My brother graduated with a nursing degree last year... no jobs. Most of the job ads actually say "Looking for nurses.. new grads need not a apply". No thanks. I, OTOH saw what was hiring most in my area. It happened to be.Net programming. I bought a book on C# and learned the basics over a few months. I then worked at an insurance company as a.Net dev for a couple years. Anyone could do this. Towards the end I took over the interview process. We were so desperate for programmers, that there were basically 2 requirements 1) don't actively creep anyone out during the interview (I had one guy say that his favorite hobby was "drinking alone") and 2) be able to program in any way (I used the FizzBuzz test and people failed 9/10 times with their language of choice and encouragement to use google in any way, including looking up the actual answer to the problem).
Seriously though, forget what the hip slashdotters are telling you. I am convinced that most of them are in high school anyway. If you can use C# to go to a SQL table, pull out a join, put the data into a Crystal Report, and run the report, then you can easily find a job in any US city with a populating greater than 150k. Is it sexy work? Nope, not at all. But do it for a couple years, then you can go out and hunt down something else from a position of strength.
Trust me, I know it sucks. I was in your same spot. A friend of mine who is in the same spot is about to be out of it as of tomorrow, after doing what I described. You can do it. Seriously, forget about fancy web stuff or compilers for now. Learn how to write and automate reports and the work is endless.
No big deal. Remember, interviewers are like wild animals: sometimes they bite, but usually they are more scared of you than you are of them. Seriously, I have seen very few people interview new employees that were not sweating bullets. As far as avoiding faux pas, just mind your manners. I assume you are not threatening the interviewer, hitting on the interviewer, or talking to yourself in front of the interviewer. If you are not doing those 3 things, then you should be fine. Do those examples sound too crazy to be possible? Trust me, they are not. You will do fine, mostly because lots your competition is so horrible they do not even stand a chance.
Apple hiring older workers... Apple hiring workers from the turn of the century... Apple looking for new design inspiration... Apple uncovers lost diary of Steve Jobs in which he explains why his favorite movie is Wild Wild West... Apple's next device to be steam punk inspired.
Could not agree more. I am in a midsize US city and work could not be easier to find. I could walk out right now and have a new gig lined up by 5 with no problem.
To the issue with older workers,I work with a guy right now who is 74. I am in my mid 20s so he has about 50 years more experience than me. We are pretty much a 2 man team, so I think we represent the dynamic pretty well. He deals with most of the desktop stuff and legacy stuff that I can barely make heads or tails of without some serious research time. I deal with our new web programming work. He helps me with a lot of the back end algorithms which are pretty complex (we write big data analytics software). With any team, you want diversity of skills and experiences. I think a reason most of us young people are drawn to the web is because there was a lack of experience in many of the shops we started out in, so it was a gap we could fill. Also keep in mind that most shops are not valley startups. Most programmers work in finance, insurance, business, etc. IME, the median age has got to be 35+ in those types of environments. Those types of places catch a lot of shit from valleyites, but I have noticed far more age and gender diversity there than in startup places. I think this is because they care less about cultivating the perfect monoculture and more about getting shit done. (Note, I now work in startup so I am not saying it is all bad, but simply that parts of the culture are problematic)
I did not make up the term, so I am just using the definition people give it. Regardless, having a UI closely reflect data on the fly may be solved on the desktop, but that has not been the case on the web. People are working hard on the web to get similar functionality that desktop guys often take for granted. Yes, they often come up with terrible names, but who honestly gives a shit? Also, We are solving different problems and we optimize for different things, who cares? When event-driven desktop programming became the new big thing, all the backend AS400 guys rolled their eyes just like you are now and said things like "why can't we just load all the data in batch at the end of the month?". They had their own reasons for doing things in batch, desktop has good reasons for rich event driven code, and the web has its own set of emerging concerns like high concurrency, maintainable scalability, and state management. If you think these problems are easy then go into consulting and collect your zillion dollars at your convenience.
The documentation tends to be terrific in my experience. Also, the libraries tend to be very small, by design. This allows you to simply pop open the source (usually just a single 100 line index.js file) and read away. Not for everybody, but I got sick of pouring over javadocs and msdn, so I think its great.
