[Tfug] OT - WAS Re: Cyber War -oh noes | Now H1B Visa Rant

[Jim Secan]

Not being up on the latest "buzz" I wasn't sure what SOA is, so I wiki'd
it.  Sounds like Same Old Anarchy to me.  A "standard" that is so
fragmented by vendors that it might as well not exist.

The core ideas, when you dig down through the technobabble, are back to
things that have been around for decades - code resuse, scope control,
network agents, ad nauseum.  I don't know why programmers should be
terrified of this, it's one more thing to learn, and charge your stupified
bosses to have you learn, and then move on to the Next Hot Thing (Web
3.0?) when that shows up.  Never-ending employment.

Sounds to me like more attempts to get around the problem that there is
more software needed than there are competent and talented programmers to
handle.  At least at slave wages.  Business won't acknowledge the fact
that not everyone can program, and a good programmer is worth his/her
weight in Doritos and Jolt.  Heck, universities can't even figure that one
out.  This seems like more attempts to make a simple problem more obscure
so no one is surprised when failure comes out the back end.

Or am I just getting testy in my old age?

Jim
cara wrote:
> Here's something that I've been noticing which is related to this thread
> (I
> think). My computer science career has led me to the study of
> Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). On two of my jobs so far,
> programmers
> have been super threatened by any talk of SOA. "Oh my god, you
> autogenerate
> code?!" Programmers assume it's another big threat to their jobs. But, it
> is
> pretty obvious that these SOA projects need people with business smarts
> and
> if the people have technical skills, well, that's an added bonus. I'm
> still
> mystified why so many programmers are threatened by the increasing amount
> of
> autogenerated code for client-server components ... components using axis
> projects, xerces, castor, embedded xdoclet ... whatever. In my opinion,
> getting the plumbing in place, could help you focus on the fine-grained
> problems.
>
> Along with communication being more important at times than technical
> skills, solving business problems seems more important than too much worry
> about shipping the techical app work to India. I would hope that American
> programmers, esp. those who grow and learn beyond just programming, will
> always have good jobs available. Yeah, our entire economy looks like a
> giant
> ponzi scheme ... maybe we will start making useful things and actually
> have
> some business problems to solve in 2009, eh?
>
> cara