What the hell do I do with this information?

[SteveDallas]

Those of you who've been paying attention know that I work in the IT racket.

Those of you who've been paying especially close attention know that I'm looking for different employment. I'm having trouble finding a good job though. Maybe 30% of what I see falls into two categories: "running the help desk" kind of jobs--I've been there and done that and they always pay less than I get now--or jobs that want obscenely more experience than I have--say, CTO at a Fortune 500 outfit. Oh, what about the other 70%? I don't even bother reading them, because they're programming jobs.

You see, I am not a programmer. I've never studied it. I'm not good at it. I don't know good technique. (What I do have experience of is running a network with a gaggle of database, web, email, etc. servers, and figuring out what solutions will actually meet the business requirements.)

Well, OK, I'm not a "programmer"... but I know snippets of code here and there. I can do little stand-alone junk projects, like do the backend of a simple web form to let somebody change their password on a directory server, or create a bunch of accounts given an input file with people's names, or search a file of fortune cookies. (I did that one for the Cellar back in the day.) These things are useful to be sure, but they don't make me a software developer, just as the fact that I can plug a DVD player into a TV doesn't make me a video producer.

But then I read this. (It was on digg, so it might be overloaded.)

Is it really this bad? If it is, maybe I should brush up my chops and consider some development jobs. (Of course I have a complete lack of experience...)