> I always thought it's an HP skill, problem, but judging by my
> friend, who's
> an Oracle expert, he can't find a decent contract anywhere.  The
> problem for
> me, is how easy it is to get into IT.  I've met so many
> contractors who can
> barely do their job, don't even know the most basic of computer
> skills, yet
> still manage to find work as the market was desperate.
>

Sadly, the quality of IT staff is not what it was. When you lurk on some of
the mailing lists (this one being an exception) in particular.. in the M$
world, you see people asking the same basic questions time and time again.
Anyone with any common sense would poke around, open up a few dialog boxes,
type sensible stuff in the fields to solve the problem and hit the "OK"
button. I sometimes get exasperated when I see jobspecs asking for "MS
Exchange Consultants". There are only so many menu options and dialog boxes
that can present themselves in MS Exchange. You just have to know what to
type in the fields to produce the desired effect and hey presto... it
(mostly) works! I've worked a lot with the point-and-click generation who,
when presented with a command-line, just try to right-click on it to see
what the options are.

-Also-

A big beef of mine is the GUI thang. Get yourself a massive chunk of SMP,
RAIDed, Quad-Processor computing hardware running at light-speed, and stick
a silly GUI front-end on it where you can customise the desktop colorscheme
and get it to play "Merry Christmas" when mail arrives. How irrelevant. LOL.

> The problem has been supply and demand, whenever you have a get rich quick
> scheme, like being an IT consultant, you get everyone jumping on the
> bandwagon, so few managers, have any idea about IT, so even the most
> inexperience contractor can blind the boss with science.  The
> biggest 'con'
> seems to be NT Network specialist, nearly everyone I've encountered, has
> been utterly useless.  As a result the supply has finally outweighed the
> demand, IMO.
>

I agree with this sentiment. There are so many also-rans in the marketplace
these days performing in a less-than-average way and *still* managing to
hang in there because they can b****t. Even more so in the recruitment
market. We have guys out there who know nothing about IT, trying to place
people with IT-savvy companies. All they can do is keyword-match.. Does
prospective Resumé have all the necessary keywords that the client jobspec
has in it. I've had so many calls recently from agents who are literally
"trained monkeys with a sales background". They ask dumb questions like...
"how many years legacy do you have?". This means that the right people
aren't getting their paper in front of the client due to the incompetence
and naievity of the recruitment consultants.

> I also have started learning Java, which I'm finding extremely difficult,
> I'm still not convinced by the hype.  As the most basic demands of an IT
> language, Database interaction and Reporting, seem to be the most
> difficult.
> Even when I did the Sun course, the teacher, couldn't understand
> why I would
> even need to access a database.
>

Databases are not for *real* programmers. Anyone who writes business
software, which makes the wheels of industry roll smoothly, is undervalued.
Real programmers store data in structured files (indexing system made up on
the fly) or in XML or in the Windows Registry, whose structure and usage is
a mystery to most normal people. Real programming is about callbacks,
operator-overloading, APIs and multithreading; not about producing invoices,
calculating purchase-price-variances and printing out balance sheets. Can
Internet Explorer intelligently analyse a P/L statement? I think not. LOL.
It can present it in pretty colours with more fonts than you can imagine
though (a plus point).

Hey I can have a bit of a rant can't I? I'm getting bored with the fact that
washing the dishes or feeding the dog is the highlight of my day right now
:-)

Mark W.

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