...the best programmers, mainframe or otherwise tend to be self educated.
That's something I can agree with entirely. As I said in an earlier post in this thread, everything I know that's useful (marketable) I've taught myself. So it's not that a college degree should make you leery of a candidate, it's that a college degree and no sign of learning on their own is what should make you (very!) leery of a candidate.
One more thought -- unless it's always fun and stimulating in your work environment, most jobs do have some unglamorous and uncreative grunt work as part of the job. Hiring Mr. Genius is all fine and good, but if he gets bored easily and then doesn't want to do his job, you might be better off with Mr. Highly Intelligent. Part of what a college degree shows is that you can stick with something and see a job through, even through the less fun parts. I.e. demonstrating that you're big boy now.
Hey Jay, here's the thing, note that I wasn't saying college grad == competence, I was simply saying college grad != incompetence, to the guy who wouldn't hire a college grad. Go back and read it again and you should see this.
BTW, I agree with you (almost) completely, and that's why I think companies look for the degree, precisely because they want people who have already demonstrated that they can put up with BS for extended periods of time. Looking at my career so far, everything I've ever made money at I've taught myself. College was good background, and there I learned how I learn, but beyond that it was just playing the game and getting the vaunted piece of paper.
And with "No Child Left Behind" it's gotten to the point of teaching to take tests. This means the arts are being negected amoung other areas.
Like it's so terrible that teachers are being made to make sure the kiddies have the basics of the 3 R's. That there's no money left over to teach the arts et al has nothing to do with Evil GW(TM) and everything to do with bloated school administrations consuming most of each dollar meant for the classroom. And these empire-building paper-pushers didn't exactly vote for GW.
Hmm, I wonder why I get the funny feeling that you yourself are a non-graduate. You know, an incapable person doesn't need to obtain a college degree to become an incapable person. Or an irrationally biased person.
They're going to be in a real pickle if folk in India and China et al are also thinking that a career in mainframes is a short one, and therefore avoid it also.
Companies see the importance of stock price, but ignore the importance of reputation. Few are willing to take a potentially limiting crossroad in their career for a company that will discard you for a nickel, even if the pay is great or worthless promises of stability are made.
Appending to your skillset regularly is what separates the 30k/year programmers from the 150k/year ones.
Generally agreed, but on the other hand, if I was a 150k/year programmer (don't I wish!), why would I rush to learn something that would put me in competition with 30k/year programmers?
(I would mod that "underrated" if I had points.) Good point -- when we refer to a browser-based app as a "thin client", we're referring to our own app not needing to be "installed" or having a "footprint" on the client machine, and we lump the web browser into that "thin" definition only because it's almost always already installed, and then forget about its footprint (especially with IE on Windows where it's thought of as part of the OS).
Well, for one, they will understand that vendor lock-in is bad.
Asker already said customer doesn't care about monopolies et al. They will understand that vendor lock-in is bad, but won't care. Look at all the Java and.Net projects going on. PHB's don't care about single-source lock-in.
If neither a place of business or your home is conducive to work from, you need to find/make a place that is.
Only if you're working for yourself. While I'm working for someone else, they set the maximum level of productivity achievable by the environment they provide.
Predictably this was dismissed as a troll. But AC had a point. As a Windows user who has been thinking about getting back into some UNIX, this would give me a platform to tinker with each of Windows, Mac, and its underlying UNIX system. I then wouldn't need Linux. Or FreeBSD for that matter. (I'm assuming here that Apple's underlying UNIX has available the most popular shells, and all the command-line utilities. Correct me if I'm wrong. Hmm, I'll need compilers too.)
He specically said the the current limited-liability for-profit corporate model is broken because the current legal framework for those corps requiring profit maximization not only encourages unethical behaviour but requires often self-destructive short-term focus.
I don't think it's the corporate model, it's just more of human nature. It's the advent of wild speculation in dot-com stocks, droves going into day-trading, and in general an increase in pervasiveness of a Get Rich Quick mentality that has increased pressure towards next quarter's numbers sacrificing long-term viability. You see, it's not just the CEO's et al that are looking to gut these companies, but practically everyone is now, even the investors.
