Letters to the Editor
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David David David
Then run a start up or stay in academia or carve out that specialized niche for yourself. Work is not art. And it's an unforgivable sin to educate a generation of people who think that it is. Anyone who believes they are the irreplaceable employee is a fool. Anyone who gets a big chunk of their identity from their job, unless they really are an artist that other people pay to create art, is deluding themself. I'm sorry if that's harsh but that's the how world is. I like to think of the great Charles Barkely who said once "How many people play basketball? Ten million? How many people are in the NBA? 300? You will never get to the NBA no matter what and I am not a role model for you."
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let's look at that
Thanks JudgeMental. The world is definitely a mix of two classes of people: whiners and go-getters. The creative-whiners are considered misfit and thrown out of the market.
No not always but they are very unhappy about that, generally.
Also there are whiners who think they are creative. The splash you see on the web by people blaming others and claiming they being creative geniuses are the ones confusing Mr Sugarman.
I have no truck with people who are productive and who are good at what they do. I would challenge anyone, for instance to find a good or great Database designer outside the US who can put together an application for an American company. It's cultural it's linguistic, it's something. But there are precious few of those people who we need and have which is why a good one gets paid do well.
Without this training however, you will not be developing RFID chips or biometric payment protection devices or the next second life platform to revolutionize net again. In this changing world, it is almost certain that you will need to change career four to five time at least in a 30 year work life.
Yes exactly. There's an old proverb "In a plague make coffins, in a flood sell boats."
It is a completely different paradigm that we are not preparing ourselves for. If you are not looking ahead and preparing yourself, you can only downgrade from an obsolete programming language job to a minimum wage job requiring no specialization. If you are not learning the new skills before your job is gone, this market will eat your future with great pleasure.
I can't tell how many people I've met who've worked hard at being the best in an obsolete or unwanted technology. Hint to the audience: Get rid of your VTAM/ACP subsystems as fast you can throw them out the door. There's like 7 people on the planet left to develop that stuff and they're all over 50 years old.
The same happened to all the company who earned by programming in COBOL during Y2K crisis. Now either they are gone or they are developing software for handheld devices.
If they were from the banking, finance, insurance sector, no. they were probably laid off en-masse in the mid 90's and screwed around broke for a few years. Then around 1998 they began billing their services to ever more panicky companies who shut their eyes pushed piles of cash at them and prayed. Most of the Cobol II guys I know retired early and wealthy. Assuming they didn't die at work from 100 hr work weeks for 2 straight years. Ah revenge is a dish best savored with a manager's eyeballs dipped in irony, on the side.
FWIW the embedded systems guys (and gals) are hit or miss. Some platforms like the Cingular 8525 use an embedded Windows version tailor made for that hardware. I think it's a XScale 'type' Samsung SC32442A then with all the phone, WiFi and other gear. As opposed to a Moto Moto-Q as opposed to a Treo and so on. That's all rather specialised work to shoehorn all that code on to a one-by hardware reference. There's not a lot of cross platform skills pollination that we see. And you understand that all of that is built inside-out. The marketing guys come and say "Wouldn't it be nice if this thing could do X, Y, Q, 1, and so on. Then the engineers figure out some basics like cost, power consumption, radio output, digital bandwidth, standards. Then they go to the firmware guys and say "Make me a WiFi subsystem that uses 3 Watts, has 7dBa, 802.11g/b autostepdown and so on. Then they call up Redmond and spec a new OS flavor to spin on that reference platform, etc etc etc etc. But generally speaking there are specialists in that field. And most of them work for the hardware vendors. Then it all goes to a package test reference group who try to shove the whole thing into a series of firmware loads. Then its sent to E/EPROM and the applications are held off to the side for flash. Voila. Another cheap PDA phone. 6 months later they're selling it for cost and they go back to the engineers to whip up a new one.
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Realname: Yes to all that
The handheld was an example... I meant, in handheld market you need to change real fast. As soon as you made the product, it is already obsolete. That is the pace of the market and innovation that we need to get used to. Also Oracle India is most probably only thing that will be left in 5 years except some high-level guys in a sleek 300 people office. Also your model of R&D being proprietary to US is already half dead. Now the jobs moving abroad are really high-skill design jobs (Centrino chips were designed in Bangalore). Nokia, IBM, Intel, GE… you name it, they all are outsourcing R&D. There is big group of people who are still not encouraging people to take up biotech, technology and math. They are hungry for all level of jobs and we have David Sugarman They may not be better now but it is also giving them on the job training. Already product from China has grown in quality significantly. And why not? We the consumers demanded it! Our companies are also taking campus interviews in top engineering schools in India and China. Waiting for them to apply is no longer a norm. The Lou Dobbs line of “oh that sooo cheap labor” is a great way to avoid the real problem. Try to get them to the local community college where people are retraining and learning c++! You’ll see Bill Gates advocating congress for waiver of all visa requirements for tech workers! How long we would let ourselves be turn into a country of consumers and not invest in our future is my question! Defense jobs are secure as we only outsource it to Israel. If one day we stop fighting all the stupid wars, we all be really out of high-skilled workplace.