How much should I charge for fixed-price software contract?

[Guest]

Have you been blind to the several times I posted my Lisp resume online
or mentionned that I had 10+ years Lisp experience and was looking for
employment doing same but now for industry instead of university?

Take a serious look at yourself.
Then ask, "Would I hire myself ?"

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

I ... doubt that they were ever published in anything reputable or
recognized.

Let me check if I understand you correctly. In your opinion, none of
the following journals is reputable or recognized:
Biophysical Journal
Theoretical Linguistics
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Instructional Science
Is that correct?

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

I also love the line where he says his supervisor may have asked him
to sign something, but he didn't know what it was for - imagine that,
signing things when you have no idea what you are signing away!

No, what I'm saying is that at the time I would have carefully read
what I was signing, but that would have been in 1977 (NMR) or 1984
(robot), both of which were more than 20 years ago, and I can't
remember so long ago which particular papers I did or did not sign at
some particular time. I have a vague memory of having to sign something
back in 1984 in regard to publishing the robot paper, but it was so
very long ago I can't trust that memory. And I have no memory at all of
any 1977 paper-signing which would have been more than 28 years ago.
Both are so awfully long ago you can't really expect me to remember
them as distinct events I can testify to here. I do however remember
that I did sign papers in 1978, in conjunction with the technology
assessment office at Stanford, when they were agreeing to help me
patent my data-compression invention. I was signing the dating of my
description so it'd be a legal document in their files whenever needed
for legal means such as proving that I was the first person to invent
that particular algorithm, and they were signing a non-disclosure
agreement, and witnessing my signature on the description on
such-and-such date, or something like that, I can't remember exactly
how many papers we signed 27 years ago, but it was a distinct thing I
had make a special appointment to do with them so that memory is more
distinct and definite than memory of other paper-signing events so very
long ago.

My point is that CGI is NOT limited to Unix environments. You
have CGI support with most multi-purpose web servers, like Apache and
they run on multiple platforms. I never made any statement that all
web servers provided CGI, only that CGI is not limited to Unix
environments.

Nice of you to agree with me now. Your original statement was unclear
and tended to imply that CGI on Unix is nothing more than just Unix by
itself because all Unix hosts support CGI and allow their users to use
CGI. My original point was that programming for the CGI environment is
quite a bit different from programming for the Unix stdio/stdout
environment in either filter (*) mode or interactive mode, so that fact
that I've written both CGI applications and regular Unix applications
is better skillset than if I had written only regular Unix
applications. But I was specifying CGI/Unix as the environment, because
I've never had access to any networked host that supported CGI except
this one that runs Unix, so if somebody is looking for somebody with
experience specifically on CGI/Windows I don't qualify, and if I just
say I have CGI experience somebody could easily mistakenly believe I
had such experience on Windows.

(*) Unix filter mode means you pipe some file or script or other data
source into stdin, and pipe stdout to another file or process, such as
with this command I wrote:
ps | grep '\- ' | awk ' {printf("kill %s\n",$1)} ' | sh
ps is the data source, while grep and awk are used in filter mode, and
sh is used in final-destination batch mode.

Note that *most* people who have written Unix applications have never
written any CGI application, so my experience there is special, more
than the average Joe's Unix programming experience. Also I specifically
used Unix features from CGI, rather than writing 100% pure CGI that
would run the same on Windows. In fact my first attempt at CGI/Perl ran
fine on Unix but wouldn't work at all on Tripod because they don't have
the underlying Unix that I was using, so I had to rewrite my CGI/Perl
script to make it run in pure CGI/Perl on Tripod. But that very limited
CGI/Perl experience was after I wrote that particular resume, so of
course only CGI/Unix was reported there. That was also before I got my
laptop running Linux, so of course my more recent Linux experience
wasn't reported either. My very latest resume, which is after both my
CGI/PurePerl and Linux experience, has CGI and Unix split apart, and
Unix/Linux joined together as a single kind of environment, to better
represent the range of my experience to-date. That part now reads:
* Platforms (programming environments): Unix/Linux shell, CGI,
Macintosh, MicroSoft Windows, and many others now obsolete
Do you have any nitpicks about that wording now?

