Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount... ; -))

From: Rob O'Donnell <classiccmp.org_at_irrelevant.fsnet.co.uk>
Date: Sun Jun 20 04:34:24 2004

At 04:47 20/06/2004, William Donzelli wrote:

> > People get too specialized these days.
>
>These day, you have to be specialized. There is little in the market for
>"jack of all trades" EEs. Those days are gone, except in very small
>companies doing fairly simple devices.
>

Sadly this is true in computing as well. I don't have a degree, the only
college I went to was a technical college, one day a week sponsored by the
company I was working for as an apprentice (Ferranti, may they rest in
peace).

But I've got over 20 years experience across the board in electronics,
computers, hardware and software. I have a reasonable understanding of how
most things work, can still remember the resistor colour code, (mostly, I
always forget the tolerance bands) could design and build a simple digital
circuit, then program up any software that is needed to run it. I can
probably set up everything an ISP needs to run, and muddle my way through
writing custom applications in php, sql and even awk, not to mention all
the microsoft languages!

But I'm not an expert in any of this, have no qualifications, and much
prefer to have some reference to hand to help me along rather than guessing
all the time. I dare say there are things I can do I'm not even good at!

I guess this makes me that 'jack of all trades'.

And can I find a new job that actually pays more than we receive on state
benefits? Nope ... everybody, certainly the bigger companies that pay the
better money, wants experts in one tiny field.

The last place I worked was indeed a small company, where some of my skills
were handy, but they were basically selling and supporting hardware on the
back of their accounts software. So the Windows NT server is getting full
and slow? Sell the customer a bigger server running Windows 2000. My boss
didn't have a clue, had no people skills, and would not use the skills or
knowledge of his staff. In the end, I'm glad we parted company....

Rob
Received on Sun Jun 20 2004 - 04:34:24 BST