 hours a week to hit the deadline, then let them work 35 hours a week. If it takes more, then they need to work more. In my opinion, being a salaried employee goes both ways; it shouldn't always mean 40+ hours a week are worked.
Maybe somebody could help me out with understanding how changing the amplitude adds frequencies. Changing the amplitude of a sine wave, say with mathimatical representation 2*sin(t), does not frequency, which is based on the terms inside the parenthesis. So, how does modulating the amplitude add in more frequencies? What am I missing?
Actually, I think it would help to be able to get out into the working world after high school before college. I know that I had no perspective on what a real job was in high school, and I may have chosen I better course if I had the experience to make an informed decision. Most people in college only guess what they want in a job based on what they think they would like to do, but I haven't seen many employers would give work that is based on what someone wants to do. I think there are a lot of opportunities in college to give your life direction, but it takes smarts and wisdom to make good choices, and I think giving people some skills in high school could be a good thing.
Actually I think there is a point with the lack of human involvement. As a guy, even I have a beef with my software job because my coworkers do not seem to place any great importance on human interaction. Project leaders do not believe in regular meetings, and team morale does not seem to factor into decisions. Coding is done for hours on end at a customer's site and dinner breaks may be nonexistent. The idea of needing time to decompress from a stressful day, or stepping away from a problem in order to get a solution does not come across the minds of my fellow engineers. Generally speaking, the other engineers ignore the fact that we are human programmers with social, emotional, and physical needs. When I tell my girlfriend about these working conditions, she is totally not interested in getting anywhere near engineering.
Now I don't mean to just rant about my job. I am lucky to have it in this economy, and I can think of much worse jobs (i.e. the nursing industry), but the point is that the lack of emphasis for the human element does not encourage women to enter the field. My grandmother, who is actually quite computer savvy for someone her age, sees engineering as a dull and boring field. She is always encouraging me to have fun, and she knows it is not going to happen at work. And that is really the crux of the problem as I see it. Engineering is NOT fun. Working behind a dumb machine for hours on end is not what women of older generations see as an exciting career, and those women are not encouraging their daughters or their daughter's daughters to persue computer science oriented careers.
I say put some fun into engineering. Have team outings, go to a concert together on the weekends. Have lunch together sometimes during the week. Design and problem solve as a group. I'm sure there are many more ideas to enliven the profession.
I think the leaders of the country have really missed the point of the space program. In an age when capitalism runs amuk (look at the Math World article posted earlier for what happens to quality ideas and creations), the government is loosing sight of what's important. We'd rather fight some pointless war in Afghanistan that we won't win, and I bet that costs a pretty penny. It's sad to see this proposal given any kind of serious consideration. I think the space program is an important key to our national future, and relying on people who ultimate objective is profit is not the point. There are many reasons the program should exist as a not for profit venture. First is the science. Companies don't want to do research on something they can't sell. Companies also don't care about human beings, so who the heck would want to ride on a shuttle where passenger safety is second to big bucks for shareholders. Third, NASA carries great national pride. Profit doesn't make people happy in the end, and ultimately NASA provides a piece of humanity's better half.
Ultimately, I would rather see the whole shuttle program killed rather than being profitized. If the government wants to be so cheap when it comes to national pride, let the world see that the U.S. dump money into a pointless war than better itself.
I, too, echo the sentiments of this Ask Slashdot. I am also in a similar position about to graduate. However, my problem is not with coding per se, or even management.
My two big issues with the industry revolve around the work environment and the attitude of those already in industry. First, I think the work environment for software projects is downright terrible. Most companies have the ubiquitous dimly lit cubicle, and they stick their employees in them like sheep in a pen, or bats in a cave. I've spent weeks without conversing with anyone at work, and that doesn't suit me very well at all. I don't understand how an engineer is supposed to be world class (see http://www.eec.psu.edu/lc/wce.htm for a description of what my university is try to do) if they spent their entire life devoid of all interaction with human beings.
Second, I think more programmers should consider team programming or pair programming. I think the engineer process needs to be fun (it can't hurt), and I think that could help attract some different people to the industry. Programming with other people is a refreshing idea, and since we are human beings, the social interaction is generally a good thing.
In short, I enjoy the idea of design and creation and that's why I wanted to be an engineer. However, it seems most companies treat these bright people as machines and robots, expecting people to forsake their humanity so they can sit alone in tiny box for years and years programming their way to who knows what. I think it's time people did something about it. Otherwise I am beginning to think maybe my first job in a movie theater was perhaps the most satifying one of all.
