there are still loads of companies looking for developers that can write C# and ASP
Why is it that whenever I hit a.asp page on the net I know I am in for an eye-gouging, mind-numbing experience?
I never said all of them were good at writing it, just that it is in demand. A really good ASP developer can make some fairly good sites, but just like when some idiot gets their hands on php without knowing how to use it, there are some things that look like the interpreter(or compiler in the case of ASP) threw up about half way through.
I'm not saying the senior developers are actually blowing up the database, but it does take them time and thought to write a half decent query. You can take a naive approach to the task and get something that works, but when you get a table that joins 3 others in that are anywhere between 3 million and 30 million rows you need to think your query through before you lock the entire damn database.
Entry level developers need to know this at the very least, and if you get someone in there that barely understands the basics of SQL you get code that might work but is completely useless if you have to scale it up (or worse goes into production and THEN you find out they are locking the database with the report query). I am not saying it is impossible, but how many companies do you know that really want to hire a person with little programming experience into that position? Moving to it within the same company, maybe, because then they at least know they work with whatever the company passes off as corporate culture and that they have basic competency, but even at my company which is not very big, they don't hire people to do software development unless they have a few years of experience.
Did you seriously just suggest Python and Ruby are more widely used than C#? I don't know what the hell you are doing, but dear lord if you want a paying job C# is in way higher demand than either of those languages. Plenty of people may have their issues with the.NET framework and such but there are still loads of companies looking for developers that can write C# and ASP.
Now C, yes that I can agree on, as the majority of software shops have moved toward managed languages (or at the very least use C++) because there is a lot more to deal with in low level imperative languages (more powerful, yes, but also much more prone to problems and sloppy programmers).
As far as the python being immature, it really isn't that bad, the syntax style is just a bit different and it is true object oriented instead of technically being a hybrid using primitive types. Most people once they get the actual concepts of general programming can easily transition between different syntax styles. I mean, saying it is immature because it doesn't use curly braces is like saying SQL is immature for the same reason. It all boils down to the language style.
Dear lord, no they are not. Yes Jr level positions are usually shadowed/mentored by some Sr level developers, but they expect you to have at least some experience. Now, obviously they don't expect you to necessarily have professional experience, otherwise no one would ever get into the field, but every software shop I have seen expects at least a few years of programming experience before they will even talk to you.
Not exactly. If the guy barely has experience with powershell or unix shell scripting then even some seemingly menial tasks can be more work than you think, especially if the company is trying to maintain decent coding standards.
Things like reports can sometimes be even harder to implement than parts of the engine depending on what you are using. Sure, you use SSRS and you can whip a.rdl file up in about half an hour if you get a bit of experience, but writing the stored procedure to power it in such a way that it won't make the database explode is a much more difficult task that even Senior developers can have problems with on occasion. So, sure some things might sound easy, but when you get into it they really are not.
Granted the reports is only one example, but also remember with most entry level positions the company hiring you views it as an investment. They are not going to want to invest much if the person applying for the position doesn't have something to show they have basic programming skills (personal projects are by far a favorite, when I graduated I had several listed on my resume and the HR people and developers they had interview me were incredibly happy to see that).
I don't know what morons you have worked with, but straight out of college every company I talked to expected me to know at least basic multi-threading. My company now is not even that big and we use multi-threading extensively. An auto-threaded compiler though could run circles around 99% of all developers. This is great for doing large levels of optimization automatically, and just like with manage languages it is a great asset to programming in general.
Yes, there are lazy developers that do not understand what a managed language is doing in the background, but look at it this way at least there is not near as much time wasted on debugging their lazy ass pointer arithmetic or messy memory leaks. There are also people that are insanely good at memory management such that they can rival or beat most managed languages, but the effort involved has highly diminished returns. Not only that but no more thread-lock that takes weeks to track down in highly complicated multi-threaded applications.
This in my opinion could be huge boost to lots of fields. Imagine a completely scalable genome sequencer running on a super-computer. We are talking minutes or even potentially seconds to compute a sequence if it continues to grow on a Moore's law scale. Applications in physics, biology, and tons of other fields make this not just huge for computer science, but for everyone.
