My brother told me several years the fundamental truth about unions:
Companies get the unions they deserve.
When a company pays its employees well, honors vacation time, hires the right number of staff to do the work, and pays a competitive wage, they don't get unionized. When companies cut pay on the rank and file to pay for massive executive bonuses, or cut medical benefits while posting profits to Wall Street, they see union strikes as per the airlines.
The effort I expend on going from running on 90% market share to 96% is probably at least double the effort for 90% market share.
Within the consumer market (e.g. games) you're absolutely right. But the consumer market is also notoriously difficult to break into. Your code may be able to run on 90% of desktop/laptop computers out there, but how will it stand out against the dozens of similar products in the same space? Code that is multi-platform has the ability to find money in multiple less crowded markets, and for some business plans that mayt be good enough.
Mechanical engineering is the oldest discipline and hence has the largest industrial establishment around it. MechE's can be hired pretty much anywhere in the country that there is manufacturing or design work. They can also feed into medical and law school (no kidding).
Electrical engineering is also an old discipline and has lots of presence. I don't know enough to say much about EE except that is on the edge of what most manufacturing people consider "real" physical engineering, e.g. a lot of EE's are more into the logic gates of chip design (Verilog) than the physical medium of the chips themselves and hence they are close cousins to computer engineering.
Chemical engineering (my major) is slightly younger than EE/MechE but represents the bridge between physics and chemistry and biology. Anything that involves a chemical transformation somewhere along the way is going to be a ChemE's job: oil and gas, chemical manufacturing (which is anything containing a liquid or made of plastic: how many items at a typical store have plastic in them or contain a liquid?), pharmaceuticals, and microchip fabrication. ChemE's can work in most places but not quite "everywhere" like MechE's.
One piece of advice: it doesn't actually matter for any particular discipline whether you think the classes are "interesting" or not. When I was your age I looked through the college catalogs and thought, "ugh, why would I want to know so much about X?" and based my decisions on what looked "neat" to know. The truth is, getting good at something is how you _make_ it interesting. I expected that molecular modeling would be really neat when I got into this, turns out I like the thermo much more, but I can do either in my job and be satisfied. When you pick a major, decide on these things:
1) What kinds of towns are the jobs in now? Would I like the kinds of houses / dating / lifestyle available in these kinds of towns?
2) If I am hired someday and laid off later, would I need to move to a new town to find an equivalent job?
3) What kinds of companies hire for this discipline? Is it just a handful of multinational corporations, or is it a lot of companies of varying sizes?
What you want first is a discipline that lets you live in the kinds of town you want to live in, that lets you settle down if you want to and be able to switch jobs without having to completely uproot, and that has some flexibility in the kinds of companies you can work for. And BTW, mechanical, chemical, civil, and electrical engineering all do that. Biomedical, nuclear, and aerospace are a bit more limited (though aero's can often be hired where mechanicals are hired).
Yeah. It doesn't help that nuclear engineers have about three employers in the entire country to hire them, or that those employers are essentially just the commercial arms of nuclear weapons manufacturers. It seems to me that the only reason nuclear engineering university departments have survived at all is for maintainance of the weapons stockpile.
(I just finished my interviewing process last fall. The nukes were very odd people even in the engineering market. I just couldn't imagine working 20 years on a design that was never made even once. Or sucking down half a billion dollars in government funding to do it.)
I see it so often with analysts, and "documentaries." They just say things and assume it is correct.
That is because the rise of infotainment targeted to the consumer class has displaced news targeted to the middle class, so "documentaries" remain as the only mass market vehicle left with which to disseminate news. It used to be the case that 10 minutes of 20 minute news program could be dedicated to something factual and potentially politically relevant (e.g. the Vietnam War, civil rights protests), now that 10 minute slot is taken up with celebrity gossip.
What you call processing still occurs in academia and in some parts of the "blogosphere".
Whoever said we have to add value by adding original material? A lot of value can be added to some pieces by *removing* material, e.g. The Phantom Edit.
And you think a customer is going to purchase a product written in an unsupported language on an old operating system running virtually?
I think y'all are arguing from different perspectives. You are talking about selling software to third parties, but it seems to me that the OP is talking about maintaining software internally. In the former case, you are right that planning to sell an application in an unsupported language is a bad idea for many reasons. But in the latter case, I think it is quite reasonable for a company to opt to maintain their existing internal VB6 applications until an opportunity to replace them arises.
