Career Choices: What we Need for Space Exploration

[VonHelton]

think theyre gonna need property developers on the moon?

 

It's possible!

 

:D

 

 

[flysgs233]

alot of what was said in this forum is true there is alot of buerocratic baloney going on with every goverment. now i don't claim to be an expert in forseeing the future but im doubtful that any goverment will be the first to Re-land on the moon. its not profitable and politicians are worried about the people crying about "if you can send a man to the moon why don't you eliminate poverty" i think its more likely for us to see a holiday inn or bestwestern flag on the moon next before we see any particular contries flag

[VonHelton]

alot of what was said in this forum is true there is alot of buerocratic baloney going on with every goverment. now i don't claim to be an expert in forseeing the future but im doubtful that any goverment will be the first to Re-land on the moon. its not profitable and politicians are worried about the people crying about "if you can send a man to the moon why don't you eliminate poverty" i think its more likely for us to see a holiday inn or bestwestern flag on the moon next before we see any particular contries flag

 

Actually, landing on the Moon (or anywhere in our solar system) is EXTREMELY PROFITABLE.

 

The Moon, for example, is rich in Helium 3, the fuel used for spaceships!

 

:stare: :stare: :stare:

 

 

[mic]

texas oil taycons anyone ?

lol,

 

 

[elderbear]

texas oil taycons anyone ?

lol,

 

 

Maybe "texas oil tachyons" ?!? B)

[mic]

I was disturbed to see a photo from a recent space science conference. Most of the people in it were 50+. If you're still in that phase of life where you're deciding on a major and a career, consider majoring in physics and doing graduate work in one of the space sciences. The field is dying out.

 

Alternatively, major in aerospace (or some other useful sub-specialty) engineering (do an internship to build your resume)) and then do a Masters in Public Administration. Target NASA for employment. NASA has become so wrong-headed that we need inspired people to administer the programs and keep pressure on to get manned space flight going beyond low earth orbit!

 

Or, for you poli-sci types, get involved in political campaigns. Figure out how they work. Learn to write and articulate well. Write position papers on space and related ventures. Write speeches. Get yourself known in the local party infrastructure. Then run for office yourself.

 

I don't have any illusions about space travel becoming common while I'm still young enough to leave earth's gravity well. But I hope that my children or grandchildren will be able to do so without forking over $$$ or training to be an astronaut.

 

very inspiring speech :cyclops: :cyclops: :cyclops:

[VonHelton]

does any one actualy read the signature????

 

Yes!

 

:cyclops:

 

 

[Beawulf]

I'll answer your call elder :D 'cept I wont be going to work for NASA, they can bite me. I'm gonna try and get work with the ESA

[VonHelton]

As long as I get to retire on Mars with a nice home near Olympus Mons, I'll be happy!

 

:cyclops:

 

 

[elderbear]

I'll answer your call elder :D 'cept I wont be going to work for NASA' date=' they can bite me. I'm gonna try and get work with the ESA[/quote']

 

And there's always Max Planck and EISCAT as other excellent facilities in Europe where the space sciences are being pursued. The field needs a new infusion of life - on either side of the Atlantic (or the globe).

[VonHelton]

I doubt much will come of it.........Mankind is "comfortable" staying on Earth. Until that changes, I wouldn't set your hopes too high.

 

:(

 

 

[BorisP]

I was disturbed to see a photo from a recent space science conference. Most of the people in it were 50+. If you're still in that phase of life where you're deciding on a major and a career, consider majoring in physics and doing graduate work in one of the space sciences. The field is dying out.

 

Alternatively, major in aerospace (or some other useful sub-specialty) engineering (do an internship to build your resume)) and then do a Masters in Public Administration. Target NASA for employment. NASA has become so wrong-headed that we need inspired people to administer the programs and keep pressure on to get manned space flight going beyond low earth orbit!

 

Or, for you poli-sci types, get involved in political campaigns. Figure out how they work. Learn to write and articulate well. Write position papers on space and related ventures. Write speeches. Get yourself known in the local party infrastructure. Then run for office yourself.

 

I don't have any illusions about space travel becoming common while I'm still young enough to leave earth's gravity well. But I hope that my children or grandchildren will be able to do so without forking over $$$ or training to be an astronaut.

