The trouble is H1B visa holders are at the mercey of the corporation that hires them whereas an American can pack up and leave at any time. That means the H1Bs effectively cost (much) less.
Have you considered computer engineering professor? You get to work with really really low level stuff. And you get learn all the newest coolest stuff so you can teach it to the undergrads.
I have a B.S. in computer science and an M.S. in EE from a top school (with high grades and experience). While some good companies have expressed interest, it's been hard. And by no means is anyone fighting over me.
Computer engineering is probably the most valuable to employers. The reason is that the barrier to entry is higher. For a network administrator or a programmer you can learn it without school. You really can't learn computer engineering without school.
Oh yes you can if you're motivated enough. I taught myself a good deal of assembly and logic design in high school. I lost motivation after that. If you want a challenge, try learning advanced mathematics by your self. I still can't do it.
All of that being said, it is always better to specialize if your goal is more money. Almost any job will base your pay based on your expertise in the area they are looking for. If a job is looking for a C# developer and you have a little knowledge of everything then you will get paid for having a little knowledge of C#. If on the other hand you are a Java expert and have been doing nothing but Java for the previous 5 years you may not get that C# position at all, but when you find a company looking for someone with knowledge of Java you can definitely expect a higher pay.
The trouble with that is it hurts everyone. Smarter companies train and keep staff. In the RTP area it's very common to hire on contract. Find the people you need when you need them, and then let them go. If a company just wants an expert in something for 3 - 9 months, they should be paying consulting fees at $100 an hour. Otherwise they should be retraining their staff.
And it hurts the individual far more than the company. If you can't find the talent you're looking for, you just go without for a few months, you settle for less, or you cancel the project. If, on the other hand, you can't find a job for 9 months, you might lose the house.
1) This is a good reason to start documenting everything you learn. If it takes 2 days to figure out how to do something silly, post something about it to your web page or blog. It will save the next guy a lot of trouble, and he'll thank you.
2) Open source writers should learn some basic business skills. Charge money! Your software is free, but that doesn't mean you can't earn a profit in it. Charge a consulting fee of $100/hr. First, this will weed out everyone who doesn't really need an answer. If you're still getting easy questions, this is good for you. You're going to be making $100 for a few minutes of work. And you'll probably force yourself to be friendly and smile while doing it.
Now you might be thinking, no one is going to pay $100/hr. Suppose the 'ignorant fool' is costing his company $50/hr in wages. If it takes a day to figure out how to do something, that's $400 in lost money and time. If it really matters, he'll pay the fee. Everyone is happy. And if he doesn't want to pay, well, he has no right to be angry. After all, the software was free.
That's so horribly bad. No company should not be writing laws, nevermind large monopolies which have been repeatedly sued for abusive behaviour. It's bad enough that they can lobby congress and do unethical things indirectly. But this is just awful. So now a 13 year old will be hit with a million dollar fine for snooping around in someone's machine, but a multibillion dollar company can do it legally.
Also, it seems that many people going to college for computer science/engineering aren't even learning the basics -- what colleges have you recent graduates gone to that have taught you real consulting skills, business sense and responsibility?
Engineering schools don't teach business and consulting skills. If you want to learn those skills, you get them on the job or you get an MBA. (And likewise, business majors aren't taught technology.)
I had to sign away all my rights to a few patents for a startup I worked for. I sometimes wonder what those patents actually mean since the design of the site was changing every month.
One of the great things about linux is its modularization, a design choice that's usually successful. It's only as big as it needs to be. I've heard that linux started at 10k lines, and it's now XX millions of lines. But most of those millions are probably user level apps. If you stripped out every module that's possible to remove, you can probably get a pretty small fast system. There are tiny distributions of linux.
I would agree however, installing and setting up the thing can be a pain. There are sooo many modules. I have no idea what most of them do. You can only learn by experience. And next year there will be 50 more. But that's not a linux issue; it's a technology issue. As more software and hardware is developed, inevitably, systems become more complex unless they choose to simply not support the latest and greatest.
I agree. It becomes irritating. I just find it amusing that the content on the web is being written for machines instead of the people make the content worth billions of dollars. Content should be made for human consumption, not HAL. Hopefully the bots will get better to the point that it doesn't really matter.
Interesting. I think there would probably need to be another clock on there. For audio, all you need is about 40khz. I don't think that will suck up too much power. It's not uncommon for cpus to run different parts of the chip at different clock rates. I remember reading that some of intel's newer chips were essentially clockless at the core.