As recently as 2005, I actually wrote a brand new VB6 app for internal use because I needed a program that could run on Windows 98 to Windows XP, could be "installed" by merely copying a directory, could put up screens and chat to a serial port, and could be modified by my future replacement. But I also knew that this was a bit kludgy and a *real* application might need to be written to replace it someday so I kept its features to a bare minimum. But the only other environment that could have worked for this task is Delphi, and finding folks who know that in this neck of the woods is very hard.
Visual Studio is a pretty good development platform, for Windows, why not extend it to Mac?
I think because XCode is pretty good too, and then are NetBeans and Eclipse. The Mac userbase might not really want to go VS.NET even if it was available and priced the same as the others (i.e. free).
But what do I know? My development platform is Emacs + make/bjam.:)
I fail to see why this one would be significantly different unless a lot of things have changed.
I think a lot of things have changed in the last 7 years. The Internet can now be 90% used quite nicely with Firefox/Konq/Opera/Safari/etc.; OOo is actually pretty usable for a lot of low-level stuff so only a (relatively) few serious professionals really need the more advanced features of MS Office; there are reasonable F/OSS alternatives to almost all of the large desktop packages (except for vertical market packages); gaming consoles are now powerful enough to run arcade-quality games; and the Mac platform has made a comeback in a major way.
I'm not sure exactly when the tipping point was, but sometime in the last 3 years I've noticed that an awful lot of people have stopped equating "computer" to Windows. I don't expect a massive migration away from MS software, but I also don't see nearly so much pressure in the form of must-have features to remain on the platform.
I'm amazed that no one is seriously talking about taxing the most important unfairness in society: assets. Paris Hilton inherited so much that she does not have to work, ever, and will still be able to pass on even more to her own heirs.
I'd like to see a progressive tax on liquid assets such that interest accrued and "asset tax" balance out to a steady state at some arbitrarily large number, perhaps $100 million, but above that amount the tax would exponentially grow such that any assets will be taxed away after say 30 years. So a particularly hard-working entrepreneur might make a billion, but their children will have to keep working hard to maintain that amount. If they decide not to work at it, it will slowly wittle down to be used elsewhere in the economy, but they will still have plenty of money to support a posh lifestyle. After a large fraction of the country finds itself in that "topped-out" state, the bar could be raised a bit to provide incentives for the next generation.
I call it "financial entropy". I think it would do a lot to bring a sense of fairness into the system.
Wow! 66.8 percent have paid off their mortages? Oh wait, maybe not...
The one stat you didn't bring up was total assets, as in are people today more in the black than 1950 or not? I don't know, but I would guess that after discounting "equity" in housing (because you really don't know what equity you have until it actually sells) more of America is in the red than it used to be what with 2 trillion in consumer debt and 9 trillion in government debt.
I won't disagree that the average American today has more "stuff" than in 1950. Homes are HUGE in comparison, cars are light-years ahead, the whole Information Age and all, but I disagree stongly that we are as a whole better off for it. We don't have as much leisure time, we are not as healthy in our prime years (obesity you know), and we don't seem to have nearly as much "community" thanks to our mobility. But you're right, as the economists tend to measure it our standard of living is much higher.
Another poster replies that IT workers "won" the battle because they can browse the Net on company time and enjoy the use of "cube toys" (whatever those are).
I say that IT workers indeed lost because of the dot-com. Back in the 90's I groaned at the idea of having to wear suit/tie to work after graduation, but then remarkably this new trend in "business casual" started taking over thanks to the dot-com millionaires. I graduated and celebrated that my job with IBM was very much a refuge from the standard business "bullshit" I didn't want to be part of: I had Net access, comfortable clothing, flex time, a stocked fridge, and seemingly a management culture that valued my work. Seemingly. A few years later things got tight and management started sounding a lot more like the "old IBM"... I was also put in an office with a stereotypical IT guy. He didn't bathe enough, he had poor social skills, he felt the need far too often to educate his co-workers who dropped by rather than just fucking fix things, etc. (To be fair he was quite dedicated to his work...) But that was one of the things that made me re-think IT as a career.
Simply put, IT is still too much a refuge for social outcasts and not enough a discipline for skilled employees. At a recent career fair I attended there was a good mix of engineering and IT folks hunting for jobs, and every single person who had inappropriate attire / bad grooming was IT. EVERY ONE. That tells the hiring managers that IT folks are STILL stuck in the dot-com mentality of "I can program a computer, therefore I don't need to know how to interact with my business-oriented peers are work."
I feel that the problem needs to be attacked in two major ways.
