shall I delve myself into the mess that is J2EE and/or.NET, or shall I do what I love and can do best: create fun games.
If you can land a job at a game company, and they're not working you to death, then I'd certainly say do that. I would if I could.
I know what you mean about J2EE/.NET. There's a lot of open-source business-management software out there, and I'm sure I could start a business installing and customizing such software for other businesses. I could start in my local area with personal contacts, and grow as much as I wanted to. Everyone else could do it too, and we wouldn't even be competing with each other until our reaches started to intersect. Great idea, right?
Well, first, it means you have to slog through a bunch of open-source packages, figuring out what they really do, how they're architected inside, and whether they're lame-brained piles of crap. Not an easy task. I'm immersed in only one open-source project right now, and one is enough! The next hurdle is figuring out how to make a profit on a service that's going to require a lot of customization and support. Plus, you have to be willing to throw yourself into what can be a really boring topic. I once worked for a tax-software company -- I loved the people I worked with, the software was well-written and documented, and they did their best to make it a fun place to work, but having to write tax software all day still eventually drove me buggers. I dunno, maybe the slow economy and tight job market would keep me focused this time.:-)
Is that the sort of dilemma you're wrestling with?
I too have spends decades programming and one thing I've learned is that a 20 minute interview with someone can tell a lot more than a couple paragraph bit of prose when it comes to personality.
What sort of things could you see in someone who is otherwise upbeat and proud of his accomplishments? All I can think of is, I've noticed over the years that most programmers tend to be the quiet & reserved type; I think I come across as something between a swashbuckler and a drill sergeant. I'm the sort that will stand up to a neighborhood bully, even if he's much larger than me. (Heck, I'm asking the Slashdot crowd to explain to me what sort of loser I am...that should settle my bravery credentials, no?:-) I do sort of see other programmers cower slightly during interviews.
Have you had experience with interviewees that sound like this?
our field does legitimately include a lot of very bright people who are really, really tough to work with.
You may be on to something there -- I generally find my fellow programmers very tough to work with. The number of programmers in my life that I thought were capable of real work, I can still count on one hand. Most seem like they got into CS for the money, and never saw a computer in their life until they entered college -- they really don't seem to have much insight on programming, nor are they knowledgeable on a wide swath of related topics. To me, computer science is something I study obsessively, and I have experience in more weird unconnected areas than I could ever describe. I don't see that in the vast majority of programmers. I also don't see source-code comments, design documents, or any hint that their design isn't being made up as they type the code. It's like they're taking the low road to job security, deliberately generating crap that's hard to figure out so that the company becomes dependent upon them. I find this very tough to work with.
But I've learned to. The vast majority of my career has been spent reverse-engineering old crappy code, figuring out how it works, and then fixing and extending it. I have become really good at what I call "software archaeology", even though I never wanted to be. I also find nasty bugs in code I didn't write; I remember tracking a memory-corruption-related crash back to a C-style static cast on a multiply-inherited object done without including the header file first. That bug had been in there for over a year, and until I found the problem, their proposed solution was to block players from entering that part of the game grid. Eeek! But how else am I to work with such persistent mediocrity? All I can do is try to fix it.
If this makes me hard to work with, I ask...is it really my fault?
You don't have to be condescending for people to have a problem with arrogance.
Eh? Isn't "scornful/condescending pride" the definition of arrogance?
Strong pride is a sin, especially during interviews. If you are not comfortable with letting your accomplishments speak for themselves, then maybe YOU are insecure...
Again...eh? If I don't sell myself, who else will? And if the accomplishments I list on my resume "speak for themselves", then why is the interview needed at all?
Because they caught a strong wiff of your arrogance.
Sure I'm proud of my accomplishments and my ability. I should be. But I truly don't think I'm condescending about it. I'm willing to change my opinions the instant someone shows me where they're wrong. I care far more about being right than asserting I'm right.
You can call me arrogant, but I think they reject me because they know I'm fully capable of replacing them, and they're too insecure about their job.
There are software engineer positions in the UK, but they are only interested in foreign workers or entry level graduates it seems - here's a job advert.
Yeah, we have a similar problem here in the United States too. My understanding of the scam is, some company find a foreign worker they'd like to import on an H1-B visa, but first they have to advertise the job, so they do so, and the ad features a mind-numbingly long list of nitpicky requirements that happen to exactly match the H1-B applicant, and when no one can match those criteria, they get to import their guest worker.
I had the same experience with job interviews a couple of years ago; "what can do you do that graduates can't do?"
