The thing that really makes me chuckle, though, is that they don't seem to believe that someone with strengths in the arts could ever be an autodidact, in spite of the fact that most good geeks have this capability as a defining trait.
But if anyone ever suggested that I fill my software shop with nothing but STEM grads, I would laugh them out of the room. No offence, all you engineers, but there's a whole raft of software design and development issues that you guys suck at.
The thing that really makes me chuckle is the hypocrisy in the two statements I quote above. I actually think the entirety of your post is brilliant until the last couple sentences, where you go from making very enlightened points showcasing a different point of view to just being someone with a chip on your shoulder.
While filling your whole software shop with nothing by STEM graduates on purpose is nothing to be proud of, it wouldn't be a tragedy either. STEM degrees range from Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, and even social sciences like Anthropology and Sociology. Thinking that you absolutely need an English major in there is just as silly as thinking an English major doesn't belong there.
To be honest I am personally giving you the benefit of the doubt because of how insightful you seem to be, but I think you went completely overboard with your last statements.
For starters, deism isn't a religion, which makes the rest of the comment not worth bothering with.
How does our differing definition of the term "religion" have anything to do with the rest of the comment? It is amazing sometimes how people are able to find reasons to not think critically.
There's no need or ability to "prove a negative"; This has always been a fallacy as proven all over the world on a daily basis: People are being proven NOT to be guilty of various things, containers are proven NOT to contain things, various theories are proven NOT not be true, etc. all over the world all the time.
The actual argument you are referring to is not that it is impossible to prove a negative. As you illustrate, it is possible to have evidence of absence. Looking inside a container provides evidence of its contents, theories that make falsifiable claims can be proven false, etc. What makes proving God(s) exist different is that no evidence is presented at all. All that leaves is an argument from ignorance, which is the fallacy in informal logic non-believers are referring to when they say you can't prove God does or does not exist. If religions made falsifiable claims, then this logical fallacy would not exist.
Your second fallacy is just you projecting opinions onto people so you can easily shoot them down. Evolution is not "proven" scientifically just because we know it is a possible solution. So far it is the only proposed solution. Religion solves no questions regarding how we got here because any questioned answered by "God did it" should be promptly followed by "then how was God created?"
I've been deistic for decades. It discounts the idea that god is an old man on the mountain, but maintains the idea that there is purpose and meaning to everything, not just man.
There really isn't anything different about being deist versus following an organized religion except you decided to create your own religion. The same inadequate reasoning that makes people think their could be meaning to the universe is the same lack of reasoning that causes smart people to be religious. It is hard to stop anthropomorphizing things that could have no intent, but it is important.
When you can tell me why my shirt wants to be blue (convincingly), I will concede it is possible for there to be meaning to the universe. Asking "why does the universe exist" is no different than asking "what color is 1+6?" Just because a set of words makes up a syntactically correct question does not make it a valid question.
I maintain that our puny little brains aren't even close to capable of "reasoning out" the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
The problem isn't our brain's inability to discover the meaning of the universe. The problem is too many people think there could be meaning to the universe. It is difficult for humans to turn off their deep desire to anthropomorphize everything around them. Just because a human can have intent does not mean that a rock, an apple, or a universe can. When you can tell me why my shirt wants to be blue (convincingly), I will concede it is possible for there to be meaning to the universe.
Asking "why does the universe exist" is no different than asking "what color is 1+6?" Just because a set of words makes up a syntactically correct question does not make it a valid question.
I have signed up for dozens of Coursera classes, but have not taken the complete course even once. The fact that they are free allows me to sign up for a class without even thinking if I have the time to watch a single video. If I watch a single video, and learn a single fact, then it was probably worth it to me. And if 100,000 people sign up and only half watch a single video and only half of them getting anything useful from the video, that was probably worth the time for a professor to create the class.
I have learned to write a parser for a personal SQL engine optimization project. I have learned a great deal of machine learning from a few different classes that I have used in my profession. I have learned interesting material about Economics, Sociology, etc. I could have learned all of this from books, but while I am an avid reader I still feel those lectures helped me learn quicker and probably even gave a more complete level of understanding.
That is worth something to me, and I hope that the professors would feel that it was worth their effort to teach people like me even though I never completed their courses. I hope that as this catches on there will be a big enough market for these professors to get paid well for their effort. I would pay $100 to even $500 for some of these classes, even if I never complete them or get a certificate.
