Sunday, January 20, 2008
Managing one's software career
Today, I was at a party with some friends, and one of the people there had been recently laid off from his job at HP. At the end of the day, his problem was he tried to stay a "web generalist", and ran out of gas trying to stay on the infinite "skilz treadmill". He's walking away from programming...
I've chosen a different career direction: getting to a high level in an extremely useful, if old, programming language - C - and mastering a relatively obscure application domain. A useful side effect is I don't have to retrain every two or three months or master yet another script language. I don't love syntax enough to play games with it over and over, and would much rather learn new algorithms and genuine new approaches to hard problems over mastering yet another bunch of syntactic gobbledygook.
My career pledge is to avoid any programming that involves a "color". It's worked well so far.
I've chosen a different career direction: getting to a high level in an extremely useful, if old, programming language - C - and mastering a relatively obscure application domain. A useful side effect is I don't have to retrain every two or three months or master yet another script language. I don't love syntax enough to play games with it over and over, and would much rather learn new algorithms and genuine new approaches to hard problems over mastering yet another bunch of syntactic gobbledygook.
My career pledge is to avoid any programming that involves a "color". It's worked well so far.
# posted by Foobarista : 9:57 PM
