Having moved around a lot in my technical career... Be very careful of moving into any unknown situation. Arrange to go there and work temporarily for a while. That way you get a chance to say, I really don't like this, and I want to go back to NYC, or where ever. We once moved to Florida, thinking of buying a house, only to find that half the houses in central Florida are always for sale, and three years is an average sale time. The job only lasted 18 months, so it is a good thing we rented. Then we moved to Cincinnati, only to discover that the "most affordable city ever" was actually the most expensive place we have ever been. It was so affordable because parents there tended to give their kids a first house as a wedding present. No house payment makes any place affordable, but everything else will be more expensive. People you work with over the net or phone may be / or find you very annoying in person - so have a plan b. Make sure you are not being dragged from an inexpensive area (Winston-Salem, NC) to a very expensive (Silicon Valley), without the necessary improvement in compensation. There are ways to check this out on the net, but be prepared for those number to be twenty percent or more low. Remenber real estate and HR people are very postive when they want you to agree to something... its their job. They will be missing in confusion, less postive, and even negative when thing do not work out. If you are moving with a family, go check it out first, then after a few weeks, make a decision to either move the family or go home. Don't let a family situation drag on for more than a few weeks, unless kids are in high school, in which case you should probably find a new job where you are. Be prepared for working hours to change. High tech areas are always in transition, so be prepared for most everything to change, because it probably will. Look for a competitive offer at home, unless you are single and they are offering temporary housing, a bonus, and a salary which will support your existing standard of living in the new location.
First of all unless you want to rid yourself of a potential competitor find a language with a relatively simple syntax, with a decent set of builtin functions. Visual Basic was probably never a good starting point either, except that it let a novice do somewhat flashy stuff without knowing how exactly to code a form box. After programming for many years, I bought visual studio 97 when it was still the rage... only to find that visual basic was perhaps one package in it that actually worked close to the advertizing. Much of the code is hidden from the novice, which makes it deceptively simple to navigate - until you bump against its limitations or encounter some other problem. When I was in computer science school at vpisu (vippysu) we started with PL/C (a pl/1 subset), then assist (an assembler subset) then on to the real PL/1 compiler. My opinion is you need to start with something the student can actually get to work, see progress, and not get so bogged down in details of the environment, that nothing is ever accomplished. The final comment I have is why would someone want to learn a language anyway? With all the development work being done elsewhere (Im a developer out of work four years now) there really is no point except perhaps for maintenance, which you can pickup on your own if you are relatively intelligent, with a decent book. Our response to the outsourcing has be to build the next generation, of next generation "CASE" tools. This will eliminate coding, maintenance, outsourcing, recruiters, agents, IS departments, and etc., ad infinitum. These tools will not pretend to operate in any of today's languages. Of all the languages in use today, only a few emerging languages like "C--" and perhaps a few assemblers will even be relevant. I have worked on the software tools used to design and build telephone networks, swithches, as well as computers. Building computer programs is not an order of magnitude more complex than any of those hardware systems. In this new age the idea that a language is needed to communicate with a computer will be fog in the quest to make use of intellegent technology. If you insist try D.
Then why am I still looking for IT work four years on and counting... I recently had an interview with a big name company which a friend helped organize. At the interview they told me they were doing it because they did not want to make their employee unhappy. They also let me know they did not need developers in the US, because their development work was going on in India. BTW this company does most of its business in the good ole USA, which makes almost as much sense as hiring hamas to operate US ports. Obviously, ACM who originated the low impact notion, has forgotten all of us who can no longer afford to pay their dues. Perhaps I should reconcider my original intent to re-instate my ACM membership if I ever find another IT job. Perhaps a great university could award a honorary "Doctor of Useless and Irelevent Information" degree to some of our most wonderful and fearlessly stupid leaders. Perhaps "Bachelor of Stupid" would work just as well.
