On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:39:06 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>> You could try submitting your resumé to Novell, RedHat and the likes.
> 
> ...are either of those companies still going? I thought Novell went
> under years ago, and RedHat vanished off the face of the earth once they
> realised that trying to sell Linux services isn't profitable.

Who do I work for again? ;-)

And RedHat is currently selling more Linux than Novell.  Turns out 
customers *want* service contracts for things their business depends on.

Jim

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> But this has basically been my experience in every group project I've ever 
> worked on. I've never met any other students who can actually program / do 
> advanced math / comprehend complicated logic / etc. Basically I'm always 
> the only guy in the group with any kind of technical skill.

Maybe you should have gone to a better University with more people at your 
level?  I can't remember exactly how old you are, did you have to go through 
the whole University application thingy where you supply your predicted 
A-level grades and get made offers from different places?  DId you choose 
somewhere that offered you really low grades or what?  You seem to have been 
quite mismatched with the course.

> (Although saying that... I *did* give some guy on my college course the 
> code to my Mandelbrot generator. Actually I didn't *give* him the code, I 
> just sat next to him and told him what to write. He seemed to be a 
> half-competent programmer. That is, I didn't have to tell him character by 
> character what to type, and he made lots of alterations after I went away 
> which didn't break the code...)

I think some people are just destined not to program, we had a 4x2 hour time 
slot to do some C++ practical, which anyone who had ever made a simple 
program with a few functions could have done easily in the first 2 hours. 
Yet there were 1 or 2 people who were still there right at the end 
struggling with the whole concept.

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> Well, as I say, I started by wiring up one NAND gate, a pair of switches 
> and an LED. What *should* have happened is that the LED lights up unless 
> you simultaneously press both switches. What *actually* happened was 
> completely different. :-/

How did you wire up the switches to the inputs? You can't just use a 
connect/disconnect switch to the V+ line, because when it is disconnected 
the input will be "floating" and probably float high.  You need to either 
add a pull-down resistor or wire up a switch to connect between 0V and V+ 
alternately.

How did you wire up the LED? LEDs operate depending on current, not voltage, 
so you usually need a resistor in series to fix the current.  Did you also 
check that the IC could source/sink enough current to drive the LED?

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:39:06 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> 
>>> You could try submitting your resumé to Novell, RedHat and the likes.
>> ...are either of those companies still going? I thought Novell went
>> under years ago, and RedHat vanished off the face of the earth once they
>> realised that trying to sell Linux services isn't profitable.
> 
> Who do I work for again? ;-)

Uh... you tell me?

> And RedHat is currently selling more Linux than Novell.  Turns out 
> customers *want* service contracts for things their business depends on.

OK. So why have I not heard anything about RedHat for several years? 
Have they gone into some kind of specialised market or something? Once 
upon a time you used to hear of them quite a bit, and now they seem 
awful quiet...

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>> Yeah - maybe I should get said to write open source software?
>>
>> Oh, wait...
> 
> http://www.novell.com/careers
> 
> Getting paid for developing open source does happen.

Yeah, it does - just not particularly often. ;-)

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>> Videogames sell a lot, but don't employ nearly as much as such huge an 
>> industry should. 
> 
> It's really not that huge an industry. Even software in general is 
> "niche" compared to, for example, construction or banking.

My sister is an accountant. (Not even a fully-qualified accountant yet.)

One week, they tell her on Monday "oh, by the way, we don't need you any 
more. Goodbye."

That Friday, she's all moaning because she has FIVE FIRM JOB OFFERS and 
SHE CAN'T DECIDE which one to pick! o_O

As in, it took her less than 3 business days to find (presumably more 
than) 5 jobs, apply to them, go to (at least) 5 interviews, actually get 
accepted and get 5 firm job offers.

WTF? I've been trying to get a new job for, like, 2 years, and so far 
I've been to *one* job interview.

On the other hand... every company on Earth needs at least one 
accountant. (This is a legal requirement. IIRC, it's something like if 
you employ more than 6 people, one of them must be an accountant.) Big 
companies need them. Small companies need them. Companies in every 
sector of commerce need them. EVERYBODY needs accountants. If you're an 
accountant, you can work for anybody, in principle.

MOST companies need salesmen. Not all of them, but most of them.

Almost no companies need programmers. MOST companies need computers and 
need software, but MOST companies buy software rather than making it. If 
you're a programmer, you can ONLY work for companies that write 
software, or companies that are large enough to have an internal 
department that writes software.

That's a pretty small market. And obviously, I'm just some random 
computer nerd. There are people out there with actual *talent*. Why is 
some company gonna hire me when they could hire one of the talented guys?

Also, apparently there's some kind of global recession thing happening 
at the moment, so people are currently firing rather than hiring...

>> I don't know, I have a feeling such huge niches do not employ people 
>> by advertising jobs through conventional channels. 
> 
> Most jobs requiring competence don't advertise. It's mostly 
> word-of-mouth.

...and since I don't know anybody, it's not going to be me.

> Plus, it seems most software places are utterly uninterested in someone 
> who could learn to do the job quickly but who don't already know all the 
> skills required. I haven't quite figured that out.  "We need someone who 
> knows Java 1.5.7.  You only list Java 1.5.4 on your resume."

Depends.

SOME people want somebody who can definitely do the job RIGHT NOW. They 
are only interested in what technologies you know (or claim to know) 
right now, and won't look at anything beyond that.

SOME people want somebody who can learn stuff. Some of them are 
explicitly not interested in what you know now, they just want somebody 
who can learn. (E.g., I suspect if you applied to work for Google, what 
they'd be most interested in is that you can learn Crazy New Gizmo X 
really quickly next time they roll out something new.)

