Why the Tech Field was Gentrified (in Flawer'Duh)
This one comes straight from the horse's mouth. I heard this straight from an IT worker and from my Voc Rehab counselor. Since both the 2008 crash and the end of the Space Shuttle program, people with Bachelor's degrees flooded the field en masse. So, because of that, I've literally no place to go. Hell, the degrees I did hold by the time I originally graduated in 2012 were legit useless by the time I got them because at the time the college I've since come back to was transitioning to a full 4 year university.
I've said flat out that I refuse to go back to customer service even if that's the only thing left where I live. Sure, we've got genocidal assholes like Grumann and Lockheed in town but they fly people in from other states rather than train people here.
So I've spent the last three weeks back at school and the learning curve has been pure hell. I'm doing well enough so far, I suppose, but this feels a hell of a lot harder than I remember. It takes me a lot longer to process things (by reading), but I do ace the programming exercises in C++. And I've got a long way to go before I finish thanks to the fact that the state requires an A.A. degree on top of my A.S. degrees, and two college semesters of a foreign language, though American Sign Language is also acceptable.
Even when I do finally finish this, there's still the drivers' license hurdle I have to overcome. Well, at least Voc Rehab has a vendor for that. Apparently companies want drivers' licenses for "added security". How quaint. I'll be dead before I ever have the chance to make a decent living. Or maybe I can go work with animals or plant trees if this doesn't work out. I like them more than most people anyway.
Comments
Work is overrated.
I did it for 45 years and there are damn few days that I can remember saying to myself,
"I can't WAIT to get to work today!!"
Never had one of those jobs.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
out of more than curiosity, what is the obstacle
to obtaining a driver's license. is it an attention thing?
i'm wondering whether, even if you are (perhaps correctly) not comfortable driving as a routine thing, you might at least be able to get through the licensing process ... in which case you'd have the pointless unnecessary credential that you need to get through the HR screen.
is this what you hope to do, via the "vendors" you mentioned (are those driver training schools)?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I don't react fast enough on the road. I'm also far-sighted.
And I've tried to learn to drive many times throughout my life, all with no success. It would probably be much worse if the Hemiplegia and Drop foot I currently deal with affected my right side instead of my left, but I still don't think I'm physically capable of it.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Could this be an ADA thing, then?
Not that I have any confidence these days that any prospective employer would even pretend to care that their job requirements are discriminatory ...
Not that I can gather.
Florida is a car state. The only places I can think of with widely used mass transit would be maybe Orlando or Talahassee.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Does gentrified refer to the people or the type of code?
I just want to pick your brain about the situation for pure IT workers. (I always did scientific programming, which had different qualifications and worker pools.) Here's what I know about pure IT. It may be out of date, so feel free to correct me.
The Indian programming consultancies (also low-cost Eastern European shops in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland) have sent a ton of IT jobs overseas, especially entry level; or they've filled US jobs with underpaid H1-B folks. Either way, the number of jobs for qualified US folks has declined dramatically. (Although, companies are beginning to bring jobs back onshore because 1) the quality of the Indian work has declined as the number of consultants has gone up; and 2) the "friction" of dealing with your staff being 12 time zones away has not been made up for by the 24 hr a day development cycle.)
OTOH, the massive grab of jobs by Indians may mean that only more exotic/specialized (Big Data/Deep Learning, Image Processing) US programmers are being hired - and those need to have advanced degrees from a respected (i.e., round up the usual elitist suspects: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc.) schools. That is credentialism again, but this time the skills being demanded are actually necessary.
Another source of "gentrification" may be the creeping credentialism that is smothering jobs in just about any field these days. For example, you need a bachelors degree just to have your resume looked at for jobs like secretary. Its just a filter - a filter that can put you in student debt for your working life.
Finally, I know nothing about the Florida IT job market. As you say, NASA cutbacks have hurt. And I respect you for not going with the warmongers. I know there was a lot of insurance/finance up around Jacksonville. I expect a lot of Spanish language stuff in Miami. From what I've seen of Florida, you have to be in a city to have any chance for tech work. Have you looked over in the Ft. Myers area? Living costs are way better than Miami. Not sure about public transport, though - and the place is a car-centric sprawl.
Does what I've send correspond at all to your situation? That is, the entry level and above jobs have been sent elsewhere?
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c++ is a good language, and it makes heavy demands on programming skills. That you can ace it says good things. It is the third most used language, and shares so much syntax and semantics with c and Java (#1 and #2). Heck, c is just a subset of c++; and Java is a rewrite of C++ with different inheritance rules.
Its used heavily by Adobe, Firefox, MySQL.
Did you pick the language because you had a job category or company in mind? Because you liked the language? Because it was the best language you could get good training in?