The voltage to amperage ratio involves higher voltage and lower amperage vs lower voltage and higher amperage, the power consumed would be theoreticaly the same, however transmission problems abound as voltage decreases. A car battery is perhaps twelve volts, supplying several hundred amps to turn the starter motor, hence the huge and relatively short battery cables. At 12 volts and 500 amps you have only 6 kilowats of power. Many "wall warts" are for charging batteries. Battery life tends to involve number of cycles and the rate of charge, so most of these tend to use very little power over several hours, vs lots of power over several minutes. Perhaps a better solution would be for electronics manufactures to standardize power usage, batteries, and charging systems, making them more interchangable, with a view to some universal charging system. Many if not most, power converters are transformers (they are heavier), so a mechanism could be included on the secondary (appliance) side to disconnect the primary (power) side, to save power, reduce fire danger, etc., when the appliance is not being charged, used, or whatever.
Perhaps brits are actally a bit smarter than we thought... in my experience the best of plans, perhaps intelligent at the time, don't look so bright thirty years on. So if, a couple decades from now, we find that we were left here by an advanced civilization, perhaps your ideas of evolution will also look fairly silly. On the other hand designing and building a self sustaining, perpetuating, and evolving system is well beyond our current abilities. Perhaps the wait and see attitude of our brit friends is actually in order.
As a developer who has written a lot of code for a lot of people over the years, I find it incrediable how you can call open source a business model. Open source is not a business model, simply because the objective it free code, which in no way supports any ones business goals - other than some other business'es desire to have something for nothing. Lets face the facts: open source is a code pool used by independant developers to build solutions for a few (maybe more) of their clients. We have a pool of code which we can use to build some really neat stuff (when we can get it to actually work!) Now, I am in favor of open source, because it is good for software people - but software people are not necessarily business, and it does keep the pressure on m'soft, to build better systems. I seriously doubt that real geeks are behind any of this, because most of us know there is no open source business model. Unfortuantely there are the next level business types who want to cash in, but are generally clueless about the technology actually involved. As far as I can tell the open source model allows independant practioners to develop prototype solutions, demonstrating what can be done at a very low price, which business people take to their m'soft geek and say I want this! He eventually delivers something, making them happy. As these systems bubble up to m'soft's attention, they develope targeted packages, plugins, addin's whatever to hold onto said customers. Open source is a developer model; A business model it is not!
Obviously you have been paged out for a while now.. Does not mater whether your courses are vocational or college level, there are no CS jobs anyway. Sorry.
Actually you might as well get use to it or find a better field, cause this sort of non-sense started un the 1980's when the big corporations determined that technical people were simply "resources", to be used and abused as needed. They replaced technical IT managers with business people who knew noting about the technology. At the time the technical IT managers became highly paid consultants, started their own businesses, etc... most of them probably retired about the time the business disappeared into oblevion. As for small companies, it is a universal truth that it is not what you know, but who you know...
Daylight Wasting Time has got to be one of the most stupid solutions ever devised to a completely non-existant problem... Truthfully I could live with it from May to September, but why do we need everyone rushing off to work before daylight four months of the year? Why do we need school children out waiting for the school bus in the dark four months of the year? How can moving the AM rush hour into darkness save energy? How can moving the PM rush hour into the heat of the day save energy? The problem is our politicans are so busy fighting about stupid stuff, the only thing they can agree on, is this sort of non solution to a non problem. It would make more sense to eliminate all underware except thongs, saving fabric, energy, and the raw materials... More daylight wasting time is something we can certainly live without...
Oh btw the guys you hear blithering on about a CS skill shortage are mostly guys who don't like paying tech people anyway... so they have sent all the work elsewhere, only to discover they have basicly moved themselves out of the loop. Now they have a tech skills shortage cause there are no college kids who can be short changed into taking jobs they can't afford in places they would never go otherwise.
Blah, Blah, Blah...
Twenty five years ago "Dr G" at Virginia Tech told us not to get our hopes up, but to enjoy a software career while it lasted, but not to count on it lasting all that long... The Va Tech guys seemed to think it would happen within five years... they were a few years late... but what do we expect from a bunch of fellows who let Mr. Dave Larson in the chemistry department invent the first micro computer to control his lab experiments... (rembember the Blacksburg Bug Books)... (I wonder if his experiments had anything to do with cloning)... Seems the CS guys were eventually right... the software bubble is busted, but please don't tell bill in redmond, he still thinks he invented the thing in a garage someplace, like cloning was invented in England. Professor J. A. N. Lee was from England, so I wonder if he had anything to do with cloning.
