william gates

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Recent posts by william gates

Some people get bored easily and like to move to new things. Some people are better at architecting and design than others.
Therefore after they design and architect a new system, they move on to another new system.
I think there are benefits to working on different projects all the time, but there are also benefits to staying at one place for a few years.

Like you said, developing relationships, mentors, mentoring people and so on are great for career growth. But depending on circumstances sometimes you might get stuck in maintenance and old technology.

On the other hand, learning new technologies is always great, but jumping from job to job sometimes leads to career stagnation. You keep learning new things but since you jump around every six months, it becomes harder to move up in any organization and as time goes on, it's more like you are jumping from similar job to job rather than advancing your career.

Like I said there are benefits to both, but i think the best way to satisfy the need to jump ship often but still advance your career is to work as a consultant or techie with a consulting company. You move around to different projects, learn new things, meet new people, but you stay at one company and can advance your career.
17 years ago
Start small and build yourself up. Learn from books, forums, your own side projects, and try to find ways to learn or implement new things at work. Whether it's a small fix or a larger one, if you can find ways to improve the flow, speed, revenue, costs of a particular software system, people will usually listen. Take some classes, learn on your own.

The biggest thing is don't doubt yourself. As soon as you start doubting yourself, it starts to show and once your confidence level is low, thats when your career path starts to become more of a straight line rather than an walking up the ladder and so on. Confidence is a big factor in anything you do. If you go into something thinking you don't know enough to do it, you'll probably make yourself not be able to do it.

On the other hand if you go into a project thinking you can do it, many times you will find ways to get it done. Always learn new things and keep your knowledge up to date, but don't doubt yourself.
17 years ago
It all depends on the situation. If somebody plans on coming to the US, working their butt off for a few years, save as much money as possible, and then move back to whatever country they are citizens of, it is a lot different than somebody who wants to stay in the US or is from the US..

Costs will be a lot different depending on circumstances. Because if you know when you go back to say, India, where many things might cost less than in the US, it is a lot easier to think you'll work hard, save money, then go back with a lot more money then you ever imagined.

Where as somebody from the US or somebody planning to stay in the US knows there is no such thing as "going back someplace and being able to live more comfortably." It is what it is..

On to the other issue about firms overcharging and taking money. I don't think it's much different as far as certain companies charging a firm
$80/hr while you get paid $40/hr. That happens for most consulting companies and contracting firms, regardless of where you come from. You get paid less than what you are being charged out as. Sometimes you might be getting less pay, but most of the time, a company charges a certain amount. And a lot of times these firms have huge contracts and deals with the large corporations and organizations. So counting out or trying to avoid the "middle men firms" is nearly impossible at times. It is what it is.

As far as pay rates.. It's business. If say people from India start demanding more money, the companies will start looking elsewhere for cheaper labor. Maybe they go to china, africa, who knows where. It's about money. It rarely is about skills. If a US person demands 40/hr while somebody on an visa demands 30/Hr with the same skill sets, they'll go with the cheaper price. And if somebody from china or africa or brazil or wherever start charging 20/hr, they'll jump on that ship.

That is why people in the US don't like to work on the cheap. Costs get more expensive the longer you plan to stay someplace. And when there is no other option to move to, you have to demand a certain salary.

Just as those on a visa need a certain amount to survive and to save, it'll start bothering you if somebody from africa or china or brazil or wherever jump in and demand half of what you're making because maybe it's cheaper to live where they come from and they know this and know after so many years, they can go back and almost live like kings off the money they saved.

While it should be about skills and experience, it never is. It's always about the bottom line. It's business and business will always go for the cheaper bargain.
17 years ago
Congrats on your new quest. I'm not so sure it would work as well here in the US, unless you have fantastic connections. You might considering you were in the finance industry.

Most normal projects in the US are contracted out to large corparations and many companies have specific deals and contracts with certain consultant firms. If you don't get brought on by ABC company, you most likely won't be brought on because that large corporation has to hire ABC company employees when contracting out services.

