I predicted this sort of thing back in 2006. And let's be honest: It's not that suprising, is it? Globalisation is once around the globe by now. In the US, entire landscapes are out of jobs and glad for anything. In China more than a decades worth of 8%+ growth has started to saturate markets and upped the price for labor, shrinking the margins.

Next up will be robots. And they don't care where they stand, neither does the corp that owns them. They will be placed closest to the buyer to reduce transport costs. The avantgarde will start building modern factories in western countries now again. Like Tesla.

My 2 cents.

I've had this issue myself here on /. a few times in the last 2-3 years.

Here's my current take on it:
People discriminate based on age, in any field or situation. That's simple psychology. You can tip the reactions in your favor, based on how you behave. I'm skinny, move a lot and wear a relatively up-to-date hipster / better-dressed nerd mix of clothing and my basic temper is sanguine, so people usually judge me roughly 6-8 years younger than I actually am. That does help me when trying to get a quick hire in the webshop next door, although that is getting more difficult in certain ways.
In the field you're easier in for a cheap quick hire if you appear young and nimble. Emphasis on cheap and quick. Easy in, easy out, no hurt feelings on either side. At a first glance, getting such a gig is definitely more difficult if you have a deer-gut, are approaching your 50ies and looking it too.

Then again, take that same deer gut 50ies body, dress it in a good suit and a well chosen shirt and tie combo, adjust your behavior and your speaking a little, perhaps take some training or stage classes, print some neat business cards with "Consultant" written on them and your salary instantly rises by 15K per year easily. Try that as a mid-twenties guy - it's going to be very difficult.
This only starts to work in your favor once you've got wrinkles and gray hair to show. I call it the 'gray-hair-bonus'. You need one guy from that camp for every contract worth 100k and up. They are indispensable, especially if they can talk and have the decades of experience to back it up. I'm turning into that sort of guy and helping the transition with some extra 'finally-grow-up' efforts. It does magic to my rates. And it's simply that I look the age that make 50% of all that possible. I just have to get used to letting that fat student kid do the setup of the next server, even if he makes tons of mistakes ... after all, I'm there to help him out if he's in a jam. But forcing yourself to keep your hands off is a bit of a challenge, I do admit. :-)

My 2 cents.

If you're looking for the most relevant RAD Language today and the one that's the strongest upcoming, that would be JavaScript. No two ways about it. Python is definitely the more interesting, simply because its syntax is more modern - JS is basically a member of the C + Java line of languages and a prime objective of Python was to do away with the clutter.

But in terms of momentum, there's no single doubt about the rapidly increasing significance of JS. With Node.js it has gotten hold on the serverside again, as it used to have back when Netscape Webserver was the only webserver around, and since the dimishing importance of Flash and the parallel increase in importance of mobile web-centric devices it has become the got-to technology for client-side logic in the mobile space. It's cross-platform and there's an engine for it in every browser. It's that simple. The increasing fragmentation of end-user devices is driving battalions of developers to JS as we speak and with the second half of humanity to be connected to the intarweb via cheap mobile devices within the next few years I don't think JSs' momentum is going to dimish anytime soon.

Bottom line:
If you need or want to bet on a single RAD PL today, JavaScript it is. Frontend to backend. Strange but true.

NEWSFLASH! JUST IN!
Classic Eskimo diet only suitable for classic eskimo climate!

Brilliant new scientist team finds out that 10 bazillion calories-per-day and lets-eat-tons-of-raw-meat-because-we-have-no-other-source-of-micronutrient-iron-and-vitamin-c-out-here-in-a-countryside-made-of-pure-ice escimo diet suitable for an arctic climate with regular temperatures of -30 Celsius and lower actually isn't suitable or very healthy at temperatures around +15C and raises risk of CADs.

Gees, what an insight. How would've thunk? ...

Seriously, how do these guys get funding?

Really? You're going to end the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics by out-fundraising them?

No. You're going to get most of the people behind the unified cause of repairing the US electorial system. Big difference.
Them donating money is a secondary side effect. The technical part of what is required to change something. The first step is to get *all* of the 99% of US citizens of their lazy fat asses and actually be willing to do something to 'effing repair their broken system. The money-meter is just a gauge of that will to finally make a change that lasts. And I mean we, the people, making that change.

It's like in eastern German. When fat-cats say "This is how it goes." like they have been for decades and 99% say "Nope. Not anymore. Game's over. New rules." you have a peaceful revolution and the wall goes down the next day. It's really that easy.

Same here. If Lessig and his crew can get this show on the road and the 'effed up US electorial system repaired that would be really cool. And I see a real chance of that happening here.

You should all get behind this folks. You can do it. It's not that hard.
Keeping my fingers crossed for this SuperPAC.

My 2 cents.

The updates seem unspectacular, but they're not neccesarly bad. The Flat UI look is a matter of taste, that's for sure ... and they've kept the green button, the only thing on the inmediate apple UI with no predictable behaviour what-so-ever ... seriously, I'm wondering why MS hasn't been making jokes about this during the last decade.

