Critiquing Claims of an Open Source Jobs Boom 134
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder examines what appears to be an open source job market boom, as evidenced by a recent O'Reilly Report. According to the study, 5 to 15 percent of all IT openings call for open source software skills, and with overall IT job cuts expected for 2009, 'the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software,' Snyder writes. But are enterprises truly shifting to open source, or are they simply seeking to augment the work of staff already steeped in proprietary software? The study's methodology leaves too much room for interpretation, Savio Rodrigues retorts. 'That's why the 5% to 15% really doesn't sit well with me,' Rodrigues writes. 'I suspect that larger companies are looking for developers with a mix of experience with proprietary and open source products, tools and frameworks,' as opposed to those who would work with open source for 90 percent of the work day."
The cheapest code... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is the one you didn't have to write in the first place. Developers with some knowledge of BSD/LGPL code that could be used for rapidly creating complex apps without reinventing the wheel is probably in demand.
Re:The cheapest code... (Score:5, Insightful)
No! The cheapest code is the code that doesn't require support, maintenance, or bug fixes! Development costs are trivial compared to upkeep costs.
Re:The cheapest code... (Score:5, Funny)
No! The cheapest code is the code that doesn't require support, maintenance, or bug fixes! Development costs are trivial compared to upkeep costs.
I'm going to sell my "hello world" code for millions! :)
Re:The cheapest code... (Score:5, Funny)
I have been reliably running my hello world program since my Apple II days. With more than 30 years of field testing, extensive debugging and hardening, it's probably one of the most enterprise-ready hello world programs in existence.
Yours obviously can't compete.
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Show me your densest, most bug-free rendition of your "hello world" code. It's possible I can beat it...
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Show me your densest, most bug-free rendition of your "hello world" code. It's possible I can beat it...
Go for it!
msg db 'Hello World'
mov dx, offset msg
mov ah, 9
int 21h
If you store that baby as COM file, its going to be all of a handful of bytes.
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I beat you all. Mine's denser.
Written in PHP:
Hello World
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It's also never going to work. Execution will start at the top, with the H of Hello; I forget what that opcode translates to, but it can't be what you expected it to be.
This might work better:
main: mov dx, offset msg
mov ah, 9
int 21h
int 20h
msg: db 'Hello World!',13,10,34
Sure, it's larger. But it works.
You can do a RET from a COM file because Dos pushes a zero onto the stack at exec time. CS:0 contains an INT 20. This is so translated CPM programs could use RET to get back to the OS.
That saves you ONE BYTE. Down to 8 bytes of code
cs:0100 BA0801 MOV DX,0108
cs:0103 B409 MOV AH,09
cs:0105 CD21 INT 21
cs:0107 C3 RET
and 14 bytes of data.
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My last attempt at writing an app that ambitious bricked my system.
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So we are in agreeance then. Open source IS better! :)
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No! The cheapest code is the code that doesn't require support, maintenance, or bug fixes! Development costs are trivial compared to upkeep costs.
Good luck with that.
Let me know when something even close to that makes an appearance. In the meantime, people are forced to deal with support issues, maintenance issues, and bug fixes. They must deal with it either directly or indirectly (maintenance fees and/or personal to pick up the phone to get support on the other end). Either way, your counter argument simp
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Or they could do like most of the open-source world when the going gets tough -- give up, fork or start a whole new app that's just as buggy, and continue on at the same crappy quality level forever.
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This Is True (Score:3, Interesting)
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Let's translate.
I convinced my employer at great expense (people time, downtime) to change technologies without a shred of evidence it would actually lower the number or amount of bugs our developers create daily. Activity for activity's sake.
I would run the open version of Eclipse but it sucks, so I buy one because it actually works correctly more often than not.
I then claim my experience leads me to believe open source is better than closed. (Huh? Why put the story in there about paying for Eclipse the
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Hmm.. point by point. Okay, I can play that game too.
