Is Computer Programming a Good Job for Retirees? 147
braindrainbahrain asks: "Ask Slashdot has been rife with career advice lately, so maybe I can get some too. I hit a milestone recently, the big five oh, and the realization of retirement is starting to settle in. The trouble is, I don't want to sit around, play golf, or even travel that much. I work in a technical field, but I have always enjoyed programming. Indeed, I do it as a hobby. I wonder what you readers would think about programming as a post retirement job. It seems well suited for a retiree, one could do contract work for a few months of the year, in some cases work from home even. By way of background, I have worked in hardware engineering for a very long time, and have pursued graduate study almost regularly (two Masters degrees so far). Should I begin preparing for a post-retirement career in computer science?"
That depends (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know, are you willing to relocate to India?
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Honestly... Someone asks about retirees and the first reply is a joke about incontinence.
I'm shocked - shocked, I tell you!
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Sure, if you want all the companies to move overseas instead, while you simultaneously spark a major trade war with every emerging power.
If you care about the American economy, on the other hand, your time would be better spent working out why companies want to go to the considerable effort of hiring foreign workers instead of using the local t
You left out some important facts (Score:2)
Right now there are US tax BENEFITS to outsourcing. That simply shouldn't be true; I've never heard any justification for it except to line the pockets of the companies large enough to do it a lot.
Companies with US employees pay a tremendous amount for healthcare, in great disproportion to the quality of care we get. a) I'm not saying we need national healthcare, but we at least need enough regulation of this critical industr
Overqualified (Score:3, Interesting)
Good luck getting a response to your resume with that background. Companies will see your credentials, assume they'd have to pay too much since you're "overqualified" and instantly send you a flush letter.
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Most companies don't bother to respond at all these days unless the response is positive. Rejection letters are a thing of the past.
Funny, because out of all the relatively large companies (most of the time 100+ employees) I have contacted, on the rougly 200 letters I've sent I received maybe 60-70 rejection letters. Much more than I'd ask for.
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Not a very large percentage as far as I'm concerned. But it may depend on the positions you're applying for. I was mainly looking for programming or PC/Network support postions.
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Re:Overqualified (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about it - how many of us started out on machines that booted directly into a shell that had BASIC built right in, let us start 'coding' little mickey mouse programs, and we spent hours and hours copying BASIC programs from magazines into our little 1MHz 6502 based computers with 32k of usable memory (if we were lucky) - but we were making the baby steps necessary to become true programmers. How many of us could bang out a bubble sort in at least one language by the time we were 15? How many 15 year olds do you know now than can do it now?
If the OP wants to make more money, not sure I can help him.
If the OP wants to make a lasting and meaningful contribution - buy (or fish out of the trash) and refurb a dozen computers that are so old they don't even qualify as door-stops (ie TRS-80, C=64, VIC-20, PC-AT class machines in the MHz (not GHz) class with floppy disks and dot matrix printers and CLI tools like DOS 6.22, GWBASIC, the DOS versions of FoxPro, Borland's Turbo Pascal and C++, some terminal emulation software and dial-up modems, maybe even an assembler and the source to some of the really old viruses, and a ton of old magazines with source code in them so the kids can copy-type in the source, see what it does.
To paraphrase a touching scene from '13th Warrior' - a man whose coding skills lives on in an entire next generation of software engineers, this is a wealthy man indeed.
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I still can't write a bubble sort off the top of my head. I know Insertion Sort is harder to write, but I can always figure it out, because I remember why the algorithm actually works. I was 17 when I took Pascal, and doing homework assignments a few months ahead of where the class was, so when I got to the sorting assignment (which I'm sure was intended to be solved with a bubblesort), I thought about what I did w
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And odds are, when you were eight years old computer programming was beyond you - it involved concepts way over your head. So was cooking, but that doesn't mean you couldn't open a bag
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Maybe if you don't have a teacher. My high school Pascal class didn't operate that way at all. We started with a basic "Hello World", then put the "Hello World" string into a variable, then did it in a simple for loop, etc.
Imagine where you would have gone had you just kept on banging on that PET / 64, copy typing in code that you didn't quite understand (and letting the natural evolution I described above happen for those seven years.)
