Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount... ; -))

At 04:47 20/06/2004, William Donzelli wrote: Sadly this is true in computing as well. I don't have a degree, the only college I went to was a technical college, one day a week sponsored by the company I was working for as an apprentice (Ferranti, may they rest in peace). But I've got over 20 years experience across the board in electronics, computers, hardware and software. I have a reasonable understanding of how most things work, can still remember the resistor colour code, (mostly, I always forget the tolerance bands) could design and build a simple digital circuit, then program up any software that is needed to run it. I can probably set up everything an ISP needs to run, and muddle my way through writing custom applications in php, sql and even awk, not to mention all the microsoft languages! But I'm not an expert in any of this, have no qualifications, and much prefer to have some reference to hand to help me along rather than guessing all the time. I dare say there are things I can do I'm not even good at! I guess this makes me that 'jack of all trades'. And can I find a new job that actually pays more than we receive on state benefits? Nope ... everybody, certainly the bigger companies that pay the better money, wants experts in one tiny field. The last place I worked was indeed a small company, where some of my skills were handy, but they were basically selling and supporting hardware on the back of their accounts software. So the Windows NT server is getting full and slow? Sell the customer a bigger server running Windows 2000. My boss didn't have a clue, had no people skills, and would not use the skills or knowledge of his staff. In the end, I'm glad we parted company.... Rob