Where would they run to, if no one was handing out multimillion dollar salaries & bonuses, especially when it's not tied to company performance?
Well the problem is there are other companies willing to pay those multimillion dollar salaries. A C-level executive at a company making $100 billion a year in revenue has the potential to make or cost that company billions of dollars. Even if a good executive is only 1% better than a bad executive, that extra 1% performance could still be worth millions.
Obviously the problem is knowing when an executive is good or not. That is a very complicated discussion. But if an executive has the ability to turn a $100 billion per year into $101 billion, they are clearly worth millions of dollars. Unfortunately until companies find a perfect way to determine that a particular executive is responsible for their company's performance, even bad executives will make tons of money.
Does not solve the problem: he still wants a car that pollutes less.
He was saying that this requirement is irrational. The consumer should separate the two concerns. They want a car, and they want to pollute less. Now that these two desires are not mixed, the consumer can choose a more effective way of fulfilling them.
NFL: One of the few industries where smooth talking idiots can rake in millions spewing bullshit.
I think the guy who moderated you Insightful instead of Funny has confused other posters into thinking you were being serious instead of making a joke.
Sorry, I'm not the AC using the expanded ACID acronym names. Regardless of how they're referred to, they aren't buzzwords. They are the essential properties of any modern and safe database system. Anyone who insists on them all being present is totally justified, and totally correct.
Anyone who insists on all four aspects of ACID being present without knowing anything about a system's requirements is not justified at all. There are plenty of use cases where ACID compliance is ridiculous, such as most banking transactions.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I'm bored and can't help myself.
acid isn't so important when the unit is a patient's records. there is also no need for a rigid data model.
This is unbelievable. Holy fuck, I sure hope that you don't work with databases professionally. I hope you don't work with them as a hobby! Nobody with an ounce of intelligence and even a minute of working with data would ever consider saying something as utterly stupid as what you just said.
As someone who actually has worked with patient data in hospitals, he is pretty on the money regarding the non-structured nature of some patient records. Full ACID compliance is not that important in many cases, often a proper audit trail will suffice. It is similar to banking transactions, which are almost never ACID (despite being used in so many textbook examples of ACID compliance).
One difference between an amateur and professional is knowing how to balance a system's requirements and create a design that actually fit the system's needs. Strict adherence to some guidelines is just plain stupid.
I never thought I'd ever see the ACID properties referred to as "buzzwords", especially here at Slashdot of all places.
When you keep repeating four common terms that have a standard acronym, that fits the meaning of buzzword pretty well. The only reason to spell them out instead of just typing ACID is to try and impress people by showing you actually know what the acronym stands for. Then you go on to list them out three times; in back to back sentences even. All you had to do next was spell out what CAP stands for a couple times and you would sound like a genius.
To be fair, the parent poster could be working in rural Arkansas or somewhere similar where $90k/yr is considered a high salary for experienced developers.
One of the things that I've always been confused by with Stallman is where he draws the line between what in his view must be free open-source software and what can be free non-open-source, and what can be truly paid commercial software.
From what I can tell, he draws the line quite clearly. There is no place for traditional paid commercial software. It is okay to make money writing software, but it is never okay to keep even a single line of software secret from the general public.
I don't agree with his philosophy at all, but he seems to make it pretty clear where he stands. I honestly don't know every single public statement he has ever made though, so there could be some inconsistencies I don't know about. With such a hard line stance, it would be hard to not be accidentally hypocritical from time to time.
There's a big difference between physical things that have limits (land, food, water, etc) and 'intellectual property' which can be copied any number of times at virtually no cost.
You are comparing the wrong things. Both physical things and intellectual property have two costs: Cost To Produce and Cost To Distribute. While the cost to distribute is near nothing for intellectual property, the cost to produce is not.
Physical things have limits like land, water, etc, and intellectual property has limits such as the number of smart educated people in the world. Nothing that requires human labor is free. Nothing.
and yet the need for network engineers and server managers is diminishing due to virtualization and keeping all your data in the cloud.
It's not though. The "cloud" is very limited right now.
Shifts in the industry, such as virtualization and the cloud, do not have to remove 100% of IT responsibilities to have an impact. A technology that can even replace 5% of IT workers is going to have a huge impact and put a lot of people out of work.
I work at a software consulting firm of about 30 employees, and we have no need for an on staff IT guy. That work is outsourced to a firm that charges us a yearly rate that would only cover a couple months of an on-site staff member. 10 years ago we would have needed a full time guy, but the combination of the cloud and better productivity tools have really reduced the need for general IT workers.