Probably n
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As for whether typing in magazine listings will help one or not depends on whether or not the person asks the next question which is "What does this do and how does it do it?" Once one does that and then work with the code to determine the answer, one has learned the code.
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I have understood the algorithm; I just can't remember why it works for more than a few weeks, for some reason.
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You're so right. Well, actually the first reply is right, they won't even contact you.
I'm having that problem now. Not that I'm over educated, but I'm over experienced. I guess the years that I've been doing my work overshadows most other people.
Unfortunately, I'm to the point that I *NEED* a job. I don't care if it's a lower job, under someone who doesn't know half of what I know. Eventually they'll move on or be fired, and I can move up to a position I dese
Absolutely! (Score:2, Interesting)
There's nothing like having to compete with someone who (a) doesn't have a family to support (b) a mortgage to pay (c) has a pention/retirement income and - this is the one that gets us all warm and fuzzy - is getting p
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Nobody should be willing to work in the field I am in for less money than I want to earn, because the competition hurts me.
Is that about right? By the same logic, people who have higher standard of living costs (maybe they live in the Silicon Valley or just prefer to commute in a Rolls Royce) are getting screwed over by your existence in the work force. If you want to keep older folks out, maybe you should be fair and remove yourself from the job pool too.
It's simply
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Again - this hasn't happened to me, but I know certain places where this has occured (can you say Florida?).
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If you live in a small community, word will spread if you are willing and able to solve the many problems people have with their computers. It will make you many friends and perhaps a few dollars. Keeping older computers out of landfills by making them still useful to their owners is a good deed for the environment as well.
On the contrary (Score:2)
But please don't take your pension and my social security and offer services which are priced lower than normal wholesale costs. In the international arena it's called dumping and it's illegal. Remember - this guy is being supported on SS (or will be in a few years - by t
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What I think you're missing is that no matter what your job is, if it involves computers and IT, someone, somewhere, will enjoy doing it for free.
That's going to be a "problem" for everybody from musicians to Microsoft employees, as more and more grunt work is automated and more and more individuals are empowered to do whatever they want with their lives. Based on the sentiments in your posts about not wanting to compete with people who don't really need the money or the work, I'd
Talk about Quixotic... (Score:2)
In other words, "I am an unique and beautiful snowflake, you're a replaceable part." Well, hon, short of selling your spunk, there's nothing you can provide that is of truly "unique" value...and what quantifiable uniqueness there is for your, uhm, "genetic material," I highly doubt there is a premium in the market that could replace a salary even if you were able to produce it like water from a fire-hose.
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The open source community is available for any retired computer programmer to publicly display their coding skills. A venue where the best programmers demonstrate their coding mojo and the unique values they bring open source projects.
The big difference between proprietary software and open source, open source actually doe
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Why
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Are you saying that you can't surv
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Unless you have opportunities to make extraordinary amounts of money in SF, I don't know that I'd pick SF in particular as a place to live (SF is nice... but at what cost?). Why not someplace like Monterey or Santa Cruz? You know, nice, but lacking the completely insane high cost of living.
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The poverty level for 2006 was around $18,300 (IIRC).
$25k/year isn't bad for somebody who isn't doing a damn thing to earn it. That's more than a relative of mine made in a large midwestern city as a full-time secretary in a doctor's office - and she had to support 2 kids.
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Social Security (Score:2)
But please don't take your pension and my social security and offer services which are priced lower than normal wholesale costs. In the international arena it's called dumping and it's illegal. Remember - this guy is being supported on SS (or will be in a few years - by the time he's worth anything) - so it's not exactly apples to apples.
First if someone's retiring and is going to collect Social Security then they paid into it. Next, if they had instead of paying SS tax, they had invested the same amoun
That depends on if you like to wirte TPS reports (Score:2)
Too soon to say (Score:3, Insightful)
Just great.... (Score:4, Funny)
While we're pondering cre-azy ideas, how about we revive that euthanasia debate?
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I wouldn't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything that you enjoy doing instantly becomes much less fun the moment you are doing it because you are required to, for whatever reason.
