Here's another little point that I think many people forget. A person on a green card is not receiving stock options, in general. Granted, in this day and age, that means less than it used to, but not only does an H1-B cost less, they also don't nibble away at the true wealth generator for most owners and senior management (who are often the same) -- the percentage of ownership in the company.
This is kind of a sleeping issue now, since most people look at the stock market and see their shares hovering only slightly above 0. However, by jettisoning employees, many of whom effectively lost their options before they could exercise them, and taking on foreign applicants, a company basically is able to reduce not only the immediate cost to the company of the employees salaries but also the long term costs associated with the dilution of stock.
There's an interesting quandary here, though. While I think there is *something* of a racist quality to the H1-B issue, I think the issues tend to be larger. I have worked with some extremely intelligent H1-B holders from India, including a database specialist who was nothing short of awe-inspiring. I also met a lot of kids who were bright, but no brighter than their American counterparts. Moreover, I think you will find that relatively few Americans actually have problems with the people who come over on these visas.
Where the problem arises, however, is that many companies did have access to local IT talent that was as qualified and competent as any non-native, but chose to go through the H1-B route because they felt that they were under no obligations to their communities. It is something akin to a company setting up a large plant next in a town after the town subsidizes their tax rates, gives them incredible breaks in restrictions, and otherwise bends over backwards, only to have the company bring in all of their own workers, buy all their resources from places that don't benefit the community, and dump their pollution in your streams and fields.
Stay in processor architecture. There's currently something of a glut there, but that too will pass. I'm staying the course with some of the advanced XML technology, simply because it is so integral to SO MANY things that are being developed right now. I think that.NET will be the last hurrah of the procedural model of programming, and everything I see from about two years out and beyond is heavily weighted toward distributed architectures. Problem with this is that DA's by nature tend to make operations more global, which only exacerbates the problems of finding a job as a programmer.
I think that avatar/agent systems will end up being big in about three years - if you're a programmer specializing in building 3D environments (or a 3D artist or a voice actor) you've got a bright future. We're going to seriously get back into the e-commerce sector in about four and a half years; that's the time it'll take to grow established services based infrastructures into profitable entities. Micro-robotics will become hot in about seven years, about the time that the first nano-tech begins to become real for more than proof of concept ideas. Organic and optical programming will be big in about twelve years, with the first commercial quantum computers coming on line about then.
Actually, the lawyers that ARE overpaid typically are the ones that are working for companies that are seeking to gain some competitive legal edge (it's easier to change the rules in the marketplace than it is to compete fairly by the existing ones, and corporate lawyers are adept at changing the rules). Lawyers that work in the criminal justice system are typically very underpaid, and often have to give up their goals of helping others because they can't afford to live on what most states are able to pay.
Doctors likewise tend to fall into extreme overpay/underpay situations. I have a step-father-in-law who's a cardiologist; he was also independently wealthy from his family even before he entered medical school. My wife's father is also a doctor, a general surgeon, but he's basically making less than many programmers.
We live in a country where in order to become wealthy you have to start off wealthy - your profession is increasingly irrelevant compared to your position in the social strata. Consider also that Bill Gates, while definitely a geek when young, was also the son of a very well-to-do Seattle lawyer who could afford to send his son to Harvard, and could afford to help find investors to bankroll Microsoft when it was still selling black-boxes.
No, the ones who are making the money in India or China are not generally the workers. They are again corporations, and often times they are not even Indian or Chinese corporations. The programmers often do fairly well in the bargain, mind you, but that isn't wealth that really makes that much difference - to become proficient enough to be a programmer brought over on an H1-B, you have to be wealthy enough to afford to go to University, a luxury that many hundreds of millions of Indians or Chinese simply do not have.
