Online Programming

[jdraw]

I've been reading and rereading Pat's posts and advice for a long time --I think Access Therapist is overdue.

NG, your comments about gaining a certificate that's focused and trims the fat is really a difficult one to answer. Let me give a couple of examples. If you want to be a graphics designer, you can find and complete some courses. Certainly it can focus your expectations and if you work with specific products and projects, you will gain experience. And that experience will help you decide on this is what I want, or this isn't quite it, yet. So you use the experience and adjust the path accordingly. If you take courses more along the theory/concepts/generalization, you do not get constrained by a specific product too quickly. But at some point you get hired to do something, and a lot of the theory/planning type jobs are occupied, so you often have to get practical and usually that means some sort of project with a completion date. Once you're in "the system", you watch for trends or problems or opportunities and apply/seek to participate according to the situation.
I worked in a government department as programmer analyst, standards, tech support(the old days- mark4, 360 assembler, pdp11 macro11, rsts, rsx11D). There was a shake up and there was an IT/EDP authority guru created and he asked me to work with him. Learned a lot about internal politics, budgets and priorities. Later there was a merger of departments which we used as an opportunity to implement database at a corporate level. This was bringing finance, HR, materiel and about 30 grants and contribution applications together from several departments. This led to the creation of a database group and followed with data dictionary and data modelling.
Later, an IRM Policy group was organized and was heavily into Strategies( following a book ???IRM by Strategy or something??) so the politics and standards evolved even more and application types --corporate , division, branch and personal-- were recognized.

When hiring, we often selected people from adult IT retraining program at community college. These people had various backgrounds - shoe salesman, pharmacy clerk, day care worker, cable TV installer.... they all had life experience; they all went for retraining and they all completed their courses. All this to say there are many diverse paths even when working in a "specific IT field". Some points of interest-- we had urban planners, lay ministers in dba. And as I have said in other posts, most of the people in the data management area were left handed.

Go figure.

 

[Pat Hartman]

While I am very pro education, when I was in the business of managing a department, I didn't look for degrees or certification. I have taken a lot of training over the years and the best was always taught by people working in the field rather than professional teachers. Even now, if I decide to take a technical course, I look for one taught by a non-teacher. Teachers teach. They don't do. Their presentation and organization is generally better because that is their profession. However, their technical skills are inferior because they don't use the skills. They teach them. It is a whole different mindset.

I too preferred older candidates with solid work experience and technical training that they went out and got for themselves. I left corporate America a long time ago, mostly because the inmates are running the asylum. Large corporations are obsessed with how much something will cost and how long it will take. They don't actually care if it works. I once had a consulting assignment with a large multi-national and we had our installation party right on time. Of course, it was at least three months later before stuff actually starting working together. It never ceased to amaze me how much time and money got wasted on projects I worked on when I was not leading the team.

Now I work mostly for smaller companies and although money is still critical, it is much more important that the application actually work.

So, the bottom line is managers who are technical are far less likely to care about the letters after your name than what you actually know how to do.

 

[Lightwave]

Hi Learn - your question is a pet project of mine

You are asking where do I get something like MS Access except to create web databases?

You are finding it difficult because.... it pretty much doesn't exist. (there are programs that are best described as 'getting there' but event management is vastly simpler and more limited.

Apologies for sending you to my own blog but pressed for time for cutting and pasting the same thing into here. This is a summary of my current position. I am at the moment creating simple mysql and sqlserver databases. But beyond the glitzy bootstrap framework event handling is basic compared with MS Access. I can however publish quickly to the web very big databases that absolutely anyone can use (subject to password and username)

http://rounduptheusualsuspects.org/?p=1360