Sunday, October 31, 2004

Time to get a good job!

It can not be explained by seasonality. From now and till late Jan or late Feb there has to be NO increase in hiring. Yet, it appears that hiring managers are in a hiring frenzy! From my recent experience, two intersting observations.
  1. Consulting and hiring companies are being kicked out of business. Companies are well equipped to do the hiring themselves.
  2. Only specialists with over 10 years of experience are in great demand.
This all, of course, is an observation for the field I'm in: software development. Hard to complain about that :)

Also, a weird story. During one day I got someone calling me. First time, he presented himself as a recruter with a big consultancy and then he talked me into telling him which companies are interviewing. After having heard some company names, he started asking names of hiring managers. An incident? Couple of hours I get another call, a guy presents himself as a recruter with _another_ consultancy, and a few minutes into conversation I realise he's following the same script! Another minute, and I'm certain it's the same guy. My guess is (and this is to prove the point #1), consultancies have big-name-company hiring managers listed from the haydays of 2000. And they want back a piece of business they thought was theirs. Not anymore.

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Bravo, QCOM!

In the best traditions of five-year plan reports and 10 days prior to Great October Socialist Revolution anniversary, QCOM reported in time for CTIA that third-party developers have been paid $200 millions. Does not impress much the fact that the poster-boy this time around is... no, not ringtone company again!!! Commanding about 5% of this sum ($1 mil a month).
As far as applications are concerned, anybody cares to subtract certification costs from this? So many suckered. $1200 per NSTL certification times number of various types of devices times number of BREW developers times number of applications from a developer times averaging coefficient... Whatever you fellow developers do, good for QCOM, bad for you.

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Web Services apologets are sick

Not to embark on [anything being close to] bileblog (one of most popular and entertaining blogs over there), but the fact that most XML documents harnessing Web Services, in, e.g. Apache Axis (wsdd, wsdl) do not vaidate looks f#$^ed up. These people seem to attain masochistic pleasure in using half of page of text to express something as simple as "class org.apache.axis.test.Echo as a handler is capable of receiveing an argument 'message' and can respond with a String". Yet, if such a service is invoked from a browser, they respond with HTML that does not have the obvious <html><head>... Sick, sick, sick!