I would now say that NOTHING you say would ever convince me of
anything.

That's a good skeptical attitude, not just for me, but for everyone who
ever tries to convince you of anything, such as that if you invest only
five dollars in a chainletter you can receive millions, or that male
enhancement drugs will make you popular with women, or that some
particular religion is based on the word of the Creator and therefore
is better than all other religions put together, or that by mixing
chemicals in a flask you can cause useful nuclear fusion to occur and
thereby provide a cheap safe source of energy.

Go with evidence, not with somebody claiming authority on some topic.
Please tell me what evidence I could present to you to convince you to
hire me to write software applications for you.

I would be very reluctant to employ anyone to solve my problems who
cannot even solve the simple problem of getting hs [sic] own
reasonable computing environment together.

I actually had a reasonble computing environment from 1989 until 1999,
able to develop Lisp applications on my Macintosh Plus, and wrote
several really useful applications there. But my MacPlus died in 1999,
and I haven't had the money to get it fixed, nor the money to purchase
a comparable programming environment on my newer Macintosh Performa.

Why didn't you hire me any time from 1991 to 1999 when I was unemployed
but still had a reasonable programming environment on my MacPlus, or
from 2004.Nov to 2004.May when I had a reasonable programming
environment on my Linux laptop plus a working modem for
uploading/downloading files between it and the net?
(I still have that reasonable programming environment on my laptop, but
without any way to move files between there and any other machine it's
not of much practical use for showing you my recent work or for doing
new work for you.)

Most employers in virtually any profession provide all the tools needed
by their employees. At most a company might require an employee to
purchase a short-sleeved white shirt (as with my job at Round Table
Pizza) or a uniform (advanced from first paycheque), but not the whole
computer system where software will be developed. When I worked for
SCU, they provided the IBM 1620 computer I used. When I worked for
Four-Phase, they provided the IV/70 computer I used. When I worked for
Stanford, they provided the PDP-10 and IBM-370 computers I used for the
various jobs there. If you claim to be an employer, but can't do the
common thing of providing a company computer for your employees to use
in developing software for you, your company totally sucks. It is
*you*, the prospective employer, not me, the prospective employee, who
needs to get a decent computer system for your employees to use.

what I wrote earlier about only commercial experience being counted

Please supply a clear definition of what *you* mean by "commercial
experience". I have no idea whether you refer *only* to software that
is sold in shrink-wrapped packs (CD-ROMs for example) in stores, or
also software that is distributed invisibly over the net in return for
e-money, or also software that isn't itself sold but which is used
in-house to solve practical problems for the employer, or also software
that is used in support of research that offers prestege to the
employer, or also software that is commercial quality but which is
written only for my own use to solve real life problems I face, or
something else I can't even guess what you might possibly mean.

regardless of what you have done outside paid employment, it doesn't
count.

Commercial contracting isn't employment, according to the IRS, it's in
a completely different tax/income category. So it doesn't count??

Likewise all open-source software is a complete waste, because even if
you eventually get income from supporting the software, it doesn't
count because it isn't formal employment?

Work you do on your own is generally not reviewed by anyone, not used
by many people and therefore has no external evaluation, only his on
subjective opinion,

That is a good point but only for *some* non-commercial work. Work for
which I got paid, as part of a university research project, is not
commercial in the shrink-wrap nor in any other software-for-sale sense,
yet still is reviewed by my supervisor. Work for which I didn't get
paid, but which is used substantially by other people, such as my
document formatting for XGP, is reviewed by the users, who choose
whether to use it for free or not use it. If they choose to make heavy
use of my software, as Bill Gosper and several others did, I consider
that a recommendation that my work is worthwhile.

For some other of my work, I put up free demos on the net, so that
random people could see my work and try it and announce how they like
it.

which to an employer is worth very little.