Your criticisms apply to any dynamic language, which is one of the oldest flamebait comments around. Dismissing the MANY talented and experienced programmers across multiple dynamic platforms really shows your ignorance.
Most people in the dynamic space are not looking for a static language. The real market share competitors are Ruby and Python. People who do choose node tend to choose it over those two for the enormous performance advantages, while remaining dynamic.
This completely ignores the new real time paradigm. This is huge. Most people interested in node, are interested due to the awesome support for real time web apps. See socket.io, derby.js, etc.
I recommend you read David Crockford's "Javascript: the Good Parts". JS nowadays is not like it was in 98. Today it feels like a flexible and powerful blend of oo and functional programming, that works really well, as long as you stay reasonable.
Actually, most libraries will work in either client side browsers or node. See https://github.com/substack/node-browserify for an example of how some interop is being done. The browser engine (handling the js) is V8, which also happens to be the node.js engine. Any js related to the DOM does not make sense to run server side anyway (with the exception of server side DOM testing, which works just fine with selenium, zombiejs, or phantomjs, making you double wrong).
Totally BS. I use node.js in every production product, so do not get me wrong, I love it. However, node happening to have the same language as the front end is an outrageously bad argument for it.
Also, "ace JavaScript developers who can write brilliant code on both sides of the request transaction have yet to emerge" is dead wrong. There are plenty of people using node.js as a production environment, and many of them are amazingly talented at front end development as well... just like RoR, PHP,.Net, Java, or any other server side platform.
The strength of node, or any other language, is in the community that forms around it..Net and Java would be terrible if they did not have a community of people building RAD controls, PDF manipulation libraries, and M$ integration libraries (common needs for the business community). RoR would suck if it was not for the huge community of people building start up web apps with similar infrastructure and design requirements (heroku sprang up out of this culture, I would argue). Node's community is still forming, but I would say it has a strong commitment to performance, high concurrency, and an embrace of a unix-y module system (see npm) that is clearly a reaction to giant frameworks like Rails and ASP.Net. It is not for everyone, and I recommend people all the time to check out Rails instead if it fits their needs better. For me though, node has been awesome over the past few years, and works for me and my company.
Science replacing religion as the source of answers is a good thing. Science is not some dogmatic list of facts. It is a skeptical process that involves trying to disprove the things people tell you. You don't like evolution? Great! Go disprove it and collect your Nobel Prize. Instead of judging whether an answer is right or not by listening to an invisible man, we go and look for ourselves by checking out the evidence and predictive power of a claim. Even then, we hold beliefs tentatively and never absolutely. Is it perfect? No, but it is the best method we have to learn about reality.
Much of it is not even worth knowing about. Science does not bother with gaining most knowledge. How many atoms are in the chair I am sitting in? What is the average mass of a fart? Scientists start every process with a hypothesis; a fundamentally subjective value judgement on the significance of a piece of information. Science, is great, don't get me wrong, but anyone who thinks it is completely objective needs to go take a Philosophy of Science course.
The most clued-up logicians I have ever met are graduates in philosophy. Logic is a seriously hard course of study, and I haven't met many engineers who are up to the challenge. (It's just a pity that philosophers are doomed to unemployment.)
We just go scoop up jobs from other fields. I am a software developer now. Most of my classmates went to med school or law school. Philosophy majors score highest on just about any graduate exam, so there are loads of options for anyone willing to get a graduate degree. I have found that Philosophy and CS have so many parallels that the transition was quite easy. CS has a lot of roots in Philosophy. ie: Godel's Proof, Turing machines, fuzzy logic, formal logic, AI, neural networks. Most of these concepts were around hundreds of years before the first computer. CS is easily as joined to Philosophy as it is to Math.
Formal logic is typically taught in the Philosophy department. A lot of CS majors only take Discrete Math which is more or less watered down formal logic cramming 4 semesters into 1.