First of all, we all know large companies like IBM and Microsoft are trying to deflate IT salaries (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html). So it's hard to believe anything they say. But even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the people who make these statements are completely out of touch with reality. My experience has been, if you aren't in Silicon Valley, it's still incredibly difficult to get a decent job, even five years after things fell apart. In my search, I've been told that a lot of companies in the RTP area were wiped out, and the work still hasn't come back. I'm seeing non entry-level jobs, requiring a B.S. in computer science that pay less than what my cousin was making doing data entry. Data entry! That's not a joke.
A lot of people are saying that it's only the low end jobs that are going. But I don't think that's true. Anything can be outsourced. It's easier to send an entire research department to India than to send a few low level IT people. There are upfront costs, but an indepent research lab doesn't have to worry about communicating over seas. I remember seeing an ad for a DSP engineer with an advanced degree, lots of experience, management ability, and ready to move to India.
It's not just outsourcing. The cap on h1b visas is about 65000 a year. I believe the majority of those tend to be software related. The cap has been as high as about 200000. How many total engineers and scientists graduate each year in this country? There are other "problems" as well. With modern hardware and software tools, one software developer can now do what it used to take an entire team of people to do. We've automated ourselves out of work!
Those exciting jobs she was talking about are few and far between. Unless you have a 3.9 GPA masters from Caltech or MIT, don't expect to get one of those jobs any time soon. And definitely not without ten years experience. Oh, and you have to be willing to move anywhere in the country and work long hours. If you're in the defense industry (for which the demand is very artificial) your odds might be a little better, but things are still awful on the commercial side. You could also go the phd route. If you're willing to work as poor postdoc until you're in your 30s and you have the discipline and the talent, you might get a good job earning real money by middle age. But if you don't succeed, you're worth almost nothing. A few years experience in IT is worth more than 10 (or 20 or 30) years research experience if you're in an IT type field.
If you're going to go into software, I think the best thing to do is start a small company . The work exists; it's just a matter of who's going to be doing it.
Well I guess I wouldn't expect pornographer-typo-domain-squatters to have a lot of morals. But are 8 year olds really interested in naked photos? And would a 13 year old be looking at neopets? I suppose it must be working, or they wouldn't do it. That's a shame.
Great, I'll show up at work and there will already be cupons for v1agra waiting for me. I hope they don't get creative with the ascii art. Glad I don't have a fax...
The article said this is a moderate security risk. This is bad. At first they were asking for private information in e-mail. Then they were coping web sites and linking to them. I've already had to train myself to be wary of e-mail. Now I've started looking at URLs. But if they can fake the URL too, how in the world is anyone supposed to know which sites are authentic?
The spam is bad enough, but I'm frequently clicking the 'report phishing' link these days. You only have to make a mistake once.
I've heard of Eiffel a number of times. The contract by design feature intrigues me; I've always wanted to try it. Well, I guess now I have more incentive. I don't think there's anything like it in the more common languages - C, Python, Java, etc. When I'm coding, I usually try to force myself to make decisions about which objects/functions are responsible for what. But it never seems to work out that way. Things decay over time.
I've wondered just how much a language can compensate for programmer laziness, carelessness, or just lack of ability. This question recently came up in a discussion. I am somewhat confident that software or languages can be designed to force good behaviour and eliminate (certain types of) mistakes. After all, there are no memory leaks in scripting languages, right? And you can't write to memory that's not yours. In lisp, it's harder to make off-by-one mistakes than in some other languages. Java forces you to handle error conditions with checked exceptions.
Redhat wanted to interview me for a virtualization development position a few days ago. This sounds like good news for anyone working with open source. But I wonder what Intel is getting out of it. Or are they anticipating future rewards when open source has more market share?
Huh? That doesn't sound right at all. I could never get anything done if I kept switching tasks. I get the most done when I'm highly focused on one thing for several hours at a time. I used to talk to a friend on IM regularly. Every time I would talk to her, she would be talking to three other people and watching a movie at the same time. I could NEVER do that. And yes, you should go out and get some exercise. Trust me, you'll sleep better. In fact, for the first few weeks, you'll do nothing but sleep.
The last time I read about embedded linux, it sounded like it was going to be a really big deal. The 2.6 kernel has soft real time support. It's not true real time because kernel threads can't be preempted. But there are check points at which the kernel will give up control. It's supposed to be far more responsive than the 2.4 kernel. I had to deal with this issue when writing asterisk modules. The ztdummy module required the 2.6 kernel (I think) because of real time support. But anyway, I read that companies and developers had already started developing embedded linux apps for the 2.6 kernel well in advance of its release.