The housing prices in the areas which CS positions tend to cluster in, are far out of reach of the salaries that CS companies want to pay their employees.
True, but at the same time, the company that relocates to BFE because housing is dirt cheap there, runs the real risk of there not being enough of a pool of talent to draw from.
Thankfully, companies are starting to get a clue and relocate offices out of the high-priced regions. Capital One, for example, is relocating their San Diego office to Plano, TX.
Capital One was one of the sleazebags that advertised through the Aurora malware I got at work some months ago, so they can go relocate to GoFuckThemselves, Hell.
The general consensus is that once your basic needs are met, changes in salary don't mean as much as more free time.
Except for one thing: retirement. I live fairly basically, in a 1030 sq ft condo, don't take expensive vacations, don't drive fancy new cars, don't have a big plasma tv, etc. But I do want to retire some day. And I don't believe social security will be there, I don't think the market will go anywhere (a lot of Baby Boomers are going to be gradually pulling money out to live off of), and we can't even begin to fathom how much health insurance will cost then. I make way more than I spend, not because I make a lot, but because I don't spend a lot. But I need every penny of it and more to put away so that I can avoid the Alpo when I'm too old to work (or unemployable).
We have an interesting set of pressures. Not only will the Boomers pretty much wipe out the social services for old people, but with outsourcing I don't even know how long I'll be working to save. It's a strange thought, but I'm completely operating under the assumption that I won't be the one picking my retirement date. It'll be when I wake up one morning and look in the mirror and realize that I've been out of work for 2 years, and that I'm old, and that I'm just not going to be hired by anyone ever again. I don't feel like I have time to worry about free time right now, I have to save for that day.
That's true, but sometimes less is more. Java took away a lot of features from C++,...
And that's why it sucks. Think of the Patriot Act -- I'm sure John Ashcroft would tell you "less (freedoms) is more". You may prefer the comfort of (the false illusion of security in) totalitarian-like control, but I like my freedom, in life and in coding. Expressiveness is what makes a better language, not dumbdownedness. Take away some major features and you've stripped considerable expressiveness.
Technically you can, by checking "Disable language extensions" in the C/C++ project settings (removes the/Ze ("extensions") compiler switch and adds/Za ("ANSI")). But then neither MFC nor the Standard C++ Library work. MFC pre-dates the standard, and was written correctly for its time -- for example, the C++ FAQ Lite's item on for-loop scoping includes the line:
The following code used to be legal, but not any more, since i's scope is now inside the for loop only:...
Have no idea why P. J. Plauger's Standard C++ Library implementation relies on MS extensions (or doesn't compile cleanly on VC++ 6's strictest warning level, for that matter).
Anyways, there's the #define hack that's the standard workaround for the for-loop scoping issue.
It's a vehicle for the casual reader to contribute. Maybe some only read occasionally, and/or don't feel that they'd be in a position to contribute something very often, so they haven't bothered to create an account. There are times when an AC post is the among the most thorough and insightful in a particular discussion.
It has legitimate uses for people with accounts, too, under the umbrella of protecting against gratutituous karma destruction, if not outright moderation abuse:
For responding to a slight tangent, like here, without getting dinked by an overzealous moderator. I enjoy occasional interesting diversions from what is stricly the topic at hand. This a good place for geeks to make even side points, and socialize a little, among other geeks where we know there's a good chance we'll actually be understood. Some moderators are just much more uptight about this.
For stating a valid opinion that is not necessarily aligned with politically correct thought as represented by the masses on this site. Unpopular opinions are still technically capable of providing insight, and I find often do here. So I read at -1, and have done so for a long time now. Remove the AC account and those of us who can actually tolerate divergent views, and sometimes even appreciate them, will be deprived of this preference and the attraction of this site will diminish among such. The hive mind here is already quite excessive, but if literally only PC opinions were allowed to be seen here, that's only the kind of people that would come here, and there'd literally be nothing but perpetual redundant "preaching to the choir".
For posting something humorous, to protect against genetic defectives born without a sense of humor. A little light-heartedness can liven up and refresh a serious discussion. I like to laugh at just about anything, and can appreciate even humor that insults my politics or religion or my mother etc., IF it's funny. But some overly-sensitive malcontents with mod points are quick to fly into a rage over any little thing and down-mod something.