This is flat wrong. I work for a Canadian company with a U.S. branch and every single software person we have is formally billed to customers in the U.S. and Canada as a Software Engineer. Canada and a couple of U.S. States' (Texas and I believe Florida last I checked) Professional Engineering boards are pushing for the title to require a P.E. and have been considering implementing a test for Software Engineers, but nothing solid has come of it and probably won't for a while.
Either you're going to eventually launch it, or not. It will never be 'consumer friendly' since it's a blatantly anti-consumer move intended to whore out to an unrepentantly anti-consumer organization.
Just wait until they've done this to about two dozen decent programmers... they'll invent some new crypto protocol that makes bittorrent look like the redheaded stepchild of piracy... "You can't stop the signal, Mel." -- Mr. Universe
Already been done. It is called BTGuard and you can get it plugged into most torrent trackers for a small monthly fee. Lifehacker ran an article about it not long ago.
Also, as outlined in the lifehacker article there are other solutions to mask the traffic from an ISP and there is no way in hell they can block some of them because they have much broader uses than just hiding your torrent tracking traffic. VPNs are way too widely used by so many businesses for telecommutes and other such, so it will ALWAYS be an option. And since (at least I think) it would be illegal wiretapping for them to capture your packets and decrypt them, there is not a damn thing they can do about it.
The problem is politics in the US are a career path all on their own. Most of them are businessmen or just people coming from money that take the political career and run with it. Many officials have little to no education on the wide array of things they are trying to regulate and have bad habits about not listening to advisers (see, net neutrality legislation and basically any case that comes up in court about new technology, I mean hell Oracle and Google had to take the Judge through a crash course on Java just to run the case).
The fact that it would have been discovered 10 years ago
We don't call this a "fact", we call it an "opinion". My opinion is that the SSC was so poorly managed at the time, it might still not be running today.
This is a fair point. If I remember correctly the SSC went over the total budget for the project before it was even half completed. Something along the lines of bad estimates on how difficult it would be to drill in the area. I've seen the soil in the area around Waxahachie (hell been by the SSC site many times) and it goes for a few feet and then turns into solid bedrock that is a BITCH to get through.
Often times these EULAs are very blanketing and have broad wording covering things that they actually can't cover. Technically a EULA is not legally binding unless the law actually covers what they put in the agreement. There is nothing that explicitly says these are not binding, but these things that remove rights granted by the country usually get thrown out because they are ruled unconscionable. I had an at length discussion and lectures on this in my engineering ethics course I took in college. I think Wikipedia has a few examples of cases where half the EULA was thrown out because it was so one sided. I had a few examples from my notes, but those are on my laptop and a lot to go through.
They ARE different when it comes to data. AT&T and T-Mobile don't offer real 4G. Sprint doesn't cap data use or throttle you. Verizon has real 4G and the largest, fastest 3G/4G cellular data network.
This is actually very incorrect. No one offers true 4G, period. The FCC bumped the legal definition of it down significantly because of lobbying from the cell carriers so that they could advertise like they have "4G" when in fact they have improved 3G.
That is by far an exception and not a rule or standard by any measure. Most of the people that did succeed with that program were borderline prodigies I bet, and could likely do that same thing with another accelerated program, but that is less than even the top.5% of most people. Fuck, just getting a college degree you are in a small percentage. Getting one in engineering even more miniscule of a percentile. Being able to get one in engineering in less than a year of training you're talking a TINY amount, some of which probably already are software engineers.
It might be possible, but those are some EXTREME circumstances and this CodeAcademy shit is nothing even close to something like that. Your average Joe Blow will go exactly no where with this sort of program.
No it is more the idea that everyone that wants to better themselves will do it. In the majority of cases it is not that a person simply cannot be educated beyond the D level you refer to, it is that they don't want to try hard enough. I agree that there are some people in a shitty ass situation where they have no way of bettering themselves and there may be a good number of them, but there are a lot more that just want the benefits without putting in the effort. I am part of the young generation right now and I still see shit loads of people act exactly that way and it fucking disgusts me. There are real people that need help and these other jobs and what not, but you have the bad eggs ruining it for them.
To address your other issues, your beef is more with societal norms and large scale business practice than anything. Education can help a great many people with their problems, no not all people but there is no end all be all solution. The rest of it is issues that educators can't really control. As many studies have already shown, people with the higher level of education generally are not way smarter than everyone else, they are just more committed to getting the higher education levels.
