Thomas G. Marshall said:
This is cross-posted because of the specific audience I wish to have
participate.
C'mon guys. Give up your secrets. What niche in the software world have
you found that is of very HIGH domestic demand? This probably goes for the
UK as well as US, since I think that many places are offshoring to india and
the like.
All glibness aside, there ought to be a serious of industries,
sub-industries, etc., that do not lend themselves to such movement overseas.
/And even out of these/ there ought to be a bunch that seem to always demand
top-dollar.
I understand why some of these things might be carefully guarded secrets,
but this really warrants a conversation for those less worried.
I think it is a mistake to make professional choices based on money.
Unless you build an organization to control entry into the top-dollar
profession, the smell of money will attract more entrants who will
then depress earnings. This is economics 101.
Indeed, vast efforts in software are based EXCLUSIVELY on the fact
that software consultants were, at some point in the past, making the
big bucks, for these bucks were a hit on a balance sheet.
Read Softwar, a biography of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. For
Oracle's customers an important goal happens to be using Oracle
unmodified and "out of the box" so as not to let "consultants" select
"best of breed" integration solutions.
This is because it's assumed these "consultants" will recommend their
friends' solutions and charge big money for integration glue that in
the final product, makes the resultant mess look nothing so much as
the spacecraft in Alien, dripping with excess Alien juice.
In my own lifetime, "consultant", owing the permission people gave
themselves under Reagan to be motivated exclusively by money, has
undergone an interesting evolution in computing.
It originally meant, in the 1950s, a vizier or wiseman employed by
Rand or somesuch profit-making (but, in the admittedly antique
Eisenhower-era songbook) public-spirited in a common effort against
extremism.
But in the 1980s, I increasingly encountered head-hunters who would
declare, as received fact, that a "consultant" in data processing
would NOT give unbiased advice to a client, that being a "consultant"
was instead figuring out what the most powerful clients wanted to
hear, and then saying it.
Today, in computing, a "consultant" is not a wiseman: he is a wiseguy
in the sense of the big-hair badabing regions of Long Guysland or
Joisey in the New York region, where many latter-day "consultants"
retire like Tony Soprano with the big bucks.
But note that the wiseguys are the exception and not the rule, for
corporations like Merrill-Lynch know very well when they are being had
by a bunch of wiseguys. The data system that represents the free lunch
for the wiseguys, who purport to "know" its secrets and to literally
hold the company hostage in place of either getting a real job or
actually learning computing science, is replaced.
If you want to make a lot of money in computing, get married and stay
married, and find a job you like with one company you like, and don't
quit for another job.
Financial guru Suze Orman puts it best. Truth makes money. The time is
past when ANY ONE programming language or operating system can be used
by an individual to hold a company hostage, and it is a LIE that any
one language can be used in this fashion.
In the 1990s, people (many of them with significant levels of
untreated math anxiety which made them strikingly ineffective)
thundered into Visual Basic 6 development for the corporation only to
find today that support is ending for VB-6 in preference to VB-Net,
because word to your mother was that they'd make the big bucks.
You make the big bucks, or really the only bucks worth making, by
doing what you love.
The scramble for top dollar produces systems that do not work, because
they are being built by people not for love of the game but for
financial reward.