This becomes a shell game after a while. A company in the United States basically sets up a shell company in India or China, staffed with native managers, developers and support staff. The employees make a modest wage, better perhaps than what's out there, but typically a couple of orders of magnitude less in percentage terms than the money they end up generating for their parent company. The real people people that end up making money are the shareholders that have invested in the parent company, and even there only a very small number of the total. If two or three people together own 90+% stock in a large conglomerate and the remaining 10% is distributed among employees and investors, then it becomes real obvious that the money is not only not going to the workers in the displaced country, but is in fact not going to the workers in the displaced company either -- it is only going to the stratos dwellers.
Oh, by the way, to put that into perspective, if your net worth (which for purposes of calculation I assume to be about $100,000) is made into a one pixel-wide dot (smaller than this "." period), then the net-worth of someone making $50 billion dollars is a circle about the size of a house.
I'm 38. I've been moving out of pure programming for a few years now and into writing technical books and articles, training, and teaching. One reason that I did this was that I saw very quickly while I was in programming (since about '83) that there IS a definite bias against older workers. If you are older than 35, you're often perceived as being too expensive. If you have a family, then employers will know that you will not be working those 80 hours a week.
Most people in this age group are superb programmers -- programming isn't about what language you know, it is about how well you can use what you do know to solve problems, and after ten or fifteen years in the field you tend to have seen many if not most of the problems often enough to recognize patterns that tend to elude younger programmers, no matter how intelligent, since pattern recognition is built in part upon experience. However, most companies don't recognize the value of that experience, because they don't understand it.
Oh, and by the way, to the KID that just got a job at Microsoft -- it's Hell there. I've been there. You got hired because you're a cheap, wet-behind the ears kid they can mold into their image, because you're better at quickly regurgitating the right answers than thinking about why the wrong ones are wrong. You'll fit right in.
I wouldn't count on it. The ones that are calling for us to recover are treating this as if it was a normal "correction" to an overheated tech market. Problem is that the dot-com fallout didn't occur because of a lack of demand or overproduction. It occurred because there were too many companies that were essentially leveraged on what amounts to borrowed money, puffed up by accounting tricks from banks and brokerages into far more than was ever there. When the stock-market collapsed, it basically caused more than one trillion dollars to disappear. The dot-coms were the place where the money was at that time (and telecomms, for that matter) so they are only the most visible manifestations of a slow motion collapse that's really only just beginning.
Ask yourself this. Consider the people who were VC'ing. In most cases, they were essentially leveraging their own funds to take out loans against future returns from extremely rapid growth companies. Every time one of those companies collapse, they essentially mean that those sections of loans have no real assets behind them. It only takes a few of those to happen before the VC has to start dipping into their principle, which of course means less money to invest to make up the shortfall. Some of those VCs were private individuals, but more were investment brokerages, banks, insurance companies. What this means is that now, many of the major pillars of the economy are weakened, and all it would take would be one fairly minor shock -- a company like Argentina or Russia going into default -- to basically cause the losses that you're seeing in the tech field to become endemic throughout the economy.
Not true. I live in a relatively small town -- Olympia, WA; far enough away from Seattle and Portland that there's not been a lot of overlap in bedroom commutes or "escaping-from-the-ratrace" programmers. What you're seeing here is that there are a FEW programming jobs, but the majority of them are maintenance... someone to keep the servers going, or clean up after they let go the development team on Government projects. It may be different in the midwest or Texas area, but it seems like most places on the West coast are in a profound slump.
Thanks for the comments about Beginning XML. I'm wrapping up a chapter for Professional Schema by Wrox, if you liked the other one.
Self education is a critical part of staying employed in this industry, and is something that I've seen a lot of people have problems with. I look upon any job that I'm in anymore as being temporary, even if I'm getting a salary as a "permanent" employee. The projects that I'm working on will change, the boss that I work for will change, the chance that the company itself will disappear overnight is always a possibility. By handling your education yourself, you basically remove that particular hold that your current employer may be able to use later as leverage to keep you either from advancing or moving elsewhere. Moreover, you can keep the reference material this way, and you can claim them as education expenses on your tax forms.