If you enjoy programming as a hobby, why not just continue to do it as a hobby? There are plenty of open source projects that would benefit tremendously from having an extra hand, especially one that doesn't have many other commitments. There are so many projects I wish I had time to work on, but other obligations get in that way. The time you have is such a luxury.
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Oh, and to the "old" guy, this guy has the right idea. Retirement isn't about travel or golf or lounging around growing mold. It's about doing what you want to do after doing what you had to do. If you want to do some dev work, do it.
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In agreement with the poster above, the last thing you want to deal with especially when you are nearing retirement, is to continue on with the stress and drama of the office politics. If you love to code, by all means go all out and start doing it 'full-time.'
That way you can do all the work you loved doing previously, and at the same time you can free your hands of all the nitty gritty /dirty world of business that prevents/slows you from doing the stuff you love in the first place. You can perfect your
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programming, even doing it as a job. *Dont*
tell my boss...
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I actually enjoy programming more. I think its because what Im doing has purpose instead of just doing little things here and there.
Its funny, because at one point I resisted taking a job in programming because I thought it would be less fun that way, and I wouldnt want to do it at work and at home, too. I dont do nearly as many personal projects now, but I definitely have more fun.
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Been doing it professionally for more than 12 years now, still loving it.
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Many people are confused about how to start
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Actually, I have had the opposite experience. I advocate doing what you love; if someone is willing to pay you for it, so much the better! I feel really bad for the people who wake up each morning and head off to a job they hate.
I absolutely love my job... (Score:2)
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Another option to consider is offering to do development work for non-profit charity groups. Many of them can benefit from systems, either custom written or created from various open source offerings, but have little in the way of budget. They usually aren't target clients for the group that is telling you to 'stay off their lawn'.
The upside of working with these groups is you're usually working with people who aren't there just to get a paycheck, they believe in the work they do, and that attitude in
Where are you? (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, if you manage to find a company that you mesh with and the projects you work on are the same thing you would do by yourself, then by all means, go for it. The team envrionment can be rewarding.
Just try to get out of the cubicle as much as possible. You'll be dead in ten years if you don't. Or close anyway.
TLF
Go for it (Score:3, Insightful)
If you like problem solving, like to learn new things, enjoy working with computers, then definitely go for it.
You didn't mention if you can survive off your current retirement savings, but if you can that I think there's even more reason to do it. You'll have the flexibility to offer your services to groups that usually can't afford to hire expensive programmers (think non-profit national science organizations, smaller mom and pop shops, etc...) or you can contribute to open source projects.
I think the best part of it, though, is that if you try out a certain technology (say web programming) and hate it, then you can jump to something else. There's nothing forcing you to have one speciality and you can figure out the skills required once you have a solid enough foundation (there is so much information available online and it's usually free).
Only you know if this type of thing fits you. But I will say that if anyone tells you that you're too old, or that your brain isn't flexible enough, pay attention to what they say and the prove them wrong.
Enjoy your life. (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, if you love code, then delve into open source, find something that you want to fix and fix it. It will feel great. If you really enjoy programming you can just keep going. If you need to find some spare cash, then you can point to your hobby work that is in the current distro of Centos or Ubuntu. And wind up with a survivable paycheck, or you can marry the feilds you know and wind up with a big ole paycheck. It is relativly hard to find a programmer with masters level domain knowlege in two fields. Ok its not that hard, if flash more than $50/hour
Good luck
Storm
Yes! (Score:1)
I'd say it's an excellent occupation for retirees. After all, anything that fills your time that doesn't involving driving around at 45 miles per hour in your Nissan Micra on the public highway, or taking all lunch-hour to cash your pension at the post office, is surely a benefit to society.
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Heh :-) My cynicism gets the better of me. In 18 years, I'll be 50. The rate time goes past now, it'll be the blink of an eye. I don't seem to be making a good job of my life so far.
68.4% of statistics (Score:2)
I think I'll add yours to the list.