BLAH, Blah, Blah...
In anycase we are seriously close to being able to build self configuring hardware. Some of us old guys know how to build self configuring software, so give us the time it takes you to get a CS degree, and we will prehaps finish the thing ending the off, on, near, and buba shore computer code game. If this happens, computer science will become about as interesting and difficult as physics, with about that many jobs to go with it.
Blah, blah, Blah...
If they don't want this to happen they best start hiring those of us who are out of work today in the computer science business, instead of blithering on about how bad it is there are no naive young people around for their companies to take undue advantage of anymore....
If you want to know what to major in get yerself on up to Hokie land... see what it is those guys are actually working on these days....
blah, blah, blah
Actually I need a couple fairly new free computers for various linux projects... so if you are in the south east and need a new home for your sick computer... let me know... Thanks.
Where is the section blaming IT losses on the american programmer? No truly current IS/IT management book could possibly be complete without it... Bulletin just in... no american programmers are left to blame for stupid management disasters.... interesting... american programmer chapter deleted... Bulletin Just in.... corporation x has just announced that all management functions have been transfered offshore to cut costs..... very interesting no management left to blame for stupid bored decisions... Bulletin just in... corporation x bored of directors has announced they are moving the company off shore to cut costs. very incrediably interesting... corporation x has moved itself beyond the protection of US Legal system... Bulletin just in... american programmer who replaced database analyst at corporation x with a computer program circa 1990 has just announced he has built a computer program to replace corporation x.... bulletin just in.... lyrics of country song playing from offshore... what was i thinking... bulletin just in... they weren't...
Actually this is an interesting theory with problems. US courts are supposed to operate on the innocent until proven guilty basis, although, that seems to sometimes be forgotten in corporate civil cases. If SCO had proceeded as the article suggests, they might have gotten to the negotiation phase by now - what he says may be the actual basis of the case. His ramblings however, may be tainted by exposure to corporate legal departments. In US civil cases plaintiffs tend to bet on pre-trial settlements since corporations do not like the negative publicity a lawsuit brings. SCO's case seems to be designed using smoke and mirror in some hope that IBM would drag them to the settlement table, not on the primary legal issues. Things are further confused by involving legitimate linux users such as Autozone, in an attempt to likewise intimidate corporate users of linux. In civil cases it sometimes seems that corporations are presumed guilty until proven innocent. There are perhaps a number of reasons for this. In any case legal departments make every effort to protect themselves. If you know you may have to prove you are actually innocent in a reverse engineering copyright case, the "Chinese Wall" is a good way to do it. Paul Murphy seems to have confused this with actual copyright law. Just because it is good corporate legal practice, does not mean it is law. SCO obviously did not realize that IBM has
a very good legal department and knows how to use it, which has blown the obvious SCO strategy to bits. How this will effect linux, is anyone's guess. Even if SCO wins, they will probably not survive the apeals process. The Linux guys need to move on however, taking what they have learned, to build a truely next generation operating system.
