[quote=paramount]Please join me in the real world!
“Do what you enjoy and it will all work out” – another load of s. If life were only that easy.
You do what pays the bills, and hopefully it happens to be something you enjoy. For most people, that’s the way things work.
Also, eclipxe, I wish I lived in your ideal world. IT is a moving target and skill requirements change and often rapidly – it often comes down to more than “GOOD” and “PRIDE” and all of that other BS your spouting – those subjective ideals alone will not guarantee that anyone is in demand.
As far as age discrimination is concerned, your comments have no value IMO as I suspect you don’t have a clue or have never been a victim of age discrimnation.
When you are 48 and get laid off from an IT job where you were making 6 figures then you might get the idea. Then maybe you won’t be so arrogant.
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I don’t think folks here are trying to be arrogant about this. It’s no surprise that technology (not IT specifically) is constantly evolving. To stay in this field, frankly you have to keep up. And frankly, as you get older, you get slower too, from your twenty something counterparts. I’m in my mid thirties, and frankly, I’m starting to see my own limitations. I can’t churn out stuff as fast I use to be able to (although I like to think the stuff I produce is a lot less crappier than before). BUT, here’s hte wrinkle. I don’t think you can expect to be a forever “code monkey”. There is no challenge in coding, or writing code. It’s the same sh!t in a different language, and software technology hasn’t really “evolved”. It’s same circular things over over and over again, done faster or cheaper.
What makes software unique is what the creator allows it to do.. You can outsource labor. You cannot outsource innovation. Innovation is about creativity and ingenuity. Ideas aren’t just going to “stop” in the U.S.. But let’s face it, a code “programmer” is just that “hired labor”. No different from a mechanic or accountant.
And another thing, if you ever worked creating a conceptual project is done by an outsourced team, for which requirements weren’t stated such that a monkey could write the code, you’ll quickly learn how difficult it is to get a non-local team to prototype a “beta” idea. It’s easy to get an outsource team to do a project that everything is well defined (either maintanence or add on features or a well stated/well documented project). Trying to get conceptual/fuzzy ideas prototyped on outsourced team, well not so easy.
No generally, once something goes into “maintenance” mode, yeah I guess it can be outsourced…BUT why would you want to stay working on “maintanence” if you had a choice? I would be a huge proponent of outsource all our maintenance if I had a choice, because there a bunch more projects I’d like to launch and have my team to build… I can’t possibly scale without offloading all the old stuff to someone else. Of course, it requires everyone on the team to learn something new again, which can be frustrating…But it beats getting folks to get stuck on something, like some ex-Cobol programmers.
That said, innovation isn’t gonna just come from U.S. India/china too will be cranking out stuff too. Same with the eastern europe slovic countries. BUT, is this really an end of U.S. development and innovation?
BTW: I see plenty of people in their 40ies and 50ies that are functioning as architects, software entrepreneurs, and/or own their own software shops. They don’t “program” anymore. Coding isn’t that difficult to learn. You can take a UCSD extension course for 1-2 months and pretty much do a good portion of one knows from school and/or hands-on experience)…Same shit, different language…. It surprises me a lot when folks in interviews ask questions like “give me the exact API for some method on some java function”….Um, step (1), open up the javadoc API guide, step (2) read what the API does…This isn’t brain surgery that requires one to memorize things.
Regarding unionization. It will be interesting to look back and see if unionization and costs of unionization are a factor into why GM/Ford/Chrysler ultimately fail.
