[Gllug] Advice on getting on the career ladder for c and linux

[James de Lurker]

Subject: Re: [Gllug] Advice on getting on the career ladder for c and linux
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 09:36:51 +0000

Tethys wrote:

> Adam Bower writes:
>>The other thing to keep in mind is that I got lots of phone calls
>>recently asking if i programmed in C, the short answer is "no"

> You do? I only get C++ and Java, neither of which particularly excite me.
> I'd pretty much given up on getting a C coding job, which is one of the
> reasons I"m currently doing sysadmin. There's very little commercial stuff
> written in C any more. The only places it's still common are embedded
> systems (and even there it seems on the wane) and open source projects.

Don't doubt how valuable that makes you; automation should be a snap. Much
harder to (re)learn decent shell programming tricks after years diverted
into faffing around with M$ GUI based "enterprise" tools. Learning Perl
is giving me serious headaches after all the anally retentive type and
array safe programming I used to do in ANSI C / C++ until the mid nineties.

Surely that is just due to the cancellation of a lot of telecoms based 
projects? By volume I seem to remember that in the peak demand months of
2000 it was _really_ difficult to turn down C programming offers as the
rates climbed heights overlooking mainstay stuff like middleware / database
connectivity that always seems to be lurking around.

I hadn't programmed in C seriously for over FIVE years, but was convinced
by a GIS company to give it a go. Crappy undocumented codebase and prima
donna lead programmer made it unbearable, rather than the project itself.

For embedded:
Java and other OO stuff hasn't replaced C / Assembler? The overhead is
awesome in terms of both compute power and memory space for code and data.
In 2000 a novel games controller design (mass market product) was sold
off to Microsoft; surprise when my C code was used as pseudo code for a
smart new grad to convert entirely to (paged) assembler in a "super" PIC
architecture! 2 Weeks in all ( in awe ) that should be, maybe.

It doesn't seem that long ago that Hitachi brought out "compiler" tools
that first made C coding for tiny micros a realistic proposition.

What have you seen replacing C for production embedded designs Tet?
Particularly for high volume commercial stuff.

Inquiring minds, (and this old geezer), would like to know ;-)

Keep banging those rocks together[tm] Sparks come out eventually(!)

-- 

   -- James

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