Posted on 02/29/2012 7:28:48 AM PST by SeekAndFind
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Unemployment is at 8.9%? Well, you sure don’t feel it here in the Bay Area.
For the technology-versed, there are plenty of jobs to be had. The only natural conclusion is that we need to mint more coders.
Facebook is not valued at $100 billion for nothing, and it’s not the only tech company that’s growing. The CBOE Technology Index (XX:ZOC) is hovering around its 10-year high, slowly making its way back to where it was in the wake of the new millennium. The current technological growth is real. The technology market is booming, and every corporation and startup is hiring. Hiring developers.
True, a lot of these recruiting wars are among the tech giants. Google Inc. (US:GOOG) engineers have been flocking to the new kids on the block, such as Facebook and Twitter. Well, with Facebook’s impending IPO you can’t blame them; they will indeed be reaping the fruits of their labor pretty soon. But though the war over the good engineers is fierce, it’s not merely the large companies like Apple Inc. (US:AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (US:MSFT) that are after the tech talent, but every tech company and startup. On top of that, pretty much every company in the world understands it needs an online, social and mobile presence. And the current talent pool is not even close to satisfying the demand.
This job market is unparalleled. In most industries, there are far more employees than employers. Here, it is quite the reverse. There are even speed-dating events between startups and developers. Companies will do anything to get a hold of (the good) developers.
In Silicon Valley, many people are starting to realize that their employment future lies in knowing how to code, and that it is quite possible to learn how, within months.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.marketwatch.com ...
I think your story is true for most of the country. However, the story is about Silicon Vally, and that’s a whole different environment. It’s ideal for technical people, especially coders. It’s easy to switch from one company to another, and even expected. The pay is excellent and the opportunities for gaining in demand experience are unmatched. If I had a child who wanted to be a coder, I’d recommend learning the skill by doing it, and then relocate to Silicon Valley. They have downturns too, but overall it’s going to be better than anywhere else.
“every company in the world understands it needs an online, social and mobile presence”
I do my best to avoid doing busioness with those kind of companies/people!
There aren’t that many jobs in software right now. India is still a threat and nobody is giving out raises (which is your first sign there aren’t that many jobs). Things are nice and stable, but we don’t need any cheap green competition, that’ll make things unstable.
Don’t knock cheating. In this day and age when 90% of your code is interacting with somebody’s API “cheating” (using various search engines to figure out which API call to make) is how code gets written. Good coders know somebody else has already made a kick butt wheel, no reason to go making another one.
Maybe so, but there's A LOT more to developing a usable application that simply coding. Frankly, AFAIC it's one of (if not THE) the biggest problem we have with software today. Most coders I've worked with do know how to code, but their design, debug and implementation skills stink. Beyond that, they don't understand how a computer works and therefore are missing vital pieces of information.
Yeah, many kids can code. But the vast majority of the time they can't do it well, and they don't necessarily know why it works. When it stops working, they're lost and usually are reduced to the debugging equivalent of shooting in the dark.
Absolutely. Cheaper coders can be gotten off shore too. A retrained person is not going to put in the time to get a project done like a fresh from college kid who's hungry to make his mark.
There's a reason 35-40 is considered over-the-hill in the industry.
>>Don’t knock cheating. In this day and age when 90% of your code is interacting with somebody’s API “cheating” (using various search engines to figure out which API call to make) is how code gets written. Good coders know somebody else has already made a kick butt wheel, no reason to go making another one.
Yeah, my wife is a PERL/SQL/CGI/etc. demon herself and she admits to the same while dogging those that write sloppy code.
I’m just getting into Javascript/Ruby/Python myself and what I meant was simply going to the q&a section of codecademy, copying the answer and pasting it instead of working the problem.
So much API coding is exactly that though. You go poking around the proper info source looking for the API call that does what you want, eventually you’ll find the function call with all their versions of the variable names, copy, paste, scroll up and define those variables, insert code to fill those variables and walla. A lot of the industry is monkey see monkey do.
I heard for C programmers plagerism is the greatest form of flattery.
bump for later
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