"My boss came up with the idea" Yeah, because changing out the development team behind everyone's backs makes for a happy workplace, and of course it was economically sound...? (You could answer that question if you were him and could see the real numbers on how much you cost versus the originally deployed solution, but it sure sounds to me like he just wanted yes-men around him, a MUCH more common reason for changing technologies in a company than any
More on the front end than the back end (Score:4, Interesting)
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Ah yes, web browsers still suck as user interfaces and always have.
Now companies want people that can beat them into submission since they bought the bullshit that the web was the way to distribute applications.
Duh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Companies want people who have open source experience - both use and contribution.
They want to use these people to implement open source projects that fit their needs, for free (beer).
They do not want these people because they love free (open) software.
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"They want to use these people to implement open source projects that fit their needs, for free (beer)."
That's intriguing. Are you saying they won't pay the wages for those people?
Many businesses are open-source based accidentally (Score:4, Informative)
Given that Java is now GPL and open-source, and lots of the popular third-party Java frameworks are also open-source, I would expect that open-source is really hot in many businesses - just that they don't know it.
When your developers code an interface to XYZ in a short time, it's not because they're reimplementing the wheel. No, they're using Axis. Or HttpClient. With hibernate, spring, struts, tiles, and so on.
But if we look at databases, you'll see a large investment in proprietary systems still, for core business data, with MySQL running minor functionality around the outside. Cutbacks simply mean that upgrading your database platform won't happen, it's already paid for, why migrate from Oracle to Postgresql!
The other big platform is MS proprietary. You all know the story. It keeps TheDailyWTF alive.
Re:Many businesses are open-source based accidenta (Score:2)
Yeah there's never been any crappy Java code on the DailyWTF.
Now that Java is open-source it makes rainbows shoot out of my ass, and my poop smell minty fresh.
As a 17 year IT consultant... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen a lot of shops. And a lot of them like open source for one reason... it's cheap. Not because they're cheap bastards, but because free software often can circumvent the corporate BS associated with spending money.
Once a place has used some open source software, they tend to keep using it. And they tend to want to hire people who know how to use what they have. I wouldn't call it an open source hiring boom. I'd just call it acceptance.
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Of course, the rest of the company uses Microsoft products, but when I need something quick and I don't want to bother with expense reports, OpenOffice goes on the test machines to open the word docs as needed, and other free and/or open source tools get use
Re:As a 17 year IT consultant... (Score:4, Interesting)
That brings up a study I'd really like to see done: What is the correlation (positive or negative), if any, between prevalence of Open Source in a shop and the salaries they offer? Do most of them use open source so they can spend more on quality people, or do they do it because they're cheap and don't want to spend money on anything, people included?
I don't have enough data in my personal work history to make an intelligent guess, although the size of the company involved may have a lot to do with the answer. However, I think it would be valuable information to have. After all, specializing in a given technology because you hear there are lots of jobs asking for it is not a wise move if all of those jobs max out at 8 bucks an hour (exaggeration to illustrate the point, not what I really think Open Source admins make).
Re:As a 17 year IT consultant... (Score:5, Interesting)
I use open source solutions often at my work, and its not because of the cost. (I don't mind paying for the right tool for the job) It has much more to do with the tracking.. If I go purchase SQL server and windows server, I have to keep track of licenses, versions, (are they enterprise, standard, etc) Are they CAL based, and do I have enough CAL's a few months later, are they processor based (and if so, did I move the app to a server with more processors). With virtualization, its an even bigger push for me, as its very, very easy to quickly deploy a new virtual OS. It takes much, much longer to ensure licensing compliance, and go through the approval and purchasing process if needed..
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Yeah but sometimes you then get the BS with "approved software." We technically weren't allowed to use Firefox at my job for the longest time because it wasn't company approved software. My team works on a web application which is supposed to support Firefox. Took a year or two to get it on the approved list.
Oh and the fastest way to get a piece of software approved here is to have it released/supported by IBM.
WHAT? (Score:2)
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What? They are now open sourcing Steve Jobs and then making him go BOOM!?!?!?!?
No, he does that all on his own. [youtube.com]
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Well, good for Apple (Score:1)
Ummm... Yah (Score:2, Interesting)
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Right now, the software industry is in a period of change from 100% proprietary code to now about 25% proprietary and 75% OSS.
