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Its a dead industry in the US. It may be dying slower in some parts than in others, but the telling feature is that the major financial corporations are seriously shopping their IT departments to the regions and countries with the lowest average cost of living. At least one of the largest international financial companies is reassigning its new IT functioning to countries where the average salary is 10% of that paid in the US, and its existing functioning to locations within the US with depressed labor pools; the quality of the work performed is no longer considered significant. Once your profession becomes nothing more than a commodity, its not a profession anymore: you become a resource to be used, exhausted, discarded and replaced as cheaply as possible. Thank you Mr. Bush.

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I think the best piece of advice here is to get Summer Internships as programmers. I really feel like I wasted my summers working in retail and such. I have a programming job now, but it took 2 years out of college to finally nab one. Although that was obviously a bad time (graduated 2002), I think I definately would have gotten a job sooner if I actually had programming experience.

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<a class="user" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131103628/103-9579445-2245435?v=glance&amp;n=283155&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131103628/103-9579445-2245435?v=glance&amp;n=283155&lt;/a&gt;

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Same here, but I'll just mod him down for the hell of it '~'

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** The moral of the story is that computer science is not the same as software development. ... The trouble is, we don't really have professional schools in software development, so if you want to be a programmer, you probably majored in Computer Science. Which is a fine subject to major in, but it's a different subject than software development. **He buried the lead. Look, if you want to be develop software, the best way is to apprentice starting in high school. If you really think college is a good idea, major in Software Engineering. Unfortunately, that's rarely an actual curriculum. So your best bet is Business Administration, Biology, Electrical/Computer engineering or Math. Better yet, go to your college counselor and try to get a cross-curriculum degree. Why Biology you ask? Some of the best programmer's I've met or encountered (via their code) had Biology backgrounds. I suspect this is due to the fact that good code organization is not unlike a good phylogenic tree -- object-oriented design is a metaphor borrowed from nature. Why Math? Because engineering and scientific programming require a certain aptitude for understanding scientific papers, which are invariably based on complex mathematical formulae.

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I've written a long and exhaustive response to this column. I hope you find it useful.<a class="user" href="http://lababidi.blogspot.com/2006/04/response-to-joel-spolskys-advice-to.html&quot;&gt;http://lababidi.blogspot.com/2006/04/response-to-joel-spolskys-advice-to.html&lt;/a&gt;

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