That's certainly something to keep in mind. My first job after college was more of an administrator type role than a development role; but I'm afraid I'm a bit under-qualified. I've got two (mostly worthless) MCP exams for Windows Server Admin from years back.

Don't get me wrong, I think I'd be able to do a pretty good job, given the chance. But I think it'll be hard to get my foot in the door, so to speak. I done it just yet, but I'll start to 'network' with some of my friends/ex-coworkers and see if anything turns up.

Thanks for the advice. I've been looking into a few of those sites and am planning on giving it a go. I've been doing a lot of desktop development in recent years so I'm currently brushing up on the web side of things to try and make myself more marketable.

Even in the US - 5k a month is good money. Without benefits it's not great; but I know entry level developers who make less. And, if you live outside of a big city, tech jobs tend to pay less anyway.

Actually - I've often wondered why we don't hear about more low tech cases of identify theft/credit card fraud. Maybe it's just so easy to do it with malware nobody cares.

Post real positions on Criagslist and others for legitimate sounding work. Be selective, post realistic requirements and pay, do a phone interview. I'd even explain that, 'Hey, since this is a work from home job/telecommute job - we're going to need your college transcripts'. That makes it seem more legit. Of course, a legit job needs your SSN. I've done real work from home (software development) and they need my SSN. It was a real company, and they paid me.

Not only would you get all of their SSN and personal info....the transcript would be worth a lot of money too. Yeah, you can open some credit cards and what not with the SSN; but have you seen how easy it is to get money for school these days? My wife barely makes over minimum wage and she was approved for SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS for her first year of school. Stop and read that again. Now, granted, say half of that is tuition. That still leaves THIRTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS. And it's pretty easy to get into a lot of graduate programs.....I'm doing my Master's right now and they didn't even need my GRE scores (they did require transcripts though). With relative ease and someone's information, I could apply on their behalf to a school, get accepted, get student loans, and get a LOT OF MONEY.

Maybe there is more about this I don't know; but it seems like it would work. In this economy, I'm sure you'd get a lot of bites from your job post; for a start date 2 months in the future. After you get the info you wait, and keep collecting it from others. At the end of the two months, you apologize to everyone and say the economic downturn has caused the project to be cancelled. You have the info but haven't done anything illegal yet. Repeat 4-5 times with different information.

Then, move, and start with the identify theft. Cha-ching. Do it in the order you collected the info; so by the time you open your first CC card, it's been 9-12 months before you got their info. They'd have a lot of trouble tracking you down. And, if the student loan thing worked out - oh man - that's a lot of money.

Just don't get caught.

My wife has been accepted to Vet School in Ireland. Not only does that not allow me to live in Ireland with her, I'm also unable to work without 'sponsorship'. While I've had plenty of interest, as soon as I mention my inability to work without sponsorship, they drop me like a bad habit.

The time difference, distance, viable exchange rate along with other reasons all mean I don't want to continue working at my current job.

My citizenship status makes it very difficult to find a job in Dublin. There are very few legit jobs in the US that would want me in the given situation. I'm a decent developer, but I'm nothing special. I've worked as a consultant; but if you were going to bring in an expert contractor - I don't have the experience/skills. If you are going to bring in a 'pretty good dev', you'd get a local guy.

In my situation, options are limited. I don't have much exposure to malware/scammers/etc - so I don't know how much luck I'd have earning a money with my own scams. It's also relatively unlikely that I'd be able to launch some great web startup that would fund my lifestyle. People have done it, but it's rare and they tend to be smarter, more skilled, and more dedicated than I am.

I have some savings, but once I can no longer show the ability to financially support myself; Ireland will kick me out. I still have months before it comes to that; but it very likely will happen in the next 6-9 months (I haven't moved there yet). As that deadline comes closer I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't *consider* slightly less than legal methods of earning money. I mean, even if I setup a website, printed some fliers and fixed local college kid's computers for $15 an hour, I'd be breaking the law.

I couldn't disagree more; having been both a consultant and an employee.

Maybe my experiences have been unique; but I've been an employee at a large insurance company (Allstate) and a smaller custom software shop (that I currently work out, so name removed). In both cases, there was little motivation to do much more than the bare minimum. I mean, sure, I showed up and did some stuff; but I found very quickly that expectations where low. I didn't have to work very hard to meet them. If the company had a good year and you were doing good - 3-5% raise. If the company had a bad year then 'salary freeze'.

Many people find they get significant raises by switching companies, and this is why. Once you are employed the company figures, 'Well, he worked for X last year, now we give him more than X - why would he quit?'.

I show up late, leave early and surf the web. I've also been pidgin-holed into maintaining and updating a very defined section of the application. Everyone knows, if you have a problem with Y, you talk to me. That's all I do. I do Y. Five years at the same company and after four months of doing good they gave me project Y. I'm still doing project Y. I'll be doing project Y for as long as I work at the company.

When I was a consultant, it was a world of difference. A consulting firm sells consultants. They want to have REALLY GOOD consultants because selling a good product is a great way to stay in business. My current job, we sell a piece of software. They company wants that software to be really good. It's a subtle difference, but it makes a huge difference. The consulting firm I worked for would intentionally rotate us in and out of projects. If you were a Java guy, they wanted you on a .Net project. If you did desktop apps before, they wanted you to do a website. They wanted you to be highly skilled and diverse because that meant they could throw you on any project that came along. They also knew that, after about a year, as a developer on the same project, the learning curve drops to about zero. You don't learn new stuff doing the same old crap. If you were leading a team, it was different, but as far as being a developer, they wanted you to be really good at it.