However, this Swift PL thing might just be something that turns out in Apples favor. The barrier of entry to native apps probably has been there for some people, and they probably want to prevent HTML5/CSS/JS Apps taking over too much of the market. Xcode 6 looks better than ever and if Apple carries on that way, MS Visual Studio might someday lose its 1st place in simple idiot-proof yet serious development - one of the rare things MS still has going for its ecosystem these days. If the FOSS community adopts Swift and offers compilers and apple isn't a douche about giving the FOSS community some support, I might even learn it. ... Until then I'm currently sticking with JS and FOSS languages though. Web is where everything is at right now and that's increasing - and it's not looking as if anything is going to change in that debt. anytime soon.

As for the whining about the anual release cycle of OS X: I've just recently updated from Snow Leopard to Maveriks, my first major upgrade in 3.5 years. All worked fine, including using the same TimeMachine with the new system. No one is forcing anyone to upgrade and I certainly won't until Yosemite or a successor to it is well established. In my experience apple systems are among those that keep their value the longest without an update.

Having an IT Background whilst doing PR and marketing can be great, if you are able to handle the discrepancy between talk and knowledge by most of your collegues and customers. Being the only guy in a crew of 25 that has done web development and knows versioning and *nix CLI stuff and can help writing usecases that are actually implementable in the given timeframe and budget and helping agency folks actually organize their work can be quite rewarding. And the pay is nice too.

Doing wordpress plugin hacks is actually quite bearable, as long as people don't expect you to do it every day all day and also give you other assignment, such as requirements analysis and such.

I'm doing that type of work right now and it feels good. I can deliver value, the team is glad to have me and I get to learn new trends and technologies as part of my job. Customer politics can be quite anyoing though, but that's what PMs and Bosses are for. :-)

My 2 cents.

I like all of them. Seriously. Each of the has distinct advantages that put it ahead of the others and basically 99% of all Foss projects in the field have good reasons for their existance.
I'd add Enlightenment, Windowmaker and Fluxbox to that list, and maybe awesome wm aswell.
I also like OS Xs GUi, especially the new maverics one. Notifications, taken from the mobile world and mission control (vrtual desktops and expose combined - very cool) are both very nice features..... Automatic rearangemnent of virtual desktops based on usage activated as default was dreamed up by some apple guy on crack though. Luckyly it's easy to turn off. And every desktop has that sort of crap defaults. KDE is great, but uses Windows defaults, f. i.

My 2 cents.

See the double post? You can thank beta for that. Mod this one down or turn it off if you are an editor, the one below is the final version.
No more beta for me.

Despite all hatred - and let's face it, PHP is a really strange phenomenon - this is why PHP continues to thrive. The PHP community gets from A to B by the most bizar reroutes across Z, Mary Poppins and f(x)=x^2e^x-2. PHP is a fractal of bad design, but they always seem to focus on the next issue that's simply in the way of getting the next real world job done. I've written a post on that a few weeks ago.

Them checking the performance of Wordpress (one of the large popular CMSes out there, with a really shitty architecture ... like most of its kind) as a benchmark for the foundation of a VM show how 'fast result' oriented the PHP community is. The idea itself of testing like this would seem insane to any serious developer, AFAICT.

Point in case for PHPs insanity that always seems to work out in a strange way:
I've fought it for over 12 years, but now I've finally given in and am working myself into Typo3, a big-league player in the world of PHP Web CMSes. Let me tell you: If you think Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla have an architecture that was designed by chimpansees (I should now, I've deployed Drupal and Joomla professionally and was on the Joomla Bugsquad), Typo3s has one that was designed by amobeas. With TypoScript - the T3 template and config language - they've got the textbook example of an inner platform (think PHP but non-turing complete for configuration and with magic numbers ... sort of like line-numbers, but not quite ... its really crazy ...). If PHP is a fractal of bad design, Typo3 classic is that ^2. It's very difficult to describe, you have to experience it for yourself to fully understand. It's like taking the red and the blue pill at the same time. Seriously.

Anyway, I'm veering off. The point is:
Knowing Typo3 is basically job security galore for any web developer in Germany. Period. I've agreed to dive into T3 and am right now scoring more than 60 Euros an hour. Being able to edit templates in the CMS Admin area isn't bad either. ... Although TypoScript is one of the strangest things I've seen in my 28 years of computing, I have to admit. Think of Typo3 as the Vi and Emacs of CMSes, all rolled into one. Yet there are over 2000 official Typo3 agencies here in Germany. Being an online agency basically means being a Typo3 agency over here. What do you say, it's what people want. T3 is a household brand, it has an official association, a neat website and the vibe of "big, complicated and professional" all over it. The customers want it, and they're willing to pay for deployment in T3. Who am I to complain?

Bottom line:
PHP is bad, and nobody cares. Its barrier of entry is basically non-existant, security issues be damned, and they have a slew of pointy-clicky stuff for the peddlers to sell to end-customers. All for free. The most succesful FOSS projects are written in it and if the PHP crew are going to stick to their crazy "make it work, then make it beautiful" approach, it's probably going to stay that way for a long time.