And while education costs are rising, if you do some research and look into a field that you like and that at least has some real application you can fight that massive debt off for the 20 years it takes for the government to automatically forgive those loans (there are also hardship deferment programs that actually work and are used for this reason too). I disagree that the "education bubble" will bust. Hell you can even look at historic trends to discredit that assumption because college enrollment and generally education numbers tend to go up significantly in the middle of and shortly after any kind of recession. We never did hit the levels of the great depression or anything like what most of the politicians want you to believe (and they want you to believe the other party is responsible for it, hint hint, both sides are full of shit).
Bottom line is lots of people can get an education IF they try and IF they actually go to something worthwhile, not this bullshit that these fucks are peddling. The rest, is just a societal rant and honestly, kind of off-topic.
I can agree that we should want people to have an understanding of basic programming, but it requires some decent logic skills. Anyone who "wonders why programming take so darn long, since all it is is just typing" probably won't learn jack from anything related to programming because if they thought it was that simple why the hell are so many people jealous of the kind of money programmers can make when they logical should be able to do the same if programming is just typing.
The inherent issue is most people don't CARE about learning the basics of programming, they just want to make money off of a skill that not everyone is suited to develop. I can't generalize everyone that isn't a programming as being guilty of this, but a large portion of them are this way. Hell, I have IT guys that still wonder how the hell software engineers do it. Even some other engineering disciplines I have had people straight up say, programming is too hard (granted not a huge number, but still a decent few).
While I do see your point, the bottom line is that is progress. Industry automation and streamlining is a big part of an engineers job. Granted we do have a lot of low income workings losing jobs, but that is the nature of the beast and the only way to fix it is encouraging those workers to get educated or move to fields with higher demand.
As much as I hate to admit it, we can't slow down country progress just because that keeps unemployment down. There are others ways to keep those people working in general with at least comparable wages and such without saying "slow down, your removing the need for my job!" Government subsidies, loans, grants for education are exactly what that is geared towards. It comes down to we need a mix of getting these people that are out of a job benefits, while encouraging them to train in fields with more demand.
Some could argue maybe they "like" their job, and while that might be true for some, a lot of low skill/wage works do it because it is a paycheck and nothing else. They would much rather be doing something else but either are too lazy to find a way into it or are in the unlucky bunch that don't actually have inroads to a job they would like to do.
That may be true in some of the other areas of the country, but in Texas not so much. I've seen lots of CS grads start working within a few months (some literally have a job before graduation) of getting their degree with 50k+ a year. 50k may not seem like a huge number, but because of the cost of living in Texas 50k is quite good (I would guess that it is at least comparable to the 75k in California). In fact, according to the last state statistics I looked at 50k is top 30% of income earners in the state.
Some states have disproportionate gluts maybe, or a lot of companies that have no concept of what makes a good software engineer. Those things are different problems though, and definitely more isolated to regions (I still routinely get companies from Wisconsin, Florida, Oregon, Oklahoma, etc. trying to get me to move there to work for them).
Only true to an extent. Like I said in my post, the initial education is laying foundation which is the most important part of creating a good software engineer. Actual applications of the concepts is akin to the way engineers work to begin with. We know tons of math and physics principles but the engineers job is to apply those principles in a meaningful way. It is very difficult for people to apply principles that they never learned.
Personally it has nothing to do with me being able to 'look down on others' and has everything to do with this shit giving people a false impression of what it takes to actually become a software engineer. This shit attempts to trivialize the discipline in description. I am not looking to run around and say I am better than everyone, but I damn sure don't want people saying that what I do is something any moron can pick up in a year.
Not only that, this shit is just attempting to exploit the HUGE buzz around the need for more engineers (especially software engineers), the high pay statistics associated with the discipline, and the fact that people think the job market is in absolute shambles (it isn't near as bad as the general perception, with the way people talk you would think half the country is unemployed). I don't really approve of people being taken advantage of in such a manner, though I know some would argue if they fall for it they deserve. I disagree that anyone would deserve that precisely because of how little understanding the general populace has of what a software engineer does.
Well sure you can throw morons at it and get something that resembles the original intent of the code, but debugging, maintaining, expanding or anything else that a real software developer might want to do becomes a god forsaken nightmare of transparent code, non-meaningful variable names and not a damn one of them knows how to document.