Now-a-days, software costs the same as hardware or even more for the average consumer. And I don't mean high end stuff, just the basic OS and virus detection and malware removal. If system developers are persuaded to sell PCs with only Windows, that will give a very big advantage to those offering to sell without. Of course, it will only be an advantage for marketing to the last 5%.
Slashdot Mirror
How many programmers can beat Kasparov at chess? It was the man and the machine.
The trouble is H1B visa holders are at the mercey of the corporation that hires them whereas an American can pack up and leave at any time. That means the H1Bs effectively cost (much) less.
We do. They're called H1Bs. And they're often cheap coders brought in to work essentially as indentured servants.
Have you considered computer engineering professor? You get to work with really really low level stuff. And you get learn all the newest coolest stuff so you can teach it to the undergrads.
I have a B.S. in computer science and an M.S. in EE from a top school (with high grades and experience). While some good companies have expressed interest, it's been hard. And by no means is anyone fighting over me.
And it hurts the individual far more than the company. If you can't find the talent you're looking for, you just go without for a few months, you settle for less, or you cancel the project. If, on the other hand, you can't find a job for 9 months, you might lose the house.
1) This is a good reason to start documenting everything you learn. If it takes 2 days to figure out how to do something silly, post something about it to your web page or blog. It will save the next guy a lot of trouble, and he'll thank you.
2) Open source writers should learn some basic business skills. Charge money! Your software is free, but that doesn't mean you can't earn a profit in it. Charge a consulting fee of $100/hr. First, this will weed out everyone who doesn't really need an answer. If you're still getting easy questions, this is good for you. You're going to be making $100 for a few minutes of work. And you'll probably force yourself to be friendly and smile while doing it.
Now you might be thinking, no one is going to pay $100/hr. Suppose the 'ignorant fool' is costing his company $50/hr in wages. If it takes a day to figure out how to do something, that's $400 in lost money and time. If it really matters, he'll pay the fee. Everyone is happy. And if he doesn't want to pay, well, he has no right to be angry. After all, the software was free.
Sounds like room for competition for video in the open source arena to me.
That's so horribly bad. No company should not be writing laws, nevermind large monopolies which have been repeatedly sued for abusive behaviour. It's bad enough that they can lobby congress and do unethical things indirectly. But this is just awful. So now a 13 year old will be hit with a million dollar fine for snooping around in someone's machine, but a multibillion dollar company can do it legally.
Engineering schools don't teach business and consulting skills. If you want to learn those skills, you get them on the job or you get an MBA. (And likewise, business majors aren't taught technology.)
So they're giving less people the axe. Is there any hiring going on?
0 91616 - my last post on this
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182579&cid=15
I had to sign away all my rights to a few patents for a startup I worked for. I sometimes wonder what those patents actually mean since the design of the site was changing every month.
One of the great things about linux is its modularization, a design choice that's usually successful. It's only as big as it needs to be. I've heard that linux started at 10k lines, and it's now XX millions of lines. But most of those millions are probably user level apps. If you stripped out every module that's possible to remove, you can probably get a pretty small fast system. There are tiny distributions of linux.
I would agree however, installing and setting up the thing can be a pain. There are sooo many modules. I have no idea what most of them do. You can only learn by experience. And next year there will be 50 more. But that's not a linux issue; it's a technology issue. As more software and hardware is developed, inevitably, systems become more complex unless they choose to simply not support the latest and greatest.
I agree. It becomes irritating. I just find it amusing that the content on the web is being written for machines instead of the people make the content worth billions of dollars. Content should be made for human consumption, not HAL. Hopefully the bots will get better to the point that it doesn't really matter.
Interesting. I think there would probably need to be another clock on there. For audio, all you need is about 40khz. I don't think that will suck up too much power. It's not uncommon for cpus to run different parts of the chip at different clock rates. I remember reading that some of intel's newer chips were essentially clockless at the core.
First of all, we all know large companies like IBM and Microsoft are trying to deflate IT salaries (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html). So it's hard to believe anything they say. But even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the people who make these statements are completely out of touch with reality. My experience has been, if you aren't in Silicon Valley, it's still incredibly difficult to get a decent job, even five years after things fell apart. In my search, I've been told that a lot of companies in the RTP area were wiped out, and the work still hasn't come back. I'm seeing non entry-level jobs, requiring a B.S. in computer science that pay less than what my cousin was making doing data entry. Data entry! That's not a joke.
A lot of people are saying that it's only the low end jobs that are going. But I don't think that's true. Anything can be outsourced. It's easier to send an entire research department to India than to send a few low level IT people. There are upfront costs, but an indepent research lab doesn't have to worry about communicating over seas. I remember seeing an ad for a DSP engineer with an advanced degree, lots of experience, management ability, and ready to move to India.
It's not just outsourcing. The cap on h1b visas is about 65000 a year. I believe the majority of those tend to be software related. The cap has been as high as about 200000. How many total engineers and scientists graduate each year in this country? There are other "problems" as well. With modern hardware and software tools, one software developer can now do what it used to take an entire team of people to do. We've automated ourselves out of work!
Those exciting jobs she was talking about are few and far between. Unless you have a 3.9 GPA masters from Caltech or MIT, don't expect to get one of those jobs any time soon. And definitely not without ten years experience. Oh, and you have to be willing to move anywhere in the country and work long hours. If you're in the defense industry (for which the demand is very artificial) your odds might be a little better, but things are still awful on the commercial side. You could also go the phd route. If you're willing to work as poor postdoc until you're in your 30s and you have the discipline and the talent, you might get a good job earning real money by middle age. But if you don't succeed, you're worth almost nothing. A few years experience in IT is worth more than 10 (or 20 or 30) years research experience if you're in an IT type field.
If you're going to go into software, I think the best thing to do is start a small company . The work exists; it's just a matter of who's going to be doing it.
Well I guess I wouldn't expect pornographer-typo-domain-squatters to have a lot of morals. But are 8 year olds really interested in naked photos? And would a 13 year old be looking at neopets? I suppose it must be working, or they wouldn't do it. That's a shame.
Great, I'll show up at work and there will already be cupons for v1agra waiting for me. I hope they don't get creative with the ascii art. Glad I don't have a fax...
The article said this is a moderate security risk. This is bad. At first they were asking for private information in e-mail. Then they were coping web sites and linking to them. I've already had to train myself to be wary of e-mail. Now I've started looking at URLs. But if they can fake the URL too, how in the world is anyone supposed to know which sites are authentic?
The spam is bad enough, but I'm frequently clicking the 'report phishing' link these days. You only have to make a mistake once.
I've heard of Eiffel a number of times. The contract by design feature intrigues me; I've always wanted to try it. Well, I guess now I have more incentive. I don't think there's anything like it in the more common languages - C, Python, Java, etc. When I'm coding, I usually try to force myself to make decisions about which objects/functions are responsible for what. But it never seems to work out that way. Things decay over time.
I've wondered just how much a language can compensate for programmer laziness, carelessness, or just lack of ability. This question recently came up in a discussion. I am somewhat confident that software or languages can be designed to force good behaviour and eliminate (certain types of) mistakes. After all, there are no memory leaks in scripting languages, right? And you can't write to memory that's not yours. In lisp, it's harder to make off-by-one mistakes than in some other languages. Java forces you to handle error conditions with checked exceptions.
Yeah, I'm going to have to try this eiffel thing.
Redhat wanted to interview me for a virtualization development position a few days ago. This sounds like good news for anyone working with open source. But I wonder what Intel is getting out of it. Or are they anticipating future rewards when open source has more market share?
Huh? That doesn't sound right at all. I could never get anything done if I kept switching tasks. I get the most done when I'm highly focused on one thing for several hours at a time. I used to talk to a friend on IM regularly. Every time I would talk to her, she would be talking to three other people and watching a movie at the same time. I could NEVER do that. And yes, you should go out and get some exercise. Trust me, you'll sleep better. In fact, for the first few weeks, you'll do nothing but sleep.
The last time I read about embedded linux, it sounded like it was going to be a really big deal. The 2.6 kernel has soft real time support. It's not true real time because kernel threads can't be preempted. But there are check points at which the kernel will give up control. It's supposed to be far more responsive than the 2.4 kernel. I had to deal with this issue when writing asterisk modules. The ztdummy module required the 2.6 kernel (I think) because of real time support. But anyway, I read that companies and developers had already started developing embedded linux apps for the 2.6 kernel well in advance of its release.
Now-a-days, software costs the same as hardware or even more for the average consumer. And I don't mean high end stuff, just the basic OS and virus detection and malware removal. If system developers are persuaded to sell PCs with only Windows, that will give a very big advantage to those offering to sell without. Of course, it will only be an advantage for marketing to the last 5%.