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I'm semi-retired now, but 20+ years ago I was caught in a big internal political fight in IBM's Watson lab. Some long time managers were demoted out of managem

I'm semi-retired now, but 20+ years ago I was caught in a big internal political fight in IBM's Watson lab. Some long time managers were demoted out of management. A lot of people left. I was walked out the door. My work was in expert systems. I was doing a lot of programming and won an award for some crucial programming work I did -- writing the code all night one night -- saving rule subroutines in our AI language. I published peer-reviewed papers in expert systems, applied math, and mathematical statistics. I was and long had been good at programming and computer science, several operating systems, languages, many algorithms, lots of applied math software, etc. I'd taught computer science in ugrad school at Georgetown and in grad school at Ohio State University. I sent 1000 resumes and got essentially nothing. My location was 70 miles north of Wall Street, and I was willing to move anywhere. In wildly strong contrast, early in my career in software and applied math within 100 miles of the Washington Monument, once a sent a few resume copies and soon in two weeks I went on seven interviews and got five offers, all with nice raises. Soon I was making in annual salary six times what a new, high end Camaro cost. IMHO, the idea that there is a lot of demand for people in computing, software, algorithms, etc. is just hype and hog wash. But I'm still good at applied math and associated software so am doing a startup. I have to please my users and, thus, my advertisers, but no way do I have to please an HR assistant, an HR phone screen person, an HR interviewer, or a hiring manager. I've typed in 100,000 lines of typing with 24,000 programming language statements (lots of internal documentation), nearly all in Visual Basic .NET with ADO.NET and ASP.NET. There is a redundantly reliable and scalable software and server farm architecture with a Web server, a Web session state server (instead of Redis, I wrote my own, just TCP/IP sockets, single threaded, using the TCP/IP queue as the queue of arriving work, object instance de/serialization, and two instances of a standard .NET collection class -- simple, fast, small, works great), two specialized compute servers with my original applied math. It all appears to run as intended. For production I don't like the log file approach I took based on what Microsoft has, so I intend to take my session state server, rip out the collection classes, put in a write to a file, and, presto, get a log server. The servers all communicate with just simple TCP/IP sockets. I identified the problem, designed the Web site, designed the architecture, designed, wrote, debugged, timed, and documented the code, and got it all to appear to work. Alpha test in progress now. I'm a native born US citizen, have held security clearances at least as high as Secret, have never been arrested, have never been charged with any crime except for minor traffic violations, am in excellent health (now for my age), but have to say that for the past 30 years I've been absolutely, positively, totally unemployable for anything having to do with computing. A shortage of people in computing? What a really bad joke.

didibus 9y ago
Well, 20 years ago the landscape was completely different, I can believe the job market changes, and maybe in 20 years I'll find it hard for me to get a job. But currently, the landscape has never been better in my opinion. Are you saying even today you're unemployable? How can that be? Unless you left some information about your credential out, like being incredibly annoying or some personality trait that would clearly reveal itself on the interview. I mean, I believe you 100% if you say that you've tried to apply for work today, and couldn't get any offer after hundred of interviews, and that you're a pleasant person, and the whole thing is bad luck and that there are in fact less jobs then you hear, but I'd want to know more details. How can a pleasant person with your experience not find work in the current market? Is it agism?
- graycat 9y ago
  > Are you saying even today you're unemployable? Likely. Maybe Wal-Mart would hire me to stock shelves. In computing, essentially unemployable and have been since 1994. Long time. Ah, along the way, I heard of a guy and several of his buddies who had, from a sudden change in some banking laws, found a hot resource allocation problem and, supposedly, some eager high end customers -- big banks. They had formulated the problem as a large 0-1 integer linear programming problem but gave up on using a linear programming package. So, they tried simulated annealing. They ran for days, quit when tired, took the best solution they'd found, and called it done without much information about how far they were from optimality. They mailed me their 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. I looked at it, thought I saw a path forward with some non-linear duality theory (in some senses, amazing stuff), did some derivations, the told them that I'd have a little in a few days and all of it in about two weeks. I did. I typed in Fortran code so that for some of the work I could call the IBM Optimization Subroutine Library for linear programming, callable from a certain Watcom Fortran compiler I had. My code ran right away. On their test problem 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables, all 0-1, on a slow computer I got a feasible solution the duality said was within 0.025% of optimality in 905 seconds. I wrote them back with the good news but never heard from them again. There was something about they were just going on vacation. Uh, the guy who had done the simulated annealing work wasn't thrilled that I might work on the problem. They had paid me nothing, so I wrote letters to the candidate banks and heard back nothing. There was another, similar case: The problem was the old one of which pharmaceutical salesmen should go to which physicians and leave what samples. Surprisingly I found a network integer linear programming formulation -- there get integer programming for free. I was writing the code in portable Fortran, since that seemed to be the effective approach, when a guy in the company who had an old heuristic wanted to get rid of me, and did. Agism is a lot of it. IMHO, broadly a CIO wants a lot of worker bees age 20 - 35 and manager bees older. As worker bees approach age 35, a tiny fraction are promoted into management and the rest fired. No way do they want to hire worker bees over 40; certainly not at 45, never but never at 50. The above is broad but IMHO roughly the situation. Really, a guy 20 would be better off starting a grass mowing service, with one lawn mower, grow the business to several mowers, trucks, and crews, expand into landscape architecture and commercial clients, and by age 35 own a nice business he could keep running as long as his health held out and pass the business down to his children. Just grass mowing. Or, a guy in computing at age 30 should think seriously about being founder of a startup. No, call that age 25 -- heck, call it age 20. I'm no longer looking for a salaried job in computing and, instead, am concentrating on my startup. I was pleasant enough a person early in my a career when I could get a better job anytime in two weeks. Now my skills with people are much better. IMHO, being a worker bee in computing is a long walk on a short pier. The field might be a profession like law, medicine, or some fields of engineering, but is not. So, there's next to nothing in professional certification, government licensing, professional peer review, legal liability, etc. From all I've seen, nursing works out better -- can continue to be a worker bee level nurse as long as can do the work. School teaching is better once get something like tenure. I don't know how to solve the problem except just to leave it and, as in my case, do a startup. I can still do computing -- my startup software with 24,000 programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing seem to work as intended, and I did it all from the first glimmer of an idea to the current alpha test. But that cuts no ice with any employer. Ah, yes, now there is data science: Gee, I have experience and an applied math Ph.D. from one of the world's best research universities that makes nearly all of current data science look like baby talk. But, that cuts no ice, either. I've got my startup. My wife died in 1992 from stresses from her Ph.D., and I'm about to get a kitty cat! I'm fine, but I looked hard for jobs from about 1992, for years -- a huge waste -- and now just want to do my startup. So, the startup will be just a Web site, and the users need know nothing about me. If there are a lot of happy users, then there will be a lot of happy advertisers, and I will do well financially. That's what I'm doing.

