Jonathan Hendry

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since Aug 16, 2003
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Recent posts by Jonathan Hendry

http://www.courier-journal.com/business/news2004/04/03/F3-jobs03-4460.html
"The only sector losing jobs was information services, where companies cut 1,000 jobs."
19 years ago
Mark: "I am surprised you can't find a job. Although the market is down, many Wall St firms are hiring these days now that the market is up. Where are you located?"
Connecticut, but not anywhere that would be convenient to commute to Stamford or New York. It's about 2+ hours each way from where I am. For the first year of my, uh, time in the wilderness, I was in Chicago.
20 years ago
Matt,
I worked 3 years on money market trading systems at a large bank, which included a course of training on the banking industry. Not exactly an MBA, but it's more than just working on code without any clue about what's going on in the underlying business. I've also worked on other trading-type software, and worked in the investment bank environment, allowing
a certain amount of osmotic learning.
But the fact of the matter is, knowledge of the business is not enough. If you don't have the specific technical skills and experience they want, they won't be interested. (There may be exceptions for the top 0.5% MIT grads. Most people don't fit that description.)
I'd actually bet that someone with specific technical experience, but no business experience, would most often get hired rather than someone with business experience and less technical experience.
This is because an organization will have lots of people around with business knowledge, from whom you can pick things up. Some large organizations, like the bank I worked for, will have an established training program to teach new employees about the business. But with technical skill, there are fewer people from whom you could learn on the job, and formal training programs are less common, because the skills are too specialized. (A course about banking would be useful for employees in many departments. A course about SQL would be useful for a much smaller group of employees, so it's better to just hire people with that skill.)
It's easier to grab someone and ask them to explain Eurodollar interest rates over lunch, than it is to get a coworker to teach you C++ or Struts.
Generally, in job ads, experience in the field of business is listed as "a plus", not a requirement.
20 years ago
What happens to CS grads?
Well, there are these crackers the government makes, to feed the unemployed.
They're called Soylent Green.
20 years ago
"More than one responder is claiming over 20 months out of work and counting"
20 months? Pah. It'll be 36 for me next March.
In hindsight, it appears I had about six months to find a job. Six months was September, 2001, and we all know what happened then. Job listings didn't exactly perk up.
At this point, I'm like a fuzzy container of yogurt that's been hiding in the back of the fridge, with a label on it "Use By 9/01".
Worse, because of my skill set and experience, which is on an oddball platform, I'm not even a yogurt flavor a company would find tasty. I'm prune yogurt. With fur.
And a little bit bitter.
20 years ago
Things seemed to pick up a smidge in late summer, here in Connecticut, but have dried up again.
It's probably not a good sign that Monster.com is showing as many "WORK AT HOME!!!" bogus jobs as there are real jobs, and sometimes more.
Kevin wrote: "All I know is the great depression actually ended at some point"
Yeah, I think it was ended by something called "World War 2".
I hope *this* slump can be ended without genocide and nuclear explosions.
20 years ago
I'm trying to come up with a project to use to learn Struts. I have a kernel of an idea, but I'm not sure it's a good Struts app.
What I'd like to write is a web interface for the contents of the Dr. Dobbs CD, with searching provided by a lucene index. The CD itself comes with a web interface, but its search engine uses an applet, which is kinda crappy.
I'm not sure how to do it as a Struts application that would be complicated enough to be worth doing - it seems like I'd only need a search page and results pages. So I might need to come up with a different idea that would use Struts more. This really isn't the kind of thing that needs a lot of state passed around.
Anyone have any ideas on how to make it more Struts-worthy, or should I just do something else?
The Dobbs project appeals because there's all that content ready to use, whereas other projects (frex, a book catalog) would require lots of data entry to become useful, so wouldn't be very interesting.
Thanks!
20 years ago
Regarding the database interface that's provided, is
that the interface that has to be used for communication
with the client?
Or, could the server class expose a different interface to the client,
and talk to the database interface itself?
(ie, client -> server -> database_interface)
Or, er, *should* the database interface be the interface used
by the client (in whole or in part)?
(ie, client -> database_interface)
Thanks
Would it be a lie to say you've been "consulting" during a period of unemployment, though you've not had any consulting work during that period and only been open to the possibility of contract work?
I think so, which is why I've not filled the gap in my resume with 'consulting'.
20 years ago
I think you mean Codd's Rules of what a database must support to be relational.
That might help you with Google.
[ September 17, 2003: Message edited by: Jonathan Hendry ]
20 years ago
Mark Herschberg writes: "Consider nursing. Evidence indicates that it is well worth the investment. How about doctors? The same holds true. What about the medical profession as a whole? It may not be true. Certain pockets can be outsourced, e.g. certain lab work, x-ray techs (I forget the correct term here). So what we see in hte medical field is the some jobs are still with the educational cost and some jobs do not."
That's only going to be true as long as there's sufficient revenue to pay for those positions. I'm not sure if that's a good long-term bet.
"Some software jobs will be outsourced (code monkeys), some will not be (e.g. domain modeling)."
I don't think it's quite that clear cut. I think non-codemonkey jobs like domain modeling will be outsourced, even though it may not work very well to do so. People in Bangalore can get MBAs and learn about problem domains too. I don't see any inherent obstacle to those jobs being sent offshore.
20 years ago
My first programming job, a college co-op job, was with a small financial software firm with three employees, whose NeXT workstations were named Godel, Escher, and Bach. (And a Sun fileserver named tumbolia).
I was fortunate in having worn a geeky Escher tie at my interview. ;^)
20 years ago
Mark Herschberg writes: " have you looked at the difference in earning potential over a lifetime for those with a BS and those without?!?! It's huge."
It *has been* huge. If good-paying skilled jobs keep going overseas, there will be less of a difference, and it'll be harder to pay off a BS. (It's already hard to pay off a BS for many majors.)
All those people who've lost manufacturing jobs and textile jobs had a definite advantage in that they didn't go $40,000 in (bankruptcy-immune) debt to learn their now-vanished field.
20 years ago
Just to confuse things, I read "Indian Visa abusers" as "abusers of Indian Visas", meaning companies or outsourcing firms abusing the US visa laws to bring in Indian developers.
(Linguistically, that still isn't quite right, because "Indian Visa" sounds like a visa to work in India, which isn't the issue.)
Frankly, I doubt most Indian programmers are in any position to abuse the visa system by themselves. Realistically, they're at the mercy of the company that brings them into the US. If the individual programmer were violating the terms of their visa, on their own, then that gets into the problem of undocumented workers, which is another problem entirely and goes well beyond the H1B/L1 visa issue. I'm not aware of a big problem of Indian immigrants ducking the terms of their visa and going in to some kind of underground labor market of illegal alien software developers.
There may be people from India in management at these companies that abuse the visa system, but caucasian Americans are quite capable of doing it themselves.
20 years ago
There's also the recent book, The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. The class is defined as "those whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content"
One of the things he talks about are the factors that draw this Creative Class to a particular area. Why did high tech spring up so much more in Austin, TX, rather than Dallas, or Houston?
20 years ago