no, they earned less than the starting salary of myself and just about every other software developer that i know or went to school with, most of whom graduated well after the dot com bust, and some of whom are graduating and finding jobs even now (for much more than $7200 a year i might add)
Which only means you aren't competing on a global market, yet. For those of us who have lost jobs to the global market, the $7200/year is what we have to compete with- there's NO reason whatsoever that any given software house has to be in the United States.
despite what all the raving lunatics on slashdot have you believing, there will always be a market for good software developers in the U.S.
Why? I've seen people like you take this on FAITH- but there's NOTHING forcing a software house to be anywhere in particular. It could be on the moon and still have the same effect on the corporation.
the real problem is the number of people who went into programming 5-10 years ago seeing easy dollar signs floating in front of them who are now pissed off when they have to work for it just like everyone else, and blame foreigners and outsourcing for the fact that they were duped into studying a field in which the both the supply and demand for jobs was unsustainaby high.
True enough- but now that employers have found out that programmers in Bangalore are just as good as anybody else, why the hell should they pay YOU an American starting wage instead of opening a branch office there and hiring locally?
well, i was just hired at my current job 5 months ago. they've hired 2 more developers and several designers since then. they'll probably hire more as soon as they can move into a larger space, as they've literally filled up every open desk in the office. now, i don't have a crystal ball, so i can't really argue convincingly with you on this one, but i'd say the signs look good so far. how about i get back to you in a year or two and let you know how it went?
That works- my first job out of college went the same way- within a year of my bein hired I was in charge of a major version of the project and had several programmers working under me. I was also the one with enough loyalty to still be owed $4000 in back pay and be paid $50 cash to pull the server hard drives for the bankruptcy court. From then on- I bolted at the first bounced paycheck and don't trust ANYTHING anybody tells me about the financial health of a company.
true enough. unless you are willing and capable of working for yourself, it certainly helps to have a good and reliable employer, but that would be true in any field. nothing particular to software developers there....
It's just that I've found that software development companies are particularily bad and unreliable- there ain't no such thing as a 30 year software job to go with that 30 year mortgage.
No REAL comparison- ARM/XScale archetecture doesn't have a math co-processor to hand the number crunching off to like x86 does. Still, for integer math (the kind most likely to be done on these models- yes virgina, most financials deal in a specialized integer math divided by 100), I'd say it's about equivalent to a Pentium III 684 Mhz.
If America relied on it's own industry for things like this, prices for these items would be ten times what they are now.
Good, they're luxury items and should be priced as such.
Red China may not treat its workers with the most respect, but I'll be damned if they can't put out a reasonably priced product. What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that is the ONLY reason the product is "reasonably priced" to your way of thinking is because the worker who made it is only getting one bowl of rice a day. Your paying that low price instead of a more reasonable price is morally profiting from direct evil.
Where I actually agree with the boycott, it's got to be a smart boycott- I don't think there are any computer products of any sort that aren't made in Southeast Asia these days. Want those jobs back? Then we need to support a quota system like the auto industry has that has encouraged makers like BMW and Toyota to open plants in the good ole' USA.
For YOUR area- what's to stop your employer from opening a programming shop in Bangalore and paying $7,500/year for the same job? I predict you will be unemployed soon as your employer obviously is not controling costs.
my parents lived the "american dream" of getting married, buying a house, having two kids, and even sending their two kids to good private schools, all on salaries lower than the average starting salary for a decent software devloper. i make more money than my father at a job where i have worked less than six months even though he has been working at the same place for 13 years and is nearly finished with his Ph.D.
Really? They earned less than $7,200/year (which is the global starting salary for a software developer these days- anybody paying more than that seriously needs to look into opening up a satellite office in Hydrabad or Bangalore, because your competition is smoking you on labor costs)? I also guarantee you that if you're making more than that, your project WILL fail because the competition is going to beat you to market.
likewise, my wife an i are closing on a house this week, and although kids aren't on the horizon now, i have no doubt we will be able to make ends meet when the time comes.
