The economy is coming to an end!! And I say bring it on

This is a bit of a socialist rant, verging on the marxist ideal so some people may want to ignore it :) I am in an industry that seems to be inappropriately paid for what it does. This may sound like a ridiculous statement but I am a highly experienced and educated enterprise software developer, this is a highly skilled industry, but the point I'd like to make is.... Do I work any harder than a construction worker or a sales person I would have to say probably not. Some people try very hard to be the best that they can possibly be at their jobs, I am one of them, I am pleased by the elegance of a solution, the fact that it can quickly and easily be enhanced this proves to me that my intellect, imagination for change and ability is sufficient for the task but does it mean that its worth more than the work of moving 10,000 bricks up a ladder on a building project. It may be more mentally demanding but not everyone was created equally, there are some people for which understanding a triple integration equation is as simple as turning on a light. What I would like to see happen is that everyone is paid for the amount of effort they exert. Sadly this, I can see is an impossibility, who would determine how much effort someone was making. I have been told that bankers are clever people, some of them maybe, some of them may simply have the job as that is what daddy got for them. The thing is as banking jobs fall by the way side, intelligent people will find other things to do. Intelligent people are generally very lazy, lazy intelligent people come up with ideas that make their work easier. This sort of laziness should be applauded it does actually advance us as a human race. When an intelligent person is doing something that comes easy to them and they are getting vastly overpaid for it they will keep doing it, and this could stagnate innovation, making people suddenly readdress their current situation is probably the best shake-up for the good of mankind at the moment. It is not going to be easy, but then again, when has anything "easy" really been worth it. So come on you are your own person, take stock, chin up and explore yourself as a person.

AWESOME

just thought I'd add this little note to say I recently went to a Slayer gig and they were awsome, Kerry can still bang out a good tune, plus I love that guitar he has I want one, if only I could play the guitar :) I missed the finally though, quite annoyed at that. I crowd surfed and as I did so I suddenly felt really old, everyone in the pit looked about 18-19, I am only 27 but that did make me feel old. The only downside is I had my phone nicked, I don't think I just simply lost it because I was in a group and we were standing near the back listening, not moshin' and we both went to get our phones out of our pockets and they'd gone. The staff at the Apollo were ... well ... rubbish I was told 3 times to see the wrong person to report the loss to so after queueing for a really long time I spoke to someone who basically didn't want to know and didn't even make a note of it suppose thats what you get for minimum wage.

lets hope 404 doesn't lead to 501!!!

so I am coming to the end of my service at my current company, not through choice, but due to being made redundant. The annoying thing is that this has nothing to do with the economic downturn its due to a merger announced about a year or so ago. The problem that I now have is that I am being put out on the street at the worst possible time to look for work. I have asked a few agents how this is effecting them, and it would seem that agents themselves are being made to do some actual work in order to earn a buck. No longer are companies accepting candidates that can barely spell JMS and have no concept of OO principles at a practical level, they are actually having to probe the people they find have stunning CV's only to discover that a large percentage simply lie on their CV!! I recently spoke to one guy that seemed a bit surprised that he could carry out a conversation with me on a technical level and it was him that had to admit first that I'd already surpassed his level of knowledge. This got me to thinking, shouldn't this have been the way it worked all along. I mean, I always intended to get into system development I started programming at 7 on the old BBC Micro then C64 I used a trs-80 and VIC20 then PC's e.t.c. and at each stage I learnt more and tried to better myself always. So I continued this attitude through university then on into the commercial sector always working out new ways to do things and just trying to be the best. However time in different companies has taught me one thing, almost no other developers have the same idea as me they simply are there to make money by lying about what they do on their CV and bungling their way through a solution one hack at a time. This is also true of contractors, although I have to admit there is a much greater proportion of those that know what they are doing to those that don't but I have still met some terrible stinkers when it comes to development. I recently moved some projects from using maven and continuum (backwards in my view) to using ant and cruisecontrol....don't ask I realise its devolution rather than evolution. The code that I was looking at looked like a series of hacks made by an unskilled school child, using member variables in servlets, having public member variables that are altered by lots of other classes in other packages, it was a mess. The author of this code was someone who was quite senior and most people generally agreed that he was good --- how on Earth do people get to these positions. The Answer; The simple answer is that the people who are for the most part responsible for hiring and firing of developers don't understand the systems these people make so just blindly trust what these people tell them, this means someone who is (for want of a better word) crap at the job they are hired to do, they are actually incredibly good at the bullshit game can go far. If these people were actually told the fact that a poorly written system costs so much more to support, so much more to maintain and is almost impossible to adapt to change then they would have trusted code reviewers that would more than likely fire idiots quickly. I have seen one contractor, whom I fully respect for being very very good at their job, stand up and say this about someone on a team to a project manager and it worked.