(In my experience, the credentials are just a filter. I know a guy who never finished college who has been a scientific programming consultant for over thirty years. But he got started early days. These days its, as you describe, credentialism, jobs concentrated in places like SV, RTP, Austin, Boston, DC. Much tougher to get a foothold.)
I wish you well. I thought you might like the opportunity to talk tech. Please let me know if you'd rather not.
Assembly Perhaps?
I was surprised that Python didn't score higher. But what do I know.
Assembly gives the best results, right? And since the cost of DRAM and GPUs are unbelievably high, why aren't software houses trying to fight back with all-assembly programs? Cheap hardware running well crafted software might be an answer. The cost of hardware seems to only go up most of the time. So people like The Aspie Corner working for very small companies (i.e. cash-poor) could try to take advantage of the baked-in greed from 'big hardware.'
Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long
asm programming is very inefficient to write and debug
That is, it takes many lines of asm to do what you can do with one Line of Code in higher level languages. Since it takes the programmer about the same amount of time to write a line of asm as of an HLL, it costs way more in programmer time to write asm. (AND: you have to write one version for each type/version of CPU you are running on! Take a look at all the considerations you have writing for the x86 architecture.) Not to mention that there are no optimizing compilers for asm; you have to do all the optimization by hand if you want good performance. Why bother when freeware HLL compilers like gcc are pretty darn good?
Also, debugging asm is much harder. You are down in the weeds. At that level, the debug environment isn't much help. All it knows are the variable names and what registers they are in. Catching problems like slow L2 cache, which aren't outright failures but merely performance issues, is much harder.
OTOH, in c or c++ you can use freeware tools like Valgrind, which tracks memory accesses and finds memory leaks (admittedly memory leaks are an HLL problem), race conditions, stack overflows.
Yes, GPUs are expensive. But writing graphics apps, as opposed to calling graphics libraries, is a very specialized area. The only non-scientific programmers who write such apps, AFAIK, are gamers, whose customers are willing to pay big bucks for GPU-heavy boxes.
You are right that DRAM has suddenly gotten expensive. Although its not clear why. Even this "inside baseball" review of that problem presents contradictory evidence for its cause
Not sure what's going on. If you wanted to talk market cartel, you could say that the fabricators see a lessening of demand and used that as a justification to cut back production and thereby increase prices. But that's just my theory.
I guess when a cheap laptop sells for about $300, $200 for 16 GB of RAM is a major force. But, the whole thrust of the computer business is to move the computing online, with operations like Amazon Web Services. The person doing the computing rents time on Amazon's server farm. They only pay usage charges, which can be as low as $0.20/CPU-hr. The price of DRAM is rolled into the rental fee, so users can pick their ration of CPU/GPU. Amazon (and M$) have entire server farms of GPUS, and even FPGAs.
Bottom line: IMHO current software - which is often multithreaded, has to play nicely on networks, and worry about security - has gone past the complexity level that can be handled by asm programming. Right now, only tiny little patches of asm are used in absolutely time-critical parts of libraries and applications.
It's a required class, a technical elective for data science.
Still, it's nice to have my groove back all the same. I actually have working knowledge with PL/SQL, XML and HTML among others. As for Adobe, one of my degrees involved their entire suite of software, although that was during the CS2, CS3 and CS4 days. I actually tried out Creative Cloud and it wasn't all that different.
Still, the lack of transportation and a drivers' license are the thing keeping me from actually using said skills.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Hi TAC,
My sincere apologies in advance if this is not something that would be up your alley, or would be beneath your interests...but, have you considered Library Science as an option? I don't know your interests, but I kind of feel like I know you a bit from reading your pages here.
I have a few friends that are librarians. They are computer savvy, and they are very happy in their "government" jobs. There is a different kind of bureaucracy that they have to deal with than in a true tech environment, and maybe this would be boring for you, but it seems to work for them. The benefits aren't great, but they are better than most capitalist type employers. I've no idea how that would work out in Florida. My librarian friends are in California and Oregon. I hope you find something that works for you. You deserve it.
I actually considered that before I even entered college.
But of course I got the usual "You can't make money with that" schtick form family members.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Our poor librarians catch hell from our NW Admin
I work at a small community college, and our Network Admin (a youth minister, no doubt) is an absolute asshole to our librarians. The library has a proxy server it uses for student access to educational databases, and with the big push for SSL certificates, updated versions of said databases require that our servers have SSLs. (I'm confused as to why the original ssl on the actual originating server isn't good enough, but whatever.)
Rather than install the damn SSL and then the updated version of the platform on which to access the DBs, Super Dick has been arguing with the librarians for months via email that I have access to.
This Christmas, I'm going to take those mostly ladies a tray of goodies to snack on. They help students on a daily basis with IT related stuff, and are there until 9:00 pm. They're wonderful people!