keithba

Keep in mind that there's a natural unemployment rate in any economy. The natural unemployment rate is typically made up of two components: people in-between jobs and people with out-dated skills.

In programming, we'll always have (in any month) some % of workers moving from one job to another (either because they quit, the company they worked for went out of business, or they were laid off - because the company performed badly or their own poor or poorly perceived performance.)

And, in programming, there will always be some set of people who find themselves out of job because the company they were working for no longer needs their Delphi or COBOL or other outdated skill (not to say there are not jobs for those Delphi or COBOL programmers, but there are less and less of them, on average.) Those programmers have to get re-trained, etc.

These two groups make up that 4% - which is around the natural unemployment rate for the economy as a whole on average over the last 70 years (it's around 4-5).

If the unemployment rate was above this (basically at the national avg of close to 9) for programmers, then the difference would be cyclical - missing jobs based on the recession. Because it is so low, I;m wondering if it's we can conclude that programming (in today's economy, at least) is recession-proof.

As a kid I was an avid reader of Heinlein and Asimov, and they were always talking about slide rules (Astrogators navigated space with them!)

This was the late 80s, and I couldn't find one. So, I found plans for one in the public library and built one. Later a math teacher gave me his.

Playing with slide rules would be useful. Building a slide rule would be even more useful.

Funny you say that - in the seven+ years I worked there I heard (serious, not ironic) versions of this phrasing _many_ times from various senior managers and execs, especially as related to IBM's consulting business.

In economics, this is called a Pareto improvement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

The idea is that if there are inefficiencies in a system (or market), we can create win-win situations by reducing the inefficiencies.

A classic and useful example of this is comparative advantage and opportunity cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage). Both parties can gain if they have different relative efficiencies, even if one party has an overall production advantage. (This is why countries will import goods and services they could produce domestically - it frees up resources to produce other stuff that they can produce more of.)

This is because it is inefficient to be good at everything you are good at all at once - the opportunity cost is too high relative to importing from someone else.

For instance, you may be better at coding (for instance, in Ruby or Python) and creating HTML/CSS from PSDs than anyone else, but since creating HTML/CSS from PSDs takes away time from coding, you can outsource the HTML/CSS creation to someone who may be slightly slower than you, but that's OK, since the opportunity cost for you is worth it: more time to code.

So - if you want to create a long-term win-win situation with another party - you should find out what you can produce for a relatively lower opportunity cost than they can, and then sell it to them. You will win, and they will win.

I felt I had to drop out of my high school because of the one-size-fits all mentality. Outside of a couple of teachers who tried to attempted to challenge me, the rest of the administration felt fine with placing me in classes that were incredibly boring for me.

And no one was willing to help me figure out how to graduate early.

So I dropped out at 15, got a GED, and enrolled in college a year later. All with no guidance from any adult (including my mom - who for obscure religious reasons was anti-higher education.)

At 19 I had to drop of college to help support my mom who was sick and never did get my degree. Since then, I've been successful (shipped some major products, published books, etc).

But, it many years to see the current educational system as anything but corrupt and useless for many years after this experience.

Here's what I did to make me better at shipping software (which is slightly different than the question asked.)

I read moneyball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball) - a book about using sabremetrics to create a winning baseball team and realized that everything I knew about being a great programmer and creating a great team was wrong.

The key takeaway I took from the book is that the things we think make a great baseball player (such as RBIs and HR) aren't what help win a game. There are better stats, such as on-base percentage.

In the world of software, I correlate between winning a baseball game with shipping software. And I suspect that what we traditionally recognize as strong individual performance isn't really what leads to shipping great software (same as having someone hit a lot of HRs on your team doesn't mean you'll win a lot of games.)

Right now, I suspect that (so-callled) soft skills around communication and time management are the fundamentals stats that are more important. So I've focused heavily on things like personal and team time management, and writing skills.

Too true - I've been leanring Ruby on Rails 3 + Koala + omniauth today. Lots of fun...