So I shudder when I see someone suggest getting rid of the AC account, kind of like when I hear it suggested that maybe we should just immediately abandon Iraq, or get rid of the Electoral College, or surrender more rights under the guise of homeland security. There are sometimes actually very good reasons for things being the way they are.
First of all, you don't compile your java code into a class file, you "compile" it. In Computer Science compilation produces machine code. javac does not.
Secondly, to your post two levels up, I don't think merely adding caching to an interpreter suddenly makes it not an interpreter. I'm sure MS's classic VB runtime cached things in loops at least. And it was definitely an interpreted language (it did eventually allow the option of making an EXE, but I don't know if it actually compiled the p-code or whatever to machine code, or just linked in the VB runtime).
Which brings me to what I'm wondering about: You say the JVM compiles the byte code into machine code. I seriously doubt that that's true. Does the JVM really take your byte code and build an executable and spawn a process for it? Until I hear otherwise, I'm under the assumption that it does not, that rather the JVM is compiled, and that your byte code never is, but is interpreted (and cached) by the JVM. That is, only JVM code is ever machine code. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It's been the same with larger businesses as well, in my experience. It's not a function of the size of the business, it's that: 1) Businesses of all sizes want to save money, and 2) PHB's don't understand that there are myriad specialities within "computer person". They wouldn't expect their neighbor who's a podiatrist to be able to diagnose their chest pains, but they'll ask an entry-level VB programmer to reverse-engineer an RS-232 device.
Just be careful with that. The few things that I represent myself as a 5 in, I'm prepared to handle, solo if need be, quickly and expertly, no matter the level of difficulty. Someone who's looking for a 5 (and is willing to pay for one) just wants someone who will completely take over responsibility for something from that person so they can cross it off their list and forget about it. If you're really a 3 or 4, and sometimes may need some help, or sometimes may be stumped, it won't look good.
They're not wasting any money, they're saving money. They're establishing that they couldn't find a qualified citizen worker, thereby justifying later going the cheaper H1-B route.
Slashdot Mirror
It's that I'd have to ride on busy streets to get there, and I'm too young to die (or worse).
...the best programmers, mainframe or otherwise tend to be self educated.
That's something I can agree with entirely. As I said in an earlier post in this thread, everything I know that's useful (marketable) I've taught myself. So it's not that a college degree should make you leery of a candidate, it's that a college degree and no sign of learning on their own is what should make you (very!) leery of a candidate.
One more thought -- unless it's always fun and stimulating in your work environment, most jobs do have some unglamorous and uncreative grunt work as part of the job. Hiring Mr. Genius is all fine and good, but if he gets bored easily and then doesn't want to do his job, you might be better off with Mr. Highly Intelligent. Part of what a college degree shows is that you can stick with something and see a job through, even through the less fun parts. I.e. demonstrating that you're big boy now.
Hey Jay, here's the thing, note that I wasn't saying college grad == competence, I was simply saying college grad != incompetence, to the guy who wouldn't hire a college grad. Go back and read it again and you should see this.
BTW, I agree with you (almost) completely, and that's why I think companies look for the degree, precisely because they want people who have already demonstrated that they can put up with BS for extended periods of time. Looking at my career so far, everything I've ever made money at I've taught myself. College was good background, and there I learned how I learn, but beyond that it was just playing the game and getting the vaunted piece of paper.
And with "No Child Left Behind" it's gotten to the point of teaching to take tests. This means the arts are being negected amoung other areas.
Like it's so terrible that teachers are being made to make sure the kiddies have the basics of the 3 R's. That there's no money left over to teach the arts et al has nothing to do with Evil GW(TM) and everything to do with bloated school administrations consuming most of each dollar meant for the classroom. And these empire-building paper-pushers didn't exactly vote for GW.
...and I prefer to hire non-graduates.
Hmm, I wonder why I get the funny feeling that you yourself are a non-graduate. You know, an incapable person doesn't need to obtain a college degree to become an incapable person. Or an irrationally biased person.
