A proprietary structure just ends up reinventing a lot of database wheels like concurrency, backups, change logging, etc., and has unfamiliar access protocols, often mirroring the "navigational databases" of the 1960's.
Not only that, but there is now a whole new layer of bugs to contend with. What should a person do when.NET spits back the equivalent of "An error just occurred. Have a nice day"? Spend the next two weeks studying all the symptoms, so that Microsoft Support will actually give a damn?
This is why I prefer to advocate simpler solutions. When bugs can occur at every level of the system from the OS to the database to the application to the client, why do so many people jump on every opportunity to add more layers, frameworks, and APIs?
You know, the biggest argument against CGI was performance, yet why does the performance of modern "web applications" suck so much? What happened? Stick the CGI language module of choice into Apache (even FastCGI, perhaps), and the result is instantly understandable architecture (webserver, HTML and CGI, database, done.). Am I a dinosaur for advocating something that works and can be learned by new employees in a matter of weeks not months?
Once you deduct income tax, SS tax, health insurance, business insurance, and travel expenses, the net would only be around $110k - $120k. It's not as unrealistic a picture as you painted.
It is unrealistic to expect $100K+ outside of New York City or Silicon Valley. The cost-of-living index in NYC, for example, is something like 2.6, where the national average is 1.0. For most of the USA, it would be very hard to get a job for more than $60K per year, unless it is a genuine engineering job or a high-level department lead position. There is also probably a surplus of untalented college graduates from the boom-time, who will probably displace expensive experienced employees. Basically, I'm pretty convinced that high salaries are for the lucky or entrenched only, and that very average salaries are all that computer people should expect, any more. Until real engineering is put into "software engineering" (so that software is no longer a complete joke), I don't expect salaries to go back up, again.
Don't let these toxin-eating microbes get anywhere near western Washington state! Remember the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark? They'd need to bring in even more microbes to clean up after the first ones.
In short, open source software is sustainable--it's pretty much inevitable in an efficient market.
Score: 10, Understanding why Microsoft's days are numbered:)
I think the only software products that will continue to hold out as proprietary software in the long term will be CAD/CAM, where the complexity from starting design to performing manufacturing is too complex and expensive to be commoditized, yet. One piece of evidence for this, is that the big CAD software vendors are still pushing features into their products at an impressive rate while dropping prices only modestly.
Another thing to consider is that a stereotypical teenager might have observed his stereotypical father driving for 16 years before being allowed to touch the steering wheel. While the teenager hasn't been paying attention to the mechanics of driving all this time, he is developing a great deal of familiarity with the car.
This is a very good point.
Another question that won't be answered until too many companies each waste $4 million on "web enabled" technology: Why does it require practically no formal training and certainly nothing like the Professional Engineer apprenticeships and exams for people to be "qualified" to work with computers on a professional basis? It seems that every project I've seen has people learning how to tie their shoes, figuratively, every two years when the "next big thing" comes out or employee turnover makes the whole office look like a nursury school.
Remember, this is the general public that doesn't understand why a monopoly in general-use operating systems is a Bad Thing (tm).
Then, why do they know enough to be suspicious of monopolies in other industries? If they went to buy a car, and they had no choice but to buy, for example, a Ford Pinto, Ford Streaky Clean windsheild wipers, Ford Slippery When Wet tires, and Ford Big Bang gasoline they would throw a fit that would make a 2-year-old envious.
My theory is that humans are very susceptible to user interfaces. All cars are basically the same, all screwdrivers are basically the same, etc., but there are enough differences between MS Windows and Motif CDE to make people uncomfortable. One thing Microsoft does well is shove a somewhat-consistent UI down everyone's throats.
Why is it that the general idea of most people that how much you get paid is directly related to how much effort you put into the job?
Factor in age, too. Highschool students have no credentials and don't know any better. A 30-year old getting paid minimum wage is bound to have other issues than "just looking for a summer job."
Minimum wage is barely enough to pay rent on a two-bedroom apartment and eat PB+J sandwiches for every meal. In many cities, you'd even have to go without the sandwiches. So, we have social democrats to come to the "rescue" and artificially prop up these people in what should be untenable situations.
That is why Star Trek is bad scifi* - the capabilities of all its technological artifacts change from episode to episode, and they can always "technobabble" their way out of any situation.
