[Khar]

Yes, but projects by businesses is not the same as the R&D being discussed in this article, except for such things as drug companies getting third party studies done at the universities. While businesses can get government grants and such, I don't think business driven R&D was quite the same (but I do agree that more of R&D in general needs to be done -- I'd prefer to see progress in my lifetime, and, aye, I'm willing to pay more taxes for it too!).

Unless you were talking about all those projects and they were government funded, but I'd figured as part of the tech bubble they would have been corporate funded studies.

[Bruce_the_vii]

If I can make out what you are refering to you are talking about government funded pure research - of which there isn't that much in Canada. This is very high tech.

As a technical programmer I talked to rather a lot of R & D project managers. They were as I say not very promising projects. I worked for Nortel R & D briefly and it was like a human jungle, not pleasant. Nortel used to have a lot of irons in the reseach fire, now all history, invisible.

[ASLplease]

Bruce_the_vii Bruce_the_vii:

If I can make out what you are refering to you are talking about government funded pure research - of which there isn't that much in Canada. This is very high tech.

As a technical programmer I talked to rather a lot of R & D project managers. They were as I say not very promising projects. I worked for Nortel R & D briefly and it was like a human jungle, not pleasant. Nortel used to have a lot of irons in the reseach fire, now all history, invisible.

If you are waiting for self recovery, It will never be the same. The High Tech sector used to be very cyclical and given enough time you generally found yourself working with or working for someone from your past. But this time around, various other sectors have realized the talent, and have hired them away. Sectors like medical, military, and oil industry have all clued into the awesome talent pool and hired some of them. If Nortel had to ramp up, they couldn't do for lack of available talent.

My point is: without Government investment, you just are going to see many new technology centres like we have in Waterloo/Kitchener area.

Another example: Calgary's high tech sector just isn't that high tech anymore, which is a shame. There isn't anything wireless that Calgary cant design and manufacture, but where are the clean rooms? where are the facilities? where are the people? They don't exist anymore.

[Bruce_the_vii]

The change in high tech has been amazing. Whereas my degree in Computer Science is worth zero on the market I personally know three whipper snappers that make $200k plus.

[ASLplease]

imo, programming is programming. I think there is high demand in developing webbased portals for companies that provide services to their clients.

And, I also think that many companies can not find the correct enterprise software so they find themselves having someone develop an intranet based system for their company.

In both cases, they dont need a computer science guy, they need a project manager with organizational skills and an ability to interact with various people of varying disciplines.