barnacle wrote:
The concern about kids not understanding the basics is serious: the company for which I worked is still trying to find an on-the-metal engineer who could handle both hardware and software for four years after I retired... which is why I am once again working from them a couple of days a week even though I'm in Potsdam DE and they're in Cambridge UK.
Interesting. I keep seeing jobs adverts for such developer work, and apply for them, only to be told "sorry, you're not what we're looking for", and see the job advertised again. Digging into it, it appears they are only prepared to consider somebody who is already actually employed doing the exact job they are recruiting for, and not actually being employed to do the exact job *today* kills your application. They won't consider anybody who has past experience, and they won't consider anybody who's experience isn't exactly 100% what they want. But, programming is programming is programming is programming. Nobody advertises for a "driver" and kicks you out because you drive a Corsa and not a Polo, but that's *exactly* what the computer engineering industry does.
I keep reading candidate skills advice that says to talk up hobby projects, and contribute to shared projects, but all but ALL vacancies demand *explicitly* /paid/ experience. 30 years programming expeience? Nobody /paid/ you to do it? **** OFF!
It also doesn't help that recruitment agencies can't tell the difference between "IT" and "developer". It is so dispiriting using my hardware/software engineering skills moving ****ing furniture! "Hey, you said you wanted to work in healthcare, this job is cleaning hospital toilets, what are you complaining about, it's in *healthcare*!"
If being alive didn't cost money, I'd just stick up two fingers are the job market and walk away.
barnacle wrote:
I grew up when there were half a dozen hobby electronics magazines; I was introduced to electronics courtesy of an engineer godfather and a cats-whisker radio.
I got my first soldering iron when I was about 8 years old. I assembled the Ladybird Book radio project, and was assembling audio leads and a two-station intercom. My father was a medical electronics engineer, and an uncle gave me a handful of ETI and Everyday Electronics magazines, and stopping buying Dandy & Beano and got EE instead.
barnacle wrote:
As a kid, I could wander down to the local radio repair shop (remember those?) and buy components directly
Two buses to the other side of town to Bardwell's to spend my pocket money on components.
They only
closed in 2017 after the owner died and the market changed to pre-built equipment.
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BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
In your earlier post, you mention how some comp-sci majors’ knowledge is all software, and mostly high-level stuff. That’s all well and good, but someone has to design the language compiler, someone has to design the assembler, someone has to design the circuit on which all that will run, etc. (...) They all think I’m a dinosaur because I monkey with machine code, chip registers and such. They don’t seem to recognize that someone has to know that stuff, else their laptops would be useless and the Internet even more useless (which it already is in some ways).
I remember when I was doing work experience in the mid-1980s and the people I was working with kept telling me not to "waste my time" persuing my interests of Z80 and 6502 machine code programming, and low-level hardware drivers, "that will be done by the compiler". But somebody has to write the bit the compiler uses to talk to the hardware. "No, that will be done by the compiler". But somebody still has to do that bit underneath the bit that the compiler does. "No, that'll be done by the compiler". No, *somebody* still has to put some code at location zero and set up the CPU to enter the code the compiler builds....
I couldn't understand how much effort people were putting into trying to get me to throw away what I was most interested, skilled, and had aptitude for.