I don't think Star Trek was ever intended to be great Sci Fi. The original series pushed the then-modern social envelope more than anything. It really wasn't until the 1990's that it decomposed into a politically-correct serial.
Or Christian Broadcasting Network, which is much more frightening. If anyone would think it is morally justifyable to fix an election to push their agenda, it would probably be religious goons like our friends at CBN. 2004 newspaper: "Only 30 million people go to the polls, yet GWB wins by 84 million votes!"
'"To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful," Professor Jones said.'
I'm not suprised by this at all. Problems, even very big glaring problems, get stuck in software early on due to naive design decisions, but they persist due to management's unwillingness to either admit the problem is there or put forth the resources to start again from scratch. The result is software that doesn't deliver, cost five times more than if they had started over, and everyone involved feels dirty for having been a part of it.
All the truely qualified software engineers are not unemployed. If you have the skills to back up what's written on your resume, there really is no problem finding a job.
No, this really isn't true. Sending a resume to a company is like playing the lottery, due to the rediculous number of resumes they are getting, many of which are from perfectly competent people. Without a genuine personal contact within the company (relative, friend, former co-worker, etc.) the chances of getting noticed and interviewed is probably one in hundreds or one in thousands.
Even people who have 4 year degrees from well-respected universities, have excellent references, and have solid work experience are having trouble getting interviews. Also, there is still tremendous amounts of "religion" in IT (from all sides), where interviews can go extremely well or very badly, depending on how well a person meshes with the interviewers' own bigotry or often-fallacious preconceptions of what makes a person good at whatever the job is.
And, to be on topic, the "engineers" behind the Diebold system are very likely very young and hired at nominal entry-level salaries. All the mistakes mentioned are probably due to the "engineers" learning about the technologies they are using the week before employing them. Their project environment is probably one, where three years later and three years more experienced they look back and think, "I got paid for that?!?"
See what you can accomplish when there are no women clouding your thoughts? 8-)
Actually, some parents believe this is a good argument for single-sex education. I suppose they feel more comfortable with their kids screwing screws and not their teammates.
The world would truly be a better place if we all rode 21" lawnmowers to work each day. Put a bar stool attached to the deck with two strings for steering, and the congestion problems due to the three wasted seats in every car will disappear. Also, highway maintaince costs would plummet as the roads could simply be well-graded grass paths, and each and every driver would be doing their part to keep the grass in check.
Also, I think everyone riding to work on a barstool attached to a mower is pretty darn funny.
The Terminator movies really do not have to be prophetic. Why is it that there are people who strive to develop technology that makes other people's jobs obselete? I understand that efficiency can be a motive, but it has to stop somewhere. What happens when even white collar and academic jobs are automated? Financial analysis could surely be done better by a computer. Computers could program themselves, one day. What then? Will we all become monks living in a compound in the mountains striving for enlightenment while the robots toil away? Or will civilization melt down in to a hedonistic dog-eat-dog world of terribly poor people?
Bascially "becase we can" is not a terribly good excuse for automating away people's quality of life, unless there is some magical pot of gold just past the horizon that I cannot see.
I shouldn't need a book to create Java applications for a mobile device.
You know, working for a living is also hard. Why not just sit back and let those welfare checks, food stamps, and magical tax returns roll in. Did you know there are people who get back more money from the IRS than they put in? It's called Earned Income Credit. Check it out.
I think the technology industry has led itself into a delusional state, where marketing is somehow reality. Too many people start pet projects thinking, "Gee, it would be neat if we had a flexible database system for tracking widgets...", and end up learning millions of dollars later that hiring new college graduates was a mistake and specifying buzzwords like "web enabled" just made the whole thing into a useless mess.
One self-inflicted reason why finding a new job is so hard, is that so many of the available slots out there are working for shitty pork-barrel what-if me-too projects that serve only to make the developers cynical and depressed. Where are the people who know what they are doing??? I'm getting a feeling they are holding onto their jobs and not letting go--hence no open slots:(
we'd have enough environmentally friendly biodegradable waste to restore a rainforest somewhere.
Actually, there would be so much noxious evil in that waste to rival plutonium in its ability to kill anything it touches. Think two-headed turtles near nuclear facilities is bad? Imagine a 450-ton evil nine-headed (with the faces of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer) kraken ascending from a swamp destroying one-third of a continent before the world's militaries takes it down. The area surrounding the kraken's grave site will be so polluted that no live will thrive within 150 miles for another 145,000 years.
