Attendance down

[chiph]

Story in Sunday's paper (Raleigh NC News & Observer) about how attendence at training classes is half what it was a year ago.

This was considered odd, as when a lot of people get laid off, one of the things they typically do is retrain and acquire new skills.

What are other people in tech areas seeing?

Chip H.

 

[butchrecon]

Ture when people get laid off they retrain for a possible carrer change. Unfortunatly the training clasess or "boot camps" come with a pretty price tag as well. A year ago the econy was better than it was today, the over all outlook was good. Today the economy is nearing the toilet and overall out look is bad. We have gone in just 1 years time from spend,spend,spend. to SAVE and hope for a turn around. People just dont have the cash to spend on trianing courses that cannot quarentee you will get a job in the NOW tight and VERY competative market. All the training courses on the planet will not help you in programming where they now need qood programmers.

One should never limit his/her self to just one field. Learn different things and become somewhat knowlegable and proficiant in them. So when a job loss happens the retraining you may need wont be so tough. James Collins
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.

 

[chiph]

True, boot camps aren't cheap. Typically around here they're $8,500 and up. Maybe people aren't sure about spending that much money without assurances of passing the tests?

> All the training courses on the planet will not help you in programming where they now need qood programmers. <

The story listed as an example one fellow who was tired of selling appliances at Sears, and wanted to move into software. I've met some people who turned out to have a talent for programming (who came from other careers), but I've met many more who are only mediocre. In either case, best wishes to the guy, at least he's trying.

Chip H.

 

[butchrecon]

Sorry about the typing, AGAIN I forgot to proof read. True some people have a talent for programming. But from what I have seen this is rare. Most people jump into the whole tech area unprepared and fall in over their heads. I have dealt with a few from the Win2K boot camp style certification who have either now lost their jobs (I had a friend who just recently lose his job because he could not do it. He paid $7000 for a MCSE course and passed all the tests. He got a job making 50K a year and lost it. I tried to help him learn but it was just too late for him.) or can not get new jobs. Let alone at the big salaries they once commanded. Companies are now going from hiring individuals with just Certifications to WANTING certified, experienced techs with AS degrees. The whole training course market has watered down the Certification to what many companies are now considering &quot;Entry Level&quot;. But that s another topic on its own. The whole point.. hell I forgot. Anyway the coming year will begin to weed out those who do not have experience and knowledge. Since the job market is getting tighter I think the race to get good jobs will be brutal. Esp. for those who just changed careers and have families to look after. Finding even an entry level position will be tough.
James Collins
Systems Support Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.

 

[wekkew]

Hello

Is it just me or do programmers in general find that they are viewed as the lowest of the low when it comes to computer staff. I am sick to death of talking to &quot;IT Managers/Developers/Sys Anal&quot; who always seem to have started out as programmers but then found the whole thing so &quot;easy&quot; that they moved onto others things. I work primarily in education/training and the amount of bullsh*t I forced to listen to is truly amazing. I have sat with other IT staff who question if we should even be teaching programming any more as there are &quot;computers to do all that now&quot;. When finally, I regained the power of speech, I did ask who was writing the code for the &quot;programming&quot; computers only to be told that other computers do that (The true definition of recursion perhaps...)

I've had &quot;professional C/C++ programmers&quot;, who have (alledgedly) worked on NASA space projects and yet they've never heard of WHILE loops or passing values to functions! The reason given for this was that NASA doesn't need to use while loops and global variables are much more efficient...

It's this kind of jargon boasting that, I believe, is one of the weaknesses of the MSCD, sure, it makes you familiar with endless Microsoft terms to waffle in front of managers, but it doesn't mean that you can actually write code that works.

I sometimes get involved with interviewing and applicants are often given coding problems to take away and complete. Applicants are then asked to return with the completed solution. We've had people bring back exe's and when we ask to see the source - they refuse as they don't think it's necessary! Other applicants, when questioned about the code don't seem to have a clue and it's hard not to believe that it's either a copy and paste job or they have had a lot of &quot;help&quot;.
I've been trying for some time to get applicants to complete these simple programming exercises after the interview, in our office (full MSDN and manuals available). But you would be amazed at how many people storm out of the interview as they think it's an insult to their ability. I certainly wouldn't be offended if I was asked to write code - would you?

This, I believe, is the answer to the failing image of the MCSD - include some code writing/evaluation of existing code/debugging of code that is more than one line long.
I can't see why it isn't possible to have automatic marking on this, so there would be no delay on results.


Kate

 

[MIScoord]

Hi all:

I don't think it's an insult at all to ask someone who is being hired as a programmer to write some code. I'm fairly new to the IT industry, but I spent 15 years as a journalist where the basic premise is the same -- either a person can write or they can't. One more than one job interview I went on, I was given a set of facts and asked to compose a story based on those facts, or else given a story and asked to edit it for grammer and style. I was never in the least bit offended, and I attended one of the more prestigious journalism schools in the South and always went into an interview with an armful of clips with my by-line on them. I always viewed it as just another chance to impress the interviewer with my abilities, especially in a pressure situation. I would think any programmer worth their salt would feel the same way. If I were hiring, it would be a given that I would want to see whether an interviewee could perform what they would be required to do. Not anything elaborate or huge, but enough to see whether they actually knew what they were talking about. Anyone who won't do that, needs to &quot;take it home&quot; or &quot;think about it&quot; looks like someone who has something to hide.

Just my two cents.

 

[chiph]

ButchRecon> Since the job market is getting tighter I think the race to get good jobs will be brutal. <

It already is. I was talking to a friend from my last job, and he says that people they're interviewing now have 4 & 5 years experience. They are now able to be much more selective in who they decide to hire. The days of free BMWs for recent college grads are over.

Wekkew> I've had &quot;professional C/C++ programmers&quot;, who have (alledgedly) worked on NASA space projects and yet they've never heard of WHILE loops or passing values to functions! <

There's a guy here who is a former NASA programmer, and he definately knows about loops and parameters to functions. But it still wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are pockets of programmers in NASA who still use tons of global variables. Much of their hardware is so memory and CPU constrained that that's the only way to get the software to run.

Chip H.