Much better... Thank you.:)

No kidding... I thought my post was about changing jobs.

As a Senior level Software Engineer I can learn new languages and technologies pretty darn quickly. I feel like I am stagnating in my current skill set's as I watch the industry take off with new software engineering technologies. Working a full time job makes it difficult to find the time to teach myself and trying to get my current employer to "move up" is a waste of oxygen. So how do you convince a prospective employer to hire you at a senior salary knowing there will be an amount of spin-up time where you are just learning, but that the return will well be worth it?

You are very welcome. It is good info and I knew it would be helpfull so I spent the better part of an hour organizing my thoughts so the info would make sense. I'm glad it helped you.:-D

-You don't spell it like everyone else (CPian, CPien ????) -You don't know what the heck it means (that would be me! :laugh:)

I have to agree. I am pretty burnt out by the end of the week. My client understands that and won't let me bill for more than 40 hours a week. Of course I am still welcome to work more than 40 but I eat the difference. Occasionally, I do that and they appreciate the extra effort (of course). So what is the payoff? Happy client keeps renewing my contract! 4 years now on the same project as a 1099. Very rare in this industry.

42%! That sucks. They have the ratio backwards. And if you are temp to perm, don't forget they are also getting that huge finders fee. If you are not temp to perm, I don't see how they can expect you to work at 42% of what you are capable of on your own. Also, the guy/gal handling you is probably getting a comission. So the less he/she gets for you, the more they get for themselves... :mad:

Actually, your original question was clear enough. Consulting is always W2. 1099 is independent Contractor. The short answer (and I am sure this changes from region to region): Turns out I was getting about 64% of what my consulting firm was charging. The long answer: W2: You work for someone who cuts you a check, withholds taxes, probably pays for health benefits, gives you paid vacation and paid holidays, etc. Consulting companies hire you out to 'their' customers. 1099: You submit an invoice to your client billing them for your time. They pay you the amount on the invoice. Done. You pay your own taxes (4 times a year), you pay for your own health care, if you take a day off you don't get paid for that day (including holidays!). Consulting companies charge their clients $x and you get $x-something. Contractors charge their clients $x and they get $x. The amount a consulting company charges their client is a closely guarded secret. Neither party wants YOU to know who is paying what. A lot of consulting companies are "head hunters", where they place you in their clients company on a temp-to-perm basis. If, after a break in period (typically 3-6 months), their client likes you, they will make you a permanent offer which should be a lot more than what your consulting firm is paying you but nowhere near what they are charging their client (your future employer, if you accept their offer). Head hunters charge a finders fee to your new employer, usually 6 months of your salary (I'm in the wrong business!). The other type of consulting company farms you out to their client for a short project (typically 3 - 9 months) and when that project is done, they find you some more work. If it takes them a while to find you some work, this is called "bench time" but you still get paid (after all, you are their full time employee). But bench time isn't free money, they can call you in and ask you to paint the office if they want to. If it takes them to long to find you another job and they get to that point of diminishing return, ADIOS! I am a 1099 Independent Contractor (Senior Software Engineer) and I got lucky. Real lucky. I "discovered" what my consulting firm was charging their client. When that client made me a full time offer (WAYYYYY less than what they were paying the consulting firm) I declined and negotiated a 1099 Contractor position at a wee bit less than what my consulting firm was charging them. They accepted. Why? It is a lot cheaper for them to pay me, say, $175,000.00 cash than it is to

I assume you want a list of lat/lng that "outlines" a country. The data you need is supplied by NAVTEK and TANA (look at the lower right corner of any google map) and they charge thousands of dollars for it. So I can't help you there. But I can help you a little with the technical side (I write mapping software for a large package delivery company with "Big Brown" trucks). The good news is that this geographical data is stored by both companies in a standard format called a "Shapefile". You can get the technical details of the shapefile format from the "ESRI Shapefile Technical Description", an ESRI white paper (just google it). A shapefile consist of geometry that represents geographical data, i.e., a polyline or polygon would be used for the outline of a country, county, state, body of water, etc. The points for each geometric primitive in the shape file are expressed in lat/lng coordinates. Finally, a shape file contains a single layer of geometry and cooresponding attributes, i.e., the street layer contains street names and other street attributes. Sounds like you need the country layer...

