I got a pair of bifocals a couple of years ago. I got really tired of tilting my head back to look at my monitors. When working on my big monitors, I just wear an old pair of glasses that doesn't correct me as much as my current pair, and that seems to do the job. Next time around, I will get a pair in just the reading prescription that is just for computer work.
I finished my Ph.D as an experimental physicist 20 years ago, and got a post-doc. And I managed to get a job in IT after that. A few comments on your story:
(1) Physics to network technology is not a natural jump. Your resume should be highlighting all the relevant experience you gathered while doing your PhD. I did a lot of heavy coding for data analysis, big data crunching, and unix system administration on cutting edge hardware. My other option besides the Sales Engineer job I ended up taking was translating particle transport code from Fortran to C++. When I was looking for a tech job, that was the experience I emphasized, not the actual physics part. (2) As others have mentioned, you need to be talking to small shops, you're more likely to talk directly to the hiring manager, rather than a HR person. (3) As many have already said, eat some humble pie. You very obviously didn't do your research before deciding to pursue a PhD in Physics. And you haven't been pursuing the obvious route of getting some network certifications. I mean, come on, what evidence are you providing potential employers that your networking knowledge is at all current, or even still exists? And yes, the Ph,D. hurts, the problem is that they think you will want to be paid commensurate with a Ph.D. with your full years of working experience, rather than paid as a network engineer with years of experience up to when you left the field. They are worried you will get bored, consider the work beneath you, and you will either leave or become a problem employee. (5) Take some contracting work. The bar is lower, because if you don't work out they can just end the contract. And that will pad out your resume with the relevant experience.
The only time my Ph.D. was a liability was in getting my first job. You need to establish a job history post-Ph.D. that shows the sort of work you are willing to do for a reasonable amount of pay, for a reasonable length of time. I kept my first technology job for five years. Then, the Ph.D. was never again an issue, it was only an asset. You might need to do contract work for a year or two to establish a similar sort of track record.
Some of this is the effect of youth, as it is pretty common for an 18 yr old to think they already have all the answers, and their parents are stupid and don't understand the way things are now. But high tech nerds especially seem to hang on to this arrogance for a long time. Part of it is problematic socialization abilities. The standard borderline Asperger's that nerds are often so proud of. Part of it is that they only interact with non-techies in the context of their area of expertise, and so they tend not to see that other people are very good at other things, even if they aren't so good at computers.
Even if you are great at everything you put your mind or your hand to, if you are arrogant, there is one thing you suck at, and that is dealing with people.
I'm over 50, and I started a new job in a new area of technology.
If you have to ask if you are too old to retrain, that presents two possibilities to me
1) You've got serious self-esteem issues: get some counseling
2) You don't really like learning new things, in which case development is not really for you, and support really might be the right choice.
You're on the fence with a 10% raise. To me, that's not so much, so I'm thinking maybe you are ready to jump already. Ask yourself, how much of a pay increase would it take to get you off the fence? If your current job was closer to home, would that make a difference? Play around with the parameters in your head, determine what motivates you and what doesn't. Then when you know what's really important to you, get as much of that as you can out of whoever you decide you want to work for.
The only subjects you are guaranteed to use directly, that you learned in school, are the three Rs, reading, ritin', and 'rithmetic.
Some subjects change your brain. Forced to do the abstract reasoning required to do higher math, your brain will change to accomodate. I made my kids study music for similar reasons.
Some subjects are there to try to make a good citizen out of you, hence history, social studies, geography, government.
Some subjects are there to enrich your life, and make you think about yourself, the world, and your place in it. To help to make you a moral person, not just an obedient person.
If school were simply about preparing you for your future job, we should all be doing apprenticeships, instead of going to school. However miserably it might fail at that goal, school is supposed to foster thoughtful adults who are able to enjoy more than sex and professional wresting, who are good citizens, and moral people.
1) There is "open mind" meaning "stick your finger in the wind".
2) There is "open mind" meaning "review all the available evidence, consult experts on all sides of a question, and come to a rational conclusion"
3) There is "keeping your promises".
There has been plenty of evidence for (1) in US politics, very little evidence of (2), and (3) is what gets you reelected.
If you are coding for yourself, and you are productive and have fun using PHP, go for it, don't worry about what other people say about the language. If you are going to hand it off to someone else, later, you need to be cognizant of how hard it is to find coders for your language of choice.
I personally like picking up new programming languages, they affect the way I approach any programming task. My usual thing is to write a web-app in the new language.
That being said, if I just have to get something working, and working well, I will go with what I already know well, if I can, or with what the environment requires, if I don't have a choice. Where I work, the choice is Java or Java.