You meant to say 20% proprietary and 80% OSS right?
Me too... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think HR just throws all in the listing... get as many applicants as possible, sort it out later.
budgets (Score:2)
.
Tight budgets are the time when management is more willing to "t
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Depends on how you spin it. We use CruiseControl.Net where I work. When I had to justify it as opposed to a "superior" (not really superior technologically, but in a "we're paying for it so it must be better" sense) proprietary technology, I pointed out that since I have access to the source code I can debug issues with our build system without needing vendor support. And I have several times. Of course, people like the cost, but managers also understand "we don't have to depend on a single source if t
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Yeah we really hate having to call a vendor who needs their product to work in order to survive and ask them for a fix, when some guy here can muck around in the code and fix it ourselves.
Both ways suck. Would be better if the bugs simply weren't there in the first place, now wouldn't it?
"The domain cruisecontrol.net is for sale. To purchase, call BuyDomains.com at 781-839-7903 or 866-866-2700."
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You're assuming that you or your problem matters enough to the vendor for them to fix it. We have, more than once, been told "Sucks to be you..." by a vendor. My boss actually quipped that the Microsoft support we payed for was nearly worthless.
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So I called RedHat and complained that they didn't include proprietary CODECs needed to view most of the content in the InterWebs, and guess what....
They didn't care.
Think your own argument just got used against you there. 99% of people WANT to do things like watch YouTube... but RedHat's not interested in fixing their problem.
Reality check: RedHat gave up on the Desktop market years ago.
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"We might like free software because it is free as in speech, but most companies tend to like it because it is free as in beer."
And that's surprising... how? Companies are basically about money, so I can't find suprising that the word "money" appears on each and every company backed-up argument. Not necesarily to say "less" money, but money will be on it.
So you will find arguments like these:
* It costs a lot of *money* so it must be good
* We are tight on *money* so this solution looks apropiate
* It seems
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Most real businesspeople don't give a fuck if it's free as in speech, free as in beer, or free as in "rainbows will fly out of my ass freely"... nowadays, they FINALLY want software to WORK.
No more lame-ass programming, no more dicking around in your basement to create shitty applications -- companies want to see whatever resource they spend on something (time, money) come back in spades. Return-on-investment.
Learn it, love it. It's the new "in" thing. "Damn, these expensive computers and data centers we
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"No more lame-ass programming"
I only wish you were true...
Dead on. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the article is dead on in questioning the study.
Perfect example: the last two places I contracted at were looking to hire C# developers who had also been exposed to Subversion. Is it fair to look at a place like that and say they're now all about Open Source? Not really, no.
Open Source is getting somewhere in the business world to be sure, but the FOSS Rapture isn't quite upon us just yet.
It Doesn't Cost Less (Score:5, Interesting)
Another fun thing we are experiencing is the total lack of knowledge closed source solution professionals have. We're finding the people to be very silo'ed without knowledge of what goes on around them. So when you are trying to implement something, you get very concerned with cross-technical area issues.
You ask an SAP basis person to come look at a screen and they'll say "Not Functional..." and wave their hands wildly with their palms facing you. Ask the Abaper and they'll shrug without a clue.
Hell, the Abaper is supposed to be a programmer you think, but they can't even teach you the basic parts of a program; you'll be lucky enough if they even know how to do proper error handling.
You see these types of people and they frighten the crap out of you. You just stare out the window and wonder why people are willing to pay 80 or 100 dollars an hour for these.... idiots!
I can go out into a University, pay a fresh graduate 40 dollars an hour and teach them everything they need to know... knowing that they'll leave after the project and still be better off than getting consultants.
Compare that with a professional in open source technologies. They need to know how things work together, because that's all they do. They can't learn just 1 technology, they need to know multiples, and how to fit them together. As they grow in their career, they know the big picture, and that is completely different than the closed source alternative.
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The other week I mentioned to someone (a studied but not certified MCSE) that RHEL 5.2 not only ships with Xen support out-of-the-box, but has a full LDAP server. "Oh? LDAP... so it does Active Directory?" was his reply. I fumbled over my thoughts and managed to get out, "let me see i
Secret (Score:2)
Shhhhhhhhh....lets just keep that a secret shall we!