First, in college: Comp Sci departments need to spend some time reinforcing the business culture so the good programmers coming out know that they need to bathe frequently, and MIS departments need to get more technical so that their graduates aren't seen as essentially business majors who just know some computer stuff. This would mean that colleges would graduate for both of the "programmer / designer" (Comp Sci / SE) and "business analyst / programmer" roles, and these roles should see themselves as two halves of the larger IT discipline.
Second, experienced developers need to start seeing the discipline as a cohesive thing and not as each person out for themselves. It is stunning to me how much more "professional" the engineering world (my new discipline) is compared to IT. In language engineers use the word "colleague" very frequently to denote the separation between engineering and everything else. Engineers are just as stupidly libertarian as IT folks, but they treat their discipline as a real discipline that requires certain dues to get in and are generally vigilant to run out the frauds. IT folks OTOH just bicker constantly.
It's late, I don't normally ramble this much (it's very late). Suffice to say I'm out of IT because I see no impulse for IT to grow up as a discipline. Hell, even plumbers and electricians are far better organized than IT, that's pretty sad.
Maybe not someone who's homeless, but an American on a minimum wage has a higher standard of living than a pharaoh.
An American on minimum wage who isn't also homeless and who has some sort of access to health care is clearly an American either being supported by someone else or who already has some real assets such as fully-paid-for housing, so I can't really say they are poor either. A minimum-wager who is responsible for all of their own bills OTOH is certainly poor in most places in the USA as minimum wage doesn't even pay for low-end housing, much less food, clothing, or medical care.
What do you think happened to ancient Egyptians when they lost their jobs? Oh wait, they couldn't lose their jobs, they were slaves.
Actually, the pyramids were probably made by paid laborers, not slaves. I'm sure there are other societies since then that have had slaves that outlived the average pharaoh's lifetime and had access to technology beyond ancient Egypt, yet the pharaohs had personal freedom (which was impossible to purchase in some of the future slave societies at all e.g. the American South circa 1860), all the food they could eat and the ability to order the pyramids built.
I fail to see how the poor are getting poorer considering how many of them have subscription TV, brand-name clothes, takeout food every week, mobile phones, MP3 players, and god-knows what else.
Because wealth and poverty are better defined as access to society's luxuries and access to leisure time in which to indulge them in. An MP3 player can be had for less than a few hours of minimum wage labor, yet the Egyptian pharaohs could not obtain them: does that make a homeless American sporting an iPod wealthier than the pharaohs? Of course not.
Poor means going into debt within hours of losing a job, wealth means being able to take a few years off from work to backpack Europe or go soul searching in Tibet. Middle class is somewhere in between. Obviously these definitions are soft: it's possible to be poor yet debt-free and with lots of time for leisure, such as the case for some tribal cultures.
When I hear talk of people leaving the IT field I have to wonder, what exactly are they getting into? Are they going back to school, do they know someone or know someone who knows someone where they can get in with another company?
I am one of the many leaving IT, and I am heading into chemical engineering.
When I was 25 (5 years ago), I had worked about 4 years for IBM's Software Group and could see the writing on the wall: the best talent I had seen at IBM was being pushed out of the company and the mediocre were staying well-paid to produce code no one needed. Looking around, I noticed further that attempts to start IT unions to enforce company loyalty were going nowhere because so many IT folks have signed on to weird libertarian fantasies about how the world works. I further noticed that everywhere I looked young people (10-18) were getting "into computers" and wanted to be programmers or artists. Ultimately, I saw that a career in IT meant for me at most 20 years of good pay followed by 20 more years of desperately following whatever technical jobs a 45+ year old person could land.
So I decided that I would head up the value chain and become a PE (licensed engineer) who could still use a lot of programming skills in the job (so that my background isn't a complete waste). I moved to another state with several good engineering schools and applied for graduate school. As a domestic I was instantly accepted: turns out that a) a computer science BS CAN be followed by a chemical engineering MS with only about 30 hours (1 year) of post-bac classes, and b) domestic students are quite rare even at very good state schools. One year of full-time programming work (embedded systems, fun!:) ) in the new state to establish residency, one year of post-bac, and now on the second year of the masters program and about to graduate in May.