Unfortunately, at the moment I'm having trouble finding either kind of 
employer... :-(

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scott wrote:
>> Well, as I say, I started by wiring up one NAND gate, a pair of 
>> switches and an LED. What *should* have happened is that the LED 
>> lights up unless you simultaneously press both switches. What 
>> *actually* happened was completely different. :-/
> 
> How did you wire up the switches to the inputs? You can't just use a 
> connect/disconnect switch to the V+ line, because when it is 
> disconnected the input will be "floating" and probably float high.  You 
> need to either add a pull-down resistor or wire up a switch to connect 
> between 0V and V+ alternately.
> 
> How did you wire up the LED? LEDs operate depending on current, not 
> voltage, so you usually need a resistor in series to fix the current.  
> Did you also check that the IC could source/sink enough current to drive 
> the LED?

.......see, now, I went into digital electronics to precisely to *avoid* 
this kind of craziness! >_<

Take a look at a diagram such as this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Full-adder.svg

How many resistors can you see? Because I count NONE!

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scott wrote:
>> But this has basically been my experience in every group project I've 
>> ever worked on. I've never met any other students who can actually 
>> program / do advanced math / comprehend complicated logic / etc. 
>> Basically I'm always the only guy in the group with any kind of 
>> technical skill.
> 
> Maybe you should have gone to a better University with more people at 
> your level?  I can't remember exactly how old you are, did you have to 
> go through the whole University application thingy where you supply your 
> predicted A-level grades and get made offers from different places?  DId 
> you choose somewhere that offered you really low grades or what?  You 
> seem to have been quite mismatched with the course.

Just for the record: I have never taken any A-levels. I only took 3 
GCSEs. I got a B and two Cs. This are unprecidentedly high grades for 
the school I went to. (Remember, I went to a school for mentally 
retarded people.)

I went to DeMontfort simply because it's the only university in the city 
of Milton Keynes. (Gotta love the way they shut down the year I 
graduated though! Apparently some folks had to transfer to some other 
random city to actually finish their courses...)

When I mentioned this to some guy in the local LUG, he goes "What? 
DeMontfort? That's not a university, it's an old polytechnic that 
*thinks* it's a university now." I have no idea what he's talking about 
- presumably some kind of cultural thing that would be over my head...

FWIW, my statements above were about college too. The class I was in 
contained a bunch of "lads" who were more interested in getting drunk 
and arguing about Cast vs Blur than actually learning stuff. Bunch of 
losers they were! I still remember the weekly paper fights. Oh, and the 
C'paddy races. (The objective being to say the word "c'paddy" the most 
times in 60 seconds.) Like, WTF?

> I think some people are just destined not to program, we had a 4x2 hour 
> time slot to do some C++ practical, which anyone who had ever made a 
> simple program with a few functions could have done easily in the first 
> 2 hours. Yet there were 1 or 2 people who were still there right at the 
> end struggling with the whole concept.

Yes. A lecturer once told me that grades for programming assignments 
show a curios bimodel distribution. There are people who "get it", and 
find the assignments ridiculously easy. They walk away with A-stars and 
better. And there are people who do not "get it". They struggly to write 
anything.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, during my entire degree I kept 
having random Asian people come up to me and beg me to "fix" their 
programs. Quite how they knew my name is beyond me...

Just once, I did in fact take a look at one guy's Java program. Except 
that... it wasn't Java. It had Java keywords in it, and the syntax was 
sort-of reminiscent of Java. But it was gibberish. COMPLETE GIBBERISH. I 
couldn't even take a wild guess at what it was *supposed* to do! The guy 
claimed he just needed me to make "a few small fixes" - but this text 
file was quite clearly not removely compilable, never mind runnable.

Clearly, the only way to "fix" this code would begin with deleting all 
the currently existing code.

I am unsure as to whether the guy in question was so clueless that he 
honestly believed that it wouldn't take much to fix this, or whether he 
was just trying to sweet-talk me. How the HELL he expected the person 
marking the work to believe that he wrote it is beyond me - unless he 
really did think he had it almost right to start with...

Seriously. What. The. Hell.

But it seems that to some people, Java is just words on a page. Only a 
few people can see beyond that and comprehend the conceptual constructs 
that those words denote.

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> How many resistors can you see? Because I count NONE!

Sure, but that circuit does not show how you generate the inputs A,B,Cin or 
how to connect the output to an LED.

Both of which require some basic knowledge of analogue electronics.

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> Just for the record: I have never taken any A-levels. I only took 3 GCSEs. 
> I got a B and two Cs. This are unprecidentedly high grades for the school 
> I went to. (Remember, I went to a school for mentally retarded people.)

OOC why did you go to that school, you don't seem mentally retarded!

> FWIW, my statements above were about college too. The class I was in 
> contained a bunch of "lads" who were more interested in getting drunk and 
> arguing about Cast vs Blur than actually learning stuff.

That mostly stops when you get to A-levels, because it's optional you only 
get people there who actually want to be there.

> I am unsure as to whether the guy in question was so clueless that he 
> honestly believed that it wouldn't take much to fix this, or whether he 
> was just trying to sweet-talk me. How the HELL he expected the person 
> marking the work to believe that he wrote it is beyond me - unless he 
> really did think he had it almost right to start with...
>
> Seriously. What. The. Hell.

Aww, would have been better if you had some hot girls in your group, then 
I'm sure you wouldn't have minded completely rewriting their code from 
scratch :-)

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