Emlyn wrote:
> Some of the purists will come out of the woodwork and attack me for this
> viewpoint. It does sound like a banal and colourless life. Don't be fooled;
> the mainstream technology is not only rewarding in a financial sense, it's
> fun. It's fun because it keeps changing at a crazy pace. When you've got
> most of the coders, and most of the install base, you can afford to put a
> lot of effort into development. This means things are rarely ever the same,
> which is damned hard, but always interesting.
>
I was not aware that MS was passing out drugs with their products. :-)
MS is NOT the mainstream except on the desktop. They are not even the
majority player in the server world and definitely not in the embedded
world.
Since most corporations have (unfortunately) become fixated on the Web
client as the UI, almost all of the real action in software today in
corporate IT and associated products is server side.
Since when did MS put a lot of effort into development? OSes with
65,000+ open bugs? OSes that still wouldn't know multi-user
functionality if it bit them in the ass? MS has hired up a lot of good
talent and mostly buried it. I mean these are the people who give you a
"power development tool" where the IDE, the program you are debugging,
and the debugger itself are all in the same thread! Yep, that shows a
lot of thought and a that a lot of the billions bilked from their
customer base is being put into development. Yep.
SQL Server is inferior to Oracle, to Sybase (which it was extracted
from) and is even inferior in many useability aspects to MS Access. It
is inferior to the Open Source database, Postgresql.
Yes, you can make a lot of money learning whatever set of tools some
organization decides to demand this year whether it makes any sense or
not. But you will learn more and be more valuable in the long run if you
are pickier and put your time in learning the technologies that really
the best to the best of your ability to discern them. You can make a
lot of money just giving everyone what they ask for though. But will
you be happy and whole doing it? Some people can stand to be whores if
paid well enough. Some don't have the stomach for it. I did my bit of
whoring. I don't have to do that anymore. And I won't.
- samantha
> Note also; I've had a lot of jobs, and never used even similar sets of
> skills/languages from one job to the next; the primary language to use, for
> instance, has always been entirely new to me. That's not uncommon. So
> there's no need to get cut up on becoming a specialist in language X or
> database Y. Just get really good at learning.
>
> Emlyn
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:21 MDT