Before long we're have to pay to access anything on Google. And I understand those of you that say that Google is a company, and thus deserves payment for their service. But how many of you would be willing to pay for Google even if a subsription service had ads? Where do I get such an idea? From cable TV of course. The original idea was to have TV without ads, but we all know what happened to that. You pay $30/month, and you still put up with advertising. I think the same is going to be said about online service. You'll pay them money, but once they have your money, what is to stop them from increasing their bottom line by getting advertisers and ugly popup/must-click-here-to-see-content style adversting?
Has anyone ever noticed the way Google's results change noticably over a small length of time for the exact same query? I'm not referring the ordinary updating of data, but rather pages that appear in the search results one day, gone the next, and back for the second day. Some days the information seems more complete than others. I notice this the most when I search for something fairly specific that generates only 10's of results. I find this lack of consistency one of Google's primary faults.
Windows CE might be great for the end user with its relatively familiar interface, but did you ever program for this type of environment? The software devlopment kit for Windows CE pretty much gives small developers the choice to either
1)buy a bunch or handheld/pocket PC type devices
2)install windows 2000/NT4
Windows 2000/NT4 is needed to support the emulator for the PDA. No other operating system will work. The only other option is to buy the devices and download the program to them. As a university student familiar with a Unix style environment, I do not appreciate having to install an overbloated OS just to do some minor development work on an application.
I would like to see more PDA operating system choices, paticularly something that could be emulated on a system other than windows 2000/NT. I would especially like to see something Linux or Unix based since my university has lots of machines available for developing on those platforms. Having more choice would allow me to work in the environment I am most comfortable. Besides, did you ever try and learn MFC in a hurry? There should be a better way.
because I never even found a company that wanted to hire me as a future engineering student. I spent my most of my days at a movie theater cleaning up after people and making minimum wage. I would guess that as cheap labor you are still probably making more than someone on the minimum wage pay scale. I did look to switch from that movie job, but no one seemed to know what do with me since I was a high school student. One company offered me a job only to later rescind the offer since they talked to their engineers and they could not figure out what to do with me.
On a similar note, I don't think you do know anything as a high school student that is all that valuable. Sure, some high school students can program, and other can set up a linux box, but I am sure that these students don't really understand the concepts that are fundamental to operating systems or good software design. As someone who worked on one of the most advanced CPU's on the planet, I will remind those high school students that there is still a lot of learning to be done. Until that you demonstrate you are competent with the advanced topics, be happy not to have to sweep napkins off a sticky theater floor.
I am currently working on a thesis where I am going to analyze a pocket PC game I develop for power consumption issues. My biggest complaint is that the most sophicated OS for these devices is windows CE, and that platform is a real big pain to program for. For example, to run emulation for my pocket PC programs, I need to have the embedded Visual C++ SDK and windows 2000. There is no other operating system that will run the emulator. So, now I have to go through the process of installing another whole OS just to do development on one program.
Having a linux friendly platform would really help me. I could develop using Linux, I wouldn't have to use Microsoft Frustration Classes or the rather complex Win32 API. In addition, my school teaches programming exclusively in a Unix type of environment, and I believe that a lot of other schools do as well. Programming for linux would certainly be an easier transition for someone like myself who just want to do a small amount of development for the pocket PC platform.
I have a similar list of complaints about using
Linux "to get the job done." A couple of years ago I tried to setup Redhat 5.2, and I eventually
had to stop using it because I had so many little problems I just didn't have the time to solve.
(1) Netscape would always print halfway down the page on my printer. I imagine there is some nice fix somewhere, but I couldn't find it.
(2) I never got my 3.5 inch floppy to work. For some reason the default install never configured it and I didn't want to play with obscure and poorly documented config files.
(3) I tried to install Licq and of course there was some dependency problem that even downloading an updated versions couldn't even cure.
In my opinion, Linux needs to work on more documentation that is included within the config files for people who generally know where to look, but don't have to time to play around with
settings all day. I'm sure the answers to my problems are nothing more than a few simple changes, but I do not where to make those changes. Linux may be free to download, but it will cost close to windows in terms of the cost of books one needs to properly configure it.
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I live in the Columbia/Ellicott City area, and I can tell you that it is not really a great place to live, so I do think the list is credible to me. The cost of living is extremely high - there are a ton of government workers and government contractors, so yes there a lot of tech jobs that pay more money than other areas of the country. I should know; I work in one. There are a lot of service based industries to serve all those people too - restaurants, strip malls, and every chain store you can imagine. But the extra salary does not begin to make up for the high cost of living - restaurants cost 10-20 more for a dinner for two, grocerries cost 20-50 me more than they did when I lived in PA. Taxes are a big pay killer - about 5% higher here than in PA for local taxes and let's not forget that my bigger salary is taxed high by the federal government too. Homes in Columbia/Ellicott City are out of reach for young professionals starting out in life. Oh and depite the rich service based industry I previously mentioned, restaurants are still packed, stores are always crowded, and the roads are clogged. The Federal government's Base Realignment and Closure will bring 20 some thousand new families to the area in the next few years, but Howard County (the county where Columbia/Ellicott City is) will not approve the necassary permits for new housing to accomdate the influx. It's a bit of a mess and it's not going to be get any better. The city may have ben hot 10 years ago, but is on the decline as far as quality of life goes. There are too many people chasing too few resources.