If that is what a business settles for, alright have fun. When the real development companies with real developers start wrecking them in the market they might rethink their hiring strategy, because these days it is all about the maintenance of software.
No not so much. Freelance work that actually pays well is kind of hit or miss unless you do straight contract work (which usually requires about the same or more experience). 17k a month is impressive just doing freelance, but it somewhat depends on how much experience the guy had before graduating.
Now, I do recommend you do stuff on your own because that is BY FAR the best way to woo an employer or prospective client. My company has been looking through a metric shit ton of new college grads and people that have a decent self made project are thrust WAY up the list. Keep in mind that a lot of companies that do software development consult their developers about prospective employees, and hell my company even has the developers conduct some of the interviews directly.
Keep at it and in a few years you will probably be able to get a lot more hits and general programming respect. A degree or certs are nice, but those personal projects are what really impress people.
That is only a half truth, there are a fair number of instances where comments are needed so that someone can understand why a design decision was made. Not only that, but even when the code is fairly easy to follow comments make it much faster to properly comprehend what is supposed to go on in a code block. Plus what about when there is a bug in the code? Or a design oversight even? In many real programming instances you will not be the only one working on that code, and therefore documentation keeps the bloat monster at bay.
You should also remember that a large majority of large scale software ends up implementing cheap hacks for temporary fixes. Sure, it would be great if the project I was working on had a ridiculously large timetable and unlimited amounts of money to fund it so that any problem I found could be properly fixed every time, but the bottom line is code architecture is NEVER perfect.
Also considering the fact that the majority of a software engineers time is spent maintaining code, documents are necessary, but I can agree need to be used properly and not above or beside everything.
Slashdot Mirror
there are still loads of companies looking for developers that can write C# and ASP
Why is it that whenever I hit a .asp page on the net I know I am in for an eye-gouging, mind-numbing experience?
I never said all of them were good at writing it, just that it is in demand. A really good ASP developer can make some fairly good sites, but just like when some idiot gets their hands on php without knowing how to use it, there are some things that look like the interpreter(or compiler in the case of ASP) threw up about half way through.
I'm not saying the senior developers are actually blowing up the database, but it does take them time and thought to write a half decent query. You can take a naive approach to the task and get something that works, but when you get a table that joins 3 others in that are anywhere between 3 million and 30 million rows you need to think your query through before you lock the entire damn database.
Entry level developers need to know this at the very least, and if you get someone in there that barely understands the basics of SQL you get code that might work but is completely useless if you have to scale it up (or worse goes into production and THEN you find out they are locking the database with the report query). I am not saying it is impossible, but how many companies do you know that really want to hire a person with little programming experience into that position? Moving to it within the same company, maybe, because then they at least know they work with whatever the company passes off as corporate culture and that they have basic competency, but even at my company which is not very big, they don't hire people to do software development unless they have a few years of experience.
Did you seriously just suggest Python and Ruby are more widely used than C#? I don't know what the hell you are doing, but dear lord if you want a paying job C# is in way higher demand than either of those languages. Plenty of people may have their issues with the .NET framework and such but there are still loads of companies looking for developers that can write C# and ASP.
Now C, yes that I can agree on, as the majority of software shops have moved toward managed languages (or at the very least use C++) because there is a lot more to deal with in low level imperative languages (more powerful, yes, but also much more prone to problems and sloppy programmers).
As far as the python being immature, it really isn't that bad, the syntax style is just a bit different and it is true object oriented instead of technically being a hybrid using primitive types. Most people once they get the actual concepts of general programming can easily transition between different syntax styles. I mean, saying it is immature because it doesn't use curly braces is like saying SQL is immature for the same reason. It all boils down to the language style.
Dear lord, no they are not. Yes Jr level positions are usually shadowed/mentored by some Sr level developers, but they expect you to have at least some experience. Now, obviously they don't expect you to necessarily have professional experience, otherwise no one would ever get into the field, but every software shop I have seen expects at least a few years of programming experience before they will even talk to you.
Not exactly. If the guy barely has experience with powershell or unix shell scripting then even some seemingly menial tasks can be more work than you think, especially if the company is trying to maintain decent coding standards.
