Depends on how you define "programmer". I define "programmer" as someone who creates software, and by that definition, I've been doing it professionally for 23 years, even though my education is in physics, not C.S.
I have seen that most of the people that entered the profession with me either have become management, or have for various reasons decided to do something else. Some have chosen to go into business for themselves, while others decided to fossilize and eventually dropped out.
The biggest factor I see in staying with it is continuing to learn the new stuff. Always stay with the leading edge development, always stay at the panic edge where you're constantly reading RFCs, studying the software journals, reading the hardware journals.
Through the years, what I've noticed is a tremendous lack of hardware understanding in the incoming software development staff. It's well and good to have had a programming language class, but it has been my understanding that knowing WHY something works the way it does is far more important than knowing HOW to code a class in Java. A language can be picked up in just a few days, if you understand the underlying principles of the science.
Also, don't think that a C.S. degree has taught you ANYTHING worthwhile, unless it has taught you how to think and to research, and find answers first. We've had far too many fresh graduates come in thinking they were God's gift to software engineering, and it just made it that much more difficult to break them and make them teachable. Many times, algorithms that work in the real world are NOT what were taught in a programming language class.
I moved from Dallas, Texas to rural Arkansas, from where I now telecommute and do the same job (software) as before.
Obviously the New England area must be EXTREMELY expensive, because my cost of living here in the country is higher than it was in Dallas. Construction labor cost is less here, but materials are anything if a bit higher due to extra shipping costs and lower competition, so housing is no less expensive, and food is more expensive than in Dallas, and the 7% state income tax really hurt.
So, there are great things about living in a rural area, but it does not guarantee a lower cost of living. If Rural Sourcing is charging their customers $35 to $50 per hour, their personnel expense likely does not exceed $18 to $25 per hour, and that has to cover benefits as well. That's not exactly a great income. It does beat lots of the jobs around here, though. Even skilled labor (HVAC installation, etc.) is only making $8-10 per hour. A highly paid professional welder makes $18/hr, and that's only in a very few special high-demand positions.
There's a reason why so many people here live in old mobile homes and drive beaters; it's all they can afford.
I highly recommend the Home Depot store brand of CF bulbs. Like many other people, I went through a large variety of different brands of bulbs (Feit, Phillips, GE, several other brands) before standardizing on the Home Depot bulbs.
They are instant on, and the light from the 60W equiv bulbs is close to full brightness within just seconds. And at $10 for 6 13w (eqiv to 60W incandescent) mini-twist bulbs, the price meets my criteria.
For years now, every bulb in my house except for the decorative globe ones over a couple of vanities are CF. In fact, when I built my current house a couple of years ago, I packed up all the old CFs from my old residence (replaced them with incandescents) and am STILL using the bulbs in my new residence.
Warning about CFs. Some automated/remote control circuits for lighting systems don't like CFs very much. I found that CFs in my remote control Hunter ceiling fans would flicker badly, unless I left one of the bulbs as a low wattage incandescent. I'm guessing that the control circuit needs a certain minimum resistive load in order to latch properly. The same is true for some motion sensing light switches. One motion sensing light switch I have would allow the CFs to flicker in the OFF condition, unless I had a low-wattage incadescent bulb on the circuit, I guess to provide a drain load.
Thanks. I have looked at their methodology. It's quite possible that my personal case would be one of the "outliers" and would have thus been discarded. I do feel some concern that their data is based upon/constrained by data from 1993. I do know that my family's financial situation has certainly gotten a lot tighter since that time, so if the real data (and not just the constraints) are from 12 years ago, it will not reflect current reality.
Far more of our income now is consumed by food and energy costs than in 1993, and overall CPI has risen dramatically, while wages have been completely static since the 2000 crash.:) I take all the itemized (property tax, charitable contributions) deductions we're eligible to take, but it still doesn't come close to the figures presented.
Yes, I do think that I'm not representative of the people that are represented by the data in the charts, but I have to wonder just how many people out there are also "not represented" in the data. It would seem to me that those people with good incomes, but a sizable family (I have 4 children) which consumes all the available income to cover cost of living (food/clothing/energy/medicine) are way underrepresented in the data.