I remember reading somewhere that long hours such as 12/7 can really be determinental to a project not just because of burnout, but because employess tend to merge their home and work lives when they spent too much time at work. For example, if you don't see your wife/significant other/family, I would imagine you would probably be taking some work time to call them. If you have errands or business to tend to, you'll probably be making the phone calls from work, or surfing the web to shop for that gift for the birthday party you won't be able to attend.
Mandating the number of hours worked for a salaried employeee makes no sense. If they do not want to compensate you, then you need a results based system that shows the tasks to be completed and project milestones. If it takes someone 35 hours a week to hit the deadline, then let them work 35 hours a week. If it takes more, then they need to work more. In my opinion, being a salaried employee goes both ways; it shouldn't always mean 40+ hours a week are worked.
Maybe somebody could help me out with understanding how changing the amplitude adds frequencies. Changing the amplitude of a sine wave, say with mathimatical representation 2*sin(t), does not frequency, which is based on the terms inside the parenthesis. So, how does modulating the amplitude add in more frequencies? What am I missing?
Actually, I think it would help to be able to get out into the working world after high school before college. I know that I had no perspective on what a real job was in high school, and I may have chosen I better course if I had the experience to make an informed decision. Most people in college only guess what they want in a job based on what they think they would like to do, but I haven't seen many employers would give work that is based on what someone wants to do. I think there are a lot of opportunities in college to give your life direction, but it takes smarts and wisdom to make good choices, and I think giving people some skills in high school could be a good thing.
Actually I think there is a point with the lack of human involvement. As a guy, even I have a beef with my software job because my coworkers do not seem to place any great importance on human interaction. Project leaders do not believe in regular meetings, and team morale does not seem to factor into decisions. Coding is done for hours on end at a customer's site and dinner breaks may be nonexistent. The idea of needing time to decompress from a stressful day, or stepping away from a problem in order to get a solution does not come across the minds of my fellow engineers. Generally speaking, the other engineers ignore the fact that we are human programmers with social, emotional, and physical needs. When I tell my girlfriend about these working conditions, she is totally not interested in getting anywhere near engineering.
Now I don't mean to just rant about my job. I am lucky to have it in this economy, and I can think of much worse jobs (i.e. the nursing industry), but the point is that the lack of emphasis for the human element does not encourage women to enter the field. My grandmother, who is actually quite computer savvy for someone her age, sees engineering as a dull and boring field. She is always encouraging me to have fun, and she knows it is not going to happen at work. And that is really the crux of the problem as I see it. Engineering is NOT fun. Working behind a dumb machine for hours on end is not what women of older generations see as an exciting career, and those women are not encouraging their daughters or their daughter's daughters to persue computer science oriented careers.
I say put some fun into engineering. Have team outings, go to a concert together on the weekends. Have lunch together sometimes during the week. Design and problem solve as a group. I'm sure there are many more ideas to enliven the profession.
I think the leaders of the country have really missed the point of the space program. In an age when capitalism runs amuk (look at the Math World article posted earlier for what happens to quality ideas and creations), the government is loosing sight of what's important. We'd rather fight some pointless war in Afghanistan that we won't win, and I bet that costs a pretty penny. It's sad to see this proposal given any kind of serious consideration. I think the space program is an important key to our national future, and relying on people who ultimate objective is profit is not the point. There are many reasons the program should exist as a not for profit venture. First is the science. Companies don't want to do research on something they can't sell. Companies also don't care about human beings, so who the heck would want to ride on a shuttle where passenger safety is second to big bucks for shareholders. Third, NASA carries great national pride. Profit doesn't make people happy in the end, and ultimately NASA provides a piece of humanity's better half.
Ultimately, I would rather see the whole shuttle program killed rather than being profitized. If the government wants to be so cheap when it comes to national pride, let the world see that the U.S. dump money into a pointless war than better itself.
I, too, echo the sentiments of this Ask Slashdot. I am also in a similar position about to graduate. However, my problem is not with coding per se, or even management.