Its not enterprises (Score:2)
a number of bigger enterprises (that are smaller than google, but bigger than avg joe inc medium business) are probably switching to open source due to costs and security as well, probably.
but the main drive to get one's business to internet is causing huge boost for ecommerce site production and maintenance,
We're ditching proprietary for open source (Score:2)
The company I work for has a huge monolith of code all done in C#/ASP.NET. We are currently in the process of scrapping it all to go Java and Ruby on Rails.
Seems like a huge expenditure for little gain, but I guess I'll wait to see what it looks like on the other side. At least I'll have experience with both when this is over. I've got lots of open source administration experience, but little open source programming experience. I'm too spoiled with the Visual Studio training wheels. It's going to be tough t
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I do! Unfortunately from what I've heard we're going to be forced into using Eclipse, which tries to be all things for all developers, and seems to fail miserably at that.
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Pretty typical of open-source applications, isn't it?
But it can do X, Y, Z, and the rest of the alphabet!
Yeah, but does it do any of them WELL?
Nah... not really. But you can pay for XYZ company's version they forked and worked hard on, and it does.
5-15%? (Score:2)
I guess I must live in an open source town. I can't remember a job posting in IT that didn't require a background in some sort of open source software. The only popular closed-source programming language is .NET, and even most of those projects seem to use things like nHibernate and nUnit.
Most sites and most jobs are not "Enterprise"!! (Score:2)
Mr Rodrigues doesn't know what he's talking about. (Score:2)
The tendency in big enterprises is for ultra specialization, the reason being simple: that way people become interchangeable (or so they think, people are not machines after all).
Small and medium companies yes, for sure, you want somebody that is more of a Jack of all trades.
told you so (Score:2)
From the summary:
'That's why the 5% to 15% really doesn't sit well with me,' Rodrigues writes. 'I suspect that larger companies are looking for developers with a mix of experience with proprietary and open source products, tools and frameworks,' as opposed to those who would work with open source for 90 percent of the work day.
So people with a mix of skill sets are considered valuable by employers, eh? And yet, in this post [slashdot.org], where I advocated requiring IT staff to rotate in their job functions and learn Linux, Windows, Cisco, etc. etc. etc, people jumped down my throat saying "that's too hard" or "geeks won't like that".
Interesting.
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Oh please, engineering, accounting, and PR are completely different career fields. Linux, Windows, and Cisco aren't, and any decent sysadmin should be able to switch back and forth between those skill sets with relative ease.
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So you've never worked in a shop where one or two guys did all of that? Seriously? In my professional life, I've been (at various times) the dba (Oracle, Informix, MySQL), the sysadmin, the sysengineer, the Windows guy, the Linux guy, the Solaris guy, the AIX guy, the mail guy (Qmail, Sendmail, Exim, Exchange, various anti-spam systems), the mainframe guy, the network guy (3COM, Cisco, Foundry), and the programmer (Python, C, Java, Perl, SQL). Not to mention all the times when I've worn the project manager
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"Vote Libertarian. The freedoms you save may be your own."
I want the freedom to have a government that taxes me and uses it for things like roads and schools.
Oh, you don't want me to have those freedoms? Go away then...
As far as your job rotation idea -- it's actually a good one. Required time in mentored positions (journeyman if you want to use union-speak) and some structure around how IT people learn their knowledge and some real honest skills tests required by companies (or by law) as people work thei
Hedging their bets (Score:3, Insightful)
A 5 to 15 percent figure for open source skills doesn't necessarily mean 5 to 15 percent of the projects will be open source. More likely, IT managers are getting smart, keeping their options open and making sure that they have a back door out of the lock in trap. A broader range of experience is also a sign of someone with a better background in CS rather than a one language/one tool technician.
This sounds like a smart tactic. In fact, I'm surprised that the figure isn't higher. And I'm particularly happy that the proprietary platform fanbois are getting their panties in a bunch over only 15 percent.
Open source software skills (Score:2)
What on earth is open source software skill?
