I worked in software development for an international company for 7 years. The last couple of years have been a bitch, with reorgs and power plays I worked for 5 different groups. I lived outside of Washington, DC, where the cost of living was astronomical.
Add to that the fact that the R&D staff is less than 50% of what it was a few years ago, despite our revenue and profits being at record levels. The management mantra was put in more hours, work faster, or we'll send your work to India and walk you out the door.
I bailed, and we moved back to where we had family, the cost of living is 1/2 what it was there and crime actually shocks people. (A man was shot and killed on the corner by my house outside DC 2 weeks before it sold, and we still got more than asking price.) We didn't spend all the money we made during the boom, so we've got cash in the bank, we've got no debt outside of our house, and I can pick up enough contract work for now to make ends meet, people were actually calling me about work before I left. I get the benefit of seeing my 3 kids anytime I want to walk out of my home office, and knowing that they'll grow up knowing their grandparents/aunts/uncles/etc.
If I have to get a 'real job' in a few years, it won't be in software. I always loved cars, and mechanics make pretty good scratch, maybe I'll go to school for that. Kind of hard to ship that managers BMW to India for a tuneup...
That is why there will always be a market for developers here, if they have people skills. Someone is going to end up in front of the customers: gathering new requirements, doing design and shipping that off to the offshore company for implementation.
Call it technical sales support if you want, but the business problem solving and software design is the most enjoyable part of the work for me. Let someone else do the coding for $10 an hour.
I bought mine as a new development machine. I don't travel much, but what I have been doing is heading to a nearby coffeeshop to work when I really need to concentrate (i.e. get away from the wife and kids). Staring at my Dell Lattitude screen for 6-8 hours was giving me eyestrain.
It's wicked fast, I can burn CDs and DVDs without copying huge amounts of data back over to my desktop and with the wide screen I can debug without flipping back and forth between the app and the debugger. I can plug in anywhere I work, so battery life isn't an issue and with built in wired and wireless networking, I'm good to go as far as connectivity. The extra 4 pounds from the car to my table don't make a bit of difference.
I was really positive about the technology it's built on from reading about it. Unfortunately when I installed it on my RedHat 7.2 box I got a rude shock... Even pure Java editors like Jext and Forte were blindingly fast compared to Eclipse. The box is a dual PIII 450 with 512 megs of ram, and Eclipse took more than a minute to open, then I could go get a cup of coffee between screen refreshes. I was the only one logged in and I don't run any servers on it, so the box was definately not low on resources.
I heard similar things from other people trying to use it under Linux and decided to leave it for a while. Have any workarounds been found?
Our experience with the Touchscreen add-on's is that they are not very robust. Especially not for a public terminal.
Get a touchscreen monitor, a good one. Other than that, if you feel like scrounging, try to find a POS (Point of Sale) systems vendor with some used terminal equipment. Most of these made in the last 4 years are touchscreen and Intel based.
Part of the problem is the belief that choice is everything. Recently I installed Mandrake 7.2 on my laptop. I literally spent a day removing packages that I did not want. I do not need all of the servers running, if I do, I can install them. I agree with the artical that installing this stuff by default is a security risk. For that matter, I do not need 4 package managers, 5 window managers, a dozen little known programming languages, 15 different editors, etc. How about letting me make a choice, instead of giving me everything by default?
What I have wanted to see for a while is a "Core Linux" distro that would install a minimal system, giving me easy options to make a choice about what to install that will leave me with a basic, functional system. Let me decide what bloat I want to install afterwards, don't fill my drives with stuff I'll never know I installed unless I spend hours digging through the system.
We do development with several SQL backends, and my experience says that they likely won't be able to easily switch backends, and you'll never get them to support it.
And I've done a lot of looking, a good business accounting package for Linux doesn't seem to exist yet. I'm not talking quickbooks, but something you could actually use for a medium to large business.
This is so true... about 6 months ago I had an idea for a new product... we were without a manager at the time, so a few other programmers and I worked on it in our spare time. About 6 weeks ago it came to the attention of management, and after some political infighting about who got to be in charge, it was approved to become a 'real project.' I took our development task list to my first meeting with the product manager who won the fight last week... it went out the window. When he had his schedule done, with all of the specifications meetings and reviews, it looked like we wouldn't release anything for another 6 months. I came away just shaking my head, and tossed out the 'official' schedule. The product will be going to QA in two weeks. I worked from home one day and killed a small forest with specifications drivel that will never be read. The real schedule and design specs are on a whiteboard in the lab, and on a legal pad on top of my monitor.
I firmly believe that really good software can't be developed with the formal process management tries to put us in so that a project and it's progress can be measured. Giving some geeks an interesting idea and leaving them alone gets better results, faster.
After 18 years at this, I've figured out that it has nothing to do with where you work, but everything to do with the attitude you bring to work. I used to put in 100+ hour weeks, saving the company. I got burned out and left several companies, and you know what, the companies somehow survived!;-)
Now I don't carry a pager, work 9-5 M-F and make 3 times what I did when I was killing myself. I speak up when schedules are unreasonable or when designs and specifications are flawed. As a result, I meet deadlines with well designed products, rather than some of the 'night before the ship date' builds I used to send out.
Lots of techies seem to have problems dealing with management, but do little to improve the situation. The suits don't want to lose their staff, or be known as the manager of a failed project, so unless they are complete idiots, I've found most will listen to reason. It's up to us to speak up though!
