Notes from a Desi Geek

Here’s an excellent rant from Katie Lucas about role/expectations from developers/managers in IT industry.

———————- Rant Start ——————————-
“Why would you want a great developer to become a manager in the first place?”

Well, this particular developer is becoming a manager for the following reason:

Job requirements for engineers have an alphabet soup attached to them. I’ve been rejected for jobs because the version of Sybase I last used is too old, and this is for a role where SQL isn’t even the core requirement. The SQL standard hasn’t changed, but agents can’t figure that out - they just want people who’ve used the latest version of Sybase.

I get turned down for UNIX dev roles because the version of VB I’ve used isn’t the latest — because they add a VB background to all the dev position requirements, and it’s got the be the latest version of VB.

I’ve just got bored of having my technical skills outdated every six months. If I take my eye off the ball and Microsoft announces a technology and I don’t immediately ram it into my CV or pick the wrong job, a year later I’m near unemployable.

I’m fed up of my career being this bizarre stamp collecting exercise where I get judged on how many of the acronyms I’ve been near lately and not whether I’ve gained any deep experience in anything.

Frankly, I’m getting too old to play this stupid game anymore. No-one wants to hire a software engineer with a decade of experience to start work in C#. They’ll train 2 year experienced people to use C#, but if you’ve got more experience than that, you better show up with experience in C# because any other experience you have is irrelevant.

I’m tired of my entire experience being torn up and thrown away every couple of years because agents and HR departments can’t figure out that a developer who can write C++ can also write C# and Java with very little training — but what can you expect? These are guys who think Visual C++ isn’t the same language as C++.

I looked at being a tech writer. I quite like writing — I’ve got a background in creative writing, it’s something I quite like, and I’ve done tech writing around IT projects before. Unfortunately, although I’ve written stuff and studied writing and so on, I’m not qualified to be a tech writer because the version of PageMaker I last used is too old… I suddenly have these visions of people saying to a re-incarnated Dickens “Look, you’ve only used quills. What the hell kind of writer are you? We’re only considering people with experience with Biros version 4 or above.”

I’ve noticed that things like “Project manager” experience doesn’t get thrown away in the same way. No-one says “Oh, but that was a year ago. We manage projects COMPLETELY differently now. That experience doesn’t count”, whereas they do with, say, SQL. It’s like SQL is a whole new langauge with each version of Oracle.

Apparently, being a successful software engineer currently means that you pick a tech, ram some experience on your CV and then bail after a couple of years before that becomes “old tech”. Every couple of years you need to pick a technology (which probably hasn’t actually shipped at that stage) and bet on it. And you must bet right every time.

You never gain deep experience because that would mean missing an acronym off your CV and who knows when you’d need the acronym.

I’ve been offered two jobs; one will get me a PM background. One will get me a bundle of technologies. The latter is a good role, but how can I tell if those technologies will leave me employable in two years time? They might be completely outdated by then and useless and irrelevant like my experience with SQL on Oracle 8.

It’ll get me a couple of years of Java, for example. But how can I tell if Java will still be an employable skill in 2007? I mean, I’ve got Java at the moment, but no hope of a job using it, because I don’t also have J2EE and anyway the Java I did was 1.1 and everyone’s after people with experience in newer versions…

Apparently I have no worthwhile experience to show for 10 years in the business because everything’s the wrong version or doesn’t have the right condiments or is just a tool no-one uses anymore. Any actual background I’ve got in things like “being an engineer who gets software written” is irrelevant. It’s like assessing a builder on whether they’ve used Black and Decker tools and not on whether their houses are still standing. Or like assessing Dickens’ writing skills by the fact he used quills and not biros.

Soft skills like PM don’t get outdated by FUD from Microsoft. They don’t come with version numbers which can drift out of date.

Really, they’re the only alternative if you’re the sort of person who can’t assume you’ll bet on the “right” technology every two years for the rest of your life.

So this developer is becoming a manager just so that I can start building an experience history to remain employable with, because I’m fed up of fighting hard to keep even a couple of years of “relevant” background on my CV.