Yes, the cloud providers have to hire staff too, but with economy of scale and better productivity tools they require far less people. Similar to what has happened to manufacturing where 100 factory workers are replaced by 20 factory workers and 5 robotics engineers.
Once again, the important thing to remember is better technology does not have to do 100% of your job to be a concern.
I should add that all my friends had college degrees. As someone who didn't get his BS until I was 29 (about 5 years ago) I understand how hard the job market can be without a degree. I got my first job after almost a year of unemployment just by putting that I was 24 credits away from my BS degree on my resume. So there is hope that things will turn around for you once you complete that degree.
My 'network admin' job was the sole IT person for a charter school with several hundred people. I did the job of a director of technology, a network admin, and a support person all in one. Maybe you should stop being condescending?
My intention was not to be condescending. I was merely pointing out that any advice to move would be bad advice if your experience was not as good as you were letting on. I have helped a few friends improve their careers, and so far everyone who was struggling had very rosy colored glasses when viewing their career. I didn't want to give advice to move to someone who might just not be realistic about how impressive their job history is.
Some of those jobs I really don't have the skills for such as requiring experience in SAP/SME, Sharepoint, Webfocus, SAS, etc which basically require that you've had a job working with those technologies to get them.
The one thing in common with all of my friends with struggling careers was they were the sole IT person at a fairly small company (well, one of them was part of a two man team). One at a high school with about a thousand students, one at a nursing home, and one at a small manufacturing company. While it may sound good that they were a jack of all trades with many responsibilities, the fact is the companies were too small to work with any of the technologies large firms would expect experienced hires to know. They weren't familiar with any large scale CRM / ERP / CMS / etc. software products. So while they all had 5-10 years of experience as system admins, they didn't really have many useful marketable skills.
Experience as a junior admin at a large company is usually far better than a senior admin at a small company.
One of my friends turned his career around by getting CCNA certified and then used a recruiter. His training included spending thousands of dollars on used equipment so he could feel confident using them, not just passing tests.
The other two took junior/intermediate level jobs at bigger companies. They had to tone down how "impressive" their previous job experience sounded on the resume so they wouldn't be considered over qualified. It took them 18 months and 3 years respectively to leave this junior level job for a very highly paid senior level position. After this short stint in a junior level job they both had 10 years of experience and now knew software like SAP, Sharepoint, etc, so they were very employable.
I don't mean to be condescending; I really am trying to help. But the first thing you need to do is understand that 5 years as the sole IT workers at a small charter school is not as useful to potential employers as you think it is.
This is not an AS or AA degree, so it is very unlikely that the credits will transfer. You may not like it, and I may agree with you that it is kind of dumb, but you get two choices for an Associates Degree:
1) A useful education that will not transfer towards a Bachelors Degree (aka Hands on Associates Degree) 2) A questionably useful general education that will transfer towards a Bachelors Degree (aka Associates of Science/Arts)
even college Algebra didn't transfer. In no way can you tell me that college algebra (which is taught to the standards of accreditation) is somehow different.
Transferring an Associates Degree is often an all or nothing endeavor. If you have an AS or AA, you will meet most if not all of your new University's general education requirements. If you do not have an AS or AA, you will be disappointed frequently regarding the classes that don't transfer.
For instance, any math class below Calculus will probably not transfer. Any math class below Calculus is basically a high school refresher class anyway; not really college level math. Science classes without significant lab work will likely not transfer. Most CS related classes will not transfer. This is true even for AS or AA degrees, but if you have one of those you probably didn't take any CS related classes beyond "Intro to Basic/C/Python" anyway.
Communication, Social Science, Humanities, etc. classes will usually transfer, with few exceptions. Don't expect your "Technical Writing" course to count towards your English Rhetoric requirement, but overall they should transfer well.
The market in my region has been stagnant. A few companies are hiring in my region
I would move, but I simply can't afford that
While it is more likely that your job problems are caused by something you aren't aware of or aren't forthcoming about (like your previous network admin job being little more than first tier tech support), if the job market is really that bad then you really have to move. There should be hundreds of companies hiring in your region unless you live in some rural town in Kentucky. If there are really just a few companies hiring for IT positions, then this is not the best place to live as an IT professional.