Microsoft has a long history of creating "innovative" solutions to web problems. It's instructive to look at where they've gone:
1) Marquee - scrolling letters, to replace : Still supported, but unused.
2) HTML+TIME - multimedia scheduling language, to compete against SMIL: Still supported, but little used.
3) Alternative CSS - Developed an early CSS implementations and built on it: Fairly widely accepted, although customer complaints have made IE6 CSS more consistent with the W3C version.
4) Agents - Animated figures: Bob (Enough said).
5) VML - Vector markup language: Used extensively in Powerpoint for the web, losing ground elsewhere to SVG.
6) Chromeffects - Integrated 2D/3D browsing for the web: cool concept, but died from too heavy a system requirement.
7) Behaviors - Using external scripting to make HTML extension tags live: Used in specialized apps, but browser and platform differences make them useless on the web.
8) Smart Tags - Interesting concept, browser specific, even in beta many managers and webmasters are disabling them...
Smart Tags are actually not a bad technology, but keep in mind that their primary purpose is not to make the web better, but to provide yet another bell and whistle to market Office XP. The focus of the W3C right now is on XML related issues, and something like this is so far off their radar that it's likely never to get on. Mozilla is more interested in developing and promoting XUL, Opera, and Konquerer are positioning themselves as close to W3C as possible; between these factors and the large installed base of IE4/IE5.x, smart tags will die of attrition long before their host platform makes any real splash.
I've been through three tech recessions, the first back in 86-7, 91-92 and 95-96. During the first, colleges that had been pushing computer grads were suddenly getting push-back from the industry saying there wasn't any more need for them, that CS was a mature field... then networked PCs became the vogue and all of a sudden industry was screaming for more workers. In 1991 a general recession hit the US, mild by historical standards, but enough the you were seeing PostDocs working at KMart.
In 1995 there was a period where the multimedia and game industries collapsed - too many startups, too much anticipated demand that never materialized, too much hype.
We've just ended the first great Internet push. Someone was complaining here about those companies that were hiring HTML programmers for top dollar at that time but didn't really understand that at the time HTML programmers were what was needed. Many of those HTML programmers went on to become senior web programmers, webmasters, sysadmins and IT managers.
The point in all this is very simple - being in IT means keeping one eye out on what is coming down the pipe and taking the time to learn it. Note that this means that it is your responsibility to stay current, not your employer's (if you are still employed). This is unfortunate, and is yet another indication of the breakdowns going in business, since for many, many years, a good employer knew that keeping their staff current with technology would give them a competitive edge.
However, pertinant to this discussion, the onus now falls on you; take evening classes, set up a spare computer in the back room and play with new tech, or even old tech that may be experiencing a resurgence (Perl/CGI is expanding, for instance, and Python is enjoying something of a renaissance). Learn everything you can about XML, then learn some more, even if you're a C++ or Java programmer; we're fast moving to a time when every stream that an object produces or consumes will be in XML, and the more you know about Web Services, distributed programming, database to XML conversion and so forth, the easier it is for you to jump from IIS to Apache to WebSphere to whatever.
No one is going to hire a web developer in this day and age, because too many managers have assumed (incorrectly) that because the Dotcom bandwagon burst, the Internet is no longer important. It is, but not for serving up web pages; the demand that is beginning to grow is for on demand weblications, custom, in-house, and relying more on component development skills than on the ability to to build large-scale stand-alone apps.
Diversify your skill set; deep knowledge is wonderful, and from the recruiters on this board deep knowledge may be desirable, but on the flip side the reason that you get so many C++ "experts" that couldn't tell a virtual interface from virtual reality is because those same companies don't want seasoned veterans who can command higher wages, they want cheap but skilled labor. If you have secondary or tertiary skills, then you can walk into situations where you can use those skills, though with the realization that you won't (and shouldn't) get the same pay as for your primary skills.