I went back and pulled my 2004 tax return. My state income tax bill was 6.9% of my gross income. 100% of gross income went for paying taxes and cost of living. And standard of living is noticeably lower than it was 5 years ago. I'm not complaining; I'm better off than many people. But we're not the people taking vacations and putting money into retirement funds...must be someone else.:)
Your point about unearned money is quite valid. 100% of our income is earned, and 100% is spent.
I just drove through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Missippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee in the last couple of weeks, and all of them (with the exception of Louisiana) seemed like lovely places to live. Beautiful countryside, kind, gracious people, peaceful atmosphere.
Where do you get off calling Alabama a bad place to live? NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville, Alabama, so there is certainly no shortage of high tech places to work either. I don't live in Alabama (I live in Arkansas, doing high tech (computer networking and VoIP) development, after living in Dallas, Texas for 23 years), but it looks perfectly nice to me.
I guessing you're just completely clueless. California is NOT the only high-tech place in the country...
I pulled up the documentation for my state (Arkansas), and it doesn't make sense to me. My income is in the next to highest category, and according to that document, it means that I'm paying 8.2% (6.8% after federal offset) of my gross for state and local taxes. However, that's completely bogus, because I'm paying 7% of gross for state income tax all by itself. The property tax amount they show (1.4%) is pretty much in line with reality, but I pay far more than 2.1% of my gross for sales and excise taxes. Perhaps I'm not a representative candidate, but my sales and excise tax bite is more in line with the lowest income category (a 9.1% of gross bite).
My total state and local tax bite comes out to be 17.5%, which is considerably higher than the 12.0% tax bite claimed for the lowest income group.
From my perspective, these numbers look bogus. Perhaps intended as justification for some tax reform desired by the organization offering up the numbers?
When I began full-time telecommuting several years ago, I bought a Raynor Miranda (currently available from Office Depot for $169) "Executive" chair, and I've never regretted it.
It's fully as comfortable as the really expensive chairs that my company provides for the in-building workers, and it has held up really well to 10-12 hour per day coding sessions.
I completely agree that the list of skills listed is extremely valuable in today's computer oriented workplace, but fundamentally a higher education should be used to broaden horizons and basically teach a person HOW to think and HOW to acquire knowledge, not load a person up with immediately marketable skills.
At my work, we fundamentally believe that new grads are useless to us for about six months, until we train them with the arcane knowledge required for the types of development we do. Unfortunately, the majority of new grads we have hired believe they are God's gift to computing, and we have to break them before they are trainable. Actually, there is only a single new grad (an Indian intern that we had) that was immediately useful to us, in the 19 years that I've been with the company so far.
This may be controversial, but I find that in general the people that end up being the best software architects are the people with non-CS degrees (physics, mathematics, engineering, etc.). The CS folks tend to think that the algorithms they were taught in school are the one true way to solve a problem, while the other folks, without the CS blinders, tend to generate more original, more efficient solutions.
Full disclosure: both of my degrees are in physics, but I had significant study in computer engineering and computational physics while in school. My superior is a CS graduate who is an absolutely wonderful software architect.
True, but the best I have available to me is 1.5Mbps, and most of the people around me are lucky to get 40Kbps. So network speed depends greatly upon location, while CPU capacity does not. Also, network capacity is reduced by the necessary network headers on the packets, while on a 300bps connection to a dedicated service, the bandwidth available to actual data transfer was a much higher percentage of the bandwidth than with our current broadband connections.
600% is 6X growth. You're talking about 6000X increase, or 600,000% growth.
Now, a bunch of those cycles are chewed up by wait states when going to external memory, which is why onchip cache is so important. Nevertheless, it's a huge increase.
To date myself, my first computer class had a single model 33 teletype, at 110 bps, to share among 20 students. We stored our files on punched paper tape...
I live in a rural area out in the boonies, but even here the ticket price is $8.50. Granted, that's for a theatre with stadium seating in a nearby town of 5000 people, but that's really out of the price range of many of the residents of this area. The theatre is apparently living on the summer tourist trade...