I've done plenty of consulting and contracting over the years. But most of the time I'm hired on by a specific consulting company for a specific contract. If I tried to avoid the "middle man consulting firm" i'd have no chance to get hired because like I said, many of these large organizations have huge contracts with various consulting companies. It might make sense on both sides to avoid the "middle man" but it could also violate contracts the "middle man consulting firm" has with the large corporation. That is never a good thing.

For me, I gained most of my experience working on those contracting and consulting projects. When I did small side projects, I learned things, but working on small simple projects is one thing, working on large scaled projects that could lose a company millions of dollars if not done right is a whole different ball game.

It might be different for some people, but from my experience, there are a lot of contracts out there that keep the "middle man consulting firm" in business for years to come. They won a bid or they have certain deals and so on with some large organizations and corporations.
17 years ago
Sort of related to original topic..

I decided to store the DB data in a bean.. Not sure if I'm doing it right or not and definitely not sure if I set up JSTL correctly. I'm new to JSTL so not sure how it all works together at times. I get my page to display, but I don't get any results back.. Just my Table Headers(which I hardcoded in the table and no data.

Here is the JSP results page with JSTL :



Here is how I store the Java Bean.




And here is the part of my servlet




[ April 20, 2007: Message edited by: william gates ]
[ April 20, 2007: Message edited by: william gates ]
17 years ago
JSP
Thanks.. I'll have to do that..

It's all for security reasons, which I understand. Doesn't make it easier, but it sort of makes sense. They've had one too many "missing laptop" problems and hence, a new IT Security Kingpin with all new rules, regulations and policies.

Besides that, I'm a contractor and I've had to go through many user rights, privledges, and admin issues over the past few months due to me being a non-employee. Sometimes I can't connect to a certain database until I get approved and that might take a week or two.

That's all besides the point though. I'll have to write a servlet to find out what is going wrong.

thanks,
17 years ago
JSP
I tested on my local system using Apache Tomcat 5 before deploying to the Websphere 6.0 development server box. But there were many issues related with new server admins, scripts, db connections, memory allocation, user accounts and so on that made it a waste to continue testing on the local Tomcat web server.

I'll try to test on Tomcat to see if I can see what's going wrong, but i'm sort of flying blind right now on the Websphere 6.0 side. The server admins have been helpful enough over the past few weeks, even though they are new to Websphere. The problem now is the two server admins are gone until May. One is in training and the other on vacation. So I can't even ask them to see if they can send me error logs.

thanks for your help.
17 years ago
JSP
It's an empty blank page.

Here is part of my servlet code.



But for whatever reason, it forwards me to a blank queryResults.jsp page.

However when I use a hashmap in the DBcode, like the code listed below, I do get results back. Albiet they aren't displayed in the order I wish them to be.





As far as logs, I don't have access to them on websphere 6.0. I run jython scripts to either update, delete or install my web application and from there I can't even read the folder on the server.. That is locked down by the server admins.
[ April 20, 2007: Message edited by: william gates ]
17 years ago
JSP
I stored DB results in a HASHMAP and then ARRAYLIST, but it displayed my results in an order that wasn't the way I needed it.

I've been trying to store my results in an ArrayList, but for some reason, the JSP page using JSTL just displays a blank page. No results, no nothing.

Here is where I store my Array List



and here is the main display part of the JSTL page.


I'm confused as to why I can use a HashMap and ArrayList and get results to display but when I try to just use an ArrayList to store, nothing is displayed at all.
[ April 20, 2007: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]
17 years ago
JSP
"To tell the truth, I don't need to do more than what I am paid"

That's a bad attitude to have for a career in IT. Heck, for any career for that matter. While you can go overboard with doing too much and not getting anything in return, the fact is, in today's world, it is a bad bad thing to have the attitude of "This isn't in my job description so I won't do it."
17 years ago
It could be a great niche to get into, but at the same time, IT Security involves a lot more things than just programming. If you want to become good at it and become an expert, you need to learn much of the "10" Security Domains. Many of which include networking technologies and various other things.