Having worked on the software side for twenty something years using pc's, unix systems, as well as mainfraims, I would suggest doing something else... I have been un-employed since just before 9/11. Today there are big problems with a software career. On the software side, you have managers, support staff, business analysts, etc... usually these guys are not programmers (degree other than CS), and they hold more permanent and laterally portable corporate positions. Most actual programming work is in software development which tends to follow economic and business cycles. Today software development is mostly dead unless you work for one of the few successful software vendors who has not pushed development offshore. The development / maintain position cycle seems to follow the prevailing political winds. If the Democrats are rising... find a development project; if the Republicians are rising get a maintenance position, and hope you don't get outsourced, before the local development economy fails, and the Democrats eventually rise again... A few positions are maintenance, but those are few and not very interesting.. lots of patching, meetings, sweat shop environments, especially with todays cost cutting and massive understaffing of production and support systems. This may be the stuff of surviving, it is NOT the stuff a BSCS makes a career of. Perhaps a third of those of us who do software development are no longer working in the field - yes I know bill says he and his friends can't find programmers in redmond, but since he is looking for PHD's from Bangalor, who don't yet know how much they need to live in HiTechville, USA, that probably leaves most of us out anyway. In any case he has not called me lately, and I can still write code. There are a few trends which you should note also: In general as any technology improves fewer people can do more with less, so the number of openings decrease relative to the work to be done over time. As the technical infrastructure (operating systems, databases, networks) improve, installation, configuration and support functions are simplified and automated allowing fewer people to manage an increasing number of systems. Another trend involves people holding off change to secure their own positions. Quite a lot of this has gone on in IS/IT over the years. A few years ago I was doing a contract for a really BIG company involving network circuit provisioning. I developed a method for extracting and presenting to the engineer a table of possible circuit paths, and equipment configurations. All the engineer needed to do was select the best choice. Of course with a few rules my program could pick the best and do all the work without an engineer. When we demonstrated this feature for the business analyst, he completely freaked out. I was told not to ever let anyone know we even had a clue how to do this, that if BIG company management knew this, he and all the engineers would be replaced by clerks. That might have saved the BIG company. The point is those of us who have done a lot of software development and worked with production quality expert and intelligence systems have some pretty good ideas how to build systems that generate systems. Perhaps we have not done it yet because we hope to make a few more bucks from a technical career. Perhaps when we retire or give up on the technical career idea, we will build it and open source the code... Possibly we write the thing and build a company or a foundation to sell it... in any case software work as you have known it promptly ends... and the pieces of the software business which so far have not collapsed promptly collapse - including your career as a software professional. So you choose hardware. Did I mention this kind of technology was developed twenty years ago to aid in the development of networking hardware? Do yourself a favor and do something useful, like become a doctor... That way when if this technology is open sourced YOU can load and adapt it for all the known medical knowledge and sell it to your non-software savy doctor friends.
Slashdot Mirror
No Kidding ...
The shuttle has been out of whack from day one. Fairly common knowledge also.
Design was driven by funding instead of what was needed.
Having moved around a lot in my technical career... Be very careful of moving into any unknown situation. Arrange to go there and work temporarily for a while. That way you get a chance to say, I really don't like this, and I want to go back to NYC, or where ever. We once moved to Florida, thinking of buying a house, only to find that half the houses in central Florida are always for sale, and three years is an average sale time. The job only lasted 18 months, so it is a good thing we rented. Then we moved to Cincinnati, only to discover that the "most affordable city ever" was actually the most expensive place we have ever been. It was so affordable because parents there tended to give their kids a first house as a wedding present. No house payment makes any place affordable, but everything else will be more expensive. People you work with over the net or phone may be / or find you very annoying in person - so have a plan b. Make sure you are not being dragged from an inexpensive area (Winston-Salem, NC) to a very expensive (Silicon Valley), without the necessary improvement in compensation. There are ways to check this out on the net, but be prepared for those number to be twenty percent or more low. Remenber real estate and HR people are very postive when they want you to agree to something... its their job. They will be missing in confusion, less postive, and even negative when thing do not work out. If you are moving with a family, go check it out first, then after a few weeks, make a decision to either move the family or go home. Don't let a family situation drag on for more than a few weeks, unless kids are in high school, in which case you should probably find a new job where you are. Be prepared for working hours to change. High tech areas are always in transition, so be prepared for most everything to change, because it probably will. Look for a competitive offer at home, unless you are single and they are offering temporary housing, a bonus, and a salary which will support your existing standard of living in the new location.