Meanwhile, almost all the residents of the area have either Dish or DirecTV service. It's interesting seeing a 6x8 camper (yes, someone lives there year around) with a satellite dish. For $29.99/month, they get a lot more entertainment than they could afford driving to Branson.
She has purchased fabric from the UK (we live in the US), but has not tried ordering the other supplies internationally. Do you have a vendor you'd recommend?
There's a reason why fabric shops have almost gone out of existence; the cost to purchase the raw materials at retail far exceeds the cost to purchase a garment manufactured in some far off country.
My wife is a quite talented seamstress, and she has sewn a LOT of clothes for herself and our children, but now she only sews items when she is going for a particular look that's not available off the rack, because it's so bloody expensive to get the fabric, fasteners, trim, etc.
However, I have both Dell Win2K and WinXP machines on my desk at work. All the real work happens on my Win2K machine, as the corporate standard, while the XP machine is around merely for testing software on XP and for running the occasional program that stipulates it only runs on XP.
Despite the fact that the XP machine is virtually a clean install, which machine do I have problems with? You got it; the XP machine.
When businesses that I have a continuing relationship with (like gas card companies) call me, I immediately tell them to put me on their own corporate DNC list, and I never hear from them again.
I'm now down to no one calling me but the Indians that are not screening against the national DNC, and they hang up quickly when I tell them I'm on the DNC.
Occasionally (maybe once a month) I'll get some Indian doing a cold call, and I'll say, "I'm on the Do Not Call list", and they apologize profusely and hang up.
Huh. How many home school families do you know? The ones I know (and we're one of them) emphasize the sciences just as much as we do biblical studies and the 3 Rs. My kids absolutely love studying dinosaurs, geology, and astronomy/cosmology.
We (at my company) used to kill huge numbers of forests, mostly for making temporary copies of documents and code listings for getting together in a conference room and doing reviews. After review, the paper goes right in the recycling bin.
Now that we've got wireless in all the conference rooms and easy/effective remote conferencing, the paper consumption has dropped dramatically. Folks either take wireless notebook to conference room, or just conference in from desk and look at the document on desktop.
I can't remember the last time I printed a work-related document. It's been several years, I think.
Intel's IPP (Integrated Performance Primatives) librares, a very, very nice set of libraries, does processor detection to select which version of the library to run. There are versions for every class of Pentium chip ever built. When an AMD chip is detected, IPP runs the lowest performance library available. If "tricks" are used to force the IPP library to run the P4 version of the libray, the AMD chips run the libraries faster than the P4 does.
Frankly, this is Intel's perogative, since Intel produced the compiler, and they really have no responsibility to help a competitor. However, it is interesting that the AMD chips run Intel's own libraries better than Intel chips do.
Agreed. And all the jibes against Missouri from those below in this thread are obviously from people who have never actually spent any time in Missouri.
I've spent time in California, New York, Ontario, Quebec, Texas, and numerous places in between, but after spending the last 23 years living in Dallas, I chose to move my family to a rural place just south of Branson, Missouri, in the Ozarks. Sure, there's plenty of poverty (and the associated dental problems), but there are also many wonderful, kind, considerate people, and the recreation opportunities and views are quite good.
I'm on a 1.5Mbps DSL line, with a 70mS latency (ATT backhauls 600 miles to Chicago, before dropping the packets into SPRINT, which then hauls them 1000 miles back in the opposite direction) to my office, and RDP works great, as does Citrix.
VNC is really, really laggy at this latency, but, as much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft did a bang-up job with RDP.
I live in a rural area with a sizable lower-income population. Because of the hilly terrain and distance to the nearest city, it's virtually impossible to receive broadcast television. Thus, there are many examples here of people living in tiny campers, with Dish or DirecTV satellite dishes mounted on the side of the camper.
It seems like virtually everyone in the area, regardless of income level, has satellite hookup. Thus, these individuals will not be affected by the conversion. I guess we'll have to look to the inner city poor for examples of people who will be affected.
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Depends on how you define "programmer". I define "programmer" as someone who creates software, and by that definition, I've been doing it professionally for 23 years, even though my education is in physics, not C.S.