Do you speak for all employers there??

if he had spent the last 10 years working on some open source
projects ...

I already spent enough years of my life doing that in the past.
Why should I spend yet another ten years doing the same thing?

In the last 10+ years, the only things he seems to have produced are
some pretty skanky CGi apps.

You are quite ignorant of what I've done. I'm not going to waste my
time posting the information about my accomplishments that I've already
posted before. If you want to cease being ignorant, go look up what I
already posted.

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

I suspect he has never been told the reasons why he lost each job he
had.

That remark would apply in only one case, when Four-Phase told me they
didn't think I'd be able to maintain the COBOL compiler all by myself,
but told the state employment department that they dismissed me because
I'm disabled, whereby they were not obligated to pay their share of my
unemployment benefits.

However in all other cases I had a clear reason for the job ending:

SCU payroll program: Job accomplished, all done.

SCU pre-registration program: Job accomplished, all done.

NMR research: Job accomplished, all done, and a better job awaiting.

Remote sensing: After having me add features in SAIL program, then
having me convert entire program to MainSail, they discovered MainSail
had too many system bugs, so they decided to convert it all to Fortran,
and one of their other employees had more Fortran experience so they
decided to have him do the conversion, and I had another job waiting
anyway.

Various porting jobs at IMSSS: Job accomplished, all done.

Research on instructible robot: We'd gone about as far as we could go
with the cruddy context-free parser we were using, and another
department was using a new parser we didn't have access to, and they
had more urgent use for me on another porting project.

CAI-Calculus: Program all working, end of five-year funding, couldn't
get funding for follow-on project for CAI-precalculus due to recession.

Tracking lineaments: One-person company had only $1500 total cash
available to hire me in middle of recession, I had used up $1492 of
that and reached a good stopping point, and any more significant unit
of work would have gone past the available cash, and it would have been
unreasonble for me to work an additional 25 minutes to use up that last
eight dollars and not be able to accomplish anything worthwhile during
that itty bitty final time period.

I think its very likely Robert has been given all sorts of made up
reasons for why his jobs were terminated or contracts were not
renewed ...

The only time we had a follow-on project planned was that
CAI-precalculus. It wasn't just me laid off. It was our entire staff,
appx. ten employees, except my supervisor who was strung along another
year, and the head honcho who retired and closed down the entire
institute at that time.

In the majority of cases, where I was hired just to perform a single
major task, either helping port some software system to a new platform,
or writing a single major application from scratch, it was obvious from
the start that as soon as the task was completed the job would be
ended, and that's exactly what happened. In all those cases we had
success, either working program put into full use, or existing software
now working just fine on new platform.

If you honestly believe I was lied to in any of those cases regarding
the reason for the project ending, please explain your perverse opinion
to the whole world here.

 

[Tim X]

Let me check if I understand you correctly. In your opinion, none of
the following journals is reputable or recognized:
Biophysical Journal
Theoretical Linguistics
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Instructional Science
Is that correct?

Robert you are a complete and total waste of space. Look at what I
wrote (which was prior to you ever stating what journals your papers
were written in BTW). Now, just in case there is a very very slight
chance you can actually engage in some real critical thought and
analysis - which I doubt - if I posted my text prior to you ever
stating what journals you published in (and in fact after you stated
you couldn't remember), the how the hell can you interpret what I
wrote as making any comment on the journals themselve?

What my statement was saying is that if you cannot state what journals
you were published in, I doubt your claim to have ever been
published. Now thanks to Patricia, who was able to find the details
very quickly - something you were unable to do for yourself (which is
another clue as to why nobody will ever offer you a job), those
journals you got published in are known and I am quite willing to
accept you did get publshed. However, I reject totally yyour twisting
of what I said as to somehow imply I was implying anyting about the
journals themselves.

To make it very very clear. I have not comment regarding the journals
themselves - I am not familiar with them personally and therefore will
not pass judgement on them. You on the other hand are a complete and
utter jerk who refuses to give up this constant wining and
complaining, who refuses to acknowledge the bleeding obvious point
that you are totally unemployable, incapable of taking responsability
for your own situation and instead of spending effort in changing your
life, continually put all your effort into rejecting any of the sound
suggestions from these newsgroups.

