Job prospects for new programers?

[Dervacumen]

I haven't coded in many years, but I'm looking for a career change.  For those of you in the industry, does it even make sense to get back in to this field?  What language(s) should I work with?  I'm sure I can get some class time somewhere.  Is there even a job market for entry level programmers (C++, PHP, HTML 5, JAVA, whatever) or are there so many experienced programmers out of work that I would be fighting a losing battle?
Any ideas would be appreciated.  Are there specific certifications I need?  I'm sure there are, but there are so many I can't begin to understand where to start.

[EightBySix]

Can you work for the same rate as offshore developers? That's the issue nowadays, unless you work for a small company, or in defence/security

[ark_ader]

Can you work for the same rate as offshore developers? That's the issue nowadays, unless you work for a small company, or in defence/security

This is very true.. Can you code for free?  Are you prepared to?  You might have to.  Coders are ten a penny.

With a surplus of coders on the job markets (most of them 3rd best) getting some coding done is so much easier than say five years ago.

You would be better off being an analyst or a trainer/teacher.  Something of worth.  Employers want multi-role applicants these days.

Or you can create a game (where the coding for free comes in) and sell it on the app markets.

Good luck, I hope you find something.

I know of five people who are C++ and java coders and they are thinking of changing direction too.

[AtomSmasher]

Not sure about entry level jobs, but there seems to be plenty of intermediate to advanced programmer jobs available.

I got into the industry by working for very little amount of money at a game developer for a couple of years.  I'd recommend looking to see if you have any shovelware game companies around you since they are often looking for eager programmers who want experience (and are willing to work crazy hours for very little).

[Vanguard]

The right experience is the key.   We're stumbling over ourselves to find qualified candidates.   If you have experience working on low level OS components (drivers, firmware, microcode) there are a lot of good paying jobs to be had.  Employers don't pay for people who can code, they pay for people who have specific area of expertise.   Coding is just a tool in your tool belt.

[drventure]

Just from my own experience, there's a ton of positions out there.

I'm a VB.net guy, with some C#, lots of VB6, MSSQL, commercial software exp etc.

Learn how to use DICE, and CareerBuilder, maybe linkedin. Find some opensource projects you're interested in and contribute something, even if its just a little.

Or opensource some of your own projects and put em up on github or one of the other open source hosts.

Possibly start a technical blog.

There +are+ a lot of developers out there doing web stuff, so differentiating yourself in that crowd will be tough. But there are plenty of other niches that are not near as crowded. Commercial dev, drivers, GIS, integration stuff, hardware (for instance, controllers for fuel pumps or industrial systems).

Just a few things to consider.

And Vanguard's right. Specific experience is definitely good. I'm mainly a developer, but I've always ended up doing the installations for every project I've worked on, so I know InnoSetup, InstallShield and Wise quite well. I get tons of calls needing installer experience, which has gotten me past the front gates on several occasions.

[stu33]

Medical Records software and interoperability.  My company has been hiring new programmers lately.  With all the Obamacare regulations, the medical software field is really growing, and it's not going away anytime soon, either.  In my experience, it's really best to be able to learn older techs quickly.  Most of these places already have installations in place, and they're old.  Seriously old.  I code mostly in C/C++/Java.  I've done most of my database work with OLD libraries, like D-ISAM and C-Tree.  Lots of SQL in this field too.

Right now I mostly work with communications, consuming and creating web services.

[drventure]

Medical Records software and interoperability.

+1. I actually do commercial pharmacy software. There's lots going on in medical software, and there's a ton of room for new stuff to happen. Medicine seems to be quite behind the times, software wise....

[stu33]

When I was getting my bachelor's, they got rid of COBOL and Pascal, virtually eliminated all C classes, and heavily pushed JAVA...

That's too bad about Pascal.  I still think Pascal is one of the best 'learning' languages.  Really teaches you about type safety and how to be a 'good' programmer, reducing code rot, etc...

Many of the programmers where I work were actually math majors that started programming in the mid-90s when coders were harder to find.  Working in some of their older code from time to time can make my eyes bleed.  The things they used to do would have failed any programming assignment I had in college.  Over the last decade or so they've hired actual computer science majors (like me), and we've established a base set of standards to follow.  I still remember the first day I was here I was working on one the reports and it was filled with goto statements...instead of looping.

[yaksplat]

My company can't find enough people that are skilled in .net and the microsoft stack.  I work in software consulting and i move from company to company.  A few months here, a few months there.  I ened up making contacts all over and work in a ton of different industries; banking, insurance, engineering, education.

I started out with Fortran, vb6 and java.  Now i primarily use C#.

[drventure]

they also got rid of the "this is a hard drive, this is a power supply, this is how to connect them" class, too.

Ack. I think that's why a lot of "new" programmers end up not getting into good positions. I can't tell how many times I've interviewed developers that seriously had no idea how to actually put a machine together, what a "stack' was, how logic functions worked (and, or, xor, etc), really basic stuff.

And a lot of it goes back to schools moving toward the "{this programming IDE} is just an application, and here's how you use that application" style of teaching programming.

I actually once interviewed a guy with a masters in computer science who did not know how to open a text file (in his choice of language), read a line, and write it out.

Ugh...

Yaksplats right, though. the .net stack is a great place to build up some knowledge, esp C# (I'm more a VB kinda guy, but I do C when I have to). Either way, learn your way around the framework, a little WPF, maybe some WCF, SQL Server and TSQL.  There's lots of positions for that skillset.

[AtomSmasher]

When I was getting my bachelor's, they got rid of COBOL and Pascal, virtually eliminated all C classes, and heavily pushed JAVA... they also got rid of the "this is a hard drive, this is a power supply, this is how to connect them" class, too.  We were assured we were all getting high paying jobs working for WorldCom, Enron, and Anderson Consulting.