I have seen that most of the people that entered the profession with me either have become management, or have for various reasons decided to do something else. Some have chosen to go into business for themselves, while others decided to fossilize and eventually dropped out.
The biggest factor I see in staying with it is continuing to learn the new stuff. Always stay with the leading edge development, always stay at the panic edge where you're constantly reading RFCs, studying the software journals, reading the hardware journals.
Through the years, what I've noticed is a tremendous lack of hardware understanding in the incoming software development staff. It's well and good to have had a programming language class, but it has been my understanding that knowing WHY something works the way it does is far more important than knowing HOW to code a class in Java. A language can be picked up in just a few days, if you understand the underlying principles of the science.
Also, don't think that a C.S. degree has taught you ANYTHING worthwhile, unless it has taught you how to think and to research, and find answers first. We've had far too many fresh graduates come in thinking they were God's gift to software engineering, and it just made it that much more difficult to break them and make them teachable. Many times, algorithms that work in the real world are NOT what were taught in a programming language class.
Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now...
I moved from Dallas, Texas to rural Arkansas, from where I now telecommute and do the same job (software) as before.
Obviously the New England area must be EXTREMELY expensive, because my cost of living here in the country is higher than it was in Dallas. Construction labor cost is less here, but materials are anything if a bit higher due to extra shipping costs and lower competition, so housing is no less expensive, and food is more expensive than in Dallas, and the 7% state income tax really hurt.
So, there are great things about living in a rural area, but it does not guarantee a lower cost of living. If Rural Sourcing is charging their customers $35 to $50 per hour, their personnel expense likely does not exceed $18 to $25 per hour, and that has to cover benefits as well. That's not exactly a great income. It does beat lots of the jobs around here, though. Even skilled labor (HVAC installation, etc.) is only making $8-10 per hour. A highly paid professional welder makes $18/hr, and that's only in a very few special high-demand positions.
There's a reason why so many people here live in old mobile homes and drive beaters; it's all they can afford.
I highly recommend the Home Depot store brand of CF bulbs. Like many other people, I went through a large variety of different brands of bulbs (Feit, Phillips, GE, several other brands) before standardizing on the Home Depot bulbs.
They are instant on, and the light from the 60W equiv bulbs is close to full brightness within just seconds. And at $10 for 6 13w (eqiv to 60W incandescent) mini-twist bulbs, the price meets my criteria.
For years now, every bulb in my house except for the decorative globe ones over a couple of vanities are CF. In fact, when I built my current house a couple of years ago, I packed up all the old CFs from my old residence (replaced them with incandescents) and am STILL using the bulbs in my new residence.
Warning about CFs. Some automated/remote control circuits for lighting systems don't like CFs very much. I found that CFs in my remote control Hunter ceiling fans would flicker badly, unless I left one of the bulbs as a low wattage incandescent. I'm guessing that the control circuit needs a certain minimum resistive load in order to latch properly. The same is true for some motion sensing light switches. One motion sensing light switch I have would allow the CFs to flicker in the OFF condition, unless I had a low-wattage incadescent bulb on the circuit, I guess to provide a drain load.
Thanks. I have looked at their methodology. It's quite possible that my personal case would be one of the "outliers" and would have thus been discarded. I do feel some concern that their data is based upon/constrained by data from 1993. I do know that my family's financial situation has certainly gotten a lot tighter since that time, so if the real data (and not just the constraints) are from 12 years ago, it will not reflect current reality.
:) I take all the itemized (property tax, charitable contributions) deductions we're eligible to take, but it still doesn't come close to the figures presented.
:)
Far more of our income now is consumed by food and energy costs than in 1993, and overall CPI has risen dramatically, while wages have been completely static since the 2000 crash.
Yes, I do think that I'm not representative of the people that are represented by the data in the charts, but I have to wonder just how many people out there are also "not represented" in the data. It would seem to me that those people with good incomes, but a sizable family (I have 4 children) which consumes all the available income to cover cost of living (food/clothing/energy/medicine) are way underrepresented in the data.
I went back and pulled my 2004 tax return. My state income tax bill was 6.9% of my gross income. 100% of gross income went for paying taxes and cost of living. And standard of living is noticeably lower than it was 5 years ago. I'm not complaining; I'm better off than many people. But we're not the people taking vacations and putting money into retirement funds...must be someone else.
