I am 42. Stayed technical, became a consultant 10 years ago. Over the last 20 years since I graduated from university, I have been a developer, architect, technical team lead, project manager and director. I came back to coding, because that's what I enjoy best, and because in I.T. Projects, there are always far more openings for developers than for architects or managers.
I do not worry that I will get kicked out of the profession for being too old when I reach 50. First of all, there are not enough younger programmers coming out of universities to replace us, and also the profession has been steadily growing older over the last decade. Yes, I lost a few contracts to development teams in India, but not all projects can be sent off shore.
Yes, as a consultant, there is always the possibility that I lose my contract and that I have to find another one. But as a consultant I make far more money than a full-time employee, so even if I don't work three or four months per year (never happened) I would still come out better than with a salary.
Also, let's say I am three months without a job before I find another contract, well I don't really lose 3 months salary. I would have lost 50% of it to income tax, plus work related expenses such as commuting. SO three months off is more like one and a half month pay loss.
As for office politics, I learned to not let it affect me. My responsibility as a consultant is to provide advice to my client, and then I keep a copy of the email. Sometimes a manager or architect will never believe their solution sucks until the team has spent six months on it and it crashes and burns in front of their eyes. As for myself, I will have spent six months working on a soon to be dead solution, but the only way for me to keep my sanity is to remind myself that I am paid by the hour, so like sex, the longer the better.
As for not having a house right now, this might just be a blessing for you. It means you are not shackled to high mortgage payments. It probably means that you could more easily move to another part of the country to get a job if you ever need to.
Being strategic about your next career move is wise. Worrying about all the bad things that may happen in the future is not going to help you, so you might just as well stop worrying and enjoy life.
Every year I hibernate my summer house. Here is how I do it:
0) Purchase a mechanical pump for about 10$ at the hardware store which plugs into an electrical drill for power. Connect two short hose normally used for connecting your washer.
1) Purchase 25 gallons of plumbing anti-freeze liquid that's normally used for RVs and boats. The stuff is not poison, so there's no problem injecting it into your water system.
2) Turn off the hot water tank heaters 3) Close the main water faucet by which the water enters the house. 4) Empty the hot water tank
5) If possible, disconnect the water tank from the rest of your system by connecting the incoming (cold) water pipe to the outgoing (hot) water pipe. This way you have a closed circuit.
6) Connect the pump to the external water faucet that's outside the house, or to the water faucet connected to the washer inside the house, and have someone inside the house open one faucet; start injecting anti-freeze by activating the drill which runs the pump until the person inside sees the red anti-freeze liquid coming out of the faucet. Then close the faucet, and repeat for the next faucet, until all faucets have been spitting out anti-freeze.
7) Flush each toilet bowl, and pour one gallon of anti-freeze in the tank and in the bowl. 8) Pour some anti-freeze in the drains of all sinks, the shower, bath, etc.
Doing all that should not take you more than a few hours. You might need walkie-talkies or two cell phones to communicate with the person who is helping you inside the house.
Personnally, I turn off all electricity inside the house, except for the refrigerator. Refrigerators which stay close for too long stink.
I have never had problems with sensitive electronics stying in the cold like that, but if you are worried about this, you can always keep a little heating inside the house so that it stays above freezing temperature.
As for electric black outs, it will take your house - depending on the quality of the isolation - between one and two days before it loses its warmth, so you have time to gt back to the house in case of a power failure and install a gasoline power generator on the outside of the house that will connect to electrical heaters inside the house. Do not forget that propane heaters are not meant for indoor use and you could die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
As other slashdotters mentioned, it's good to have a neighbor checking out the house once in a while.
Underestimating a competitor is never a smart move. Remember that the U.S. auto industry was laughing at the first japanese cars to reach our continent. The japanese eventually gave them a good run for their money.
How much bandwidth would be required simply to launch MS-Word? I think I`d rather fire up OpenOffice from a USB or CD drive rather than having to wait for MS-Word to download from the internet every time I want to use it. There are a maybe a hundred people on the floor here using MS-Word constantly. And they pretty much all come in to work at 9am in the morning. If they were to all download Ms-Word at the same time every morning, the local network would stop to a grinding halt at that time.