See, this is what happens when we try to screw around with nature?
So I can buy some overpriced movie tickets! Boo MPAA ! (+5 Anti-MPAA)
Well, the MPAA derserves what they get when they make taking a family to the movies as expensive as a week's worth of groceries or two new tires. I haven't been to a full-priced movie in years (saw Star Wars and LOTR in matinee mid-week or at the $2 cheapie theater). Movie theaters suck, anyways, when some piece-of-trash teenagers starts rapping in the front row and someone has to get an usher to kick them out.
..."Nobody's forcing you to live in a city that requires surveillance cameras in every bedroom and bathroom."...
Very true. I saw on the news that shanty with a tarp used by Eric Rudolph, and it ain't so bad. Add some flowers to the thatched walls, and you've got a regular big-city condo! Cities are overrated, anyway.
Sarcasm aside, I think we really are forced to live where the work is, lest we regress back to sustinence farming or hunting for survival. If regular people are feeling that their government is marginalizing them away from a lifestyle of adequate food and good health, then we've got a real big problem on our hands.
Whats the cost to Australia of all that money going to the USA when some of the money could go to employee people in Australia to make OSS practical for all aplications?
I agree very much with your point, but the U.S. has a severe trade deficit that means the world is generally sucking money out of the U.S. Microsoft is a pretty small part of that pie.
You know, software is probably one of the last industry that has a trade surplus in favor of the U.S. When software trade goes red, then all we will have left is shitty schools and Country music. Yup, that's it for us, when the last radio station finally becomes Country (make it stop!!!!! aaarrrggghhh!!!).
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A proprietary structure just ends up reinventing a lot of database wheels like concurrency, backups, change logging, etc., and has unfamiliar access protocols, often mirroring the "navigational databases" of the 1960's.
.NET spits back the equivalent of "An error just occurred. Have a nice day"? Spend the next two weeks studying all the symptoms, so that Microsoft Support will actually give a damn?
Not only that, but there is now a whole new layer of bugs to contend with. What should a person do when
This is why I prefer to advocate simpler solutions. When bugs can occur at every level of the system from the OS to the database to the application to the client, why do so many people jump on every opportunity to add more layers, frameworks, and APIs?
You know, the biggest argument against CGI was performance, yet why does the performance of modern "web applications" suck so much? What happened? Stick the CGI language module of choice into Apache (even FastCGI, perhaps), and the result is instantly understandable architecture (webserver, HTML and CGI, database, done.). Am I a dinosaur for advocating something that works and can be learned by new employees in a matter of weeks not months?
Once you deduct income tax, SS tax, health insurance, business insurance, and travel expenses, the net would only be around $110k - $120k. It's not as unrealistic a picture as you painted.
It is unrealistic to expect $100K+ outside of New York City or Silicon Valley. The cost-of-living index in NYC, for example, is something like 2.6, where the national average is 1.0. For most of the USA, it would be very hard to get a job for more than $60K per year, unless it is a genuine engineering job or a high-level department lead position. There is also probably a surplus of untalented college graduates from the boom-time, who will probably displace expensive experienced employees. Basically, I'm pretty convinced that high salaries are for the lucky or entrenched only, and that very average salaries are all that computer people should expect, any more. Until real engineering is put into "software engineering" (so that software is no longer a complete joke), I don't expect salaries to go back up, again.
Don't let these toxin-eating microbes get anywhere near western Washington state! Remember the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark? They'd need to bring in even more microbes to clean up after the first ones.
...Blake's 7 societies.... ...these are people who monitor the every footstep of these actors....
I'm sure there is a psychological term for this. And, whatever complex convoluted word it is, I offer this translation to us lay people: "not well".
In short, open source software is sustainable--it's pretty much inevitable in an efficient market.
:)
Score: 10, Understanding why Microsoft's days are numbered
I think the only software products that will continue to hold out as proprietary software in the long term will be CAD/CAM, where the complexity from starting design to performing manufacturing is too complex and expensive to be commoditized, yet. One piece of evidence for this, is that the big CAD software vendors are still pushing features into their products at an impressive rate while dropping prices only modestly.
Another thing to consider is that a stereotypical teenager might have observed his stereotypical father driving for 16 years before being allowed to touch the steering wheel. While the teenager hasn't been paying attention to the mechanics of driving all this time, he is developing a great deal of familiarity with the car.
This is a very good point.