Your point about unearned money is quite valid. 100% of our income is earned, and 100% is spent.
Now, now...
I just drove through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Missippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee in the last couple of weeks, and all of them (with the exception of Louisiana) seemed like lovely places to live. Beautiful countryside, kind, gracious people, peaceful atmosphere.
Where do you get off calling Alabama a bad place to live? NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville, Alabama, so there is certainly no shortage of high tech places to work either. I don't live in Alabama (I live in Arkansas, doing high tech (computer networking and VoIP) development, after living in Dallas, Texas for 23 years), but it looks perfectly nice to me.
I guessing you're just completely clueless. California is NOT the only high-tech place in the country...
I pulled up the documentation for my state (Arkansas), and it doesn't make sense to me. My income is in the next to highest category, and according to that document, it means that I'm paying 8.2% (6.8% after federal offset) of my gross for state and local taxes. However, that's completely bogus, because I'm paying 7% of gross for state income tax all by itself. The property tax amount they show (1.4%) is pretty much in line with reality, but I pay far more than 2.1% of my gross for sales and excise taxes. Perhaps I'm not a representative candidate, but my sales and excise tax bite is more in line with the lowest income category (a 9.1% of gross bite).
My total state and local tax bite comes out to be 17.5%, which is considerably higher than the 12.0% tax bite claimed for the lowest income group.
From my perspective, these numbers look bogus. Perhaps intended as justification for some tax reform desired by the organization offering up the numbers?
When I began full-time telecommuting several years ago, I bought a Raynor Miranda (currently available from Office Depot for $169) "Executive" chair, and I've never regretted it.
It's fully as comfortable as the really expensive chairs that my company provides for the in-building workers, and it has held up really well to 10-12 hour per day coding sessions.
I completely agree that the list of skills listed is extremely valuable in today's computer oriented workplace, but fundamentally a higher education should be used to broaden horizons and basically teach a person HOW to think and HOW to acquire knowledge, not load a person up with immediately marketable skills.
At my work, we fundamentally believe that new grads are useless to us for about six months, until we train them with the arcane knowledge required for the types of development we do. Unfortunately, the majority of new grads we have hired believe they are God's gift to computing, and we have to break them before they are trainable. Actually, there is only a single new grad (an Indian intern that we had) that was immediately useful to us, in the 19 years that I've been with the company so far.
This may be controversial, but I find that in general the people that end up being the best software architects are the people with non-CS degrees (physics, mathematics, engineering, etc.). The CS folks tend to think that the algorithms they were taught in school are the one true way to solve a problem, while the other folks, without the CS blinders, tend to generate more original, more efficient solutions.
Full disclosure: both of my degrees are in physics, but I had significant study in computer engineering and computational physics while in school. My superior is a CS graduate who is an absolutely wonderful software architect.
True, but the best I have available to me is 1.5Mbps, and most of the people around me are lucky to get 40Kbps. So network speed depends greatly upon location, while CPU capacity does not. Also, network capacity is reduced by the necessary network headers on the packets, while on a 300bps connection to a dedicated service, the bandwidth available to actual data transfer was a much higher percentage of the bandwidth than with our current broadband connections.
Sigh. I can't do math either.
2.4GHz = 2400MHz / 4MHz = 600X --> 60,000% growth
600% is 6X growth. You're talking about 6000X increase, or 600,000% growth.
Now, a bunch of those cycles are chewed up by wait states when going to external memory, which is why onchip cache is so important. Nevertheless, it's a huge increase.
To date myself, my first computer class had a single model 33 teletype, at 110 bps, to share among 20 students. We stored our files on punched paper tape...
I live in a rural area out in the boonies, but even here the ticket price is $8.50. Granted, that's for a theatre with stadium seating in a nearby town of 5000 people, but that's really out of the price range of many of the residents of this area. The theatre is apparently living on the summer tourist trade...