I was living in a small semi-rural college town when the first company I worked for as a programmer when bankrupt in 2008. I tried for two years (starting before the company went under) trying to find work in the same area with no luck. Not a single phone interview even. So I finally gave up and moved to the more heavily populated suburbs outside the largest city in my region. I didn't have to move to an area with high rents, just a place where I could have an hour or so commute to the city.
After moving I found a job in three weeks. This was after two years of no luck in my rural town.
Their seems to be a half a dozen US cities with insane amounts of IT industry activity, about 30 with sustained IT activity, and the rest of the top 100 cities (one of which I live by) are anemic for IT and always have been. I could never seriously afford to live in any of those cities so many of us in IT work in: San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc.
There are far more than a half dozen cities with a large number of IT jobs. Any city with a population of at least 300k is going to have a lot of IT jobs, and there are over 50 of them in the US. Any of the 10 cities with at least a million population is also going to have a thriving IT job market in its suburbs.
The fact that you said you are more than 100 miles away from a decent IT job market either means you are restricting yourself to San Fransisco, Seattle, etc. or you really do live in the middle of nowhere. You don't need to restrict yourself to the major IT hubs in the US. You could move to Raleigh NC, Nashville TN, Salt Lake City UT, San Antonia TX, Indianapolis IN, or whatever major city is closest to you and find plenty of companies that are hiring in IT.
To start like almost always happens no credits carried over from my associates degree to my bachelors degree, so I've had to start from scratch.
This only happens when people get an associates in IT / basketweaving / etc. Getting an Associates of Science/Arts will transfer nearly 100% of the time. If your associates degree was filled with classes like networking, web design, A+ cert study prep, etc. then those classes will absolutely not transfer to a BS degree. But if you were taking English, Sociology, Chemistry, Art History, etc. then they will transfer to any school (as long as the grades were good, usually C or above but sometimes B or above). Time doesn't matter either; I started my BS degree 9 years after finishing my AS degree, and I only had to take a single humanities course to complete my gen ed requirements.
People often confuse the difference between an associates that is basically job training and an associates that prepares you for a BS degree. Their is almost nothing similar between these different types of degrees.
Do I have to be the one to note that we don't have any intelligent machines? None of them have any more of a mind than a toaster. I don't think there's an AI out there that can even approximate the intelligence of a cockroach.
Don't assume that robots have to be as intelligent as humans to take our jobs. Even if a robot can only do 50% of your job, it still has the potential to put 50% of the people in your industry out of work.
There is no debate that robots will start doing a large percentage of the work currently done by humans. The only debate is whether enough new jobs will be created that robots cannot do.
I don't have a lot of patience with the profession since it's built on a fatally flawed analogy and all software architects ever do is waste and overhead from a lean perspective.
Your article written on the flaws in the software architect analogy is a good read, but the role of software architect I am used to seems to be far different than the one you are referring to. When I think of a software or systems architect, I am not thinking of someone who is writing or usually even designing software. They are more often determining how different software systems and business processes are interacting with each other. In most situations, each of these software systems is a black box to the architect. The only software code the architect is usually responsible for is any custom middle-ware products needed to help each system interface with each other.
In this context, many of the critiques you mentioned in your 2003 article are not as valid. Systems architectures are not easily duplicated for different companies, just like a building cannot be easily duplicated. And when working with software products that are often black boxes, the software architect will likely be just as constrained as a construction architect (although usually not by as many regulations and codes).
Obviously there are strong differences between the fields, but there are strong differences between mechanical / electrical / chemical engineers as well. And just as the word engineer has evolved from someone who builds medieval machines of war, I personally see no problem with the word architect evolving from just someone who designs and supervises the construction of buildings.
That is one of the stupids things I have ever heard. Ofc the distinction is made on wealth and general development, otherwise most people would consider the USA a second or third world country. North Korea is in many eyes not even third world, but close to fourth. The situation is complicated as it is wealthy enough to have a noticeable military.
You should at least use Google before commenting on something you know nothing about. First/Second/Third world distinctions have nothing to do with wealth. It has to do with whether you align yourself with NATO, the Communist Bloc, or neither. This isn't one of those debates where there are two sides; it is very clear cut.
You must be too young for the Pentum 2 vs. K6-2 debates.
You must be too young to remember that in the late 90s / early 00s, no one other than techies even knew there was competition between Intel and AMD. They just bought their Intel Inside Dells and Gateways.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that really makes me chuckle, though, is that they don't seem to believe that someone with strengths in the arts could ever be an autodidact, in spite of the fact that most good geeks have this capability as a defining trait.