Things like reports can sometimes be even harder to implement than parts of the engine depending on what you are using. Sure, you use SSRS and you can whip a .rdl file up in about half an hour if you get a bit of experience, but writing the stored procedure to power it in such a way that it won't make the database explode is a much more difficult task that even Senior developers can have problems with on occasion. So, sure some things might sound easy, but when you get into it they really are not.
Granted the reports is only one example, but also remember with most entry level positions the company hiring you views it as an investment. They are not going to want to invest much if the person applying for the position doesn't have something to show they have basic programming skills (personal projects are by far a favorite, when I graduated I had several listed on my resume and the HR people and developers they had interview me were incredibly happy to see that).
I don't know what morons you have worked with, but straight out of college every company I talked to expected me to know at least basic multi-threading. My company now is not even that big and we use multi-threading extensively. An auto-threaded compiler though could run circles around 99% of all developers. This is great for doing large levels of optimization automatically, and just like with manage languages it is a great asset to programming in general.
Yes, there are lazy developers that do not understand what a managed language is doing in the background, but look at it this way at least there is not near as much time wasted on debugging their lazy ass pointer arithmetic or messy memory leaks. There are also people that are insanely good at memory management such that they can rival or beat most managed languages, but the effort involved has highly diminished returns. Not only that but no more thread-lock that takes weeks to track down in highly complicated multi-threaded applications.
This in my opinion could be huge boost to lots of fields. Imagine a completely scalable genome sequencer running on a super-computer. We are talking minutes or even potentially seconds to compute a sequence if it continues to grow on a Moore's law scale. Applications in physics, biology, and tons of other fields make this not just huge for computer science, but for everyone.
This is flat wrong. I work for a Canadian company with a U.S. branch and every single software person we have is formally billed to customers in the U.S. and Canada as a Software Engineer. Canada and a couple of U.S. States' (Texas and I believe Florida last I checked) Professional Engineering boards are pushing for the title to require a P.E. and have been considering implementing a test for Software Engineers, but nothing solid has come of it and probably won't for a while.
Either you're going to eventually launch it, or not. It will never be 'consumer friendly' since it's a blatantly anti-consumer move intended to whore out to an unrepentantly anti-consumer organization.
Just wait until they've done this to about two dozen decent programmers... they'll invent some new crypto protocol that makes bittorrent look like the redheaded stepchild of piracy... "You can't stop the signal, Mel." -- Mr. Universe
Already been done. It is called BTGuard and you can get it plugged into most torrent trackers for a small monthly fee. Lifehacker ran an article about it not long ago.
http://lifehacker.com/5863380/how-to-completely-anonymize-your-bittorrent-traffic-with-btguard
http://btguard.com/
Also, as outlined in the lifehacker article there are other solutions to mask the traffic from an ISP and there is no way in hell they can block some of them because they have much broader uses than just hiding your torrent tracking traffic. VPNs are way too widely used by so many businesses for telecommutes and other such, so it will ALWAYS be an option. And since (at least I think) it would be illegal wiretapping for them to capture your packets and decrypt them, there is not a damn thing they can do about it.
The problem is politics in the US are a career path all on their own. Most of them are businessmen or just people coming from money that take the political career and run with it. Many officials have little to no education on the wide array of things they are trying to regulate and have bad habits about not listening to advisers (see, net neutrality legislation and basically any case that comes up in court about new technology, I mean hell Oracle and Google had to take the Judge through a crash course on Java just to run the case).
The fact that it would have been discovered 10 years ago
We don't call this a "fact", we call it an "opinion". My opinion is that the SSC was so poorly managed at the time, it might still not be running today.
This is a fair point. If I remember correctly the SSC went over the total budget for the project before it was even half completed. Something along the lines of bad estimates on how difficult it would be to drill in the area. I've seen the soil in the area around Waxahachie (hell been by the SSC site many times) and it goes for a few feet and then turns into solid bedrock that is a BITCH to get through.
Often times these EULAs are very blanketing and have broad wording covering things that they actually can't cover. Technically a EULA is not legally binding unless the law actually covers what they put in the agreement. There is nothing that explicitly says these are not binding, but these things that remove rights granted by the country usually get thrown out because they are ruled unconscionable. I had an at length discussion and lectures on this in my engineering ethics course I took in college. I think Wikipedia has a few examples of cases where half the EULA was thrown out because it was so one sided. I had a few examples from my notes, but those are on my laptop and a lot to go through.
