If you only pay peanuts, you will only attract monkeys. IBM, I’m looking at you. And if you insist on paying wadloads, you might get the fscknuts. Airbnb, I’m looking at you.
Peter van der Linden Don’t they depend alot on Indian software farms tho? There was a successful attempt to replace IBM lifers with Indian sub contractors..
I told my dad while I was still in high school in the late 80s that I wanted to major in computer science. He insisted that I get a degree in Physics. Since he was paying, I didn’t have much room to argue. Now, not only have I never had a job that took advantage of that knowledge, but I have also been unemployed for more than six years. Thanks dad! BTW, I excommunicated him in February 2007 for reasons I will not discuss here.
You should have all the same career choices with a Physics degree, that you would have with a Comp Sci degree, David Lazarus. Once you have your first job as a developer, people only care about your narrow job experience, not your degree major.
Peter van der Linden – That might be the case now, but it wasn’t in the early to mid 90s. It would have helped for me to pick up a couple of object oriented programming languages. Unfortunately, with the physics curriculum, I did not. I only picked up the nearly useless and quite convoluted Pascal. Now, I don’t have the necessary funds to retrain myself. I’m stuck in a very bad situation.
Ouch, sorry to hear that, David. If you want to retool, get on the mailing list of udemy, and udacity. They each have sales every few weeks, where in-demand mainstream courses like Python sell for $10 for a day or two (usual price $150). Just an idea.
If you knew Pascal at one time, Python will be within easy reach. Most of the algol-based languages have similar features and capabilities.
Peter van der Linden – I have the Udacity and edX apps, but I haven’t done much with them. I’ll take a look. Thanks. But a day or two? I’d think it would take quite a bit more than that to really learn anything. I also knew dBase IV which was much more useful than Pascal . . . at least for me. Being more like BASIC, dBase IV was much easier for me to learn.
The SALE lasts a day or two. You buy the course, and complete it on your own timeline, David.
You are right about the timeline. I teach python to experienced programmers, and the course runs for 11 weeks, meeting for 5 hours/week, and 5 hrs of lab time each week.
John Hardy Developer 
“Dear AirBnB: I’d like to work remotely from AirBnBs all around the world. I can Google StackOverflow like a champ. How ’bout it?”
LikeLike
John Jainschigg That would be far, far from the worst pitch I’ve ever heard! They might even go for it…
LikeLike
If you can work from home, you can work from Rome!
LikeLike
If you only pay peanuts, you will only attract monkeys. IBM, I’m looking at you. And if you insist on paying wadloads, you might get the fscknuts. Airbnb, I’m looking at you.
LikeLike
Peter van der Linden Don’t they depend alot on Indian software farms tho? There was a successful attempt to replace IBM lifers with Indian sub contractors..
LikeLike
Meng Shen Lim yes and this model is not working very well at the moment.
LikeLike
I told my dad while I was still in high school in the late 80s that I wanted to major in computer science. He insisted that I get a degree in Physics. Since he was paying, I didn’t have much room to argue. Now, not only have I never had a job that took advantage of that knowledge, but I have also been unemployed for more than six years. Thanks dad! BTW, I excommunicated him in February 2007 for reasons I will not discuss here.
LikeLike
You should have all the same career choices with a Physics degree, that you would have with a Comp Sci degree, David Lazarus. Once you have your first job as a developer, people only care about your narrow job experience, not your degree major.
LikeLike
Peter van der Linden – That might be the case now, but it wasn’t in the early to mid 90s. It would have helped for me to pick up a couple of object oriented programming languages. Unfortunately, with the physics curriculum, I did not. I only picked up the nearly useless and quite convoluted Pascal. Now, I don’t have the necessary funds to retrain myself. I’m stuck in a very bad situation.
LikeLike
Ouch, sorry to hear that, David. If you want to retool, get on the mailing list of udemy, and udacity. They each have sales every few weeks, where in-demand mainstream courses like Python sell for $10 for a day or two (usual price $150). Just an idea.
If you knew Pascal at one time, Python will be within easy reach. Most of the algol-based languages have similar features and capabilities.
LikeLike
Peter van der Linden – I have the Udacity and edX apps, but I haven’t done much with them. I’ll take a look. Thanks. But a day or two? I’d think it would take quite a bit more than that to really learn anything. I also knew dBase IV which was much more useful than Pascal . . . at least for me. Being more like BASIC, dBase IV was much easier for me to learn.
LikeLike
The SALE lasts a day or two. You buy the course, and complete it on your own timeline, David.
You are right about the timeline. I teach python to experienced programmers, and the course runs for 11 weeks, meeting for 5 hours/week, and 5 hrs of lab time each week.
LikeLike
Peter van der Linden – Ah, OK. That makes more sense. Thanks.
LikeLike