> On 06/09/2012 10:56 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> You already have some chemical knowledge acquired by osmosis, why not
>> try to focus on bio-tech or pharmaceutical companies?
>
> Because the bio-tech industry is going south in a big way currently.
> (Actually, this arguably applies to /every/ industry right now...)
>

They still have job openings.  Are you looking to put food on your table 
next week, of for a career that will last until you retire?

>> Right. And encryption/decryption algoritms sprout from trees?
>
>  From what I've seen, there are, like, three academics globally who
> write the vast majority of this stuff. And there are already /way/ more
> ciphers in existence than anybody actually wants or needs.
>

Ok.  And no one ever needs to implement those algorithms?


>>>> logistics
>>>
>>> Really? I'm sure it's difficult keeping track of stuff, but I don't see
>>> much technical detail involved. It's just about keeping track of a lot
>>> of stuff all at once. It's hard, but it isn't very technical.
>>
>> Planning bus routes, garbabe disposal truck routes, snow removal routes,
>> etc... are not exactly trivial.
>
> I didn't say it's /easy/, I said it isn't very /technical/. It's
> difficult for mundane, real-world reasons, not because the maths is hard.
>
>> Operational reasearch is a field
>> of mathematics that is quite active, and those mathematicians need
>> programmers who also can understand them. You'd fit nicely.
>
> Really? There's actually mathematics involved in remembering to do stuff?
>

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=operational+research

Remembering to do stuff is only part of it.  Doing all of the stuff 
efficiently is a lot harder.  You have to optimize the routes so that 
each truck picks as much garbage as possible without having to reuse the 
same street (to save fuel, and because old ladies complain about the 
racket), to minimize the number of trucks used (to save moeny on 
maintenance and crew salaries) and to minimize the time it takes to the 
job (again old ladies complaining about trash bins on the sidewalks).

>>>> data mining
>>>
>>> Does anybody actually do that? I thought it was just a fashionable
>>> middle management buzzword.
>>
>> See airline example above. They don't decide to put an Airbus 319 or 388
>> on each flight just for the fun of it. There's very extensive data
>> analysis that goes in to determine the best aircraft size for a
>> particular flight, and that analysis comes from crunching as much of the
>> previous passenger stats they can. Most industries also do so at all
>> levels to see how many widgets to pre-order to keep the aseembly line
>> running, without having to pay for a larger than necessary warehouse.
>> When to time your yearly discounts, how to target your advertizing
>> campaigns. Etc...
>
> All of that sounds to me like an extremely specialised, extremely small
> niche role that would be almost impossible to get hired for.
>

Who cares if it's almost impossible to get hired?  You can still try. 
The worst that can come out of it is that you get told "no".

I used one example.  There are many more.  You said in another reply 
that you thought the biggest problem was asking the right question. 
It's more than that.  It's asking the right question in the right order. 
  'SELECT name, phonenumber, sex, age, status FROM TABLE 
MiltonKeynesResidents WHERE sex = "f" AND (age > 18 AND age < 29) AND 
status = "single"' will return results a lot faster if you first get 
only the 18-29 age bracket, because it then makes a smaller subset of 
the population for which to check their status or sex.  Moreover, if you 
add other criteria such as 'WHERE father.sport <> "karate"' optimizing 
the queries properly can give you much faster results  (Apologies if the 
SQL is nessed up).

You did say you had Oracle experience.  Even if you don't have a lot of 
experience with it, you could look for DBA jobs, or even jobs where 
they're looking for Crystal Reports knowledge.  This means they want 
someone to produce nice-looking reports from a DB backend.  you could 
use this as to get your foot in the door, and then move up from there.

>>>> robotics
>>>
>>> Is there any commercial application for that?
>>>
>>
>> Apart from all the manufacturing that's done by automation, even today's
>> dishwashers have programmable controllers that can sense the dirtiness
>> of the dishes and adjust the cycles accordingly. If I was named Sarah
>> Connor, I'd be worried at the moment.
>
> Sure, there are autonomous machines all around us. I don't think that
> designing or programming them requires a vast amount of technical
> knowledge - just extensive testing and experimentation.
>

Nope, no technical knowledge at all.  Just farting around with legos.

http://s1.lemde.fr/image/2012/08/02/540x0/1741894_5_d417_le-nouveau-rover-martien-de-la-nasa-curiosity_9df653ffb46806f83c2f7d6e1516a8d1.jpg

Seriously.  STOP WITH THE PRECONCIEVED NOTIONS.  Unlearn everything, you 
must.

>>>> communications
>>>
>>> From what I've seen, installing comms equipment doesn't require a great
>>> deal of technical skill - you just need to be good at carrying stuff
>>> around and running cables.
>>
>> Right. That's because the shmuck who has to go onsite to run the cables
>> isn't the one who has to keep them running. It's like if you'd said
>> "mechanical engineering doesn't look that hard... I mean the guy at the
>> gas station barely does anything".
>
> Again, "communications" could mean just about anything.
>
> If you mean the 3 people on Earth who design the protocol stacks...
> well, those have already been designed. And we already have the 3 people
> who design them.
>
> If you mean the people who design switches and routers and so forth...
> then there's maybe, what, 6 companies globally who make the hardware for
> that. And it's already been designed. And they already have the 20 or so
> employees each who do that work, so they aren't hiring. And besides, I'm
> no electrical engineer.
>

What about the millions of companies that USE those equipment?  You've 
already said in this forum that it was impossibly complicated to program 
a Cisco switch, yet here you are saying the exact opposite!  I get that 
it may not be your favorite field of work, nor your best field of 
expertise, but at least be constistent in your dismissal of it!

> If you mean something else...
>
>>>> disaster response
>>>
>>> What kind of disaster response requires technical skill?
>>
>> Planning to avoid them, and planning to deal with them when they can't
>> be avoided. And dealing with them once you're knee deep in the water and
>> the roof has flown 5 miles away. all of these steps require as much, if
>> not more, technical-know how than heavy lifting.
>
> When I wrote our disaster recovery plan, it was /way/ easier than a
> trivial programming exercise.

How many 9s of uptime did your company require?  "we can live with being 
offline for a few days" is not the same thing as "99.999% uptime or we 
will be Fukushima'ed".

All kidding aside, as I've said in earlier replies, I've had to do lots 
of hiring in the past - and dated a HR rep for a few years - so send me 
your C.V. and a typical presentation letter, I'll see if there's 
something you could easily improve with them.

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

Post a reply to this message