Are you going out on your own? If you are a true independent contractor, then fees such as mileage and hotel bills are just included in your project or hourly fee. Are you saying you have a customer who wants an itemized bill?

Salary is based on skill set, location, experience, etc. If you're in the Bay Area, CA, I think most entry level QA guys are making $30k to 35k a year these days. It was more a couple of years ago.

You're pretty young. Have you considered school instead?

 

There is some truth to that. From 1990-1994 or so, before companies geared up for Y2K, the IT job market was shit. As y2k conversions became more pressing, spending and hiring increased, peaking in 1999. Y2k came and go, less people were needed. As far as the .COMs, the bubble burst. No earnings, no company. So, now the IT situation is back to 1990-1991 again. Shit lands.

A lot of young people got conned with this certification BS as well. Both of my brothers have MSCEs and a couple of other certificates, and both are now unemployed. My older brother, however, who is a college graduate, is getting his calls returned. So, certificate plus college seems to be a better ticket.



Not true. Silicon Valley is inundated with Indian and Chinese H1-Bs, with the Indians speaking better English, thanks to the British. They have a heavy accent, but are understandable.



Well, it's going back to where it was in 1990-1991, that's all. The only difference is this time we have millions of foreign laborers competing for those same jobs. The situation is not the same.

People forget the history. Here's a refresher.

1990-1994 IT job market is shit. Programmers (and everyone else, for that matter), are treated like shit at the job. Corporations have the upper hand, the worker is told he is lucky to have a job and treated the same.
[more]

1994-1995 Companies gear up for Y2K. All of a sudden, these same IT people, the people corporations treated like shit in 1990-1994 are needed and have some bargaining power. They demand a living wage and humane working hours. If the grass is greener, they split.

The corporations realize they better do something. They will not he held hostage by computer geeks demanding more money and they resent the fact IT people are jumping ship, taking their corporate-sponsored training with them. Remember, up until recently, if you were a programmer and your company needed new IT talent, they would train you, not hire someone else. This changed in the mid-1990's. Once programmers started jumping ship, the training stopped.

Hmm... How could business get the people they needed without paying for expensive training and taking the risk that the highly-trained employee would take that training elsewhere for more money? Think H1-B.

1996-1997 ITAA commissions an IT labor study. Study basically says there is an IT labor shortage and if US corporations want to remain competitive, we need to import more foreign workers. ITAA lobbies Congress on behalf of corporate America, makes donations as necessary to both parties, with the Demos holding out a little longer for more money. Although, the Demos say they want protections for American workers, which is a lie. The Republicans don't even bother lying about it. Pretty soon bills are in Congress to import more foreign workers. And that's hundreds of thousands of workers, not twenty.

So, now the corporations are happy, they have their cheap workers. For a while, that is. Eventually, the majority of H1-Bs go to bodyshops who charge $100-$150/hour for Indians and Chinese with questionable and unverifiable experience and education. All of a sudden it's expensive to hire H1-Bs, unless you're an 800 lb. gorilla like Sun Micro or Cisco.

1998-1999 Y2K preparedness in full swing. Legacy systems ported to modern client/server or n-tier models. Programmers and network engineers are making money for a change and everyone wants in on the action. Stock options, MSCE touted as the road to riches, six-figure salaries, secretaries at Yahoo driving Porsches, BMWs, young IT workers flooding CA from out of state, it's the Gold Rush all over again!

2000-2001 SHTF. Dot-BOMBS collapse, Y2K completed, economy sinks, layoffs. Telecom collapse. Who needs a fiber optic router? Who are we going to sell Internet bandwidth to if the .COMs are dead? Crash! Cisco writes off billions!

IT job market back to 1990.

BUT, the difference between 1991 and 2001 is this time we have hundreds of thousands of foreign workers in the country competing for these same jobs.

Why haven't the number of H1-B workers imported into the US been curtailed? Should we need worry about American workers first?

BTW, remember these books?

[img]pweb.netcom.com/~mattja/pics/Yourdon01_25.jpg[/img]
1992

[img]pweb.netcom.com/~mattja/pics/Yourdon02_25.jpg[/img]
1996

The years they were published is telling. I wonder what he has for 2002? Hopefully, he's not as wrong as he was about y2k.

All I can add is from a recent hiring spree at bmc here in austin.  3 positions, 300 resumes.  280 of them were SHIT.  No kidding.  Out of the 20 guys we interviewed, 17 sucked, 3 were better than everyone else but not up to the level of the positions we were hiring for.  We downgraded the positions and hired the 3 guys.  All are US citizens.