At school I worked *hard*, as hard as I ever put into my programming jobs. I put together my supplies ahead of time (one decent whitebox system, found a cheap laptop, found two HP-48GX calculators in case one broke), and once started in school began to meticulously develop good habits. Scheduling study time, always using engineering paper (to force the association of "calculator + paper == engineering problem"), stopping by every used bookstore I passed to see if any $5 engineering textbooks were lying around (because a lot of problems in one book are solved as examples in another), and just not letting any of my homework go until I understood it. It helped tremendously that my wife supported me in everything -- that would be a much longer post to detail.
I had chosen a school with a really good career center, and that plus the grades (3.4 GPA) paid off last fall when I interviewed with close to 20 companies. As a ChemE I had chosen some unusual places to look and avoided the standard big oil employers, so I actually stood out from the crowd a bit and had half a dozen second interviews and 3 good offers. After graduation I will begin entry-level engineering work at essentially the same salary I had upon leaving IBM. The town the plant is in is much smaller and cheaper to live in than most of the towns IBM is in, as such my wife and I will be able to afford a house and be much happier overall. Also, this particular plant is hiring rapidly because so many boomers are beginning to retire, and it is critical in this kind of manufacturing that the company culture be preserved through the next generation.
Are they maybe taking a position that's nominally within marketing or accounting and leveraging their IT skills to work on computer systems from within those departments?
I know two other decent folks who stayed in IT. One has been promoted to low-level management, the other to application design. Both feel that are overpaid for their work (read as: could be replaced at the next major upheaval), both are disappointed that their technical skills are getting so rusty. Me OTOH, my code-fu is still OK because
30-50 years ago, if you went to college, chances are your parents were blue collar people who worked their asses off to save enough money to give you that opportunity, and you probably had to work your ass off to get more money and scholarships to make it.
Actually, at many state schools such as the UC system once you got in tuition was free. See here:
Douglass said that after his election in 1966, [Ronald] Reagan proposed cutting the UC budget by 10 percent across the board. He also proposed that, for the first time, UC charge tuition
In general, college is MUCH more expensive now than 25-30 years ago, and also much more necessary to land a job that pays a living/family wage. The result is that graduates are necessarily much more mercenary in their career aspirations to pay off those debts (averaging now about $30,000 at a public school) yet also far less likely to agitate collectively for a political solution -- since they can be fired so quickly for their activities outside the workplace.
The double-row enter key was a pretty standard PC keyboard style circa 1988 when I got my first XT. I think it might have been in response to the Apple IIe keyboard. At that time, Apple II's were still in serious competition with PCs for the home market.
So from what discipline do you plan on recruiting people who have all the training that you so desperately need? Chemistry majors perhaps?
I think the skills the GP wants to hire frankly don't have an agreed-upon degree name anymore. Used to be any semi-decent CS program would have covered it, but I find that the CS/MIS programs at my school also are so non-technical as to be practically useless. The odd good student that comes through usually has already gained the skills on their own and can blow through the program with no sweat; the regular students who are here to learn it for the first time come out barely more computer literate than they came in (but they manage a lot of gaming in the meantime). The computer engineering majors do pretty well, but they are out of the EE department and spend more time on embedded systems than anything else -- no requirement for operating systems, compilers, etc.
I've got most of the skills the GP is asking for, but then I'm also heading out of IT and into physical engineering. I don't want to have to move every few years after I turn 40 to stay technical, nor do I want to be forced into middle management, so I'm getting a PE.
We want very good maths as well, and that closes the filter so tight that one has to trade off.
How good? My CS undergrad required up to Cal 2 (I think) + discrete + linear algebra + intro statistics. My MS engineering goes to PDE + perturbation theory. So: multivariable calculus, ODE, PDE, perturbation theory, linear algebra, intro statistics: is that high enough to meet the bar?
I'm just curious, I'm actually scheduled to do full-time chemical engineering shortly.
What I wrote was that the F/OSS I tend to use differentiates itself by being what I need and no more, which is not the same thing as, nor can be implied as, "all commercial software is bad and out to get me". Particularly when I point out that vertical-market applications have value, and that "sometimes commercial software gets there first". You also accused me of falling for propaganda and now call that a "logical" argument. Hint: hyperbole is rarely a logical argument.
I'll bet you're also the kind of person who must get the last word in no matter what. Whatever, I'm not playing anymore.
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My brother told me several years the fundamental truth about unions:
Companies get the unions they deserve.
When a company pays its employees well, honors vacation time, hires the right number of staff to do the work, and pays a competitive wage, they don't get unionized. When companies cut pay on the rank and file to pay for massive executive bonuses, or cut medical benefits while posting profits to Wall Street, they see union strikes as per the airlines.
