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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (257979)	11/2/2005 1:12:28 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575421

That's interesting. Did you get any sense whether the foreigners want to work in this country or return to their country of origin or some other country? I worked far from the hardware for 15 years, but no COBOL! I developed application programs for microcomputers and then the internet using various languages. I knew people who worked close to the hardware, even one guy who hand optimized machine code output from compilers, but their shelf life seemed much shorter than mine, without continual re-education. Hardware changes pretty often. People always advised me NOT to get too close to the hardware. It burnt me out, and I don't even WANT back in! Fortunately I came out of the '90's pretty financially well off. No thanks to three start-ups and three clutches of worthless stock options that were supposed to pay for all my overtime. But the house I bought in CA in '93 appreciated handsomely!

To: combjelly who wrote (257979)	11/2/2005 1:37:32 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575421

"The last stat I read is that it's running about 6-8% for software developers, which is what I used to do." I guess the point I was trying to make is that you you need triple check your figures. If you claim a point that can be proved in the slightest extent as false, your entire argument will be invalidated. Even your narrow example loses force, 6-8%, while high, is not very high when compared to an overall rate which is somewhere arond 5.5%. It is a much stronger argument to compare 6-8% to the historical norm of 2-4%. You have to realize that your opponents regard you as "reality-based" as opposed to "faith-based". Ok, this seem to be a stupid distinction, but it isn't. Yes, for some, what you believe about reality is more important than what you can prove. Kant would barf. But that is the reality that Americans have to deal with. Most especially the "reality-based".

To: combjelly who wrote (257979)	11/2/2005 11:25:18 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1575421

"The last stat I read is that it's running about 6-8% for software developers, which is what I used to do." That might be the case. There still is an overhang after the Internet bubble collapse. But "software developer" covers a lot of area, everything from COBOL coders to embedded programmers on specific processors. The closer you get to the hardware, the lower the unemployment rate. There is a lesson to be learned here. I think 6-8% may have been true 6 months to a year ago for both software developers and engineers but using San Jose as an example of an area that employs a lot of both, its unemployment rate dropped below 6% in March and was 5.2% in Sept. Given those numbers, I suspect engineering unemployment is somewhere between 4-5% at the present time. data.bls.gov