DonXML Blog

Here’s the last in my series of non-coding blogs.  As someone who has done some hiring of programmers over the last couple months, I can say from experience that it is not just a case of too many programmers and not enough jobs, or outsourcing causing the problems in the current tech job market.  It's a multilevel problem that starts with lots and lots of inexperienced programmers (who flocked to IT during the dot com boom) looking for jobs.  These inexperienced programmers are flooding the market with resumes, just trying to make something stick.  These resumes are making it impossible to try to find the good quality programmers' resumes.  To make matters worse, you can't even go thru a recruiting agency or a consulting firm, because any recruiter that was worth anything got out of that field when the jobs got scarce.  So the recruiters aren't doing their jobs and just push the bad resumes along. 

Continuing my trend of business related blog entries, I thought I’d comment on Martin Spedding’s latest blog entry, “Outsource Coding, When Not If”.  Some of what he is saying I agree with, but outsourcing has been around forever, and has had limited success.  I can’t see the outsourcing success rate increasing in the near future.  The major reason is due to the lost art form that was the Business Analyst’s role.  The way it is suppose to work is the business analyst understands the business process, the system analyst talks to the business analyst and builds those needs into a corporate wide systems approach, and the programmer analyst talks to the system analyst to make sure the program meets the needs of the business users, and the corporate systems needs.  During the 90’s the business analyst’s role was slowly diminished to the point that the position is rarely used anymore. The death of the analyst role was also fueled by the mass exodus from these positions to development positions during the Dot Com boom, and once things went bust, out went to developers, along with their analyst role.  I have not seen a come back yet, but believe that in order to survive, companies will need to revive these roles.  There was a time in the late 90’s where people predicted that a Systems Analyst with an MBA was the career choice of the future, but the future is here, and I still don’t see these positions, and my consulting clients are Fortune 100 companies.  If they are ever going to get outsourcing to work, they are going to have to bring back the analyst roles.

Could it be that DB actually cut his hair?  He mentions it on his blog, and Scotg has a post, but I haven’t seen a picture yet.  Somebody has to get a picture and post it for all to see.  Scot has a cool list of DB's Hair FAQ:

A couple months back a bunch of us had a cool thread going on feeling like your programming talent is underappreciated.  Basically, a few people mentioned that it seemed like the artist got all the praise for a good website design, but no one (but us) seem to be impressed over a fully functional database driven backend.

Jeff Julian let me know that this blog has been listed on Blogshares.  Seems as though I need to post the following on my page to claim it.

My punk and metal friends will cringe reading this, but I’ll be at the Springsteen show tonight at Giants Stadium (first of 3 shows for me).  It’s not so much the music, as it is the opportunity to tailgate with my friends (since elementary school) and our wives.  Springsteen is pretty cool live.  He hasn’t broke into my top 5 live shows, but he still does pretty well.  I’ll make up for seeing Bruce, by going to the Warped Tour in Asbury Park in August.

Sean Gerety let me know about this.  It seems that SharpVectors was (barely) mentioned in Paul Prescod’s SVG Open key note speech “SVG: A Sure Bet”, and it was published on XML.com. 

There wasn’t an official announcement, but it seems that the W3C has released the third version of the 1.2 working draft.  Most folks wouldn’t even notice this, but if you check out the details, they added support for Rendering Custom Content (RCC), which happens to look a lot like the stuff in my XMLDevCon presentation.  What it does is allow you to create your own custom UI Widgets (like element behaviors does) or XForms element, and bind them to transformations.  This way you have code reuse, but everything is rendered down to pure SVG.