The effort I expend on going from running on 90% market share to 96% is probably at least double the effort for 90% market share.
Within the consumer market (e.g. games) you're absolutely right. But the consumer market is also notoriously difficult to break into. Your code may be able to run on 90% of desktop/laptop computers out there, but how will it stand out against the dozens of similar products in the same space? Code that is multi-platform has the ability to find money in multiple less crowded markets, and for some business plans that mayt be good enough.
Ask the average American to identify ONE thinker?
When political party shills are labeled "serious intellectuals" by the media, it quickly renders the term "intellectual" useless.
Mechanical engineering is the oldest discipline and hence has the largest industrial establishment around it. MechE's can be hired pretty much anywhere in the country that there is manufacturing or design work. They can also feed into medical and law school (no kidding).
Electrical engineering is also an old discipline and has lots of presence. I don't know enough to say much about EE except that is on the edge of what most manufacturing people consider "real" physical engineering, e.g. a lot of EE's are more into the logic gates of chip design (Verilog) than the physical medium of the chips themselves and hence they are close cousins to computer engineering.
Chemical engineering (my major) is slightly younger than EE/MechE but represents the bridge between physics and chemistry and biology. Anything that involves a chemical transformation somewhere along the way is going to be a ChemE's job: oil and gas, chemical manufacturing (which is anything containing a liquid or made of plastic: how many items at a typical store have plastic in them or contain a liquid?), pharmaceuticals, and microchip fabrication. ChemE's can work in most places but not quite "everywhere" like MechE's.
One piece of advice: it doesn't actually matter for any particular discipline whether you think the classes are "interesting" or not. When I was your age I looked through the college catalogs and thought, "ugh, why would I want to know so much about X?" and based my decisions on what looked "neat" to know. The truth is, getting good at something is how you _make_ it interesting. I expected that molecular modeling would be really neat when I got into this, turns out I like the thermo much more, but I can do either in my job and be satisfied. When you pick a major, decide on these things:
1) What kinds of towns are the jobs in now? Would I like the kinds of houses / dating / lifestyle available in these kinds of towns?
2) If I am hired someday and laid off later, would I need to move to a new town to find an equivalent job?
3) What kinds of companies hire for this discipline? Is it just a handful of multinational corporations, or is it a lot of companies of varying sizes?
What you want first is a discipline that lets you live in the kinds of town you want to live in, that lets you settle down if you want to and be able to switch jobs without having to completely uproot, and that has some flexibility in the kinds of companies you can work for. And BTW, mechanical, chemical, civil, and electrical engineering all do that. Biomedical, nuclear, and aerospace are a bit more limited (though aero's can often be hired where mechanicals are hired).
its because nuclear has a serious PR problem.
Yeah. It doesn't help that nuclear engineers have about three employers in the entire country to hire them, or that those employers are essentially just the commercial arms of nuclear weapons manufacturers. It seems to me that the only reason nuclear engineering university departments have survived at all is for maintainance of the weapons stockpile.
(I just finished my interviewing process last fall. The nukes were very odd people even in the engineering market. I just couldn't imagine working 20 years on a design that was never made even once. Or sucking down half a billion dollars in government funding to do it.)
I see it so often with analysts, and "documentaries." They just say things and assume it is correct.
That is because the rise of infotainment targeted to the consumer class has displaced news targeted to the middle class, so "documentaries" remain as the only mass market vehicle left with which to disseminate news. It used to be the case that 10 minutes of 20 minute news program could be dedicated to something factual and potentially politically relevant (e.g. the Vietnam War, civil rights protests), now that 10 minute slot is taken up with celebrity gossip.
What you call processing still occurs in academia and in some parts of the "blogosphere".
It seems like almost any type of software update I do, or most configuration updates, it wants me to reboot.
I believe that is ultimately because in Windows you cannot delete an open file.
Whoever said we have to add value by adding original material? A lot of value can be added to some pieces by *removing* material, e.g. The Phantom Edit.
And you think a customer is going to purchase a product written in an unsupported language on an old operating system running virtually?
I think y'all are arguing from different perspectives. You are talking about selling software to third parties, but it seems to me that the OP is talking about maintaining software internally. In the former case, you are right that planning to sell an application in an unsupported language is a bad idea for many reasons. But in the latter case, I think it is quite reasonable for a company to opt to maintain their existing internal VB6 applications until an opportunity to replace them arises.