Finally, realize that a company is not your friend, mother, nanny, or benefactor. Companies exist to make money. The more enlightened ones treat their employees well, but enlightenment tends to go out the window when the stocks are tumbling. Most managers have a need to fill and will get people to work for them to fulfill that need, and if they can get away with it, will jettison that person the moment the need no longer exists. This is what the Just-In-Time economy is all about, unfortunately.
Finally, diversify. Get into writing. Start a side business that has nothing to do with programming. If you're a marketer, spend some time learning about code. So many of the people that entered into the dot com market directly out of college have tied their entire identity to their jobs, and are only now beginning to understand that they are not programmers, or marketers, or managers, but people, with creative impulses that were stifled to get into the IT rat race.
-- Kurt Cagle
-- Author, Professional XSL, Wrox
Okay, wading into the fray here. I've written three books on Visual Basic. For what it is - a RAD tool for developing GUIs and components, it's okay. Not great, but no worse than most Java implementations. I actually used to do a lot of prototyping in VB because I could see in a matter of hours what would take me days to do in C++, though its clunky distribution process, poor multimedia support and bizarre event handling (most basic objects do not support mouseover and mouseout, for instance) made it less than ideal for building production level tools.
I do almost all of my GUI work in this day and age using XML, XSLT, JavaScript and servlets, typically against the IE5 browser. I like having VB around to give me a quick look at a COM object's classes, but found recently that when I picked up a new machine and couldn't find my VB installer disks, I didn't really need it.
By the way, VB.NET is a monstrosity. It tries unsuccessfully to be Java, it loses all of the best features of VB and keeps many of the worst, and it is not even remotely compatible with anything written before it. Even the hard core VB enthusiasts that I know (and yes, they are expert VB programmers, and most also know C++, Java, and a host of other languages, thank you) just grimace when they have to talk about VB.NET publicly.
-- Kurt Cagle
-- Author, XML Developers Handbook, Sybex and VB6 Gold Book, Coriolis
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another little point that I think many people forget. A person on a green card is not receiving stock options, in general. Granted, in this day and age, that means less than it used to, but not only does an H1-B cost less, they also don't nibble away at the true wealth generator for most owners and senior management (who are often the same) -- the percentage of ownership in the company. This is kind of a sleeping issue now, since most people look at the stock market and see their shares hovering only slightly above 0. However, by jettisoning employees, many of whom effectively lost their options before they could exercise them, and taking on foreign applicants, a company basically is able to reduce not only the immediate cost to the company of the employees salaries but also the long term costs associated with the dilution of stock.
There's an interesting quandary here, though. While I think there is *something* of a racist quality to the H1-B issue, I think the issues tend to be larger. I have worked with some extremely intelligent H1-B holders from India, including a database specialist who was nothing short of awe-inspiring. I also met a lot of kids who were bright, but no brighter than their American counterparts. Moreover, I think you will find that relatively few Americans actually have problems with the people who come over on these visas. Where the problem arises, however, is that many companies did have access to local IT talent that was as qualified and competent as any non-native, but chose to go through the H1-B route because they felt that they were under no obligations to their communities. It is something akin to a company setting up a large plant next in a town after the town subsidizes their tax rates, gives them incredible breaks in restrictions, and otherwise bends over backwards, only to have the company bring in all of their own workers, buy all their resources from places that don't benefit the community, and dump their pollution in your streams and fields.
Stay in processor architecture. There's currently something of a glut there, but that too will pass. I'm staying the course with some of the advanced XML technology, simply because it is so integral to SO MANY things that are being developed right now. I think that .NET will be the last hurrah of the procedural model of programming, and everything I see from about two years out and beyond is heavily weighted toward distributed architectures. Problem with this is that DA's by nature tend to make operations more global, which only exacerbates the problems of finding a job as a programmer.