I have never had any such problem. For one thing, I'm never typing nearly as many numbers on the phone as I do on the computer and calculator number pads. For another, I'm usually dialing phone numbers with my thumb, and numbers on the computer, calculator, or adding machine with my fingers. And speaking Italian or Spanish also fail to destroy my memory for English.
What she says may or may not be true. However, if your lawyer, your doctor, your martial arts instructor posted crap like this, how long do you think they would stay in business? Kids attending a public school don't have the option of shopping around.
At every technology company I'm aware of, 55 hour weeks are normal. Someone who works 40 hours isn't going anywhere professionally. Most techies I know are at or a little beyond the threshold for a schedule that causes burnout in the long run. So, rather than accuse your co-workers of being slackers, I will assume that what your boss is really asking after is an extra 10-15 hours per week per person. As weekly hours go up, so does likelihood of burnout, and time to burnout drops. Ask too much, and it is only a matter of time before everyone that stays becomes nasty, stupid, or both.
That is leaving aside the idea of asking for more work without offering anything in return. A significant fraction of those who can find another job will, and he'll be left with the loyal, the lazy, and the ones that couldn't find anything better.
I was hoping to read some answer that answered my similar requirements.
My requirements were for a searchable, portable mail message database. Ability to tag messages is also important. I had high hopes for Mozilla Raindrop, but my last experience with it didn't do anything for me. Here's what I am doing now: I have set up an IMAP server (imapd) on an Ubuntu server. Thunderbird is currently my primary email client. Thunderbird connects to all my various email accounts. When I am ready to archive an email, it gets copied to a folder on my imap server. The emails are tagged, and stored in folders by quarter to keep any particular file from getting to large.
What I would like is the ability to store them in a searchable database with an open source implementation.
If you have time to get up and grab a snack at work, you have time to exercise instead. A few five minute strolls while at work add up. If you don't have time to even get up and get a snack, I doubt you are going to have a problem with food at work. Make sure you have snacks that are healthy and filling for the commute, and nothing else to eat or drink. I might have made the same claims as you, except that the time I spent "exercising" (dancing and dance lessons) was also time I didn't have access to food, and didn't think about it.
I met my wife that way. Be clean, be neat, be nice. Dance studio practice parties are less competitive than dance clubs. Ballroom dance places seem to always have excess women, salsa clubs excess men. Learn to spin a girl well in Salsa, and they will queue up to dance with you.
CO2 that is part of the natural carbon cycle is certainly not the problem. Yeast eats sugar that contains carbon that was bound from the atmosphere by a recently living plant. It's just not the same as dumping carbon into the air from materials that were sequestered and out of the atmosphere for millions of years.
Remember, alcohol is a renewable resource, and if we can find a way to make it without burning fossil fuel, a darn good way to make a dent in net carbon emissions.
It's always programmers that claim programmers are expensive, and hardware is cheap. People who make this claim rarely take other costs into consideration. Like support, power, rack space, etc. I would just love to see someone do a study tracking total project costs against the money spent up front in planning, design, and development.
After years with propietary software, I am wishing my company would consider open source. Why? For what we pay for support, we could hire three competent developers. What we get are patches that break existing applications, or a statement that they have decided not to implement the enhancements we need. For the same money, I could just fix the bugs and add the enhancements I need to OSS. And I end up getting what I paid for, instead of excuses. All this pain just so that we have someone to point a finger at when things go wrong. I don't want to point fingers, I just want things to work.
There is precious little detail, to determine what is going on here. Many people in the neighborhood are under 40? From what I've heard, many over 25 have trouble hearing the mosquito (although I am not one of those). If it is a neighborhood problem, and enough neighbors actually complain to the police, it will be hard for them to ignore it, so I have to assume that it is only the poster that has complained. You might be too young to consider that the old man might actually be afraid of young people, and has sought a way that helps keep them more distant from him. I know that young men certainly seem to cultivate an intimidating appearance these days. And why not be fearful? What have you done to invite trust? What have any young people in your neighborhood done to reach out to him? Yes, I know, nasty, boring, paranoid, old codger.... Of course, he is thinking "nasty, loud, obnoxious, inconsiderate kids...." And any of the illegal and vindictive approaches suggested validates his point of view.
You think maybe there is a reason he feels paranoid? You might not be the ones that got him this way, but it was probably kids that engendered his paranoia. You reap the benefits of inconsiderate youth before you. And, let's face it, kids that are inconsiderate of others, making their cars shake with their subwoofers, piercing my ears with their ipods cranked up to 90dB, are extremely evident, whether or not they are a minority contingent.
