Subj : McDonalds/RoundTable, design&farm (was: I'm still waiting for ...)
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp
From : rem642b
Date : Fri Aug 26 2005 11:46 pm

> From: use-reply...@spambegone.null (Michael Sullivan)
> ... instead of looking for exactly and precisely the kind of work
> that you have done in the distant past, ...

You're displaying a serious misconception. I'm available for any legal
work where I'd be doing something actually useful so that it would be
worth paying me to do it. It's the employers who refuse to even
consider people who haven't done exactly the same kind of work before.

> Go work at McDonalds

I tried that, when I had less than one year work experience. The
manager at the McDonalds on El Monte near El Camino Real told me that
because I have a college degree he won't consider me for employment
because he'd waste two months training me and then I'd find a better
job elsewhere and he'd be out the expense of training. Later that year
I got a job at Round Table Pizza on University in Palo Alto, where a
ditzy redhead Mrs. Masinter wasn't watching where she was going and
collided with my car and then freaked out seeing the car parts strewn
on the pavement, apologizing, exchanging insurance info, then she drove
off before giving me a chance to inspect the damage and see that all
the damage was to *her* car, not mine. Anyway, Round Table fired me
because I suffer a learning disability, unable to memorize the prices
on the menu. A year or two later I was sitting at a terminal at the
A.I. lab doing my usual work for free, and occasionally running FINGER
to see who else was around, when I saw Larry Masinter logged in, so I
wwnt over and asked if he was in any way related to that ditzy driver,
and indeed that was his former wife. He showed me Lisp for the first
time, impressed me, and after Hans Moravec explained the REP loop to me
I was forever going strong with Lisp.

> or a factory

That's not a good idea. I have very poor muscle coordination, can't
write legibly, can't do sports at all, take ten times as long as anyone
else to do a simple mechanical task in metal/wood shop in school and
still the result is cruddy, need extra space on both sides of car when
I'm driving because I can't judge distance between car and parket cars,
break almost anything physical I try to work on, did I tell you about
the disaster when I tried to do work on my car (tune-up, and lubricate
the air-duct wire-in-sleeve control cables)?

> a lot more brainpower goes into defining the problems that explicitly
> than into the actual coding, 

Much of my work at Stanford was like that. Unfortunately there's no way
to express that with buzzwords on a resume, so you're not aware of that
from reading my resumes.

> and once you've done that part -- Indians and Chinese can and will

I'd be glad to design the software, farm it out to I&C, then check what
comes back to make sure it does the job that was required. Do you know
any such software-design jobs available now? I've never seen any such
jobs advertised anywhere, ever in all the years since I started
programming.

.