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Welcome to the thirty-fourth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of the Job Market. In this edition, Adrian describes the painful recent evolution of the Swiss tech job market; Graham reflects on the difficulties of the hiring process and the obsolescence of the technical interview; and in the Library section, Adrian talks about "My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job" by Chad Fowler.
Until the mid-90s, the Swiss job market required two things of anyone interested in pursuing a career in management in any major local industry: a university degree… and a grade in the Swiss Army. As a consequence, in the Swiss side of my family I had a fair share of sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and other mid- to high ranking officers, most of them in artillery and infantry.
It is very easy to get information about career progression in the software engineering world, but very hard to get good information about it. To understand how the various problems collude to stop us learning about our own career paths, let us start at the beginning.
There was a time when I advertised my services as "Ruby on Rails" programmer. It was by that time that I got to learn the names and work of many people in that field; many of whom had come from the J2EE world, were tired of configuring everything in XML files, and preferred to use… YAML files instead. OK, I am being sarcastic here. Ruby on Rails was truly revolutionary when it appeared.