They ARE different when it comes to data. AT&T and T-Mobile don't offer real 4G. Sprint doesn't cap data use or throttle you. Verizon has real 4G and the largest, fastest 3G/4G cellular data network.
This is actually very incorrect. No one offers true 4G, period. The FCC bumped the legal definition of it down significantly because of lobbying from the cell carriers so that they could advertise like they have "4G" when in fact they have improved 3G.
Refer to this article (it is from last year, but I believe most of it is still true): http://gcn.com/articles/2011/01/13/what-is-4g.aspx
Another article (From this year about it): http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2012/01/23/itu-confirms-official-true-4g-standards.htm
And of course, Wikipedia awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G
So no, don't buy the cell phone companies' BS about them having "4G" when they are not hardly halfway to what the actual standard dictates.
That is by far an exception and not a rule or standard by any measure. Most of the people that did succeed with that program were borderline prodigies I bet, and could likely do that same thing with another accelerated program, but that is less than even the top .5% of most people. Fuck, just getting a college degree you are in a small percentage. Getting one in engineering even more miniscule of a percentile. Being able to get one in engineering in less than a year of training you're talking a TINY amount, some of which probably already are software engineers.
It might be possible, but those are some EXTREME circumstances and this CodeAcademy shit is nothing even close to something like that. Your average Joe Blow will go exactly no where with this sort of program.
No it is more the idea that everyone that wants to better themselves will do it. In the majority of cases it is not that a person simply cannot be educated beyond the D level you refer to, it is that they don't want to try hard enough. I agree that there are some people in a shitty ass situation where they have no way of bettering themselves and there may be a good number of them, but there are a lot more that just want the benefits without putting in the effort. I am part of the young generation right now and I still see shit loads of people act exactly that way and it fucking disgusts me. There are real people that need help and these other jobs and what not, but you have the bad eggs ruining it for them.
To address your other issues, your beef is more with societal norms and large scale business practice than anything. Education can help a great many people with their problems, no not all people but there is no end all be all solution. The rest of it is issues that educators can't really control. As many studies have already shown, people with the higher level of education generally are not way smarter than everyone else, they are just more committed to getting the higher education levels.
And while education costs are rising, if you do some research and look into a field that you like and that at least has some real application you can fight that massive debt off for the 20 years it takes for the government to automatically forgive those loans (there are also hardship deferment programs that actually work and are used for this reason too). I disagree that the "education bubble" will bust. Hell you can even look at historic trends to discredit that assumption because college enrollment and generally education numbers tend to go up significantly in the middle of and shortly after any kind of recession. We never did hit the levels of the great depression or anything like what most of the politicians want you to believe (and they want you to believe the other party is responsible for it, hint hint, both sides are full of shit).
Bottom line is lots of people can get an education IF they try and IF they actually go to something worthwhile, not this bullshit that these fucks are peddling. The rest, is just a societal rant and honestly, kind of off-topic.
I can agree that we should want people to have an understanding of basic programming, but it requires some decent logic skills. Anyone who "wonders why programming take so darn long, since all it is is just typing" probably won't learn jack from anything related to programming because if they thought it was that simple why the hell are so many people jealous of the kind of money programmers can make when they logical should be able to do the same if programming is just typing.
The inherent issue is most people don't CARE about learning the basics of programming, they just want to make money off of a skill that not everyone is suited to develop. I can't generalize everyone that isn't a programming as being guilty of this, but a large portion of them are this way. Hell, I have IT guys that still wonder how the hell software engineers do it. Even some other engineering disciplines I have had people straight up say, programming is too hard (granted not a huge number, but still a decent few).
Too many typos, god it is early in the morning....
While I do see your point, the bottom line is that is progress. Industry automation and streamlining is a big part of an engineers job. Granted we do have a lot of low income workings losing jobs, but that is the nature of the beast and the only way to fix it is encouraging those workers to get educated or move to fields with higher demand.
