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I getting a sense that eBay is not cool anymore (something I've thought for a while - since this post, I've maybe done two or three transactions there). Is this because of the stock performance this year or the cause of it? If it is the latter, look out because something built on network externalities can fall just as quickly as it rose.
This article in the AP is pessimistic about the job prospects for programmers in the US. If CS grads from Stanford aren't going to work in sofware companies in Silicon Valley because they see their prospects dimming there, what is the hope for most of the programmers out there? The BLS says otherwise and that computer software engineering is going to be one of the fastest growing occupations in the near future. So, which one is it?
What seems to be happening is a reversion to the mean from the bubble years where programmers were being paid over the odds by companies flush with easy money. It takes a while for people to adjust their expectations (last years college grads entered just when the bubble was ending). If Gartner is right and 15% of US tech workers drop out of the field, that is just creative destruction at work - the lower skilled will leave the field and be replaced by offshoring and the a good number of the people left will move up the food chain to do more creative work.
To successfully manage offshored software development, you have to know how software projects work. If you can't manage it successfully, an offshored project won't be of value no matter how low a wage the programmers are being paid. I haven't seen anyway to learn that other than participating in them yourself. So, what we might see is just what the article is describing - you have to have both technical and managerial skills to make a career out of it.
I just finished reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (an early Father's Day present). Probably, my biggest disappointment was that I'd heard so much about the book that I knew about all of the facts and arguments presented before I even opened it up because I'd read multiple reviews and had been reading the weblog. This made the book less novel for me, but I still enjoyed the explainations behind the arguments. The issues examined include cheating on standardized tests, changes in the crime rate, the economic structure of crack gangs and an evaluation of the importance of people's names. The examinations of each are kept lively but backed up with analysis of the data.
The premise of the book as completely unorthodox in the field of economics is not quite correct - guys like Gary Becker have been analyzing a wide variety of social phenomena using the tools of economics for decades (in fact, the authors point out in a few places that Adam Smith himself applied economic thinking to non-economic topics) but that doesn't detract from the quality of the work.
I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in an examination of important (and some not-so-important) social issues. You don't have to invest much time as it is a very quick read, the writing style is entertaining and you will learn a thing or two.
Mono is an open-source platform for running .NET framework applications which I'd been curious about for some time, but hadn't gotten around to configuring on a system. Monoppix provides a live Linux CD that you just boot up and to get a pre-configured demo system running Mono on Linux. This removed my excuse for not checking Mono out. It works with Virtual PC 2004 and took me all of 10 minutes to get going (all you need to do is use the Virtual Machine Wizard to create a new VPC, start it up and capture the iso image downloaded from the Monoppix site).
I haven't done much with it (just some simple programs and playing around) but it seems to work great. Highly recommended if you want to see what Mono is all about.
p.s. It looks like Mono Live offers the same kind of thing, but their web page didn't work when I tried to investigate further.
Maybe it is just me, but I love household gadgets shaped like a squid.
Although I have no idea what the name means (What exacly is a connected system?), the Connected Systems Competition looks fun. I wish they had these kinds of things when I was in college...
I just got finished reading the book they gave out at an awards dinner I attended recently. The book was co-authored by the keynote speaker, Bob McDowell.
This book mostly consists of interviews with business people on the business value of IT. The basic message I got was that IT projects should be owned and driven by business people and that it is important to carefully select and measure the IT projects that are undertaken. If this is done successfully, you can expect to gain value from your investments in IT. If not, your mileage may vary and you will probably end up wasting money.
Overall, it was a bit too much like the case studies I read in graduate school and I was a little bored. Not a lot of insights that were new to me, but it might be valuable reading to either techies who have no clue that business value matters or to business folks that have no clue that technology matters.