As recently as 2005, I actually wrote a brand new VB6 app for internal use because I needed a program that could run on Windows 98 to Windows XP, could be "installed" by merely copying a directory, could put up screens and chat to a serial port, and could be modified by my future replacement. But I also knew that this was a bit kludgy and a *real* application might need to be written to replace it someday so I kept its features to a bare minimum. But the only other environment that could have worked for this task is Delphi, and finding folks who know that in this neck of the woods is very hard.
Visual Studio is a pretty good development platform, for Windows, why not extend it to Mac?
:)
I think because XCode is pretty good too, and then are NetBeans and Eclipse. The Mac userbase might not really want to go VS.NET even if it was available and priced the same as the others (i.e. free).
But what do I know? My development platform is Emacs + make/bjam.
I fail to see why this one would be significantly different unless a lot of things have changed.
I think a lot of things have changed in the last 7 years. The Internet can now be 90% used quite nicely with Firefox/Konq/Opera/Safari/etc.; OOo is actually pretty usable for a lot of low-level stuff so only a (relatively) few serious professionals really need the more advanced features of MS Office; there are reasonable F/OSS alternatives to almost all of the large desktop packages (except for vertical market packages); gaming consoles are now powerful enough to run arcade-quality games; and the Mac platform has made a comeback in a major way.
I'm not sure exactly when the tipping point was, but sometime in the last 3 years I've noticed that an awful lot of people have stopped equating "computer" to Windows. I don't expect a massive migration away from MS software, but I also don't see nearly so much pressure in the form of must-have features to remain on the platform.
I'm amazed that no one is seriously talking about taxing the most important unfairness in society: assets. Paris Hilton inherited so much that she does not have to work, ever, and will still be able to pass on even more to her own heirs.
I'd like to see a progressive tax on liquid assets such that interest accrued and "asset tax" balance out to a steady state at some arbitrarily large number, perhaps $100 million, but above that amount the tax would exponentially grow such that any assets will be taxed away after say 30 years. So a particularly hard-working entrepreneur might make a billion, but their children will have to keep working hard to maintain that amount. If they decide not to work at it, it will slowly wittle down to be used elsewhere in the economy, but they will still have plenty of money to support a posh lifestyle. After a large fraction of the country finds itself in that "topped-out" state, the bar could be raised a bit to provide incentives for the next generation.
I call it "financial entropy". I think it would do a lot to bring a sense of fairness into the system.
2 Home ownership:
Today 66.8 percent
Wow! 66.8 percent have paid off their mortages? Oh wait, maybe not...
The one stat you didn't bring up was total assets, as in are people today more in the black than 1950 or not? I don't know, but I would guess that after discounting "equity" in housing (because you really don't know what equity you have until it actually sells) more of America is in the red than it used to be what with 2 trillion in consumer debt and 9 trillion in government debt.
I won't disagree that the average American today has more "stuff" than in 1950. Homes are HUGE in comparison, cars are light-years ahead, the whole Information Age and all, but I disagree stongly that we are as a whole better off for it. We don't have as much leisure time, we are not as healthy in our prime years (obesity you know), and we don't seem to have nearly as much "community" thanks to our mobility. But you're right, as the economists tend to measure it our standard of living is much higher.
Another poster replies that IT workers "won" the battle because they can browse the Net on company time and enjoy the use of "cube toys" (whatever those are).
I say that IT workers indeed lost because of the dot-com. Back in the 90's I groaned at the idea of having to wear suit/tie to work after graduation, but then remarkably this new trend in "business casual" started taking over thanks to the dot-com millionaires. I graduated and celebrated that my job with IBM was very much a refuge from the standard business "bullshit" I didn't want to be part of: I had Net access, comfortable clothing, flex time, a stocked fridge, and seemingly a management culture that valued my work. Seemingly. A few years later things got tight and management started sounding a lot more like the "old IBM"... I was also put in an office with a stereotypical IT guy. He didn't bathe enough, he had poor social skills, he felt the need far too often to educate his co-workers who dropped by rather than just fucking fix things, etc. (To be fair he was quite dedicated to his work...) But that was one of the things that made me re-think IT as a career.
Simply put, IT is still too much a refuge for social outcasts and not enough a discipline for skilled employees. At a recent career fair I attended there was a good mix of engineering and IT folks hunting for jobs, and every single person who had inappropriate attire / bad grooming was IT. EVERY ONE. That tells the hiring managers that IT folks are STILL stuck in the dot-com mentality of "I can program a computer, therefore I don't need to know how to interact with my business-oriented peers are work."
I feel that the problem needs to be attacked in two major ways.