And, unlike selling software, where your contributions were pretty abstract and subjective; when I was a consultant my time had a very clear value attached to it. The client was being billed for it. If I worked overtime, two things happened. First, I got paid (and my company did too). Second, the client had to pay more. There was an actual expectation of measurable work being done.

Being a consultant was great. I did, at least 2-3 times more work than I do now. I also learned a lot more from people who were really talented and knowledgeable. It was also really hard. I didn't get to spend an hour every day surfing the web and ducking out at 4pm to get an early start on my WoW raids.

Eh, I think we've got a biased view of how things really went down. The truth is, politics today are very much like politics in the past. It's really just a power/money circle jerk amongst the wealthy.

We all learned about England taxing us and the Boston Tea party. What they didn't tell you in history class is that nobody was upset about 'taxation without representation'. As it turns out, there were some very wealthy people making a fortune 'smuggling' tea. They'd get tea elsewhere and thanks to the high taxes on legit tea, they could sell they bootleg tea for less, and keep a considerable profit.

When the 'Tea Act' came about, it wasn't adding tax. It wasn't even a new tax. It was a SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION to an ALREADY ESTABLISHED TAX.

Stop and think about that for a second. That would be like, tomorrow the US Government announcing they were no longer going to tax gasoline...and then people GETTING UPSET. That doesn't sound right, does it? Nope.

Who *would* be upset by a significant reduction in the cost of tea? Well, people who were getting rich selling smuggled tea. So they got together, and started drumming up the masses (now, like then, the majority of people didn't know or care much for politics) and they got a bunch of 'sheep' angry about their significant tax break.

Really, things have changed much.

Exactly. Everyone loves to cheat on their taxes.

Growing up, I played on the same soccer team for years. One of the kids I became friends with was home schooled. His parents were both friendly, sociable, well educated (and from the looks of their house, doing quite well financially).

The kid was as normal as anyone else on the team. He had plenty of friends and did pretty good with the girls too. Honestly, looking back, he seemed to be a few years ahead of the curve; and was one of the most genuinely nice kids I knew. I don't know where the stereotype of home-schooled kids being freaks came from; but in my limited experience, not true.

I generally agree with what you are saying; but it's important to remember the context.

In a college-level English class, sure, it's absurd to cover how to hold a pencil. But that *is* taught in our school system....just at a much younger age. If I were going to teach my 13 or 14 year old kid Computer Science (and he hadn't already been exposed to computers), I would not start with a B+ tree. I would start with typing. I'd also encourage him to do 'cool' stuff with the computer. He might not understand the underlying CS Theory that allows that cool flash game to be awesome but again, isn't that approach really common in junior high level physics and chem classes? Show kids cool stuff, have them build cool stuff....then teach theory. It might be years before a kid can fully explain and calculate everything involved in his 5th grade pumpkin launcher he built, but building it was fun, and taught him stuff, and maybe, kept him interested in what can be an overwhelmingly boring topic.

I thought one of the core values of 'Computer Science' is that it is language agnostic, by definition.

I'm not sure if you are talking about Visual Basic (6.0) that was released in 1998, or if you are talking about VB.NET; but I'm pretty sure you can handle many fundamental CS concepts in both.

As someone with a BS in Computer Science and an in-progress Masters; I think it's safe to say anyone who is offended by this question is a d-bag.

Unless you are certain it's being used as a backhanded insult, all this means is someone doesn't fully understand what 'Computer Science' is. That's really not a reason to be offended. I don't really understand Physics, or Chemical Engineering, I'd hate to be afraid of asking a harmless question because I'm likely to offend some overly sensitive guy waiting to jump over a n0ob who only wants to learn.

Besides, what qualifies as 'Computer Science' is pretty subjective anyway. I took a 300-level 'Computer Science' class that was called 'Unix'. It covered basics of the operating system....things as simple as creating directories were covered. And it was very much apart of the Computer Science curriculum at a moderately respected 4-year University.

If they wanted to distribute with p2p, they'd seed it and upload it to torrent sites.
If they want people to visit their site and download it, they'd create a site and host it there.

Even when it's *free* people are still unwilling to give the creator of their entertainment any control over it.

Nobody buys a PlayStation for productivity (except possibly researchers).
Nobody uses the PSN for productivity.

Of course, there are more productive things you can do in place of a recreational activity. But that's the point. Now, if you said people without the PSN found other recreational activities that are MORE FUN, I'd agree, that could be a problem.

Nearly everyone had the opportunity to read books, play solo games and watch hulu/TV before the PSN existed. So the fact that those things still exist aren't a threat to the PSN.

Thank you.

I'm sick and tired of people acting like college is an entry level task. College students are *adults* and they have spent (at least) the last 12 years preparing for their academic endeavors. It's not something to be taken lightly. Oh, and it's *really expensive*.

College *shouldn't* be for the C- kid who didn't really do much in high school, who played a lot of World of Warcraft and decided to be a Computer Programmer. Because that kid is going to fail out of the entry level programming classes. Colleges will gladly accept his 15k for one year of Ds and Fs before he fails out. Now, some professor is advocating changing their program so that this kid can manage to pass?

We already have a system that cover pre-college level material; it's called.....High School!