Open Source Expertise in Short Supply 346
whydoyouask writes "Information week has an article on the shortage of expertise for enterprise open source projects and it's ramifications for both enterprises and salaries
for those possessed of these skill. While it is suspicious in it's timing and references to Ballmer's recent email it does point out some definite considerations that companies planning open source projects better account for. Those looking for marketable job skills might also take note."
Hard not to be cynical... (Score:5, Insightful)
Went back to school and aced one of those year-long programming courses. Knowing that it would look like one of those garbage diplomas, I bolstered my resume with side-projects, including a search engine (powered by, coincidentally enough, on Open Source).
When I graduated? No jobs available.
It's okay. I like being an English teacher in Korea right now, but if that segue is amusing to read, it wasn't to live through.
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:3, Insightful)
How about open source developers in high demand?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hard not to be cynical...Outsourcing menial jobs. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now you know why people don't like outsourcing. Everyone talks about we should be glad those "menial" jobs are gone, but those jobs were the "starting points", plus those aren't the only ones going bye, bye.
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:4, Informative)
Many Unix solution providers won't have a hard time developing solutions for Linux. It has a lot more in common with Unix than Windows does.
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:2)
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, as the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance. If you you can't afford to train people, you sure as hell can't afford to employ good people who already have those skills, which might explain this:
I suspect the problem isn't games, Linux fans doing their own thing, or newbies playing with your system. It's far more likely to be that you simply aren't offering the market rate for someone good enough to do the job you want done. If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys. :-)
See also my reply to the grandparent post [slashdot.org].
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, but They should have trained up all the staff first, so We can hire them. You know, Them, the ones who do all the low-paid monkey-work so we don't have to.
The sad truth is that short-sighted corporate policy has frequently been:
With that sort of mindset, life is always going to come and kick you in the arse sooner or later
Not meaning to be rude (Score:2)
Re:Hard not to be cynical... (Score:2)
Good Article (Score:3, Insightful)
Blame? (Score:5, Informative)
Only if you go and install the latest stuff from Freshmeat. Most businesses use a supported commercial distribution (Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, etc.)
My business uses completely open source software because we have the technical personnel to make it work. When something breaks I am usually the one who fixes it, and if I can't I escalate to the community. We run our entire infrastructure on open source software and have extremely high returns on investment in these areas. We have found it to be very viable.
I used to work at Microsoft's Product Support Servicess. I can tell you that you are wrong if you feel the need to blame someone else. You can always blame someone else. I am not aware of any cases where Microsoft has been successfully sued for faults in their products, so maybe this is just a psychological need.....
Really, the reason for calling MS isn't to blame them, it is to escalate to them in order to get some additional perspective you can use to solve your problem (if you are intelligent) or to have someone babysit you through a process you are not willing to otherwise do (if you are not). Blame usually doesn't come into it at all, IMO.
Now, let me tell you about a time I needed technical support for an open source noncommercial product.
I had just locked down my box and Qmail started locking up on incoming connections. After about 10 incoming pop3 connections, the next one would hang until the service was restarted. The logs didn't show anything.
After doing my best to solve the problem (I was still somewhat new ot Qmail at the time), I sent an email to the list. Within about 15 minutes I got a reply asking me for more information. Within another 15 mintues, I got another email suggesting some diagnostics. It turned out the problem was that the log process would not handle an append-only logfile and so the log buffer would fill up and the process would lock. Unsetting the append-only attribute solved the problem. Total time to resolution after incident submitted: 30min. Total cost of support: $0. I could have paid for support, but I chose to have the community help me instead. Had it been more time critical (actually a system in production) I probably would have paid someone for their opinion.
PostgreSQL, Asterisk, and Samba also have extremely helpful communities, IME. If course not all OSS is this helpful. But the most common projects are.
My business (which supports much of this software) is at www.metatrontech.com [metatrontech.com]
Re:Blame? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am the UNIX systems administrator in my company - we have a wide range of UNIXes, midframes and mainframes that we develop on, and we of course have problems from time to time. My first source for support is always what is available on the internet, next level is a relevant community.
Only in very special situations will I use the technical support that we pay for, for several reasons; the most important being that a consultant simply isn't in as good a position to solve the problem as I am, having worked with and thought about it for so much longer. In the recent 4 years I have had external support on site 3 or 4 times: once because one RS/6000 had been damaged in a thunderstorm, another time because we needed to upgrade the some firmware on an HP9000 - the latter isn't difficult, but I thought it would be better to let an external company handle it, the reason being that if I screwed up, my company would face the bill, but if an external consultant screws up, it not my company. Sometimes you have to be devious.