Another question that won't be answered until too many companies each waste $4 million on "web enabled" technology: Why does it require practically no formal training and certainly nothing like the Professional Engineer apprenticeships and exams for people to be "qualified" to work with computers on a professional basis? It seems that every project I've seen has people learning how to tie their shoes, figuratively, every two years when the "next big thing" comes out or employee turnover makes the whole office look like a nursury school.
If I had to go it alone, being a Unix System Admin, I wouldn't dream of charging less than $100/hr, and mostly likely closer to twice that.
And you would probably have no clients. Do you really and truly think people doing sysadmin contract work get paid $300,000 per year???
It seems that $40 to $50 per hour is more reasonable, anymore (based on what a livable salary would be after expenses).
Remember, this is the general public that doesn't understand why a monopoly in general-use operating systems is a Bad Thing (tm).
Then, why do they know enough to be suspicious of monopolies in other industries? If they went to buy a car, and they had no choice but to buy, for example, a Ford Pinto, Ford Streaky Clean windsheild wipers, Ford Slippery When Wet tires, and Ford Big Bang gasoline they would throw a fit that would make a 2-year-old envious.
My theory is that humans are very susceptible to user interfaces. All cars are basically the same, all screwdrivers are basically the same, etc., but there are enough differences between MS Windows and Motif CDE to make people uncomfortable. One thing Microsoft does well is shove a somewhat-consistent UI down everyone's throats.
Why is it that the general idea of most people that how much you get paid is directly related to how much effort you put into the job?
Factor in age, too. Highschool students have no credentials and don't know any better. A 30-year old getting paid minimum wage is bound to have other issues than "just looking for a summer job."
Minimum wage is barely enough to pay rent on a two-bedroom apartment and eat PB+J sandwiches for every meal. In many cities, you'd even have to go without the sandwiches. So, we have social democrats to come to the "rescue" and artificially prop up these people in what should be untenable situations.
in this anti-galaxy, would there be anti-comedians? Would everyone's boss be an anti-asshole? I'm getting dizzy...
That is why Star Trek is bad scifi* - the capabilities of all its technological artifacts change from episode to episode, and they can always "technobabble" their way out of any situation.
I don't think Star Trek was ever intended to be great Sci Fi. The original series pushed the then-modern social envelope more than anything. It really wasn't until the 1990's that it decomposed into a politically-correct serial.
If there's more votes in any race than people who passed through the doorway, you've got a problem.
What about changed votes?
For every problem solved, there lies another one in hiding...
It IS interesting to note how many dollars have flowed between Diebold and the Republican party...
Actually, it was simply a matter of a Republican party official accidentally getting an extra $234 million from a Diebold ATM one afternoon...
Cowboyneal for office!
Or Christian Broadcasting Network, which is much more frightening. If anyone would think it is morally justifyable to fix an election to push their agenda, it would probably be religious goons like our friends at CBN. 2004 newspaper: "Only 30 million people go to the polls, yet GWB wins by 84 million votes!"
'"To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful," Professor Jones said.'
I'm not suprised by this at all. Problems, even very big glaring problems, get stuck in software early on due to naive design decisions, but they persist due to management's unwillingness to either admit the problem is there or put forth the resources to start again from scratch. The result is software that doesn't deliver, cost five times more than if they had started over, and everyone involved feels dirty for having been a part of it.
All the truely qualified software engineers are not unemployed. If you have the skills to back up what's written on your resume, there really is no problem finding a job.
No, this really isn't true. Sending a resume to a company is like playing the lottery, due to the rediculous number of resumes they are getting, many of which are from perfectly competent people. Without a genuine personal contact within the company (relative, friend, former co-worker, etc.) the chances of getting noticed and interviewed is probably one in hundreds or one in thousands.
Even people who have 4 year degrees from well-respected universities, have excellent references, and have solid work experience are having trouble getting interviews. Also, there is still tremendous amounts of "religion" in IT (from all sides), where interviews can go extremely well or very badly, depending on how well a person meshes with the interviewers' own bigotry or often-fallacious preconceptions of what makes a person good at whatever the job is.
And, to be on topic, the "engineers" behind the Diebold system are very likely very young and hired at nominal entry-level salaries. All the mistakes mentioned are probably due to the "engineers" learning about the technologies they are using the week before employing them. Their project environment is probably one, where three years later and three years more experienced they look back and think, "I got paid for that?!?"
