A question to IT KBers, part II

[Street Gerbil]

Ok, boys and girls, thank you for the bits and bytes of information you have provided so far. Here is the deal. After 10 years of working at the same place I am rusty. I know our infrastructure class library by heart and I can recite business rules until the next week without pausing. Outside my former employer's company it is worth squat. I have mental capacity to learn one thing. Now please vote and explain your choice, what should I focus on to get a decent job. Please elaborate.

1) General C++ - 7.5 years of "experience" working with corporate infra. I dread C++ questions on the interview, because our company only used a small subset of features, e.g. I never used templates in my life. I am not familiar with the std library. I have no idea what is "smart pointers" and I have never used boost in my life. On the other hand, when I code, I think in C++ and I love dealing with pointers.

2) Java - a few months of experience maintaining a fairly large web-based application. I know very little, apart from the fact that I like this language.

3) VB and/or C# .NET - I know enough VB to code on an amateur level and I can put together an application in C# if I keep my nose in the manual. I love C#, but I have very little practical experience.

4) ASP.NET - seems like quite an exciting technology but I am worried about it being limited to Microsoft technology. I do not want to repeat an error of sticking myself into a niche.

5) Something else


EDITED----
Oh, and if your company is recruiting, feel free to PM me so I can forward them my resume. There will be beer. I promise.

[scracha]

Logo .....10 chars

[Street Gerbil]

Logo .....10 chars

Or may be forth?

[limbimtimwim]

Become a Perl guru.

Not being extremely common means you can be paid more, but Perl isn't obscure enough you can't get a job. And it's fun to write in, you get results quickly. On the other hand, reading other people's code is...... well...... can be difficult. And reading your own 6 months later can be frightening.

[Street Gerbil]

Become a Perl guru.

Not being extremely common means you can be paid more, but Perl isn't obscure enough you can't get a job. And it's fun to write in, you get results quickly. On the other hand, reading other people's code is...... well...... can be difficult. And reading your own 6 months later can be frightening.

I can code in Perl. Any leads?

[RantyDave]

I'd say C#. This makes me scum, clearly, but I have my reasons.

First C++. I loves me some C++ and am in a similar (ish) position in that I didn't have much time with STL before leaving the language. I don't think there is a non-maintenance C++ project left on the planet. OTOH the cool kids all want to learn Ruby which means that somebody somewhere has to still be able to code C++. Under the circumstances I wouldn't worry about not knowing STL. Besides, it's only fairly recently that STL has got to the point where it's actually halfway usable IMHO.

ASP? Fuck that.

A lot of Java is retarded. Good language, 'orrible libraries and all this J2EE shit really made a mess. OTOH they get awesome development tools now - I work with a guy who pines after IntelliJ almost daily. Quite a few bucks in Java too - people rely on it now. Less obnoxious than C++, clearly.

So, C#. Much as I hate Microsoft I think it's become apparent that C# is a less retarded Java. Good dev tools and a healthy market within gullible corporate cunts ... I mean enterprise development teams ... that tend to be overstaffed, overpaid and low on expectations. Sweet place to learn a language while drinking nice coffee I reckon.

Of course all this good advice comes from someone who hasn't written a line of C++ in two years, kinda writes Objective-C, spends far too much time with maths, algorithms and bastard OpenGL, and is getting into Python. None of which are sensible skills from a 'nice safe career' perspective. But hey. Fuck it. It pays the bills.

Dave

[Street Gerbil]

None of which are sensible skills from a 'nice safe career' perspective. Dave

Ok, Dave, so you are saying C# is career-safe.
Other opinions? Please?
Does any of you gentlemen have any C# training videos I can borrow?

[jrandom]

Ok, Dave, so you are saying C# is career-safe.
Other opinions? Please?
Does any of you gentlemen have any C# training videos I can borrow?

You may have noted that I also voted for C#. Similar reasons, it's the development platform du jour.

Videos? No. Can you even get programming language training videos?

I suspect that everything you need to teach yourself C# will be findable on msdn.microsoft.com.

[-df-]

.....Lots of stuff....

Was going to write out my opinion...but that sums it up.

I'd vote for C# after using it for 3 years. I switched from C++ and never looked back (except for some performance issues...but thats what unmanaged C++ DLL's are for are they not?)

So basically...if you can code C# and C++ you are set in todays world. Rapid dev with C#, and for the things that need performance do it in C++ and call it from C#.

If you did a MSCD course (or what ever they call it now) in C# I'd say you'd get a job without much problem.

Most companies look for programming ability...not just knowledge of a language...anyone can use google to find what method to call

[Her_C4]

Become a Perl guru.

Not being extremely common means you can be paid more, but Perl isn't obscure enough you can't get a job. And it's fun to write in, you get results quickly. On the other hand, reading other people's code is...... well...... can be difficult. And reading your own 6 months later can be frightening.

My 0.002c worth on this?

I have just spent the last month frantically looking for a perl guru for a short term contract. Sorted now but there are opportunities out there for the rarer technologies.

[avgas]

i have another question for you all.
how many people are ITIL accredited? is it worth it? seems a rather large sum of money for 3 days of "training"

[jrandom]

I have just spent the last month frantically looking for a perl guru for a short term contract. Sorted now...

IMHO, that's all that's ever likely to be out there that's Perl-specific, inasmuch as it's no sort of tool that anyone in their right mind uses for large commercial software projects.

Perl's designed to be text-manipulating scripting glue. Yes, it's a Turing-complete programming language, but so is Brainfuck. You could theoretically do anything in Perl that you could do in, say, C++, but anyone who'd try that when tasked with implementing a saleable maintainable product should be locked in a padded cell, IMHO.

So it's handy to know about, but not something you're likely to have much luck finding a job working with for any length of time.

[imdying]

I suspect there's no love for ASP.NET in the poll because once you know C#, ASP.NET is just a stepping stone away. All the important stuff (i.e. talking to SQL servers and webservices) is exactly the same

[xwhatsit]

It's very simplistic of course, but there's some introductory resources for C# targetted at Java programmers available here and here. Make use of all the education taxes you've been paying to universities!

C# is nice, .NET libraries are nice, Visual Studio is nice (what's wrong with vi though!), but why is the compiler so slow? Maybe to facilitate this...

[mister.koz]

I'd say java because of my fairly strong hatred for c#

Its brilliant until you get down to speeding things up and you realize how completely hair-brained the .net environment really is i have had it firing events twice, not firing events when it should and even had it lock up while doing something as simple as processing the same string it has 1000s of times...

For design, deployment and managing code, c# is brilliant its very easy to use and quite scalable (providing you have good principles) the portability of code from desktop->pocketpc->web is very cool too although i would rather learn ruby on rails or write pages in html with notepad than write another asp.net website.

Java is the choice for me because it has true portability (apart from pocket pc) as in it runs on bloody everything and its consistant on everything (we use are about half and half windows for penguins here. Its not microsoft and it is open source.

Its not nearly as defined or simplified like c# which means the deeper you get into framework development the more you can find you have to re-write to make everything contiguous, though i think this is mainly my inexperience and my c#-way of thinking.