But if anyone ever suggested that I fill my software shop with nothing but STEM grads, I would laugh them out of the room. No offence, all you engineers, but there's a whole raft of software design and development issues that you guys suck at.
The thing that really makes me chuckle is the hypocrisy in the two statements I quote above. I actually think the entirety of your post is brilliant until the last couple sentences, where you go from making very enlightened points showcasing a different point of view to just being someone with a chip on your shoulder.
While filling your whole software shop with nothing by STEM graduates on purpose is nothing to be proud of, it wouldn't be a tragedy either. STEM degrees range from Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, and even social sciences like Anthropology and Sociology. Thinking that you absolutely need an English major in there is just as silly as thinking an English major doesn't belong there.
To be honest I am personally giving you the benefit of the doubt because of how insightful you seem to be, but I think you went completely overboard with your last statements.
For starters, deism isn't a religion, which makes the rest of the comment not worth bothering with.
How does our differing definition of the term "religion" have anything to do with the rest of the comment? It is amazing sometimes how people are able to find reasons to not think critically.
There's no need or ability to "prove a negative"; This has always been a fallacy as proven all over the world on a daily basis: People are being proven NOT to be guilty of various things, containers are proven NOT to contain things, various theories are proven NOT not be true, etc. all over the world all the time.
The actual argument you are referring to is not that it is impossible to prove a negative. As you illustrate, it is possible to have evidence of absence. Looking inside a container provides evidence of its contents, theories that make falsifiable claims can be proven false, etc. What makes proving God(s) exist different is that no evidence is presented at all. All that leaves is an argument from ignorance, which is the fallacy in informal logic non-believers are referring to when they say you can't prove God does or does not exist. If religions made falsifiable claims, then this logical fallacy would not exist.
Your second fallacy is just you projecting opinions onto people so you can easily shoot them down. Evolution is not "proven" scientifically just because we know it is a possible solution. So far it is the only proposed solution. Religion solves no questions regarding how we got here because any questioned answered by "God did it" should be promptly followed by "then how was God created?"
I've been deistic for decades. It discounts the idea that god is an old man on the mountain, but maintains the idea that there is purpose and meaning to everything, not just man.
There really isn't anything different about being deist versus following an organized religion except you decided to create your own religion. The same inadequate reasoning that makes people think their could be meaning to the universe is the same lack of reasoning that causes smart people to be religious. It is hard to stop anthropomorphizing things that could have no intent, but it is important.
When you can tell me why my shirt wants to be blue (convincingly), I will concede it is possible for there to be meaning to the universe. Asking "why does the universe exist" is no different than asking "what color is 1+6?" Just because a set of words makes up a syntactically correct question does not make it a valid question.
I maintain that our puny little brains aren't even close to capable of "reasoning out" the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
The problem isn't our brain's inability to discover the meaning of the universe. The problem is too many people think there could be meaning to the universe. It is difficult for humans to turn off their deep desire to anthropomorphize everything around them. Just because a human can have intent does not mean that a rock, an apple, or a universe can. When you can tell me why my shirt wants to be blue (convincingly), I will concede it is possible for there to be meaning to the universe.
Asking "why does the universe exist" is no different than asking "what color is 1+6?" Just because a set of words makes up a syntactically correct question does not make it a valid question.
I have signed up for dozens of Coursera classes, but have not taken the complete course even once. The fact that they are free allows me to sign up for a class without even thinking if I have the time to watch a single video. If I watch a single video, and learn a single fact, then it was probably worth it to me. And if 100,000 people sign up and only half watch a single video and only half of them getting anything useful from the video, that was probably worth the time for a professor to create the class.
I have learned to write a parser for a personal SQL engine optimization project. I have learned a great deal of machine learning from a few different classes that I have used in my profession. I have learned interesting material about Economics, Sociology, etc. I could have learned all of this from books, but while I am an avid reader I still feel those lectures helped me learn quicker and probably even gave a more complete level of understanding.
That is worth something to me, and I hope that the professors would feel that it was worth their effort to teach people like me even though I never completed their courses. I hope that as this catches on there will be a big enough market for these professors to get paid well for their effort. I would pay $100 to even $500 for some of these classes, even if I never complete them or get a certificate.