 

very inspiring speech :cyclops: :cyclops: :cyclops:

 

It is too late. The world is going to go into a tailspin of poverty and ugliness.

 

I wanted to cry when I read this. I am a kind of doom and gloom person but still, to me this is the epitaph for America.

 

 

Career experts say the decline of traditional tech jobs for U.S. workers isn't likely to reverse anytime soon.

 

The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005.

 

"Obviously the past four or five years have been really rough for tech job seekers, and that's not going to change  there are absolutely no signs that there's a huge boom about to happen where techies will get big salary hikes or there will be lots of new positions opening for them," said Allan Hoffman, the tech job expert at career site Monster.com.

 

Not everyone from the class of 2005 thinks programming is passe, and companies are always eager to hire Americans who can write great code  the type of work that, in recent years, produced innovations including file-sharing software at

Napster and search engine tech at Google.

 

But even the most dedicated techies are entering the profession with less zeal than their predecessors.

 

The erosion of "deep code" and other technology jobs in the next decade is creating a high-stakes game of musical chairs for geeks, Silicon Valley recruiters say.

 

Dimming career prospects have been particularly ego-bruising for people who entered the profession during the late '90s, when employers doled out multiple job offers, generous starting salaries, and starting bonuses including stock options and Porsches.

 

"The current situation is getting back to the '70s and '80s, where IT workers were the basement cubicle geeks and they weren't very well off," said Matthew Moran, author of the six-month-old book "Information Technology Career Builder's Toolkit: A Complete Guide to Building Your Information Technology Career in Any Economy."

 

"They were making an honest living but weren't anything more than middle-class people just getting by," Moran said.

 

Thousands of U.S. companies have opened branches or hired contractors in India, China and Russia, transforming a cost-saving trick into a long-term business strategy. Offshoring may be a main factor in eroding enthusiasm for engineering careers among American students, creating a vast supply of low-wage labor in eastern Europe and Asia and driving down worldwide wages.

 

The average computer programmer in India costs roughly $20 per hour in wages and benefits, compared to $65 per hour for an American with a comparable degree and experience, according to the consulting firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.

 

According to the most recent data from the

National Science Foundation, 1.2 million of the world's 2.8 million university degrees in science and engineering in 2000 were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, with only 400,000 granted in the United States.

 

U.S. graduates probably shouldn't think of computer programming or chemical engineering as long-term careers but it's "not all gloom and doom," said Albert C. Gray, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers.

 

He says prospects are good for aeronautic, civil and biomedical engineers, the people who design and build artificial organs, life support devices and machines to nurture premature infants.

 

"In this country, we need to train our engineers to be at the leading edge," Gray said. "That's the only place there's still going to be engineering work here."

 

At Stanford, career experts are urging engineering and science majors to get internships and jobs outside of their comfort zones  in marketing, finance, sales and even consulting.

 

They suggest students develop foreign language skills to land jobs as cross-cultural project managers  the person who coordinates software development between work teams in Silicon Valley and the emerging tech hub of Bangalore, India, for example.

 

Stanford listed 268 job postings in its computer science jobs database in the spring quarter  roughly double the number from last year.

 

But that doesn't necessarily indicate a plethora of traditional tech jobs. About half of the new postings would prefer applicants who speak at least two languages and many were for management-track positions, said Beverley Principal, assistant director of employment services at Stanford.

 

"When they're first hired at the entry level, just out of school, people can't always become a manager or team leader," Principal said. "But many employers see these people moving into management roles within two years. They need to know how to step into these roles quickly."

 

[BorisP]

I hope you guys don't mind the size of things. I didn't have the link to that story above. I saved it because I keep news articles saying where the future is going.

 

Below is a persons insightful reply to the above article. The first part may not make sense. In the beginning of the article above it described how a rich chinese guy took a 4 year degree, then dumped it to get a job at Dad's company because the degree was worthless.

 

For me, I expect people to run around wringing their hands when they see stuff like this. The entire country turning to McJobs. The USA is going to be like a Latin American or African or Asian nation in another 5 or 10 years. A thin veneer of the rich elite with the entire rest of the nation scraping by.

 

The middle class that was established back in the 50's and 60's will never be repeated I don't think. There is nothing to build or invent anymore. Just polishing what has already been invented.

-------------------------------------

 

The thing never discussed in articles like this is,

on the one hand...

