Me bitter? Never. I've yet to get turned down for any position that I apply for save for one government job where they basically said they couldn't afford my rate. They told me that right in the interview and that was OK. I understood that they didn't have the budget to pay me what I commanded and I wasn't able to come down with the price. We parted ways. No business but no hard feelings either. Just the way it is sometimes.
The truth is however that most people can't sell themselves in interviews and they always get conned by unscrupulous hiring managers.
Another issue is that managers exaggerate the job descriptions (this is so prevailent now it's not funny) and then you have to dig deep to really find out that they are looking for a jsp codemonkey. Then you discover that the Senior J2EE architect position is not all that senior and the enterprise application is a couple of webpages for the payroll department.
Yet hiring managers are perfectly able to get away with bullshit job descriptions.
So guess what mate, when you come to interview me my last couple of JSPs I slapped together in an afternoon will be called "a multi-tier enterprise solution with multiple integration points (it had to export to Excel)". Until hiring managers keep inflating job descriptions I'll keep inflating my job experiences. Fair ball?!
When I stopped being honest and humble in my resume or in my interviews I started getting more interviews and talking about substantially more cash for my services. No outright lies on my resume, just some let's say, "well worded phrases"... Works like a champ even with morons like you. Oh, and I CAN do the job so getting dismissed for poor performance is out of question.
I don't bullshit myself out of the situation I'll just not include your job on my resume. Who told you that resumes had to always be chronological? Bwahahaha!
If that were the truth we wouldn't have deceptive marketing brochures, features promised but never delivered and salesmen hiding scratches on cars they sell.
The truth (no pun intended) is that marketing is about telling half truths and remember that a half truth is a full blown lie.
When you are in an interview your job is to make the other side believe you are more valuable than you yourself believe you are. If you sell yourself short in an interview you are doing yourself a bid disservice because everyone expects you to exaggerate your claims. It's the norm in business these days and applies the same way to selling products (like cars) and services (which is what job interviewing is).
You weren't dismissed in spite of your project successfully shipping. You were disposed of because your project shipped. It's not uncommmon where moronic managers treat developers like construction crews. Hire when the work picks up and let go when the work is done. Most managers are too dim to understand the difference between skilled and unskilled labour.
Actually the ripple effect of the US economy is not true. See how the Canadian economy grew while the US was stagnant? And how the Canadian economy gets sluggish when the US soars? This is a typical trend. Canada is a resource based economy and high energy prices which hurt the US economy a lot are actually good for Canadian exports. Thus the two economies are usually in an opposite phase to one antoher.
Sorry but no dice. I actually owned (and reviewed) a number of high end crt and lcd monitors. When it comes to focus and plain text crispness nothing can hold a handle to a dvi based lcd screen. Even the finest CRTs face a losing battle.
CRTs still have some advantages (like more accurate color reproduction) but for the most part an average joe programmer will be much happier with a 20" LCD than a 21" CRT. The cost is still an issue but I guess you get what you pay for.
This is not really as important as you claim it is.
It is. Maybe you learned to make do without one but it is a pain in the ass. Don't even try convince me otherwise.
try remoting with IIS to achieve scalability and distributed performance.
Homogenous clustering is not always the answer. Heterogenous clusters utilise resources more effectively and some things simply cannot be built without them.
.Net for the moment is supposed to be used on MS Windows
See, here's the crux of the problem with Microsofties. They want you to convert to everything Microsoft so that their new pet project will interoperate with their MS stuff. Yeah, most companies are going to ditch all their existing enterprise solutions just so that they can bring.Net in house. Yeah.
Finally.net lacks real credibility in the enterprise
Throwing up a webpage with a shopping cart is not building an enterprise solution.
means that there arent enough good.Net coders in your company.
We have many folks here who have 10 years experience coding on Windows and if they say that.Net is not ready for the enterprise I take their word for it.
C# innovated this, and already has this in the spec
Bollocks to that. C# copied generics from C++ (which likely copied it from somewhere else) and so did Java. And they both (C# and Java) got it wrong and missed the point.