I think that avatar/agent systems will end up being big in about three years - if you're a programmer specializing in building 3D environments (or a 3D artist or a voice actor) you've got a bright future. We're going to seriously get back into the e-commerce sector in about four and a half years; that's the time it'll take to grow established services based infrastructures into profitable entities. Micro-robotics will become hot in about seven years, about the time that the first nano-tech begins to become real for more than proof of concept ideas. Organic and optical programming will be big in about twelve years, with the first commercial quantum computers coming on line about then.
Actually, the lawyers that ARE overpaid typically are the ones that are working for companies that are seeking to gain some competitive legal edge (it's easier to change the rules in the marketplace than it is to compete fairly by the existing ones, and corporate lawyers are adept at changing the rules). Lawyers that work in the criminal justice system are typically very underpaid, and often have to give up their goals of helping others because they can't afford to live on what most states are able to pay. Doctors likewise tend to fall into extreme overpay/underpay situations. I have a step-father-in-law who's a cardiologist; he was also independently wealthy from his family even before he entered medical school. My wife's father is also a doctor, a general surgeon, but he's basically making less than many programmers. We live in a country where in order to become wealthy you have to start off wealthy - your profession is increasingly irrelevant compared to your position in the social strata. Consider also that Bill Gates, while definitely a geek when young, was also the son of a very well-to-do Seattle lawyer who could afford to send his son to Harvard, and could afford to help find investors to bankroll Microsoft when it was still selling black-boxes.
No, the ones who are making the money in India or China are not generally the workers. They are again corporations, and often times they are not even Indian or Chinese corporations. The programmers often do fairly well in the bargain, mind you, but that isn't wealth that really makes that much difference - to become proficient enough to be a programmer brought over on an H1-B, you have to be wealthy enough to afford to go to University, a luxury that many hundreds of millions of Indians or Chinese simply do not have. This becomes a shell game after a while. A company in the United States basically sets up a shell company in India or China, staffed with native managers, developers and support staff. The employees make a modest wage, better perhaps than what's out there, but typically a couple of orders of magnitude less in percentage terms than the money they end up generating for their parent company. The real people people that end up making money are the shareholders that have invested in the parent company, and even there only a very small number of the total. If two or three people together own 90+% stock in a large conglomerate and the remaining 10% is distributed among employees and investors, then it becomes real obvious that the money is not only not going to the workers in the displaced country, but is in fact not going to the workers in the displaced company either -- it is only going to the stratos dwellers. Oh, by the way, to put that into perspective, if your net worth (which for purposes of calculation I assume to be about $100,000) is made into a one pixel-wide dot (smaller than this "." period), then the net-worth of someone making $50 billion dollars is a circle about the size of a house.
I'm 38. I've been moving out of pure programming for a few years now and into writing technical books and articles, training, and teaching. One reason that I did this was that I saw very quickly while I was in programming (since about '83) that there IS a definite bias against older workers. If you are older than 35, you're often perceived as being too expensive. If you have a family, then employers will know that you will not be working those 80 hours a week. Most people in this age group are superb programmers -- programming isn't about what language you know, it is about how well you can use what you do know to solve problems, and after ten or fifteen years in the field you tend to have seen many if not most of the problems often enough to recognize patterns that tend to elude younger programmers, no matter how intelligent, since pattern recognition is built in part upon experience. However, most companies don't recognize the value of that experience, because they don't understand it. Oh, and by the way, to the KID that just got a job at Microsoft -- it's Hell there. I've been there. You got hired because you're a cheap, wet-behind the ears kid they can mold into their image, because you're better at quickly regurgitating the right answers than thinking about why the wrong ones are wrong. You'll fit right in.