This is the absolute last time I will respond to your self obsessed
moaning and poor attempts to justify your hopeless position by
misquoting and misrepresentation of what everyone has suggested. You
have the dubious honor of being the first person from c.l.l to be put
into my kill file. Enjoy your self imposed misery.

Tim

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Use your limited bandwidth for something constructive,
rather than waste everybody else's please, Robert.

Follow-Ups set appropriately.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Use your limited bandwidth for something constructive,
rather than waste everybody else's please, Robert.

Follow-Ups set appropriately.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Use your limited bandwidth for something constructive,
rather than waste everybody else's please, Robert.

Follow-Ups set appropriately.

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

It is good to have specialized resumes, but don't show them all to a
prospective employer. They just get confused.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here.
When I apply for a job, I send one resume, either a specialized resume
if one is appropriate, or my general resume customized for the
particular job.
When people offer to help me write a better resume, I show them the
work I've already done so they have a starting point for suggesting
improvements. If a prospective employer happens to witness this thread,
there's nothing I can do to stop that person from seeing everything
that anyone else in the thread can see.
When I set up a Web site that explains my entire attempt to find
employment, I have different sections for people offering me help with
the general process and for people searching for some particular
specialized resume I might have. Again I can't prevent some prospective
employer from browsing inappropriate parts of my Web site.

Have a general one that whets there [sic] appetite to learn more
aobut [sic] you and contact you.

Both my pre-school children knew the difference between "their" and
"there". What's your excuse for not knowing that??

How do I get any prospective employer to actually see my resume,
when there are several thousand resumes submitted for each job ad?

I prefer people that give an accurate objective statement

Other advice was that objective statements are of negative value,
unless they are almost exactly a match for the particular job offered.
Obviously that's not possible in a general resume posted for many
potential employers to browse.

some indication of familiar technologies and an accurate indication
of expertise, but mostly this information comes in the form of
desciptions about past experience.

There's no room for descriptions on a one-page resume, so what are you
trying to recommend in regard to my resume?? Somebody else suggested
that an online resume should have links from each item in the resume to
a more complete explanation elsewhere on the Web, and I suggested in
response that I make a HTML resume with links, and then use lynx's
print command to create a plain text rendering which I could send as my
print/FAX resume. Is that what you're suggesting, or something else I
can't guess?

It helps me get to know what you've done to help others and what you
might to [sic] for me.

My helping others includes a lot of areas not included on my
programming resume, such as my years of helping people on
news.newusers.questions, tutoring, peer counseling including saving a
few lives, ... I find it difficult to believe you really want to know
about such things when considering me specifically for a computer
programming job, and even more difficult to consider including such
items on my already-crowded computer-programming resume.

I also do a phone interview with those that seem worth learning more
about. It is a huge turn off for me if the person indicated some
level of expertise in a couple subjects and can't answer simple
questions or say anything more than the resume already did.

How would you feel if you asked me for more information about something
I'd done and I spent the next ten minutes telling you about it?

A good description is quite enough. What your responsibility was,
perhaps the major technologies, and what you accomplished for the
employer.

That would take a whole page for each job, far too much to include in a
one-page resume. Where should I put that info?

You listed C++ exactly once on the multipage resume you published
a web link to.

Please cite the URL so I know which resume you're talking about.

A resume is only suppose tease you into cantacting me for more info.

Did you in fact try to contact me, by e-mail or telephone, or even
by my Web application for sending me instant short-messages/alerts?

It was pretty much trial and error finding what your recent
activities and accomplishments were.

I don't understand your difficulty. I have a chronology of many of my
accomplishments of the past few years. Were you looking at it or not?
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/SeekJobAccom.html
If that's what you were browsing, you know what I was accomplishing
during each particular time period, often during a single month. So
what do you mean trial and error? You select the time period you are
interested in, click on that link, and there you are.

