In this economy, You are pretty replaceble, according to what you say your skills are. So you are behind the eightball.

That may have been true at the beginning of the year, but that's not the case any longer. Of the nine developers in my department, four have found new jobs within the past month. Another has threatened to leave and accepted a counter-offer to stay with the company. People are sick of the BS they received from management over the past year and are ready, willing, and able to jump ship now. Expect a lot of churn within companies over the next several months until this all settles down.

Corporations need the roads so that their employees, customers, and suppliers can actually reach them. Corporations need the court system to enforce contracts. Corporations need the police and fire systems to keep their workplaces safe and secure. Corporations need electric, garbage collection, and sewage treatment. Corporations need highly trained employees educated by public schools and universities.

Corporations use a lot of services without paying for them. Your proposal would result in corporations paying higher taxes than they are today. To me that sounds good.

Swing, Java3D, Vector/ArrayList, StringBuilder/StringBuffer, Date handling, etc.

Look for low end testing jobs. Show enthusiasm even for minor things. State that yes, you are happy to work 80 hours a week for the privilege of having a crappy job in the industry of your choice. The point is to get experience so that later you can get the job in a company you actually like.

When it comes to development jobs, the main difference between entry level and 20 years of experience is salary.

It seems to me that when China has some of the best developed infrastructure in the world, it really can't be considered a developing country any more. It is developed. Sure, maybe not all areas of China are fully developed, but you could state the same thing about any country, including the US.

Bullshit. You are implying that laid off workers some how deserve to be laid off. There are plenty of companies out there who either went out of business or who have destroyed whole divisions to improve the bottom line. The developers at these companies are laid off through no fault of their own. Many are completely employable and, in fact, were employed up until recently before their business managers ran their company or their division into the ground.

Software development isn't rocket science. Connecting a front end to a database through a business layer doesn't take "the best and the brightest". What I found when I interviewed people is that the vast majority could do the job just fine. The reason candidates got turned down was because they didn't fit into our corporate culture. Typically, some manager got a hair up his ass about a turn of phrase that didn't sit well with him, so they shitcanned the candidate. Right now, companies can afford to be incredibly petty in their hiring decisions. And that is exactly how they're acting.

The books chosen in college courses are typically not of the "Learn Visual Basic in 21 Days" variety. They cover algorithms, data structures, hardware architecture, OS design, database design, etc. These are general topics whose basic theories haven't changed in some cases for over 50 years. These are topics you use over an entire career, not just until the latest technology fad gets stale like VB, Pascal, Cobol, etc. They are meant to give you the theoretical underpinning so that you understand why any computing technology operates the way it does.

What I've noticed is that the developers who dismiss college and those "very old books" is that they have a superficial knowledge on maybe a few pieces of technology. They don't really understand how everything fits together and works. Although, they may be decent code monkeys. However, if they run into any truly difficult issue that isn't covered in their "Learn Visual Basic in 21 Days" book, then they're SOL due to their lack of understanding in the fundamentals. You have to truly understand a difficult problem before you can fix it.

Further, as soon as the technology they know gets replaced, they are the first out a job because they don't have that deep understanding to enable them to transition to new ways of developing. Their future is the same as the Cobol programmers of today. The best they can do is pick up a different "Learn the Latest Fad in 21 Days" book and start over as a junior programmer in a different programming job.

Ok, troll. I entertained your bullshit response once, I suppose I can do it again.

You want to talk about reading comprehension. How about you tell me when I'm supposed to program in my spare time WHEN I HAVE NO SPARE TIME? I made the lack of that time plainly obvious to anyone in my writing, except of course you.

If you want to hire someone who has copious amounts of free time such that they CAN program outside of work, then feel free to do so. You're the idiot who's going to have to live with inexperienced engineers. The reason for that is also in my previous response in case you're too stupid to have comprehended that either.

>>If you think I should be spending all my free time coding after putting in more than 40 hours of coding at work, then you have no understanding of work-life balance.

Well no one is saying that, but nice strawman.

From what I see, people are saying that. That's not a strawman at all. You want people who put in 45-70 hours of professional time per week writing software code to then go home and write more software code in their free time. There's only 168 hours in a week. 56 of that should be used for sleeping. I spend 7 hours a week driving to/from work. I spend about 10 hours a week eating. I spend 3 hours a week in the shower and getting dressed. So, after work that leaves me with what, 47-22 hours for everything else. My daughter and wife easily take up the majority of that time. That leaves me with little time for say watching a movie, playing a game, or simply vegging out. You'd like me to spend that writing even more code than I already put out? Let me reiterate: you have no concept of work-life balance. And again, that's not a strawman.