As much as I hate to admit it, we can't slow down country progress just because that keeps unemployment down. There are others ways to keep those people working in general with at least comparable wages and such without saying "slow down, your removing the need for my job!" Government subsidies, loans, grants for education are exactly what that is geared towards. It comes down to we need a mix of getting these people that are out of a job benefits, while encouraging them to train in fields with more demand.
Some could argue maybe they "like" their job, and while that might be true for some, a lot of low skill/wage works do it because it is a paycheck and nothing else. They would much rather be doing something else but either are too lazy to find a way into it or are in the unlucky bunch that don't actually have inroads to a job they would like to do.
That may be true in some of the other areas of the country, but in Texas not so much. I've seen lots of CS grads start working within a few months (some literally have a job before graduation) of getting their degree with 50k+ a year. 50k may not seem like a huge number, but because of the cost of living in Texas 50k is quite good (I would guess that it is at least comparable to the 75k in California). In fact, according to the last state statistics I looked at 50k is top 30% of income earners in the state.
Some states have disproportionate gluts maybe, or a lot of companies that have no concept of what makes a good software engineer. Those things are different problems though, and definitely more isolated to regions (I still routinely get companies from Wisconsin, Florida, Oregon, Oklahoma, etc. trying to get me to move there to work for them).
That is not what they are touting though. A person doing that is a code monkey not a software engineer.
Only true to an extent. Like I said in my post, the initial education is laying foundation which is the most important part of creating a good software engineer. Actual applications of the concepts is akin to the way engineers work to begin with. We know tons of math and physics principles but the engineers job is to apply those principles in a meaningful way. It is very difficult for people to apply principles that they never learned.
Personally it has nothing to do with me being able to 'look down on others' and has everything to do with this shit giving people a false impression of what it takes to actually become a software engineer. This shit attempts to trivialize the discipline in description. I am not looking to run around and say I am better than everyone, but I damn sure don't want people saying that what I do is something any moron can pick up in a year.
Not only that, this shit is just attempting to exploit the HUGE buzz around the need for more engineers (especially software engineers), the high pay statistics associated with the discipline, and the fact that people think the job market is in absolute shambles (it isn't near as bad as the general perception, with the way people talk you would think half the country is unemployed). I don't really approve of people being taken advantage of in such a manner, though I know some would argue if they fall for it they deserve. I disagree that anyone would deserve that precisely because of how little understanding the general populace has of what a software engineer does.
Well sure you can throw morons at it and get something that resembles the original intent of the code, but debugging, maintaining, expanding or anything else that a real software developer might want to do becomes a god forsaken nightmare of transparent code, non-meaningful variable names and not a damn one of them knows how to document.
If that is what a business settles for, alright have fun. When the real development companies with real developers start wrecking them in the market they might rethink their hiring strategy, because these days it is all about the maintenance of software.
I don't know why you're surprised, most people end up with syntax errors when they copy and past working code...
No not so much. Freelance work that actually pays well is kind of hit or miss unless you do straight contract work (which usually requires about the same or more experience). 17k a month is impressive just doing freelance, but it somewhat depends on how much experience the guy had before graduating.
Now, I do recommend you do stuff on your own because that is BY FAR the best way to woo an employer or prospective client. My company has been looking through a metric shit ton of new college grads and people that have a decent self made project are thrust WAY up the list. Keep in mind that a lot of companies that do software development consult their developers about prospective employees, and hell my company even has the developers conduct some of the interviews directly.
Keep at it and in a few years you will probably be able to get a lot more hits and general programming respect. A degree or certs are nice, but those personal projects are what really impress people.
That is only a half truth, there are a fair number of instances where comments are needed so that someone can understand why a design decision was made. Not only that, but even when the code is fairly easy to follow comments make it much faster to properly comprehend what is supposed to go on in a code block. Plus what about when there is a bug in the code? Or a design oversight even? In many real programming instances you will not be the only one working on that code, and therefore documentation keeps the bloat monster at bay. You should also remember that a large majority of large scale software ends up implementing cheap hacks for temporary fixes. Sure, it would be great if the project I was working on had a ridiculously large timetable and unlimited amounts of money to fund it so that any problem I found could be properly fixed every time, but the bottom line is code architecture is NEVER perfect. Also considering the fact that the majority of a software engineers time is spent maintaining code, documents are necessary, but I can agree need to be used properly and not above or beside everything.