Re:Blame? (Score:2, Insightful)
But there are reams and reams of intermediate projects that don't have the critical mass for this type of support.
For instance, a widely used package, which I'm using right now is dom4j [dom4j.org]. If you look at the News section [at date of this article] you can still see that there are a LOT of bugs being fixed here. This is in a project that is several years old, dealing with XML parsing. XML started being used seriously from 1999.
No
Re:Good Article -- ROI, based on how long? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're a shop with administrators with 20 years experience on windows, those folks are going to be quite cranky about moving to linux. Downright fearful, in fact. We had a few admins who were concerned enough that they considered retiring a little early rather than having to face upgrading from windows NT 4.0 to XP. Their job is to know exactly what to do when a client comes to them, and their "knowledge" is hard-won by experience. It will take a few years for such people to retrain to the same level of expertise on linux. It's deeply different. For a large shop:
That, as far as I can gather, is Munich's plan. It is an exceedingly rational one. The main point is that the first two or three years are going to be more expensive. You're going to be paying all the MS taxes and adding massive training costs for techs, and parallel deployments of linux boxes. It's got to be more expensive at first.
You have to appreciate the complete mind warp we are asking windows people to do. After the admin's are onside (this is the really tough part.) They need to get comfortable (they've done some implementations, they don't look for D: anymore to install stuff from. They google for help, and don't think the only source of true knowledge is a vendor) And finally, they have to get attuned (When we need a new application, their first reaction is to check out sf.net & freshmeat, and spend some time evaluating open source before looking at commercial stuff.)
This is seriously relearning how to think kind of stuff. It will take a few years to adjust to. Rolling out desktops has to be the last bit on the end, once all the techies are comfortable and attuned. Because when a client comes to them, they are the expert. The techies will feel really uncomfortable if they are not comfortable.
So like the realistic plan is something like... training for a year, with some pilots, then another year doing some server stuff. That second year will drag into two. Third year you start handle the tougher apps (those without ready analogues), move the clients over to open office, and train the front-line user desk staff. (roll out desktops for the techies.) year four, you do the desktop rollout. I seriously believe that end users in large shops will not require much training at all. All the complications in linux arise from administration tasks: installing software, configuring services, network connections, driver support. All of this stuff is handled by techis in a big shop. So all that is left to users is navigating in the file browser, which, honestly, is not going the take much training.
So in year five, most of your licensing costs drop to 0. Remote administration, for managing applications, configuration, and patches become much easier and simpler (cron + apt-get for debian stable users.), and viruses are something others worry about. So the ratio of admins to users will be able to increase, and you can re-task admins for other fun stuff.
Re:Good Article -- NEED? (Score:5, Insightful)
I see this idea all the time, and it is completely bogus. The admins are responsible for fixing the problem. Period. Are you going to empower them, or shackle them?
When we call up MS with an Exchange problem, they want us to de-activate our virus scanner, because they don't support that. In real life, there is usually a whole mess of interoperating bunches of code: firewall exchange Anti-Virus OS app environment.
No vendor will stand up and say, when you have an actual multi-vendor configuration, "this is my problem and I am going to fix it." The admin always has to prove absolutely that you are on a completely supported configuration (don't get me started on "compatibility matrices") and then run tests for each vendor, and figure out which one to sit on in any given situation.
What you really need is in-house admins who understand how the software works, in order to pin down where the problem lies in order to know where to apply pressure.
That whole analysis process is much more difficult on windows because it is much more obfuscated and complicated (layer after layer of compatibility, and unfathomable binaries) than linux (no binaries, can inspect everything, tend to have less depth and breadth in individual programs.)
It is really hard to have good windows admins, not because their aren't a lot of smart people running windows, but because those smart people have nothing to work with to develop anything beyond the most rudimentary skills.
If you run open source linux, (not canned binaries, and not applications built on ten layers of middleware) people who have the potential will grow skilled with time. but it is a long term thing. Skilled people are a long term investment.
Re:Good Article -- NEED? (Score:2)
Pretty much everyone who runs linux runs 'canned' binaries. Maybe you like to compile sed and fsck but I'll take the ones that come with the system. The availibility of the source code doesn't solve all problems. Sorry, you come off as not knowing what you're talking about.
emerge system (Score:2)
Re:Good Article -- NEED? (Score:2)
Pretty much everyone who runs linux runs 'canned' binaries.
