On “Job requires Experience”
May 26th, 2008As mentioned in Alan Greenspan book: “A dysfunctional U.S. elementary and secondary system has failed to prepare our students sufficiently to prevent a shortage of skilled workers and a surfeit if lesser-skilled onces, expanding a pay gap between the groups. Unless America’s education system can rise skill levels as quickly as technology requires, skilled workers will continue to earn greater wage increase, leading to ever more disturbing extremes of income concentration.”
As a newly grad you can experience this yourself. Thanks to the involvement in “acm at uic” I was introduced to technologies and its uses. If you take your education upon yourself and do what interests you, eventually you will be the “skilled” worker. Thanks to just awareness of what open source technology is available out there and ability to efficiently apply it at my work, my salary has been doubling each year. Others, especially in electrical engineering fields can experience that instantly and I know example of people who’s wage went from $6 an hour to 60,000 a year just by the virtue of graduating.
As my suggestions to collage students. Get involved in clubs that introduce you to technology, volunteer, or work for free to gain knowledge, take classes that interest you not just classes that get you by with an A. From my undergrad courses I especially used C++ object oriented programming where we wrote 5 C++ programs which I used for all my work related reference and grad course in scientific software for industry which opened my mind of what technology can do for any field, or company.
“In Life unless we take action we perish. The extent to which people are willing to take risks depends on the rewards they think they may gain.” AG p.503 If you have not taken any action you cannot feel sorry for yourself on anybody else who complains they cannot find a job.
Always use and learn based on the open source technologies with no patents. If you were at FLOSS 2008, you could see how IBM went from “Write all closed source software unless justified to be open source” to “All open source unless justified to be closed source software”. “None of the empirical evidence at our disposal and none of the theoretical arguments presented either confirm or confutes the belief that the patent system has promoted the progress of the technical arts and the productivity of the economy” This was a conclusion of Prof. Machlup who studied the Patent system. You can create and deploy open source software twice as fast as closed source software*; you can definitely develop faster with lower initial investment starting at day one if you choose to use open source license. If you work for company that doesn’t develop software but uses it (70% of all software developed* ) that will be a huge performance increase for you, your team and company.