Re: Advice for mid-life career change (to programming)
- From: spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 31 May 2005 17:01:59 -0700
Randy wrote:
> spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > CBFalconer wrote:
> >>Tony wrote:
> >>... snip ...
> >>>So, what suggestions would you have for my next step in my attempt
> >>>at a career change?
> >>
> >>Good luck. It sounds to me as if you have the necessary abilities
> >>without the specific experience, and you need to find someone
> >>willing to bet on your learning curve. With the present
> >>outsourcing you will have problems. Look to the embedded field.
> >
> > It's not true that outsourcing destroys American jobs. It creates jobs
> > for communicators who can speak on the phone or write to the developers
> > in other lands.
>
> Where do you think the new jobs came from? They aren't new; they're old
> jobs that used to be here before they went there.
Nonsense. First of all a job is not a thing. There are strong arguments
in the absence of humane welfare and unemployment systems for giving an
employee a property right in a job, but this tends create two-tier
caste systems and if a society, like America, doesn't want to provide
humane welfare, retirement and health care, it tends not to want to
give people property rights in jobs.
But even if a job was a thing, the jobs in India and China aren't "old"
jobs and (apart from IBM sites) old skills such as Cobol aren't needed
(for IBM, it's the higher-level skill of maintaining mainframe
compilers and operating systems: since computer science enrollments are
declining in the US IBM finds it simply cannot hire developers with the
skills to maintain system software, and the work ethic to put up with
unglamorous work).
>
> Or are you suggesting that there's an explosion of IT work in the world,
> and it's only the US that's not keeping up with the Joneses?
There is not now and apart from the go-go years of the 1960s and the
dotcom era, there never was an explosion of IT work. Such explosions
create the seeds of their own destruction and in both the gogo and
dotcom case never provided labor longterm dignity and security.
The US economy has been serially manipulated to generate illusions such
as the dot.com boom (in which slobs programmed and dreamed of Golconda)
and today the housing boom (in which slobs abuse tenants of multiple
homes). What it doesn't provide is long term dignity.
But certainly the US is not keeping up with the Patels and the Zhous,
because US programmers with a grand total of one language, informed by
a brutal free-market anti-intellectualism and a tendency towards the
quick fix, still expect six figures in a world where the Patels expect
three or two.
>
> >
> > Furthermore, companies in China and in India are so hurting for
> > personnel that they will even hire Americans who at many companies are
> > valued as mentors.
>
> Lots of examples of this are forthcoming in your next post?
My own position: also, see an article in the NY Times last year about a
developer in India. As I said these demonstrate a massive trend, but
this, in turn, is due to the fact that Americans, in contrast to
Europeans and Australians, are xenophobes and don't like to travel and
work internationally.
>
> >
> > I realize that not every American programmer is up to selling the house
> > and hopping a ship to Shanghai. But on balance outsourcing creates jobs
> > as well as a modicum of economic justice.
>
> Think before you speak. Nobody who is losing their job in this country
> deserves your definition of "justice". They oppressed nobody.
In fact, their consumption levels and ignorance of global warming
created today's problems of terrorism and global warming therefore they
DID oppress.
>
> I'd agree that this is the inevitable unintended consequence of
> colonialism. Eventually, the conquistadors lose control of the
> conquered and when technology enables the latter to compete on an even
> playing field with the former, the latter is motivated to kick ass.
Well, yes. Indians revolutionised the formerly gentle game of cricket
by bowling at the speeds of American baseball, within the rules of
cricket.
>
> >
> > It's always been hard to find an entry level job in programming.
>
> False. Kids were being plucked out of college before graduation from
> 1995 through 2000. 90% of CS grads found computer work within a year of
> graduation for more than a decade before that.
Oops, this deconstructs your argument that American jobs are
disappearing. Furthermore, plucking students out of cs programs (1)
deprives older employees of opportunity and (2) damages the long term
future of the pluckees.
>
> > Basically, it's hard when you start out, easy in midcareer and then
> > it's hard again (life sucks). In part this is because American
> > programmers lack solidarity and look to their managers to do them
> > personal favors.
>
> It's hard because inertia is against you. You're bucking the trend --
> you're not making life easy for HR folks. If they hire you and you
> fail, they will look foolish because they took a chance on you and chose
> you instead of some safe choice like someone with a BS in CS. You're
> making them work harder, and that's bad for you.
>
> ...
> >
> > As to the embedded field, my friends in that field all still use C and
> > not Java for performance reasons, and they tend to use legacy coding
> > methods, avoiding OOD and OOP. They are protected because they have
> > made their chops not by learning new developments but by being able to
> > write tight and fast systems rapidly. A truly effective OOP paradigm
> > and just-in-time compilation might do a better job but the field is
> > sufficiently sealed off that it does not want to change, in my limited
> > experience.
>
> There's very little work in the embedded field for software engineers.
> On average, there are more than 10 software jobs for every hardware job
> in this country, a great many of which are located in $ilicon Valley.
>
> Also, most programmers of embedded systems have a background in EE, not CS.
No, it's the usual recursion. Embedded programmers have a background
and a track record in embedded programming. To get the recursion
started one can developed embedded software on the open source basis in
the basement and then leverage that background.
