On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:40:01PM -0800, Mike Connors wrote: > Please excuse me for this selfish rant. Howerver, I'm frustrated w. the > lack of Linux job opps in PDX and and the rest of the state too for that > matter.
Jobs are created by entrepreneurial people who start businesses (or who start bureaucracies within government). They usually have goals that have little or nothing to do with what kind of software they are using. They just need tools that do their job, preferably with low risk. In case you haven't noticed, Portland has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Arguably, this is because there are too many workers and not enough entrepreneurs. What jobs there are go to the lowest risk people - with demonstrated track records, but not so old that they won't take orders. Yes, people with LOTS of experience are having trouble finding work, too. 5 to 15 years of experience is probably the sweet spot. If you can't "get a job", perhaps that means that you should be creating them. Finding a real-world problem that people will pay to solve, and solving it. Then hiring others to help you. Chances are, you don't want to go through that difficult and risky process. Well, welcome to Portland, where nobody else does either. Providing open source solutions for problems, with demonstrably much lower risk and lower effort for users/employers, would be a good business. Unfortunately, for most software people, the failure occurs with the demonstration. Microsoft succeeds because they have good sales people peddling a marginally acceptable product. When members of the open source community learn how to sell (and that starts with selling yourself) then we will knock Microsoft off its pedestal. Open source software creation offers a great path to do this, because you can write programs that solve problems and put them out there for others to use and improve. If you do it right, you will develop the entrepreneurial and managerial skills and the demonstrable track record that others are looking for. You might have to push a broom for a few years while you do the software work for free. That is, earn the same amount that Linus Torvalds earned over the first five years of Linux. So - learn how to sell yourself. There are books about that. It involves replacing a lot of bad habits. Once you learn how to do that, perhaps you can develop an open source app that trains others out of their job-repellent habits. Programmer, program thyself. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