There are a surplus of workers here in austin, a surplus of bad workers.  Maybe the H1-B situation hasn't gotten here yet, or bmc requires citizenship, but honestly, the people I have seen are pretty bad.

One other thing to consider, federal employment.  In 5 years, 55% of the federal IT workforce is going to be eligible for retirement.  They are about to face a serious hiring crunch and only US Citizens need apply.  They are talking raising pay rates to be competitive and offering signing bonuses.  This should create an interesting environment in 2007.

Also, the amount of venture capital has risen significantly in the past 2 months.  Possibly another trend of start-ups looking to cash in on security and disaster recovery projects that are becoming the new hot thing.

Don't underestimate the introduction of GSM and next generation wireless connectivity that will offer bandwidth at 20-30 times current tdma speeds.  This will make web services a little more attractive to companies.

Bottom line, there are alot of new opportunities that could materialize in the next few years.  Most H1-B's I have seen are a joke and are not serious competition for most competent US tech workers.  

We are in a recovery, pure and simple.  The jobs are coming, but the work force is not there.  I have seen it myself and that is worth more than all of the pundits and articles in the world.

Oh and 71-Hour_Achmed....

Suck it!

The basic problem is that doing large scale programming is hard. That will always be the case, and smart people who can manipulate abstract concepts will always be in demand.

The Next Big Thing, IMHO: web services. Thousands of companies out there can automate their supply chains, a la WalMart. It's probably a year or two from taking off.

ARCHITECTURE FOR SALE!!! GET YOUR ARCHITECTURE HERE!!! ENTERPRISE SYSTEM ARCHITECT FOR SALE!! HE AIN'T CHEAP BUT HE'S GOOD!!! GET YOUR....

...sorry.... couldn't resist...

That's the way I went. I started out building Heathkit projects with my dad (UAW electrician) and building huge light displays with electromechanical controls.

My first job was in a panel shop wiring acres of relays and early PLC's.

When I finally got around to college I decided to give Comp Sci a go. The most important thing I learned there is I don't ever want to work in Comp Sci.

I compromised and took a job developing control systems for industrial automation. Everything from simple relay controlled labor savers to plant level process management systems.

It can be a real pain in the ass since I make it up as I go along but it's never boring and I haven't been out of work since 1981.

BenDover, between this post, and some of your stock market posts, you sound like an interesting kinda guy. If you ever make a trip to the Oregon coast, give me a shout....

This sounds very interesting.

Imagine, me, a fed...

Do you have any more specific information? If it looks promising for me I'd like to get a headstart on this kinda thing.

It's my son - he's got a couple of Unix classes under his belt, some C++ and TCL, other skills (make PC's, HTML), got hired in a pre-launch crunch the month before Comdex, now working
as part of their "periodic development cycle", (you probably understand that better than I do) with more normal hours.  Now they're talking about a regular job offer in SJ, but I think he'd be better off finishing college now rather than 'someday', since he's about 1 year from transferring to UC.

"Web Services" (whatever the hell that is) is the current buzzword in the industry press.  Pick up any recent issue of InfoWorld or Network Computing or some other rag and you won't be able to get away from the buzzword of the day.  Just like any number of buzzwords before... remember reading the hype about intranets, e-commerce, B2B, CRM, and a bunch of other crap that was supposed to revolutionize the way companies did business?

Well, the press would hype it up, and then move on to something else.  Meanwhile, the technology would mature and companies would adopt some of it, as it made sense, but not nearly in the numbers originally predicted.

I had a couple of links, but they are no where to be found.  I also saw this in a federal IT worker trade mag.

Best advice is to do a internet search for federal it jobs.  

Sorry I can't help more.

Sure it is hype, but where there is smoke there is fire.

Basically, web services are a different way for companies to deploy their products.  Instead of a complete install, you will subscribe to a product and access it, in whole or part, over the net.

What does this mean?  Basically, there are several enterprise level products which are large and difficult to deploy ( Patrol being an example ), so many shops will gladly pay less, get 80% of the functionality and subscribe instead of install and maintain.

Web services also have the added ability of removing the responsibility of upgrading from the customer to the software manufacturer since they control the source base.

Will this revolutionize software?  No.  Is there a market?  Yes.  Is there money to be made?  Yes.