They're going to be in a real pickle if folk in India and China et al are also thinking that a career in mainframes is a short one, and therefore avoid it also.
Companies see the importance of stock price, but ignore the importance of reputation. Few are willing to take a potentially limiting crossroad in their career for a company that will discard you for a nickel, even if the pay is great or worthless promises of stability are made.
(I would mod that "underrated" if I had points.)
Good point -- when we refer to a browser-based app as a "thin client", we're referring to our own app not needing to be "installed" or having a "footprint" on the client machine, and we lump the web browser into that "thin" definition only because it's almost always already installed, and then forget about its footprint (especially with IE on Windows where it's thought of as part of the OS).
"Yeah, I could root your box in about five seconds," and she slapped me!
(I apologize in advance for this.)
It could have been worse, you could've gotten the Blue Scream of Death.
Well, for one, they will understand that vendor lock-in is bad.
.Net projects going on. PHB's don't care about single-source lock-in.
Asker already said customer doesn't care about monopolies et al. They will understand that vendor lock-in is bad, but won't care. Look at all the Java and
If neither a place of business or your home is conducive to work from, you need to find/make a place that is.
Only if you're working for yourself. While I'm working for someone else, they set the maximum level of productivity achievable by the environment they provide.
Predictably this was dismissed as a troll. But AC had a point. As a Windows user who has been thinking about getting back into some UNIX, this would give me a platform to tinker with each of Windows, Mac, and its underlying UNIX system. I then wouldn't need Linux. Or FreeBSD for that matter. (I'm assuming here that Apple's underlying UNIX has available the most popular shells, and all the command-line utilities. Correct me if I'm wrong. Hmm, I'll need compilers too.)
He specically said the the current limited-liability for-profit corporate model is broken because the current legal framework for those corps requiring profit maximization not only encourages unethical behaviour but requires often self-destructive short-term focus.
I don't think it's the corporate model, it's just more of human nature. It's the advent of wild speculation in dot-com stocks, droves going into day-trading, and in general an increase in pervasiveness of a Get Rich Quick mentality that has increased pressure towards next quarter's numbers sacrificing long-term viability. You see, it's not just the CEO's et al that are looking to gut these companies, but practically everyone is now, even the investors.
The housing prices in the areas which CS positions tend to cluster in, are far out of reach of the salaries that CS companies want to pay their employees.
True, but at the same time, the company that relocates to BFE because housing is dirt cheap there, runs the real risk of there not being enough of a pool of talent to draw from.
Thankfully, companies are starting to get a clue and relocate offices out of the high-priced regions. Capital One, for example, is relocating their San Diego office to Plano, TX.
Capital One was one of the sleazebags that advertised through the Aurora malware I got at work some months ago, so they can go relocate to GoFuckThemselves, Hell.
The general consensus is that once your basic needs are met, changes in salary don't mean as much as more free time.
Except for one thing: retirement. I live fairly basically, in a 1030 sq ft condo, don't take expensive vacations, don't drive fancy new cars, don't have a big plasma tv, etc. But I do want to retire some day. And I don't believe social security will be there, I don't think the market will go anywhere (a lot of Baby Boomers are going to be gradually pulling money out to live off of), and we can't even begin to fathom how much health insurance will cost then. I make way more than I spend, not because I make a lot, but because I don't spend a lot. But I need every penny of it and more to put away so that I can avoid the Alpo when I'm too old to work (or unemployable).
We have an interesting set of pressures. Not only will the Boomers pretty much wipe out the social services for old people, but with outsourcing I don't even know how long I'll be working to save. It's a strange thought, but I'm completely operating under the assumption that I won't be the one picking my retirement date. It'll be when I wake up one morning and look in the mirror and realize that I've been out of work for 2 years, and that I'm old, and that I'm just not going to be hired by anyone ever again. I don't feel like I have time to worry about free time right now, I have to save for that day.
The reduction of the use of C in our profession marks the decline of real knowledge in the average programmer.
Which commensurately marks the decline in real wages for the average programmer. Less knowledge/skills, less pay warranted.
That's true, but sometimes less is more. Java took away a lot of features from C++, ...
