Re: Attention Experienced Professionals

Harry,

I am sorry if you think your post was what triggered Alan's comments about student assignments. I don't think it was. The thread that Rajiv had started has a response from Alan to the effect of not providing answers to assignments, and that post by Alan appear close to his initiating the discussion alerting experienced professionals.

 I'm also sorry if your post was not given the attention it deserves. I missed it.

There are two other aspects to this discussion.

The first is that comp.databases.theory really covers two grounds. One is how to create a database, or how to work with a given database. The other is the theory of how DBM systems ought to be designed, or what's good or bad about recent innovations in database languages, ones that have yet to make it to "main street", so to speak. Theoreticians follow these innovations avidly. Some of today's innovations will be the common stuff of work with databases some five years from now.

My solution was to propose a new Usenet newgroup with the name: comp.databases.design
You can help me. If you had seen two newsgroups, side by side, comp.databases.design and comp.databases.theory which one would you have posted your question in? or both?

The other aspect is anger. I've been in the IT field for over forty years, counting summer jobs on campus, and I've seen a lot of change in that time. I'm a retired database consultant, and my retirement was forced by the market. At $100 an hour, I was happy to be a road warrior, providing advice, training, or just plain technical know how depending on what the customer wanted. At $10 an hour, I'm not willing to do that. But consultants should expect the vicissitudes of the market place.

Employees, arguably, should not. And I have talked to dozens of competent professionals whose last assignment, before they were fired, was to train their successor. And their successor appeared to be patently unqualified for the job, and probably commanding a less than middle class wage. Those displaced employees are angry, and some of that anger pervades even the climate of this newsgroup.

I am NOT blaming this on you. I am merely saying that it's part of the climate, like it or not. Received on Sun Oct 10 2004 - 07:11:52 CDT