Debian and all the RPM-based distros have source packages, so you can examine and read the exact code that you're running on your system. You can't do that (easily and/or inexpensively) with Windows, Irix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, ...
--
Re:Good Article -- NEED? (Score:2)
Re:Good Article (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless your product is something really niche for which there is no good Opensource equivalent, you really do have OSS alternatives. You're using Windows 2000 Enterprise Server and you run into a hitch - whom do you call? Microsoft. So, if you're worried about a similar situation, buy from a commercial vendor like RedHat. In case you run into a hitch, you can call them.
Big deal. You get the same support for a cheaper price. Price is a
Re:Good Article (Score:2)
No, it's management that needs someone external to blame, especially if customers are impacted.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
More FUD from the same Retards. (Score:3, Informative)
Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio agrees. "There's a dearth of skilled Linux administrators, by comparison to the more-mature Windows, Unix, NetWare, and Macintosh environments," she says. And what happens when too much demand meets too little supply? "They can command a premium," DiDio says. "They get a 20% to 30% salary premium in the large metropolitan markets."
Mature? Please. When you consider that o
The Only Time I ever see "Open Source" (Score:5, Interesting)
If the real companies would actually advertize that they need open source people, they might be surprised at what they find.
Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source" (Score:3, Insightful)
But wait! Don't order now, you're both right.
And the biggest problem with evil idiots is that there's no way to plan for what they do, the havoc they cause even takes them by surprise, since it isn't at all the havoc they intended. About all you can do is watch the windshield getting closer, and closer, and closer. .
Worked there, done that, lost my T-shirt.
Come my brothers in s
Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source" (Score:5, Funny)
1. Need a PhD, no MA, MBA, any Master's Degree, BS, BA, or any Bachelor's degree or AA or AS, or any Associate's Degree accepted.
2. Must speak all languages human and computer.
3. Must have a 4.0 GPA from grade school on.
5. Applicant must have perfect attendance and never been late once in your life.
6. Must be in excellent health.
7. Must pass a background check, alcohol, and drug tests.
8. Must pass the BAR exam, Perfect 1600 SAT score, Ace the GRE
9. Must have an IQ of 160.
10. Must possess perfect spelling and grammar. You can not do anything wrong.
11. Professional attitude and dress is a must.
12. Must graduate from a Top tier school(Ivy League).
13. Must have 15 letters of excellent references.
14. Write a 150 page pager on why do you want to work for us.
15. Never quit a job, been terminated, or laid off before.
16. Never a straight shooter attitude.
17. Excellent interpersonal skills.
18. Pass personality tests.
19. Never use any curse words.
20. Must have a perfect credit history(No late payments ever!!)
21. Must be under 40, but have 41 years experience.
You must attend 20 interviews, go to a panel interview, pay for parking, and buy everyone in the company lunch and snacks.
Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source" (Score:2)
Then they can hire someone at half the already depressed wage.
Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source" (Score:2)
Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source" (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because you don't understand job advert's.
I've written job advert's (I'm a tecchie with 16+ years experience in assembler, c++, c and java; I also taught OO for a couple of years at Rational.) and generally I'm not looking for one person, and even if I am I'm probably not looking for one set of skills: often it's a case that I'd like someone with some combination of the listed skills plus at least some idea what the others are even if they aren't expert. Obviously there are some key skills: for example if I'm looking to recruit someone to work on a system written in Java running on Oracle then I'd probably advertise Java as a must-have, Oracle as pretty important: but I'd also consider someone with experience of another mainstream relational database: so they get listed as well. It's even possible I'd consider someone with no Java skills but a ton of Oracle: because I might be able to move other people around (for example I may currently have my top Java guy baby sitting the Oracle database: if I hire the Oracle expert my Java expert can go fulltime Java and I'm in the same position as if I'd hired another Java/Oracle hybrid). It's impossible to write an ad that defines all the combinations I'd consider: at least partly because until I see the CV I don't know whether I'd consider it. Newly minted CS graduates aside: most people applying for IT positions are unique in their combination of technical skills and personal attributes.
Conversely: when I read a job listing I don't automatically skip over it if it asks for skills I don't have: for example I *know* what DSDM is but I am not expert in it: however I am an expert in RUP and I know that's similar enough to give me some credibility. What's the worse the advertiser can do? Not reply- frustrating but hardly life threatening. And at best they might consider me anyway because I have skills they didn't emphasise or didn't even occur to them as being important. (I know of jobs where they didn't even bother advertising for the skill they really wanted because: a- they didn't expect to find anyone with it and b- they didn't necessarily want to put people off if they weren't necessarily expert in that area).
Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source" (Score:5, Funny)
"even possible I'd consider someone with no Java skills"
I hate you.
Check out this job (Score:3, Funny)
REQUIREMENTS
Skills Required:
MVS(Expert)
VM(Expert)
zOS(Expert)
z VM(Expert)
JES2(Expert)
JCL(Expert)
General PC(Expert)
LAN/WAN TCP/IP(Expert)
Tivoli(Expert)
Tivoli Workload Scheduler(Expert)
Tivoli System Automation(Expert)
HMC for Mainframe(Expert)
Tivoli Event Console(Expert)
eESM(Expert)
AIX(Good)
Linux(Go od)
OS/2(Good)
SUN Solaris(G
Expertise? (Score:2)
Open Source != Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
There, again, did you see that word? Product. Open Source is mainly concerned with Projects, not Products. So while the person who initially opened the project on Sourceforge and the people who joined up early are all experts, those outside the main circle are not usually so well versed in the projects. Put a company behind the project, turn it into a product, and then you'll have a serious chance of getting "expertise".
When a project is just a project, no one benefits from having many users sitting around bitching on the mailing list. But when someone is trying to sell that product, the company trying to make a buck benefits by having people out there who are experts in the product and can provide support to a whole range of customers.
So yes, on the micro level some Open Source projects are well staffed with experts and companies can feel secure in their decision to go with that project because of the large pool of experts. But on the macro level, most Open Source projects are ill-funded, undocumented, and flat out bad.
Re:Open Source != Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Open Source != Linux (Score:2)
There are commercial enterprises who're willing to take up most lucrative Opensource "projects" and package them into a complete "product".
Except that PHBs can more easily accept that Windows is a product from Microsoft, rather than Linux is a product from RedHat.
"Most" is a red herring (Score:2)
But they are also utterly irrelevant to any business case. The only software projects that are relevant to business is that which has achieved a code base that is mature enough to be used. That includes basis software like Linux and FreeB
Moral of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Use your knowledge of open source and *nix to help your company PLAN for the switch over to open source. Help them realize what it takes. This is your chance to shine. Otherwise, they may freak out at the extra effort needed to get it off of the ground when they realize that it takes SKILLED admins instead of the run of the mill Microsoft admins.
Re:Moral of the article (Score:2)
I want to say the big linux advantage is to let people deploy at will. But let's face it, M$ is only pretending to care about piracy. So it's not really an advantage anymore.
Note on the skilled admins thing (Score:2)
We all hate it, no argument there. I can think of many things that I'd rather be doing and that would be better uses of my time
Re:Note on the skilled admins thing (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Matchmaker? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a jillion online employment sites.
Are there any sites that match FOSS projects with potential volunteers?
For example, I'm a lawyer and I'm not doing anything this evening. I'm sure some FOSS project could use one....But I don't know which or where.
Re:Matchmaker? (Score:4, Informative)
Or you could always start a "Free Software Lawyer Matching" site yourself -- just submit a Slashdot article about it and I'm sure you'll get lots of help.
Re:Matchmaker? -- Yes, they exist (Score:3, Informative)
SourceForge [sourceforge.net] (SF) has been doing this for years. And SF lets its open source projects advertise for volunteers who want to work on non-technical matters (such as software documentation), too. So a project could advertise its need for a lawyer as well as, say, a PHP coder or DBA.
Re:Matchmaker? (Score:2, Informative)
I screwed that post up badly. Sorry: hit Submit instead of Preview by mistake. Wish I could delete my own posts. Oh well, let's try again...
If you're serious about this, drop me a line at lawyer@po8.org [mailto]. I can think of two projects I'm heavily involved with offhand that could use some pro bono legal help from somebody with the right credentials.
Open Source Expertise in Short Supply (Score:5, Funny)
Hopelessly vague (Score:5, Insightful)
For one, they're conflating administration and software development - I should think the difficulties of finding and/or training the two kinds of people are of different orders of magnitude of difficulty. (And it's not like learning Linux administration requires an expensive outlay on proprietary software, which is a big hurdle for commercial products.)
For another thing, as regards availability of open-source software developers, that's uselessly vague.
Do the need people who are highly experienced with the internals of a specific open-source project?
Or do they need people who are experienced with using a specific open-source system, for the development of their own projects?
Somehow, I don't think they're hard up for people who know how to compile with gcc and edit text files with emacs.