Where would they run to, if no one was handing out multimillion dollar salaries & bonuses, especially when it's not tied to company performance?
Well the problem is there are other companies willing to pay those multimillion dollar salaries. A C-level executive at a company making $100 billion a year in revenue has the potential to make or cost that company billions of dollars. Even if a good executive is only 1% better than a bad executive, that extra 1% performance could still be worth millions.
Obviously the problem is knowing when an executive is good or not. That is a very complicated discussion. But if an executive has the ability to turn a $100 billion per year into $101 billion, they are clearly worth millions of dollars. Unfortunately until companies find a perfect way to determine that a particular executive is responsible for their company's performance, even bad executives will make tons of money.
Does not solve the problem: he still wants a car that pollutes less.
He was saying that this requirement is irrational. The consumer should separate the two concerns. They want a car, and they want to pollute less. Now that these two desires are not mixed, the consumer can choose a more effective way of fulfilling them.
NFL: One of the few industries where smooth talking idiots can rake in millions spewing bullshit.
I think the guy who moderated you Insightful instead of Funny has confused other posters into thinking you were being serious instead of making a joke.
Sorry, I'm not the AC using the expanded ACID acronym names. Regardless of how they're referred to, they aren't buzzwords. They are the essential properties of any modern and safe database system. Anyone who insists on them all being present is totally justified, and totally correct.
Anyone who insists on all four aspects of ACID being present without knowing anything about a system's requirements is not justified at all. There are plenty of use cases where ACID compliance is ridiculous, such as most banking transactions.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I'm bored and can't help myself.
acid isn't so important when the unit is a patient's records. there is also no need for a rigid data model.
This is unbelievable. Holy fuck, I sure hope that you don't work with databases professionally. I hope you don't work with them as a hobby! Nobody with an ounce of intelligence and even a minute of working with data would ever consider saying something as utterly stupid as what you just said.
As someone who actually has worked with patient data in hospitals, he is pretty on the money regarding the non-structured nature of some patient records. Full ACID compliance is not that important in many cases, often a proper audit trail will suffice. It is similar to banking transactions, which are almost never ACID (despite being used in so many textbook examples of ACID compliance).
One difference between an amateur and professional is knowing how to balance a system's requirements and create a design that actually fit the system's needs. Strict adherence to some guidelines is just plain stupid.
I never thought I'd ever see the ACID properties referred to as "buzzwords", especially here at Slashdot of all places.
When you keep repeating four common terms that have a standard acronym, that fits the meaning of buzzword pretty well. The only reason to spell them out instead of just typing ACID is to try and impress people by showing you actually know what the acronym stands for. Then you go on to list them out three times; in back to back sentences even. All you had to do next was spell out what CAP stands for a couple times and you would sound like a genius.
To be fair, the parent poster could be working in rural Arkansas or somewhere similar where $90k/yr is considered a high salary for experienced developers.
One of the things that I've always been confused by with Stallman is where he draws the line between what in his view must be free open-source software and what can be free non-open-source, and what can be truly paid commercial software.
From what I can tell, he draws the line quite clearly. There is no place for traditional paid commercial software. It is okay to make money writing software, but it is never okay to keep even a single line of software secret from the general public.
I don't agree with his philosophy at all, but he seems to make it pretty clear where he stands. I honestly don't know every single public statement he has ever made though, so there could be some inconsistencies I don't know about. With such a hard line stance, it would be hard to not be accidentally hypocritical from time to time.
There's a big difference between physical things that have limits (land, food, water, etc) and 'intellectual property' which can be copied any number of times at virtually no cost.
You are comparing the wrong things. Both physical things and intellectual property have two costs: Cost To Produce and Cost To Distribute. While the cost to distribute is near nothing for intellectual property, the cost to produce is not.
Physical things have limits like land, water, etc, and intellectual property has limits such as the number of smart educated people in the world. Nothing that requires human labor is free. Nothing.
and yet the need for network engineers and server managers is diminishing due to virtualization and keeping all your data in the cloud.
It's not though. The "cloud" is very limited right now.
Shifts in the industry, such as virtualization and the cloud, do not have to remove 100% of IT responsibilities to have an impact. A technology that can even replace 5% of IT workers is going to have a huge impact and put a lot of people out of work.
I work at a software consulting firm of about 30 employees, and we have no need for an on staff IT guy. That work is outsourced to a firm that charges us a yearly rate that would only cover a couple months of an on-site staff member. 10 years ago we would have needed a full time guy, but the combination of the cloud and better productivity tools have really reduced the need for general IT workers.