Gee, I dunno, how about your ability to apply experience and spot problems before they start, instead of stupidly running right off the cliff? The problem is the managers too don't have enough insight to avoid running right off the cliff.
"Undoubtably you could do the work of three graduates if not more, but given the economic situation, we have to take on as many graduates as possible"
Uh...er...huh? I don't even begin to understand that. Are you more expensive than 3 graduate students put together? Or is there a London in Japan these days?:-)
Employers are advised by financial analysts not to allow any one person to gain a monopoly of knowledge within the company, and to avoid this
situation by taking on a constant stream of graduates, or rotate staff between departments.
WHAT?!?! How about avoiding the situation with proper documentation and proper technical oversight??? Oh yeah, that would require brains and skill. Can't have that.
You should consider studying for a Masters degree. These days, for any kind of architect position, you need a Masters degree if not a Ph.D.
Get a higher degree in a subject where there already aren't any jobs? You sure about that? I'd love to get my Ph.D. in Computer Science, but don't see the point.
I agree , "organizational fit" is BS. It reeks of groupthink.
Exactly. Apparently, what they really want is for everyone to get along fabulously as they run the company right into the ground.
I'm starting to believe that the CEOs of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc. are the harbingers of the new reality in American business -- economic fascism. Under this model, creating a viable business is not the priority -- now it's all about conning investors into giving you money, paying yourself handsomely, and skipping out before the house of cards comes crashing down. I don't know how else to explain what I'm seeing.
I don't agree that someone who is passionate about video games is inherently suffering from arrested development
Oh, I dunno, I would expect adults to desire more meaning out of their jobs.
Speaking of which - your journal entry about the rejection letter: [...] Sometimes it's just about a fit of the team, and how it gels, and if someone doesn't fit, then that's the way it goes.
And how on Earth did they figure that out so quickly? Years ago I remember seeing an SBIR (sorry, can't find it now) where the military asked for help designing a psychological screening protocol that could detect which soldiers would succeed and which would become disciplinary problems and so on. I think these people, with their apparent superior skills in this area, should track down that SBIR and go become filthy rich! Unless they're just faking it. To me, their stated reasons are obvious BS.
It feels like you're looking for someone to blame for that [...] but just let it go:)
Sorry, but after 2+ years of unemployment, and overly generic & inexplicable rejection letters, and that whole life-falling-apart thing, I'm pissed. Being a nerd is hard enough...but a poor, unemployed nerd? No wonder I look forward to the end of civilization.
Scary... you must have worked on the project I joined...
Are you about 50 miles north of Los Angeles?:-)
Have you tried graphics chip vendors?
At this point, I've given up looking for a software job. I don't think any committee will ever approve of offering me a job. I think I have no choice but to start my own business.
Oh yeah, and there's no source-code comments, no design documents, no institutional knowledge about the code, and no direction from your tech lead.
Oh, and the code was actually written by another company, and the publisher decided to fire them and give your company the project. (Actually happened to me.)
I wish video-game companies weren't the only ones responding to my online resume postings. Oh well.
So in other words you are saying that you enjoyed working on video games and programming?
Absolutely! I just don't spend all my spare time playing video games. The problem, it seems, is that video-game companies see this as some sort of problem.
Too many people in college, at least my college, picked computer science for the money.
Yeah, I was absolutely stunned by how many of my classmates had never programmed a computer until they got to college. In both of my assembly-language classes, I was the only one that had any prior experience with it. That pattern repeated in industry...boy, were my co-workers clueless.
Are you intentionally trying to discourage people from getting into the industry?
They already do that. Every gaming-industry ad I see requires a minimum of one published game. That pretty much filters out new people.
I also like how they almost universally mention being a team player with a strong work ethic, and a passion for video games, as important. Translation: you need to love working yourself to death!
That only leaves room for the people passionate about the industry.
And why is that necessarily a good thing? Does someone have to be an absolutely committed gamer to work in the video game industry? Wouldn't a more well-rounded team, with other skills and interests, lead to better results?
I've been programming for over 20 years, and have been in the software industry for around 12 years. I've worked for a word-processing company, a tax-software company, an ISP, a defense firm doing electronic-warfare simulation, a defense firm doing 3-D battlefield visualization, and two video-game companies. It never once occurred to me that I should look to specialize my software in one particular field; the true strength of a programmer is to be able to pick up any field and program it. But your attitude is consistent with the sort of people that I've met in the gaming industry -- they genuinely don't seem to understand that. I remember when we lost our audio programmer, and the higher-ups were panicked about hiring a new one. I told them I had done plenty of audio programming, and they told me no, they needed a specialist. I gave them a little history of the sort of audio programming I had done on my own, and left them speechless. They simply weren't willing to believe it. When I was being interviewed for my second video-game job, the president of the company told me that what he liked about my resume was my console experience; what he didn't like was that I didn't have enough console experience. Talk about tunnel vision.