Java didn't have this before? LOL
Lack of enumerated types in Java has been a real pain in the ass as was lack of typedef.
Memory sharing between VMs is not so easy to do when you have umpteen platforms to support. Much easier when you have one like in.net.
What.net lacks however is more substantial. There is no API in.net for doing O/R mapping such as JDO or CMP (belch). There is no API for distributed clustered components like EJB session beans. MSMQ is only usable in the Microsoft world. JMS queues can generally be used to integrate with legacy systems. Java has a bunch of great open source tools for it like Eclipse and all its plugins not to mention the Jakarta project..net has bugger all for a developers' community, unless you consider Microsoft's astroturfing a vibrant community.
Finally.net lacks real credibility in the enterprise. The company that I work for (biggest consulting shop in North America) has a strategy of using.net for quick several week hack jobs but the real projects are always done with J2EE.
Probably. The more vague the artifacts you have to produce the easier it is to get away with bumming around and pretending. Contact wally@dilbert.com for tips.
The key is to stop working for someone else and start doing stuff on your own. I never apprenticed with a construction crew. I bought a very old house and a fixer uppper and worked on it for the last three and a half years. The amount of konwledge and experience I got out of it was enough to convince me that I could do it as a day job for someone else. Especially that I received a lot of praise for the work I did on my own house. I got a few gigs from friends who needed odd jobs done around their homes and then it sort of snowballed. I started getting work from referrals and now I get more calls about work than I can handle. If I wanted to I could probably grow a small company around this right here but I enjoy working with my hands too much to get back into a management role.
Strictly speaking the US HAS the highest per capita GDP. You check your facts. There are no oil rich countries that have higher per capita GDP than US even when PPP is taken into account. You're probably thinking about the principality of Brunei but even they have a per capita GDP lower than the US. Luxemburg comes close but it got eclipsed by the US over the last few years.
Your Indian friend will of course tell you all kinds of tales about the affluence in his country because he sees it through rose tinted glasses. But even if we take his story about servants as true, I'd rather have clean running water and 24/7 electricity (let the California jokes roll) than a stable of servants to pedal on my dynamo backup generator:-)
Lower purchasing parity blah, blah... Live lika a king in country X blah, blah... everything including a house costs under a thousand greenbacks blah, blah...
Where the fuck do you guys get those stories from? I happen to have been born in a pretty inexpensive country (Eastern Europe). Yes some things are cheaper over there BUT my salary back home would have been an equivalent of $16,000US. A three bedroom house there costs $150,000. A new car costs $25,000. A meal in a restaurant runs up around $30. Yeah. so it's cheaper than the US. By about 20%. Except salaries (even for programmers) are about 70% lower. Stop daydreaming you are not going to live a lavish life if you move to an Indian IT sweatshop to be a code monkey for da man. However many rupees they'll pay you is definitely not going to make your life more comfortable than an average American can afford. There is a reason why US has the highest PER CAPITA Gross Domestic Product in the world.
I worked as developer in this industry for over eight years. But there is only so much humiliaton and abuse and disregard that one can endure in a career. What the fuck is a softwae developer's career worth anyway? We are always the bottom of the corporate totem pole, we are treated as nerds and misfits and now we don't even have a good paycheck or any sense of security. Fuck that I say. You can kiss my J2EE development ass.
I'm switching careers to trades. It isn't that hard and most of us can work with our hands and will take twenty seconds instead of twenty minutes to calculate how much tile is needed for the bathroom walls. I've already done a few tiling projects on the side and now I'm getting my electrician's papers. Soon I'll be able to cover everything from finishing carpentry to wiring and plumbing. Pays just as well as the office job did at peak if you're willing to work hard. Last month I netted $5,000CAD (I live north of the border) which is a very healthy sum here especially that that's AFTER TAX money. And wehn was the last time you heard of a plumber being outsourced to India? That's right my friedns, when that pipe bursts in your CEO's house even the 20,000 Indians he's hired arent gonna be much use at 15,000 miles away.
So my friends, next time you hear that your job is getting shipped to India tell your manager that she can kiss your ass goodbye because it's a great opportunity to give up your (most likely) shitty job and do something useful instead. You'll be surprised how rewarding trades can be compared to an office job.
