Engineering Careers Short-Circuiting 1286
8BitWimp writes "Today's edition of the Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article discussing the current plight of the U.S. engineering profession. One 29-year-old engineer recently caught in Nortel Network's layoffs said "I spent seven years in school, and it resulted in a six-year career." The article goes on to say a California computer science professor has statistics to show that a programmer's career is not much longer than a pro-football player. What do other Slash-Dot readers think of this situation as related to their programming and engineering careers? Would you pursue the same career path again?"
Engineering is working out fine for me (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Engineering is working out fine for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been a generalist in the computer field for 20 years. In addition to being a generalist, I have good programming and databasing skills.
I currently work in a Fortune 100 company as a SysAdmin / Programmer / Project Manager. I make a good salary for my geographic area and am not in danger of losing my job (knock, knock).
I'm compelled to post because there are so many FUDs and misinformation in this thread it's not funny. But there are a few tidbits of genuine wisdom:
1. The computer pond is shrinking, but that's because it's been overstocked for quite a while. The talented, smart, crafty, dedicated fish will always be in demand, the ones who are simply looking for a paycheck will be walking an unemployment line.
2. (This is related to #1.) If you genuinely love to craft software and hardware solutions, then you will strive for excellence, regardless of the pay. I simply couldn't be happy doing another type of job.
3. There is much garbage code out there, largely caused by too many people coding "Fast Food" type development tools. Can somebody please tell me why it takes a 2GHz processor and 512MB of RAM to show me my appointment calendar? Then crash while I'm looking at it?
4. Management IS NOT where it's at. I've been in my current job for 11 years now. In that time we've gone through 6 managers. None of them really knew what I.T. was all about.
5. We recently were accepting applications for a vacant position. We were FLOODED with resumes from web developers. They all went in the trash. Why? Because they were a dime a dozen and didn't have the overall skills to support our customers. We wound up hiring a guy with good GENERAL skills, because those can be broadly applied to our diverse environment.
What I'm getting at folks is that there was a huge wave of expansion in the computer industry which introduced a lot of flotsam and jetsam. Now the wave is receeding and those not prepared for it are left high and dry.
My advice: Use your knowledge of the industry to forecast where it's going, decide if you want to go there, then position yourself (with skills and interpersonal networking) to ride the next wave.
If you give up just because "times are tough" you never were meant to be in the field in the first place.
You mistake luck for skill! (Score:3, Insightful)
You have made the clasic mistake of assuming because you are lucky everyone else is too. While it is true that too many people got into computers several years ago who had no buisness in computers, that does not mean that there are plenty of jobs for people who are good at computers. Those hiring have no good way of knowing who is good. They have a stack of resumes, and they don't tell you a thing about how good the auther is at programing.
You have a job. Me, and several hundred programers that I know do not. Some of them are in the group who shouldn't touch a computer, but many are good or excellent programers.
I have not giving up on computers. However I need to eat and pay my bills. Since nobody will pay me to work with computers, and I don't have the personality to sell myself (if there are contract jobs...) I've been forced to take a job in construction. I'm not alone in that choice.
P.S. anyone want to hire me?
Re:Engineering is working out fine for me (Score:2)
Re:Engineering is working out fine for me (Score:4, Informative)
Not exactly. The first known use of "engineer" in English was in 1839, meaning "locomotive driver." Another word for "locomotive" was "engine." "Engine" comes from the 13th century Old French word engin, meaning skill or cleverness. This word came to be used to describe any trick or device, particularly in the military sense. ("Siege engine," for example, means any device or tactic used to wage war against a fortified position.) Engin came from the Latin ingenium, meaning inborn qualities or characteristics. Ingenium came from the root word gignere, meaning to beget or give birth to.
"Genius" was first used in English to mean "person of natural intelligence or talent" in 1649. It came through Norman French from the Latin word genius, meaning the guardian deity or spirit which watches over a person from birth. Genius also came from gignere, to beget or give birth to, but in a different way.
Gignere, through various circumlocutions, gave us many modern English words: ingenuity, for example, came from Middle French ingénieux, which came from Latin ingeniosus, meaning of good capacity.
So while the words "engineer" and "genius" are indeed related, you have to go back 2,000 years to an extremely distant root word to find the relation. "Engineer," on the other hand, is a first-order derivative from the mechanical sense of "engine."
Re:Hmm OED has much earlier uses. (Score:5, Informative)
The Engineers were responsible for the placement and use of seige engines etc. That profession goes right back to Roman times.
That is why we have 'civil engineering' as a profession, it is civil as in non-military. The Institution of Civil Engineers is an independent engineering institution. It was established in 1818, and today represents almost 80,000 professionally qualified civil engineers worldwide. [ice.org.uk]
A person who drives a train is called a train driver. They are not an engineer unless they are a member of a chartered institution (unlikely unless they drive trains for fun). Equally the guy who fixes your car is a mechanic, not an engineer.
Re:Well, I've already noticed... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.radiofreenation.net/article.pl?sid=02/1 2/03/0426254 [radiofreenation.net]
also at: http://www.altnewsring.com/jobs.html [altnewsring.com]
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
Story telling time:
Back when Henry Ford was starting to build cars, one of the famous things he did was to yes, work his workers hard, but he also gave them wages far above what was normal for the day and age. This was to help prime the pump of demand for his product. If you had a country of poor people, then no-one could really buy your expensive product, and you would never have a mass market. Thus it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well.
Fast forward to the present day, where you have this quote [radiofreenation.net]: "We're trying to move everything we can offshore," HP Services chief Ann Livermore told Wall Street analysts.
And you wonder what will be left in the USA if everyone is working in MacDonalds. The USA is the Greatest Market in the World, but not if everyone is reduced to flipping burgers because of the lack of anything better.
The SeeSaw of Economic forces may take centuries to balance out. In the meantime, all we have is the great sucking sound of jobs getting sucked out over seas.
Re:Well, I've already noticed... (Score:3, Informative)
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
Is debatable. You can't compare a graduate from India Institute of Technology to an unemployed MCSE. But that isn't my main point... what I have issue with is:
Back when Henry Ford was starting to build cars
I'm not sure where you read this, but from all accounts I've heard, Henry Ford *tried* to pay his workers low wages.
But they all quit.
After less than a month on the job.
Assembly line work was so bad compared to the other work available at that time, Ford just couldn't keep workers. I'm not talking about one or two people leaving after a couple weeks - I mean EVERYONE - the total employee turnover rate was a couple hundred percent as year. The situation was so bad that it was worth it to pay higher wages just to keep people around.
He paid higher wages because it was in his short-term interest.
Re:Well, I've already noticed... (Score:3, Troll)
Your suggestion? Deport the curry eaters. Brown faced little bastards are taking jobs away from good ol' American boys.
In case you missed it in whatever fine school you were educated at, here's how it works:
1. Joe makes an assertion.
2. Charlie casts Joe's assertion as something else.
3. Charlie's cast of Joe's assertion is wrong, therefore Joe's original assertion is wrong.
You're Charlie. Good day.
Re:Not a zero-sum game (Score:4, Insightful)
The zero-sum economy is one of those wonderful humanist myths. It comes from the same scientific fatalism that attempts to make every person just a cog in a machine, without any independent choice. (Ergo, the wise, all-knowing leaders who somehow are above this limitation can make the decisions we can't make for ourselves)
Think about it: an economy depends on a collection of individual choices. If enough people refuse to work, or refuse to work as hard as another group, then of course the economy will have trouble. If the government siphons personal effort into non-productive areas, then of course that economony will be strained a little more. But, if everyone works hard, even though they might be "stealing" jobs from one another, the end result is a much more healthy economy than if everyone is carefully protected in whatever mediocre position. It's not rocket science.