I'd suggest listing C++ only if you could be useful to an employer
in that language.

I believe I could be useful for some C++ tasks, so if I leave it out
I'm stupidly cutting myself off from jobs I can do.

A recent applicant claimed to be a C++ expert and could only list
six years experience using computers.

If all six years he was not just using computers, and not even just
programming computers, but programming computers using C++, then it's
quite possible he is an expert at using C++ for programming.

Anyway the applicant couldn't complete "strcpy" given the function
definition and asking him not to use any other functions.

Let's see, you have two pointers, one of them to a block of data that
consists of non-null characters terminated by one null character, and
the other pointer into writable memory of sufficient size to hold a
copy of the original block of data. What if the two blocks overlap? Do
you assume this doesn't occur? Anyway, strcpy is not a C++ function,
it's a C function, so to implement it (assuming no overlapping data
areas) I'd just write a loop that incremented the two pointers in
parallel, copying one byte at a time, and checking for null byte after
each copy. (The null byte needs to be copied too.) So any beginner C
programmer could easily write that. But a C++ programmer might be more
comfortable with object oriented programming and might be dumbfounded
by such an elementary question. (Or as you suspect, he might have lied
about C++ expertise, and in fact might have had not a slightest bit of
either C or C++ programming experience, not even elementary classwork.)

Here's a more interesting, and C++ specific, riddle, which I managed to
solve after both my current-at-the-time C++ instructor and my previous
C instructor were both stumped by it (and I was stumped until I finally
read the key information later in the textbook that gave me the clue I
needed to solve the riddle and explain it to my instructors): How is it
that cin can be chained, yet cin can be used as a boolean to test for
EOF? Is the value of cin boolean, true or false depending on EOF or
not, or iostream, *always* returns itself, never returns a false
value?? The answer to the riddle is one of the reasons C++ is an
inscrutably more perverse language than just about any other language,
making it impossible to understand even one line of code sucn as a
simple C-syntax IF statement without knowing the entire rest of the
program simultaneously. Do you want me to tell you the answer now, or
do you want to try guessing first? To avoid one person telling the
answer and the other claiming to already know it when in fact he
didn't, I suggest we use an incremental-info-exchange protocol. Are you
familiar with the "tell me something I don't already know" problem with
information barter, and the incremental-info-exchange solution?

If you can work in that you didn't know Java but picked it up to
complete a project that shows effort on your part.

In the case of Java, I actually took three classes, beginning java,
advanced java, and distributed java. But in the cases of Perl, PHP,
HTML, CGI, awk, and sh I learned enough on my own to complete a
project, and many years previously I learned a large number of other
programming languages on my own in order to do work of my own desire.
Prior to my recent classes in VB, Java and C++, the only time anybody
gave me any help learning a programming language is when Hans Moravec
explained the read-eval-print (of Lisp) to me. All my learning of
Fortran, SAIL (Algol), the rest of Lisp, MainSail, MacSyma, Macintosh
toolbox/OS traps, Forth, and a large number of machine/assembly
languages, was me learning directly from a manual and practicing on my
own. C is the primary crossover language, part self-teach and part
class, where I taught myself the barebones, using a very crude compiler
on my Mac for one project, then using a more complete compiler on Unix
to write a major application, but never needing to learn about structs
in all that work, finally using structs for the first time when I took
a class only because it was required before taking C++ or Java.

It would be very helpful if you told the employer what it is you
wanted to do for them.

In a general resume written for everyone to browse, there are an
unlimited number of things I might want to do for various employers.
Your advice would seem to be useful only after I already have a general
resume perfected and I'm ready to use it as a base for preparing custom
resumes for each new job that is advertised.

If you know so many languages, perhaps the language isn't important
and you can focus on what you want to do.

It's very unlikely that what I really want to do, such as work with
others to design an industry standard spec for interval arithmetic,
would be of any interest to most employers.