First of all unless you want to rid yourself of a potential competitor find a language with a relatively simple syntax, with a decent set of builtin functions. Visual Basic was probably never a good starting point either, except that it let a novice do somewhat flashy stuff without knowing how exactly to code a form box. After programming for many years, I bought visual studio 97 when it was still the rage... only to find that visual basic was perhaps one package in it that actually worked close to the advertizing. Much of the code is hidden from the novice, which makes it deceptively simple to navigate - until you bump against its limitations or encounter some other problem. When I was in computer science school at vpisu (vippysu) we started with PL/C (a pl/1 subset), then assist (an assembler subset) then on to the real PL/1 compiler. My opinion is you need to start with something the student can actually get to work, see progress, and not get so bogged down in details of the environment, that nothing is ever accomplished. The final comment I have is why would someone want to learn a language anyway? With all the development work being done elsewhere (Im a developer out of work four years now) there really is no point except perhaps for maintenance, which you can pickup on your own if you are relatively intelligent, with a decent book. Our response to the outsourcing has be to build the next generation, of next generation "CASE" tools. This will eliminate coding, maintenance, outsourcing, recruiters, agents, IS departments, and etc., ad infinitum. These tools will not pretend to operate in any of today's languages. Of all the languages in use today, only a few emerging languages like "C--" and perhaps a few assemblers will even be relevant. I have worked on the software tools used to design and build telephone networks, swithches, as well as computers. Building computer programs is not an order of magnitude more complex than any of those hardware systems. In this new age the idea that a language is needed to communicate with a computer will be fog in the quest to make use of intellegent technology. If you insist try D.
Then why am I still looking for IT work four years on and counting ...
I recently had an interview with a big name company which a friend helped organize. At the interview they told me they were doing it because they did not want to make their employee unhappy. They also let me know they did not need developers in the US, because their development work was going on in India. BTW this company does most of its business in the good ole USA, which makes almost as much sense as hiring hamas to operate US ports. Obviously, ACM who originated the low impact notion, has forgotten all of us who can no longer afford to pay their dues. Perhaps I should reconcider my original intent to re-instate my ACM membership if I ever find another IT job. Perhaps a great university could award a honorary "Doctor of Useless and Irelevent Information" degree to some of our most wonderful and fearlessly stupid leaders. Perhaps "Bachelor of Stupid" would work just as well.
The voltage to amperage ratio involves higher voltage and lower amperage vs lower voltage and higher amperage, the power consumed would be theoreticaly the same, however transmission problems abound as voltage decreases. A car battery is perhaps twelve volts, supplying several hundred amps to turn the starter motor, hence the huge and relatively short battery cables. At 12 volts and 500 amps you have only 6 kilowats of power. Many "wall warts" are for charging batteries. Battery life tends to involve number of cycles and the rate of charge, so most of these tend to use very little power over several hours, vs lots of power over several minutes. Perhaps a better solution would be for electronics manufactures to standardize power usage, batteries, and charging systems, making them more interchangable, with a view to some universal charging system. Many if not most, power converters are transformers (they are heavier), so a mechanism could be included on the secondary (appliance) side to disconnect the primary (power) side, to save power, reduce fire danger, etc., when the appliance is not being charged, used, or whatever.
Perhaps brits are actally a bit smarter than we thought ... in my experience the best of plans, perhaps intelligent at the time, don't look so bright thirty years on. So if, a couple decades from now, we find that we were left here by an advanced civilization, perhaps your ideas of evolution will also look fairly silly. On the other hand designing and building a self sustaining, perpetuating, and evolving system is well beyond our current abilities. Perhaps the wait and see attitude of our brit friends is actually in order.
As a developer who has written a lot of code for a lot of people over the years, I find it incrediable how you can call open source a business model. Open source is not a business model, simply because the objective it free code, which in no way supports any ones business goals - other than some other business'es desire to have something for nothing. Lets face the facts: open source is a code pool used by independant developers to build solutions for a few (maybe more) of their clients. We have a pool of code which we can use to build some really neat stuff (when we can get it to actually work!) Now, I am in favor of open source, because it is good for software people - but software people are not necessarily business, and it does keep the pressure on m'soft, to build better systems. I seriously doubt that real geeks are behind any of this, because most of us know there is no open source business model. Unfortuantely there are the next level business types who want to cash in, but are generally clueless about the technology actually involved. As far as I can tell the open source model allows independant practioners to develop prototype solutions, demonstrating what can be done at a very low price, which business people take to their m'soft geek and say I want this! He eventually delivers something, making them happy. As these systems bubble up to m'soft's attention, they develope targeted packages, plugins, addin's whatever to hold onto said customers. Open source is a developer model; A business model it is not!