Re:Hopelessly vague (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hopelessly vague (Score:2)
The reason I don't want to write code is that a coder spends most of the day sitting in front of a computer writing code. I spend my day interacting with human beings so I can make their computers work for them better.
And I do get my hands dirty writing code sometimes, all part of the rich variety of the sa's job. (And I do get my hands dirty, because my
Re:Hopelessly vague (Score:2)
I think you can even extend the number of posible categories further:
Basic Strength (Score:2)
.
The article leads to a central value proposition of open source.
With OSS the expertise required to accomplish X is always within reach by non-career-specialists because a competent software engineer can come up to speed quickly by studying the source code.
Re:Basic Strength (Score:2)
Is that why open source documentation is always so piss poor...
Always so poor? I'm not sure how you could sustain that argument/generalization after examing the numerous counter examples, but let's not get sidetracked here.
Consider the difficulty programmers the world over have just understanding Windows API documentation. And then, how often is the API documentation wrong and/or inconsistent?
Cost to society: millions of engineer hours per year.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen such a blatant "hit-piece".
Vague "Unexpected costs", admins are 30% more expensive, Linux training is 15% expensive than Windows training, undefined problems causing a company to go from tomcat to IBM websphere, hiring open source programmers is a gamble, you may get sued for using Open Source, open source is harder to support than you realize...
Sheesh.
Open Source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Translation (Score:5, Funny)
shortage of people having experience in working for free
The DOJ trial revealed that Gates .... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.findarticles.com/p/artic l es/mi_m0CGN/is _1999_Jan_18/ai_53594866
"At the antitrust trial in Washington Thursday, Microsoft Corp's key economist witness, professor Richard Schmalensee was shown to have used survey information that had been paid for by Microsoft that reached conclusions requested by Bill Gates."
This article smells exactly like that. Balmer makes some while claims using dubius 'independent' sources to back his statements up.
Less emphasis on the resume is needed (Score:4, Insightful)
On of the advantages of open source is the community, is its "equal opportunity" nature. Plenty of academics but also plenty of self taught geeks. Anybody can sit down and do the work.
The big shortage is proably in the middle management where those folks don't understand the benifits and the culture, and thus are reluctant to hire the kind of people that probably could
Enterprise is reluctant to even consider hiring people without the right pedigree, but its the sefl taught hackers that make major contributions to the software, and the community.
Businesses should stop being so set on worthless paper degrees, and look for people passionate about technology.
Before deciding to work for myself, I worked at a company where if there was an IT opening the prefered method of filling the position was sending a lazy secretary (who usually sat around playing freecell) to CNE class or MSCE, etc.
That company ended up with one sorry IT staff, I was a business analyst at the time, and ended up doing a lot of my departments IT because the most of the real IT group was so pathetic, and the guys there that were good techies, were so burdened cleaning up for and assisting the shitty people that they burnt ou quickly, thus re-enforcing the bad loop.
Anyway, the moral of this story is I am sure there is a lot more to the shortage than the article implies. Able bodies most definately can be found, but the companies are not looking for the most talented people, but rather the people that fit their outdated requirements. In short actions and experience should speak much louder than words on a resume.
Re:Less emphasis on the resume is needed (Score:2)
The problem has been there are good jobs but the bozos at the agency don't understand more then a few words of Jargon and even then they don't know the good from the bad. The last one that contacted me had mispellings in the req. I admit I am hopeful about this one.
what they forgot to mention: (Score:4, Funny)
So that's why I a getting flooded by headhunters. (Score:2)
I see several problems (Score:4, Interesting)
First, there is a lack of skilled computer people in any category -- unix sysadmins, Microsoft sysadmins, DBAs, coders, website design, etc.
In some categories (Microsoft sysadmins, website design) the lack of a clue is not immediately apparent to managers. In other fields (unix sysadmins) the lack of a clue tends to have immediate rammifications to management. [ Please note, I'm not trying to imply that MS admining is easier than unix admining -- IMNSHO, its harder, but that is another post. ]
The other main problem is that I see many people who are knowledgeable about admining OSS, but don't have the papers to get past many HR departments. They don't have college degrees or certifications, yet are probably more knowledgeable than the average MCSE (we can thank transcender for that!) and the average technical college graduate.
Finally, those who are knowledgable, and can survive the corporate HR hiring process tend to be expensive, CSS or OSS. You can find cheap MS sysadmins, but they tend not to be good sysadmins. However, due to the fact that MS tends to be nicer to those who set up flawed systems, it might not be obvious to management or the IT department that their workers are not as skilled as they should be.