[As a complete side note, reading the job pages in the paper I came across an advert for a "housing policy officer". Now, bear in mind 'm used to adverts which say "Reqd Skills; C++, UNIX, Windows, VB, MFC, ASP, STL, ATL, Multithreaded, C#, .net, CVS, ClearCase "

This one said "You should have a higher-second or first degree and a track record of generating effective housing policies."

Wow. Pay was pretty much a match for being a software engineer.]

———————- Rant Over ——————————-
[Note: I could not obtain Katie's permission to reproduce this post as I do not have her contact details. But I am assuming it is okie to reproduce this post on my blog as original post was in public domain and I am giving the credit to her as the author of this excellent post.]

It’s sad, but that’s the state of IT industry right now.
I have had my own share of interaction with recruiter and I get thoroughly pissed off when a recruiter dismisses my skills by saying that I know XHTML but not DHTML! That I don’t have 2.5 years of experience in .NET technologies! [C'mon, .NET was adoption started only around 2 years back] Recruiter, who doesn’t even know difference between DOC format and PDF format, will toss up my resume in trash just because I used ASP.NET with VB.NET instead of C#. I wonder what could be the solution to this problem.

Over at JoS forums, there is a thread titled ‘What’s the fascination with MySQL?’, where poster asks why MySQL is so popular when there are better technical alternatives. I think following are few of the main reasons why MySQL is so popular:

1. Native Windows support.

This is a HUGE plus. Though I develop for LAMP platform, I actually use Windows for writing all of my code and finally deploy it on *nix. You can install Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl on Windows box and write complete app which can be deployed on Linux by just copying the folder tree. Heck, there are numerous Windows packages [Nusphere, FirePages, WAMP comes to my mind] which allow you install and configure Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl in 5 minutes flat.

2. EXCELLENT administration/development utility like phpMyAdmin.



Anyone who has used MySQL, has used phpMyAdmin utility at least once. I believe that phpMyAdmin has played a significant role in MySQL’s adoption. It’s web based, installs in seconds and lets you control almost every aspect of your data in MySQL. Dare I say that if it was not for phpMyAdmin, MySQL would not have been so popular.

3. Lack of ‘enterprise’ features like transactions/triggers.

Yes, the lack of ‘enterprise’ features has actually been a PLUS for MySQL adoption. If you look closely at how people use MySQL database, you will quickly find that they need triggers nor transactions. This means that user’s learning curve is short. [And in case you are savvy enough to need triggers/transactions/foreign keys, you will not use MySQL anyways.]

There are other reasons why MySQL is popular but I think the above three are the key reasons.

Robby made a great post about geek culture and values. Quoting him:

This discussion is about *culture* of software more than it is about the *profession* of software. Most software people (especially those who hang out here) are passionate about their job. That passion translates into many realities (or at least semi-accurate stereotypes), including 70-hour work weeks, lack of bathing, respect for hacks, working at low wages, etc.

Other kinds of people in other fields, whether professional or service industries, seem to have a clearer work/life seperation. My girlfriend is a secretary, and she works hard and cares about her job, but she doesn’t continue to think about secretarial techniques at home nor argue passionately for different secretarial models at JoelOnAdministration.com until 5 AM.

The geek culture is both a great boon to our efforts and a great boondoggle. We owe much of the world’s technological advancement to Wizards Who Stayed Up Late. While other folks were selling cars, drinking beer and going to the gym, we forged the Internet, created the cellphone, and built Google.

Unfortunately, as seriously as we take ourselves, geek culture has spent practically nothing on PR. Few people outside the community understand or appreciate what we do; consequently they fear and disrespect software and software people. And because we build object libraries for fun (profit? oh yeah, need to eat…), we tend to be less organized about developing methodologies that meet precise business needs.

Our culture needs help, so that people know what we do and why we do it, so that we’re respected like other professionals, and so that loving what you do is the norm rather than the exception.

See the complete thread.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s amazing to find the perception of non technical people about us (geeks). Most of them seem to think that we make *easy* money. They simply can not see the fact that our job is (amazingly) complex. And as geeks, we have completely failed to convey the same. And unless that changes, I don’t think software engineers will get the respect they deserve.

I don’t think any of my readers (are there any?) got affected by the fact that my site was down for 2 days. But none the less, sorry for the interruption as I moved my site from JodoHost to TextDrive. I have quite a few interesting stuff to post about, so stay tuned!