In another time, in another place, he would be getting help, respect, attention, from the young people around him, and would be more likely to trust youth. Now, the only people that seem to even sometimes care are their own kids, and there's no guarantee of that, even.
Yeah, you didn't make him that way. But how often have you gone out of your way to put an older person at ease, before? If you had, there probably wouldn't be an issue now, because you could just do the same thing again. However, if you can't be bothered to take some time out for a senior, well, is it any wonder seniors are distrustful of youth?
The letter of the law is grossly underspecified. SOX is whatever the bloody auditors with their accounting degrees say it is. In any case, I was not under the impression that the original poster was talking about engineering. Any refusals I have seen have been involved with IT operations that touch financials in some way.
This is the sort of complaint I hear constantly. So, speaking from the IT side of the house....
My job is to keep existing systems that generate revenue and enhance productivity up and running and secure. Downtime costs serious bucks in lost revenue. On top of that, I do indeed have an overwhelming bureaucracy to deal with, doubled in difficulty and complexity by Sarbannes-Oxley. The S-Ox auditors are not techies, they are accountants, which means a great deal of irrelevant detail has to be audited.
Exceptions to existing application environments and frameworks are extremely expensive in terms of allocating dedicated hardware and dedicated people that could potentially be servicing ten times the resources, but those economies of scale are lost when we have to do special things for someone's one-of project. Handling exceptions is very expensive in a large scale environment.
If we need something new, lots of planning goes into it, to make sure we can keep it up and running, and scale to much greater than anticipated load.
If you want agility, you either have to find a way to achieve it within existing channels (in our environment, the turn-around for J2EE or Oracle apps is quite short), or you need to convince upper management of the value of a skunk-works type mini-DC for such "agility", with the understanding that anything successful will need to be reengineered to be robust enough for the main DC.
Most of all, you have to have a value case. It's not enough to talk about lost business opportunities. You have to be able to quantify the projected value of the opportunity, and balance that against the cost of handling an exception in the datacenter. If IT cannot quantify the cost of an exception, bad on them.
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I got a pair of bifocals a couple of years ago. I got really tired of tilting my head back to look at my monitors. When working on my big monitors, I just wear an old pair of glasses that doesn't correct me as much as my current pair, and that seems to do the job. Next time around, I will get a pair in just the reading prescription that is just for computer work.
I finished my Ph.D as an experimental physicist 20 years ago, and got a post-doc. And I managed to get a job in IT after that. A few comments on your story: (1) Physics to network technology is not a natural jump. Your resume should be highlighting all the relevant experience you gathered while doing your PhD. I did a lot of heavy coding for data analysis, big data crunching, and unix system administration on cutting edge hardware. My other option besides the Sales Engineer job I ended up taking was translating particle transport code from Fortran to C++. When I was looking for a tech job, that was the experience I emphasized, not the actual physics part. (2) As others have mentioned, you need to be talking to small shops, you're more likely to talk directly to the hiring manager, rather than a HR person. (3) As many have already said, eat some humble pie. You very obviously didn't do your research before deciding to pursue a PhD in Physics. And you haven't been pursuing the obvious route of getting some network certifications. I mean, come on, what evidence are you providing potential employers that your networking knowledge is at all current, or even still exists? And yes, the Ph,D. hurts, the problem is that they think you will want to be paid commensurate with a Ph.D. with your full years of working experience, rather than paid as a network engineer with years of experience up to when you left the field. They are worried you will get bored, consider the work beneath you, and you will either leave or become a problem employee. (5) Take some contracting work. The bar is lower, because if you don't work out they can just end the contract. And that will pad out your resume with the relevant experience. The only time my Ph.D. was a liability was in getting my first job. You need to establish a job history post-Ph.D. that shows the sort of work you are willing to do for a reasonable amount of pay, for a reasonable length of time. I kept my first technology job for five years. Then, the Ph.D. was never again an issue, it was only an asset. You might need to do contract work for a year or two to establish a similar sort of track record.
Some of this is the effect of youth, as it is pretty common for an 18 yr old to think they already have all the answers, and their parents are stupid and don't understand the way things are now. But high tech nerds especially seem to hang on to this arrogance for a long time. Part of it is problematic socialization abilities. The standard borderline Asperger's that nerds are often so proud of. Part of it is that they only interact with non-techies in the context of their area of expertise, and so they tend not to see that other people are very good at other things, even if they aren't so good at computers. Even if you are great at everything you put your mind or your hand to, if you are arrogant, there is one thing you suck at, and that is dealing with people.