First, in college: Comp Sci departments need to spend some time reinforcing the business culture so the good programmers coming out know that they need to bathe frequently, and MIS departments need to get more technical so that their graduates aren't seen as essentially business majors who just know some computer stuff. This would mean that colleges would graduate for both of the "programmer / designer" (Comp Sci / SE) and "business analyst / programmer" roles, and these roles should see themselves as two halves of the larger IT discipline.
Second, experienced developers need to start seeing the discipline as a cohesive thing and not as each person out for themselves. It is stunning to me how much more "professional" the engineering world (my new discipline) is compared to IT. In language engineers use the word "colleague" very frequently to denote the separation between engineering and everything else. Engineers are just as stupidly libertarian as IT folks, but they treat their discipline as a real discipline that requires certain dues to get in and are generally vigilant to run out the frauds. IT folks OTOH just bicker constantly.
It's late, I don't normally ramble this much (it's very late). Suffice to say I'm out of IT because I see no impulse for IT to grow up as a discipline. Hell, even plumbers and electricians are far better organized than IT, that's pretty sad.
Maybe not someone who's homeless, but an American on a minimum wage has a higher standard of living than a pharaoh.
An American on minimum wage who isn't also homeless and who has some sort of access to health care is clearly an American either being supported by someone else or who already has some real assets such as fully-paid-for housing, so I can't really say they are poor either. A minimum-wager who is responsible for all of their own bills OTOH is certainly poor in most places in the USA as minimum wage doesn't even pay for low-end housing, much less food, clothing, or medical care.
What do you think happened to ancient Egyptians when they lost their jobs? Oh wait, they couldn't lose their jobs, they were slaves.
Actually, the pyramids were probably made by paid laborers, not slaves. I'm sure there are other societies since then that have had slaves that outlived the average pharaoh's lifetime and had access to technology beyond ancient Egypt, yet the pharaohs had personal freedom (which was impossible to purchase in some of the future slave societies at all e.g. the American South circa 1860), all the food they could eat and the ability to order the pyramids built.
I fail to see how the poor are getting poorer considering how many of them have subscription TV, brand-name clothes, takeout food every week, mobile phones, MP3 players, and god-knows what else.
Because wealth and poverty are better defined as access to society's luxuries and access to leisure time in which to indulge them in. An MP3 player can be had for less than a few hours of minimum wage labor, yet the Egyptian pharaohs could not obtain them: does that make a homeless American sporting an iPod wealthier than the pharaohs? Of course not.
Poor means going into debt within hours of losing a job, wealth means being able to take a few years off from work to backpack Europe or go soul searching in Tibet. Middle class is somewhere in between. Obviously these definitions are soft: it's possible to be poor yet debt-free and with lots of time for leisure, such as the case for some tribal cultures.
When I hear talk of people leaving the IT field I have to wonder, what exactly are they getting into? Are they going back to school, do they know someone or know someone who knows someone where they can get in with another company?
:) ) in the new state to establish residency, one year of post-bac, and now on the second year of the masters program and about to graduate in May.
I am one of the many leaving IT, and I am heading into chemical engineering.
When I was 25 (5 years ago), I had worked about 4 years for IBM's Software Group and could see the writing on the wall: the best talent I had seen at IBM was being pushed out of the company and the mediocre were staying well-paid to produce code no one needed. Looking around, I noticed further that attempts to start IT unions to enforce company loyalty were going nowhere because so many IT folks have signed on to weird libertarian fantasies about how the world works. I further noticed that everywhere I looked young people (10-18) were getting "into computers" and wanted to be programmers or artists. Ultimately, I saw that a career in IT meant for me at most 20 years of good pay followed by 20 more years of desperately following whatever technical jobs a 45+ year old person could land.
So I decided that I would head up the value chain and become a PE (licensed engineer) who could still use a lot of programming skills in the job (so that my background isn't a complete waste). I moved to another state with several good engineering schools and applied for graduate school. As a domestic I was instantly accepted: turns out that a) a computer science BS CAN be followed by a chemical engineering MS with only about 30 hours (1 year) of post-bac classes, and b) domestic students are quite rare even at very good state schools. One year of full-time programming work (embedded systems, fun!