I wouldn't count on it. The ones that are calling for us to recover are treating this as if it was a normal "correction" to an overheated tech market. Problem is that the dot-com fallout didn't occur because of a lack of demand or overproduction. It occurred because there were too many companies that were essentially leveraged on what amounts to borrowed money, puffed up by accounting tricks from banks and brokerages into far more than was ever there. When the stock-market collapsed, it basically caused more than one trillion dollars to disappear. The dot-coms were the place where the money was at that time (and telecomms, for that matter) so they are only the most visible manifestations of a slow motion collapse that's really only just beginning. Ask yourself this. Consider the people who were VC'ing. In most cases, they were essentially leveraging their own funds to take out loans against future returns from extremely rapid growth companies. Every time one of those companies collapse, they essentially mean that those sections of loans have no real assets behind them. It only takes a few of those to happen before the VC has to start dipping into their principle, which of course means less money to invest to make up the shortfall. Some of those VCs were private individuals, but more were investment brokerages, banks, insurance companies. What this means is that now, many of the major pillars of the economy are weakened, and all it would take would be one fairly minor shock -- a company like Argentina or Russia going into default -- to basically cause the losses that you're seeing in the tech field to become endemic throughout the economy.
Not true. I live in a relatively small town -- Olympia, WA; far enough away from Seattle and Portland that there's not been a lot of overlap in bedroom commutes or "escaping-from-the-ratrace" programmers. What you're seeing here is that there are a FEW programming jobs, but the majority of them are maintenance ... someone to keep the servers going, or clean up after they let go the development team on Government projects. It may be different in the midwest or Texas area, but it seems like most places on the West coast are in a profound slump.
It's a known problem, and one I need to fix. It will work with IE because that browser handles white space in query strings differently from others.
Thanks for the comments about Beginning XML. I'm wrapping up a chapter for Professional Schema by Wrox, if you liked the other one.
Self education is a critical part of staying employed in this industry, and is something that I've seen a lot of people have problems with. I look upon any job that I'm in anymore as being temporary, even if I'm getting a salary as a "permanent" employee. The projects that I'm working on will change, the boss that I work for will change, the chance that the company itself will disappear overnight is always a possibility. By handling your education yourself, you basically remove that particular hold that your current employer may be able to use later as leverage to keep you either from advancing or moving elsewhere. Moreover, you can keep the reference material this way, and you can claim them as education expenses on your tax forms.
Microsoft has a long history of creating "innovative" solutions to web problems. It's instructive to look at where they've gone:
...
1) Marquee - scrolling letters, to replace : Still supported, but unused.
2) HTML+TIME - multimedia scheduling language, to compete against SMIL: Still supported, but little used.
3) Alternative CSS - Developed an early CSS implementations and built on it: Fairly widely accepted, although customer complaints have made IE6 CSS more consistent with the W3C version.
4) Agents - Animated figures: Bob (Enough said).
5) VML - Vector markup language: Used extensively in Powerpoint for the web, losing ground elsewhere to SVG.
6) Chromeffects - Integrated 2D/3D browsing for the web: cool concept, but died from too heavy a system requirement.
7) Behaviors - Using external scripting to make HTML extension tags live: Used in specialized apps, but browser and platform differences make them useless on the web.
8) Smart Tags - Interesting concept, browser specific, even in beta many managers and webmasters are disabling them
Smart Tags are actually not a bad technology, but keep in mind that their primary purpose is not to make the web better, but to provide yet another bell and whistle to market Office XP. The focus of the W3C right now is on XML related issues, and something like this is so far off their radar that it's likely never to get on. Mozilla is more interested in developing and promoting XUL, Opera, and Konquerer are positioning themselves as close to W3C as possible; between these factors and the large installed base of IE4/IE5.x, smart tags will die of attrition long before their host platform makes any real splash.
I've been through three tech recessions, the first back in 86-7, 91-92 and 95-96. During the first, colleges that had been pushing computer grads were suddenly getting push-back from the industry saying there wasn't any more need for them, that CS was a mature field ... then networked PCs became the vogue and all of a sudden industry was screaming for more workers. In 1991 a general recession hit the US, mild by historical standards, but enough the you were seeing PostDocs working at KMart.
In 1995 there was a period where the multimedia and game industries collapsed - too many startups, too much anticipated demand that never materialized, too much hype.