Combine this all, and businesses get the impression that skilled MS IT people are a dime a dozen, and OSS IT people are rare and expensive, even though the reality is that any skilled IT person tends to be rare and expensive.
Just my $.02
Feel free to follow up with horror stories about your coworkers who are management's darling, but couldn't tell a sparc from an alpha.
OSS disinvited (Score:2)
To support her, I volunteered to give a talk about what could be accomplshed with Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, Apache, JBoss, Eclipse, etc. Initially the response was positive. In the end I was disinvited.
Talking to my wife afterwards, she just commented that there was a lot of fear and confusion over oopen source software.
What can I say? There's a lot of disinformation out there, I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
Title should read... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Expertise in Short Supply"
I've been trying to hire recently, and I can say that it's hard to find good people. Not good in a particular topic, just good thinkers.
It's logical analysis and that's mostly missing. 99% of the applicants (to our java/perl shop) got into the business in 1999 after a quick nine-month certificate, and never learned how to program a computer. They don't love the art; they want a buck without having to think too much about it. They're not solving problems, they're "applying a skill," i.e., trying to slide through with old knowledge from courses.
For every good programmer, there are four hundred useless ones with "5 years experience" because anyone could be a programmer in 1999. And from what I've heard from the win32 side of the fence at my company, it's even worse there.
Re:Title should read... (Score:3, Insightful)
The number isn't quite that high. In my 8 years experience it's somewhere around 10% that is able to master software development and engineering.
One of the major issues I noted was that we expect new people to come in and "just do it." Perfectly. Very often, they don't have a clue on real engineering.
The experience either comes from loads of years of study, or from mentors. If you're not mentoring the new guys then you're looking for t
Re:Title should read... (Score:3, Insightful)
-- Otake, Shibumi, p105. Trevanian
"Enterprise" may be the key word here (Score:4, Insightful)
It's one thing to write a few VB apps when you can keep referring back to books or online manuals to show you the fine details of e.g. which fonts to use, but taking that level of VB knowledge and applying it to huge VB-based apps (yes, they exist!) is a leap that most people simply can't do. There's a point where you can't just focus on the minute details of your chunk of code; trying to adhere to project- or enterprise-wide coding and design standards is a really tough thing for many people.
As an example, think of all the "professional coders" you know. Now think of how many of them would know about design patterns, and would either refer to the Gang of Four book when needed or have it memorised to the point where they don't need to. I'm betting less than 10% of "professional coders" (yes, I'm using this term loosely) actually know of the existence of design patterns, yet they're absolutely fundamental once you start working on projects over a certain size.
Finally, I've found that really good coders are really good in just about any language (and project). A top C++ programmer will become a top Perl, VB, Eiffel, Ada, Python, COBOL(!!) programmer, given a bit of training on language features and documentation standards, as the same design patterns will work relatively independent of language syntax. I don't believe there's a shortage of enterprise FOSS people that's any greater than the shortage of enterprise closed source people; they're both in big demand.
Re:"Enterprise" may be the key word here (Score:2, Interesting)
CoBOL? Did you say CoBOL?
I beg your pardon. Design patterns don't work with CoBOL.
Well, maybe some of the new object CoBOLs, I haven't looked at them. Is anyone actually using those? I mean, it seems like moving from the old CoBOL to the object oriented Co
There is no patent on design patterns (Score:2)
Maybe the article really means a shortage of people who can bullshit management with big words like "Gang of Four" and "Xtreme Programming", who can justify this way that the project took two months longer than required, thus tricking the PHB into doing sane software development.
I also wouldn't be surprised if it worked as increasing job-security because you can re-do the project
Smelly (Score:2)
I have been peddling around for PHP projects with very little response. If there was truely a shortage, then companies would not be demanding 7 years of expertise in the language and a jillion certs just to be interviewed. And I bid low.
There are just plain too damned many developers floating around that nobody wants. Somebody is too quick to declare "shortages", period!
Re:Smelly (Score:2)
The last few weeks, these skills in "shortage" have been "Linux/OSS skills".
I would dearly like to meet some of these people who are surveyed and say there's a shortage, because I was laid off from supporting and administering a boatload of Linux servers in September and I've had all of 2 interviews.
My experience suggests article is mostly nonsense (Score:2)
I see very little demand for people who have a good understanding of the "open source revolution" (OSR) or who are smart. Look at the second paragraph of my resume:
Re:My experience suggests article is mostly nonsen (Score:2)
Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re:My experience suggests article is mostly nonsen (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I'm somewhat impressed on the geek level by your low
However, a good reality check is needed, because I wouldn't hire you either. Why not? Read on.
