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.