Do you use some fancy tool to build your gui and write all of the database interface code and the communications layer between your clients and servers??? Have you ever written your own memory allocator??? or forgone standard library calls for file access and wrote the code to read the disk sectors yourself??? Have you ever done any serious work using COBOL, RPGII, PASCAL, C ??? If you answered Yes, No, No, No, do you seriously consider yourself to be a programmer!!!???? Perhaps the dev tools of today have replaced the need for behind the scenes, hardcore programming. But is it really programming???

We switched from VSS to Perforce and never regretted it. The Perforce integration feature can migrate your code changes forward to another version which is usefull when you are supporting several versions of your product. We make a change in the earliest version and let Perforce integrate the changes automagically into the later versions. Also, multiple developers can work on the same code at the same time which most Version Control Systems boast but, using VSS we had to implement policy to not allow multiple checkouts of the same code because VSS constantly screwed it up. My only gripe is Perforce is slow when it needs to update its local data from the server. Stay away from VSS if you can...

You have probably received more than enough info on the topic but I thought I would put my 2 cents in. -The KDE IDE can be problematic, but once you get your projects set up you are good to go. If you go with command line gcc, you will need to be very knowledgeable about makefiles. -For GUI development on *nix, I would go with Qt. If you have ever done any X Window/Motif programming, you will love Qt. The KDE was built with Qt as well as Google-Earth, as examples. -For game programming you are probably using OpenGL. Qt provides a few classes that you MUST use to draw in a OpenGL context. It seems a little restrictive at first but I have used it to draw maps for UPS. It takes some getting use to. Maybe they have improved it with Qt 4.0 (I'm using 3.5). -You can get the non-commercial version of Qt for free from Trolltech. Bonus: If you stay within the Qt framework and standard programming constructs, you should be able to port your game to Windows with minimum fuss (famous last words:~ ). Have fun!

As an old school X Window/Motif programmer, I really like the Qt approach to GUI programming. Though I have never had a chance to use it professionally, that may soon change. If you develop Qt apps in Visual Studio 2003, 2005 .NET Framework, I would appreciate your professional pro's and con's. Also, does anyone know if Qt works with .NET api's like the Dundas Gauge's we see advertised here at The Code Project? Thanks in advance -- modified at 6:22 Tuesday 4th April, 2006

Because you can use MFC in .NET. But it seems to me that any new development in the .NET framework would use Forms instead. Does that make sense?

Hmmmm... Maybe "replace" was the wrong word. Vista is the OS. Win32 is the API for creating app's that run on the OS. How can Vista be an extension of Win32? From Wikipedia: "WinFX is the name of a new set of managed API's that Microsoft will introduce in its upcoming operating system, Windows Vista to supersede the current Windows API. The Windows API will still be present in Vista, but it will not give direct access to all the new functionality introduced with the new Application Programming Interface. In addition, WinFX is intended to give programmers easier access to the functionality present in the Windows API." So WinFX may not be replacing Win32, but it certainly provides access to the core Vista OS were Win32 has no such access. Is that correct? I'm not saying the GDI is going away. I am saying that a subset of the WPF (2D and 3D graphics, vector and raster graphics) utilizes DirectX. So any new development in the .NET framework would use the WPF instead of the GDI. Is that correct? Again, I'm not saying MFC is going away. But any new GUI/front end development in the .NET framework would use Forms instead of MFC. Is that correct? Thanks again...

Do I have this right? -WinFX (Vista) replaces Win32 -WPF (Vista) replaces the GDI -Forms (Vista) replaces MFC Thanks in advance!

Please excuse my ignorance on this whole .NET thing but I guess everyone in this field eventually gets around to it... From what I understand, Windows Forms are the next generation of MFC designed for use in a .NET, managed code environment. Is that correct? Does this mean I have to write managed code to use 3rd party api's that are built on Windows Forms (i.e., Dundas Chart, Gauge and Diagram products)? Or, can I continue to write unmanaged code and still utilize Windows Forms based api's in C++ code? In other words, can I use the Dundas products in unmanaged C++ code? Thanks in advance! Bob

Please excuse my ignorance on this whole .NET thing but I guess everyone in this field eventually gets around to it... From what I understand, Windows Forms are the next generation of MFC designed for use in a .NET, managed code environment. Is that correct? Does this mean I have to write managed code to use 3rd party api's that are built on Windows Forms (i.e., Dundas Chart, Gauge and Diagram products)? Or, can I continue to write unmanaged code and still utilize Windows Forms based api's in C++ code? In other words, can I use the Dundas products in unmanaged C++ code? Thanks in advance! Bob