I'm a hiring manager in charge of an international (two offices, in in Canada and one in California) team. Our company runs its entire infrastructure on Lin
Re:My experience suggests article is mostly nonsen (Score:2)
Thank you for taking the time to write such a lengthy and insightful reply. Your position as a hiring manager makes your perspective all the more valuable.
When I modified my resume this summer (early July, IIRC) to insert the offending paragraph, I was well aware that it might have the effect (on readers) that you describe, but thought that I had almost nothing to lose given the lousy response that my resume was generating at that time. I also thought that it might be a good idea to experiment with resume
Maybe I'm crazy (Score:2)
If you're looking for a
These companies missed the value proposition... (Score:2)
The value proposition comes fro
nt (Score:2, Funny)
says OS development isn't quite all the rage...
i mean people love it, but experts are in short supply
for the free OS programs you don't need to buy
now this lack of experts
should start ringing bells
in the ears of those corps
who might lose business to dells
I say OS is great and OS is grand,
but in order to become the way of the land
you must fight, you must train,
craft experts all your own
fuck this college nonsense,
throw a student a bone
train the
Well... (Score:2)
2. Get flooded with zillions of job application letters, choose cheapest turd, fire bunch of old Unix admins
3. Profit!
Wait a sec...
FUD vs. Reality (Score:5, Informative)
Reality: "Open source tends to be supported extremely well, but the costs are incurred differently than with commercial software. More expensive is harder to evaluate since commercial stuff tends to be aquisition based + annual maintenance while open source tends to be a combination if in-house expertise, low aquisition cost, possibly higher annual maintenance. It could be a wash or either one could be higher. The difference is that _you_ are in control and can switch (or cancel) support contracts at will. Try that with some commercial product."
FUD: "Linux admins are hard to find"
Reality: "The Linux admins you do find tend to be 10x-100x better technically than the paper-MCSE idiots you'll get for windows admins. This translates to fewer admins needed overall, plus much less ''support'' required since the admins are more self-sufficient. You need to be able to hire people with 2-3 years of ''real'' experience vs. the 5-10 years demanded by most HR departments."
FUD: "Open source may force you to self-support with web searches & mailing lists"
Reality: "Most (99%+) windows problems I've encountered tend to be solved by google or microsoft knowledge base searches. The other 1% we either live with or assign a low-level tech to call and sit on hold waiting for a high-school dropout to read us a script about rebooting. The fact is, most commercial support sucks. Hard. Be glad there are mailing list archives, google searches, etc. to help solve problems. As a bonus, once you've solved the problem you're never forced to upgrade to a new unstable version by the vendor -- you support your own stuff with your own experience coupled with the experience of the community at large."
FUD: "Open source expertise is hard to find"
Reality: "There are a lot of open source projects in a lot of different fields. This is really like saying ''Computer experience is hard to find'' back in the 80s or 90s. The problem is finding experience for the specific product you need. Try finding a ''sagent'' admin to hire (an expensive proprietary ETL tool) -- it's hard because there aren't many people using it. Likewise finding someone with 10 years of Oracle or DB2 is going to be easier than 10 years of MySQL or Postgres, the point of which is that 1: the commercial product may have been around longer and 2: the commercial product from 10 years ago was likely a very different beast than the current product, so the value of 10 years of experience in a specific product is suspect at best. In this case you should be looking for 10 years of RDMBS/SQL experience without regard to the specific products used."
A lot of this seems to be a fundamental phase-shift in IT expertise required hitting the shoals of inadequate HR hiring practices.
Open Source cough expert cough for hire. (Score:3, Informative)
I am currently:
Implementing bounty into bugzilla.
The ability to pay for bug fixes that are important to you, to incentives developers to fix them.
Converting a number of linux/gnu configuration files (all if possible) into xml with defining XSD's, using xmlstarlet to replace the various grep and Perl scripts currently used to read configuration.
Developing a system to read information from windows registry files and use that information to configure a linux/gnu system. The system will use registry to xml then xsl to transform that into an xml file compatible with the for mentioned linux/gnu configuration files.
A number of radical modifications to the way that the KDE user interface works.
Dynamically loading of content in view, instead of loading the entire content, improving latency and reducing memory and processor overhead, the user interface will update in constant time instead of linear time with constant memory and CPU usage, instead of linear memory and CPU usage.