In fact, it seems history has proven that the more you limit individual choice, the more you limit your economy. Interestingly, this seems to compare well with work in distributed "swarming" algorithms, etc... in the computer world: you can't absolutely predict the outcome, but it is possible for a swarm of automonous units to do things that could not be accomplished with the old-fashioned 'top-down' approach. (Read Michael Crichton's "Prey", for a good intro to these concepts.).
Thurow isn't the first economist to be a negative boo-hooer. There have always been experts crying that the end is near. Thomas Malthus, back in the 18th century, predicted that within a few decades the world would no longer be able to sustain economic growth, and massive starvation/anarchy/whatever would occur.
These people have all failed to see that through hard work and ingenuity, human beings have consistently managed to do more with less. And, willingness of individuals to work hard, while sometimes affecting others in negative ways, temporarily, has an overall effect of lifting the total economy. Take three people living on an acre of land. If all three till the ground and grow vegetables, they will be much better off than if only one does. If you force the most successful vegetable grower to stop until the others catch up, then the net result is...less vegetables. It's not rocket science.
Anyway, for more than 200 years, Americans have experienced an economic freedom that was unheard of anywhere in the world. For this reason, of course, tough-minded individuals who didn't mind taking their chances emigrated from all over the world to the U.S. I'm not trying to paint a completely rosy picture. Of course there was repression, but that always involved *restricting* personal choice. If we had not repressed women or certain ethnic groups, I am convinced America would be even richer now. But I believe the end result was undeniable: freedom produces more wealth than restriction.
okay lets release FUD now.. (Score:5, Insightful)
My personal example; Programming for about 15 years..many job titles.. I am stil programming!
What are we reporting and releasing FUD now like Microsoft?
Re:okay lets release FUD now.. (Score:3, Informative)
Well experience as a programmer would not necessarily qualify you as a chartered engineer.
To become a member of the British Computer Society (a chatered body) you have to be more than simply someone who does grunt work. You have to have experience, you have to have responsibility for project outcomes - either as a manager or as an architect.
In Germany the title 'Engineer' is as important as 'Doctor' and merits serious respect. Until their economy got kinda clobbered by the absorbtion of East Germany, Germany was a model for a modern industrial society.
Come to that so was the US during the Clinton-Gore years. I would argue that over the long term there is a positive correlation between respect for engineering and economic success.
So why do silicon valey companies have Chief Scientists and rarely Chief Engineers?
We win (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but who gets more tit 'n ass?
Development is working out fine for me! (Score:5, Insightful)
And when you die... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And when you die... (Score:3, Insightful)
Started developing hardware, firmware, then drivers, and finally end-user apps.
Started doing junk projects no other Engineer wanted to touch, moved on to small projects, then larger projects, and finally project management.
Started with work I thought was horrid, moved on to fairly rewarding work, then work that was fun, and finally some critical, full-recognition development -- stuff still used by users around the world.
That's the way it goes for virtually any career worth pursuing!
Even rock-and-roll artists take ten years, on average, to become an "overnights success". Many scientists don't get any recognition whatsoever until they've specialized in a field for thirty years or more.
Six measily years on the job is nothing. You were just getting out of diapers! Now it sounds like you're going another direction... What a waste.
Right now, I manage people. That took me about seven years to get right -- as good as it's going to get. The people I hire have about five years of experience, on average, and it shows. I alwayse sense they think getting where I am in my career should be easy. I take it as a real compliment because, to me, it means I've learned to make it all look easy
If you really want to look back (when you die) and feel like you've made something of your life, the only way to do so is to stick to something. Invest a significant portion of your life toward that one thing.
Re:Development is working out fine for me! (Score:4, Insightful)
My job was shipped to India (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I wonder if the whole economic problem we're having is due to many companies doing this same thing, exporting our high paying jobs to other countries. It saves them money in the short run, but in the long run its taking money out of our country and slowing our economy.
But then, I'm not an economist, and eventually, I did get another job with another company. But I was unemployed for a year, thats 1 year of my salary that I was unable to produce because my job went overseas. If you add that up over all the people in the industry who are in similar situations.
It was grim, being unemployed for a year. I even contemplated switching industries, actually thought about becoming a Truck Driver to sustain my family. But for me, my job is more of a love than a carreer. Its what I do. Its my hobby, its my passion, and I really don't want to do anything else.
But the guy in the story wants to give up on his job because he got laid off from one company, thats sad. Maybe for what he does its necesary, I don't know, but there are other jobs out there, and who knows.
Anyway, thats my 2p.
What makes you think you're better than an Indian? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What makes you think you're better than an Indi (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, he's an American. And as a result, if he were to try to do the same job for less than his Indian counterpart, he would be unable to pay his rent. Hell, he'd probably be unable to pay for his car, much less his apartment.
The cost of living in the U.S. is much higher than it is in India. That's why his Indian counterpart can get away with being paid so much less. It has nothing to do with what the guy in the U.S. is unwilling to do and everything to do with what he's unable to do.
There is a huge injustice in all this: companies are able to shop around and find the cheapest source of labor worldwide, but the labor is not allowed to move in response to the shifting demand. So the person you're responding to can't move to India to take advantage of the greater demand for talent there. Despite his years of training and experience, he can't offer his services competitively because immigration laws of other countries prevent him from doing so, just as immigration laws in the U.S. prevent many from attempting to satisfy the demand for labor in the U.S. (not that there's much of that right now).
For the "global economy" to truly work, people must be able to move as easily as the demand for labor does.
Too much pride? (Score:3, Interesting)
I do, however, have friends that think we're still living in the dot.com era. More than one of my friends have been laid off in the past 6 months, and each of them seems to think their the cock of the fucking walk in the IT industry. These are people that were making 80k a year at the age of 25 now sitting at home still convinced that employers were going to be dying to toss money at them. And they did get some offers, but they refused every one of them for not paying enough. These are guys with families and thier giving me the "No way in hell I'm running cat5 for $20 an hour, fuck that." I wanna fucking punch them in the throat. At what point do you swallow your pride and take the $14 an hour tech job doing acrobat installs? When they start shutting off utilities at your house? When they take the car? This is ridiculous. People with financial obligations do NOT have the luxury of job market pride.
Sorry, I got off on a tangent, but my point is you can't always stick at your current pay/job level and need to recognize when it's time to bite the bullet.
A funny after-thought: How many of you now see job postings requiring RIDICULOUS credentials to even interview? I honestly saw a job posting the other day in the paper for a $12.95/hr tech job troubleshooting tier-1 cable modem calls that required a BS in CS, I damn near shit myself laughing.
Re:My job was shipped to India (Score:5, Insightful)
This completely ignores the human side of the equation.
Problem #1: what happens when your industry is wiped out?
The Globalists say "easy, switch careers". Try telling that to a 45-year old with 2 kids and a mortgage. Going to college at $25k/year isn't much of an option. Being unemployed for a year or two isn't much of an option. Even actually switching careers isn't much of an option, because few companies in their right mind would choose a 45-year old over a 25-year old, even at the same salary. They see the 25-year old as being more flexible, more "hip" to the profession, and probably with less baggage. Someone who agrees to reduce their salary is seen as being someone who is going to use the job as a "transitional job", someone who will not be loyal to the company.
Sure, maybe 20% can make the switch, but what about the other 80% of the people in the industry? What will they do? We get taught in school that if we work hard and do our best, that we are so much better than the losers on welfare who just feed off the system, but when you're bounced from an industry that moves overseas, most are no better than the welfare cases.
Problem #2: Who is making the money here?
