[CLUE-Talk] Job web sites to visit

[Mike Miller]

I try to stay out of these conversations as they tend to be unwinnable,
with neither side convincing the other, and it pretty much depends on
whether the people involved are optimists or pessimists...but:

I don't see NAFTA and Indian Software development as the end of America
as we know it. I DO see the commoditization of software writing. For the
most part, writing software is getting to be less and less 'cool and
new' all the time. How many Tax programs need to be written? Operating
systems? Word Processors? I think the software that CAN be written
cheaply will find the lowest level and be written where labor is cheap,
but the cutting edge stuff will still be written here. 

I think the IT market was seen as an incredibly lucrative field...and
it's now over-saturated. Face it, there's going to be limited number of
jobs for custom code programmers in companies, and the BULK of those
don't require any particular talent other than what can be picked up in
a 2 year degree. 

Where we will do well (and always have been) is creating and bringing to
market new things. Biotech and Genetic research is going nuts, work on
Quantum computing is showing some incredible potential. The most
successful people will not be the ones that can code C++ (or Java, or
C#) but the ones that can Code what's needed to today, while still
learning what's coming down the pike.

My First Real Job out of college was writing engineering software in a
Bastardized Basic and C. I hated it. The amount of time spent debugging
pointer arithmetic alone....eh. I moved over into Web stuff, that worked
out well, and when the web changed from a static medium to one running
under ASP and Javascript, I loved it. It sheltered me from coding the
interface crap and let me concentrate on writing the applications that
got things DONE....but there's really only about 5 things you need to
know to code any web application. (Listen to Form input, Email stuff,
talk to a DB, get stuff from a DB, write pretty HTML, etc.)

My current job started out as a 100% Webmaster position, THAT has
morphed to a Network Support, Security analysis, R&D position, of which
only about 10% is still web related. Why? Because once the  Website went
through two or three redesigns, and all of our main documentation was
webbified, there wasn't a whole lot else to do. (If our department has
12 documents, and one or two change slightly a year --- you're going to
be pretty bored after that first year.)

What India WON'T take away is local support. Companies NEED fingers to
push reset buttons, hot swap drives, lay cable, etc. 

Those things almost become a blue collar type job, it doesn't TAKE a
rocket scientist to find the drive with the error light, pull it and
replace it with another one. So the object is to find a level of work 
that DOES require a rocket scientist...if that's what motivates you.

I've seen my fair share of friends lose jobs as a result of the
shakeout. 20% changed disciplines, 20% haven't really been trying to
find jobs, and the remaining 60% didn't have problems finding jobs at
all. The fact that that 60% was TALENTED may have something to do with
that too.

No one OWES you ANYTHING. They don't owe you an IT position, they don't
OWE you a middle-class income. The reason why America is the richest
nation on the planet, with the largest military, and the largest number
of millionaires and the greatest amount of R&D is because it's peopled
by a driven population. It's easy to point fingers at out warts (Enron,
Dot Com bust) and cry foul, but that's not really productive.