Computer science!=programming (Score:2)
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It's so true. I'm an engineering applied sciences major (left MechE after I decided that the MechE curriculum didn't allow me to take as many math classes as I wanted to). I had always maintained and was somewhat pedantic about the programming/computer science difference. After taking a software engineering class in EE/CompE department, I came to understand the even fur
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Because of that, currently at my job Im quickly becoming the guru of software developement, even though I just ha
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After having completed an AI degree and wrapping up a CS degree with a
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They do? I have a CS degree, and despite spending a lot of time coding in college, I don't do much of it today. Other than hacking a little HTML and PHP, my job is mostly system administration, network maintenance, training, support, and building the occasional system out of spare par
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Some keys to success (Score:3, Insightful)
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Maybe #7 is "Don't tell everyone everything you know."
This association is not correct... (Score:3, Insightful)
I suggest unpaid, open source, work (Score:2)
Ever think about Teaching? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Let me answer with... (Score:1, Funny)
if (this.getAge() 23) {
this.jobSecurity(true);
this.jobCompetition(false);
}
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Horrible code.
Do you want Full-time vs. Part-Time work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Professional programming usually isn't part-time work, at least if you're working for a company that's producing a product to sell as opposed to doing in-house projects to support other activities. It's typically feast-or-famine schedule, with the usual deadline crunches. Now that the 90s boom is over, there may be less of the 80-hour-week-deathmarch kind of thing going on, and programmers may be more likely to have lives rather than being 25-year-olds with an infinite tolerance for caffeine, but that still tends to be the environment.
So if you want to work part-time, you'll need to look a bit longer for a gig than if you want to be full-time. On the other hand, if you want to work occasional full-time gigs, then contract/temp work does fine for that. Or if you want to do sysadmin work, that's often flexible about schedule.
Mature attitude needed in IT (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer so this may come across off-topic, but there is a lesson to be learned with respect to mature vs *cough*immature*cough* people in the world of IT.
Most of the people working in this area at the moment are very young and enthusiastic. Thats not a bad thing in itself; its bad when they start 'playing' with systems on which other peoples livelyhoods depend.
They are often people who think its ok to introduce fascinating new technologies into the enterprise machine room because they *love* to tinker with shiny new stuff "ooooh Linux iscsi on all our servers! Wheeeee!!!".
Its bad when you have IT professionals who so love fixing computer problems that they don't mind being woken up by a pager at 3am; for them its a wonderful opportunity to wrestle with a computer problem.
The mature attitude says that computers should not wake people with a 3am pager call; they should not go wrong in the first place. It says that you should not introduce bleeding-edge technologies into important systems. It says that stability and reliability are very important.
Same sort of thing applies to coding I guess, but not being a coder, take no notice of me.
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I totally agree with everything you mentioned. Our company tends to be very bleeding-edge; the sysadmins I work with want to install every single new technology the day it goes beta. It's encouraged in the name of "innovation", which I agree with. However, people need to learn to build stable systems that don't die unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Ripping out Solaris in favor of Linux? Fine, just make sure it's rock-solid and thoroughly te
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What you have to do when talking with management about such issues, is to liberaly use such words and phrases as "untried", "untested", "unproven", "not ready for the enterprise".
You have to make sure that the people above you are made totally aware that if they settle on some unproven solution that any downtime or other problems that result will be thei
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Programming at 50+ (Score:5, Interesting)
Good idea, but will others think so? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm guessing this will change as the profession matures. However, today is not a good day for older workers in the tech field. Too many people don't realize the value of life experience. Also, employers don't want to hire older workers because they're afraid they won't be able to keep up with younger peers. Older workers also demand higher salaries, which IT is not willing to pay in most companies.
I agree that retirement is going to be a lot different for our generation. I really can't see myself on a golf course every day or working as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Hopefully the tide will shift a little. I already see businesses less willing to put up with IT failures caused by "new, cool" systems. Maybe a little standardization and movement towards a "information systems engineering" profession will help.
Academia (Score:3, Interesting)
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I work on open source projects. I do some writing. I took the courses and passed the tests so that I can teach in the public schools. I haven't been able to find a job there yet. There are a lot of people like me chasing too few teaching jobs. I do teach part time at the local community college. But, very few people in the US are interested in learning programming right now. I have only had 6 students in the last 3 semesters. I teach and code when I can. I was thinking about going to law school. But I do not have the money and I would have to move which is not an option right now.
So, all I can say is good luck with that.
Stonewolf
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So I do not think you can really be a retiree computer programmer unless you are willing to do charity work for a school or open
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First off, good luck yourself.
