Reading reports of engineers and programmers being laid off is discouraging for all of us to hear, to be sure. But what role did the now-umemployed people play? I think the wisdom of my research professor is rather appropriate for this situation.
When I first started working for him, he told me that when he asked students what they wanted to do with their degrees, 95% of them said that they wanted to program. They didn't say they wanted to work with networking or image analysis. He had worked in the industry before, and he told me that employers are looking for people with specialized knowledge, but not necessarily in languages; they wanted knowledge that could be applied to languages.
So someone that has specialized knowledge would be very valuable in the industry, while someone with specialized knowledge AND good programming experience would be extremely valuable.
With some appliable knowledge under one's belt, perhaps the many threats to one's job will be, at the very least, reduced somewhat significantly.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading reports of engineers and programmers being laid off is discouraging for all of us to hear, to be sure. But what role did the now-umemployed people play? I think the wisdom of my research professor is rather appropriate for this situation.
When I first started working for him, he told me that when he asked students what they wanted to do with their degrees, 95% of them said that they wanted to program. They didn't say they wanted to work with networking or image analysis. He had worked in the industry before, and he told me that employers are looking for people with specialized knowledge, but not necessarily in languages; they wanted knowledge that could be applied to languages.
So someone that has specialized knowledge would be very valuable in the industry, while someone with specialized knowledge AND good programming experience would be extremely valuable.
With some appliable knowledge under one's belt, perhaps the many threats to one's job will be, at the very least, reduced somewhat significantly.