Category Archives: Working For Others

It’s nice to have someone reach out and give you a helping hand. It’s better when they help you find a job. Here is some nitty-gritty advice I learned the hard way.

There are times in almost every life when our plans don’t work out and life puts the squeeze on us. More and more of us have had to deal with being unemployed for short or long periods of time.

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Startups seem to go stale in less than five years. By then the best and brightest have departed for better opportunities. The underlying reason for going stale is misestimating the effort required to succeed. This is the same reason that most projects go stale after 18 months.

There is a interesting relationship between success and the correct estimation of the effort required. I think that’s because success has more to do with morale than money. Money is a fundamental requirement, but employee morale is the driving force that achieves success in spite of all obstacles. Update: Employee morale can stay high for many years if the risks and effort have been correctly estimated.

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OldCatman reminds me that there are IT professionals with COBOL experience who are being shoved out of the corporate nest. For all I know, there may still be DIBOL programmers out there, or assembly language programmers for mainframes. I left the industry in 2001 when C++ and Java experience were in demand. Even these skills may be history soon.

Our industry grew so fast and in so many different directions that those of us on the bleeding edge lost sight of our fellow professionals in niche situations. Today, there are many generations of software languages still in use, but very few programmers know more than a few languages. High-tech growth can turn capable technical people into dinosaurs overnight.

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When you get the first indications that your employment is ending, a fearsome shadow falls over your life, but there is more to life afterwards than you would ever expect.

Getting fired , like getting divorced, is not something you plan for. Sometimes, it just happens, in spite of your best efforts to avoid it. In either case, there is little to be gained by finding fault, because there is more than enough to go around.

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