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

[cara]

Jim,

 ... if you're old ... I think I'm old too. I don't disagree with you at all
... as a matter of fact, I love your comments. But, I'm currently seeing
programmers paid in the 6 figures who can't architect their way out of a
paper bag. This means, architect anything beyond the
app/algorithm/glue_script they are currently working on. Follow a customer
required specification for a system design? You can freakin' forget it.

Their managers, who are just as clueless, keep things going ... but for how
long? Everyone thinks they have a maintainable system, they think they do
'software' ... and well, I've seen so little competence in the field that I
have struggled to find a good mentor. Yeah, SOA is somewhat like CORBA is
somewhat like just plain doing nice modular oo code ... But, yeah, good
programmers who can design, see the big picture, write something scalable,
write something maintainable and put the real business goals in perspective
... over and above, "I whipped out this cool python GoogleEarth plugin
today." ... are rare ... I swear, they are rare. Basic programming skills
can be had for less money. And, if simple programming skills go from a
salary of $90K+ a year to whatever they make in other parts of the world,
then things seem to be working correctly to me.

cara

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Jim Secan <jim at nwra.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tfug.org/pipermail/tfug_tfug.org/attachments/20090110/133cb106/attachment-0002.html>