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And this relates to "open source software skills" exactly how? You are talking about development costs, not open source. I can download a heck load of closed software for free and use them without any costs. Let's take for example Microsoft products Visual Studio Express and SQL Server Express which both are free to download and
So is "open source software skill" same as doing things cost-effectively? If yes, then every employer is advocating those skills and so am I.
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That's like saying since drag racing cars are the fastest cars everybody should be driving one.
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You're making the insanely simplistic assumption that one language is appropriate in all parts of a given application/project. Yes, obviously anything that's truly resource/speed dependent will generally require a language like C or C++ to allow you to get intimate with the lower-level aspects of the given system. Which is why just about any newer language makes it simple to create native language modules and packages allowing you to take all the advantages of a tightly coded core with the convenience of wr
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Haha, an ancient troll gets modded up to 3, Interesting, and even garners a few serious chin-stroking responses. Well done, sir.
repeated troll... (Score:2, Informative)
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A free Java implementation of MapReduce and GFS (Apache Hadoop) already works fine on 5000 computers cluster.
And there's no real reason why it can't scale further.
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Actually...
The largest "real, in-use" Hadoop cluster that Yahoo! has is around 2000 nodes, counting a dedicated name node. As far as we're aware, we've got the largest Hadoop cluster. [If there is a bigger one, we'd love to talk to you and compare notes. :) ]
That said, we do have Hadoop running on tens of thousands of machines. Just not as one big cluster.
It is also worth pointing out, that most of our clusters are multi-user, multi-application. The number of nodes is really more indicative of the size
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If speed were your primary concern, how could you not go with assembly.
On the other hand, one little programming challenge on Cecric Beust's website was solved in a large variety of algorithms/languages and when implemented with the fastest algorithm, the C++ solution had to be compiled with high optimization (-03) to simply match Java's performance.
If you were to program OO using C++, it should always be significantly slower than Java due to the large number of tiny heap allocations/de-allocations. In ord
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If speed were your primary concern, how could you not go with assembly.
With rare exceptions (like codecs), c++ is just as fast as asm, and twice as easy to maintain. Most of your gains are from algorithm choice, anyway.
If you were to program OO using C++, it should always be significantly slower than Java due to the large number of tiny heap allocations/de-allocations. In order to compete, C++ programmers constantly have to consider putting every object on the Stack.
Or maybe a C++ programmer just throws things in there as needed. No mallocs = fast memory usage.
Also, many languages are going away from speed concerns altogether. Ruby is so far out of the C++/Java ballpark that it's silly.
Dunno about that, but python allows you to replace chunks of your script with native code, so you get script dev speed and the slow parts are a native library.
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>>Or maybe a C++ programmer just throws things in there as needed. No mallocs = fast memory usage.
This kind of proves a point. C++ keeps programmers from understanding OO development. Just as a quick review--when I moved from C++ to Java, I suddenly realized I had NO IDEA how to program OO in C++. It wouldn't let me.
To think in OO, you create objects without owners or lifecycles. They are shared--they kind of float around. Others may have references to your objects or not.
the way you are able to
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Honestly I started to argue and then had to stop and consider if you were messing with me.
Pointers are simply an artifact left over from when it was too difficult to make a compiler produce high-performance code. There is absolutely no advantage to pointers now that compilers can be written to perform with the same speed on arrays. They are just a horrid horrid idea.
I'm actually quite good with pointers--I'm not scared of them or anything, It's not that they aren't a little fun at times, but they don't su
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There is no reason it has to be less efficient is my only point.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
As far as intuitive--I'm not sure I like "Intuitive" code much. I saw a lot of it in Ruby and to tell you the truth, The more "Intuitive" the language, the harder the code tends to be to read (and often, the worse the implementation--some of these string manipulation tools built into the language become the "Go-to" solution for all problems when in fact they are creating some horrid underlying solutions..)
I'd like l
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When your main concern is speed C++ (or C for that matter) is they way to go.
From what I've heard, Goggle uses three languages in production: C++, Python and Java (not to mention all that Web 2.0 craziness on the client side.) I don't think they hired Guido van Rossum to write C++ (although he is obviously a talented C programmer.)