Perhaps my perspective could help. I only have a few lowely AAS degrees combined with credits toward the CS. I've been at my current job, apps programmer for about 5 years, and had pretty much the same job for 3 years at a different company before moving. Most of the jobs I have applied for, and the 2 I have taken have been with small-medium size companies. The demand for programmers at these companies is very overlooked. Especially in manufacturing shops. Companies that
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I would jump at a job like those you describe. Almost all my experience has been in small start up companies. I have worked at 5 start up companies. I have actively been looking for companies like that. I have been turned down for those jobs and the reasons are usually that 1) I am over qualified, i.e. they assume I will leave at the drop of a hat and 2) I am over 50.
The second one can be a killer for small companies. First off, they usually believe that you have to very young to be
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Well, then they have yet to learn their lessons. Wait till they pay a vendor or contractor to do something for them only to find they get little or no support, or extremely overpriced support. We've proven many cases where having an in-house programmer can be much cheaper than buying or contracting software. Especially when you have to employ a full time DBA to manage an overly complex application that you are already paying liscensing and support costs for.
But I do know that second one is a killer. I
Excellent idea (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, since they will tend to drop dead during a project, the lost art of commenting code will need to be reintroduced. In order to make sure that this gets done each senior citizen/coder will be assigned an unemployed baby-face, who will make cups of tea, issue pills, and remind them not to dribble on the keyboard. Every hour the baby-face will insist that the old codger comments the previous hour's work, and archives it.
One day the fossil will collapse across the desk, at which point the baby-face will push the body to one side, and take over the programming job. She, in her turn will be assigned a baby-face.
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I thought that was called "Extreme Programming"?
How can you retire and still work? (Score:1)
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Usuallly, the pension scheme had a minimum number of years service (and in come cases a compulsory retirement age). Once a person retired, they are
free to do what they like with the money. Many people would find second incomes through hobbies like antuque dealing - go through the second hand
stores looking for items of value to be traded on Ebay.
It won't be easy (Score:2)
alternative (Score:1)
Go for it.... (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't need the extra income, then there are no shortage of outlets where you can "scratch" your programming "itch". Contribute to an open-source project (or start your own), write some useful piece of shareware, write some business applications for your local non-profit organization, teach programming at a community school, etc. None of these avenues will provide much income (if any), but it does allow you to take your hobby to the next level.
If you are looking to actually make money out of your hobby in retirement, my advice would be to leverage your pre-retirement vocation. There is a branch of software development known as "embedded programming", which is writing software for special-purpose hardware devices. As a hardware engineer, you probably have a lot of knowledge that would be very attractive to a potential employer. Also, you probably have contacts from your hardware days who might be able to help you land a job in this area.
TEACH (Score:4, Interesting)
Like me, you sound like you won't be happy at all not working. I really can't think of myself as being out of a job, not even when I am 60+. So I plan on teaching.
You have the required education, and just so much more real world knowledge than 80% of the instructors out there today. PASS IT ON. I have taught part time in the past on and off for 5/6 years. It is a lot of fun, it keeps you sharp and the students love you because, you are for real and not just from a book.
If you code after you retire, it will get to be another full time job and who wants to deal with dead lines, time lines, requirements, and boneheads that don't know what they are talking about etc... Doesn't sound like retirement to me... If you go the teaching route, maybe a few bad ass kids in the bunch here and there, but everything else is set up, its not that hard and can be a blast.
You won't make a lot of money, but pick a good open source project and code for it as a hobby, and go teach to make a little cash and really feel good about helping all the young geeks out there ;)
duke
Do what you love... (Score:1)
If you have a passion, follow it. You will find others with your passion, and with their help find a way to continue with your passion. It does not hurt to just show up someplace that has an interest for you, offer them your services, probably as 'part-time' since you are retired you are very flexible with pay and hours.
As an employer, I do prized a good skill set, although, I must say skill set is nothing if a person has no passion to work.
Ha! I used to drop off resumés at various biz's untill I fou
Programming in real life != programming for self (Score:2)
In the real world, software development is frequently boring.
Sure, solving problems is fun. But 70-80% of the time, the things you're working on are something like:
Open Source Software (Score:2)