本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Just record some true stories.

1) After I moved to Virginia, I made a friend who moved from Canada to USA. He originally came from China and got a Canadian citizen 5 years ago. After he came to USA, he worked for a telecom company in Mariland. We knew each other 2 years ago. In my opinion, he is a confident person and enjoys his life: doing his dog-duty, drinking a bottle of beer each day. I don't know his exact age, but I guess he is now over 40, because his oldest son will graduate from high school next year. He has a second son. His wife is not elligible to work in the United States because they don't have a green card (though they are Canadian citizens). In one word, my friend is the only bread-winner in his family. He needs to support 4 people. He bought a single house 1 year ago, so he has a mortgage. According to the rumour among other friends, his salary was not very high, roughly about $65K/yr, which is not a big number for a family of four in the metropolitan Washington area.

Three months ago, I met his wife at Chinese school. She told me that her husband lost his job one day ago, and asked me to talk his husband on the phone to provide some advice. Surprisingly, I found my friend was absolutely un-prepared for lay-off. Before he was laid off, there had already 2 rounds of lay-offs in his company. He survived the first two. He though he was the system administrator and he would not have any problems. During the past years, he indeed adminstered some servers for his employeer, but I think he had been doing some routine works. His working enviornment is a cluster of Sun Solaris servers with a bunch of Oracle database servers. In such a good environment, he did not manage to understand these systems thoroughly at all. When he was laid off, he did not know how tight the job market was and still dreamt of getting a job in the telecomm industry. So far, three months has elapsed but my friend are still on the bench. Because his family has no green cards, they completely live on their savings. His wife teaches paiting in Chinese school, so many parents have tried to help them. So far, there have been no good news. We know that telecom industry has been heavily beaten in the dot-com crash, but I have been wondering how my friend could be unprepared, both mentally and technically.

2) I have a co-worker who is my Alumni. By training, he is a biologist and not a programmer. He channged his career in the dot-com wave. He has been laid off several times but each time he got hired shortly. Last year, he was laid off twice. The second time, I recommended him to my employer and he got employeed. So far, we have been working together for more than 6 months. Since we are close friends, we often discuss when we are going to be kicked off from our present employer ( Of course, not in English!) . After several year's hard work, he bas become a seasoned J2EE programmer. Whenever we are alone, however, he is talking me about Microsoft .Net and data modeling. He has a heterogeneous network of 6 computers at home. He is not only talking Microsoft .Net, but using it home. Although there is little possibilty for our company to lay off programmers this year, my friend has already begun to leave!
His tenet is to embrace various new technologies, whatever they are. As programmers, if you are not prepared to be laid off, you will be in trouble sooner or later. I have ever posted some notes about job interviews, but most resposes are very negative. Some people claim they can pick up whatever technology it is if they are given opportunities. Some other people think that Jabber is extremely unfriendly to his peer programmers. Actually, these people do not realize the fact: The employer don't want to give you an opportunity to learn new technology as they hire you. Jabber's interview questions may not be fair to some people, but no rules in this job market is fair. One of my friends told me he had ever been questioned consecutively by 8 people in a job interview in a Washington DC company. He said he felt offended but he had to stand wp with it. Why? He needed a job. Sooner or later, I will leave my present employeer or be kicked off by it. I am prepared to be manipulated by those employeers更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net