Yeap,
That's why they manufacture BMW's in South Carolina and BMW has expanded the plant and hired more workers over the years. Last time I took a tour of the facility, they were making all the X3's, X5's, and X6's for the world market, including the ones being sold in Asia.

Yeap, we can't compete with anyone.

Basic ain't that bad.

I worked at a very large retailer that used Business Basic running on Data General mini-computers in the early 1990's. Of course, they also had IBM iron running MVS with tons of CICS/COBOL programs. Its surprising how much "could" be done with Basic back in the day.

I also still remember the C-64 games, a lot of which were written in basic and would use a bunch of "pokes" to load assembly routines into memory.

And what about good old Access Basic and Visual Basic? The easiest way to code a windows GUI program back in the day. Much easier to use than that Visual Studio/MFC C++ junk back in the 1990's. :)

As an older guy - I have no problem helping younger guys out. I have had a lot of mentors over the years and I still learn from those more experienced then I am. I just get a little torqued up when someone young comes along and thinks they know all the answers and starts trying to "boss" everyone around. Usually these guys are the first ones laid off or forced out, as they are not team players.

Uh actually - I just turned 45. I was coding mostly C and some C++ when I was 30 and Java was just starting to get noticed.

Anyway, at 45 I probably get contacted by anywhere from 1 to 5 recruiters a week. I also haven't gone more than 2-3 weeks without work in the last 20 years without either a job offer or the next job lined up. In fact, at this point, I have to avoid recruiters just to get a little time off between contracts or jobs.

I don't consider myself the best or a genius. I'm probably in the top 20% of coders - but definitely not the top 5%. Yet I find myself arguing the same arguments and solving many of the same issues from company to company because so many folks fail to see the bigger picture. Yes, I have been let go a few times in my career, but its mostly because I wouldn't convert from contractor to a perm position or because of political reasons. I don't think I've ever been let go in a true lay-off, and most of the time I choose when I leave my job and move onto the next one.

As for the walker - thankfully not yet. I still manage to lift weights and hike/run/bike in my spare time..

I guess 45 is the new 29. :)

Yeah, this old fart knows Cobol, Assembly, C, C++, Java, a little C# and several other languages. I enjoy when you younger guys come to me for help because you can't read a log file, resolve a memory leak, write a test plan up, or optimize your SQL. :)

Mainframes aren't so "specialized". Maybe you are confusing Mainframes with Supercomputers which tend to be much more specialized and focused towards scientific and research usage.

I worked on IBM big iron back in the day and a "mainframe" can run Linux Partitions as well as other mainframe OS's. Unix boxes aren't so generic either. A unix box running Linux is different than a Unix box running HP-UX or Solaris and requires some different sys-admin skills. There are other issues with shared library linking being different, different compiler's, different shells, etc.

MVS is now z/OS and it supports multiple programming languages - its not just your grandfather's COBOL anymore:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS

The Crab people will rise up and take over the Earth. Time to buy a Prius. Oh, wait, the lithium ion batteries create more carbon from manufacturing them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV5wmDhzgY8

Doh!!

I'm not so sure about the reciprocity. In India, the Indian nationals were being treated as badly as I was. I mean, my god, why does a passport have to be checked 5 or 6 times when exiting India by every other armed guard? I have stood in immigration lines coming into the US and it was nothing like the process I saw in India. It seemed almost as difficult to get out of India as to get in.

Likewise, in the Philippines guys from the UK, Europe and other countries that I knew had to go through the same BS as us Americans.

Talent has nothing to do with it - until a company is burned and a bunch of unmaintainable code with variable names like "foo" and Class names like public UtilityClassThatDoesEverything, which is full of memory leaks is crashing the servers every day or 2.

Then they call in the people with real talent and pay decent salaries. Or they hire consultants and contractors to fix the mess.

Talent does matter. It just takes some companies a little time to learn that doing things correctly with talented people often is a lot better strategyin the long run than hiring based on the lowest prevailing wage.

@Kumiorava,
I went to the UK a few times as part of my job employed by a US company. I usually arrived via Gatwick. I had a US passport, but no Visa since I was working for a US company temporarily at their offices. I was "grilled" at the airport in Customs by a british custom/immigration agent for around 10 minutes. I even told her I had a house in the US and I wasn't going to be there more than 2 weeks. But I still had to answer all these questions and I was treated like I was trying to "sneak" in to the UK.

I also went to the Philippines several times and went through some of the same mess and I had to get multiple Visa's to stay beyond 2 weeks each time, even though I was working for a US company based in the Philippines and had no intention of staying or taking jobs from local residents. I was in fact there to train staff.