didibus 9y ago

Well, 20 years ago the landscape was completely different, I can believe the job market changes, and maybe in 20 years I'll find it hard for me to get a job. But currently, the landscape has never been better in my opinion. Are you saying even today you're unemployable? How can that be? Unless you left some information about your credential out, like being incredibly annoying or some personality trait that would clearly reveal itself on the interview. I mean, I believe you 100% if you say that you've tried to apply for work today, and couldn't get any offer after hundred of interviews, and that you're a pleasant person, and the whole thing is bad luck and that there are in fact less jobs then you hear, but I'd want to know more details. How can a pleasant person with your experience not find work in the current market? Is it agism?

graycat 9y ago
> Are you saying even today you're unemployable? Likely. Maybe Wal-Mart would hire me to stock shelves. In computing, essentially unemployable and have been since 1994. Long time. Ah, along the way, I heard of a guy and several of his buddies who had, from a sudden change in some banking laws, found a hot resource allocation problem and, supposedly, some eager high end customers -- big banks. They had formulated the problem as a large 0-1 integer linear programming problem but gave up on using a linear programming package. So, they tried simulated annealing. They ran for days, quit when tired, took the best solution they'd found, and called it done without much information about how far they were from optimality. They mailed me their 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. I looked at it, thought I saw a path forward with some non-linear duality theory (in some senses, amazing stuff), did some derivations, the told them that I'd have a little in a few days and all of it in about two weeks. I did. I typed in Fortran code so that for some of the work I could call the IBM Optimization Subroutine Library for linear programming, callable from a certain Watcom Fortran compiler I had. My code ran right away. On their test problem 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables, all 0-1, on a slow computer I got a feasible solution the duality said was within 0.025% of optimality in 905 seconds. I wrote them back with the good news but never heard from them again. There was something about they were just going on vacation. Uh, the guy who had done the simulated annealing work wasn't thrilled that I might work on the problem. They had paid me nothing, so I wrote letters to the candidate banks and heard back nothing. There was another, similar case: The problem was the old one of which pharmaceutical salesmen should go to which physicians and leave what samples. Surprisingly I found a network integer linear programming formulation -- there get integer programming for free. I was writing the code in portable Fortran, since that seemed to be the effective approach, when a guy in the company who had an old heuristic wanted to get rid of me, and did. Agism is a lot of it. IMHO, broadly a CIO wants a lot of worker bees age 20 - 35 and manager bees older. As worker bees approach age 35, a tiny fraction are promoted into management and the rest fired. No way do they want to hire worker bees over 40; certainly not at 45, never but never at 50. The above is broad but IMHO roughly the situation. Really, a guy 20 would be better off starting a grass mowing service, with one lawn mower, grow the business to several mowers, trucks, and crews, expand into landscape architecture and commercial clients, and by age 35 own a nice business he could keep running as long as his health held out and pass the business down to his children. Just grass mowing. Or, a guy in computing at age 30 should think seriously about being founder of a startup. No, call that age 25 -- heck, call it age 20. I'm no longer looking for a salaried job in computing and, instead, am concentrating on my startup. I was pleasant enough a person early in my a career when I could get a better job anytime in two weeks. Now my skills with people are much better. IMHO, being a worker bee in computing is a long walk on a short pier. The field might be a profession like law, medicine, or some fields of engineering, but is not. So, there's next to nothing in professional certification, government licensing, professional peer review, legal liability, etc. From all I've seen, nursing works out better -- can continue to be a worker bee level nurse as long as can do the work. School teaching is better once get something like tenure. I don't know how to solve the problem except just to leave it and, as in my case, do a startup. I can still do computing -- my startup software with 24,000 programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing seem to work as intended, and I did it all from the first glimmer of an idea to the current alpha test. But that cuts no ice with any employer. Ah, yes, now there is data science: Gee, I have experience and an applied math Ph.D. from one of the world's best research universities that makes nearly all of current data science look like baby talk. But, that cuts no ice, either. I've got my startup. My wife died in 1992 from stresses from her Ph.D., and I'm about to get a kitty cat! I'm fine, but I looked hard for jobs from about 1992, for years -- a huge waste -- and now just want to do my startup. So, the startup will be just a Web site, and the users need know nothing about me. If there are a lot of happy users, then there will be a lot of happy advertisers, and I will do well financially. That's what I'm doing.