I am completely serious about this.

It was the same way when I was going to college, although only the first two years were focused on Java, the second two were on C and C++.  Luckily the CS class I took in highschool was in Turbo Pascal, and I also took an after school class in highschool on building and repairing computers (it was supposed to get you prepared to get your A+ cert).

[Vanguard]

Ack. I think that's why a lot of "new" programmers end up not getting into good positions. I can't tell how many times I've interviewed developers that seriously had no idea how to actually put a machine together, what a "stack' was, how logic functions worked (and, or, xor, etc), really basic stuff.

This is why jobs dealing with hardware pay so much.   If you can't find a guy who knows AND, OR, XOR, imagine how hard it is to find a guy who understands kernel transitions, interrupts, bus interfaces, DMA, etc...

Forget knowing how to put a machine together, there are very few people who know how one actually works at the hardware level.   Everyone is so caught up in web development where you are 5 times removed from the hardware, that people don't even think about the hardware anymore.

[MonMotha]

DMA's fun ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---.  Your average DMA controller isn't very bright: it'll happily do EXACTLY what you tell it, even if that involves clobbering your page tables.  Most systems don't have an IOMMU to block that sort of thing, either, and even on systems that do, it's not widely used by most OSes.

If you really want to have fun, work on some mid-range embedded platforms that are big enough to support a somewhat substantial OS and several simultaneous applications but don't have protected memory.  It's like running Windows 3.1 all over again.  Anything can walk all over anything else.  Anything can just arbitrarily disable interrupts and deadlock the whole system.  Fortunately, this is starting to change as putting real features like an MMU and priv levels into even low end micros is becoming economically practical.

(Moral of that mostly OT story: if you understood what I just said, you probably have people interested in hiring you.  If not, well, good luck.)

[Vanguard]

All the ARM11 stuff we work on has a system MMU that handles all memory operations for all devices on the SOC (camera, modem, audio, network, GPU, etc..).   Since WinMobile 6.0, the flat memory model went away.   Our page tables have full protection bits.   I've not seen this type of support on ARM9 and earlier but it is on everything going forward.

Having knowledge in system architecture is by far the best way to maximize your returns as a programmer.   It can be a frustrating job though.   Dealing with a freshly born GPU or CPU and having to identify and work around hardware bugs is challenging work.    Taking a black box with 250 million transistors and bringing it to life for the first time with any number of unknown issues blocking progress isn't something everyone finds "fun".   

[Dartful Dodger]

With a surplus of coders on the job markets (most of them 3rd best) getting some coding done is so much easier than say five years ago.

It is getting easier and easier to program. My company has three real programmers (I'm one of them) and the rest of the "programmers" just copy and paste the code we've already written and modify a few variables to work with their project.

To get hired at my company you need to get past 2 rounds. HR then a peer review.
To get selected by HR all you need is a good resume (or you're in a minority).
To get selected by your possible peers all you need a good personality (or you're easy on the eyes).

[MonMotha]

All the ARM11 stuff we work on has a system MMU that handles all memory operations for all devices on the SOC (camera, modem, audio, network, GPU, etc..).   Since WinMobile 6.0, the flat memory model went away.   Our page tables have full protection bits.   I've not seen this type of support on ARM9 and earlier but it is on everything going forward.

Having knowledge in system architecture is by far the best way to maximize your returns as a programmer.   It can be a frustrating job though.   Dealing with a freshly born GPU or CPU and having to identify and work around hardware bugs is challenging work.    Taking a black box with 250 million transistors and bringing it to life for the first time with any number of unknown issues blocking progress isn't something everyone finds "fun".   

ARM920T and ARM926EJ-S, some of the most common ARM9 cores, do have MMUs that should be supported by both WinCE and Linux kernels.  There's little reason not to use those facilities, though applications not using external memory (just using the memory integrated on the SoC) don't usually have room for even the most stripped down Linux kernel, let alone WinCE.

The issue is things like ARM Cortex-M3/M0, ARM7TDMI, etc. as well as many small MIPS SoCs, AVR32 UC3, and others.  These are readily powerful enough to run a minimal OS (something along the lines of FreeRTOS or various offerings from the likes of Green Hills, etc.) with several largely independent tasks, but everything shares the same memory space.  Some of these (mostly newer ones) do have an MPU you can adjust on task switch to prevent a runaway task from hosing the entire system.  You're still limited to a flat, non-remappable memory space (which can cause issues if you want to make lots of use of heap), but at least you can catch a runaway task stepping totally out of its assigned memory regions.

The DMA controllers, even on most PCs, usually are totally uninhibited, though: they can (and will) walk all over anything.  They're usually only programmed from supervisor mode, but some things like GPUs have to accept user direction and can cause all sorts of mayhem if the drivers miss a problem and configure the hardware to do something "bad".

FWIW, I like taking a black box with 250 million transistors and making it do useful things, though I prefer to put the chips on a board rather than putting software on the chips.  And yeah, I've been bit pretty hard by chip errata before.  Just part of the "fun"

[Gray_Area]

Medical Records software and interoperability.  My company has been hiring new programmers lately.  With all the Obamacare regulations, the medical software field is really growing, and it's not going away anytime soon, either.  In my experience, it's really best to be able to learn older techs quickly.  Most of these places already have installations in place, and they're old.  Seriously old.  I code mostly in C/C++/Java.  I've done most of my database work with OLD libraries, like D-ISAM and C-Tree.  Lots of SQL in this field too.

I remember in '90 when my cousin was starting to make a business in this industry, and vaguely recall his comments then about how open it was. Apparently 'they' got it going and then it stagnated.