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Sender: "Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
From: Stanley Allen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 21:48:42 -0600
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Reply-To: Stanley Allen <[log in to unmask]>
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Terry Westley wrote:
>
> This is good news.  What other measures do we have of improving
> or flagging interest in Ada?

I'm afraid I have no numbers to contribute, but I think
Ada jobs offered per quarter would interesting.  SIGAda
and AdaIC have their jobs pages, and I often see Ada
jobs offered in EE Times or posted on c.l.a.

Is there even a way to gauge how many current Ada
developers there are out there and their salary
ranges?  I know many Ada developers who abandon the
language because they don't believe they can make
a career of it.  It takes considerable persuasion
on my part to get them to even consider that this
might not be the case.  And these are generally
people who enjoy the language itself.  (Naturally,
I make a point of telling them about the people
who have left my office for 6-figure consulting
jobs doing commercial Ada development.)

The reported experience of those who have manned
the Ada booths at ObjectWorld or STC is that there
are many developers out there who "used to program
in Ada, liked it, but aren't using it now".  The
Ada job market is good enough to offer them a
reason to come back.

Associated anecdote: I have a good friend who
programmed Ada at my current company and who is a
Mac fanatic.  I own a PC, and he very often would
razz me about it whenever I mentioned problems
with my Wintel box, mercilessly (but good-
naturedly) ridiculing me for putting up with all
of that while a clearly superior product was
available.  When he left my company, he began
taunting me about the future of Ada -- he
considered it a lost cause -- and began working
for a company doing C++ development.  Later he
starting looking for other work and was offered an
Ada job in the northeast.  As he was considering
whether to take the job or not, he was in the
middle of a big integration effort for the C++
system he was building.  So I asked him: "how much
time do you spend in the debugger?"  His answer:
"about 80%!"  So I reminded him of his earlier jibes
about PC vs Mac and mercilessly took him to task for
not using Ada.

It felt gooood.

--
Stanley Allen
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