Yes, the cloud providers have to hire staff too, but with economy of scale and better productivity tools they require far less people. Similar to what has happened to manufacturing where 100 factory workers are replaced by 20 factory workers and 5 robotics engineers.
Once again, the important thing to remember is better technology does not have to do 100% of your job to be a concern.
I should add that all my friends had college degrees. As someone who didn't get his BS until I was 29 (about 5 years ago) I understand how hard the job market can be without a degree. I got my first job after almost a year of unemployment just by putting that I was 24 credits away from my BS degree on my resume. So there is hope that things will turn around for you once you complete that degree.
My 'network admin' job was the sole IT person for a charter school with several hundred people. I did the job of a director of technology, a network admin, and a support person all in one. Maybe you should stop being condescending?
My intention was not to be condescending. I was merely pointing out that any advice to move would be bad advice if your experience was not as good as you were letting on. I have helped a few friends improve their careers, and so far everyone who was struggling had very rosy colored glasses when viewing their career. I didn't want to give advice to move to someone who might just not be realistic about how impressive their job history is.
Some of those jobs I really don't have the skills for such as requiring experience in SAP/SME, Sharepoint, Webfocus, SAS, etc which basically require that you've had a job working with those technologies to get them.
The one thing in common with all of my friends with struggling careers was they were the sole IT person at a fairly small company (well, one of them was part of a two man team). One at a high school with about a thousand students, one at a nursing home, and one at a small manufacturing company. While it may sound good that they were a jack of all trades with many responsibilities, the fact is the companies were too small to work with any of the technologies large firms would expect experienced hires to know. They weren't familiar with any large scale CRM / ERP / CMS / etc. software products. So while they all had 5-10 years of experience as system admins, they didn't really have many useful marketable skills.
Experience as a junior admin at a large company is usually far better than a senior admin at a small company.
One of my friends turned his career around by getting CCNA certified and then used a recruiter. His training included spending thousands of dollars on used equipment so he could feel confident using them, not just passing tests.
The other two took junior/intermediate level jobs at bigger companies. They had to tone down how "impressive" their previous job experience sounded on the resume so they wouldn't be considered over qualified. It took them 18 months and 3 years respectively to leave this junior level job for a very highly paid senior level position. After this short stint in a junior level job they both had 10 years of experience and now knew software like SAP, Sharepoint, etc, so they were very employable.
I don't mean to be condescending; I really am trying to help. But the first thing you need to do is understand that 5 years as the sole IT workers at a small charter school is not as useful to potential employers as you think it is.
My associates is in Computer Science: Networking
This is not an AS or AA degree, so it is very unlikely that the credits will transfer. You may not like it, and I may agree with you that it is kind of dumb, but you get two choices for an Associates Degree:
1) A useful education that will not transfer towards a Bachelors Degree (aka Hands on Associates Degree)
2) A questionably useful general education that will transfer towards a Bachelors Degree (aka Associates of Science/Arts)
even college Algebra didn't transfer. In no way can you tell me that college algebra (which is taught to the standards of accreditation) is somehow different.
Transferring an Associates Degree is often an all or nothing endeavor. If you have an AS or AA, you will meet most if not all of your new University's general education requirements. If you do not have an AS or AA, you will be disappointed frequently regarding the classes that don't transfer.
For instance, any math class below Calculus will probably not transfer. Any math class below Calculus is basically a high school refresher class anyway; not really college level math.
Science classes without significant lab work will likely not transfer.
Most CS related classes will not transfer. This is true even for AS or AA degrees, but if you have one of those you probably didn't take any CS related classes beyond "Intro to Basic/C/Python" anyway.
Communication, Social Science, Humanities, etc. classes will usually transfer, with few exceptions. Don't expect your "Technical Writing" course to count towards your English Rhetoric requirement, but overall they should transfer well.
The market in my region has been stagnant. A few companies are hiring in my region
I would move, but I simply can't afford that
While it is more likely that your job problems are caused by something you aren't aware of or aren't forthcoming about (like your previous network admin job being little more than first tier tech support), if the job market is really that bad then you really have to move. There should be hundreds of companies hiring in your region unless you live in some rural town in Kentucky. If there are really just a few companies hiring for IT positions, then this is not the best place to live as an IT professional.
