Women at work

I have a PhD in electrical engineering and have been teaching and doing programming and IT for ... too many years. (specializing in networks and security) I am not going to disclose my age! I am one of very few women of my age who STAYED in the field, since it is super competitive macho field. But here I am! I use my engineering skills for everything I do. In this blog, I will share anything from technical to social comments on technology.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

jobs

> I am going to make a guess that if you are fresh out of
> getting a Masters, and if you are willing to move to
> anywhere in the world that the job is, then you can
> eventually find an entry level position in any of
> the categories you list, if that is all you care
> about.
>
> If you restrict yourself to the parts of your home country and
> America that you know, then your options are fewer,
> but still reasonably good, depending upon what else
> you think you need. Can you wait 3 years to find
> your job?
>
> So, you need to make some decisions about what is
> important to you, including:
> 1. Where you are living
> 2. What you are doing on the job
> 3. What you earn
> 4. What you learn
> 5. Who you work with and who manages you
> 6. The physical work environment
> 7. How soon you need to find the job
> 8. The commute
> 9. Will you still have a job in a year?
> 10. Possibility for advancement
> 11. Flexible hours or not
> 12. Dress code or not
> 13. Level of verbal abuse on the job
> (such as in technical support
> or with management having an emotions
> like an overtired 2 year old)
> and so on.
>
> I have been a software developer for over 20 years.
>
> I have never been a consultant, but my impression is
> that consultants have two kinds of skills beyond
> their technical expertise, which is specialized.
> 1) They know how to sell themselves well and are
> willing to spend considerable time and effort doing
> so. If you love job hunting, being a consultant
> is for you.
> 2) They have experience and a reputation.
>
> A consultant needs to quickly convince the customer
> that they are worth paying a lot, learn the customer's
> project, solve problems which the customer's own staff
> cannot solve, and then move on to the next customer
> and do it again. This is highly paid and not easy.
> Consultants only get paid when they work.
>
> So unless "consultant" means something different in
> the context which you are talking about than I am
> familiar with, I don't think that is the place
> to go straight out of school. After a year or
> five, maybe, not right away.
>
> An analyst is not the same as a consultant in my
> experience. Analyst is a title that means different
> things in different places and contexts. It means
> that you analyze something and report the results
> of your analysis. In the context of software, I
> would assume that an analyst is typically someone
> who can evaluate, compare, integrate, configure,
> and use existing software, or who can figure out
> how to apply technology to the needs of a business,
> and whose expertise becomes
> more broad and shallow than narrow and deep,
> as compared with a software developer.
>
> Nothing wrong with the future demand for that.
> Whether you want to be an analyst depends upon
> what you already decided was important.
>
> If you are "interested in databases" there are
> specialities and you likely want to
> decide which one you like best.
>
> There is the database administrator. This is often
> someone with less education than you have already,
> who does backups, and installs new versions and patches.
> It is work that I would find repetitive and
> I think you are overqualified for it.
>
> There is the table designer and data modeler.
> There are rules about how the tables in relational
> databases should be designed, "normalized" data.
> These people also deal with database
> performance, tuning, indexing, and so on.
> The ones I know seem obsessed about what they do.
> It also helps if you are visual and like pictures
> a meter square with a dozens of tiny boxes and lines.
> (I am not kidding.)
>
> Then there are software developers who build stuff
> that calls database code. An example would be someone
> who builds the website that exists between the user
> who buys something and a database which represents
> a catalog of things for sale and a record of how
> many of each item is in stock. Some of these developers
> work in layers closer to the database, and worry about
> technologies such as JDBC and JDO and Hibernate.
> Some of these developers concentrate more on the user
> interface or the user experience of searching, and use
> technologies such as Javascript, Python and PHP.
> Some of them work on configuring the software that
> helps one organize the website, such as Apache,
> or WebSphere. This is the general kind of thing that
> I do. There is some demand for it in America, but
> only if you don't care WHERE in America. I expect
> the job market is better in India.
>
> In America, most of these jobs have insanely long
> lists of things they want you to know, so that
> they have an excuse not to hire someone whom they
> dislike for reasons of race, gender, disability,
> age, and so on. Then again, there are so many
> unemployed techies that there are people on
> the market who know the whole list. But if they
> are older than you, the employer may still
> prefer you, because they think your health
> insurance costs them less.
>
> If you like this kind of job, then
> I suggest you concentrate on smaller companies,
> since your education will be broader and you
> experience better. The down-side of small
> companies is that they can crash very fast,
> but if you have no mortgage and no children, and
> can relocated almost at will, you can
> afford that risk. Big companies sink too, but
> you see it coming further ahead of time.
> You are more likely to be laid off from a big
> company that continues to exist after you
> leave it.
>
> In America, simplyhired.com and ventureloop.com
> are my favorite places to look.
> I don't know about India.
>
> Then there are people who actually implement the
> database code at the bottom - who develop the
> Oracle database for Oracle or DB2 for IBM and so on.
> The big multinational companies who own the most
> successful closed source databases are currently
> emphasizing paying their developers as little as
> they can, so they are firing the expensive people
> who invented their products, and it is probably a
> great time for someone relatively inexpensive
> like you to get one of these database product
> maintenance jobs, if you are willing to relocate to
> India, (or China or Russia, or Eastern Europe
> or to wherever is cheapest this week).
> This is a job, not a career.
> Remember that low cost is the more important to
> these big companies than good product or the
> satisfaction of their employees or customers,
> their rhetoric notwithstanding.
> They assume that there is an unlimited supply of
> developers to hire if the ones they have become
> unhappy. To do this job, you have to be excellent
> at understanding other people's bad and
> undocumented code. You are unlikely to do much
> new in this context. In big companies, there are
> many layers of management, and directives from on
> high that may not always make sense after passing
> through the layers.
>
> See:
> http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=373232
>
> To get these jobs, check the website of your favorite
> multinational company to find the job, but do not apply
> that way. Find a contact within the company (such as
> through linkedin or systers) and apply through your
> contact. Applying through the website sends your resume
> to an overworked underpaid Human Resources person
> who probably does not understand it and who is looking
> for reasons to filter you out because she has too many.
> Your contact, if you can find a good one, can judge
> whether you are qualified, and if you are,
> can send the resume directly to the hiring manager.
> The best contact is someone who knows the hiring manager and
> can give you hints about what to put in the cover letter
> and how to prepare for the interview.
>
> Then there are people who develop open source databases.
> Sun Microsystems has been paying people to develop MYSQL
> for years, but Sun is not doing very well. While this
> can be a very satisfying thing to do, and is where any
> innovation in databases is most likely, it is hard to
> make a living at it. Some people do, but the majority
> have other jobs to pay their bills, often involving
> teaching.
>
> Judging by a very quick search, there is a lot of demand
> for college and university teaching in India, but not
> having a PhD may hurt you a little. Prospects in American
> colleges are bad, but if you're willing to teach
> computer stuff in High School (age 15 to 18) there is
> plenty of demand for that, but the pay is low and the
> computers are old, but the benefits are good and
> you can write open source databases (or anything
> else) in your spare time.
>
> While you are job hunting, if you want to learn to do
> something, find an Open Source project that involves
> doing it, and try contributing to the project. If you
> want to find a job, having code you wrote that your
> employer can see is helpful.
>
> Then add it to your resume.
> At least in America, taking initiative is good.
> It also says your talent is still "fresh"
> even if the job hunt takes time.
>
> I hope this is useful.

Labels: