Learning a programming language...

[Deja Q]

Should I bother?

[One_Life_To_Give]

1. Will you ever be in the position

to have somepone else hired over you. Because they have programming skills and you don't?

[Deja Q]

3. I've lots of skills.

None fully developed because I've been dipping my feet into things and seeing if I like the job well enough...

[DS1]

4. PHP

Get out of tech support. Then focus on what you really want to do in your spare time.,

[Hugin]

2. There will always be little local jobs to be done...

Once they've trashed everything by offshoring it.

[CarpeDiebold]

5. there are some technical jobs that can be outsourced

but design and innovation will stay here, i think. true, they have offshored some chip design, financial consulting and stuff like that to hyderabad and beijing, but i think the key is to remain needed here in the US. knowing c/c++ won't get you anywhere in the near future, imo. you need to learn to innovate at a very high level if you want to have a ojb 10 years from now.

it seems to me like the doors to offshoring have opened and companies see how much they can save and won't ever go back. depressing as that may seem.

[One_Life_To_Give]

9. We may lose design and innovation too

While we have a hold at the top now. Where will the future system architects, and other top level people come from? Most of the positions where you learn to be inovative are being offshored.

[Deja Q]

15. A zdnet response had a person, working for a chip company whose name

starts with an "I" overheard how project managers were contemplating moving engineering to Russia as it paid much less than for Americans.

And yet a coworker keeps getting told that IT jobs are coming back...

[qnr]

6. I enjoy it just for the sake of knowing it. When things in the outside

world seem totally uninterpretable, it's nice to know that I can delve into something that is eminently logical, that errors I encounter/create are generally fixable, and that I have created something. An artist I'm not, nor an author - but that program is my baby.

[Xithras]

7. Some people overreact to offshoring and think programming is dead.

The absolute worst-case projections I've seen predicted that 60% of American programming jobs would be lost to offshoring, and most estimates put the number anywhere from 20% to 40%. That is a HUGE hit to the programmers job market, but depending on the numbers you believe, that leaves 40%-80% of the programming jobs HERE. There IS still a market for programmers in this country, and there always will be one.

Well, almost always. One of these days we're ALL going to be out of work. AI is continuing to get better (slowly), and one of these days someone is going to develop a self programming computer system where someone inputs a programs requirements and the computer writes the software on its own. There's already been some fascinating research in evolutionary computing, and one day it will make computer programmers as irrelevant as the book copiers of old, or those people who used to manually update ledgerbooks before computerized spreadsheets put them all out of work.

[billyskank]

8. What???

Don't these people read books? Watch films? It's as clear as day that one of these creations will be stomping on office blocks and trying to exterminate mankind before closing time!
;)

[Misunderestimator]

11. True... but the rates of the offshore work drive down the rates here.

Not saying it's not worth it to do. Fortunately for me, I was a programmer long before offshoring... but now as a manager, 90% of the software developers I manage are not American. And the wages of programmers here have gone down. :shrug:

[LSK]

13. and how is the quality of the work?

[Misunderestimator]

14. Over time it has become quite good.

In many cases comparable to that of a native senior developer. The only really difficult boundary is the language and communication one... and over the past ten years (generally speaking), that has improved tremendously. My team... every single one of them is top notch.

[Deja Q]

16. As far as you know it to be.

How much checking do managers look - for bugs, loopholes, and little things like "security backdoors"? The programmers in India and China have no qualms making little backdoors... they need to or else they couldn't begin to buy what they need.

[Misunderestimator]

18. In this case... yes, it is what I know it to be.

And I and other managers, and other senior developers and architects and code review processes and constraints around migrations into other environments ensure that these security backdoors you mention are impossible. That's in my situation. Other companies I'm sure do NOT have the finances or resources to put such processes in place and your point is quite valid in those cases.

[Deja Q]

19. Yes, but American workers are called stupid by the corporate elite.

As a main reason FOR offshoring in the first place.

Therefore, if they are telling the truth, how do they know their offshore employees don't know how to cover their tracks? If American workers are stupid. so are the executives doing the offshoring.

[Misunderestimator]

20. What??? It's about $$$$!!

I have never heard a corporate executive or any manager anywhere along the line in my career call American programmers stupid as compared to any others. In fact, many would prefer to hire American programmers because of the ease of communication, but we cannot because of the "bottom line." It's about price, not about stupidity.

Where on earth did you hear that?

[Deja Q]

21. The media.

You hear everything in the media. Both sides of the issue. Judge for yourself.

Have fun with the bottom line. That's more important than America or its economy in the long term. :(

[Misunderestimator]

22. Hey... I didn't make the rules...

I despise the bottom line... I have no choice... did you think I meant I did. Sorry if my answers weren't what you were looking for in this thread.

:shrug:

and on edit... "Have fun with the bottom line. That's more important than America or its economy in the long term."

Um what? Are you asking why I hate america? :rofl:

I'm just a cog in the wheel man.

[Deja Q]

17. ALL out of work? Does this mean I should be studying

"Final Exit" instead?

The choice between quick'n'painless and rotting in the gutter, I know which I'd prefer. :(

[LSK]

10. yes, it is the safest bastion of IT

I know of companies that tried outsourced programming packages and they did not work. Focus on learning an object-orientated language (Java or Dot.net) and learn SQL.

[bleedingheart]

12. I work for a large company that is "reverse outsourcing"

you see it was and still is the rage in industry to "outsource"...but in the end they find that while it is hard to manage any office full of personnel...it is far worse when you are managing people half way around the world. I could tell you silly but sad stories about how even communication differences between cultures has caused big uproars for nothing....

So they have only outsourced old has-been maintenance code overseas....and all new development is here in the US...PLUS...they are getting a new office for our location to add additional staff...

[Jamastiene]

23. Yes, if for nothing else but the fun of knowing how to make your own apps.

I have taken classes in Visiual C# and taught myself BASIC (the old one) years ago, althout I am a bit rusty on the finer details of basic. Just knowing that I can make an application if I want to or even help someone out if they need something simple done is nice. Jobwise, you may be asked to do some programming as part of a job, but getting a job as a programmer only may be harder to do.