You may have misunderstood what I meant.
Restated, it is better to keep business and personal emails totally separate and not worrying about asking a lawyer after being sued about whether there might be a problem.
Seems the thread has gotten hijacked but as I have spent 20 years programming and now 8 in management I would say emphatically NO! unless jr truly has a passion for something in IT. Corporations attempts to commoditize and flood the labor field with candidates has been successful. Not that I blame them, thread discussed motives, but when you look at all of the industries that the corporatists have done this to (veterinarians, lawyers, pharmacy, MBA’s) it is just the natural course. If your child’s chief motivation is money you should figure out what will be hot in a few years ,not what is paying well now.
Cybersecurity is red hot now, and it doesn’t look like it’ll cool down for a long time.
This has got to be one of the most depressing CC threads I have yet encountered. I have a daughter in high school right now and “Go into STEM!!! Huzzah for STEM!!” is being shoved at them front, back and sideways, eight days a week.
And I read this thread and I think, “Why the hell should any of these kids let us force them into such a nightmare?? Why should they want to go into IT (especially girls)? Why pursue coding or CompSci? Just so they can be chewed up and spit out? THAT is why they should be doing all-nighters at 15, 16, 17 years old, so they can get that great ACT/SAT score, so they get into that great school, in order to beat out some H-1B applicant?”
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I’m coming in a bit late to this discussion, but I have written many things on this subject. If I have time, I’ll write more, but for now, I’ll opine that people who don’t have a strong interest in CS, software, and other related activities shouldn’t pursue them professionally, because there is no guarantee that they will have solid, stable salaries for the rest of their working years.
On the general subject of women pursuing careers in STEM, Philip Greenspun gave some opinions on the subject in http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science.
I would add to @CollegeAngst’s list that the interview process for computer industry jobs can be highly subjective, particularly at the very (financially) successful, top-of-mind awareness companies such as Google and Amazon. Steve Yegge, who worked at both, covered this in [Get that job at Google](Stevey's Blog Rants: Get that job at Google). Pay particular attention to the “interview anti-loop” section.
IT contractors like Cognizant are getting their due. http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/as-cognizant-battles-bribery-scandal-indian-it-stares-at-a-slowdown-116101200306_1.html
I have to agree that the interview/selection process for tech jobs is horrible. They will ask very specific technical questions that are specific to a programming language and base a hiring decision on that. A good tech person knows the principles behind stuff and uses that to figure out solutions - these are the people you want to hire - problem solvers not somebody who can memorize programming syntax.
A million years ago I did interviewing for tech jobs - I never asked those kinds of questions - I would ask how would you go about doing something or how have you gone about solving something to allow candidates to demonstrate their problem solving skills.
This is not unique to tech - some business majors find themselves drilled on interviews to answer stuff like what is today’s exchange rate. The correct question to ask is how would you find out today’s exchange rate.
@kiddie I agree with you 100% – platforms evolve so fast these days that skills in a specific discipline have a very limited shelf-life. People who love technology, are good problem-solvers and can auto-didactically pick up every new API and platform (as they rush down the conveyor belt like Lucy’s chocolates) are the most valuable people.
@kiddie – while I agree with not giving “trick” questions on an interview, for a software job you have to ask the interviewee to actually write some code and not just verbally do problem solving. For example, when I was on the interviewer circuit at work in the early 1990s, I was third or fourth in the list of interviewers for a candidate. Everyone ahead of me liked the guy so I asked some easy, real life programming questions. Simple things at first to shake off any jitters (e.g. reverse a string in-place in C). Complete failure. In my feedback to the interviewer pool I told those after me to ask more real programming questions in case it was just a failure of me and the interviewee to communicate. It wasn’t.
On the other side, sometimes you interview someone who’s on the next step up the evolutionary ladder from us normal humans! This one interviewee from California looked like a surfer dude, with the hair and slick leather jacket. Not your usual computer geek – I was thinking he probably spent more time surfing than coding. Anyway, he blew through every single coding question with good solutions very quickly, even the very poorly spec’d questions where the goal was to get the interviewee to “see” the implementation issues ahead of time and ask questions before writing code. It was like the guy could read my mind.
@kiddie @droppedit @Postmodern
You’ll all be happy to know that many tech companies these days have updated their interview practices. While coding questions are still asked, they are usually language agnostic and the interviewer asks for the interviewee to choose any language they want. Many are done on laptops of the interviewee rather than a whiteboard as well, to avoid the very unconventional medium. Some even allow open internet for syntax questions.