Oh and in the evening (that's right trade jobs run 9 to 5 not 8 to midnight, imagine that!) when you get home there is no reason not to fire up the computer and do some open source coding, for fun, without the stresss and aggravation of a PHB meddling with good things and making stupid suggestions. Write some great software and donate it to Open Source. Even Indians can't compete with that pricing model:-)
So my friends this is our new reality we all have to face. We all love programming but it doesn't make us money anymore. It started out as a hobby (for most of us) and now is the time it went back to being a hobby. For a living however, we must do something more lucrative that can't be outsourced by the next bunch of stuffed shirts. Like trades.
To add insult to injury: Most university professors distribute course notes to their students so that students don't have to go out and buy any textbooks. It's all photocopied and sold at a small fee (between 2 and 5 pounds per copy). Some of those notes are upwards of 200 pages.
What the publishers are doing (and the universities are condoning) is the practice of releasing new "editions" of the same textbooks with only very minor changes so that page numbers and exercise numbers get messed up between editions. Then your one year old pampered textbook becomes worthless because lecturers always use the latest edition and older books become very hard to use.
In Poland they used to call them Ford Carton. There probably used to be a Ford Carleton at some point but the joke plays on the similarity of the two words. Carleton doesn't mean anything in Polish but carton means cardboard.
When my dad in law went shopping for his first car in communist Poland he had his eyes set on a brand new Syrenka.
What a vehicle that was. He said that he had examined every single car in the parking lot and there was not one that was truly complete. Most had parts of them missing such as wipers, batteries (yes, batteries!) door handles etc.
He finally settled on one that only had both wipers gone and a crack on a dashboard. Other thatn that it was fine:-). This is brand new cars we're talking here...
He drove the thing for a few years until it became too embarrassing to be seen in one of those things at which point he pretty much had to scrap it 'cause nobody else would be seen dead in it.
Speaking of Lada jokes:
Q: How do you double the value of a Lada?
A: Pour 10 gallons of petrol in it.
If you feel like throwing good money after bad, go ahead get yourself a Lada. Its quality is below anything you can imagine. My friend bought one of those things and he sold it the year after. His most positive comment about it was: "Well, it beats getting the bus... When it starts that is.".
I too LIVE in Canada and in my part of the country (Maritimes) the price of a popular CD is between $18.99 to 21.99. Food here seems no cheaper than in the UK. There is no equivalent of real el-cheapo stuff like Tesco Value products. In practice I spend on food just as much as I did in the UK so no bargain there.
Gasoline is more expensive than in the states. Electrical appliances are cheaper here than anywhere in Europe but there is a reason for it. They always all fall apart within two months of warranty expiration. Ditto for clothes.
Housing is cheap where I live but there is few well paying jobs so the savings on mortgage are offset by the lower wages.
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offtopic my ass! What do you think the fact that hardliners have taken over will do to those sprouting "internet cafes"?
...and now thanks to Dubya yapping about "Axes of Evil" Islamic hardliners have won a landslide victory there. A ain't going there to install Linux!
The truth is however that most people can't sell themselves in interviews and they always get conned by unscrupulous hiring managers. Another issue is that managers exaggerate the job descriptions (this is so prevailent now it's not funny) and then you have to dig deep to really find out that they are looking for a jsp codemonkey. Then you discover that the Senior J2EE architect position is not all that senior and the enterprise application is a couple of webpages for the payroll department.
Yet hiring managers are perfectly able to get away with bullshit job descriptions.
So guess what mate, when you come to interview me my last couple of JSPs I slapped together in an afternoon will be called "a multi-tier enterprise solution with multiple integration points (it had to export to Excel)". Until hiring managers keep inflating job descriptions I'll keep inflating my job experiences. Fair ball?!
When I stopped being honest and humble in my resume or in my interviews I started getting more interviews and talking about substantially more cash for my services. No outright lies on my resume, just some let's say, "well worded phrases"... Works like a champ even with morons like you. Oh, and I CAN do the job so getting dismissed for poor performance is out of question.