The conventional wisdom says that if a US company lays off its $100k programmers for some $5k programmers in India, that it can both lower the price of its products, and make those products available to the people in India who now have $5k/year. Also, the wages in India will rise because of increased demand.
The problem is the price reduction takes too long, and companies capitalize on the increased profit margins to simply get fatter and concentrate wealth. Price reduction does not replace the lost income to the US. Wages never increase in a global economy; when wage pressure shows its head, the jobs are moved to the next nation.
That means that the product doesn't get noticibly cheaper in the US, and the people in India don't get noticibly wealthier (so they don't consume). So the effect on the US economy is that there are less people employed at good salaries. This does eventually deflate the US economy, but the ironic thing is that it does not immediately hurt an individual company as much as it helps them in the short run. Trimming $1 million from your expenses today isn't as bad as losing 20% of your potential customers over a 10-year period. At least, companies don't see it this way.
But what happens when the US consumer appetite is eventually weakened by 40% because there are only low-paying jobs here? We will be stuck in an economic middle "black hole", where we can't afford our own goods because we don't make enough money, but others can't afford them either because neither do they. The only way out will be a complete crash.
There will be about 500 people in the country who can afford to buy the goods -- the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies. That doesn't sustain an economy.
Problem #3: Are globalized countries willing to participate in both halves of the equation?
Sure, we're sending more money to India. Does India have the opportunity to "buy American"? Or are we just exporting our dollars overseas for nothing, and we can expect to never see them again? Is India willing to raise its human standards once it starts getting wealthy, even if it reduces their ability to compete and puts them at risk of losing jobs to China?
What I think people fail to realize is that a global economy probably can't exist without a global government, because individual countries do not behave the same. India can compete because they discard 50% of their population by not educating them, banishing them to a life of poverty. China banishes more, and holds families to strict population quotes. Countries like this are throwing their resources to the cream of the crop, while more advanced countries have developed a "nobody left behind" philopsophy.
When businesses compete for labor, people have the ability to switch companies if the labor conditions aren't that good. But when countries compete for labor, then the lowest common denominator has a huge advantage -- the US is already losing jobs to countries where there are 7-day, 60+ hour workweeks, no safety regulations, no child-labor regulations, etc. And it's hard to move backward on social conditions. That means that developing countries, who have poor social conditions, won't develop them because it would be suicidal.
If India offered the same "benefits" to its citizens -- goals for 100% literacy, worker safety, decent hours, retirement, social programs -- that the US does, I don't think they could provide the same labor for $5k/year.
Globalization will cause great upheaval, all this for theoretical benefits which have failed to materialize. It is merely a gimmick for the powerful to gain more power. Regionalization offers more stability, more safety, and does not allow power to be concentrated into the hands of a few.
Think about it -- it might theoretically be better if there was a single brand of car out there -- it would be cheaper to produce, easier to fix, and would allow for standardization of everything from parking lots to garages. Yet would you be willing to snap your fingers and give one company the power to be the sole supplier of this car? Would you be willing to trade the heterogeny of our current car industry for the homogeny of a single manufacturer?
Diversity should be the goal, but globalization is the enemy of diversity.
All Problems, No Solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
If you ran a company would you keep a large workforce of highly paid workers or would you ship jobs overseas? How would you compete with competitors who did the same thing?
There is an economic force that is pushing companies to employ people overseas where there is a much higher demand for jobs. This is very bad for the US and the US standard of living. But I don't think any laws to stop the flow of jobs overseas will do any long-term good. They will just slow the tide that is based on the simple math of lower operating costs.
I think what we need to focus on are strategies to create jobs in the US to replace jobs that go overseas. We have a highly skilled workforce in the US as well as an excellent infrastructure. Start-Ups in the US have a huge advantage to StartUps in Afghanistan.
I think we need to stimulate entrepreneurship and make it easier for new businesses to find starting capital and to succeed. With the poor performance of stocks and bonds lately, there's lots of money out there looking for good investments... We need some way to connect the dots and stimulate new business and provide good investments for retirement savings... maybe some cross between VC and insurance funds...
We also need to decrease the cost of education. In the past student loans have made education obtainable for all americans with the academic ability. However, paying off student loans is a huge albatross that makes it hard to buy a house or raise a family. The cheaper education is the more skilled workers we will have for new businesses and the greater our advantage will be over other countries.
Re:The Free Trade Fallacy (Score:4, Insightful)
As for complicated arguments revolving around free trade, I once had a physics professor who told us routinely that if we were not able to explain a concept to an average person using normal language (no math, physics jargon, etc) then we did not understand that concept ourselves. He tested us based on that principle, also. Every test included an essay section requiring us to explain what one of the questions was asking and what the answer meant. Passing the essay section was required to pass the test. This is a good way to distinguish potentially good arguments from clear BS. Complicated arguments require complicated logic, and most people (including academics) are just not that good at doing complicated logic. The vast majority of complex arguments full of fancy terminology and authoritative jargon can be torn to shreds in seconds by anyone who has studied formal logic. This is not to say that everything is obvious and that nothing that is complicated can be right. It just means that if your first reaction to an argument is that it is a load of shit, it probably is. The clear, consise argument using normal language should always be preferred.
Good for everyone except those who are left without a job. Or left earning 25% of what they used to. The US may be the wealthiest contry on Earth, but that only applies to the country as a whole, not the idividual citizens. The people of the US are not even close to being the wealthiest on the planet. A small percentage control the vast majority of the wealth and skew the averages. Free trade, or rather the form of extremely restrictive trade that is passed off to us as being "free," only makes the situation worse.You can moralize all you want about the virtues of free trade and you can throw out every diversionary argument you can think of. But in the end, I don't care about any of that. I want to be able to feed my family and live a good life. Any political system that rewards the few at the expense of the many and cloaks itself in the language of morality is doomed to failure. If you think that the US is immune to this, I suggest you crack open a history book.
Just In Time (Score:2)
Re:Just In Time (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have taken a look lately, Companies are requesting Doctorates with 10+ years exp for 32k a year. Keeping a positive attitude is great, but the economy is crap. I surely hope you can disprove my pessimism.
Re:Just In Time (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of PhD's do it because they love what they do, not because there's money in it. The economics of research are very unfavorable. A typical ROI, if you could even call it that, could be decades away.
Your typical postdoc, which is what you do right after getting a PhD, might earn $30-40k/yr. Even a new professor at a major lab is only getting something like $70k. I'm not sure how universities pay, but for assistant/associate professors I doubt it breaks the $100k mark.
Of course, if you've got decent credentials you could start in the mid-six-figures doing quantitative analysis for a brokerage firm in Manhattan...
But, yes, there is certainly a trend in current job ads to ask for a lot of experience. This is an employer's market nowadays, as opposed to the employee's market that just ended. 10 years from now, employers might be begging to hire anyone with a little bit of biochemistry experience (like being able to synthesize your own buffer) the way they would hire anyone with a tiny bit of programming a couple of years ago (Remember? You could even get by with just some HTML knowledge).
Re:Just In Time (Score:3, Funny)
Kid, you're gonna get your ass handed to you on a platter if you believe this. Coming from someone who's already been there, IComp Sci is pretty easy: you learn the formulas, equations, languages, etc, and you bundle it up in packages. Most projects are pretty much identical. A real businessperson has to handle many, many different things. There's no sitting on your ass in a comfy cubicle while you surf Slashdot. You may get an assignment in a job that's "Improve sales by 25% in the next month. Go." And that's *all* you get. At least, with the comprable IT problem: "Improve performance by 25% in the next week", you know where to look, what to do, you can read web sites, etc.
If you think an MBA will be "easy", you're in for a rude awakening.
Re:Just In Time (Score:2)
Programming "Career" (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I have not attended University or College for training in the field, I made a substantial income.
