I don't believe that "unemployed" in this sense means "without paycheck." I considered myself unemployed after graduating from college because I was making my money by catering. Not exactly why I went to college...
So, with that interpretation; I was making barely enough to pay what little bills I had, I was able to do one of the things on Seth's list: I taught myself HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, and PHP. I built a couple simple DB driven websites for a friend's band. I then started messing around with the Asterisk PBX and foolishly tried to sell one to a company in the area and fortunately was saved a lot of pain and was hired by them instead.
The whole time I was told that I should be trying to get this type of job or the other, but I was dead-set on ending up in doing something technology-based. I think it was a good 18 months before that happened.
I don't think Seth is saying anything revolutionary. A piece of paper alone doesn't make your a good hire. If they aren't biting with what you have, then work on making it into what they want to see. Over simply; stop wallowing, get over any feelings of entitlement that may be lingering, and do something productive.
You have an awesome point here and an excellent story.
One thing that Seth does not mention that may be worth considering is actual grad school. It is true that a master's will never replace experience, but it can help you get interviews and stand out in a stack of resumes. Certifications also help if you are interested in tech.
A certification will never get you a job (certainly not one you would really want), but it can help you get interviews. I say this as someone that was told point blank I got one of my earlier job interviews because of my certifications when I was starting out and who later used them to help weed out stacks of resumes when they were on my desk.
I'm putting my support behind this interpretation of the complaint.
I spent some time at a gov't subcontractor and the copy-paste version of cya was clear as day. Sometimes you'd see where search/replace failed and there would be other program names.
It was a mess and I'm fairly certain it was because of our size. Fighting a contract in court is an expensive and potentially reputation damaging prospect, so if you have significantly less resources at your disposal it is very likely that you won't be able to fight the baked in vagueness and contradiction.
Oh, that is interesting. It has been a while since I fiddled with... I think it was Fluxus.
It is one of those things were I became insanely fascinated and then suddenly found myself deluged under a ton of other fascinating things. Hopefully I'll be able to make it back to it at some point. Consolidating my art+music+coding together could open the window to doing something crazy like finishing a project...
I fall pretty dead on into the Level 1 category, though in certain areas I fall into the 2 and I think I managed a level 3 someplace... But, then I have < 2 years professional programming experience (proceeded by 3 years of management experience) and a masters in information systems, but even that is more management oriented.
Hopefully at some point I'll be able to make up for my terrible education in the areas of math and algorithms.
You aren't alone. If I had access to the book for my Project Management class, then I could give you exact stats for how terrible most estimates prove to be. The numbers are astounding (the studies are dated, but still adequately horrifying).
Even doubling your estimates is unlikely to have any real reflection on reality.
How far do you want to go though? You could look up COCOMO-II, I saw someone mention function-point analysis, then you could do monte carlo simulation...
The best way is to compare the task to previous similar tasks, but the trick is making sure that tasks are really similar enough to make an accurate comparison.
It might cut down on the volumes of resumes, but once culled down to actual potentials, I think the effect of the "niche language" is minimal. I spend my time hopping between a bunch of languages and I'm equally mediocre in all of them, but my friend who does the same is amazing in whatever language is thrown at him. I have yet to meet a really excellent programmer that can only program in one language (they might not be equally proficient in all of them).
When hiring for the small percentage of excellent programmers, I don't see language as a barrier. Sure, there will be spin up time, but you'll have that regardless. No one is experienced with every library, framework, or configuration. Adding in a new syntax might compound the issue, but I think that there is the definite potential for long-term productivity gains once the team is up to speed.
Sheesh, from the comments you'd think The Register is known for level-headed journalism.
It is a snarky, piss-taking, grease-trap that mixes news with commentary with little to no discretion or fear of violating "journalistic integrity." Once you understand that, it becomes a great source of news and entertainment.
Just to be contrary, I actually don't like the Aeron.
I sit in one 8+ hrs a day and I don't know if it doesn't fit me correctly (I'm 6'4") or what, but I'd prefer a different chair. Unfortunately the only other chair available to me is some terrible ikea chair that is wrong in ever possible way.
For as much as they cost, I thought they'd be way more comfortable.
They come in three sizes, A, B and C. Since you're 6'4" you need size C. You can tell the size of the chair you're sitting in by feeling under the top part. If you're in the wrong size chair, you're probably not going to like it. FYI.
Yep. If it doesn't fit you, it doesn't matter how much it costs. I'm only 6'2" and the Aeron C is a hair short for my legs, so I can well imagine that many 6'4" wouldn't like it.
Arguably VB for Applications could come in handy for almost anyone. Though interestingly most farmers, carpenters, and other handy-workers are more capable of performing arithmetic than the rest of the population. Still the power of a well-tuned spreadsheet is quite amazing.
Farmers are also a bad example these days, agriculture is totally high-tech.
I'm currently in a Masters program for Information Systems and one of my peers had the joy of having the professor of the class ask him why his answers and another student's were so astoundingly similar. Having worked with this gentleman a lot on the homework, this particular assignment even, I knew that he wasn't the one cheating. Apparently one of our classmates had asked to see his work to "verify" and instead had copied it. Granted, allowing someone to see your answers could be considered cheating, but one assumes that the other person isn't a complete imbecile and has actually done the work. I think that level of trust is even more likely at the graduate level when your peers are all well into adulthood and should know better.
We were both pretty ticked to find this out. I was mostly ticked because I had worked with the one for several hours trying to help him understand the questions and how to get to the answers (without ever giving him the answers) and so knew how hard he had worked to get that lab done. Having someone weasel his work off of him was just rather foul.
We both didn't understand his motivation either. Why pay close to $800/credit just to risk losing it as well as not getting anything except a piece of paper at the end. I know that paper can get you in the door, but it is also really obvious when you don't actually know your stuff.
This was on of the more technical of the classes. It dealt with web services.
So, with that interpretation; I was making barely enough to pay what little bills I had, I was able to do one of the things on Seth's list: I taught myself HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, and PHP. I built a couple simple DB driven websites for a friend's band. I then started messing around with the Asterisk PBX and foolishly tried to sell one to a company in the area and fortunately was saved a lot of pain and was hired by them instead.
The whole time I was told that I should be trying to get this type of job or the other, but I was dead-set on ending up in doing something technology-based. I think it was a good 18 months before that happened.
I don't think Seth is saying anything revolutionary. A piece of paper alone doesn't make your a good hire. If they aren't biting with what you have, then work on making it into what they want to see. Over simply; stop wallowing, get over any feelings of entitlement that may be lingering, and do something productive.