In message , at 20:39:08 on Sat, 14 Jan
2017, tim... remarked:


"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 10:47:29 on Sat, 14 Jan
2017, tim... remarked:

just because you know that there is a shortage of workers in one
group cannot help you determine if there is a shortage in the other.

In case you hadn't noticed, the majority of programming requirement
is now for the online space.

agreed

but that's irrelevant to a discussion which stared with me saying

there isn't a shortage of IT staff in engineering

and you saving

yes there is

And the online paradigms are often new and evolving, thus it helps to
get new blood in.

I think that's insulting to experienced staff to say "we don't think
that you can learn this new skill"

The skill required is in imagining and devising whole new ways of
working.

I had this discussion very very early on in my career when real time
development was done on specialist development systems and moved to
being done on IBM PC's

Recruiters would say nonsense like you don't have PC experience, my
client can't use you - to which I could respond "but I do have
development on PC experience" (though I was pretty unique in that at
the time), but if I hadn't they would have been saying to a 28 year old
graduate "you can't be retrained to use a simple computer interface"
(that all our, left school at 16, admin staff are being retrained to
use) - Utter Bull ****!

I agree that in the environment you describe, the skills are portable,
and attitudes of employers and recruiters had not yet moved on. The
"whole new way of working" (which was probably coming in when you
started your career) was to program in high level languages rather than
assembler.

Thus it doesn't matter whether you know how to optimise assembler
routines on a pipelined TTL mainframe but people suspect you might not
be able to readily do the same on an 8086; having mastered C (or
whatever) that skill is indeed portable to any computer with a decent C
compiler.
--
Roland Perry