Heck, I have great doubts that you will even be employed a year from now when your company goes bankrupt.
given what i know of the people i went to school with, as well as my wife and the people she and i work or have worked with, computer programmers (even now, after the bust) still make a decent amount more than many other fields with comparable work and comparable or greater school requirements. somehow many of these people, who make far less money than the average computer programmer of equivalent experience, have found a way to afford your american dream.... in short it's all about priorities, budgeting and living within your means.
It's also about being able to depend on having the same job for more than a few months at a time, and/or find another one quick when the company goes bankrupt.
Am I married? Do I have a kid? Own my own place? Not yet, but someday; nothing about my job would prevent me from doing these things.
Here's a few things I never thought would happen with computer programming that prevent me from doing these things easily: 1. Business fads have made my career seriously unstable- as in unable to keep the same job for more than two years at a time. 2. Competition from oversease (control systems, for instance, can easily be done remotely from anywhere in the world) has seriously jeprodised any engineering career in the United States. 3. The lack of benefits means that your kid will never have adequate health care, and may even get denied insurance entirely for superficial birth defects.
Of course, that's just my experience- I hope yours is better- but chances are it won't be because it is simply unprofitable to hire Americans to do anything anymore.
Why should your teacher hire you instead of some code monkey in India for $2.50/hr or in China for $.24/hr? What do you think you've got that a guy with three bachelor's degrees doesn't?
Well, all right, if by "own your own home" you mean "have it paid off, no mortgage, by the time I'm 24", then, yeah, you probably can't do that as a programmer. Those days are over.
I mean- continue to afford the mortgage I committed to 6 years ago. THOSE days are over- and hell, you're better off renting anyhow since your chosen industry is going to force you to move every couple of years anyway just to find a job. (Right now the jobs are in India, but as soon as the wages there go up they'll move someplace else).
But if you mean, "I can afford to buy a house on a programmer's salary", then, yes, you certainly can. You're going to have to live on a budget (just like everybody else), but you can do it. (But, I must admit, you can't do it in California. If you're there, wake up and smell the real estate prices in the rest of the country.)
You must have a really inflated sense of what people are willing to pay for programming these days. Near as I can tell, you'll be lucky to get better than $10/hr without risking your job moving to an area where the standard is $2.50/hr or worse yet $.24/hr.
It is in fact a C programmer thing- it comes directly from C and AFAIK, only C-inspired languages use it. EVERY other computer language I know other than C, Java, C# and C++ use "NOT" spelled out.
I really enjoy my job. If I didn't, there's no way in hell I would have put up with a 26 month layoff to keep working in this industry. And that's where this guy's advice falls down for me- there is no way in hell anybody is going to make a living in computer software anymore, no matter how good you are. You're better off selling real estate than doing computer programming if you want to make a living in America. The ONLY reason to do computer programming is because you enjoy it. I only wish somebody had told me that before I tried to do both computer programming AND living the American Dream of owning my own home, getting married, and having a kid. My best advice to young students is- read everything this guy says, then make your choice. You can have EITHER a job you enjoy, or you can live the American Dream. NOT both. EVER.
And Linux/Gambas might just win out on cost alone- if a support contract isn't required. Last I looked, it was $700 for a copy of Visual Studio Enterprise...
Now that's the truth. If he had done it for real, Homeseer or Mr. House (Windows or Linux, respecitively) would most certainly have melted down- I don't think their internal webservers can handle more than a couple of connections at a time, certainly NOT over a DSL line.
At the top of the food chain was the Haast's Eagle, the only eagle known to have been the top predator in a major terrestrial ecosystem. The eagles hunted moa, the herbivorous, flightless birds of New Zealand, which can weigh more than 400 pounds. Scientists believe the eagle died out within two centuries of human settlement of New Zealand.
Gee, this is news? "Predator Species dies out after mankind hunts prey nearly to extinction". Film at 11.
And a sudden explosion of Lord Of The Rings related discoveries? I know the movie was filemed there, but first hobbits and now giant eagles? What's next, we're going to find walking trees?
I would think that if they then raised prices there would be more of and outcry and class-action suits.
Based on WHAT exactly? The right of a retailer to price however he wants to vs what? I'm sorry- but there's nothing actionable to file a class action lawsuit on. Any retailer with the money to back can use loss leaders to put others out of business and then raise their prices.
Can you provide any references to where they increase prices after forcing other businesses out?