I observed many of my co-workers and friends whom had gone through University and such, and their careers ended just as quickly as mine.
The common problems we all faced were that management did not understand the nature of the job performed, and ended up hiring a large agency to take over our "home brew" projects.
I have reformed my future, and am becoming a Special Ed teacher for the Blind and Visually Impaired... because the IT industry has completely collapsed, not resulting from poor economy (I live in Canada, and our economy is quite strong right now...), but as a result of poor management and planning.
My suggestion to anyone considering, or currently working in IT, is to educate themselves in another field, and use their skills as an addition to their qualifications.
I write small applications to make programs like Excel more accessible for the Blind, as there is little, or no support for Text-to-Speech software, while at the same time performing my other duties.
Re:Programming "Career" (Score:3, Funny)
Since when the high unemployment and poor economy is as a result of our fault? Let me rebuke your FUD and give you a real picture of what IT business is.
The major problem the IT business is facing is the programmers in general failed to follow what has been planned by management. We've stressed on focusing on our core values for many years and none of our programmers could list any one of them in any of their review, least following them. I don't know what their core values are, neither, but when we've made them, they should follow them precisely. Also, we've emphasis on the importance of COM(Customer Oriented Management) for years and even introduced 4P(Professionalism, Partnership, Proactiveness and Priority), but none of our programmers seemed to have followed them. Therefore, this year, we restated the nessacity of TCQM(Totally, Completely Quality Management) and our compliance with ISO 60002. Guess what, none of them understand a hell of them!
At the beginning of this year, I gave them one last chance and called for "paradigm shift" and "thinking out of the box", to my provokation all they could do is eating out of the box! We even so nice as to rewrite the VMV(Vision, Mission and Values) and annoucned "3Rs &1M" (Re-prioritisation, Re-engineering, Reorganisation and Market enabling). I hope they could at least re-organize, re-engineer or re-prioritize their code toward the heaven of total quality, but all they could raise up is to urge me to adopt some craps like design pattern! We are not running garment business God damn it.
You see how many chances I've given to them? If anyone of them could comply with what we've planned we could have achieved the state of Total Quality, Zero-Error and Complete Customers Satisifaction years ago! Now you say we are to blame?!
(For humor-impaired: this is a joke, but all the terms listed above are real, some of them are extracted from our Director's year resolution, sadly)
Re:Programming "Career" (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly don't give a damn if you learn how to program by going to college and sitting through 3 lectures a week for 4 years, or curling up in bed with a volume of Knuth whenever you have the chance. As long as you understand and are comfortable with the concepts, you can be a good programmer.
You might argue that someone with a formal education is more likely to grok the concepts, but anecdotally I've seen a LOT of kids getting degrees (and this is from high-ranked national universities, never mind the DeVry and trade school grads) that certainly don't belong anywhere near software design.
Re:Programming "Career" (Score:5, Insightful)
That's certainly a big part of it.
However, there is a large part of accumulated knowledge that you need to learn to be a proficient software engineer. You can do it on your own, but classroom can provide a clear direction and help filter the stupid stuff from the essential stuff.
Re:Programming "Career" (Score:3, Insightful)
You're talking esoterica and dusty cobwebbed corners of the field -- not anything that 99% of engineers will ever need to know.
Thanks. That was exactly the answer I was expecting. I suggest you take a look at this article [paulgraham.com] to start with.
Should have unionized (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Should have unionized (Score:3, Interesting)
"Look for the union label" is supposed to convey an image of quality. Especially in freelance fields, being hiring a union member means that the person qualifies for membership, and only performs work that complies with the union standard. More expensive, yeah. But it serves as a great way to convince others that the work complies with standards. "Yeah, we use subcontractors, but everybody we hire is union."
Think about it, how many companies will want a Linux server set up, but then not be willing to pay you to patch it or and don't know how patch it themselves. A union standard could prevent such a situation, by refusing to set up servers for people who do not committ to also have them supported by a union member. Yeah, they could go the cheap way by having non-union techies set it up, but that may hinder the company when trying to impress other companies.
Re:Should have unionized (Score:4, Insightful)
All of these things might conceivably raise costs for the people that buy my work. But what you're arguing is that I should have no health care or insurance, that I should be easily screwable and that I should have no voice in government, all so the products you buy might be a little cheaper. This is a very selfish attitude on your part and does not tend to lead to quality products for your consumpution.
I know nothing about you, but who knows, you might be able to afford a little price increase for quality and to protect the humanity of those who serve you if you also had a union going to bat to keep your wages fair for what you do.
We can all either be economic slaves or valued workers together. I choose the latter; I will continue to pay my union dues and vote in my union elections!
I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
Fresh kids out of college know current technology, have the lowest starting salaries (so you can get more of them), and willing to work ungodly hours without extra pay. With the competition for engineering jobs ramping up in India and other lower cost countries, I realized early that I may like technology, but without having the desire to go into management or get a doctorate (to get access to career engineering jobs), then I needed to get into another profession.
Re:I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:2)
One of the highest paid group of programmers these days are old cobol programmers. Big companies (mainly in insurance and banking) don't have the same system turnover than most places. As the number of cobol programmers drop, their value increases.
Even medium sized companies have 'old' systems that only a rare few people know how to use properly, and will just continue to age (especially now with spending freezes and drops).
Re:I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineers with a ton of real-world design experience are an amazing asset, not just in my industry but aerospace, civil engineering, and most other "old" engineering disciplines. I definitely wouldn't generalize that all engineers get less valuable with time.
Re:I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:5, Funny)
hehe....knowing a couple engineers myself I must say - that's a lot of gold...
Re:I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I've seen other engineers stuck in one place for years, mostly because they're content to keep doing the same thing every day, never taking any initiative to push themselves further along. It's not just about embracing the techno-fad of the day, it's about the certainty that no matter what you're doing, you're not as good at it as you could be, and it's up to you to improve.
If you're not a better engineer now than you were a year ago, someone else will have your job eventually. If you are, and you can say that every year, then you'll have people offering you jobs out of the blue even in today's economy.
What this really means... (Score:4, Insightful)
But that line of reasoning often turns into a psychological crutch for chronic whiners. How many posts on Slashdot read something like, "Dammit, I know Logo, BASIC, Pascal, VB, FORTRAN, assembly, Java, C++, and C#... and I still got laid off!" Sure, but how good were you at solving problems? Should an auto shop manager be impressed when a job applicant claims to have worked on Pintos, Novas, Malibus, Mustangs, Explorers, Cavaliers, and Excursions? How many of those cars drove away from the applicant's garage bay with their lugnuts cross-threaded?
Quality software engineering is more than a resume full of hip languages and buzzwords from the Gamma book. The best software engineering is usually done by people who got into the business because computers seemed like a really powerful and enjoyable way to solve engineering or (in the games biz) aesthetic problems. Those folks -- not the language lawyers, tool fetishists, and epicene gnomes of Unix who still have their home page set to schwab.com -- are the ones who tend to have the best answers to the question, "OK, why should I hire you?"
Re:I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
Then he was an idiot.
Those kids fresh out of college may know current technology, but they don't have a damn clue when it comes to designing systems. When it comes to making a decision most will take whatever path is quicker/easier and not consider the longterm implications -- which means down the road you have to throw out huge chunks of code and rewrite it because it wasn't done right the first time. After all, long-term up till now has meant "next semester".
Learning the latest technology is trivial. Having the mindset to solve problems, plan out a project, and write code that doesn't break is something learned only through experience, which can't be taught so easily. And yes, you'll pay more for those people. It's worth it.