I don't bullshit myself out of the situation I'll just not include your job on my resume. Who told you that resumes had to always be chronological? Bwahahaha!
The truth (no pun intended) is that marketing is about telling half truths and remember that a half truth is a full blown lie.
When you are in an interview your job is to make the other side believe you are more valuable than you yourself believe you are. If you sell yourself short in an interview you are doing yourself a bid disservice because everyone expects you to exaggerate your claims. It's the norm in business these days and applies the same way to selling products (like cars) and services (which is what job interviewing is).
You weren't dismissed in spite of your project successfully shipping. You were disposed of because your project shipped. It's not uncommmon where moronic managers treat developers like construction crews. Hire when the work picks up and let go when the work is done. Most managers are too dim to understand the difference between skilled and unskilled labour.
Moderators, please have some fucking sense of humour.
Actually the ripple effect of the US economy is not true. See how the Canadian economy grew while the US was stagnant? And how the Canadian economy gets sluggish when the US soars? This is a typical trend. Canada is a resource based economy and high energy prices which hurt the US economy a lot are actually good for Canadian exports. Thus the two economies are usually in an opposite phase to one antoher.
CRTs still have some advantages (like more accurate color reproduction) but for the most part an average joe programmer will be much happier with a 20" LCD than a 21" CRT. The cost is still an issue but I guess you get what you pay for.
Proud owner of two(!) Dell 2000FPs.
Hope this helps.
It is. Maybe you learned to make do without one but it is a pain in the ass. Don't even try convince me otherwise.
try remoting with IIS to achieve scalability and distributed performance.
Homogenous clustering is not always the answer. Heterogenous clusters utilise resources more effectively and some things simply cannot be built without them.
See, here's the crux of the problem with Microsofties. They want you to convert to everything Microsoft so that their new pet project will interoperate with their MS stuff. Yeah, most companies are going to ditch all their existing enterprise solutions just so that they can bring
Finally .net lacks real credibility in the enterprise
Throwing up a webpage with a shopping cart is not building an enterprise solution.
means that there arent enough good .Net coders in your company.
.Net is not ready for the enterprise I take their word for it.
We have many folks here who have 10 years experience coding on Windows and if they say that
Bollocks to that. C# copied generics from C++ (which likely copied it from somewhere else) and so did Java. And they both (C# and Java) got it wrong and missed the point.
Java didn't have this before? LOL
Lack of enumerated types in Java has been a real pain in the ass as was lack of typedef.
Memory sharing between VMs is not so easy to do when you have umpteen platforms to support. Much easier when you have one like in .net.
What .net lacks however is more substantial. There is no API in .net for doing O/R mapping such as JDO or CMP (belch). There is no API for distributed clustered components like EJB session beans. MSMQ is only usable in the Microsoft world. JMS queues can generally be used to integrate with legacy systems. Java has a bunch of great open source tools for it like Eclipse and all its plugins not to mention the Jakarta project. .net has bugger all for a developers' community, unless you consider Microsoft's astroturfing a vibrant community.
Finally .net lacks real credibility in the enterprise. The company that I work for (biggest consulting shop in North America) has a strategy of using .net for quick several week hack jobs but the real projects are always done with J2EE.
So, is the power leakage on the Opportunity rover also fixed or are they just going to put up with a shorter lifespan of the machine?
Probably. The more vague the artifacts you have to produce the easier it is to get away with bumming around and pretending. Contact wally@dilbert.com for tips.
The key is to stop working for someone else and start doing stuff on your own. I never apprenticed with a construction crew. I bought a very old house and a fixer uppper and worked on it for the last three and a half years. The amount of konwledge and experience I got out of it was enough to convince me that I could do it as a day job for someone else. Especially that I received a lot of praise for the work I did on my own house. I got a few gigs from friends who needed odd jobs done around their homes and then it sort of snowballed. I started getting work from referrals and now I get more calls about work than I can handle. If I wanted to I could probably grow a small company around this right here but I enjoy working with my hands too much to get back into a management role.