Only by comparing their local newspaper day-of-welfare-check advertisements between towns; New Wal*Mart stores ALWAYS have lower prices than well-established ones.
Also, your view on capitalism applies to short term profits, but is a suicidal model for long term gains.
By the Securities Exchange Commission Rules, Publically Held Corporations are actually forbidden to consider long term gains. They HAVE to file balance sheets every 3 months and their value is based upon those quarterly reports.
Therefore, your comment about long term gains is a moot point.
Considering your Nick one would think Wal*mart was the fulfillment of Marxism in America.
2nd reply- I think you've got Marxism mixed up with Stalinism. There's a tiny, but very profound difference between the two. Under Marxism, the Democratic State owns everything and no individual owns anything. Under Stalinism, the Democratic State is replaced with a single dictator. Under Corporatism, that dictator is the stockholder. Corporatism is Stalinism, not Marxism.
MH - I think you're way over the top in saying something like that and it's bad form.
Bad form has never worried me for a second- and over the top is the point. The rich have declared war on the poor- the purpose of this form of elimination of competition is a direct attack in a class war. If we don't fight back- then we'll all be proles to a few rich people.
Considering your Nick one would think Wal*mart was the fulfillment of Marxism in America. Once all the competition is gone, everyone shops in the same place, same prices for everyone. The rich can't get rich if nobody plays.
If only it were that simple- but no, WalMart isn't after the $200,000/year set of customers, which is why you'll never find a WalMart store in a rich neighborhood, only in neighborhoods where the average yearly salary falls below $40,000/year.
This continuous elimination of competition is precisely the opposite of capitalism. Who said irony was dead, it's a doorbuster on Wall St.
Corporatism might have that end- but much MORE likely is that it will spawn a new feudal system, where everybody is a wage slave, a slave to a corporation.
Why do you envy those stockholders?
I don't- but when somebody fires a bullet into a family member, I fight back with equal vengance.
Once the competition is gone what will make the stock worth holding?
Hmm, the $.75/share quarterly dividends maybe?
The economy has already moved underground to churches, gambling halls, and back rooms.
Funny, I don't see that yet- Wal*Mart is still doing big business with their price drop sales timed to coincide with welfare checks.
America is eating itself alive and voting for people who will make sure the citizenry is throughly cooked. I doubt you need to lift a finger except to stop resisting - the sooner things get worse the sooner things will get better.
Ah, but there's the rub- there's NO guarantee that things WILL get better within our lifetime, or for that matter the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. In fact, chances are things will get worse.
LEGO LOGO! I wanted one, but my parents wouldn't even buy me TI Logo alone, so I ended up emulating it with this funky little program that figured out vector graphics and translated them into (CharX, Char Y, 16-byte hexadecimal string) and redefined the upper 127 character set for displaying on the screen in TI Basic.
Now we're going in circles. The original post said that your paycheck gets smaller. And I said "but you can buy more because the lower cost of production makes goods cheaper". And now you say "but your paycheck is smaller" again. Yes, I get that. We can go around forever.
Exactly my point- except for one thing: the law of diminishing returns applies to this. Eventually, YOUR paycheck will go to $0- because you will have been laid off. Laying Americans off and creating jobs overseas looks like efficiency- it really isn't, but it looks like it to the corrupt stockholders. So eventually we have dirt-cheap goods that NOBODY can afford to buy unless they're independantly wealthy- it's a negative feedback loop and the law of diminishing returns does apply.
What kind of spam bulk do you get? I doubt you would see a false positive if you are getting 100+ spam emails a day. I own several domains and have a catchall email account for one of those. This is a calculated risk because it is not a TLD, (.id.au) and isn't well known. I just use the built in spam filter in Mail.app (Mac OS X) and I rarely get any spam in my inbox. I do, however have to check my spam box, because the filter is still learning.
I was talking about two different filters- the Symantec filter doesn't learn terribly well, it's not designed to. That's the one I get false positives on (about 500 messages a day). The Spambayes learning filter I get false negatives on, about 30/300 spams a day get through the filter.