I think that you would find much better employement opportunities by
determining what you want to do and address specific employers
one-by-one.

I don't know any way to find even one employer that is interested in
what I want to do. I already tried posting introductions to some of my
ideas in comp.programming, but not a single employer responded by
offering me a job or even just talking with me about what I had
proposed. That was my only guess how to propose my ideas, and it
fizzled, and I can't think of any other approach that would be likely
to ferret out such an employer interested in my ideas for new projects.

Cold calling or appying [sic] to jobs that don't exist can work in
your favor too.

I'm really uncomfortable cold-calling a receptionist at a big company
trying to talk my way into a conversation with somebody who actually
knows anything about programming but who is very busy and can't take
time off work to talk with every bozo who calls. I hate spam, and I
hate telemarketing even worse. Ever heard of the Golden Rule??

 

[David]

Hello Robert,

I've offered you advice from my perspective.

How do I get any prospective employer to actually see my resume,
when there are several thousand resumes submitted for each job ad?

What makes you think that your resume does not reach the
appropriate party or invoke the appropriate response?

When you receive inquiries from potential employers how well do
you handle them?

How would you feel if you asked me for more information about something
I'd done and I spent the next ten minutes telling you about it?

That would depend largely on how it was presented. If we were
interacting well and I was interested, it could be a great insight.
I would hope that we could move on to other subjects when it was
appropriate. A one sided conversation lasting ten minutes would be
a bit excessive.

That would take a whole page for each job, far too much to include in a
one-page resume. Where should I put that info?

Surely you can keep your descriptions at an appropriate length for
the size resume that you want to produce. There is nothing sacred about
producing a one-page resume. Make it larger if that is what fits your
relevant experience.

As for your question, leave that information out!

The purpose of a resume is to entice the reader into contacting you
for further information or perhaps discussing a particular job
opportunity. You need the right balance of information to get by
someone that screens resumes for HR and just enough information for
the appropriate hiring manager to decide if you warrant contacting.

If you applied for a particular position it will likely get to the
hiring manager without a screener. Persons that screen resumes have
a different role, that being to take general submissions and decide
if they can meet the needs of specific groups.

Please cite the URL so I know which resume you're talking about.

You have changed the subject line far too many times for me to
find the one post where we started this particular discussion. Perhaps
the subject is moot now.

Did you in fact try to contact me, by e-mail or telephone, or even
by my Web application for sending me instant short-messages/alerts?

Please don't take this the wrong way. We have been talking already.
I've read your posts for years. I have considered what you have to
offer and have not found a situation where your particular talents
matched the needs of any of the groups that I've been involved with.
Your name has come up in discussion with people I network with. I have
no idea what communications you may have had with them, if any.

These news groups are as an effective way as any to network with
professionals and potential employers. You need not specifically
advertise your availablity with a resume sent to posted jobs. That
is just one way to be considered for a position.

You have an online personality that presumably matches your real
life personality. That can make it easy for someone to contact you
if they want. It can also allow an employer you have already contacted
through other means to do a quick search on your name and find these
discussions, other web pages you might announce, and of course other
people with the same name. You are not anonymous and don't wish to be.

My experience has been that others are likely to remember those of
us that have a personality that is memorable. I have been offered
and taken some of the jobs offered to me through various news groups.
I have also found many people that were not in contact and needed to
be. In other words, becuase we all knew each other through some means
new relationships, including employment opportunities were formed.

I believe I could be useful for some C++ tasks, so if I leave it out
I'm stupidly cutting myself off from jobs I can do.

Are you equally open to finding junior employment opportunities in
C++? Your experience appears to be focused in other areas where you
are likely to command a higher salary.

David

 

[Christopher Browne]

This is the first I've ever heard of such. All the information I got
previously was that Oracle is the high-end commercial RDBS that
hardly anybody can afford and so there's no way they'd give it away
for free. If I ever can get the modem on my laptop working again, I
might see about downloading the free Oracle. Thanks for the clue,
even though I can't make any use of it at present.