Slashdot Mirror
My brother graduated with a nursing degree last year... no jobs. Most of the job ads actually say "Looking for nurses.. new grads need not a apply". No thanks. I, OTOH saw what was hiring most in my area. It happened to be .Net programming. I bought a book on C# and learned the basics over a few months. I then worked at an insurance company as a .Net dev for a couple years. Anyone could do this. Towards the end I took over the interview process. We were so desperate for programmers, that there were basically 2 requirements 1) don't actively creep anyone out during the interview (I had one guy say that his favorite hobby was "drinking alone") and 2) be able to program in any way (I used the FizzBuzz test and people failed 9/10 times with their language of choice and encouragement to use google in any way, including looking up the actual answer to the problem).
Seriously though, forget what the hip slashdotters are telling you. I am convinced that most of them are in high school anyway. If you can use C# to go to a SQL table, pull out a join, put the data into a Crystal Report, and run the report, then you can easily find a job in any US city with a populating greater than 150k. Is it sexy work? Nope, not at all. But do it for a couple years, then you can go out and hunt down something else from a position of strength.
Trust me, I know it sucks. I was in your same spot. A friend of mine who is in the same spot is about to be out of it as of tomorrow, after doing what I described. You can do it. Seriously, forget about fancy web stuff or compilers for now. Learn how to write and automate reports and the work is endless.
No big deal. Remember, interviewers are like wild animals: sometimes they bite, but usually they are more scared of you than you are of them. Seriously, I have seen very few people interview new employees that were not sweating bullets. As far as avoiding faux pas, just mind your manners. I assume you are not threatening the interviewer, hitting on the interviewer, or talking to yourself in front of the interviewer. If you are not doing those 3 things, then you should be fine. Do those examples sound too crazy to be possible? Trust me, they are not. You will do fine, mostly because lots your competition is so horrible they do not even stand a chance.
Apple hiring older workers... Apple hiring workers from the turn of the century... Apple looking for new design inspiration... Apple uncovers lost diary of Steve Jobs in which he explains why his favorite movie is Wild Wild West... Apple's next device to be steam punk inspired.
...Let the rumors begin!
Could not agree more. I am in a midsize US city and work could not be easier to find. I could walk out right now and have a new gig lined up by 5 with no problem.
To the issue with older workers,I work with a guy right now who is 74. I am in my mid 20s so he has about 50 years more experience than me. We are pretty much a 2 man team, so I think we represent the dynamic pretty well. He deals with most of the desktop stuff and legacy stuff that I can barely make heads or tails of without some serious research time. I deal with our new web programming work. He helps me with a lot of the back end algorithms which are pretty complex (we write big data analytics software). With any team, you want diversity of skills and experiences. I think a reason most of us young people are drawn to the web is because there was a lack of experience in many of the shops we started out in, so it was a gap we could fill. Also keep in mind that most shops are not valley startups. Most programmers work in finance, insurance, business, etc. IME, the median age has got to be 35+ in those types of environments. Those types of places catch a lot of shit from valleyites, but I have noticed far more age and gender diversity there than in startup places. I think this is because they care less about cultivating the perfect monoculture and more about getting shit done. (Note, I now work in startup so I am not saying it is all bad, but simply that parts of the culture are problematic)
I would add to that when your package manager of choice goes down... right before a big development deadline.
Use coffeescript then.
I did not make up the term, so I am just using the definition people give it. Regardless, having a UI closely reflect data on the fly may be solved on the desktop, but that has not been the case on the web. People are working hard on the web to get similar functionality that desktop guys often take for granted. Yes, they often come up with terrible names, but who honestly gives a shit? Also, We are solving different problems and we optimize for different things, who cares? When event-driven desktop programming became the new big thing, all the backend AS400 guys rolled their eyes just like you are now and said things like "why can't we just load all the data in batch at the end of the month?". They had their own reasons for doing things in batch, desktop has good reasons for rich event driven code, and the web has its own set of emerging concerns like high concurrency, maintainable scalability, and state management. If you think these problems are easy then go into consulting and collect your zillion dollars at your convenience.
lol quite true. I think the big differences is that it took about 10 years for the Good Parts to actually catch on in the JS community.
The documentation tends to be terrific in my experience. Also, the libraries tend to be very small, by design. This allows you to simply pop open the source (usually just a single 100 line index.js file) and read away. Not for everybody, but I got sick of pouring over javadocs and msdn, so I think its great.
As as node.js dev.... **cringe**
That quote made me want to barf.
