From GIS User to Developer - Part 1

I've been doing this four years now and gotten a chance to experience the GIS field from multiple perspectives. I'd like to share these experiences in the hope that someone traveling along the same path can learn from my successes and, of course, the embarrassing mistakes I've made. But first, some backstory: Motivation: I have two basic motivations to get more technical in my job. First, I love tinkering. I build my own computers, jump in on the newest software betas (example: posting from Windows 7), and long before I knew it was worthwhile for employment purposes, I was messing with programming. I wrote a terrible, but fully functional C++ tic-tac-toe game at 15. This means basically nothing now of course, with 8-year-olds routinely getting major Microsoft certifications ("BOY OR GIRL!"), but it was pretty cool to be able to bend a computer to my will. The second motivation has to do with the future of GIS. Future of GIS: There are basically two schools of thought here. The technophile psuedo-utopia/distopia school - depending on your point of view - involves always on, complete geographical awareness via mobile devices or Matrix-style head jacks. Go out for a night on the town and you'll know where your friends are, you find breadcrumbs (static notes) that tell you the places that are crowded/cheaper/better/live nudes/whatever. Hold your phone camera up to the skyline and see information on all the buildings and places in the distance. Almost everything is web based, served by a number of gargantuan server farms run by Amazon (EC2), Microsoft (Azure), or Google (basically everything they do). While somewhat fanciful, a lot of this stuff is here already and running. Check out the 4D map setup D.C. put together so people that go to the inauguration might have a chance to commute out of Washington before the next election. The second school believes this change will happen more slowly, with a place for paper maps and existing uses of GIS in desktop and imbedded applications. Despite advances in mobile internet architecture, it would be foolish to marry all applications to the cloud because the possibility of service interruption for, say, rescue workers is a non-starter. Plus a ton of the data kept by organizations is sensitive in nature and the data giants mentioned above are not as good of stewards of some information. Cartographers and analysts using desktop applications won't go away, particularily for extremely hardware intensive uses. I still consider myself fairly new to the field, but it would appear to me the first group is probably closer to the mark. Of course there will be applications for GIS that will not easily translate into the web; customized statistical modeling, data model design, and anything with heavy raster manipulation comes to mind. But powerful tools for bringing GIS to the masses, to shamelessly add an abominable cliche to this tirade, have been found to be increasingly popular. The dominant player in GIS - ESRI - is quickly moving in the direction of the first school. To make this happen you need developers who are creative and interested in geography. You need analysts and data modelers to make the back end work, and cartographers/designers to make it usable and pretty. The common thread with these folks now is that, to get your stuff online, you'll have to know at least Javascript. Oh sure. You can get away with using a wizard or template system to make a web map, but to do anything really interesting you'll want to pick up a scripting language and probably more. Thus begins this story. I was a student having just finished up a GIS oriented Geography degree. If you are in a similar situation, or anywhere between that and an actual GIS dev, this might help you. Sorry this first bit is somewhat slow.

Government Jobs

Some folks, particularly in this economy, tend to look more for government positions because of the perceived job security. The problem is you have to contend with stuff like this, sent to me by a friend. She told me it took them six months to hear back from them, and she had forgotten she had applied to the job at all. Everything is stripped of personal/identifiable information to protect the stupid or annoyed. Red highlighting is mine.

*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----* Replies to this email will be sent to Joe Sixpack *----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----* December 15, 2008 Jane Doe 1243 Fake Street Springfield, IL 78841 Dear Candidate: Thank you for applying for the position of Systems Analyst with the Government Department. As part of the evaluation process, you are being invited to participate in a performance examination. The exam will be conducted using computer based testing programs. The exam may consist of data entry, clerical proofreading, basic office skills, and customer service representative skills. EXAM CHECK-IN Check-in will begin ten minutes prior to your scheduled exam time. Do not arrive any earlier, as there is no waiting area outside of the testing room. Your exam is scheduled for the following time and location: Date: 12/23/2008 Time: 01:30 PM Duration: 1 hour, 45 minutes Location: County Building, Room 120 123 10th Ave Makin, GA 62479 You must bring official picture identification, such as a driver’s license, to be admitted to the test (no exceptions). Instructions for Test Confirmation To confirm your appointment, please e-mail test@county.gov. no later than 4:30PM, DATE, 2008. In the subject line, write: Systems Analyst, Yes I will attend testing session *OR* Systems Analyst, No I will not attend testing session. Include your first and last name in the body of the e-mail. Due to the volume of responses, we are unable to reply to email confirmations. If you are unable to attend your scheduled appointment time and need an alternate test time, please leave a message at 555-1234. We will try and accommodate your request. However, due to limited testing facilities and time constraints we cannot guarantee an alternate time. Parking There is limited on-street parking (applicable fees charged) off 10th Ave between Parkplace and Broadway. There are several parking lots and garages nearby that provide parking for a fee. We look forward to seeing you. Directions to this location are provided at http://www.someurl.gov Sincerely, Joe Sixpack Human Resources Division PLEASE DISREGARD THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE: If you applied online, please verify you have received this message by visiting: https://www.wtf.com *----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*----*

Lets list the hilarious parts, in order:

The exam will be conducted using computer based testing programs

Whoa, tests on computers now! Fancy. I bet it uses the same fantastic generic form program this letter was (still)born from.

The exam may consist of data entry, clerical proofreading, basic office skills, and customer service representative skills.

