[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: <offtopic>Opinions About Cold Fusion</offtopic>
Tool based opportunities means jobs, not careers. Settling in on a tool and not paying continuous attention to the evolution of the technology is a death trap. Here is how it works in the States. The way job postings read in the USA, experience with the tool is the primary qualification. The degree is necessary but in most cases, the active clearances are more important if you work near the MIL-IND complex. The level of degree (say Bachelors vs Masters) makes a difference in what they can charge a government customer for your hours, so more is better there but not because of what you know, simply because of the job codes. The job titles are meaningless unless one has access to the job code/salary value pairs to which they correspond (a salary range that may also correspond to years in work force). This is where it gets tricky. Age discrimination is a very real thing. The closer you get to retirement, the more you cost to own. No matter what the Human Resources brochure tells you, the manager is discriminating now that MBAs run the companies where technical means a spreadsheet. If they tell you otherwise, that's a clue. Next, we have a coupler between the maturity of a tool and the age of a developer that forces the developer to keep searching for opportunities to get experience with emerging tools or to stay put at any job that uses a tool. When coupled to rising salaries, about the time one hits forty, the system is deftly snapping handcuffs on the developer to stick with the job regardless of other conditions. Intergraph Public Safety resolved in the late 90s the web was a fad and worse, the web offered no barrier to complexity against competition. As a result, they stuck with tools such as Visual FoxPro far past the sell-by date. There were the usual prototyping efforts, and finally a rush job to produce web-based systems once the RFPs could not be bid without them, but they had done little to create a sustaining base of developers. The result coupled with downsizing to reduce costs prior to sale of the corporation was to diminish the bandwidth. This is a death spiral because the effect of 9/11 was to drive procurements toward regional systems. Regional systems require software that scales to small and large installations. All they had to offer was Cadillac solutions and industrial trucks. In other words, very fat client expensive server solutions with all of the costs. At the same time, as the management talent bails in the face of *changes*, the development ranks are left without the significant skills and years of experience on what you and I would consider mature tools. This is how lack of real product planning, not meeting goers but people who have the capacity to analyze and the cahones to speak truth to power kills off not just the company but devastates the careers of the young and the middle aged developers, not to mention, creates chaos among the customer base which begins to detect that the contract is over-promised for the actual development capacity. I stayed because of a stock option. Considering the opportunities available to me in 1996, it was a very bad choice. Never trade on values for cash. It is always a bad trade. If you look around and the tools you use are slipping too far behind the curve, and your management is arrogantly resisting change, polish up the resume, put it in the hoppers, and get to the door. Age or experience regardless, things only get worse. len From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@z...] Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2007 10:27 PM Hi Len Tools are careers - at least today. So when I go to employ someone (being old fashioned) I look for an application developer - figuring that if you know how to build applications you can adapt to the tools. That may be true but the industry (at least here in oz) is based on tools. So I'm having extreme difficulty finding people to work for me because they want to be "Oracle" programmers or "SAP" programmers or ... I'm starting to wander if they even see the projects in terms of outcomes or just "I spent x years working with product y doing z". ie Even the resumes don't reflect completion, only practice. I worked for x years on ... rather than I built this and this and this - or the team I worked with completed these projects. The world has changed ... Rick PS being true to yourself and your goals is also old school (but I don't intend to change either).
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