Slashdot Mirror
no, they earned less than the starting salary of myself and just about every other software developer that i know or went to school with, most of whom graduated well after the dot com bust, and some of whom are graduating and finding jobs even now (for much more than $7200 a year i might add)
Which only means you aren't competing on a global market, yet. For those of us who have lost jobs to the global market, the $7200/year is what we have to compete with- there's NO reason whatsoever that any given software house has to be in the United States.
despite what all the raving lunatics on slashdot have you believing, there will always be a market for good software developers in the U.S.
Why? I've seen people like you take this on FAITH- but there's NOTHING forcing a software house to be anywhere in particular. It could be on the moon and still have the same effect on the corporation.
the real problem is the number of people who went into programming 5-10 years ago seeing easy dollar signs floating in front of them who are now pissed off when they have to work for it just like everyone else, and blame foreigners and outsourcing for the fact that they were duped into studying a field in which the both the supply and demand for jobs was unsustainaby high.
True enough- but now that employers have found out that programmers in Bangalore are just as good as anybody else, why the hell should they pay YOU an American starting wage instead of opening a branch office there and hiring locally?
well, i was just hired at my current job 5 months ago. they've hired 2 more developers and several designers since then. they'll probably hire more as soon as they can move into a larger space, as they've literally filled up every open desk in the office. now, i don't have a crystal ball, so i can't really argue convincingly with you on this one, but i'd say the signs look good so far. how about i get back to you in a year or two and let you know how it went?
That works- my first job out of college went the same way- within a year of my bein hired I was in charge of a major version of the project and had several programmers working under me. I was also the one with enough loyalty to still be owed $4000 in back pay and be paid $50 cash to pull the server hard drives for the bankruptcy court. From then on- I bolted at the first bounced paycheck and don't trust ANYTHING anybody tells me about the financial health of a company.
true enough. unless you are willing and capable of working for yourself, it certainly helps to have a good and reliable employer, but that would be true in any field. nothing particular to software developers there....
It's just that I've found that software development companies are particularily bad and unreliable- there ain't no such thing as a 30 year software job to go with that 30 year mortgage.
No REAL comparison- ARM/XScale archetecture doesn't have a math co-processor to hand the number crunching off to like x86 does. Still, for integer math (the kind most likely to be done on these models- yes virgina, most financials deal in a specialized integer math divided by 100), I'd say it's about equivalent to a Pentium III 684 Mhz.
If America relied on it's own industry for things like this, prices for these items would be ten times what they are now.
Good, they're luxury items and should be priced as such.
Red China may not treat its workers with the most respect, but I'll be damned if they can't put out a reasonably priced product. What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that is the ONLY reason the product is "reasonably priced" to your way of thinking is because the worker who made it is only getting one bowl of rice a day. Your paying that low price instead of a more reasonable price is morally profiting from direct evil.
Where I actually agree with the boycott, it's got to be a smart boycott- I don't think there are any computer products of any sort that aren't made in Southeast Asia these days. Want those jobs back? Then we need to support a quota system like the auto industry has that has encouraged makers like BMW and Toyota to open plants in the good ole' USA.
For YOUR area- what's to stop your employer from opening a programming shop in Bangalore and paying $7,500/year for the same job? I predict you will be unemployed soon as your employer obviously is not controling costs.
my parents lived the "american dream" of getting married, buying a house, having two kids, and even sending their two kids to good private schools, all on salaries lower than the average starting salary for a decent software devloper. i make more money than my father at a job where i have worked less than six months even though he has been working at the same place for 13 years and is nearly finished with his Ph.D.
Really? They earned less than $7,200/year (which is the global starting salary for a software developer these days- anybody paying more than that seriously needs to look into opening up a satellite office in Hydrabad or Bangalore, because your competition is smoking you on labor costs)? I also guarantee you that if you're making more than that, your project WILL fail because the competition is going to beat you to market.
likewise, my wife an i are closing on a house this week, and although kids aren't on the horizon now, i have no doubt we will be able to make ends meet when the time comes.
Heck, I have great doubts that you will even be employed a year from now when your company goes bankrupt.
given what i know of the people i went to school with, as well as my wife and the people she and i work or have worked with, computer programmers (even now, after the bust) still make a decent amount more than many other fields with comparable work and comparable or greater school requirements. somehow many of these people, who make far less money than the average computer programmer of equivalent experience, have found a way to afford your american dream.... in short it's all about priorities, budgeting and living within your means.