Meanwhile, almost all the residents of the area have either Dish or DirecTV service. It's interesting seeing a 6x8 camper (yes, someone lives there year around) with a satellite dish. For $29.99/month, they get a lot more entertainment than they could afford driving to Branson.
She has purchased fabric from the UK (we live in the US), but has not tried ordering the other supplies internationally. Do you have a vendor you'd recommend?
There's a reason why fabric shops have almost gone out of existence; the cost to purchase the raw materials at retail far exceeds the cost to purchase a garment manufactured in some far off country.
My wife is a quite talented seamstress, and she has sewn a LOT of clothes for herself and our children, but now she only sews items when she is going for a particular look that's not available off the rack, because it's so bloody expensive to get the fabric, fasteners, trim, etc.
In most places that are decent to live, the dew is too heavy on the grass to mow in the morning.
Perhaps XP is better for someone...
However, I have both Dell Win2K and WinXP machines on my desk at work. All the real work happens on my Win2K machine, as the corporate standard, while the XP machine is around merely for testing software on XP and for running the occasional program that stipulates it only runs on XP.
Despite the fact that the XP machine is virtually a clean install, which machine do I have problems with? You got it; the XP machine.
When businesses that I have a continuing relationship with (like gas card companies) call me, I immediately tell them to put me on their own corporate DNC list, and I never hear from them again.
I'm now down to no one calling me but the Indians that are not screening against the national DNC, and they hang up quickly when I tell them I'm on the DNC.
Like a charm.
Occasionally (maybe once a month) I'll get some Indian doing a cold call, and I'll say, "I'm on the Do Not Call list", and they apologize profusely and hang up.
Huh. How many home school families do you know? The ones I know (and we're one of them) emphasize the sciences just as much as we do biblical studies and the 3 Rs. My kids absolutely love studying dinosaurs, geology, and astronomy/cosmology.
We (at my company) used to kill huge numbers of forests, mostly for making temporary copies of documents and code listings for getting together in a conference room and doing reviews. After review, the paper goes right in the recycling bin.
Now that we've got wireless in all the conference rooms and easy/effective remote conferencing, the paper consumption has dropped dramatically. Folks either take wireless notebook to conference room, or just conference in from desk and look at the document on desktop.
I can't remember the last time I printed a work-related document. It's been several years, I think.
Intel's IPP (Integrated Performance Primatives) librares, a very, very nice set of libraries, does processor detection to select which version of the library to run. There are versions for every class of Pentium chip ever built. When an AMD chip is detected, IPP runs the lowest performance library available. If "tricks" are used to force the IPP library to run the P4 version of the libray, the AMD chips run the libraries faster than the P4 does.
Frankly, this is Intel's perogative, since Intel produced the compiler, and they really have no responsibility to help a competitor. However, it is interesting that the AMD chips run Intel's own libraries better than Intel chips do.
Agreed. And all the jibes against Missouri from those below in this thread are obviously from people who have never actually spent any time in Missouri.
I've spent time in California, New York, Ontario, Quebec, Texas, and numerous places in between, but after spending the last 23 years living in Dallas, I chose to move my family to a rural place just south of Branson, Missouri, in the Ozarks. Sure, there's plenty of poverty (and the associated dental problems), but there are also many wonderful, kind, considerate people, and the recreation opportunities and views are quite good.
I'm sure Bulgaria is a very nice place as well.
Huh?
I'm on a 1.5Mbps DSL line, with a 70mS latency (ATT backhauls 600 miles to Chicago, before dropping the packets into SPRINT, which then hauls them 1000 miles back in the opposite direction) to my office, and RDP works great, as does Citrix.
VNC is really, really laggy at this latency, but, as much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft did a bang-up job with RDP.
I live in a rural area with a sizable lower-income population. Because of the hilly terrain and distance to the nearest city, it's virtually impossible to receive broadcast television. Thus, there are many examples here of people living in tiny campers, with Dish or DirecTV satellite dishes mounted on the side of the camper.
It seems like virtually everyone in the area, regardless of income level, has satellite hookup. Thus, these individuals will not be affected by the conversion. I guess we'll have to look to the inner city poor for examples of people who will be affected.
No. It rained for 40 days. The actual duration of the voyage was more like 11 months.