Obviously you have been paged out for a while now ..
Does not mater whether your courses are vocational or college level, there are no CS jobs anyway.
Sorry.
Actually you might as well get use to it or find a better field, cause this sort of non-sense started un the 1980's when the big corporations determined that technical people were simply "resources", to be used and abused as needed. They replaced technical IT managers with business people who knew noting about the technology. At the time the technical IT managers became highly paid consultants, started their own businesses, etc... most of them probably retired about the time the business disappeared into oblevion. As for small companies, it is a universal truth that it is not what you know, but who you know...
Daylight Wasting Time has got to be one of the most stupid solutions ever devised to a completely non-existant problem... Truthfully I could live with it from May to September, but why do we need everyone rushing off to work before daylight four months of the year? Why do we need school children out waiting for the school bus in the dark four months of the year? How can moving the AM rush hour into darkness save energy? How can moving the PM rush hour into the heat of the day save energy? The problem is our politicans are so busy fighting about stupid stuff, the only thing they can agree on, is this sort of non solution to a non problem. It would make more sense to eliminate all underware except thongs, saving fabric, energy, and the raw materials... More daylight wasting time is something we can certainly live without...
Oh btw the guys you hear blithering on about a CS skill shortage are mostly guys who don't like paying tech people anyway ... so they have sent all the work elsewhere, only to discover they have basicly moved themselves out of the loop. Now they have a tech skills shortage cause there are no college kids who can be short changed into taking jobs they can't afford in places they would never go otherwise.
Blah, Blah, Blah...
Twenty five years ago "Dr G" at Virginia Tech told us not to get our hopes up, but to enjoy a software career while it lasted, but not to count on it lasting all that long... The Va Tech guys seemed to think it would happen within five years... they were a few years late... but what do we expect from a bunch of fellows who let Mr. Dave Larson in the chemistry department invent the first micro computer to control his lab experiments ... (rembember the Blacksburg Bug Books) ... (I wonder if his experiments had anything to do with cloning) ... Seems the CS guys were eventually right ... the software bubble is busted, but please don't tell bill in redmond, he still thinks he invented the thing in a garage someplace, like cloning was invented in England. Professor J. A. N. Lee was from England, so I wonder if he had anything to do with cloning.
BLAH, Blah, Blah...
In anycase we are seriously close to being able to build self configuring hardware. Some of us old guys know how to build self configuring software, so give us the time it takes you to get a CS degree, and we will prehaps finish the thing ending the off, on, near, and buba shore computer code game. If this happens, computer science will become about as interesting and difficult as physics, with about that many jobs to go with it.
Blah, blah, Blah ...
If they don't want this to happen they best start hiring those of us who are out of work today in the computer science business, instead of blithering on about how bad it is there are no naive young people around for their companies to take undue advantage of anymore ....
If you want to know what to major in get yerself on up to Hokie land ... see what it is those guys are actually working on these days....
blah, blah, blah
Actually I need a couple fairly new free computers for various linux projects ... so if you are in the south east and need a new home for your sick computer ... let me know ... Thanks.
Where is the section blaming IT losses on the american programmer? No truly current IS/IT management book could possibly be complete without it... Bulletin just in ... no american programmers are left to blame for stupid management disasters .... interesting ... american programmer chapter deleted ... Bulletin Just in .... corporation x has just announced that all management functions have been transfered offshore to cut costs ..... very interesting no management left to blame for stupid bored decisions ... Bulletin just in ... corporation x bored of directors has announced they are moving the company off shore to cut costs. very incrediably interesting ... corporation x has moved itself beyond the protection of US Legal system ... Bulletin just in... american programmer who replaced database analyst at corporation x with a computer program circa 1990 has just announced he has built a computer program to replace corporation x.... bulletin just in .... lyrics of country song playing from offshore ... what was i thinking ... bulletin just in ... they weren't ...