This thread is interesting, but I wanted to get back to the specific question asked by the OP. One poster said: “Companies are rarely concerned with the upfront expenditure for something - they are mainly concerned with the ROI relative on said expenditure.”
Well, let’s reverse that. In this field, what is the ROI for the employee as opposed to the initial ‘investment’? That is, what are the job prospects after, say, 15 years? I don’t worry about landing the job. I’d worry about what happens when you’re 35, have a family to support and car payments and childcare and a mortgage, and you want to also actually be with your children a bit as opposed to working insane hours on hyper-pill-popping mode-- what are your prospects? How scared should you be of being laid off for cheaper 20 somethings?
I personally know several adults in their 50s who have put their whole lives into this field only to be tossed out, after training Indians. (Meaning no disrespect to Indians at all; just commenting on the outsourcing). NO they were not fired because they were incompetent or rigid or refused to learn new stuff. They trained the Indians after all. They were all terrified of being fired and worked ginormous hours. One of my friends actually had to be flown out to a large company after the Indians messed up on the work; he was the ‘face’ of his tech company, meant to soothe their client’s feathers and reassure them that they were in good hands despite the mistake. And of course, fix the problem. He saved the deal and the company’s reputation, but the company fired him a few years later after he trained dozens of Indians for his own type of job. It was far cheaper.
Given that outsourcing or ‘insourcing’ (visas) seems to be inevitable, what are the prospects for this job beyond the 20s? What can the individual do to try to protect themselves from a similar fate to my friends? Just don’t say, “Work enormous hours & learn new things all the time.” They did. Their problem seems to me that a) they could be outsourced, saving a ton of money and b) they were not in high enough positions that they had power and agency.
I’m really interested in hearing words of wisdom from those who are successfully in the business well into their mature adulthood.
Rather than be on the defense (trying to “protect” themselves), they could go on the offense and use their experience and connections to form a competing company. One that won’t suffer from the mistakes/problems that come with outsourcing. Focus on quality and pick off the old company’s customers one-by-one.
If only it were that easy. The contracts may have non-compete clauses and it isn’t all that easy to pilfer your former employers clients.
“I’m really interested in hearing words of wisdom from those who are successfully in the business well into their mature adulthood.”
Pick a profession that your employer cannot or will not replace you as you age. There are industries, say banking and law, that value experiences and the value of networking; these attributes tend to increase as time goes by. There are also some professions that are better protected by union contracts and industry norms. For example, I teach at a university and I feel that I am almost like a general partner of the university: no one in my university can ask me to leave as long as I deliver quality teaching and research and do not do crazy things. 
I think this is probably why some professors of computer science are not too upset that their students may earn the same as they do when they are just fresh out of college.
Perhaps that is why there seem to be people who show up on these forums looking for colleges that offer the fast track to Wall Street, management consulting, or the executive office, since those are the kinds of jobs where (at least after advancing sufficiently) one decides whose job will be outsourced or offshored.
@ucbalumnus: what you said are quite true. But I was thinking more about say someone who is a managing director in banking or consulting who use his/her experiences and relationships to bring business to and add value to his/her firm as he/she ages. At this position, he/she is unlikely to make outsourcing decision yet. This is often been done at very top level, say CEO.
“I’m really interested in hearing words of wisdom from those who are successfully in the business well into their mature adulthood.”
Alternatively, you can become an entreprenuer in the tech business. No one can fire you, except for the market.
Re: #175
While the Wall Street banker or management consultant does not directly make outsourcing or offshoring decisions, s/he can have considerable influence on CEOs who may make such decisions (e.g. Wall Street pressure on companies to make short term cost reductions, or consultants who recommend outsourcing or offshoring decisions).
Thanks for the input.
So basically you have to be either a consultant, an entrepreneur, or top level managerial class?
@prof2dad, honestly, tenured professorial jobs are becoming increasingly rare (I used to be a professor). Much as I hear you about your own job satisfaction, that sort of autonomy at universities I think will be increasingly hard to find.
@connections: it is true that, overall, tenured professorial jobs in the US are becoming increasingly rare, particularly in humanities and some basic sciences. But there are a few bright spots; some are due to increased demand from universities outside of the US that can be newly founded and well-endowed. A few friends of mine gave up their tenured position in US big-name universities, such as BC and UTA, and now teach in Asia. They earn more in terms of US dollar (often more than $300k) from their new employers, plus more opportunities doing industry consulting.