Your Indian friend will of course tell you all kinds of tales about the affluence in his country because he sees it through rose tinted glasses. But even if we take his story about servants as true, I'd rather have clean running water and 24/7 electricity (let the California jokes roll) than a stable of servants to pedal on my dynamo backup generator :-)
Where the fuck do you guys get those stories from? I happen to have been born in a pretty inexpensive country (Eastern Europe). Yes some things are cheaper over there BUT my salary back home would have been an equivalent of $16,000US. A three bedroom house there costs $150,000. A new car costs $25,000. A meal in a restaurant runs up around $30. Yeah. so it's cheaper than the US. By about 20%. Except salaries (even for programmers) are about 70% lower. Stop daydreaming you are not going to live a lavish life if you move to an Indian IT sweatshop to be a code monkey for da man. However many rupees they'll pay you is definitely not going to make your life more comfortable than an average American can afford. There is a reason why US has the highest PER CAPITA Gross Domestic Product in the world.
I'm switching careers to trades. It isn't that hard and most of us can work with our hands and will take twenty seconds instead of twenty minutes to calculate how much tile is needed for the bathroom walls. I've already done a few tiling projects on the side and now I'm getting my electrician's papers. Soon I'll be able to cover everything from finishing carpentry to wiring and plumbing. Pays just as well as the office job did at peak if you're willing to work hard. Last month I netted $5,000CAD (I live north of the border) which is a very healthy sum here especially that that's AFTER TAX money. And wehn was the last time you heard of a plumber being outsourced to India? That's right my friedns, when that pipe bursts in your CEO's house even the 20,000 Indians he's hired arent gonna be much use at 15,000 miles away.
So my friends, next time you hear that your job is getting shipped to India tell your manager that she can kiss your ass goodbye because it's a great opportunity to give up your (most likely) shitty job and do something useful instead. You'll be surprised how rewarding trades can be compared to an office job.
Oh and in the evening (that's right trade jobs run 9 to 5 not 8 to midnight, imagine that!) when you get home there is no reason not to fire up the computer and do some open source coding, for fun, without the stresss and aggravation of a PHB meddling with good things and making stupid suggestions. Write some great software and donate it to Open Source. Even Indians can't compete with that pricing model :-)
So my friends this is our new reality we all have to face. We all love programming but it doesn't make us money anymore. It started out as a hobby (for most of us) and now is the time it went back to being a hobby. For a living however, we must do something more lucrative that can't be outsourced by the next bunch of stuffed shirts. Like trades.
To add insult to injury: Most university professors distribute course notes to their students so that students don't have to go out and buy any textbooks. It's all photocopied and sold at a small fee (between 2 and 5 pounds per copy). Some of those notes are upwards of 200 pages.
What the publishers are doing (and the universities are condoning) is the practice of releasing new "editions" of the same textbooks with only very minor changes so that page numbers and exercise numbers get messed up between editions. Then your one year old pampered textbook becomes worthless because lecturers always use the latest edition and older books become very hard to use.
In Poland they used to call them Ford Carton. There probably used to be a Ford Carleton at some point but the joke plays on the similarity of the two words. Carleton doesn't mean anything in Polish but carton means cardboard.
What a vehicle that was. He said that he had examined every single car in the parking lot and there was not one that was truly complete. Most had parts of them missing such as wipers, batteries (yes, batteries!) door handles etc.
He finally settled on one that only had both wipers gone and a crack on a dashboard. Other thatn that it was fine :-). This is brand new cars we're talking here...
He drove the thing for a few years until it became too embarrassing to be seen in one of those things at which point he pretty much had to scrap it 'cause nobody else would be seen dead in it.
Speaking of Lada jokes:
Q: How do you double the value of a Lada? A: Pour 10 gallons of petrol in it.
Peace!
Truly a buyer beware proposition.
Gasoline is more expensive than in the states. Electrical appliances are cheaper here than anywhere in Europe but there is a reason for it. They always all fall apart within two months of warranty expiration. Ditto for clothes.
Housing is cheap where I live but there is few well paying jobs so the savings on mortgage are offset by the lower wages.
But despite all that I still love it here :-)