I was hired to my first video-game job as a sort of "opportunity" programmer; they knew I was good, though I only had informal video-game experience, like the Quake II mod Weapons Of Destruction. I've been doing assembly-language programming and other low-level hardware tweaking since I was 12, so they gave me the (HUGE!) PlayStation 2 Hardware Reference manuals, and told me to get on with it. Within 3 months, I knew the machine well and was rewriting large sections of our code to either use the vector unit or to squeeze better into the FUBAR memory model. I was finding stuff that seemed really basic to me, but all the best "game programmer" minds that had worked at that company for 10+ years somehow couldn't find them. I even achieved an order-of-magnitude increase in performance for our physics engine. Oh, I picked up physics simulation while I was there too. (I remember being told by my boss that I was now considered the PS2 and physics-performance expert in the company. The same boss that was speechless about my audio experience. LOL!) It's not "passion about the video-game industry" that drove me to these accomplishments. I just normally act this way at work. (I act this way atplay, also.)
Besides, what sort of grown adults could be so passionate about video games? The same sort that suffer from arrested development, that's who. The social atmosphere at both video-game companies where I worked was positively middle-school. I remember being told, hush-hush, that so-and-so "just doesn't like you", as if that was supposed to be some life-altering event. It was, too: I got fired from both jobs for reasons that didn't rise very far above that. A rejection letter I received recently from a video-game company actually went so far as to admit that.
If the video-game industry wants to improve itself, then the people involved first have to grow the hell up. The rest of what you need to do will become more obvious once you do that.
The US was an attempt at such. The concept was largely independent states united in an effort to protect themselves from more powerful enemies, such as (at the time) England. Originally (as I understand it), the concept was for states to retain most of the power, but the fed to have power for defense against foreign powers, and to make sure that no state did anything to violate the constitution.
How far we have strayed...
From my reading of history, this is mostly because the United States has been in a permanent state of war since 1941. After WWII ended, we went straight into the Cold War with the Warsaw Pact nations. (I consider the Cold War to be WWIII, and Korea and Vietnam to be the two times that the Cold War got "hot".) By the time the Soviet Union crumbled on Christmas 1991, we were already at war with these stupid neo-Muslim fanatics, but Bill Clinton dodged it for 8 years. GWB embraced the terrorist-hunter legacy, and now we're involved in a global conflict against them, which is essentialy WWIV.
The federal government indeed defends the states against foreign powers, and has been for 63+ years in a row now. That tends to leave things lopsided. I tend to believe that, should the rest of the world finally stop trying to kill us, federal powers will eventually flow back to the states.
Of course, that'd be after the defeat of neo-Muslim terrorism, and presumably Chinese totalitarianism...both big ifs. And assuming our economy survives globalization (our own idea, no less). I had always assumed law would never get outsourced, but it has. Now nothing is safe.
Apparently, the scam is that companies post these job listings, with a mind-numbingly long list of requirements that matches the H1-B person they want to bring on board, then when no one else in humanity matches, the H1-B person gets approved by the government. Nice, huh?
What us unemployed geeks need is a pied piper! Someone to start the atheistic-rationalistic equivalent of a cult, so we can combine our geek skills together and make the world sorry they gave us so much free time. Someone like John Galt, but real. And a project like Linux, but even more disruptive.
I was thinking strongly of doing something like this, but it was my understanding that this career was already being outsourced to places like India. Is that your experience?
After what happened to my C.S. career, I refuse to waste my time going back to school to get a degree that'll get outsourced.
Here we are, freshly graduated, young and naive yet ready to learn and grow, and the world says, "Fuck you".
I can imagine that would hurt. Me, I was in the industry for 12 years, breezing through problems that my idiot peers found insurmountable, and now I get bizarre rejection letters like this one . Either way, this sucks.
I'm not even sure what to get a degree in. Bioinformatics would be a great match for me, but that's already being outsourced to India. Even medicine is being outsourced; India now has "medical tourism" for major operations like heart bypass surgery. About the only thing that's safe is an MBA or law degree, and to be one of the bastards causing the mess, but I never wanted to do that for a living.