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Python isn't interpreted. It's compiled to bytecode, like Java. You can even compile it to Java's bytecode and run it on the JVM if you want to.
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Yeah, that's useful. Great. Just what end-users want, crappy code that still doesn't run right but now you can run it inside a different interpreter. Wheee.
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Guess that since Java has held the "slow" torch for long enough, it's time to pass it on to Python, Ruby, and all the other interpreted languages.
It's not Ruby that's the problem, its the Rails....
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Hey! I like programming, especially being paid for my doing my hobby! It's just like a soccer player, getting paid for doing what he loves. However programmers has the advantage that they can do their hobby at a professional level as long as the mind is good. Soccer players has to throw in their towel when they're in their thirties.
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Soccer players has to throw in their towel when they're in their thirties.
But a good soccer player can make enough money in 10 years to cover a lifetime of work. A good programmer has to work all of his life to make enough money to feed themselves most of the time.
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I think $90,000+ a year qualifies as a bit more than feeding oneself. Do you work in the software industry?
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No, but it is "feed themselves" good, right? And really good programmers make a lot more than $80K (gross), although that may depend upon where you live, I suppose. If you're a motivated contractor, you can gross $120K a year pretty easily.
Re: IT degree = waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)
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And 4x as a senior dev for an investment bank in London.
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That's great logic if you assume that the programmer lives alone and inside a box under a bridge somewhere.
It's sh*tty logic if you consider that the programmer may need to get to his job
every morning, may need a safe clean place to live and may be paying for several
other people to do the same. That programmer probably also needs to pay for their
food too, as well as their medical care and also be able to account for possible
future emergencies that may include being downsized and unemployed for awhile.
Then t
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The median family income in the US is $48,000 a year, so clearly lots of people would do just fine with one household wage earner making $90,000. In fact, they'd be incredibly thankful for it.
I'd say it's your logic that's shitty, and you should probably examine your spending habits.
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Plumbers and electricians make as much as IT workers, and always have. IT just likes to think we have "important" jobs.
Ask a master electrician in the local IBEW union what they make and see how much they work and how hard it is. Then come back and tell me that complex programming or system administration is a good job choice.
The reality is, they are good jobs... but they're not any better than the guy next door with his own bathroom remodeling business.
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A good programmer has to work all of his life to make enough money to feed themselves most of the time.
Only if you are working in Open Source. If you sell a proprietary, closed source application, you can make -bank-.
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(ITDegree || ComputerScienceDegree) Programmer
An IT degree can be any number of things... program management, Quality Assurance, etc. And Computer Science isn't programming either... it's really applied mathmathmatics and logic. My IT degree focused on Program Managment, and I have never used it because I'm not in software, but there are tons of well paying positions for software lifecycle management and similar jobs.
I agree that it's a waste of time to teach business programming anymore... those who are
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Yeah, like open-source has produced better products that have no "mediocrity" in them... no bugs, all the end-users are happy with the Linux Desktop because it's better than Microsoft or Apple for their needs, and everything's roses coming out of my ass.
Mediocrity will remain. There is this thing called a bell curve, and only a few programmers are in the small far-right portion of it.
The rest crank out crap, year after year after year. Don't believe me? Take a job in senior technical support for 15 years
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So the assumption is that someone who has worked with proprietary technologies is incapable of working with OSS technologies? Because I'd say thats pretty much completely contrary to my experience.
I work with propriety technology ATM. Didn't stop me from opting for CruiseControl.Net and NAnt over the proprietary build systems that were vying for our business. There are plenty of technologies we're using that I'd switch to OSS alternatives in a heartbeat (goddamn ClearCase...). Yeah, some of my coworkers
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"So the assumption is that someone who has worked with proprietary technologies is incapable of working with OSS technologies?"
I don't think so.
I think the parent poster is more on the line that if the candidate has not experience on the open source world, its ability to manage it is still to be seen. If there're candidates that won't have such uncertainty it's just reasonable to stick with them.
"Because I'd say thats pretty much completely contrary to my experience."
That's your experience. Mine is that e