DIY skills

[jgharston]

Whatever they want me to do. Programming is General Practice not Brain Surgery. I'll do whatever job they want me to do with whatever tools they want me to use.

JGH

[Clive George]

Wrong answer.

If I'm going to hire you, I need to know what you're good at, and I need you to be able to demonstrate that - unless you're just looking for a bottom-level junior role, and I'd hope you're not.

So, what are you good at? In what environments have you demonstrated your greatness?

[Andy Champ]

JG, you have two chances to get that right. We just had headcount signed off... in Maidenhead, if that bothers you.

Andy

[Tim Watts]

That's not the best answer...

eg

If my lot needed to replace me, they'd want a linux bloke(ss), apache skills and preferably in depth debian/ubuntu experience (but readhat derivative would suffice) at the server level plus an all round general knowledge of running lots of servers (virtual or real). Lots of other stuff is "nice to have" but is called for infrequently enough that it could be learnt on the fly. I'd never seen VMWare ESX before but I managed to limp along well enough until I'd got the hang of the basics.

My last job but one required database and network programming skills, though I did get to choose the language and the database (from a choice of two - MySQL and Postgresql). Interest in electronics helped.

What I'm trying to say is that, except for very junior positions, or helpdesk roles (which have a lot of comptetion from recent graduates and college leavers), the majority of hard to fill vacancies right now tend to be in roles with specific skills demands and people are looking for folk who can be useful quickly at something specific. But they are not necessarily ultra demanding positions (some are, but those are often the consultancy type ones with 60+k salaries).

Lots of security analyst roles (often want CISSP), lots of web backend programming stuff (php, perl, java/jsp), quite a few senior linux sysadmin positions (perl or python expected plus redhat or debian) and embedded developers seem to be hard to find. Probably a lot in the Windows world but I mentally filter those out because I don't do Windows (since 1999 anyway).

So what are you best at - or enjoy the most?

A good measure of the market is to have a browse round cwjobs and

(university jobs all go here).

Cheers,

Tim

[dave]

Wrong!

[Chris J Dixon]

For what looks, at first glance, to be a pretty reasonable detail description, look here

in the loft I still have my hand-drawn notching curves for Class 313.

Chris

[Dave Liquorice]

Agreed, maybe this is why he remains a wage slave. The right answer would have been something like:

"Mostly C++ with some Ada developing database applications for the windows platform under MySQL and dBase."

Yes I know that's bollocks but I'm not a programmer. What it tells me, as a prospective client, is the vauge skill set. If those skills loosely fit what I'm after I'd ask more questions. As it is I get the impression that he is a (not very good) jack of all trades, master of none...

Yep, someone hiring a freelancer/contractor needs to know that the person they are hiring can do the job they are being hired to do. Without that person spending the first week getting up to speed on the language(s) to be used. They aren't interested in training or teaching, if they wanted that they'd hire a school leaver on 1/10th the rate and train 'em, but that doesn't get the job done now...

[Man at B&Q]

RTFLMFAO.

MBQ

[hognoxious]

...

How does that factoid automatically make him wrong?

Seventh place isn't the same as producing one seventh.

The top six could produce 16.66% each for all we know. What does seventh place amount to then?

[hognoxious]

Obviously indeed. I figured it looked like a cross between an enigma machine and part of a telephone exchange, but if I'd had to guess I would have said a traffic light controller.

[hognoxious]

Hell yes. There's both the languages and the application domain to consider.

Now he might know C, Cobol and Java, and he might have worked on device drivers, accounting systems and phone applets.

Pretty unlikely though.

[Huge]

Three years older than me, then.

[Matty F]

There's a large piece of iron running from the electromagnet across the top of all the contacts. Here's a similar unrestored controller:

are more than 50 controllers to maintain, so I'll be busy for years!

I'm working on a couple of indirect controllers at the moment. They are much simpler to fix. We even have spare parts!

[Andrew Gabriel]

I was into electronics from a very early age, as my dad had boxes of components left around that he'd used before I was born. I still clearly recall what originally got me interested in them - they looked pretty (a bit like sweets, although I never tried eating them), with all the different coloured markings on them. I started connecting them up to batteries and bulbs, and basically went from there. I was using my dad's soldering iron around age 7, although I didn't actually work out how to make good soldered joints until a couple of years later (I'm not sure my dad knew how to, so that was something I had to slowly work out for myself).

It was sometime around this age when I left the soldering iron on whilst I was out somewhere. Came home to find mum with a large bandage on her hand, having picked it up by the wrong end. (That's not something she did again either.) They bought me a soldering gun (which I still have somewhere) on the basis that you can't leave that on, but actually they're useless for making good soldered connections, so I didn't use it for long.

