Newsletters- Fall 2004

It’s obvious: the high tech job market is opening up once again.

I am not making this claim based on government statistics or media surveys, but on firsthand observation. Stout Systems is experiencing a threefold increase in inquiries to fill permanent position openings and contract job orders. Many other southeast Michigan staffing suppliers are now coming to us to help fill their requisitions as well. That’s a good sign for anyone who has been looking for long-term work throughout the past few years.

Yes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that over 300,000 payroll jobs were added in October 2003. But job creation is only one part of the story.

Two years ago, we had stacks of resumes from highly qualified candidates - some of whom we would have killed for in 1999 - who could not find work. Many of those people are in stable positions now, and they are reluctant to risk their jobs in order to go back into the job-hopping mode of earlier years. This more conservative approach to employment is a factor in the reduced supply of candidates.

So we are getting back to the point where employers can no longer afford to sit on qualified resumes for long periods. The days of leisurely hiring cycle are coming to a close again. And most companies know it.

HR personnel are getting resumes reviewed more quickly, interviews are being arranged within days of resume submission rather than weeks. And when a company feels they have made a good match, the turnaround time on an offer letter is usually less than a week. One of our clients, well aware of the increasing competition for the best personnel, made an offer to a senior candidate via the candidate’s cell phone as he drove away from the interview. Not every hire has to be that extreme, but high tech companies must put resources in place to streamline their hiring or risk losing out on the best candidates.

Now that doesn't mean that it has become a job seeker's market yet. In contrast to the scene of five years ago, cost containment is still very much a factor. Salaries and billing rates tend to be more competitive. One interesting development is that we are seeing more requests for junior candidates in order to keep pay rates down. This appears to match trends noted in the InfoWorld 2004 Compensation Survey, in which they report small salary increases for the more senior personnel but salary reductions at the more junior levels.

Similarly, in an attempt to guarantee value, employers are demanding certifications at a higher rate than usual. We recently had an experience in which we submitted a database administrator candidate’s resume. He was bright and very skilled, but he didn’t have a certification and was rejected outright for that reason by our client. He joked that he should go and get a certificate and I told him, yes, absolutely, do it now. He did and two weeks later we resubmitted his resume to the same client. This time, he got an interview immediately.

If you are a developer or database administrator, it is fairly straightforward to get certification and I highly recommend it. If you are an employer, however, I encourage you to not accept certification as an automatic sign of competence, since some certification tests use multiple choice and some consider fairly low percentages (as low as 60%) as passing grades.

The anxiety over high-tech jobs going overseas seems to have subsided, especially after a few years of offshore realities have set in. More and more we hear that hopes of a low cost offshore project were dashed once the project got underway, and that these projects are beset by communication difficulties and cultural clashes. One California company reported in Business Week earlier this year that 40% of its “onshore” work load was fixing botched projects that had been originally sent offshore. This isn’t to say that American high tech jobs still aren’t under threat from overseas competition, just that the threat doesn’t have the teeth it once seemed to have.

For those of you who periodically review our job openings you will be pleased to see many more positions listed than usual. And for those of you that are looking for employees, we provide a service that you might not know about. We post many of our employment candidates on our Web site. You can review their skill summaries and salary ranges on-line and then request a detailed resume. Visit our Web site www.stoutsystems.com for both.

John W. Stout is the founder and president of Stout Systems. He has twenty-five years experience in the software development industry consulting for many companies on a wide variety of projects. He is also sought after as a technology speaker, presenting sessions at developer conferences and user groups. E-mail .

GPS: A Technology You Can't Avoid
by Duane Collicott

I became interested in GPS (Global Positioning System) technology, after hearing about Geocaching - a high-tech form of treasure hunting. I bought a GPS receiver that attached to my Palm PDA and got involved in this activity with my sons. It was then that I realized it was a perfect melding of my interests in gadgets, software development and the outdoors.