Is there a free version that works on FreeBSD Unix? If the whole
things occupies less than ten megabytes, I could install it on my
personal shell account.

The temporary Java installation you'd need to do in order to run the
Oracle installer would consume _considerably_ more than 10MB.

And no, running it on a personal shell account on FreeBSD won't be an
option. The installer needs root access because it needs to set up
multiple Unix user IDs.

And no, there will never be any dimension in which Oracle would be
less than 10MB in size. It would prefer to have a gigabyte of RAM,
forget about disk.

You likely can't run Oracle on hardware wimpy enough that people would
throw the hardware away...

 

[Christopher Browne]

If they list requirements I will make it INCREDIBLY easy for them to

You are obviously talking about writing custom resumes, a different
resume for each job you see advertised such that you respond to
it. It has been recommended that I apply for ten jobs per day,
despite the fact that I haven't seen even one job I qualify for in
the past ten years, and it takes a full workday of scanning job
sites such as CraigsList just to find one or two jobs where I only
half qualify.

It takes weeks or months to compose a brand new resume from scratch
without any base resume as a starting point. At present I have a
half dozen general resumes and a half dozen specific-area resumes,
any one of which might serve as a starting point for editing to
yield a custom resume for a single job ad. Unfortunately general
concensus is that every last one of my existing resumes is total
crap and not suitable for using as a base for any custom resume. I
don't believe adding a bunch of custom keywords to a crap resume
would get me an interview, do you?

OK, so that seems to establish that it is hopeless for you to present
resumes to the sorts of organizations that post opportunities in those
sorts of places.

IBM actively discriminates against disabled people such as myself in
their advertising of jobs available, so I'd just as soon not discuss
them any further here.

Presumably they aren't interested in hiring a lot of people that are
going to be more costly than the "productivity" that they provide.
And if you're "disabled," there's definitely going to be some cost to
them to support you.

Unfortunately, that factor applies equally to plenty of organizations
other than just IBM.

Any company that is sufficiently large will have sufficient similarity
to IBM that they're probably hopeless for you to apply to for a job.

Unfortunately, smaller companies, that haven't got IBM's stunning
levels of bureaucracy, aren't likely to have a place where you'll fit,
either. IBM has the "merit" that they're so enormous and
management-bound that they have rather a lot of room for people who
aren't productive to fit in without being noticed.

Small companies can't afford to hire people that offer the risk of
lack of productivity that your disabilities present.

I'm desperate for a job.

Unfortunately, that is unlikely to change.

Desperation is typically downright unhelpful in such processes; it
represents a further "disability," albeit one which can be cured.

Based on what you have said in the discussions you have participated
in, I know that I'd have grave reservations about considering you as a
candidate for *any* sort of job. Unfortunately, for you, that seems
to be a common reaction.

I just can't see any likelihood of your entering a career in either
Lisp or Java programming, regardless of any unemployment office's
"aptitude tests" to the contrary.

 

[blmblm]

[ snip ]

Here's a more interesting, and C++ specific, riddle, which I managed to
solve after both my current-at-the-time C++ instructor and my previous
C instructor were both stumped by it (and I was stumped until I finally
read the key information later in the textbook that gave me the clue I
needed to solve the riddle and explain it to my instructors): How is it
that cin can be chained, yet cin can be used as a boolean to test for
EOF? Is the value of cin boolean, true or false depending on EOF or
not, or iostream, *always* returns itself, never returns a false
value?? The answer to the riddle is one of the reasons C++ is an
inscrutably more perverse language than just about any other language,
making it impossible to understand even one line of code sucn as a
simple C-syntax IF statement without knowing the entire rest of the
program simultaneously. Do you want me to tell you the answer now, or
do you want to try guessing first? To avoid one person telling the
answer and the other claiming to already know it when in fact he
didn't, I suggest we use an incremental-info-exchange protocol. Are you
familiar with the "tell me something I don't already know" problem with
information barter, and the incremental-info-exchange solution?