[Andrew Gabriel]

We did woodwork and technical drawing in the first 2 years, and I loved both. In the third year, we got streamed for sciences, and if you were in top set for physics (which I was), you did latin (which I hated), whereas the other 3 sets did woodwork instead (which I would have loved to carry on with). I still did technical drawing up to O-level and I got grade A, and I have found it to be very useful many times since. On the other hand, latin has turned out to be completely pointless to me ever since, as I suspected it would at the time. The school only started getting metalworking facilities after I'd done my O-levels, so I didn't get to do any there. However, at university (doing Physics), we got the opportunity to do a metalwork course so that we could build our own experiments, and I jumped at that. I still have my little brass cannon with a steel barrel, and with a mixture of soft soldering, brazing, and all home-made nuts, bolts and screws.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Reminds me of the picture of Antony Worrall Thompson on the back of a pack of sausages with the caption "Prick with a fork".

[Frank Erskine]

ISTR that I tried "tasting" waxed mica condensers (when I was around 5 or 6 years old, and that they seemed to taste like toffee :-)

Only a year or two later I did minor repairs to the "wireless" (probably replacing chewed-up condensers), and "designed" bits of circuit elements, probably more electrical than electronic at that stage.

Certainly by the age of 8 or 9 I was dismantling old wireless sets, itemising and storing components in typically matchboxes glued together "Raaco"-style, each "drawer" fitted with a 6BA screw, nut and two washers as handles...

I do remember stringing together lots of Woolworths MES batten lampholders (4d each?) using probably bare or DCC wire, and poking the ends of the string into a 5A mains socket. My "fairy-lamp" setup worked, and I'm still here to tell the tale...

Happy days!

My first electric soldering iron was also from Woolies, and cost something like 3/11d or 4/6d, but my main 11th birthday pressie was a

25W Henley Solon, which I had for many years, although it took a lot of maintenance - jammed-in bits, burnt-out elements et. al., but it served me well. I eventually added a Weller soldering gun to my inventory... I think I still have that somewhere.

[Chris J Dixon]

Indeed you will.

Chris

[John Rumm]

As a proper independent contractor you should only get the "disbenefits" of not being an employee (and it only takes about 3 months to work out that they are mostly illusory or worthless anyway).

The contractors that get shafted from both sides are those that are employed by medium sized companies and then resold as contractors to their clients. They have to do the flexible working thing, but don't get the true independance or reward that goes with it.

2) is where lots of IT folk rely on agencies. Not ideal, but that can solve the problem.

With contract positions in the larger companies, it not unusual for the contractors to outlast the permies - especially if they are reasonably competent. (after all they know why they are there, and tend to be far more flexible in attitude)

If you can arrange to swap annual leave for money (or notice period) then that can smooth the transition. Once you have three months worth of salary in the bank you have as much security as you had before, but now you at least know in advance when the job runs out and you can prepare for it.

[John Rumm]

While there is an element of truth in that, its not the sort of answer most recruiters are going to want to here. Keep in mind many will be managers who have been empire building their little corner of the company[2] - while keeping close control on their little niche of skills etc. They are quite probably not away that many skills are transferable and hence want to see the right terms and buzzwords on the CV. Note also that agents are going to prefilter based on what they see on the CV. Quite often they will not realise what the relationship is between different technologies and hence can't make a value judgement that ok it says they want X, but this chap has Y and that is close enough to make no difference. Its a case of does the acronym match[1], yup, that one gets sent to the client.

That's the sort of flexibility you can promote once you have your foot in the door - but it won't necessarily get you the first step...

[1] I have had some quite amusing chats with non technical agents over the years, when all of the sudden the penny drops and you realise that there is a little gap in their knowledge that is making their job *so* much harder. For example I had one who was very keen to talk up a position he had since I had such a rare skill apparently - that of "firmware" ;-) He had obviously been given that term to search for without understanding what it meant. Hence was probably skipping over tons of viable candidates because they did not mention it explicitly even though, like myself at the time, probably had a dozen or more years experience developing embedded systems. [2] Some folks really do live in IT ivory towers - especially anyone from a mainframe background. Many years ago I went to a job fair type of expo in London. Wandering about, saw one company with boards up saying they wanted assembler programmers. So I stopped for a chat, handed her a CV to have look through. After a few mins she said "I can't see any assembler experience on here". So I pointed her at the "low level languages" section and its long list of processor architectures. It soon became apparent that she did not have a clue what it was talking about. Turned out they had IBM mainframe/midrange leanings and hence "Assembler" to them was a specific IBM technology. They had no realisation that to the rest of the world it was a generic term for pretty much any processors native language. They could also not grasp the concept that once you have a fairly broad experience in a few processor architectures, you can generally be productive in another one in a relatively short space of time because even if all the mnemonics change the concepts remain much the same.