My 2 cents.

Despite all hatred - and let's face it, PHP is a really strange phenomenon - this is why PHP continues to thrive. The PHP community gets from A to B by the most bizar reroutes across Z, Mary Poppins and f(x)=x^2e^x-2. PHP is a fractal of bad design, but they always seem to focus on the next issue that's simply in the way of getting the next real world job done. I've written a post on that a few weeks ago.

Them checking the performance of Wordpress (one of the large popular CMSes out there, with a really shitty architecture ... like most of its kind) as a benchmark for the foundation of a VM show how 'fast result' oriented the PHP community is. The idea itself of testing like this would seem insane to any serious developer, AFAICT.

Point in case for PHPs insanity that always seems to work out in a strange way:
I've fought it for over 12 years, but now I've finally given in and am working myself into Typo3, a big-league player in the world of PHP Web CMSes. Let me tell you: If you think Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla have an architecture that was designed by chimpansees (I should now, I've deployed Drupal and Joomla professionally and was on the Joomla Bugsquad), Typo3s has one that was designed by amobeas. With TypoScript - the T3 template and config language - they've got the textbook example of an inner platform (think PHP but non-turing complete for configuration and with magic numbers ... sort of like line-numbers, but not quite ... its really crazy ...). If PHP is a fractal of bad design, Typo3 classic is that ^2. It's very difficult to describe, you have to experience it for yourself to fully understand. It's like taking the red and the blue pill at the same time. Seriously.

Anyway, I'm veering off. The point is:
Knowing Typo3 is basically job security galore for any web developer in Germany. Period. I've agreed to dive into T3 and am right now scoring more than 60Ã an hour. Being able to edit templates in the CMS Admin area isn't bad either. ... Although TypoScript is one of the strangest things I've seen in my 28 years of computing, I have to admit. Think of Typo3 as the Vi and Emacs of CMSes, all rolled into one. Yet there are over 2000 official Typo3 agencies here in Germany. Being an online agency basically means being a Typo3 agency over here. What do you say, it's what people want. T3 is a household brand, it has an official association, a neat website and the vibe of "big, complicated and professional" all over it. The customers want it, and they're willing to pay for deployment in T3. Who am I to complain?

PHP is bad, and nobody cares. Its barrier of entry is basically non-existant, security issues be damned, and they have a slew of pointy-clicky stuff for the peddlers to sell to end-customers. All for free. The most succesful FOSS projects are written in it and if the PHP crew are going to stick to their crazy "make it work, then make it beautiful" approach, it's probably going to stay that way for a long time.

My 2 cents.

The human brain is a neural network. The human body and nervous system, even sans brain, is an incredibly complex system which, in parallel, processes insane amounts of data in an instant. Lot's of what we percieve as emotion stems from complex interactions of various subsystems in it and how our consciousness reacts to them and percieves them and goes far beyond what a simple abstact logic-engine can process. The sensory input that our nervous provides for our consciousness is by orders of magnitude larger of what we today can feed into a computer with modern technical sensors, let alone process and interpret in a meaningful time. The way our neural network reacts to that is - if at all - very difficult to copy with todays processor technology.

I think it will still be quite long before humans are able to build any meaningful intelligence that equals their own. We're even having difficulties building robot vaccuumcleaners that are feasible without measurable extra programming and prepping work done by humans. And once they are, they will still suck at making coffee, raking the garden or giving an interview.

My 2 cents.

'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.'

Amen, brother, Amen!

PHP/MySQL is to CS what McD's is to french cuisine. Usually that is. Of course you can do proper development in PHP and proper DB design with MySQL, but you'll get queer looks from 99% of your collegues in the field and a rundown from your boss on why that internet thingummy isn't finished yet. Last winter I met a guy doing MySQL for a decade who didn't know foreign key constraints or their concept or what they were. He was my senior. He was the leaddev on a large data-driven project which was the core businessmodel of the company. Not joking. My braincells are dying as I type, just thinking back about it. This stuff is the norm in this field.

In a nutshell: If generic "pimp this crappy hack Wordpress (bizarely shitty base-architecture initiated by non-developers in the hayday, just like every other PHP/MySQL CMS out there) with this other crappy hack [generic shitty architecture webshop] with a crappy hack you piece together by yesterday" PHP/MySql Webwork is what you want to do, then more power to you. But then you should *not* waste your time in CS.

The list of WebDev requirements for a given job is long because it's idiots compiling the requirements for devs. If the list of technologies is enough to fill 3 expert positions, you do not want to work for the company in question, unless it is by carefully consulting the boss into a development and technology strategy that isn't complete bullshit. The latter you can only do after you've gained serious experience doing real world work.

Bottom line: If you are spending huge bucks getting a CS degree, you do *not* want to waste your time doing generic webdev in PHP and MySQL - unless as a college job to pay your bills that is.