I'm over 50, and I started a new job in a new area of technology. If you have to ask if you are too old to retrain, that presents two possibilities to me 1) You've got serious self-esteem issues: get some counseling 2) You don't really like learning new things, in which case development is not really for you, and support really might be the right choice.
You're on the fence with a 10% raise. To me, that's not so much, so I'm thinking maybe you are ready to jump already. Ask yourself, how much of a pay increase would it take to get you off the fence? If your current job was closer to home, would that make a difference? Play around with the parameters in your head, determine what motivates you and what doesn't. Then when you know what's really important to you, get as much of that as you can out of whoever you decide you want to work for.
The only subjects you are guaranteed to use directly, that you learned in school, are the three Rs, reading, ritin', and 'rithmetic. Some subjects change your brain. Forced to do the abstract reasoning required to do higher math, your brain will change to accomodate. I made my kids study music for similar reasons. Some subjects are there to try to make a good citizen out of you, hence history, social studies, geography, government. Some subjects are there to enrich your life, and make you think about yourself, the world, and your place in it. To help to make you a moral person, not just an obedient person. If school were simply about preparing you for your future job, we should all be doing apprenticeships, instead of going to school. However miserably it might fail at that goal, school is supposed to foster thoughtful adults who are able to enjoy more than sex and professional wresting, who are good citizens, and moral people.
they might learn to think a bit more logically. And that would not be a bad thing.
1) There is "open mind" meaning "stick your finger in the wind". 2) There is "open mind" meaning "review all the available evidence, consult experts on all sides of a question, and come to a rational conclusion" 3) There is "keeping your promises". There has been plenty of evidence for (1) in US politics, very little evidence of (2), and (3) is what gets you reelected.
If you are coding for yourself, and you are productive and have fun using PHP, go for it, don't worry about what other people say about the language. If you are going to hand it off to someone else, later, you need to be cognizant of how hard it is to find coders for your language of choice. I personally like picking up new programming languages, they affect the way I approach any programming task. My usual thing is to write a web-app in the new language. That being said, if I just have to get something working, and working well, I will go with what I already know well, if I can, or with what the environment requires, if I don't have a choice. Where I work, the choice is Java or Java.
I have never had any such problem. For one thing, I'm never typing nearly as many numbers on the phone as I do on the computer and calculator number pads. For another, I'm usually dialing phone numbers with my thumb, and numbers on the computer, calculator, or adding machine with my fingers. And speaking Italian or Spanish also fail to destroy my memory for English.
He said it to you directly. He didn't post it on his blog.
What she says may or may not be true. However, if your lawyer, your doctor, your martial arts instructor posted crap like this, how long do you think they would stay in business? Kids attending a public school don't have the option of shopping around.
Nice for you. I guess you don't work in Silicon Valley or NYC.
At every technology company I'm aware of, 55 hour weeks are normal. Someone who works 40 hours isn't going anywhere professionally. Most techies I know are at or a little beyond the threshold for a schedule that causes burnout in the long run. So, rather than accuse your co-workers of being slackers, I will assume that what your boss is really asking after is an extra 10-15 hours per week per person. As weekly hours go up, so does likelihood of burnout, and time to burnout drops. Ask too much, and it is only a matter of time before everyone that stays becomes nasty, stupid, or both. That is leaving aside the idea of asking for more work without offering anything in return. A significant fraction of those who can find another job will, and he'll be left with the loyal, the lazy, and the ones that couldn't find anything better.
I was hoping to read some answer that answered my similar requirements. My requirements were for a searchable, portable mail message database. Ability to tag messages is also important. I had high hopes for Mozilla Raindrop, but my last experience with it didn't do anything for me. Here's what I am doing now: I have set up an IMAP server (imapd) on an Ubuntu server. Thunderbird is currently my primary email client. Thunderbird connects to all my various email accounts. When I am ready to archive an email, it gets copied to a folder on my imap server. The emails are tagged, and stored in folders by quarter to keep any particular file from getting to large. What I would like is the ability to store them in a searchable database with an open source implementation.
If you are going to drink fruit juice, you might as well drink soda from the weight control perspective. Drink water and eat fruit.
If you have time to get up and grab a snack at work, you have time to exercise instead. A few five minute strolls while at work add up. If you don't have time to even get up and get a snack, I doubt you are going to have a problem with food at work. Make sure you have snacks that are healthy and filling for the commute, and nothing else to eat or drink. I might have made the same claims as you, except that the time I spent "exercising" (dancing and dance lessons) was also time I didn't have access to food, and didn't think about it.