And that's why it sucks. Think of the Patriot Act -- I'm sure John Ashcroft would tell you "less (freedoms) is more". You may prefer the comfort of (the false illusion of security in) totalitarian-like control, but I like my freedom, in life and in coding. Expressiveness is what makes a better language, not dumbdownedness. Take away some major features and you've stripped considerable expressiveness.
Anyways, there's the #define hack that's the standard workaround for the for-loop scoping issue.
- It's a vehicle for the casual reader to contribute. Maybe some only read occasionally, and/or don't feel that they'd be in a position to contribute something very often, so they haven't bothered to create an account. There are times when an AC post is the among the most thorough and insightful in a particular discussion.
- It has legitimate uses for people with accounts, too, under the umbrella of protecting against gratutituous karma destruction, if not outright moderation abuse:
- For responding to a slight tangent, like here, without getting dinked by an overzealous moderator. I enjoy occasional interesting diversions from what is stricly the topic at hand. This a good place for geeks to make even side points, and socialize a little, among other geeks where we know there's a good chance we'll actually be understood. Some moderators are just much more uptight about this.
- For stating a valid opinion that is not necessarily aligned with politically correct thought as represented by the masses on this site. Unpopular opinions are still technically capable of providing insight, and I find often do here. So I read at -1, and have done so for a long time now. Remove the AC account and those of us who can actually tolerate divergent views, and sometimes even appreciate them, will be deprived of this preference and the attraction of this site will diminish among such. The hive mind here is already quite excessive, but if literally only PC opinions were allowed to be seen here, that's only the kind of people that would come here, and there'd literally be nothing but perpetual redundant "preaching to the choir".
- For posting something humorous, to protect against genetic defectives born without a sense of humor. A little light-heartedness can liven up and refresh a serious discussion. I like to laugh at just about anything, and can appreciate even humor that insults my politics or religion or my mother etc., IF it's funny. But some overly-sensitive malcontents with mod points are quick to fly into a rage over any little thing and down-mod something.
So I shudder when I see someone suggest getting rid of the AC account, kind of like when I hear it suggested that maybe we should just immediately abandon Iraq, or get rid of the Electoral College, or surrender more rights under the guise of homeland security. There are sometimes actually very good reasons for things being the way they are.It starts up less than 40 seconds which I think is pretty good for an application as big as NetBeans.
?!?!?!
That zero's a typo and shouldn't be there, right? (Tell me you good Java folk aren't that insane!)
First of all, you don't compile your java code into a class file, you "compile" it. In Computer Science compilation produces machine code. javac does not.
Secondly, to your post two levels up, I don't think merely adding caching to an interpreter suddenly makes it not an interpreter. I'm sure MS's classic VB runtime cached things in loops at least. And it was definitely an interpreted language (it did eventually allow the option of making an EXE, but I don't know if it actually compiled the p-code or whatever to machine code, or just linked in the VB runtime).
Which brings me to what I'm wondering about: You say the JVM compiles the byte code into machine code. I seriously doubt that that's true. Does the JVM really take your byte code and build an executable and spawn a process for it? Until I hear otherwise, I'm under the assumption that it does not, that rather the JVM is compiled, and that your byte code never is, but is interpreted (and cached) by the JVM. That is, only JVM code is ever machine code. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It's been the same with larger businesses as well, in my experience. It's not a function of the size of the business, it's that:
1) Businesses of all sizes want to save money, and
2) PHB's don't understand that there are myriad specialities within "computer person". They wouldn't expect their neighbor who's a podiatrist to be able to diagnose their chest pains, but they'll ask an entry-level VB programmer to reverse-engineer an RS-232 device.
Just be careful with that. The few things that I represent myself as a 5 in, I'm prepared to handle, solo if need be, quickly and expertly, no matter the level of difficulty. Someone who's looking for a 5 (and is willing to pay for one) just wants someone who will completely take over responsibility for something from that person so they can cross it off their list and forget about it. If you're really a 3 or 4, and sometimes may need some help, or sometimes may be stumped, it won't look good.
They're not wasting any money, they're saving money. They're establishing that they couldn't find a qualified citizen worker, thereby justifying later going the cheaper H1-B route.