Actually this is an interesting theory with problems. US courts are supposed to operate on the innocent until proven guilty basis, although, that seems to sometimes be forgotten in corporate civil cases. If SCO had proceeded as the article suggests, they might have gotten to the negotiation phase by now - what he says may be the actual basis of the case. His ramblings however, may be tainted by exposure to corporate legal departments. In US civil cases plaintiffs tend to bet on pre-trial settlements since corporations do not like the negative publicity a lawsuit brings. SCO's case seems to be designed using smoke and mirror in some hope that IBM would drag them to the settlement table, not on the primary legal issues. Things are further confused by involving legitimate linux users such as Autozone, in an attempt to likewise intimidate corporate users of linux. In civil cases it sometimes seems that corporations are presumed guilty until proven innocent. There are perhaps a number of reasons for this. In any case legal departments make every effort to protect themselves. If you know you may have to prove you are actually innocent in a reverse engineering copyright case, the "Chinese Wall" is a good way to do it. Paul Murphy seems to have confused this with actual copyright law. Just because it is good corporate legal practice, does not mean it is law. SCO obviously did not realize that IBM has a very good legal department and knows how to use it, which has blown the obvious SCO strategy to bits. How this will effect linux, is anyone's guess. Even if SCO wins, they will probably not survive the apeals process. The Linux guys need to move on however, taking what they have learned, to build a truely next generation operating system.
Having worked on the software side for twenty something years using pc's, unix systems, as well as mainfraims, I would suggest doing something else... I have been un-employed since just before 9/11. Today there are big problems with a software career. On the software side, you have managers, support staff, business analysts, etc... usually these guys are not programmers (degree other than CS), and they hold more permanent and laterally portable corporate positions. Most actual programming work is in software development which tends to follow economic and business cycles. Today software development is mostly dead unless you work for one of the few successful software vendors who has not pushed development offshore. The development / maintain position cycle seems to follow the prevailing political winds. If the Democrats are rising ... find a development project; if the Republicians are rising get a maintenance position, and hope you don't get outsourced, before the local development economy fails, and the Democrats eventually rise again... A few positions are maintenance, but those are few and not very interesting.. lots of patching, meetings, sweat shop environments, especially with todays cost cutting and massive understaffing of production and support systems. This may be the stuff of surviving, it is NOT the stuff a BSCS makes a career of. Perhaps a third of those of us who do software development are no longer working in the field - yes I know bill says he and his friends can't find programmers in redmond, but since he is looking for PHD's from Bangalor, who don't yet know how much they need to live in HiTechville, USA, that probably leaves most of us out anyway. In any case he has not called me lately, and I can still write code. There are a few trends which you should note also: In general as any technology improves fewer people can do more with less, so the number of openings decrease relative to the work to be done over time. As the technical infrastructure (operating systems, databases, networks) improve, installation, configuration and support functions are simplified and automated allowing fewer people to manage an increasing number of systems. Another trend involves people holding off change to secure their own positions. Quite a lot of this has gone on in IS/IT over the years. A few years ago I was doing a contract for a really BIG company involving network circuit provisioning. I developed a method for extracting and presenting to the engineer a table of possible circuit paths, and equipment configurations. All the engineer needed to do was select the best choice. Of course with a few rules my program could pick the best and do all the work without an engineer. When we demonstrated this feature for the business analyst, he completely freaked out. I was told not to ever let anyone know we even had a clue how to do this, that if BIG company management knew this, he and all the engineers would be replaced by clerks. That might have saved the BIG company. The point is those of us who have done a lot of software development and worked with production quality expert and intelligence systems have some pretty good ideas how to build systems that generate systems. Perhaps we have not done it yet because we hope to make a few more bucks from a technical career. Perhaps when we retire or give up on the technical career idea, we will build it and open source the code... Possibly we write the thing and build a company or a foundation to sell it... in any case software work as you have known it promptly ends... and the pieces of the software business which so far have not collapsed promptly collapse - including your career as a software professional. So you choose hardware. Did I mention this kind of technology was developed twenty years ago to aid in the development of networking hardware? Do yourself a favor and do something useful, like become a doctor... That way when if this technology is open sourced YOU can load and adapt it for all the known medical knowledge and sell it to your non-software savy doctor friends.