Your criticisms apply to any dynamic language, which is one of the oldest flamebait comments around. Dismissing the MANY talented and experienced programmers across multiple dynamic platforms really shows your ignorance.
Most people in the dynamic space are not looking for a static language. The real market share competitors are Ruby and Python. People who do choose node tend to choose it over those two for the enormous performance advantages, while remaining dynamic.
I will fight smartassery with more smartassery by leaving this here for you http://appjs.org/
This completely ignores the new real time paradigm. This is huge. Most people interested in node, are interested due to the awesome support for real time web apps. See socket.io, derby.js, etc.
I recommend you read David Crockford's "Javascript: the Good Parts". JS nowadays is not like it was in 98. Today it feels like a flexible and powerful blend of oo and functional programming, that works really well, as long as you stay reasonable.
Many prominent libraries have been ported back and forth, so this is accurate. At the same time, this is not a requirement most of the time.
Actually, most libraries will work in either client side browsers or node. See https://github.com/substack/node-browserify for an example of how some interop is being done. The browser engine (handling the js) is V8, which also happens to be the node.js engine. Any js related to the DOM does not make sense to run server side anyway (with the exception of server side DOM testing, which works just fine with selenium, zombiejs, or phantomjs, making you double wrong).
Totally BS. I use node.js in every production product, so do not get me wrong, I love it. However, node happening to have the same language as the front end is an outrageously bad argument for it. Also, "ace JavaScript developers who can write brilliant code on both sides of the request transaction have yet to emerge" is dead wrong. There are plenty of people using node.js as a production environment, and many of them are amazingly talented at front end development as well... just like RoR, PHP, .Net, Java, or any other server side platform.
The strength of node, or any other language, is in the community that forms around it. .Net and Java would be terrible if they did not have a community of people building RAD controls, PDF manipulation libraries, and M$ integration libraries (common needs for the business community). RoR would suck if it was not for the huge community of people building start up web apps with similar infrastructure and design requirements (heroku sprang up out of this culture, I would argue). Node's community is still forming, but I would say it has a strong commitment to performance, high concurrency, and an embrace of a unix-y module system (see npm) that is clearly a reaction to giant frameworks like Rails and ASP.Net. It is not for everyone, and I recommend people all the time to check out Rails instead if it fits their needs better. For me though, node has been awesome over the past few years, and works for me and my company.
CS is anything by a hard science.
Never published. It was undergrad.
Which is why the entire point of Philosophy is to take a text and rip it apart.
Science replacing religion as the source of answers is a good thing. Science is not some dogmatic list of facts. It is a skeptical process that involves trying to disprove the things people tell you. You don't like evolution? Great! Go disprove it and collect your Nobel Prize. Instead of judging whether an answer is right or not by listening to an invisible man, we go and look for ourselves by checking out the evidence and predictive power of a claim. Even then, we hold beliefs tentatively and never absolutely. Is it perfect? No, but it is the best method we have to learn about reality.
* that it is worth knowing more about
Much of it is not even worth knowing about. Science does not bother with gaining most knowledge. How many atoms are in the chair I am sitting in? What is the average mass of a fart? Scientists start every process with a hypothesis; a fundamentally subjective value judgement on the significance of a piece of information. Science, is great, don't get me wrong, but anyone who thinks it is completely objective needs to go take a Philosophy of Science course.
The most clued-up logicians I have ever met are graduates in philosophy. Logic is a seriously hard course of study, and I haven't met many engineers who are up to the challenge. (It's just a pity that philosophers are doomed to unemployment.)
We just go scoop up jobs from other fields. I am a software developer now. Most of my classmates went to med school or law school. Philosophy majors score highest on just about any graduate exam, so there are loads of options for anyone willing to get a graduate degree. I have found that Philosophy and CS have so many parallels that the transition was quite easy. CS has a lot of roots in Philosophy. ie: Godel's Proof, Turing machines, fuzzy logic, formal logic, AI, neural networks. Most of these concepts were around hundreds of years before the first computer. CS is easily as joined to Philosophy as it is to Math.
... like some basic math, and formal logic.
Formal logic is typically taught in the Philosophy department. A lot of CS majors only take Discrete Math which is more or less watered down formal logic cramming 4 semesters into 1.