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Sender: "Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 17:17:12 -0500
Reply-To: Michael Feldman <[log in to unmask]>
From: Michael Feldman <[log in to unmask]>
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In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]> from "Pascal Obry" at Mar 16, 2000 09:23:52 AM
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[said Andreas, then Pascal]

> > It's a nice argument to show that there are Ada jobs in the USA! An
> > issue which did not came up in this discussion yet is that most of this
> > jobs are in US military projects which keeps non US citizens out of the
> > game. Or has this mailgroup become a US_only_party?
>
> Well, in France it is not very common to have job adds sent via e-mail
> I would say. Don't know for others country...
>
> Pascal.
>
It is true that most of the _posted_ jobs are in US military contracts.
The biggest problem we face in promoting Ada is that the job postings,
and other project facts, for the military stuff, is MUCH more open
than the purely commercial sector.

It's in the nature of competitive commerce that companies do NOT like
to talk or write about how they do things. It's not part of the culture,
in the US, in Europe, or elsewhere, plus there are genuine issues of
secrecy and competitiveness here.

For example, in the 2 months or so since I started soliciting info
about _defense_ projects for the project list on the web, I received
over _60_ responses, most of which contained pointers to websites.
I have gotten only a few for non-defense projects, and most of those
are in the defense-like space domain inhabited by NASA and ESA.

(http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html)

I hear persistent rumors, from people who claim to _know_, of
LOTS of Ada in the banking/finance industry. Yet the list of
such things on the project list is frustratingly short; nobody
will tell me a word, even in strict confidence, that I can use on
the web. I'm sure there are other similar domains out there,
but anyone connected with them is sworn to secrecy.

    * * * * *

Languages like C++ and Java, with deep-pockets companies pushing
them, don;t have to provide _facts_ about how their stuff is being used.
They have the money to continue to imply that EVERYONE is using
their stuff, and the world will believe them.

One of our problems is that such hype won't work for us; we are too
small and we are not Microsoft or Sun. So we have to provide _facts_
like job listings, project lists, etc. Yet these facts are _very_
hard to obtain. Jobs are solicited quietly, by recruiters who can
operate by word-of-mouth, and commercial project data is mostly
unreported, closed up behind those firewalls.

So let's not argue over whether Team-Ada is an appropriate place to
discuss available jobs. Of COURSE it is. Let's take whatever info we
can get, Teamers!

Mike Feldman

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