It's also about being able to depend on having the same job for more than a few months at a time, and/or find another one quick when the company goes bankrupt.
Am I married? Do I have a kid? Own my own place? Not yet, but someday; nothing about my job would prevent me from doing these things.
Here's a few things I never thought would happen with computer programming that prevent me from doing these things easily:
1. Business fads have made my career seriously unstable- as in unable to keep the same job for more than two years at a time.
2. Competition from oversease (control systems, for instance, can easily be done remotely from anywhere in the world) has seriously jeprodised any engineering career in the United States.
3. The lack of benefits means that your kid will never have adequate health care, and may even get denied insurance entirely for superficial birth defects.
Of course, that's just my experience- I hope yours is better- but chances are it won't be because it is simply unprofitable to hire Americans to do anything anymore.
Why should your teacher hire you instead of some code monkey in India for $2.50/hr or in China for $.24/hr? What do you think you've got that a guy with three bachelor's degrees doesn't?
Well, all right, if by "own your own home" you mean "have it paid off, no mortgage, by the time I'm 24", then, yeah, you probably can't do that as a programmer. Those days are over.
I mean- continue to afford the mortgage I committed to 6 years ago. THOSE days are over- and hell, you're better off renting anyhow since your chosen industry is going to force you to move every couple of years anyway just to find a job. (Right now the jobs are in India, but as soon as the wages there go up they'll move someplace else).
But if you mean, "I can afford to buy a house on a programmer's salary", then, yes, you certainly can. You're going to have to live on a budget (just like everybody else), but you can do it. (But, I must admit, you can't do it in California. If you're there, wake up and smell the real estate prices in the rest of the country.)
You must have a really inflated sense of what people are willing to pay for programming these days. Near as I can tell, you'll be lucky to get better than $10/hr without risking your job moving to an area where the standard is $2.50/hr or worse yet $.24/hr.
So how does he compete with American Eyeglasses, Binyon's, or Lenscrafter's? Or does he really work for a corporation and is really a wage slave?
It is in fact a C programmer thing- it comes directly from C and AFAIK, only C-inspired languages use it. EVERY other computer language I know other than C, Java, C# and C++ use "NOT" spelled out.
I really enjoy my job. If I didn't, there's no way in hell I would have put up with a 26 month layoff to keep working in this industry. And that's where this guy's advice falls down for me- there is no way in hell anybody is going to make a living in computer software anymore, no matter how good you are. You're better off selling real estate than doing computer programming if you want to make a living in America. The ONLY reason to do computer programming is because you enjoy it. I only wish somebody had told me that before I tried to do both computer programming AND living the American Dream of owning my own home, getting married, and having a kid. My best advice to young students is- read everything this guy says, then make your choice. You can have EITHER a job you enjoy, or you can live the American Dream. NOT both. EVER.
And Linux/Gambas might just win out on cost alone- if a support contract isn't required. Last I looked, it was $700 for a copy of Visual Studio Enterprise...
Have to be pretty big to be like the Ents and Entwives- and a longer life span too....
RTFA- the Giant Eagles hunted the Moa and went extinct when mankind severly limited thier food supply.
Now that's the truth. If he had done it for real, Homeseer or Mr. House (Windows or Linux, respecitively) would most certainly have melted down- I don't think their internal webservers can handle more than a couple of connections at a time, certainly NOT over a DSL line.
At the top of the food chain was the Haast's Eagle, the only eagle known to have been the top predator in a major terrestrial ecosystem. The eagles hunted moa, the herbivorous, flightless birds of New Zealand, which can weigh more than 400 pounds. Scientists believe the eagle died out within two centuries of human settlement of New Zealand.
Gee, this is news? "Predator Species dies out after mankind hunts prey nearly to extinction". Film at 11.
And a sudden explosion of Lord Of The Rings related discoveries? I know the movie was filemed there, but first hobbits and now giant eagles? What's next, we're going to find walking trees?
I would think that if they then raised prices there would be more of and outcry and class-action suits.
Based on WHAT exactly? The right of a retailer to price however he wants to vs what? I'm sorry- but there's nothing actionable to file a class action lawsuit on. Any retailer with the money to back can use loss leaders to put others out of business and then raise their prices.
