If your going to study something based on career prospects? Finance and Law is where the money will always be imho. You just need to sacrifice your personality to the former, and your scruples to the latter.
Contract rates right at the moment? suck. Not for Cold Fusion in particular, but for IT in general. The only people making money are strategic consultants, and even those guys have had to lower their rates from a couple K a day to a couple hundred. Picking up work in IT sucks. Its been firmly established in the minds of many, MANY employers that half the applications they recieve are from wankers, half are from propellor heads with no office work skills, and sorting the one or two applications that are employable and worth the money they want to work for you is almost impossible amidst the vast piles of utter fiction, creative expansion, waffling crap, and tome like volumes of accademic citation combined with a complete lack of aptitude or ability. So between morons, liars, and kids with no idea but plenty of degrees, its a serious trick to actually pull a gig in IT of any nature at the moment. As a developer? I've found that the most success comes from a portfolio. Which is far easier for pony tails then propellor heads. If your a ponytail (IE you make things look pretty) you can write interfaces and gui's and flash movies and such to your hearts content, thump them up on freeby hosting accounts, and carry around a journal of pretty things with your name on them to convince people to pay you to make things pretty. As a propellor head? A toolkit or suite of mini apps is a good start, download managers, indexes, libraries, searches, FTP clients, file managers etc through the browser will all go a long way, and a few projects on Sourceforge probably wouldn't hurt either. As a propellorhead, its also worth having a smattering of experience with everything. ASP, Dot Net, Cold Fusion, PHP, Perl, Python, Java, Etc. The more things you can say 'I've worked with that' about, the more chances you have of picking up a gig. Being able to describe what dot net is, what xml is, what you'd use a DOM for, etc will do wonders at the interview if you get your foot in the door. Personally when I interview developers? I chat to them about technology. I work on the basic principle that if you can't hold a conversation with me about what the future of the industry is and what technologies you think are going to take over with some opinions of your own and reasoning behind them... I don't want to pay you. The next trick of course is convincing people that have those opinions and etc to do it my bloody way not how they think it should work. But thats easy enough if your the one paying. ermmm - the abbrievated version? Spread your skill set, when an employer asks 'so what do you know about monkey's in taiwan?' be able to discuss it intelligently. 'I've seen those running and done a little monkey spanking myself in regards to my private website to see if the functionality was an improvement, it looks interesting but I think the technology field will move on towards orangutangs for the more intelligent million monkeys with a million keyboards approach' Have a port folio - be able to say 'See this? I did this. I actually do know what I'm doing. Here's the proof that I'm not another scammer or accademe with no idea.' And don't expect to pick yourself up a fat cat set of digs with enough ho's and bad leopard skin rugs to be on MTV Cribz, and 6 top end sports cars with the extended supermodel inside package with your first contract cheque. Keep in mind its a job, not a fountain of money bottle and run with. And keep in mind if you aren't particularly attached to your personality or your consience, financial law is the biggest scam goin. -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Dickinson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, 21 March 2003 10:54 AM To: CFAussie Mailing List Subject: [cfaussie] CF Job prospect - a spark for Friday discussions/rants Another CFer (from Bris) was saying to me that contractor rates in Brisbane suck, and things don't appear drastically different in the rest of the country. This got me thinking .......... Kinda depressing for a career development point of view. I've been doing fairly low-level programming tasks in CF in this job for 18 months. (Despite the tone of that sentence, I still seriously love my job - no, I'm quite serious !). The natural step is to improve my CF programming skills, at least as soon as the company finally decides whether to purchase 5 or MX. But I look at the number of apparently highly qualified and capable programmers already out there, and the outrageous requirements for little return in those cfjob ads (like "expert programmer in CF, ASP, SQL, and ten different other things wanted for 4 weeks contract work in central northern Queensland, must pay own relocation expenses"), and think, "is it worth trying to progress?" . Perhaps I should do as my wife suggests, and study pharmacy for a medium term career change! Not that I want a change just yet, but the truism of continuous education is particularly sharp in IT. Thoughts ? Ravings ? --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/ --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/