If people want a cathedral experience with Linux, they can buy an officially-supported version, like Red Hat, or SUSE, or even Linspire.
He can complain that these vendors need to do more to create a consistent GUI across applications, but complaining that the bazaar isn't a cathedral just seems to be missing the point.
Around 15 years ago, in my first software-industry job, I worked for a small Mac developer, writing a product that directly competed with something Microsoft puts out. Microsoft ended up hiring the two most senior engineers right out of the company, by giving them better salaries and major stock options. That basically decapitated the development team, and the company has never been the same since.
Turnabout is fair play.
The stock options of those two have been under water for several years now. They thought they could make the Dark Side Of The Force work to their advantage, and like so many before them, they got burned.
I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.
The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.
You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.
We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.
Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!
Slashdot Mirror
If you can land a job at a game company, and they're not working you to death, then I'd certainly say do that. I would if I could.
I know what you mean about J2EE/.NET. There's a lot of open-source business-management software out there, and I'm sure I could start a business installing and customizing such software for other businesses. I could start in my local area with personal contacts, and grow as much as I wanted to. Everyone else could do it too, and we wouldn't even be competing with each other until our reaches started to intersect. Great idea, right?
Well, first, it means you have to slog through a bunch of open-source packages, figuring out what they really do, how they're architected inside, and whether they're lame-brained piles of crap. Not an easy task. I'm immersed in only one open-source project right now, and one is enough! The next hurdle is figuring out how to make a profit on a service that's going to require a lot of customization and support. Plus, you have to be willing to throw yourself into what can be a really boring topic. I once worked for a tax-software company -- I loved the people I worked with, the software was well-written and documented, and they did their best to make it a fun place to work, but having to write tax software all day still eventually drove me buggers. I dunno, maybe the slow economy and tight job market would keep me focused this time. :-)
Is that the sort of dilemma you're wrestling with?
What sort of things could you see in someone who is otherwise upbeat and proud of his accomplishments? All I can think of is, I've noticed over the years that most programmers tend to be the quiet & reserved type; I think I come across as something between a swashbuckler and a drill sergeant. I'm the sort that will stand up to a neighborhood bully, even if he's much larger than me. (Heck, I'm asking the Slashdot crowd to explain to me what sort of loser I am...that should settle my bravery credentials, no? :-) I do sort of see other programmers cower slightly during interviews.
Have you had experience with interviewees that sound like this?
You may be on to something there -- I generally find my fellow programmers very tough to work with. The number of programmers in my life that I thought were capable of real work, I can still count on one hand. Most seem like they got into CS for the money, and never saw a computer in their life until they entered college -- they really don't seem to have much insight on programming, nor are they knowledgeable on a wide swath of related topics. To me, computer science is something I study obsessively, and I have experience in more weird unconnected areas than I could ever describe. I don't see that in the vast majority of programmers. I also don't see source-code comments, design documents, or any hint that their design isn't being made up as they type the code. It's like they're taking the low road to job security, deliberately generating crap that's hard to figure out so that the company becomes dependent upon them. I find this very tough to work with.
But I've learned to. The vast majority of my career has been spent reverse-engineering old crappy code, figuring out how it works, and then fixing and extending it. I have become really good at what I call "software archaeology", even though I never wanted to be. I also find nasty bugs in code I didn't write; I remember tracking a memory-corruption-related crash back to a C-style static cast on a multiply-inherited object done without including the header file first. That bug had been in there for over a year, and until I found the problem, their proposed solution was to block players from entering that part of the game grid. Eeek! But how else am I to work with such persistent mediocrity? All I can do is try to fix it.
If this makes me hard to work with, I ask...is it really my fault?
You don't count -- you're "anybody". Everybody is waiting for "somebody".
Eh? Isn't "scornful/condescending pride" the definition of arrogance?
Again...eh? If I don't sell myself, who else will? And if the accomplishments I list on my resume "speak for themselves", then why is the interview needed at all?
Sure I'm proud of my accomplishments and my ability. I should be. But I truly don't think I'm condescending about it. I'm willing to change my opinions the instant someone shows me where they're wrong. I care far more about being right than asserting I'm right.
You can call me arrogant, but I think they reject me because they know I'm fully capable of replacing them, and they're too insecure about their job.
Yeah, we have a similar problem here in the United States too. My understanding of the scam is, some company find a foreign worker they'd like to import on an H1-B visa, but first they have to advertise the job, so they do so, and the ad features a mind-numbingly long list of nitpicky requirements that happen to exactly match the H1-B applicant, and when no one can match those criteria, they get to import their guest worker.