I met my wife that way. Be clean, be neat, be nice. Dance studio practice parties are less competitive than dance clubs. Ballroom dance places seem to always have excess women, salsa clubs excess men. Learn to spin a girl well in Salsa, and they will queue up to dance with you.
D**n, I forgot what day it is. OK, you got me, man.
CO2 that is part of the natural carbon cycle is certainly not the problem. Yeast eats sugar that contains carbon that was bound from the atmosphere by a recently living plant. It's just not the same as dumping carbon into the air from materials that were sequestered and out of the atmosphere for millions of years. Remember, alcohol is a renewable resource, and if we can find a way to make it without burning fossil fuel, a darn good way to make a dent in net carbon emissions.
It's always programmers that claim programmers are expensive, and hardware is cheap. People who make this claim rarely take other costs into consideration. Like support, power, rack space, etc. I would just love to see someone do a study tracking total project costs against the money spent up front in planning, design, and development.
After years with propietary software, I am wishing my company would consider open source. Why? For what we pay for support, we could hire three competent developers. What we get are patches that break existing applications, or a statement that they have decided not to implement the enhancements we need. For the same money, I could just fix the bugs and add the enhancements I need to OSS. And I end up getting what I paid for, instead of excuses. All this pain just so that we have someone to point a finger at when things go wrong. I don't want to point fingers, I just want things to work.
There is precious little detail, to determine what is going on here. Many people in the neighborhood are under 40? From what I've heard, many over 25 have trouble hearing the mosquito (although I am not one of those). If it is a neighborhood problem, and enough neighbors actually complain to the police, it will be hard for them to ignore it, so I have to assume that it is only the poster that has complained. You might be too young to consider that the old man might actually be afraid of young people, and has sought a way that helps keep them more distant from him. I know that young men certainly seem to cultivate an intimidating appearance these days. And why not be fearful? What have you done to invite trust? What have any young people in your neighborhood done to reach out to him? Yes, I know, nasty, boring, paranoid, old codger.... Of course, he is thinking "nasty, loud, obnoxious, inconsiderate kids...." And any of the illegal and vindictive approaches suggested validates his point of view. You think maybe there is a reason he feels paranoid? You might not be the ones that got him this way, but it was probably kids that engendered his paranoia. You reap the benefits of inconsiderate youth before you. And, let's face it, kids that are inconsiderate of others, making their cars shake with their subwoofers, piercing my ears with their ipods cranked up to 90dB, are extremely evident, whether or not they are a minority contingent. In another time, in another place, he would be getting help, respect, attention, from the young people around him, and would be more likely to trust youth. Now, the only people that seem to even sometimes care are their own kids, and there's no guarantee of that, even. Yeah, you didn't make him that way. But how often have you gone out of your way to put an older person at ease, before? If you had, there probably wouldn't be an issue now, because you could just do the same thing again. However, if you can't be bothered to take some time out for a senior, well, is it any wonder seniors are distrustful of youth?
The letter of the law is grossly underspecified. SOX is whatever the bloody auditors with their accounting degrees say it is. In any case, I was not under the impression that the original poster was talking about engineering. Any refusals I have seen have been involved with IT operations that touch financials in some way.
This is the sort of complaint I hear constantly. So, speaking from the IT side of the house.... My job is to keep existing systems that generate revenue and enhance productivity up and running and secure. Downtime costs serious bucks in lost revenue. On top of that, I do indeed have an overwhelming bureaucracy to deal with, doubled in difficulty and complexity by Sarbannes-Oxley. The S-Ox auditors are not techies, they are accountants, which means a great deal of irrelevant detail has to be audited. Exceptions to existing application environments and frameworks are extremely expensive in terms of allocating dedicated hardware and dedicated people that could potentially be servicing ten times the resources, but those economies of scale are lost when we have to do special things for someone's one-of project. Handling exceptions is very expensive in a large scale environment. If we need something new, lots of planning goes into it, to make sure we can keep it up and running, and scale to much greater than anticipated load. If you want agility, you either have to find a way to achieve it within existing channels (in our environment, the turn-around for J2EE or Oracle apps is quite short), or you need to convince upper management of the value of a skunk-works type mini-DC for such "agility", with the understanding that anything successful will need to be reengineered to be robust enough for the main DC. Most of all, you have to have a value case. It's not enough to talk about lost business opportunities. You have to be able to quantify the projected value of the opportunity, and balance that against the cost of handling an exception in the datacenter. If IT cannot quantify the cost of an exception, bad on them.