Changing the way that menu are displayed.
The ability for applications to request a menu based on context. A menu will the be generated based upon this context, allowing for machine learning (moving items up and down the context hierarchy), and the ability for any function to be accessed from any menu.
Machine learning will allow the GUI to generate a menu tailored to the task in hand, statistics can be shared so that an organisation can look at how an application is being used, adjust there work processes and feed back the adjustments into the menuing system.
I am also working on other reviews of OSS software, identifying points that need looking at and suggesting possible solutions.
Apart from that I have helped write a ADSL modem driver [sourceforge.net], put forward a number of patches for the kernel,(usb and pcmcia network card), and reverse enginered the Microsoft access database fileformat.
So, if you've got an OSS problem and you think I can help provide the solution drop me an email at oliver_stieber@yahoo.co.uk.
Rubbish (Score:2)
If anybody wants to give me a job using/developing open source software, please contact me at the contact address on the site.
Re: (Score:2)
I Just Experienced This (Score:2)
If you have a piece of software out there, that's a good thing, it looks good on a resume, but you will rarely be able to sell it. What you want to look into is offering support and development expertise for similar classes of apps.
I am in the middle of a fairly large project for a big corporation, to deploy around 3-5000 security boxes. One of the candidates is a BSD-licensed (
too late! (Score:2, Interesting)
And I have much more free time now.
If someone called with a job now I would turn it down.
Exactly match my experience (Score:4, Insightful)
Open-Source now have a lot of momentum, a kind of honey moon of sort if you want. Gone are the day of 1999 where IT director where laughing at the concept. It's now part of the landscape. Lot of people are not using on a large scale right now, but are trying deployement or pilot.
Since most of the IT workforce have been happy to drink the MS Kool-aid exclusively for the past decade, they are basically helpless when it come to deploying and maintaining Linux. Unfortunately for them, they can't click their way to competence, Linux not being as forgiving as the various flavor of Windows in this regard. Actually, it's pretty damn hostile to newbie sysadmin. Thus these people need help with Linux and Open-Source, and their bosses are willing to pay.
At this point in time, a lack of Linux expert in the workforce and the service industry may slow the adoption of Open-Source. If you have been earning a living doing the proprietary stuff in the past years and considering going freelance eventually to offer Linux and Open-Source services, NOW IS THE TIME !
The walk in the desert is coming to an end for us Linux geeks. For most of us, it's been mostly a work of love, faithful that we where doing the right choice when using and advocating Linux. Now, it's payback time.
Re:Advice for those looking to take a similar path (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. I have been working 3 years for a Linux integrator that mostly service the SMB market; I also worked on a few "large" project (mostly, email servers). I would not say I have a large network of contact, but I have a good reputation in my circle. So far, all my lead where from contact made at my LUG, where I often do presentation at the monthly meeting. These presentations help build my credibility, and friends from the LUG contact me with offer when they heard I started freelancing.
I don't know how well this could apply to your situation, though. The LUG idea is a good one assuming that 1. you have one in your area, and 2. at least some professionnal frequent it.
I think the idea is to make yourself visible, and demonstrate technical proficiency. Other avenue might be to participate in local technical mailing list and forum, and offer sound advice. Or frequent your local board of trade to network with local businessman (although you will need to adapt your discourse for these people).
Sorry I do not have anything more concrete, I must admit I have been very lucky so far to be in the right place at the right time. Could you expand a little on your professionnal background ?
OSS "shortage" is not reflected in the job ads (Score:2)
This articles reminds me of those idiotic "shortage of BSCS" articals. Again, look at the job ads, very few jobs require a BSCS. Employers want experience, and lots of it, in a var
Re:I blame the GPL (Score:2, Funny)
Or you are
Re:I blame the GPL (Score:2)
Re:I blame the GPL (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't distribute the binary, you can keep your changes to yourself. Go re-read the GPL, particularly section 2: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
Re:not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
THe open source killer app is freedom....
Lets face it, part of why they are amazed is that to g
Re:Patents in the Open Source Community? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Patents in the Open Source Community? (Score:2, Insightful)
If your technology and information was out there public, prior to their claim of invention, then it's there bad.
But the problem is, you need a lawyer with about 350 billion dollars behind him.
That's one of the main reasons the US needs to reform it's patent laws.
But then again, what do we do with all those left over lawyers. Ahhhhh! We increase the number of representatives in Congress.
Which brings us to the question, could we be more f&*%$d than we currently are?
Re:No wonder... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)