Gee, I dunno, how about your ability to apply experience and spot problems before they start, instead of stupidly running right off the cliff? The problem is the managers too don't have enough insight to avoid running right off the cliff.
Uh...er...huh? I don't even begin to understand that. Are you more expensive than 3 graduate students put together? Or is there a London in Japan these days? :-)
WHAT?!?! How about avoiding the situation with proper documentation and proper technical oversight??? Oh yeah, that would require brains and skill. Can't have that.
Get a higher degree in a subject where there already aren't any jobs? You sure about that? I'd love to get my Ph.D. in Computer Science, but don't see the point.
Exactly. Apparently, what they really want is for everyone to get along fabulously as they run the company right into the ground.
I'm starting to believe that the CEOs of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc. are the harbingers of the new reality in American business -- economic fascism. Under this model, creating a viable business is not the priority -- now it's all about conning investors into giving you money, paying yourself handsomely, and skipping out before the house of cards comes crashing down. I don't know how else to explain what I'm seeing.
Ah, you noticed the reference to The Fountainhead, I see. :-)
Oh, I dunno, I would expect adults to desire more meaning out of their jobs.
And how on Earth did they figure that out so quickly? Years ago I remember seeing an SBIR (sorry, can't find it now) where the military asked for help designing a psychological screening protocol that could detect which soldiers would succeed and which would become disciplinary problems and so on. I think these people, with their apparent superior skills in this area, should track down that SBIR and go become filthy rich! Unless they're just faking it. To me, their stated reasons are obvious BS.
Sorry, but after 2+ years of unemployment, and overly generic & inexplicable rejection letters, and that whole life-falling-apart thing, I'm pissed. Being a nerd is hard enough...but a poor, unemployed nerd? No wonder I look forward to the end of civilization.
Are you about 50 miles north of Los Angeles? :-)
At this point, I've given up looking for a software job. I don't think any committee will ever approve of offering me a job. I think I have no choice but to start my own business.
What'd you do exactly, cut organs into little pieces and paste them onto a big posterboard and then show it to Dada and Andy Warhol?
I'm gonna guess you didn't really learn how to do organ transplants in "college".
Oh yeah, and there's no source-code comments, no design documents, no institutional knowledge about the code, and no direction from your tech lead.
Oh, and the code was actually written by another company, and the publisher decided to fire them and give your company the project. (Actually happened to me.)
I wish video-game companies weren't the only ones responding to my online resume postings. Oh well.
Absolutely! I just don't spend all my spare time playing video games. The problem, it seems, is that video-game companies see this as some sort of problem.
Yeah, I was absolutely stunned by how many of my classmates had never programmed a computer until they got to college. In both of my assembly-language classes, I was the only one that had any prior experience with it. That pattern repeated in industry...boy, were my co-workers clueless.
They already do that. Every gaming-industry ad I see requires a minimum of one published game. That pretty much filters out new people.
I also like how they almost universally mention being a team player with a strong work ethic, and a passion for video games, as important. Translation: you need to love working yourself to death!
I posted about that here.
I guessed I should have submitted it as an article...then I would be cool.
And why is that necessarily a good thing? Does someone have to be an absolutely committed gamer to work in the video game industry? Wouldn't a more well-rounded team, with other skills and interests, lead to better results?
I've been programming for over 20 years, and have been in the software industry for around 12 years. I've worked for a word-processing company, a tax-software company, an ISP, a defense firm doing electronic-warfare simulation, a defense firm doing 3-D battlefield visualization, and two video-game companies. It never once occurred to me that I should look to specialize my software in one particular field; the true strength of a programmer is to be able to pick up any field and program it. But your attitude is consistent with the sort of people that I've met in the gaming industry -- they genuinely don't seem to understand that. I remember when we lost our audio programmer, and the higher-ups were panicked about hiring a new one. I told them I had done plenty of audio programming, and they told me no, they needed a specialist. I gave them a little history of the sort of audio programming I had done on my own, and left them speechless. They simply weren't willing to believe it. When I was being interviewed for my second video-game job, the president of the company told me that what he liked about my resume was my console experience; what he didn't like was that I didn't have enough console experience. Talk about tunnel vision.