I was living in a small semi-rural college town when the first company I worked for as a programmer when bankrupt in 2008. I tried for two years (starting before the company went under) trying to find work in the same area with no luck. Not a single phone interview even. So I finally gave up and moved to the more heavily populated suburbs outside the largest city in my region. I didn't have to move to an area with high rents, just a place where I could have an hour or so commute to the city.
After moving I found a job in three weeks. This was after two years of no luck in my rural town.
Their seems to be a half a dozen US cities with insane amounts of IT industry activity, about 30 with sustained IT activity, and the rest of the top 100 cities (one of which I live by) are anemic for IT and always have been. I could never seriously afford to live in any of those cities so many of us in IT work in: San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc.
There are far more than a half dozen cities with a large number of IT jobs. Any city with a population of at least 300k is going to have a lot of IT jobs, and there are over 50 of them in the US. Any of the 10 cities with at least a million population is also going to have a thriving IT job market in its suburbs.
The fact that you said you are more than 100 miles away from a decent IT job market either means you are restricting yourself to San Fransisco, Seattle, etc. or you really do live in the middle of nowhere. You don't need to restrict yourself to the major IT hubs in the US. You could move to Raleigh NC, Nashville TN, Salt Lake City UT, San Antonia TX, Indianapolis IN, or whatever major city is closest to you and find plenty of companies that are hiring in IT.
To start like almost always happens no credits carried over from my associates degree to my bachelors degree, so I've had to start from scratch.
This only happens when people get an associates in IT / basketweaving / etc. Getting an Associates of Science/Arts will transfer nearly 100% of the time. If your associates degree was filled with classes like networking, web design, A+ cert study prep, etc. then those classes will absolutely not transfer to a BS degree. But if you were taking English, Sociology, Chemistry, Art History, etc. then they will transfer to any school (as long as the grades were good, usually C or above but sometimes B or above). Time doesn't matter either; I started my BS degree 9 years after finishing my AS degree, and I only had to take a single humanities course to complete my gen ed requirements.
People often confuse the difference between an associates that is basically job training and an associates that prepares you for a BS degree. Their is almost nothing similar between these different types of degrees.
Do I have to be the one to note that we don't have any intelligent machines? None of them have any more of a mind than a toaster. I don't think there's an AI out there that can even approximate the intelligence of a cockroach.
Don't assume that robots have to be as intelligent as humans to take our jobs. Even if a robot can only do 50% of your job, it still has the potential to put 50% of the people in your industry out of work.
There is no debate that robots will start doing a large percentage of the work currently done by humans. The only debate is whether enough new jobs will be created that robots cannot do.
I don't have a lot of patience with the profession since it's built on a fatally flawed analogy and all software architects ever do is waste and overhead from a lean perspective.
Your article written on the flaws in the software architect analogy is a good read, but the role of software architect I am used to seems to be far different than the one you are referring to. When I think of a software or systems architect, I am not thinking of someone who is writing or usually even designing software. They are more often determining how different software systems and business processes are interacting with each other. In most situations, each of these software systems is a black box to the architect. The only software code the architect is usually responsible for is any custom middle-ware products needed to help each system interface with each other.
In this context, many of the critiques you mentioned in your 2003 article are not as valid. Systems architectures are not easily duplicated for different companies, just like a building cannot be easily duplicated. And when working with software products that are often black boxes, the software architect will likely be just as constrained as a construction architect (although usually not by as many regulations and codes).
Obviously there are strong differences between the fields, but there are strong differences between mechanical / electrical / chemical engineers as well. And just as the word engineer has evolved from someone who builds medieval machines of war, I personally see no problem with the word architect evolving from just someone who designs and supervises the construction of buildings.
That is one of the stupids things I have ever heard.
Ofc the distinction is made on wealth and general development, otherwise most people would consider the USA a second or third world country.
North Korea is in many eyes not even third world, but close to fourth. The situation is complicated as it is wealthy enough to have a noticeable military.
You should at least use Google before commenting on something you know nothing about. First/Second/Third world distinctions have nothing to do with wealth. It has to do with whether you align yourself with NATO, the Communist Bloc, or neither. This isn't one of those debates where there are two sides; it is very clear cut.
You must be too young for the Pentum 2 vs. K6-2 debates.
You must be too young to remember that in the late 90s / early 00s, no one other than techies even knew there was competition between Intel and AMD. They just bought their Intel Inside Dells and Gateways.