One does this of course against massive resistance from head hunters
who seek to stop applicants who have created open source.
>
> >
> > It is true that in America, programming jobs are hard to get as opposed
> > to offshoring communication. One reason is the hangover of truly absurd
> > salary expectations from the dot.com boom, where a generation of
> > developers learned they needed 200,000 a year to survive. The reality
> > is that companies have no morals and will hire you if you offer them a
> > rate of 10.00 an hour and can do the job.
>
> Or for that wage, you can just go to work in McDonalds.
If a job in programming is to you the same as fries widdat, stay at
McDonald's. I was delighted to get my first job at 5.00 per hour in
1971 because I wanted to code.
>
> Fact is, few laborers make good software engineers. Programming is
> hard. It takes a logical mind, a good sense of organization, a lot of
> knowledge about the design and implementation considerations, and
> ideally, the ability to see your code through somebody else's eyes.
> These skills are uncommon, and as such you're not going to find capable
> programmers among the employees at your local burger shack. Therefore
> to hire such people, you're going to have to pay them more than
> $10/hour. Unless they live in China, that is.
"Few laborers make good software engineers?" I find that hard to
believe since the laboring and shipping clerk jobs I worked at before
entering programming taught me valuable lessons about applied
mathematics: for example, the fact that I was executing an algorithm
when I single-handedly had to unload a truck containing 250 odd-sized
boxes, and stack them neatly.
Subsequently and on investigation I discovered that the enumeration of
programming skills that starts with a "logical mind" was all too often
mere authoritarianism and a willingness to do what one was told, which
laborers typically don't share, because their authority is the real
world.
Indeed, "being methodical" and having "a logical mind" really means, in
many cases, being willing to obey the boss and implement pre-broken,
short term quick fixes.
As I stacked boxes while studying Fortran I had a better exposure to
what a Fortran array really is, a finite collection of elements, each
of which has mass in turn. Whereas an "idealistic" approach to Fortran
from mathematics and science confuses the Fortran tyro into such
elementary mistakes as the belief that i + L points, not to the array
element following an array slice but to the slice last element. It does
only when i is a real number referring to an infinitesimal and L is
likewise "really" real, but in the real world of the "laborer"
infinitesimals and infinite quantities don't exist.
>
> >
> > As to getting nailed on the Web or in person for working at what is in
> > fact a global rate, ask the nailer where he was when you were pounding
> > the bricks looking for 500.00 an hour.
>
> So programmers make either $10/hr or $500/hr... nothing in between?
No. But the natural tendency of capitalism is to offer first entrants
the moon and stars and to immediately start to find ways to bring the
stars down to earth. The media convinces the lower middle class that
there is a permanent Golconda, which lures people who don't like to
code and can't anyway into the field, where they make life miserable
for everyone else.
>
> >
> > I predict that in a few years, programming will be no more prestigius
> > or higher paid than simple forms of advertising copywriting or
> > journalism, because that's what it is: writing. The people who remain
> > will be those who like to code.
>
> I'll take that bet in a heartbeat. I know lots of smart folks with CS
> degrees who are poor programmers. Even after years of education and
> professional experience, many software professionals develop software
> poorly. Again, programming is hard. It's going to be hard forever,
> because it's all about making design and implementation decisions that
> work correctly and make sense.
>
> Few people are logical or methodical. If you look at careers in which
> professionals cannot afford to make mistakes and on which business
> depends, all are paid well. And this doesn't *begin* to factor in the
> constant study required of all programmers in order to remain up-to-date
> with the technology. Probably no other field requires as much self
> study as programming. Not even medicine.
It may require self-study. But in fact there is no discipline coming
from programmers or their management for self-study.
Certification programs have been destroyed by companies which have
gamed those programs to indoctrinate programmers into buying their
software.
Instead of self-study one sees content-free language wars meant
primarily to establish authority.
>
> If you doubt the difficulty inherent in programming, do a literature
> search on "automatic programming" -- the attempt to build an
> "intelligent" system that can develop software with a minimum of human
> assistance. Generously, this endeavor may be described as having
> "crashed and burned". AFAIK, after over 40 years of frustration, the
> field disintegrated.
Actually, the "automatic programming" movement was a success insofar as
it was about "compilers": see my book Build Your Own .Net Language and
Compiler (Apress 2004). What could not be eliminated more or less by
definition was the boundary between human and social consciousness and
code.
Furthermore, this "automatic programming" movement has been Joseph
Schumpeter's creative destruction in that it has indeed, since about
1980, destroyed the need for the assembly language programmer.
>
> We'll automate medicine before we automate programming.
What's interesting is the fact that so many people cannot see either an
automatic or a "real" doctor. What's not interesting is the possibility
of an automated medicine, because, in fact, so many medical procedures
have in the US been automated as long as some anonymous millionaire can
make money...while health care, in the US, contines to decline.
"The future" was always a lower-middle class construct in which the
felt dependence on systems is generalized to the point where it
excludes something that has remained, which is the fact that "the
future", the world of George Jetson, is superstructure as regards base.
For this reason, denizens of the administered world encounter issues of
job loss and the putative "theft" of jobs with a variety of illusions.
One solution is to exit mentally the administered world...while using
the usual strategems to find a job.
>
> Randy
.
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