See what you can accomplish when there are no women clouding your thoughts? 8-)
Actually, some parents believe this is a good argument for single-sex education. I suppose they feel more comfortable with their kids screwing screws and not their teammates.
Try riding that across country.
The world would truly be a better place if we all rode 21" lawnmowers to work each day. Put a bar stool attached to the deck with two strings for steering, and the congestion problems due to the three wasted seats in every car will disappear. Also, highway maintaince costs would plummet as the roads could simply be well-graded grass paths, and each and every driver would be doing their part to keep the grass in check.
Also, I think everyone riding to work on a barstool attached to a mower is pretty darn funny.
The Terminator movies really do not have to be prophetic. Why is it that there are people who strive to develop technology that makes other people's jobs obselete? I understand that efficiency can be a motive, but it has to stop somewhere. What happens when even white collar and academic jobs are automated? Financial analysis could surely be done better by a computer. Computers could program themselves, one day. What then? Will we all become monks living in a compound in the mountains striving for enlightenment while the robots toil away? Or will civilization melt down in to a hedonistic dog-eat-dog world of terribly poor people?
Bascially "becase we can" is not a terribly good excuse for automating away people's quality of life, unless there is some magical pot of gold just past the horizon that I cannot see.
I shouldn't need a book to create Java applications for a mobile device.
:(
You know, working for a living is also hard. Why not just sit back and let those welfare checks, food stamps, and magical tax returns roll in. Did you know there are people who get back more money from the IRS than they put in? It's called Earned Income Credit. Check it out.
I think the technology industry has led itself into a delusional state, where marketing is somehow reality. Too many people start pet projects thinking, "Gee, it would be neat if we had a flexible database system for tracking widgets...", and end up learning millions of dollars later that hiring new college graduates was a mistake and specifying buzzwords like "web enabled" just made the whole thing into a useless mess.
One self-inflicted reason why finding a new job is so hard, is that so many of the available slots out there are working for shitty pork-barrel what-if me-too projects that serve only to make the developers cynical and depressed. Where are the people who know what they are doing??? I'm getting a feeling they are holding onto their jobs and not letting go--hence no open slots
we'd have enough environmentally friendly biodegradable waste to restore a rainforest somewhere.
Actually, there would be so much noxious evil in that waste to rival plutonium in its ability to kill anything it touches. Think two-headed turtles near nuclear facilities is bad? Imagine a 450-ton evil nine-headed (with the faces of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer) kraken ascending from a swamp destroying one-third of a continent before the world's militaries takes it down. The area surrounding the kraken's grave site will be so polluted that no live will thrive within 150 miles for another 145,000 years.
See, this is what happens when we try to screw around with nature?
So I can buy some overpriced movie tickets! Boo MPAA ! (+5 Anti-MPAA)
Well, the MPAA derserves what they get when they make taking a family to the movies as expensive as a week's worth of groceries or two new tires. I haven't been to a full-priced movie in years (saw Star Wars and LOTR in matinee mid-week or at the $2 cheapie theater). Movie theaters suck, anyways, when some piece-of-trash teenagers starts rapping in the front row and someone has to get an usher to kick them out.
Don't go messing with the technology of your passport. You could end up in the Federal pen.
Actually, it's: Don't get caught messing with the technology of your passport.
Now that it's digital, not getting caught is easier than ever before.
..."Nobody's forcing you to live in a city that requires surveillance cameras in every bedroom and bathroom."...
Very true. I saw on the news that shanty with a tarp used by Eric Rudolph, and it ain't so bad. Add some flowers to the thatched walls, and you've got a regular big-city condo! Cities are overrated, anyway.
Sarcasm aside, I think we really are forced to live where the work is, lest we regress back to sustinence farming or hunting for survival. If regular people are feeling that their government is marginalizing them away from a lifestyle of adequate food and good health, then we've got a real big problem on our hands.
Whats the cost to Australia of all that money going to the USA when some of the money could go to employee people in Australia to make OSS practical for all aplications?
I agree very much with your point, but the U.S. has a severe trade deficit that means the world is generally sucking money out of the U.S. Microsoft is a pretty small part of that pie.
You know, software is probably one of the last industry that has a trade surplus in favor of the U.S. When software trade goes red, then all we will have left is shitty schools and Country music. Yup, that's it for us, when the last radio station finally becomes Country (make it stop!!!!! aaarrrggghhh!!!).