Re Web services:

It's a poorly defined field, and talking to five different companies will get you ten different definitions. Microsoft in particular is muddying the waters for its own purposes. (Nobody has yet figured out what .NET is.)

The basic idea is to describe data and operations in terms of XML. If you send an invoice to a company you send the invoice in a pre-defined XML format. If you want to execute  procedure call or perform an operation ("buy this item") you learn about the operations in an XML dialect.

Another way to describe this is that the current generation web is designed for human interaction. A web services oriented web would be designed to allow for computer interaction; instead of a human clicking on hyperlinks, a computer program navigates through the web and performs actions. (This doesn't pre-empt human interaction, btw.)

Many of the initial efforts (like B2B online auctions) had flawed business models. But the general need for improved business-to-business interaction is real and huge.

Web services mean something more than a novel method of implementation... it means greatly enhanced (read that... condensed)support and maint. One fix in one place means hundreds or even thousands of implementations are instantly updated. That's a maint. cycle dream come true.

I guess you could call me interesting in a clinical sort of way. I won't take offense to that. I can't say I get out there... ever. I have been to Portland once. The Pacific NW is AWESOME though. I love flannel shirts, conifer forests, melancholy garbage rock bands, heroin, & serial killers.

One of these days I will drag Tweet out there to the mountains for a couple of weeks. We were actually talking about doing the Great American Road Trip next year.

Not true. I know what it is and have been developing on the platform for almost a year now.



There's standards for what you describe.... SOAP??



You have just described batch processing.



The first thing that had to happen was a mechanism of data standardization. XML metadata provided that. Then you had to come up with efficient ways to develop applications that manipulate that standardized data. J2EE and .NET are both examples of this.

Mr Bill just gave a talk about .NET and how it has not yet achieved what they hoped, primarily because they haven't communicated what exactly it is. Personally, I think that failure of communication is because they're not completely sure themselves; vaguenss in communication is often the result of poor understanding.

SOAP is one of the elements. Also WSDL and UDDI, maybe a bit of RDF. They're all just emerging now as more-or-less real standards, and really haven't had a huge impact on the market yet.

[url]http://www.webservices.org[/url] for the gory details.

In the future, all net traffic will be tunneled over port 80 ;-)

He has the rest of his life to work. If he got accepted into UC, he's obviously a smart kid and should stick with it. When he's 23 or 24 he'll have a nice degree from UC and perhaps the economy will be better. Sure, he can work now, but four years from now he'll find himself competing against kinds his own age who are college graduates. And the degree is a ticket into management.

He can be a full-time student and take a part-time job like a lot of kids do, myself included. Anyway, at his age education should be his primary focus in life. That and the fun that goes along with being a college student.

Just my 2 cents.

One thing Web Services has going for it is it is probably easier to integrate applications using XML than some other methods. If I understand it correctly, and there are quite a number of competing definitions out there, Web Services is just another stab at distributed computing, this time using port 80. Long before Web Services we had EDI, and then CORBA, DCOM, etc. Java and CORBA are a good combination because for the most part, Java's Reflection API accomplishes what WSDL accomplishes. So, there really is nothing new here as far as the basic model. There is still the problem with semantics, meaning you still need to define a set of standard XML tags and metadata so disparate applications communicate using a standard dictionary.

Web Services has potential, but I'm not sure it provides a solution to the problems that plagued previous models of distributed computing. In that regard, it's not a hell of a lot better than CORBA.

Oh sure, come out here next year when I'll probably have caved in and gotten a job in Kansas or some other God forsaken place ;)

Oh, here's my 2 cents on the IT situation... just like my job choice (CAD) you must learn as much as you can, about as many things as you can, at each job you are at. I've worked on several CAD systems. I've tried to learn as much as I could about the OS they are on (AIX, HP-UX, NT, etc). I'm one of those end users you IT guys hate, because when my workstation goes down, I either kick it back into gear, or really FUBAR it. When I have work to do, I don't have time to listen to some helpless desk kid fresh out of high school tell me the online manual he's looking at doesn't tell him what to do in a particular situation. I know very little about programming, but I can kill processes with the best of them ;)

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that it seems you can't focus on one specialty too much. Nobody can know EVERYTHING, but most of us can know a little bit about many, many things. I've gotten jobs on CAD systems I've never touched, simply because I've used so many different ones. I think they need to offer classes on Phone Interview BSing ;)

Sorry I couldn't jump in with any geek speak, but figured I'd ramble a bit. :)

Sounds like the typical CS graduate. he he