Outsource to India? No thanks... I've seen the results of that. My company tried to outsource the GUI front-end of our application to India for a very, very low sum. End result? All of the code was thrown away. The one piece that may have been salvagable turned out to be a BSD-license library that was from an alpha release and had its license violated -- the moron coder removed the copyright and claimed it was his own. It was broken too (hence the reason it was alpha). We hired a Java programmer and he finished in four months what they had failed to do in nine.
We're currently interviewing for another two positions as well, plus one more sysadmin. And we find the same thing over and over - most of the people applying for the jobs are idiots and shouldn't have been in the field in the first place. They lie about their experience, and we catch them (most are caught in pre-screen -- if you claim to know Unix, you should really know what things like 'pwd' do). The actual interview is more theory than practice, as well as making sure you'll work well in the group. It's really amazing just how many people claim a masters in CS or EE, 10 years of experience, and yet have no idea what a race condition or deadlock is or how to handle/prevent them.
Yes, I was laid off at the start of the year. And, know what? I found another job. And if it happens again I'll find another one, even if it takes some time. My wife and I have a 6 month cash emergency fund, so we're ok for awhile even if we both lose our jobs. And we can live on a single salary if needed. If you don't have a cash fund, or are living over your means, fix it. Now.
Re:I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:3, Informative)
And in most cases, these fresh-minted graduates are coming out of an ivory-tower development environment, where it doesn't have to work well as long as it shows that the student grasps the concept that the professor is presenting. And the development environments make them used to writing code as if there's no limit on the amount of storage and memory they can use, so their code is elephantine and slow.
I remember a project I worked on involving electronic storage/maintenance of training documents. Because we only had a couple of programmers on the project, part of it was contracted out. When we tested the code on a real set of documents, one of their modules kept blowing up; it turned out that their code defined a fixed-length array for what was an indeterminate number of elements, and the real-world document had half again as many elements as the array had space for. Another module had every single routine allocating the same 3Mb data structure dynamically on entry, even if only 1% of that space was actually being used (3000-element array of a structure with 6 float fields and four 240-character text fields; the text fields were never used). The program I was responsible for, the import-export module, which would pull all of the pieces out of the Oracle dataabase that held them, including all their links, then link them back into the database at another site, was written using linked lists for all of its dynamic storage. When the project was completed and accepted for implementation, the contractor took over maintenance of the code -- and promptly ripped out all of the linked-list code in the import-export module and replaced it with fixed-length arrays -- even though it had already been proven that fixed-length arrays broke on real-world data.
There are morons everywhere; unfortunately, in the programming industry, the morons leave legacies that can survive for years beyond when they depart, with the task of actually fixing those problems hampered by those problems becoming part of accepted corporate practice -- once everybody's gotten used to doing it wrong, you can't change the user interface because all of the non-techies would *gasp* have to learn a new UI...
I will have been employed full-time as a programmer for 20 years come the middle of next month, plus three years as a student contractor before that, and I don't expect to retire until I've got more than 30 years in (actually, I can't retire on 30 years -- I come up a year short of minimum retirement age when I have 30 years); I've seen people burn out on programming, and I've seen people get pushed into management as the only available mobility option. It may keep me from making The Big Bucks(tm), but I don't ever want to get shoved into management; having to deal with the egos and prejudices where I work resembles a kindergarten more than it does an office.
Re:I heard one hiring manager tell me (Score:3, Informative)
Of my IT friends, 5 of six lost their jobs the last year (including me). Now 4 of us are working - and guess what? Our senior experience helps. A lot.
You may get a kid with the latest technology, but is he going to know how to troubleshoot? To find things on the net? Know the right users? Have a sense of history?
I just finished building an application in the latest tech (.NET sadly). 80% of what I did had NOTHING to do with
Sometimes it takes 10 new kids to equal one old fart. That's not good economic sense.
People will learn. The hard way.
Seven Years? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think careers in engineering fields require a degree of career management from the individual. They can no longer expect to be given success and wealth just because they have an engineering degree. They need to guide their career so they can grow into different positions as time goes on.
While this is no different than other disciplines, I guess it's a new idea for the technologically inclined.
19 years pro for me (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO, the surges in the industry attract a bunch of riff raff, which get purged when times get tough. Not to disparage the articl poster (or is it poseur :-) jest kidding); he may be a great engineer, just too much of the riff raff feeding from the new jobs trough. When it comes to staying employed, it's really about whom you know and your reputation. Anyway, during the slumps is when the real core of the industry gets to innovating the next wave...
Definitely not high tech .... (Score:2)
If I had to do it all over again I would have joined a monopoly. No I'm not talking about Microsoft. I would have been a premed major and let the AMA monopoly stamp me into a money making doctor machine.
Re:Definitely not high tech .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Alot of people do the exact same, becoming a millionaire doesnt just come from Y number of hours for X Years, expectations sometimes are just unrealistic, the vast majority of people in this world will work their entire life and never have near 1 million in the bank.
No 'safe' careers anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget job security, defined skill sets and straight career paths. This uncertainty is here to stay.
There *is* a safe career choice! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There *is* a safe career choice! (Score:4, Funny)
I already quit. (Score:2, Informative)
Course, I still read
Replace "Engineer" with almost anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar reasons can be found for almost any career being short, and statistics can be shown to support that (as well as almost anything you can think of.)
Problems with the current economy shouldn't cause one to abandon a career.
Maybe we're too paranoid. I've seen burn-out, and lemme tell ya, it dosen't need to happen, and most people I've heard complain about it are really NOT burning out.
M@
Vanishing Middle Class (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think this is a good trend for our nation as a whole. In the long run it will hurt everyone.
I interview for a new job probably about once a month. The last one was for a single opening w/the USDA for slightly lower than average pay. It was to do development and database administration. There were over 100 applicants. They wanted a programmer that had been an accountant and got it. Being just a plain old programmer hasn't been helping me a lot lately.
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Re:people have said this for decades (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, these things happen very slowly. If you look at the general trend over the past 20 years, there has been a collapse in the number of high-paying skilled manufacturing jobs, living standards and job security for many professionals are declining, and the fastest growing sector is "service" jobs like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. The growth of information technology and programming was maybe the only exception to this, but it is not looking so good now. There is still biotech which seems to be the hot thing now. However, I think the worst fears anyone expressed 'decades' ago have generally come to pass. But people expecting a rapid and devastating catastrophe will probably continue to be disappointed.
Re:Vanishing Middle Class (Score:3, Funny)
You are very right my friend. I think the revolution will come sooner than most people think. Join your local national guard now, so you at least have access to automatic weapons when you need them.
Easier job. (Score:2)
Re:Easier job. (Score:2)
I came in and bitched about the dumbass students in the lab. She said "well, at least you don't wipe asses for a living!"
I replied with "I do the mental equivalent of it"
It will never be the same (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not sorry I became an engineer but I have no desire to return to the field even if there were some jobs, which of course, there are not.
All of the companies are moving to small management teams and are outsourcing everything, mostly over seas to Taiwan and India. This country will never learn. First we did it with manufacturing and now we are doing it with engineering. Douglass Adams was right, we are going to be nothing but a bunch of Phone Sanatizers and we will all be in the first arc to go.
You got to move with the times (Score:2)
Continually learning (Score:2)
Please...don't. (Score:2)
And don't talk about engineering careers ending...I'm still trying to start mine.
Tell me about it (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm still standing... (Score:2)
The answer to getting laid off is to employ yourself.
Another View (Score:2)
As far as knowledge having a half life, I'd have to agree. I work my butt off to stay current and know what clients will want before they do.