Check out a book on CISSP.
Research it as much as you can about IT Security, careers and so on. I've thought about moving more toward IT Security in the past, but I've always enjoyed creating, designing, building and developing things a lot more than what I'd be doing in IT Security. Yeah if i moved up the ladder I'd get a chance to design IT Security policies and so on, but there is no gurantee you'd wind up as a manager one day. As a software engineer, even in pigeon holed roles, I usually get a chance to create something.

So it really depends on what you think IT Security is and what you want to do. It can be a great career path, but understand, it can be a lot different than software engineering.
17 years ago
Sounds like a bad situation to be in. You don't want to get a bad review from your current boss, but at the same time threatening another manager with a "resignation" is never a good thing.

If it were me, I would try to explain to the current manager that it's not in your best interest to threaten a "resignation". It'll make you look bad in the long run. Who knows what will happen in the future but I know a few of the places I've worked at, the managers moved around, up or down, about every 2 years, if not sooner. So if you threaten another manager with a "resignation" ploy and suddenly your current boss is out the door or off somewhere else, You probalbly won't be in a very good situation.
17 years ago
It's all about risk. Most people hear about all these stories, hear about people becoming wealthy off the stock market, listen to all these radio shows and tv shows and read tons of books.. The problem is many of these shows are all about making the people on those shows wealthier. Many of these books rarely tell you anything but general information.

So people read a book, listen to any of the television or radio show hosts on stocks and business and then think they are "experts".

While you might make money, it is always a risk. It becomes a larger risk when most people who work in another industry think they are experts after reading a few books and watching a few shows.

For somebody to make decent money in stocks, it becomes like another full time job. If you have another 8 hours a day to donate to learning, studying, and keeping up to date about business, finance, wall street, the world markets, and so on on top of the 8 hours + a day you already do in your normal job, then you will have a very good chance at making money by investing in wallstreet or real estate or whatever.

But if you just think you can read a book, look at the wall street journal in the morning, tune into Kramer, and then expect riches, I just hope you don't waste too much of your money.
[ April 19, 2007: Message edited by: william gates ]
17 years ago
When you speak of web design do you mean flash, graphics, text, images, and the layout or a combo of that and xhtml, html, search engine optimization,and so on or do you mean java, jsp, asp, perl, javascript, jdbc, and so on.

There are many web designers who are more graphic artists and then there are those called web designers when they really are web developers and programmers.

It really depends on what you are referring to. JDeveloper, Eclipse, NetBean are all great tools to use for programming. They aren't used for graphic or flash type of work.

So it really depends on what you mean by the term web designer. I'm assuming since your on a java programming forum, you mean web developer. But I could be wrong.

JDeveloper is a great tool. I've used it in the past and it seems to have a lot more built in features and "auto-code" type of wizards on topo of the latest and greatest oracle connections that eclipse or net beans normally don't have. But I've used eclipse for quite some time now(3.2 now) because it has many open source add ons that sometimes aren't available for Jdeveloper or don't work as well. And at times JDeveloper seems to make things a lot more complex if all you want to do is write a simple text file. I like eclipse, I liked JDeveloper. I really haven't used NetBeans all that much, so i can't give my opinion there. I also use TextPad a lot. A simple notepad type of application for compiling and writing code.

It really is up to you. Whatever you like and feel comfortable with, use it and learn it.

If you are referring to Web Design, there are tons of things out there like a Flash, like Dreamweaver, like frontpage, like textpad. Plus photoshop, there was imageready a few years back, IPhoto and so on. It really depends on what you like and don't like and your budget. But i use graphic type of software off and on, I'm by no means an expert on using any of them.

[ April 18, 2007: Message edited by: william gates ]
[ April 18, 2007: Message edited by: william gates ]
If you plan on staying on the technical side of things and not moving anywhere near management, an MBA in the short term, probably won't do much for your career.

But you never know what your attitude will be or what your situation will bei in 10-15 years. If you get a company to pay some of the costs, it's always good if you have the time to add something extra to your knowledge base. Because while it may seem pointless now, that MBA in 10-15 years might be more useful than you ever imagined. You never know where your career will take you.
17 years ago