The only thing I can see standing in the way of
better languages taking over the web application
sphere is the fact that the decision making
process is based more on fame than on qualities.
Actually the decision to use one language is more based on availability of information and of skilled resources in the
workforce that are trained on this language, coupled with
good development tools (Eclipse) and the availability of
existing, reusable code. Nobody builds projects from scratch nowadays. I personnally believe in evolution, not revolution.
A few weeks ago I purchased the DLink 108MBPS 802.11g router plus two cards; one for my laptop, one for my wife's desktop computer. I am very satisfied, btw.
The justification for the higher speed in my case is the ability to remotely print documents and share files between the two computers.
Hikers typically get lost because they strayed away from the established path. How can you track their location if they have been walking for two days in the wilderness out of the beaten path?
You are at a point in your career where what you put in your resume will greatly affect your value on the market for years to come.
I advise you to choose the job that will bring the most value in your resume. Invest in yourself. The first experience in your resume is as important as your education for any recruiter.
The same kind of philosophical question can and will be raised about cloned humans. I agree with the previous poster that your brains, which holds your memories, your emotions, intelligence and personality) would determine your identity, and so each clone having a distinct combination of those can be considered a unique individual ven if he/she is perfectly identical both physically and genetically to another individual.
I love Mozilla and use it everyday both at home and at work. But I need to keep using Microsoft Outlook for booking meetings, sending/receiving emails (MS Mail server), and I need to use IE in order to view several web sites which don't render properly in Mozilla.
Franckly, I don't care if Mozilla implements W3C standards anymore, the tool would be a lot more useful to me if it just rendered correctly the web sites that were designed with IE in mind. web site developers can't produce several versions of their DHTML just to please the minority who use Mozilla, so they pick the current market leader (IE) as a target platform, and I can't blame them for doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
Illcar,
I am 42. Stayed technical, became a consultant 10 years ago. Over the last 20 years since I graduated from university, I have been a developer, architect, technical team lead, project manager and director. I came back to coding, because that's what I enjoy best, and because in I.T. Projects, there are always far more openings for developers than for architects or managers.
I do not worry that I will get kicked out of the profession for being too old when I reach 50. First of all, there are not enough younger programmers coming out of universities to replace us, and also the profession has been steadily growing older over the last decade. Yes, I lost a few contracts to development teams in India, but not all projects can be sent off shore.
Yes, as a consultant, there is always the possibility that I lose my contract and that I have to find another one. But as a consultant I make far more money than a full-time employee, so even if I don't work three or four months per year (never happened) I would still come out better than with a salary.
Also, let's say I am three months without a job before I find another contract, well I don't really lose 3 months salary. I would have lost 50% of it to income tax, plus work related expenses such as commuting. SO three months off is more like one and a half month pay loss.
As for office politics, I learned to not let it affect me. My responsibility as a consultant is to provide advice to my client, and then I keep a copy of the email. Sometimes a manager or architect will never believe their solution sucks until the team has spent six months on it and it crashes and burns in front of their eyes. As for myself, I will have spent six months working on a soon to be dead solution, but the only way for me to keep my sanity is to remind myself that I am paid by the hour, so like sex, the longer the better.
As for not having a house right now, this might just be a blessing for you. It means you are not shackled to high mortgage payments. It probably means that you could more easily move to another part of the country to get a job if you ever need to.
Being strategic about your next career move is wise. Worrying about all the bad things that may happen in the future is not going to help you, so you might just as well stop worrying and enjoy life.
Sincerely,
Pascal
Every year I hibernate my summer house. Here is how I do it:
0) Purchase a mechanical pump for about 10$ at the hardware store which plugs into
an electrical drill for power. Connect two short hose normally used for connecting your washer.
1) Purchase 25 gallons of plumbing anti-freeze liquid that's normally used for RVs and boats. The stuff is not poison, so there's no problem injecting it into your water system.
2) Turn off the hot water tank heaters
3) Close the main water faucet by which the water enters the house.
4) Empty the hot water tank
5) If possible, disconnect the water tank from the rest of your system by connecting the incoming (cold) water pipe to the outgoing (hot) water pipe. This way you have a closed circuit.