It seems to me that there still will be rewarding engineering careers in the computer and programming fields. I just think that the attractiveness of the industry became it's own worst enemy and drew a ton of talented people who would have been good at anything they put their minds to. I think as the tech industry matures, it will grow a more solid foundation that will give engineers good careers, but without the outrageous perks. Sure, they may feel like they have to join a more plebeian "real world". But really, it's not that bad.
GIve me a shell, a good language and... (Score:2, Funny)
I'll never give that kind of power up.
"Programmer" is not the same as "Engineer" (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, just from looking at the numbers from my high school, I would guess that there will actually be a shortage of engineers (i.e., electrical, material, chemical, aerospace, etc.) in the next couple decades. With the boomers retiring and decreasing numbers in my generation going into engineering (because science and math are too "hard," and they have been taught very poorly in the last 20 years by the public school system so they opt for law), the US is losing its engineering workforce. One of the best observations I have heard was from a professor at MIT who observed that 50 years ago engineers outnumbered lawyers by far, whereas today the opposite is true.
Just because Microsoft and Oracle are hiring foreigners to do the programming doesn't mean that the other traditional engineering fields are waning as well. Think of how much software engineering is design versus implementation. The implementation workers are really akin to skilled factory labor, and that is why they are replaceable by cheaper foreign labor. Erecting barriers to immigration will just cause companies to leave the US.
Defense Contractors (Score:2)
Go War On Terrorism!
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Global Competition and Pressure (Score:4, Insightful)
1. These people enjoy stress. They spend so much time at work, it is insane. Yet, at the same time, this type of stress is different. It is inter-work stress, not intra-work stress. That is, it isn't stress related to solving interesting and complex problems. They are having a hard time dealing with it.
2. The impact of offshore competition is really starting to gain ground in most companies. Small companies, large companies, high technolohy companies, low technology companies. Especially if you are in IT, this is no joke. The global economy has arrived. Many workers never thought it would hit them, but it has. This means adjustments in salary expectations, job prospects, networking with others, and more.
3. In my opinion, most development companies outside of the U.S. don't realize the economic and social impact they are having on U.S. workers. They are relatively ignorant of how they are extracting money and jobs from U.S. workers. This isn't a complaint against these companies. It is merely an observation. (I'm curious what others have to say about this, especially developers from India, Eastern Europe, and other such places.)
4. The main competitive advantage for U.S. workers is their "sfot skills" in areas such as business analysis, communication, creativity and project leadership. A friend of mine recently interviewed with a company. They were entirely uninterested in his Java, Lotus / Domino, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc. skills, but they were very interested in his ability to communicate, his analysis skills, his writing skills, and so forth. In other words, they cared that he had a clue about how people actually work, versus just being a code monkey.
5. Most technical workers I know don't enjoy technology. Instead, they enjoy the challenge of technology: creativity, problem solving, analysis, puzzles, etc. Therefore, leaving technology wouldn't be such a big deal for most folks I know. One guy wants to be an English professor, another guy wants to drive a truck, still another guy wants to build houses. This is amazing to me because these guys are diesel. I mean, they are seriously good with technology and it would be a shame to see them go.
What did the employed physicist say . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
"Would you like fries with that?"
It's a bit of cruel, sick joke, but the more so because of its truth. In some respects you should be greatful if you get several good years in your major field. Most people don't you know. The real crunch is going to come in about 4 years as the univerisities are really just cranking up the "mill" to turn out programers and CS grads.
Odds are these people will never work in the field at any high level capacity. Code grinders maybe, if they're good, and if they're lucky.
An education is still a good thing you know, for its own sake. Really. And just because you end up in the plumber's union by the time you're 30 doesn't mean you can't still code and enjoy everything that the *act* of coding gives you.
If you didn't get into CS because you love it, *that* was your mistake. Coding is one of the few remaining fields in which you can still do top grade work in your "spare" time and with the internet even in cooperation with groups of like minded individuals.
Real hacking is like poetry really, a creative art form. Guess what? The poets have been used to having to be plumbers for thousands of years.
KFG
Right on! (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly! When I was a chipper, geeky first-year CS student back in the very early 90s, I was surrounded by a class of similarly-minded people--people who enjoyed coding, figuring out problems, loved the all-nighter culture and did just swell.
Years later, as a TA at the height of the dot-com revolution, the first-year class was full of fucking fratboys, dumbasses each and every one of them, there because 'dude, this is where the bucks are!' They had no love for it, no dedication to their craft, no doing it for fun at home even after weeks of slaving on assignments. They were there to get rich. It's those people that we're currently purging for those that truly do know what they're doing, people who do love what they do, and we'll be a stronger workforce for it. In a few years, the cycle will begin again.
Darn. (Score:2)
It always seemed that there were two types of people in my Computer Science program, those that would be there no matter what and those that thought it was a ticket to a higher salary. Even if I was working at a minimum wage job flipping burgers, I'd be spending my evenings tinkering with Linux and a junked out 386
job security has always been a mirage (Score:2)
First thing you need to do is to be absolutely honest with yourself. On everything. You are simply who you are. Work from there & have fun. Good luck to all who are in tough times.
That's because we live in interesting times (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it is because we are at the same stage in software engineering that medicine was in when the guy who cut your hair was the same guy who set your bones.
We don't know shit about how to program computers, you know. Not SHIT.
Software engineering is so grossly inefficient that only kids have the stamina to weather the hours that it takes to do anything robust and useful.
I am a software engineer but I'd be ashamed to show my face at a mechanical or civil engineer convention - the buildings and machines they make don't blow up all the time, repeatedly, for no reason at all.
I am right now on the eighth floor of an eleven floor building. I'm eight stories up and there's still a thousand tons of concrete and steel over my head. I have a great deal of confidence that if I don't make it out of this building alive it won't be because it collapsed on me.
BUT - if this building were a computer program I'd be freaking terrified at all times UNLESS it had been around for a long time (and therefore rebuilt over and over after falling on other people.)
Also, this business, which no one understands, is changing at a high rate of speed.
It's as if you became a doctor and 2 years later no one had a liver anymore. They all upgraded to a new organ, about which you know nothing. All the learning about the liver you did and the exams you passed on it mean nothing.
Now all the hospitals are hiring young new doctors who know all about the new organ, never mind your years of experience.
Now you get to sit around in unemployment, watching these kids make all the intern mistakes again. Swell.
Of course, you can go back to medical school to learn the new organ, but two years from now you're going to have to do it again. How long can you keep this up?
The fact is - we are screwed. The industry has not seen it's Newton yet, so all is in darkness.
The creating of Doctors is a science. MEDICINE is an art but CREATING DOCTORS is a science. They go to medical school, they serve an internship, they pick a specially etc.
If a Doctor and his Grand Dad the Doctor and his Grand DAUGHTER the Doctor all got together to discuss becoming Doctors, they'd find they all had things in common, the toughness of medical school the greater toughness of internship etc etc.
Computer programming on the other hand, is like hiring a poet. You never know what kind of poetry you are going to get, so everyone wants an EXPERIENCED poet so someone else paid for the bad poetry they do in the beginning.
There's lamers with PhDs and great coders in high school. What to do?
The fact is, in Software Engineering if you are over 30 you had better be in management or a legacy maintenance program like me with Clipper, or you're out.
This hurts CS. Can you imagine where chemical, mechanical or civil engineering would be if they got rid of all the engineers over 30?
When CS is a mature discipline you'll see older guys dominating it.
Until then, CS, like Trix, is for kids.
Re:That's because we live in interesting times (Score:5, Insightful)
This is primarily the fault of those who work in the industry. I once worked for a very large chipmaker and they loved hiring new college grads. It was way better for them than competing for existing engineers in the job market.