I was hired to my first video-game job as a sort of "opportunity" programmer; they knew I was good, though I only had informal video-game experience, like the Quake II mod Weapons Of Destruction. I've been doing assembly-language programming and other low-level hardware tweaking since I was 12, so they gave me the (HUGE!) PlayStation 2 Hardware Reference manuals, and told me to get on with it. Within 3 months, I knew the machine well and was rewriting large sections of our code to either use the vector unit or to squeeze better into the FUBAR memory model. I was finding stuff that seemed really basic to me, but all the best "game programmer" minds that had worked at that company for 10+ years somehow couldn't find them. I even achieved an order-of-magnitude increase in performance for our physics engine. Oh, I picked up physics simulation while I was there too. (I remember being told by my boss that I was now considered the PS2 and physics-performance expert in the company. The same boss that was speechless about my audio experience. LOL!) It's not "passion about the video-game industry" that drove me to these accomplishments. I just normally act this way at work. (I act this way at play, also.)
Besides, what sort of grown adults could be so passionate about video games? The same sort that suffer from arrested development, that's who. The social atmosphere at both video-game companies where I worked was positively middle-school. I remember being told, hush-hush, that so-and-so "just doesn't like you", as if that was supposed to be some life-altering event. It was, too: I got fired from both jobs for reasons that didn't rise very far above that. A rejection letter I received recently from a video-game company actually went so far as to admit that.
If the video-game industry wants to improve itself, then the people involved first have to grow the hell up. The rest of what you need to do will become more obvious once you do that.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;18136 34491;fp;16;fpid;0
A study on EDS' own web site confirms they use it and love it.
The opposition to Linux is so uniformly pathetic...it truly boggles the mind.
From my reading of history, this is mostly because the United States has been in a permanent state of war since 1941. After WWII ended, we went straight into the Cold War with the Warsaw Pact nations. (I consider the Cold War to be WWIII, and Korea and Vietnam to be the two times that the Cold War got "hot".) By the time the Soviet Union crumbled on Christmas 1991, we were already at war with these stupid neo-Muslim fanatics, but Bill Clinton dodged it for 8 years. GWB embraced the terrorist-hunter legacy, and now we're involved in a global conflict against them, which is essentialy WWIV.
The federal government indeed defends the states against foreign powers, and has been for 63+ years in a row now. That tends to leave things lopsided. I tend to believe that, should the rest of the world finally stop trying to kill us, federal powers will eventually flow back to the states.
Of course, that'd be after the defeat of neo-Muslim terrorism, and presumably Chinese totalitarianism...both big ifs. And assuming our economy survives globalization (our own idea, no less). I had always assumed law would never get outsourced, but it has. Now nothing is safe.
Apparently, the scam is that companies post these job listings, with a mind-numbingly long list of requirements that matches the H1-B person they want to bring on board, then when no one else in humanity matches, the H1-B person gets approved by the government. Nice, huh?
What us unemployed geeks need is a pied piper! Someone to start the atheistic-rationalistic equivalent of a cult, so we can combine our geek skills together and make the world sorry they gave us so much free time. Someone like John Galt, but real. And a project like Linux, but even more disruptive.
...to which I can only ask, "Where the hell have you all been for my entire career?!?!"
I only meet the morons that can barely code, much less comment or design.
I was thinking strongly of doing something like this, but it was my understanding that this career was already being outsourced to places like India. Is that your experience?
After what happened to my C.S. career, I refuse to waste my time going back to school to get a degree that'll get outsourced.
I can imagine that would hurt. Me, I was in the industry for 12 years, breezing through problems that my idiot peers found insurmountable, and now I get bizarre rejection letters like this one . Either way, this sucks.
I'm not even sure what to get a degree in. Bioinformatics would be a great match for me, but that's already being outsourced to India. Even medicine is being outsourced; India now has "medical tourism" for major operations like heart bypass surgery. About the only thing that's safe is an MBA or law degree, and to be one of the bastards causing the mess, but I never wanted to do that for a living.
See my sig for good news on that front.
If people want a cathedral experience with Linux, they can buy an officially-supported version, like Red Hat, or SUSE, or even Linspire.
He can complain that these vendors need to do more to create a consistent GUI across applications, but complaining that the bazaar isn't a cathedral just seems to be missing the point.
Around 15 years ago, in my first software-industry job, I worked for a small Mac developer, writing a product that directly competed with something Microsoft puts out. Microsoft ended up hiring the two most senior engineers right out of the company, by giving them better salaries and major stock options. That basically decapitated the development team, and the company has never been the same since.
Turnabout is fair play.
The stock options of those two have been under water for several years now. They thought they could make the Dark Side Of The Force work to their advantage, and like so many before them, they got burned.
I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.
The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.
You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.
We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.
Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!