We've just ended the first great Internet push. Someone was complaining here about those companies that were hiring HTML programmers for top dollar at that time but didn't really understand that at the time HTML programmers were what was needed. Many of those HTML programmers went on to become senior web programmers, webmasters, sysadmins and IT managers.
The point in all this is very simple - being in IT means keeping one eye out on what is coming down the pipe and taking the time to learn it. Note that this means that it is your responsibility to stay current, not your employer's (if you are still employed). This is unfortunate, and is yet another indication of the breakdowns going in business, since for many, many years, a good employer knew that keeping their staff current with technology would give them a competitive edge.
However, pertinant to this discussion, the onus now falls on you; take evening classes, set up a spare computer in the back room and play with new tech, or even old tech that may be experiencing a resurgence (Perl/CGI is expanding, for instance, and Python is enjoying something of a renaissance). Learn everything you can about XML, then learn some more, even if you're a C++ or Java programmer; we're fast moving to a time when every stream that an object produces or consumes will be in XML, and the more you know about Web Services, distributed programming, database to XML conversion and so forth, the easier it is for you to jump from IIS to Apache to WebSphere to whatever.
No one is going to hire a web developer in this day and age, because too many managers have assumed (incorrectly) that because the Dotcom bandwagon burst, the Internet is no longer important. It is, but not for serving up web pages; the demand that is beginning to grow is for on demand weblications, custom, in-house, and relying more on component development skills than on the ability to to build large-scale stand-alone apps.
Diversify your skill set; deep knowledge is wonderful, and from the recruiters on this board deep knowledge may be desirable, but on the flip side the reason that you get so many C++ "experts" that couldn't tell a virtual interface from virtual reality is because those same companies don't want seasoned veterans who can command higher wages, they want cheap but skilled labor. If you have secondary or tertiary skills, then you can walk into situations where you can use those skills, though with the realization that you won't (and shouldn't) get the same pay as for your primary skills.
Finally, realize that a company is not your friend, mother, nanny, or benefactor. Companies exist to make money. The more enlightened ones treat their employees well, but enlightenment tends to go out the window when the stocks are tumbling. Most managers have a need to fill and will get people to work for them to fulfill that need, and if they can get away with it, will jettison that person the moment the need no longer exists. This is what the Just-In-Time economy is all about, unfortunately.
Finally, diversify. Get into writing. Start a side business that has nothing to do with programming. If you're a marketer, spend some time learning about code. So many of the people that entered into the dot com market directly out of college have tied their entire identity to their jobs, and are only now beginning to understand that they are not programmers, or marketers, or managers, but people, with creative impulses that were stifled to get into the IT rat race.
-- Kurt Cagle
-- Author, Professional XSL, Wrox
Okay, wading into the fray here. I've written three books on Visual Basic. For what it is - a RAD tool for developing GUIs and components, it's okay. Not great, but no worse than most Java implementations. I actually used to do a lot of prototyping in VB because I could see in a matter of hours what would take me days to do in C++, though its clunky distribution process, poor multimedia support and bizarre event handling (most basic objects do not support mouseover and mouseout, for instance) made it less than ideal for building production level tools. I do almost all of my GUI work in this day and age using XML, XSLT, JavaScript and servlets, typically against the IE5 browser. I like having VB around to give me a quick look at a COM object's classes, but found recently that when I picked up a new machine and couldn't find my VB installer disks, I didn't really need it. By the way, VB.NET is a monstrosity. It tries unsuccessfully to be Java, it loses all of the best features of VB and keeps many of the worst, and it is not even remotely compatible with anything written before it. Even the hard core VB enthusiasts that I know (and yes, they are expert VB programmers, and most also know C++, Java, and a host of other languages, thank you) just grimace when they have to talk about VB.NET publicly. -- Kurt Cagle -- Author, XML Developers Handbook, Sybex and VB6 Gold Book, Coriolis