Why? 1) NCGs tend to be single, so they don't have as much of a social life to pull them away from work after 5pm. 2) NCGs tend to be still be in that "obsessed about the computer" phase of their lives and would work longer hours just for "fun."
Those two items, plus the "go public" gold rush led to a burn-em-up-and-spit-em-out mentality. As long as we in the industry allow it, both as hiring entities and as employees it's not going to change.
What can you do? Leave a 5pm. Say "no". Don't sign on to schedules that can't be achieved without overtime. Don't expect work to be your life. If you're a manager, kick people out when they work late too often, and make them use their vacation time.
Believe me, if everyone in the industry went home after 8 hours of work, the industry would change.
Re:That's because we live in interesting times (Score:5, Insightful)
In a mature industry like medicine students are taught a broad understanding of all concepts. A student studying to be an ear, nose, and throat doctor must learn about the nervous system, the heart, nutrition, cancer, bacteria, and broken bones before said student ever gets to be an intern. This helps ensure that the doctor understands his/her specialty as an intregal part of a whole system. That way the ear doctor can refer you to a neurologist if you need one, or tell you to drop the caffeine from your diet and the ringing will stop if that's the case. Even though s/he's not a nutritionist or neurologist s/he knows enough to treat the human system and not just treat the ear as an insolated phenomenon.
So why are so many CS graduates going out into the work force with a few OO languages under their belt and maybe a general idea of what a NIC does and THAT'S IT?? It's crazy. We need developers who can see and understand whole systems, who can discuss data modeling, image rendering, archive methodology, user interface, Ease of Use, compression, the L2 cache, hyperthreading, know volts from watts, and be able to muster a little respect for the accounting department. Then with experience use that broad knowledge to understand existing infrastructure, legacy systems, and future trends so they can look intelligently at a given business model and write project proposals based on ROI. Then defend their methods vs. others. To me that is a Doctor of CS. Our schools need to spit out far less Code Monkeys and start making far more Code Wizards.
Currently the above is most often accomplished via committee. A committee of PHB's and Code Monkeys. No wonder it's a mess.
Well, hopefully that last bit isn't seen as being trollish. I think it's one of the major issues we face.
moving target (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe Doctors have more longetivity and market value because they are inherently respected as learned people. Our profession(s) still have the public image of code slingers. Software development is an infant discipline and we may be comparible to the barbers who also did dentistry on the side. I don't mean this as an excuse in any way, but rather as an observation and hope that software development finds its footing like other professions. Afterall, the need for software isn't going away.
The Trends (Score:5, Interesting)
But still, I think the internet boom had an incredibly bad effect of attracting people that were only in it for the money and the idea that they could pull it. I still suspect that you need to have logic geeks for good software engineering, smart-but-not-into-it really doesn't tend to be good enough in a field where we are still trying to figure out the best practices and everything is controversial. You have to care, because there is no way for an automoton to solve the harder problems.
There was a glut of new engineers, many not really interested in software engineering, though maybe they do want to do a good job. But no one knows what entails "just" doing a "good job" is in software engineering, so I think they are at a great disadvantage because they are not into really working out what works by experimentation and perfecting their practices.
One other thing: the half life of technology is an illusion. Logic is the tool. It's timeless. Software engineers are applied logicians, and it's the same logic forming a substrate underneath all technologies.
If build up a learning curve cost, you have to take a salary cut because you are asking your employer to help educate you, it's worth it for all involved, and if you understand logic then you can be sure that when you do learn, it will be with expertise.
However, I know in the real world people that hire don't always know that.
Frankly, I hope people that like software stick with it. But a lot of people who were so-so on it probably do need to vacate the industry.
Be willing to change (Score:4, Insightful)
I meet computer programmers/enginers every day that are working on a dead end project and can't see it. I see Cobol programs that refuse to learn JAVA and hardware techs that refuse to learn DSP.
Watch whats getting hot. Learn XML, JAVA, the Linux kernel, encryption systems.
If you are holding on to something is this business your dieing and schools can't teach you this stuff. You have to go it alown. If there are more then two books about it on the book shelf at Barns & Noble its too old.
I was an electronics enginer. Now I run the web site for a F500 company.
At one time you wanted to learn the tech stuff. Don't stop. Never stop learning. That is what makes you good.
It is happening due to lack of organization (Score:5, Insightful)
The attitude towards recent changes in employment and wages have been massively passive-aggressiveness. The things done during the 1990's to help sow the seeds of derailing the profession, like the ITAA's legislative (and PR) lobbying, were not met with and now that things are bad many people simply want to walk into some other profession, where, for less pay and possibly much self-financed education, they will be walked all over by the plutocrats in that profession as well.
Some IT people still say "My wages are the same, I have a job, everything is fine except $100k HTML coders are laid off, they're cutting the chaff from the wheat, I'm *happy* this is happening". Well, these people have a very poor view of economics usually. For one thing, in a market economy, unemployment is ALWAYS the decision of the unemployed person (although the minimum wage creates an exception when it cancels a few potential less-than-minimum-wage jobs). This makes rational sense many times though, it is often better to collect unemployment and look for a decent paying job than to get paid part-time minimum wage, leaving you unable to pay for rent, food etc. Another thing about the ridiculousness of this idea by some IT workers is that surveys show wages recently dropped industry-wide - even if you feel you will always be employed, which anyone who will take any wage WILL be (unless it goes under minimum wage), can you explain why wages going down is a good thing? People talk about it like it's the weather "well, it was inevitable wages would go down". Like some alien on another planet pulls the levers of the economy and regulates the IT profession. People truly interested in economics and how they pertain to the IT labor market, and who read and study this will not see these things as alien, like barbarians who saw thunder and said it must be gods who made it since they had no understanding of it.
Anyhow, what's the solution? The solution is organization, be it an association, a union, a guild, an advocacy group, whatever. What is needed is about 2% of the profession to be actively involved in organizing, educating, fighting against bad legislation (like H1-B visa cap raises, FLSA exemptions only for IT workers, section 1706 of the IRS tax code pertaining to IT consultants etc.) which is pushed through Congress by the ITAA, which is paid to do so by IBM, Intel, Microsoft etc. You need 2% of IT workers working on this stuff, and majority support of IT workers for this stuff. I say 2% and majority because that's what a survey of sociological studies says is the percentages necessary to have something successful get done.
Do these organizations have to be created out of thin air? No - these organizations already exist, the forums for education and coordination already exist and so on, they just need more critical mass, more people coming on board. People already have compiled all the information [geocities.com] you want to know about, say, the H1-B visa issue, you just have to look for it. Campaigns are already working on the issue, you just have to join them. And with more support they will have more successes. Or you can turn tail and run when kicked to another profession, where you will be treated exactly the same way.
Re:It is happening due to lack of organization (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a pool of money that goes either to wages or profits. Productivity increases that pool each year - this is a good thing. We are all agreeing so far. OK, now depending on how you divided that up, wages can decrease, stagnate or increase. In fact, since it is growing, both profits AND wages can both increase every year. Thus, wages decreasing is bad. Wages should increase with productivity (and in my view should take a larger bite out of the profit rate).
Dual Tracks (Score:5, Insightful)
BA in English/Comp Sci
MA in Comp Sci
MFA in Fiction
The result? Lots of jobs. I switch between technical writing, article writing, and programming. I've published stories, am working on a novel, and just sold a one-act play to a regional theater. I code in ASP/CF/PHP and C#. And I love every bit of it -- coding, writing, and thinking. It all comes from the same place deep inside my brain, and I often tell folks that there's not much difference between writing a short story or coding a project under a deadline. The adrenaline flows, the creative energies get harnassed, and the subconscious does some wild and wacky shit.
