Re: pittance

At 10:01 AM 4/11/2004 -0700, you wrote:

>I have heard that the number of people going into Comp Sci, for
>instance, is greatly diminished. Like all things, there's an ebb and
>flow.

That's an ebb in the US. In India, China, Russia and elsewhere the tide is flooding.

My suggestion is to become an expert in a particular industry to which you can apply you Perl experience in a way that can't easily be shipped offshore.

To the extent that writing an application that eases the doing of some work in the first place "de-skills" the original need to some extent, then eventually it will be de-skilled enough that the price will go down because lots more people will be able to handle it, wherever they happen to be.

So if you want the high wage jobs, then you need to be doing high skilled specialist work, and be aware that eventually what is "specialist" work today will be "routine" work tomorrow. So be thinking ahead for new specialist areas as well.

And don't bank on unionization -it will never happen and there will never even be a serious attempt. OTOH, the AFL-CIO might care enough to try to actually be persuaded to install some sort of system that needs some perl programming...

Best,

Barry