Can you provide any references to where they increase prices after forcing other businesses out?
Only by comparing their local newspaper day-of-welfare-check advertisements between towns; New Wal*Mart stores ALWAYS have lower prices than well-established ones.
Also, your view on capitalism applies to short term profits, but is a suicidal model for long term gains.
By the Securities Exchange Commission Rules, Publically Held Corporations are actually forbidden to consider long term gains. They HAVE to file balance sheets every 3 months and their value is based upon those quarterly reports.
Therefore, your comment about long term gains is a moot point.
Considering your Nick one would think Wal*mart was the fulfillment of Marxism in America.
2nd reply- I think you've got Marxism mixed up with Stalinism. There's a tiny, but very profound difference between the two. Under Marxism, the Democratic State owns everything and no individual owns anything. Under Stalinism, the Democratic State is replaced with a single dictator. Under Corporatism, that dictator is the stockholder. Corporatism is Stalinism, not Marxism.
MH - I think you're way over the top in saying something like that and it's bad form.
Bad form has never worried me for a second- and over the top is the point. The rich have declared war on the poor- the purpose of this form of elimination of competition is a direct attack in a class war. If we don't fight back- then we'll all be proles to a few rich people.
Considering your Nick one would think Wal*mart was the fulfillment of Marxism in America. Once all the competition is gone, everyone shops in the same place, same prices for everyone. The rich can't get rich if nobody plays.
If only it were that simple- but no, WalMart isn't after the $200,000/year set of customers, which is why you'll never find a WalMart store in a rich neighborhood, only in neighborhoods where the average yearly salary falls below $40,000/year.
This continuous elimination of competition is precisely the opposite of capitalism. Who said irony was dead, it's a doorbuster on Wall St.
Corporatism might have that end- but much MORE likely is that it will spawn a new feudal system, where everybody is a wage slave, a slave to a corporation.
Why do you envy those stockholders?
I don't- but when somebody fires a bullet into a family member, I fight back with equal vengance.
Once the competition is gone what will make the stock worth holding?
Hmm, the $.75/share quarterly dividends maybe?
The economy has already moved underground to churches, gambling halls, and back rooms.
Funny, I don't see that yet- Wal*Mart is still doing big business with their price drop sales timed to coincide with welfare checks.
America is eating itself alive and voting for people who will make sure the citizenry is throughly cooked. I doubt you need to lift a finger except to stop resisting - the sooner things get worse the sooner things will get better.
Ah, but there's the rub- there's NO guarantee that things WILL get better within our lifetime, or for that matter the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. In fact, chances are things will get worse.
LEGO LOGO! I wanted one, but my parents wouldn't even buy me TI Logo alone, so I ended up emulating it with this funky little program that figured out vector graphics and translated them into (CharX, Char Y, 16-byte hexadecimal string) and redefined the upper 127 character set for displaying on the screen in TI Basic.
Now we're going in circles. The original post said that your paycheck gets smaller. And I said "but you can buy more because the lower cost of production makes goods cheaper". And now you say "but your paycheck is smaller" again. Yes, I get that. We can go around forever.
Exactly my point- except for one thing: the law of diminishing returns applies to this. Eventually, YOUR paycheck will go to $0- because you will have been laid off. Laying Americans off and creating jobs overseas looks like efficiency- it really isn't, but it looks like it to the corrupt stockholders. So eventually we have dirt-cheap goods that NOBODY can afford to buy unless they're independantly wealthy- it's a negative feedback loop and the law of diminishing returns does apply.
What kind of spam bulk do you get? I doubt you would see a false positive if you are getting 100+ spam emails a day. I own several domains and have a catchall email account for one of those. This is a calculated risk because it is not a TLD, (.id.au) and isn't well known. I just use the built in spam filter in Mail.app (Mac OS X) and I rarely get any spam in my inbox. I do, however have to check my spam box, because the filter is still learning.
I was talking about two different filters- the Symantec filter doesn't learn terribly well, it's not designed to. That's the one I get false positives on (about 500 messages a day). The Spambayes learning filter I get false negatives on, about 30/300 spams a day get through the filter.