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I worked in software development for an international company for 7 years. The last couple of years have been a bitch, with reorgs and power plays I worked for 5 different groups. I lived outside of Washington, DC, where the cost of living was astronomical.
Add to that the fact that the R&D staff is less than 50% of what it was a few years ago, despite our revenue and profits being at record levels. The management mantra was put in more hours, work faster, or we'll send your work to India and walk you out the door.
I bailed, and we moved back to where we had family, the cost of living is 1/2 what it was there and crime actually shocks people. (A man was shot and killed on the corner by my house outside DC 2 weeks before it sold, and we still got more than asking price.) We didn't spend all the money we made during the boom, so we've got cash in the bank, we've got no debt outside of our house, and I can pick up enough contract work for now to make ends meet, people were actually calling me about work before I left. I get the benefit of seeing my 3 kids anytime I want to walk out of my home office, and knowing that they'll grow up knowing their grandparents/aunts/uncles/etc.
If I have to get a 'real job' in a few years, it won't be in software. I always loved cars, and mechanics make pretty good scratch, maybe I'll go to school for that. Kind of hard to ship that managers BMW to India for a tuneup...
Call it technical sales support if you want, but the business problem solving and software design is the most enjoyable part of the work for me. Let someone else do the coding for $10 an hour.
I bought mine as a new development machine. I don't travel much, but what I have been doing is heading to a nearby coffeeshop to work when I really need to concentrate (i.e. get away from the wife and kids). Staring at my Dell Lattitude screen for 6-8 hours was giving me eyestrain.
It's wicked fast, I can burn CDs and DVDs without copying huge amounts of data back over to my desktop and with the wide screen I can debug without flipping back and forth between the app and the debugger. I can plug in anywhere I work, so battery life isn't an issue and with built in wired and wireless networking, I'm good to go as far as connectivity. The extra 4 pounds from the car to my table don't make a bit of difference.
I was really positive about the technology it's built on from reading about it. Unfortunately when I installed it on my RedHat 7.2 box I got a rude shock... Even pure Java editors like Jext and Forte were blindingly fast compared to Eclipse. The box is a dual PIII 450 with 512 megs of ram, and Eclipse took more than a minute to open, then I could go get a cup of coffee between screen refreshes. I was the only one logged in and I don't run any servers on it, so the box was definately not low on resources.
I heard similar things from other people trying to use it under Linux and decided to leave it for a while. Have any workarounds been found?
Our experience with the Touchscreen add-on's is that they are not very robust. Especially not for a public terminal. Get a touchscreen monitor, a good one. Other than that, if you feel like scrounging, try to find a POS (Point of Sale) systems vendor with some used terminal equipment. Most of these made in the last 4 years are touchscreen and Intel based.
Part of the problem is the belief that choice is everything. Recently I installed Mandrake 7.2 on my laptop. I literally spent a day removing packages that I did not want. I do not need all of the servers running, if I do, I can install them. I agree with the artical that installing this stuff by default is a security risk. For that matter, I do not need 4 package managers, 5 window managers, a dozen little known programming languages, 15 different editors, etc. How about letting me make a choice, instead of giving me everything by default?
What I have wanted to see for a while is a "Core Linux" distro that would install a minimal system, giving me easy options to make a choice about what to install that will leave me with a basic, functional system. Let me decide what bloat I want to install afterwards, don't fill my drives with stuff I'll never know I installed unless I spend hours digging through the system.
We do development with several SQL backends, and my experience says that they likely won't be able to easily switch backends, and you'll never get them to support it.
And I've done a lot of looking, a good business accounting package for Linux doesn't seem to exist yet. I'm not talking quickbooks, but something you could actually use for a medium to large business.
This is so true... about 6 months ago I had an idea for a new product... we were without a manager at the time, so a few other programmers and I worked on it in our spare time. About 6 weeks ago it came to the attention of management, and after some political infighting about who got to be in charge, it was approved to become a 'real project.' I took our development task list to my first meeting with the product manager who won the fight last week... it went out the window. When he had his schedule done, with all of the specifications meetings and reviews, it looked like we wouldn't release anything for another 6 months. I came away just shaking my head, and tossed out the 'official' schedule. The product will be going to QA in two weeks. I worked from home one day and killed a small forest with specifications drivel that will never be read. The real schedule and design specs are on a whiteboard in the lab, and on a legal pad on top of my monitor.
I firmly believe that really good software can't be developed with the formal process management tries to put us in so that a project and it's progress can be measured. Giving some geeks an interesting idea and leaving them alone gets better results, faster.
After 18 years at this, I've figured out that it has nothing to do with where you work, but everything to do with the attitude you bring to work. I used to put in 100+ hour weeks, saving the company. I got burned out and left several companies, and you know what, the companies somehow survived! ;-)
Now I don't carry a pager, work 9-5 M-F and make 3 times what I did when I was killing myself. I speak up when schedules are unreasonable or when designs and specifications are flawed. As a result, I meet deadlines with well designed products, rather than some of the 'night before the ship date' builds I used to send out.
Lots of techies seem to have problems dealing with management, but do little to improve the situation. The suits don't want to lose their staff, or be known as the manager of a failed project, so unless they are complete idiots, I've found most will listen to reason. It's up to us to speak up though!