Re: Can an amateur find an Ada job?

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2013 22:38:25 +0200, Victor Porton <porton@narod.ru>
declaimed the following:

>In past years I used Ada 95 as an amateur.
>
>Recently I've lost a PHP programming job.
>
>Now after this I've applied to about 20 jobs (mostly related to PHP) and yet 
>wait for answers to arrive. Maybe tomorrow I will start searching also for 
>Perl jobs. I search for a part time telecommuting job.
>
>But now I thought, it would be more interesting to do Ada programming than 
>PHP programming, and salary for an Ada programming I think would be greater.
>
>Does it make sense to re-read Ada Reference Manual to refresh my memory and 
>attempt to find an Ada job, taking into account that I have not even 
>finished university degree?

	Your last sentence may be the killer...

	My experience with Ada is that Ada knowledge is not the critical factor
(ie; they aren't looking for Ada "coders"); rather a good background in
software engineering (requirements analysis, broad exposure to the
industry) with a familiarity of multiple languages is of more weight.

	In my college programming languages course, I chose Ada as the language
to do a report upon... At the time, the SigPlan published preliminary
reference manual and rationale, and one slim text, were all that was
available (spring of 1980). In January of 1981, Lockheed sent five of us
(recent hires) to a formal class on the language. It took 22 years, a
layoff, rehire, and 2 more years before I ever got assigned to do Ada
related work (and that was on a system where an XML file was used to
generate the spec file, and a template body file to be filled in).

	I'm now with a company that uses Ada for some projects, though my
upcoming assignment appears to be C/C++. I've been with the company 8
months, and even with a 30-year history feel like a neophyte: 20 of my 30
years history was with "mainframe" (if a VAX/Alpha VMS systems are
"mainframe") number crunching applications, the last 5 years were
simulations for satellite interface using a simulated (external) clock; my
new job (after a second layoff) is real-time avionics; and I have no past
experience with that, I understand the concepts but it is a whole different
mind-set WRT coding (all dynamic allocations are done during
initialization, before entering the real processing main loop).

	In truth, the only assignment in the last 8 months that /I/ feel good
about used Python to generate traffic packets to feed to a "Cross Domain
Solution" box, collecting the sent/received packets via Wireshark, another
Python program to match up the outgoing to incoming packets, and a third
program to produce CSV files of the latency data for plotting within Excel.
The Ada related assignments fizzled out for time/funding.

-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/