Well, I think I understand in general terms why one can write, for
example,

while (cin << data_item)

but apparently you'd prefer people not post explanations just yet,
so I won't.

What I *am* curious about is what this has to do with needing to
know the rest of the program to understand a single line; i.e.,
what makes you say this:

The answer to the riddle is one of the reasons C++ is an
inscrutably more perverse language than just about any other language,
making it impossible to understand even one line of code sucn as a
simple C-syntax IF statement without knowing the entire rest of the
program simultaneously.

[ snip ]

 

[Steve Sobol]

Let me check if I understand you correctly. In your opinion, none of
the following journals is reputable or recognized:
Biophysical Journal
Theoretical Linguistics
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Instructional Science
Is that correct?

Can you find somewhere else to debate this, other than c.l.java.programmer
where it's way off-topic? (probably also offtopic for .lisp)

 

[Patricia Shanahan]

Since this is a general comment about programming, independent of
language, followups set to comp.programming only.

How is that possible? When I had a job, I was paid to write software,
not to socialize with co-workers thereby distracting them from the
work they were trying to do.

I think this embodies a basic misconception. A programming team can be
much more effective than its members would be working in isolation.

People tend to communicate better with people they know than with total
strangers. Socializing facilitates exchanges of information and mutual
aid. The benefit in "whole greater than sum of the parts" effects of
getting to know colleagues often outweighs the costs.

Many programming and engineering managers understand this. For example,
I've known managers discussing proposed office space layouts to treat
spaces that support informal, casual conversation as an important design
feature. They plan activities, such as a weekly "donut hour", for the
purpose of getting random individuals to talk to each other.

Of course signals, such as closed office doors, are needed to get peace
and quiet when needed, but that should not be all the time.

Patricia

 

[Roedy Green]

for a list of cheap and free SQL engines see:

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/sqlvendors.html

 

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

How is that possible? When I had a job, I was paid to write software,
not to socialize with co-workers thereby distracting them from the
work they were trying to do.

You guys didn't eat lunch?

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

The temporary Java installation you'd need to do in order to run the
Oracle installer would consume _considerably_ more than 10MB.

JDK 1.2.1 is already installed on the FreeBSD Unix account. Would that
be sufficient already? (It's moot since I don't have a gigibate of disk
space available for Oracle itself, but I'm curious.)

And no, running it on a personal shell account on FreeBSD won't be an
option. The installer needs root access because it needs to set up
multiple Unix user IDs.

So that's yet another reason I wouldn't be able to install it on my
personal account on my Unix ISP shell account. So the next time
somebody tells me I should learn Oracle, I can tell them to **** Off
not once but three times (disk, RAM, root).

So back on topic: Is there any employer who would hire me for an
entry-level position programming with Java or CommonLisp (CL) through
ODBC to Oracle which they already have installed on their monstrous
computer whose shell is accessible from here via TELNET or SSH? I've
never used Oracle, and can't ever until you hire me, but I already know
how to write Java/ODBC code that works equally well with MicroSoft
ACCESS and CloudScape/Derby, so I think I'm well qualified for an
entry-level Oracle position.

 

[Duane Bozarth]

....
So back on topic: Is there any employer who would hire me for an
entry-level position programming with Java or CommonLisp (CL) through
ODBC to Oracle which they already have installed on their monstrous
computer whose shell is accessible from here via TELNET or SSH? I've
never used Oracle, and can't ever until you hire me, but I already know
how to write Java/ODBC code that works equally well with MicroSoft
ACCESS and CloudScape/Derby, so I think I'm well qualified for an
entry-level Oracle position.

I don't think anybody will hire you approaching age 60 for any
entry-level position in a software field of that type. At that age you
should be well beyond "entry-level" and that you're looking for such a
position is indicative that there's a problem.

As I've said before I think you need to figure out how to use what you
were trained in.

 

[Frank Buss]

So back on topic: Is there any employer who would hire me

just in case you didn't realize it already: this is not on topic for this
newsgroup. Perhaps the followup group can help you with your resumes.