The point is not that someone should spend all their time coding after work, the point is they should, at some point have demonstrated that they do like programming/design/whatever enough to do something on their own time. That might be 10 years ago in college, that might be a couple hours every month on something trivial.. It doesn't matter, the point is when someone is openly hostile to the very concept of programming after work, they are likely not the best candidate when you're hiring.

Fine. I programmed in my free time back when I had enormous amounts of free time in elementary, junior high, and high school. I've only sporadically done that during and after college. Since I've had my daughter, I haven't done any programming in my free time. And if you ask me about that, then I will be hostile to the mere concept of it.

You think I'm a bad candidate because of that? If not, then fine. Go bugger off. If so, then we have issues.

Anyone with a significant amount of time in software engineering is going to go get a life at some point. Your senior engineers, your architects, your people with 20 years of experience aren't going to be doing code 24/7. If you just hire people who code 24/7, then you're only going to get the young and inexperienced. Maybe that's what you like. But, those aren't going to be the people who help you successfully finish your projects.

Passion is great. That's what makes companies of all types hire inexperienced people. However, passion is no substitute for experience and the ability to consistently produce high-performance, bug-free, maintainable code that meets business needs on time and under budget. With experience comes people with real lives, who don't like coding 24/7.

For the benefit of the childless people:

After I put in my time at work, which is never just 40 hours a week, I come home and have about 2 hours to spend with my young daughter before she goes to bed. Those two hours includes dinner and bath time. If I don't spend that time with her, then her mother comes after me. After she's in bed, I'm at the very end of my day. My brain is mush. I have another 2 hours before I need to sleep. Even if I were capable of programming more, I have zero interest in actually doing so. That is my time to watch tv, veg out, recharge, and catch up with my wife.

Weekends are family time. Either there's a family birthday, or one of my daughter's friends birthdays, or we're going out of town, or there's something else my wife scheduled, or whatever. Programming for fun is about the last thing on my mind. Why? I've already gotten my programming fix from working during the week. Further, my family takes up what little free time I possess. Finally, even if I were able to find the time to sit and code, there is no quiet space in my house where I would be uninterrupted for any length of time by either my daughter or my wife.

If you think I should be spending all my free time coding after putting in more than 40 hours of coding at work, then you have no understanding of work-life balance. People can not live a life of constant work or attention to a single task. You do that and you're all but asking to burn out. Me? I'd like to still be in this industry in 20 years, thank you very much. I don't want to be diabetic at 35 from a complete lack of physical inactivity. I don't want to be single at 40 from ignoring my wife. I don't want a heart attack at 45 from all the stress of work and no free time. I'm in this for a long-haul.

And if you want to be in this industry 20 years from now, I suggest you chill out, even if just a little.

First off, where do I get this mythical job where I can work 9 to 5? In all the software jobs I've had, putting in only 40 hours a week was not an option and most likely to get you fired. Many, many people easily put in 60-70 hours a week. When is this free time we're supposed to have for conferences, contributing to open source, blogging, and twitter? I'm doing damn if I attend the local Java Users Group. And they only meet once a month!

The point of the article is that people have families and real lives. With all the time I already spend coding, I would completely burn out were I to spend my limited free time outside of work also coding. Go ask someone with 20 years of experience in development what they do for fun. You'll find they don't spend all of their time in front of a computer. Why is that? The type of person who does nothing but code ends up burning out much earlier in their career and leaves the industry.

Frankly, I find your opinions about hiring both naive and stupid. You want people so passionate about programming that they do nothing else and they care about nothing else. Your perfect job candidate is someone with no family, no friends, no kids, no life, and no balance. The problem is that people aren't meant to live that like. And most people can't live like that for more than a few years.

Your interview process doesn't find the best people. It finds the people who are mostly likely to burn out in a few years.

This article isn't anything new. The GMAT already has a computer ranking the written assessment section of their test. Supposedly, it checks "over 50 structural and linguistic aspects, such as idea organization, syntactic variety, and subject analysis."

http://www.cybergmat.com/en/GMAT_Scores

Seriously. I can't understand why anyone would expect a decent economic discussion on a semi-technical website full of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, Ron Paul anti-government Libertarians, and other zealots who interpret forceful opinion as actual fact.

Economics IS a difficult subject to understand, let alone interpret correctly. Even professional economists who do nothing but study the economy often get things wrong. Yet, everyone talks about the economy as if they are the expert and they actually know what's going on, even if they've had zero education on the subject.

Sorry dude, a degree from DeVry is not the same as one from MIT. Neither is the education the same.

Big name universities are typically higher ranked than no-name universities for a reason - they are better schools. Yes, that means you have to compete to get in. But, that also means that your classmates are going to be more competent. So, your professors can go through topics faster than if they had to stop every five seconds to explain something in excruciating detail so the slowest person in the class can understand. Also, your professors are going to be higher quality. That means they can actually cover advanced areas that no-name schools can't.

In short, that means you learn a lot more and get a better education.