At school I worked *hard*, as hard as I ever put into my programming jobs. I put together my supplies ahead of time (one decent whitebox system, found a cheap laptop, found two HP-48GX calculators in case one broke), and once started in school began to meticulously develop good habits. Scheduling study time, always using engineering paper (to force the association of "calculator + paper == engineering problem"), stopping by every used bookstore I passed to see if any $5 engineering textbooks were lying around (because a lot of problems in one book are solved as examples in another), and just not letting any of my homework go until I understood it. It helped tremendously that my wife supported me in everything -- that would be a much longer post to detail.
I had chosen a school with a really good career center, and that plus the grades (3.4 GPA) paid off last fall when I interviewed with close to 20 companies. As a ChemE I had chosen some unusual places to look and avoided the standard big oil employers, so I actually stood out from the crowd a bit and had half a dozen second interviews and 3 good offers. After graduation I will begin entry-level engineering work at essentially the same salary I had upon leaving IBM. The town the plant is in is much smaller and cheaper to live in than most of the towns IBM is in, as such my wife and I will be able to afford a house and be much happier overall. Also, this particular plant is hiring rapidly because so many boomers are beginning to retire, and it is critical in this kind of manufacturing that the company culture be preserved through the next generation.
Are they maybe taking a position that's nominally within marketing or accounting and leveraging their IT skills to work on computer systems from within those departments?
I know two other decent folks who stayed in IT. One has been promoted to low-level management, the other to application design. Both feel that are overpaid for their work (read as: could be replaced at the next major upheaval), both are disappointed that their technical skills are getting so rusty. Me OTOH, my code-fu is still OK because
30-50 years ago, if you went to college, chances are your parents were blue collar people who worked their asses off to save enough money to give you that opportunity, and you probably had to work your ass off to get more money and scholarships to make it.
Actually, at many state schools such as the UC system once you got in tuition was free. See here:
Douglass said that after his election in 1966, [Ronald] Reagan proposed cutting the UC budget by 10 percent across the board. He also proposed that, for the first time, UC charge tuition
In general, college is MUCH more expensive now than 25-30 years ago, and also much more necessary to land a job that pays a living/family wage. The result is that graduates are necessarily much more mercenary in their career aspirations to pay off those debts (averaging now about $30,000 at a public school) yet also far less likely to agitate collectively for a political solution -- since they can be fired so quickly for their activities outside the workplace.
The double-row enter key was a pretty standard PC keyboard style circa 1988 when I got my first XT. I think it might have been in response to the Apple IIe keyboard. At that time, Apple II's were still in serious competition with PCs for the home market.
So from what discipline do you plan on recruiting people who have all the training that you so desperately need? Chemistry majors perhaps?
I think the skills the GP wants to hire frankly don't have an agreed-upon degree name anymore. Used to be any semi-decent CS program would have covered it, but I find that the CS/MIS programs at my school also are so non-technical as to be practically useless. The odd good student that comes through usually has already gained the skills on their own and can blow through the program with no sweat; the regular students who are here to learn it for the first time come out barely more computer literate than they came in (but they manage a lot of gaming in the meantime). The computer engineering majors do pretty well, but they are out of the EE department and spend more time on embedded systems than anything else -- no requirement for operating systems, compilers, etc.
I've got most of the skills the GP is asking for, but then I'm also heading out of IT and into physical engineering. I don't want to have to move every few years after I turn 40 to stay technical, nor do I want to be forced into middle management, so I'm getting a PE.
We want very good maths as well, and that closes the filter so tight that one has to trade off.
How good? My CS undergrad required up to Cal 2 (I think) + discrete + linear algebra + intro statistics. My MS engineering goes to PDE + perturbation theory. So: multivariable calculus, ODE, PDE, perturbation theory, linear algebra, intro statistics: is that high enough to meet the bar?
I'm just curious, I'm actually scheduled to do full-time chemical engineering shortly.
University is not occupational training.
Well gosh, maybe we should tell that to the corporate world so they will stop requiring university degrees for occupational jobs.
What I wrote was that the F/OSS I tend to use differentiates itself by being what I need and no more, which is not the same thing as, nor can be implied as, "all commercial software is bad and out to get me". Particularly when I point out that vertical-market applications have value, and that "sometimes commercial software gets there first". You also accused me of falling for propaganda and now call that a "logical" argument. Hint: hyperbole is rarely a logical argument.
I'll bet you're also the kind of person who must get the last word in no matter what. Whatever, I'm not playing anymore.
but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job.
So long as he works for his original manager you mean.
Any employer that does not have a clear channel for their employees to express their honestly held opinions is a company doomed to failure.
If by "failure" you mean "make so much money that they are in the Fortune 10 for several decades", then you're absolutely right.