6) Connect the pump to the external water faucet that's outside the house, or to the water faucet connected to the washer inside the house, and have someone inside the house open one faucet; start injecting anti-freeze by activating the drill which runs the pump until the person inside sees the red anti-freeze liquid coming out of the faucet. Then close the faucet, and repeat for the next faucet, until all faucets have been spitting out anti-freeze.
7) Flush each toilet bowl, and pour one gallon of anti-freeze in the tank and in the bowl.
8) Pour some anti-freeze in the drains of all sinks, the shower, bath, etc.
Doing all that should not take you more than a few hours. You might need walkie-talkies or two cell phones to communicate with the person who is helping you inside the house.
Personnally, I turn off all electricity inside the house, except for the refrigerator. Refrigerators which stay close for too long stink.
I have never had problems with sensitive electronics stying in the cold like that, but if you are worried about this, you can always keep a little heating inside the house so that it stays above freezing temperature.
As for electric black outs, it will take your house - depending on the quality of the isolation - between one and two days before it loses its warmth, so you have time to gt back to the house in case of a power failure and install a gasoline power generator on the outside of the house that will connect to electrical heaters inside the house. Do not forget that propane heaters are not meant for indoor use and you could die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
As other slashdotters mentioned, it's good to have a neighbor checking out the house once in a while.
Good Luck
Underestimating a competitor is never a smart move. Remember that the U.S. auto industry was laughing at the first japanese cars to reach our continent. The japanese eventually gave them a good run for their money.
Earth's moon is drifting away from us
Of course it is! It made news in 1975:
http://www.space1999.org
Of course, there was a bug in Windows Calc, it was 2.01 - 2.0 = 0 (If I remember correctly).
Not exactly, but close enough.
Soon enough we`ll have to board airplanes bare naked, and our luggage will be shipped separately through UPS...
Stem Cells Cure: Paralyzed Rats
Isn't it ironic that DNF stands for Did Not Finish in racing circles?
MS Office a web app?
How much bandwidth would be required simply to launch MS-Word? I think I`d rather fire up OpenOffice from a USB or CD drive rather than having to wait for MS-Word to download from the internet every time I want to use it. There are a maybe a hundred people on the floor here using MS-Word constantly. And they pretty much all come in to work at 9am in the morning. If they were to all download Ms-Word at the same time every morning, the local network would stop to a grinding halt at that time.
The only thing I can see standing in the way of better languages taking over the web application sphere is the fact that the decision making process is based more on fame than on qualities.
Actually the decision to use one language is more based on availability of information and of skilled resources in the workforce that are trained on this language, coupled with good development tools (Eclipse) and the availability of existing, reusable code. Nobody builds projects from scratch nowadays. I personnally believe in evolution, not revolution.
Why didn`t they build it on the ground then?
> He should run for President.
Isn't he Canadian? Can't run for Prez then.
playing:i tbingo/
http://www.perkigoth.com/home/kermit/stuff/bullsh
playing http://www.bullshitbingo.com/
2GB you say? Time to write a hotmail filesystem module for Linux :)
The justification for the higher speed in my case is the ability to remotely print documents and share files between the two computers.
Hikers typically get lost because they strayed away from the established path. How can you track their location if they have been walking for two days in the wilderness out of the beaten path?
I advise you to choose the job that will bring the most value in your resume. Invest in yourself. The first experience in your resume is as important as your education for any recruiter.
Good Luck
I wonder if the creator if the Internet has something to do with this?
Seven times the speed of sound? How does that compare to the Millenium Falcon going at hyperspeed?
Try J&R near city hall.
The same kind of philosophical question can and will be raised about cloned humans. I agree with the previous poster that your brains, which holds your memories, your emotions, intelligence and personality) would determine your identity, and so each clone having a distinct combination of those can be considered a unique individual ven if he/she is perfectly identical both physically and genetically to another individual.
Franckly, I don't care if Mozilla implements W3C standards anymore, the tool would be a lot more useful to me if it just rendered correctly the web sites that were designed with IE in mind. web site developers can't produce several versions of their DHTML just to please the minority who use Mozilla, so they pick the current market leader (IE) as a target platform, and I can't blame them for doing that.
No, they copied it from SCO!
If the meeting starts with an Org chart, get the hell out.