Great, a basic office skills and data entry test. Not at all a waste of time for a Systems Analyst.

Do not arrive any earlier, as there is no waiting area outside of the testing room

"People arriving early will be forced to run on a treadmill until the time has elapsed." I don't get it. Do people cheat through walls now? Has the office banned chairs because of the tightening economy?

12/23/2008

I assume the six month wait was so they could have the test on the second to worst day of the year.

no later than 4:30PM, DATE, 2008

"I am too lazy and/or incompetent to actually fill in all the fields in this form letter."

PLEASE DISREGARD THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE

On second thought maybe this isn't sheer stupidity - perhaps it is the test itself! Anyone stupid enough to click on a link in an email from a vaguely trusted source (that even goes to the trouble of telling you not to click it) would be a useless Systems Administrator. Actually anyone given a computer that does this is a network outage waiting to happen. The people qualified for the job, assuming they didn't get one already (my friend did) should answer it like this: "Subject: Systems Analyst, No I will not attend testing session. Is this a joke? Is a form letter really that hard to fill out? Why do I want to work with such an HR department? You wait six months to assign me to a test for which anyone applying for this position will be embarrassingly overqualified for the day before Christmas Eve. If this isn't a joke, get bent."

Some choice quotes from an economic catastrophe

I haven't posted for a while, but now that I think I've finally gotten a somewhat decent grasp on it, I'd like to talk about the economy. Forget about the whole "bad loans to people who couldn't afford it" shtick. The reality is that people from lower income brackets can get subprime loans and the economy need not collapse. Slate has a very good article up on subprime mortgages that are doing just fine because the companies in question actually bother gauging risk correctly instead of shopping around at ratings agencies.

Like a bunch of present-day George Baileys, ethical subprime lenders evaluate applications carefully, don't pay brokers big fees to rope customers into high-interest loans, and mostly hold onto the loans they make rather than reselling them. They focus less on quantity than on quality.

Those ratings agencies aren't the biggest issue, but some of the stuff that is now known about their risk assessments defies belief (from this excellent article by Michael Lewis):

He [Eisman] called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

And when S&P wouldn't give them a good (AAA) rating on something, just ask another rating agency! (Bill Ackman on Charlie Rose):

ROSE: One person after another has come to this table and just cast huge criticism at the ratings agencies. ACKMAN: Yes. ROSE: It’s all deserved? ACKMAN: It’s deserved. ROSE: How did it come to that? ACKMAN: [...] There was a lot of rating shopping. An investment bank would walk into Moody’s and say, look, here is a risk. We’re looking for a Triple-A rating. It would be analyzed by Moody’s and they’d say, OK, it’s Triple-A. The investment bank would say, what, if I throw this in, is it still Triple-A? They would say, looks Triple-A to us. What if I threw in a few more bad mortgages, is it still Triple A? At some point Moody’s would say, it’s no longer Triple-A. They’d say OK. Then they’d walk across the street to S&P. They’d take a look at it, and if they said yes, they’d get paid a 600,000 dollar fee. Yes, it’s Triple-A. If they said no, they wouldn’t make any money.

These bad loans were the basis for bad insurance policies. They called them credit default swaps because if you actually called them insurance you would need money to back them up (thanks Phil Graham and the congress who voted for that little exception in 1999). Of course, if you can get insurance on something, you tend to perceive the risk to be less, so you take out more loans. There is a reason why insurance companies need to have the money to back up their policies - natural disasters would otherwise constantly be giving the economy a full bodyslam. These default swaps made what probably would have been isolated losses of billion into trillions that are now poised to hammer every part of the economy, and be potentially the start of a second great worldwide depression. A good portion of my family or friends aren't being hit by this yet. We work in tech jobs and often for government(ish) agencies. It doesn't feel like we are actually in a recession, but I think we are just starting the lovely cycle they call a liquidity trap. The song goes something like this:

Reduced demand -> cut production, jobs -> fired people don't buy things -> reduced demand -> next verse, same as the first

Many believe that this is happening right now. That is why we've been hurling money at financial institutions and they've basically stuffed it in a mattress rather than loaning it. They are terrified of the next Lehman Brothers-like company crashing and taking them along, so they horde money for that rainy day. Give that money to just about anyone right now - automakers, consumers, dogs - they aren't going to spend it. And not because of rampant dog-as-customer discrimination. Ask yourself this: how willing are you right now to buy a new car? Maybe a little less than a year ago? The fix is finding some sector of the economy that will always spend more, then give them the means to do so. In the last sentence, if you started mouthing "the Congress of the United States," other people have the same idea. Even people who previously thought this was bad idea - Secretary of the Treasury Paulson is a good example - are now doing it one way or another (buying control of banks rather than just making loanshark-style loans to them). Some economists are skeptical of the existence of liquidity traps. One thing that is generally agreed on: it isn't always obvious to an a given person they are in such a trap, because different industries/job sectors go from step 1 to step 2 at different times. If it hasn't affected you yet, and it continues, you might just need to wait a little while.

Twitter

I've broken down and starting using Twitter, largely to eliminate the habit of finding a link on the internet and using work email to send it to my private email. Also so I can follow people smart people who rarely actually make blog updates. My account name is Bwreilly. At one point I will probably collect the links I wander into and repeat them up here as it is an embarrassingly easy way to make a post and also because the links themselves are often of interest and it would be a shame to deny them to people who disdain Twitter.