And all of this came about because of an off-hand remark I once heard in a VAX assembly language language class by the prof: he assured us (eager college freshmen) that math and science students in particular should put their egos in check and their noses in books -- non-science books. Stuff like Plato and Milton and Dante -- the so-called "useless" stuff that most compsci students poopoo and claim they don't have time to read. Four years spent reading the "boring" stuff can lead to all sorts of minor and major personal epiphanies.
I'm not saying this is the answer, but it certainly is a solution. The coolest part about it is that people are actually impressed when you tell them you can code in C# and are writing short fiction as a "side project".
Everybody in the tech industry seems to want writers -- folks who can understand the technical side and then explain it simply and clearly. In fact, people go out of their way to express their admiration for this sort of talent.
Now, I'm not here to fan the flames and start another liberal arts versus sci-tech debate. But I will say that having my feet firmly planted in both sides has made things a *lot* easier. There is no shortage of jobs, people respect me, pay me well, and call upon me when the hardcore compsci folks can't get their brains out of "tunnel-vision" mode and their creative energies revved.
*shrug*
I hear a lot about the export of jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who would brave the storm, have you thought about how you would stay valuable in this market? I would be interested to hear if anyone has tried to learn an Indian language in order to communicate with their intercontinental coworkers.
If this becomes a major resume item in the next five to ten years and/or an aspect of computer trade school programs, I would be interested in getting a head start in case the issue becomes reality for me. Now may be the time to buck the trend of securing your job and/or career by simply learning one language and a couple APIs per year, and get down to following the twists and turns of the business that funds the IT industry. You know. For those who are up to it.
PS. I'm Canadian, and I have work from American firms already. To some degree, getting Canadian work is a lesser version of getting Indian work: there may be timezone and communication barriers, but the work is cheaper. When you're from a country with a much smaller economy than the US, it 's often necessary to get American work. Canada's economy makes up for 3% of the world's. Not that much, for the second biggest mass of land in the world, eh? :-)
18 years and still counting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Been at it 30 years and counting (Score:4, Interesting)
"Programmers" are a commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
Now everyone and his brother can develop and maintain computers, and so can there kids. Add to that the fact that industry caught on and has created a number of technologies that allow for cookie-cut software development.
Most software problems are VERY simple. Get info from DB, Present to user, allow input, perform calculation, put info back into DB. This describes 90% of the software solutions out there. This is EASY. If it's hard to you, you're in the wrong industry.
Most of the SW jobs out there are for maintaining and small incremental features on the above type of software. This is where the commodity programmers live. If this is all you are qualified to do, life is going to suck for you until there is a greater need for that kind of work. This work does not pay very well (It used to, during the boom, but no longer).
The remaining 10% of the work has to do with innovation or Very Hard Problems. Innovation is where you get paid to think up new things. This describes 50% of what I've been working on for the last 6 years (VOIP for me, there are plenty of other innovations out there).
This is HARD work. Enjoyable, but not easy. You get asked daily, "What's today's bright idea, smart guy?" or "Do you have the prototype complete for your GREAT IDEA?" If you can't keep 'em coming, you're out the door. The pay can be very good.
The other 50% I've worked is the pure "Hard Problem" stuff. Multi-Treaded debugging (deadlocks, data corruption, etc...) Performance, Reliability (5-9's), etc and the testing/verification of all these. These are problems that "regular programmers" can't solve. They are HARD. Most projects today created so that these don't happen and the regular programmers don't need to debug them. The projects that need these type of SW engineers are willing to pay for them and respect the capabilities of those engineers. These jobs pay well.
If you're a commodity engineer in today's market, life is not good. If you are a seasoned engineer with a proven track record, finding a job may take a little time, but won't be that hard. But then, if you're a seasoned engineer, you probably already know this and aren't too worried...
=Shreak
Re:"Programmers" are a commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately that's what managers who build their prototypes with Access over the weekend think.
The problem becomes more diffcult if you have to find the data in a 100Gig database, while 10,000 other people are trying to do the same thing.
While another 2345 users are trying to update the same records. Oh, yeah and all the access if over a wide-area network, with the users expecting sub-second response.
Think of credit card verification system. Each transaction is trivially simple - get credit available, subtract payment, store new balance.
Alan Kay once had a nice analogy for this issue. Anybody can build a doghouse. You can get some wood from Home Depot and put a usable doghouse together.
However, the ability to build a doghouse does not qualify you as a builder of sky scrapers. The doghouse methods do not scale up.
Re:"Programmers" are a commodity (Score:4, Funny)
"Think of credit card verification system."
Ok, I will bite...
If that is happening in your credit card verification system, it should block all the 2345 record updates and flag the card as stolen by a mob of 2344 people.
If you're out of work, ask youself this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you're out of work, ask youself this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen. There's a certain spark for programming and engineering. It can be cultivated, perhaps even induced, but for many, you're either born with it or you aren't.
Your quote takes me back to when I was 5 and playing with my legos. Should have thought ahead, and I wouldn't have had my career detours until I wound up in the embrace of programming.
Industry Groups Still have their Heads in the Sand (Score:3, Interesting)
After getting quite a bit of well deserved criticism, including one guy [washtech.org] who offered ITAA a $1000 bounty to find his unemployed programmer buddy a job, they released an update [itaa.org] scaling back their optimistic outlook. They still spin the industry as an under-staffed career option among other rosy interpretations. The problem is, these reports are relied on by all sorts of people who have a very real effect on my career opportunities:
Re:Will it be enough? (Score:2, Insightful)
Learn the fundamentals, and learn them well (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn computer architecture. Learn how a CPU, cache, and RAM work. Learn data structures. Learn why you'd want a tree in some situations and a hash table in others, and the consequences of each choice. Build a compiler from scratch. Learn parsing and grammar recognition. If you want to work on networks, learn queueing theory. Learn how an operating system works, what a virtual memory manager needs to do, how copy-on-write works, what a semaphore is. Et cetera.
If you know the entire foundation of the profession, you can pick up anything new that comes along with ease. You won't be so quickly cast aside when times get tough. And you'll have one-up on all the opportunists who learned from silly books or certification classes. They'll only know how the latest fad works. You'll know *why* it works, and you'll be much more able to set things right when it doesn't perform as advertised.
Re:H1B's used for more than computer work (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds like a licensing problem (Score:2)
M$FT is still making huge profits! There was a tech boom and bust cycle, and 100k+ jobs for "assembling software components" is not a sustainable thing.
BTW, Richard Stallman started the FSF close to 20 years ago. Linux actually was also a buzz word that resulted in the biggest jumping IPO (where we are currently posting).
S
Get a better product / business model (Score:3, Insightful)
Your problem is not open source. Your problem is you're denying the nature of the market, and refusing to change with it. If it wansn't open source, sooner or later some other market entity would come along and do the same thing to you for the same reason. Guess what? That's business. Deal with it. Adapt to the constantly changing market or die. It's obvious which of those options you have chosen.
Re:I blame opern soure (Score:3, Insightful)
>since an open source version of our project was
>released.
Add value then. Provide a better solution. Compete! Don't just give up. Geez, what do you wanna be... a monopoly?
Whatever.
Re:I blame opern soure (Score:4, Interesting)
But if you make a product that tons of people would like and then give it an astronomical price, don't be surprised when someone writes a free version. In this guy's example, he complained about BugZilla. BugZilla was developed to help the development of Mozilla, a very large open-source project. What does this guy expect, all the thousands of developers (paid and unpaid) to go out and purchase ClearDDTS contracts for thousands of dollars per seat? Obviously this is a product with a large appeal but a ridiculous price tag, and it got superceded by a free replacement. Too bad. If some developers could make a similar product for free, Rational obviously was charging far too much.