 

you've got the "savvy" ivy league Stanford, Cornell, MIT grads (and just how did a 20-year-old Shanghai native pay for Stanford in the first place, with a paper route? mowing lawns in the summer? hardly) who just casually change careers after graduation from Computer Science to "Management Consultant" and get hired at Dad's law firm for 6 figures right out of school,

 

while on the other hand...

 

you've got the "engineers" in Bangalore and Ho Chi Minh City doing the tech equivalent of migrant farm labor for a few bucks/hr.,

 

But where's the guy in between???

Where's the Middle Class Worker in all these Utopian Outsourcing scenarios?

 

Where's the story about the guy who graduated from State last year with a BSEE who can't find a job anywhere as an Engineer and can't afford to spend ANOTHER 4 years "retraining" for some other middle class job that will ALSO be non-existant by the time he graduates?

 

That's what kills me when economists say oh we'll retrain them - AS FCKING WHAT??? - the jobs you want to retrain them for like, oh i don't know, maybe BIOTECH ENGINEERS are ALSO GOING OFFSHORE! Or the other typical solution offered is that everyone will become an Entrepreneur and Start Their Own Business. Selling What?! To Who?! Selling homemade Arts and Crafts to each other at Flea Markets and EBay???

 

A McJob used to be the viable temporary alternative until you could move up into something you were trained for, but when the skilled middle class jobs go away, and the unskilled jobs are filled by BOTH the unskilled blue collar AND the skilled middle class - what is there to move up to? I mean there's only so many insurance salesmen and taxi driver and swimming pool ditch digger and motel receptionist jobs to go around.

 

What do you do when you can't move up, and you can't move down, and there is no "sideways" to move to at all?

[BorisP]

 

I don't have any illusions about space travel becoming common while I'm still young enough to leave earth's gravity well. .

 

Dang you Elderbear! Why you go and make me cry? I still haven't let the full impact of that hit me. I can see myself at school, sitting in the cafeteria watching a moon shot right this minute.

 

And these bozo's have never been back after almost 40 years.

 

It is shameful. If there was an alien race out there, they are shaking their heads at the losers and quitters who would go to the moon, then choose to return to their petty life back on Earth over the wide open challenging frontier of space.

[brainisfried]

Link to Warrant Officer BorisP's newswire article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/tech_job_decline;_ylt=AjeBrlrUip49NbvyuUBabvus0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2bm5xNHVjBHNlYwNtcA--

 

What's really sickening is that the PHB types think that programming is "routine", "grunt work", etc. It's not. I hear complaints from engineers still in the business about the crap they get back from India that they then have to straighten out. You can't run successful projects that way. It didn't work with domestic outsourcing and it sure as hell isn't happening with overseas outsourcing. But they'll do it anyhow because their spreadsheet says it's "cheaper" and the elite B-schools told them it works, even though the professors haven't held a private sector job in their entire lives. And don't get me started about the whores at Gartner.

 

"Offshoring" can be made to work. It's just setting up another office of the company. Microsoft is doing it. But using the body shops? Forget it.

[elderbear]

I don't have any illusions about space travel becoming common while I'm still young enough to leave earth's gravity well. .

 

Dang you Elderbear! Why you go and make me cry? I still haven't let the full impact of that hit me. I can see myself at

 

school, sitting in the cafeteria watching a moon shot right this minute.

 

And these bozo's have never been back after almost 40 years.

 

It is shameful. If there was an alien race out there, they are shaking their heads at the losers and quitters who would go to the moon, then choose to return to their petty life back on Earth over the wide open challenging frontier of space.

 

I mourn with every funeral I attend. I used to work with Frank Djuth, Mike Sulzer, and Jules Fejer at the Arecibo Observatory. AO doesn't has a rack room, full of floor to ceiling 19" racks, containing sythesizers, mixers, amplifiers, filter banks, etc. You basically build your radar receiver by wiring the right chunks together. I can still see Jules (an aged 5' 4") standing on his tiptoes between Mike and Frank (both about 6'6") trying to see the oscilloscope trace they were looking at.

 

Jules is dead now. Mike and Frank will both reach retirement age in about 15 years. And there's not really anybody to replace them. A couple years ago, cancer took a number of 2nt tier space physicists. The year before that, an active research swallowed the barrel in a mall parking lot.

 

It's hard to watch.