I went to India one week to conduct training working for a US based company. I had to get a letter of introduction from someone that worked as my office, a visa that cost a couple hundred dollars from the Indian Consulate, fill out a bunch of papers with my personal information, and then I got treated like crap and ordered around by security in the Bangalore airport a few times by security officers brandishing assault rifles. I was there to train consultants from India. If anything, I was helping to train the local staff, not taking any jobs from anyone, but I still had to jump through all these hoops for 1 week. Only 1 week.

In my experience, I think the US is probably not as much as a hassle compared to other countries. I dispute what you are saying.

"An anonymous reader writes" - What? I've been on Slashdot for a while and enough is enough. "An anonymous reader" shouldn't be able to submit articles. "Anonymous" cowards are already trolling Slashdot to dead. If you don't have the guts to post under your username, then why should you have the right to post anything?

Just my opinion.

Agreed. Pointless post. Code.org is probably irrelevant anyway as people who want to code will learn how anyway, and most other people probably don't care.

Besides coding is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge difference between teaching a kid how to code in school and actually writing quality code, understanding relational databases, coding for real-time transaction processing, understanding source control, having the patience to sit in front of a monitor for 8-10 hours a day, etc, etc.

Most of the people I took coding classes ( Basic on Apple II's ) with in high-school aren't even coding or in IT at all now. In fact, some of the people I went to college with have even left the field.

Firstly, "Nerds" haven't "pushed technology that cost people jobs". Corporations, business owners, and even the government push the technology to save money and increase efficiency. "nerds" are usually either the ones discovering the technology, implementing it, or debugging it, and many of us rarely get the credit or the financial rewards.

Secondly, would you rather hold back technology so everyone continue to work in factories and sustain long term medical problems from doing repetitive tasks? Or have everyone exposed harm by doing dangerous jobs like welding on car frames in factories, when a robot can do the job without putting a person in danger?

I think most people's lives are much easier today than they were 100 years ago due to technology, even if they have to retrain or educate themselves to get a job because they lost a job doing a redundant task because of technology.

The guy posting the question could code a simple game. My first 3 apps I wrote in Basic on a TRS-80 and then a commodore 64 when I was 15 were:

1. A character generator for D&D that would roll the stats and let you pick the attributes to generate a D&D character.
2. A text based Blackjack 21 game.
3. A simple shooter that had one sprite for a space ship you could move around and control with a joystick and some simple sound and graphics.

I probably learned more coding these types of app's then I learned in college. For example, to code the simple shooter I learned about sprites, peeks and pokes, using plot verse directly addressing screen memory to control graphics,writing loops, handling input real-time events from the keyboard and then a joystick, generating random numbers, data types, etc. It also started me looking into assembly language for games because Basic was so slow.

Of course, a lot has changed since then, but a simple game app would be a challenge and it would be something this guy could show off to his friends when he was done.

Actually, the hourly rate and what a contractor makes depends on a lot of factors. I've contracted a lot ( almost 10 gigs in my career ) as an LCC, Sub Chapter-S corp and as a W-2 Employee ) and basically:

1. You can setup a sub-chapter S corp and work for a company as another corporation.
2. You can just do 1099 self-employeed as sole-propritor, LLC or partnership if you have others involved.
3. You can work through a contracting company as their "employee" where they pull out the FICA, Social Security, etc and provide benefits at a cost to you and you get billed at X dollars an hour and get paid X - Y dollars an hour ( Y being the contracting companies cut ).

There are probably other options I don't know about.

So when someone says 100 bucks an hour, it doesn't mean much until you look at HOW they are earning 100 bucks an hour: W-2 or Independent as S-Corp, self-employed, etc , how they are filing their taxes, what expenses and other deductions they are taking, etc. In fact, I would say that at least in my experience I actually earned more of the rate as a sub-chapter S then any other way. Its just some extra work to keep track of all the expenses, run your own payroll, pay estimated taxes, file taxes and make sure you take all the deductions for the right expenses, etc.

Also rates depend very much on skills and demand. 100 dollars an hour is not that unrealistic. SAP and other ERP software packages and specialists can easily go over 100 an hour even being paid as a W-2 employee no matter where you are.

On the other hand, if a programming language or skill is "saturated" with a lot of programmers and the supply of talent exceeds the demand, rates drop like bricks. This seemed to happen with Java a few years back. I had some people calling me offering 30-40 bucks an hour for Java. I either ignored or laughed at most of them. Thankfully Java rates seem to be going up again, although I'm not doing much Java these days so I can't comment on what the going rates are for Java right now.

But the previous post was right. You have to "live" it. Even when I take time off between jobs, I spend some time reading technical books, checking out new languages, and writing code to keep my skills current. An hour a day probably isn't enough to learn a new language.