Documentum blogger Pie wrote a post entitled Documentum and ECM:A Career or a Job?,  which I found rather interesting. If he had written his entry in the 1970's, (when few, if any, of us were part of the workforce) I might have been in full agreement; but the world has changed quite a bit since then. The days when a single employer has a life-long or, even long-term, career to offer an individual are gone, gone, gone....

Why? Because the nature of business has changed. Employee payrolls are the major expense in a service economy and guess what happens when revenues fall? Jobs get cut in order to preserve a healthy bottom line. CEO's have to report to their shareholders.

For those of you who may not know, I write about jobs for some national publications. My most recent article is about where the job growth will be for 2008, and the foreseeable future. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources, the market for IT professionals, on the whole, will continue to grow BUT the demand for what career experts call "routine coders" or "code monkeys" is actually expected to shrink. 

While this may sound like bad news for some of you, it's excellent news for the rest. Why? Because the "code configurators", as one of my readers calls them, who may have been driving your salaries and hourly rates down, will disappear, or at least become a less significant part of the Western economy.

What matters in the interim, I think, is that we re-establish what a "developer" actually is and does. As someone who has spent more than two decades interviewing and placing a large number of individuals who earn at least part of their living writing code, I want to start, or chime in on the conversation, if it has already begun. Bear with me, and contribute, if you wish; this will take more than a single post.

Yes, we usually write about ECM and Regulatory Affairs, Documentum, Interwoven, Alfresco, SharePoint, eCTDs and the like, but every once in a while, we have to write about job search "how-tos" , especially when HOW you go about it can put your credit and your security at stake. 

Why do I say that? Because in the past few months job-seeker data has been compromised on both Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. 

Oh God, I'm way beyond being a developer, an architect, a project manager...

In my next job I see myself as...RULING THE WORLD?

Sometimes I actually want to finish a technologist's sentence that way.

Why? Because sometimes IT professionals see their career paths too linearly. It's as if you start as a dishwasher, and move on to french fry man, to salad maker, to prep cook, to line chef, to chef...and it's as if your pay goes up accordingly.

Well, it doesn't always happen that way. Many of the developers and architects we place make more than their project managers. Many of the Project Managers we place have never written a line of code. And many of the best developers we place would never want to quit coding, and, quite frankly, they couldn't afford to... they roll in dough.

So while we're not proponents of anyone being a developer Vs, CIO, we'd like people to know that there's room to be well-compensated in whatever you do, provided that you excel at it. We've finally found an article (subjective as it is) that does justice to REAL developers.

Please note that the opinions below belong to the author, not to us; but that we do find it to be an entertaining, interesting, and worthwhile read!