GPS is a system that allows us to determine our position and movement on or above the earth with fairly good accuracy. GPS receivers accomplish this feat by comparing and analyzing information obtained from multiple satellite-based transmitters. Applying a bit of mathematics, the location or “fix” of the receiver can be calculated to within a few meters, in optimal circumstances. Local, ground-based transmitters—now ubiquitous at harbor entrances and airports - combine with GPS to form DGPS (Differential GPS), further increasing accuracy.

The idea of satellite-based navigation was spawned in the late 1960s to meet military needs. The current constellation of twenty-four Navstar satellites emerged in the late 1970s. Initially, the system provided a high degree of accuracy for the military only, leaving civilians with only a rough estimate of their positions. This restriction, known as Selective Availability, was lifted in May of 2000, allowing civilian users to benefit from increased accuracy. Now, GPS receivers are found in every consumer electronics store. PDA add-on units range from $80 to $200. Stand-alone handheld units range from $200 - $2000. Commercial units range upwards from there.

The applications of GPS technology are diverse, ranging from the predictable (navigation) to more surprising (displaying the progress of boats on TV during America’s Cup races). Navigation has received a great boost from this technology, of course, which provides more accuracy, reliability and weather tolerance than older technologies. Tracking fleet vehicles is a common commercial use for GPS. Couriers are using real-time fleet-tracking to determine which truck is in the most advantageous location to respond to a pickup request. Automobile rental companies are using GPS receivers and data storage devices to monitor usage of their cars, tacking on additional fees for customers who are fond of excessive speed. Personal and entertainment-related uses of GPS technology include outdoor sports (backpacking, mountain biking), a high-tech message-in-a-bottle (containing a GPS receiver and a cell phone transmitter which phones home and reports its location) and outdoor games.

This brings us back to Geocaching. This is a new outdoor activity in which a person hides a cache within a weatherproof container and posts its location on the official Web site www.Geocaching.com. Other people then go out to find caches, log their visits, perhaps exchange trinkets, and hide the cache again for the next participant. Travel Bugs - objects to which a tag with a unique identifier is affixed - travel from cache to cache by hitching a ride with participants on their travels. Some of these Travel Bugs eventually circle the globe, while others have more modest aspirations, like, “Please keep me within Michigan."

Software development against GPS devices is not complex, since the hardware and firmware do nearly all the tough work for us. Hardware interfaces are typically RS-232 serial ports, even when non-serial hardware is used. For example, an SD card receiver in a Pocket PC presents a virtual COM port. Communications protocols are simple as well. The standard protocol, NMEA 0183 (National Marine Electronics Association), implements variable-length, comma-delimited “sentences” of ASCII characters (see example below). Each sentence begins with a dollar sign and ends with a CR-LF pair. Since these three characters cannot appear anywhere else in a sentence, there is no escaping involved. Each type of sentence provides a different set of information, such as a fix, current movement (derived), satellite information, number of satellites tracked, quality of the fix (2-D, 3-D, DGPS), current date and time, and, in some advanced units, the azimuth and distance to a target fix. This protocol also allows for manufacturer-specific sentences, which most often support the unique or advanced features of each device. Binary protocols also exist, which present binary-encoded data (e.g., 32-bit integers, 64-bit floats, etc.) in fixed-length record. These protocols allow for faster parsing, since values are in a predictable location within the packet and conversion from ASCII strings to numeric values is not necessary.

GPS is quickly becoming one of those technologies you can’t avoid: the next time you ride a city bus, fly in a plane, use the electronic map in your new car, ask OnStar to unlock your doors (again), call 911 from your wireless phone, power up your new fish-finder, or have cement delivered for that new driveway, you may be using GPS.

Duane Collicott is a seventeen-year veteran of software development and information technology. As Managing Consultant of Software and Systems Solutions, he provides software, Web and database development and technology infrastructure services in southeastern Michigan. He has invented a new GPS outdoor game and has developed two GPS-enabled software applications. More information is available at www.SoftwareAndSystems.com.

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