My two big issues with the industry revolve around the work environment and the attitude of those already in industry. First, I think the work environment for software projects is downright terrible. Most companies have the ubiquitous dimly lit cubicle, and they stick their employees in them like sheep in a pen, or bats in a cave. I've spent weeks without conversing with anyone at work, and that doesn't suit me very well at all. I don't understand how an engineer is supposed to be world class (see http://www.eec.psu.edu/lc/wce.htm for a description of what my university is try to do) if they spent their entire life devoid of all interaction with human beings. Second, I think more programmers should consider team programming or pair programming. I think the engineer process needs to be fun (it can't hurt), and I think that could help attract some different people to the industry. Programming with other people is a refreshing idea, and since we are human beings, the social interaction is generally a good thing. In short, I enjoy the idea of design and creation and that's why I wanted to be an engineer. However, it seems most companies treat these bright people as machines and robots, expecting people to forsake their humanity so they can sit alone in tiny box for years and years programming their way to who knows what. I think it's time people did something about it. Otherwise I am beginning to think maybe my first job in a movie theater was perhaps the most satifying one of all.
Before long we're have to pay to access anything on Google. And I understand those of you that say that Google is a company, and thus deserves payment for their service. But how many of you would be willing to pay for Google even if a subsription service had ads? Where do I get such an idea? From cable TV of course. The original idea was to have TV without ads, but we all know what happened to that. You pay $30/month, and you still put up with advertising. I think the same is going to be said about online service. You'll pay them money, but once they have your money, what is to stop them from increasing their bottom line by getting advertisers and ugly popup/must-click-here-to-see-content style adversting?
Has anyone ever noticed the way Google's results change noticably over a small length of time for the exact same query? I'm not referring the ordinary updating of data, but rather pages that appear in the search results one day, gone the next, and back for the second day. Some days the information seems more complete than others. I notice this the most when I search for something fairly specific that generates only 10's of results. I find this lack of consistency one of Google's primary faults.
Windows CE might be great for the end user with its relatively familiar interface, but did you ever program for this type of environment? The software devlopment kit for Windows CE pretty much gives small developers the choice to either
1)buy a bunch or handheld/pocket PC type devices
2)install windows 2000/NT4
Windows 2000/NT4 is needed to support the emulator for the PDA. No other operating system will work. The only other option is to buy the devices and download the program to them. As a university student familiar with a Unix style environment, I do not appreciate having to install an overbloated OS just to do some minor development work on an application.
I would like to see more PDA operating system choices, paticularly something that could be emulated on a system other than windows 2000/NT. I would especially like to see something Linux or Unix based since my university has lots of machines available for developing on those platforms. Having more choice would allow me to work in the environment I am most comfortable. Besides, did you ever try and learn MFC in a hurry? There should be a better way.
because I never even found a company that wanted to hire me as a future engineering student. I spent my most of my days at a movie theater cleaning up after people and making minimum wage. I would guess that as cheap labor you are still probably making more than someone on the minimum wage pay scale. I did look to switch from that movie job, but no one seemed to know what do with me since I was a high school student. One company offered me a job only to later rescind the offer since they talked to their engineers and they could not figure out what to do with me.
On a similar note, I don't think you do know anything as a high school student that is all that valuable. Sure, some high school students can program, and other can set up a linux box, but I am sure that these students don't really understand the concepts that are fundamental to operating systems or good software design. As someone who worked on one of the most advanced CPU's on the planet, I will remind those high school students that there is still a lot of learning to be done. Until that you demonstrate you are competent with the advanced topics, be happy not to have to sweep napkins off a sticky theater floor.
I am currently working on a thesis where I am going to analyze a pocket PC game I develop for power consumption issues. My biggest complaint is that the most sophicated OS for these devices is windows CE, and that platform is a real big pain to program for. For example, to run emulation for my pocket PC programs, I need to have the embedded Visual C++ SDK and windows 2000. There is no other operating system that will run the emulator. So, now I have to go through the process of installing another whole OS just to do development on one program. Having a linux friendly platform would really help me. I could develop using Linux, I wouldn't have to use Microsoft Frustration Classes or the rather complex Win32 API. In addition, my school teaches programming exclusively in a Unix type of environment, and I believe that a lot of other schools do as well. Programming for linux would certainly be an easier transition for someone like myself who just want to do a small amount of development for the pocket PC platform.
I have a similar list of complaints about using Linux "to get the job done." A couple of years ago I tried to setup Redhat 5.2, and I eventually had to stop using it because I had so many little problems I just didn't have the time to solve. (1) Netscape would always print halfway down the page on my printer. I imagine there is some nice fix somewhere, but I couldn't find it. (2) I never got my 3.5 inch floppy to work. For some reason the default install never configured it and I didn't want to play with obscure and poorly documented config files. (3) I tried to install Licq and of course there was some dependency problem that even downloading an updated versions couldn't even cure. In my opinion, Linux needs to work on more documentation that is included within the config files for people who generally know where to look, but don't have to time to play around with settings all day. I'm sure the answers to my problems are nothing more than a few simple changes, but I do not where to make those changes. Linux may be free to download, but it will cost close to windows in terms of the cost of books one needs to properly configure it.