1151 Working For Cheap Or Learning Technologies? - Simple Programmer Podcast
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Welcome to the Simple Programmer Podcast. Making complex programming simple and fast. With everything from career advice to philosophy, it's the Simple Programmer Podcast. Hey, what's up? John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com. This time I'm going to be talking about working for cheap.

or learning technologies. I got this email from Raj. Raj is a pretty dang cool name, by the way. I like that name. I think if I were in India, I would go with Raj. Should I choose to work for cheap on technologies, wind forms, image processing, which will have very less impact on my career, or learn technologies? He's got ASB.net, MVC, AngularJS with high demand in market and continue job search.

The way I interpret this question is he's basically saying, hey, look, I can get a job doing wind forms development or doing—what else did he put here? Something that's not as valuable, image processing. I think image processing is valuable, which will have not much impact on the career because it's wind forms development. Who's using that anymore? We're using MFC and all that. Or I can continue my job search—I don't have a job right now, but I could learn—I

ASP.net and InklerJS, something more valuable in the marketplace. What should I do? Should I take the short term money and work the wind farms thing and sacrifice my future or should I go without a job and maybe not eat for a while and learn ASP.net? Here's what I would actually recommend that you do. I would recommend—

If you don't have a job and you don't have a buffer, take the job that you can get with the skills that you have right now, but figure out how you can start transitioning

in that job to more updated skills. If you know you can get a wind forms job like this tomorrow, then go for it. Then go do it. In the meantime, start learning something else and try to incorporate that into your current job. I think a lot of people—and this is—I mean we could apply this to the higher level. I think a lot of people that are out there looking for jobs, a lot of you software developers right now because I know because I get emails from you, you're like, "Well,

I want to do this, but I'm not getting that job or I don't have that perfect opportunity or you're even—you're working—you've got some experience in retail or some other area and you're like, oh, well, this is beneath me. I want to be a software developer now, so I'm going to just be unemployed for a long time and I'm just going to keep on learning my software development. Life doesn't work that way. You've got to be working.

You're not going to have success by just like spending all this time learning and then you get a job and it's the perfect job that you want. A lot of times you have to create your own opportunities in life and they're going to come from unexpected places that you might not expect. I would say that like don't wait. Don't just wait for this perfect opportunity. Don't wait for the perfect job that may not come along.

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I mean, be specific. Be targeted in your job search, but mostly this advice goes to someone who already has a job. If you don't have a job, don't be picky. Be willing to do whatever you need to do to get by in the meantime and it's going to take some extra work. It's going to take some extra hours that you're going to have to devote some extra time studying and learning something else and maybe you can incorporate it into your job. There's always ways to do it that I've found. When I was working as a developer—maybe this will help you more than anything else—I

Take that WinForms job and figure out how to build some tools using ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC or whatever technology or AngularJS that you can use at the company. I use this technique myself a lot. I work for a lot of companies that were using outdated technologies. I work for like HP and Xerox and companies and also for—

government systems where they had really—actually, government systems was probably the best one where they had really outdated technologies. They were not on the cutting edge at all. I guess maintain these old systems. You know what I did is there's always a need for developer tools. There's always a need for tools that make the developer's job or the team's job easier, all kinds of business processes and things that you have that you've got to automate in some way or that can help developers to do their job better that are on your team.

What you can do is you can build those tools in those technologies. I was working for this one contract position at a government job and we had, again, an old antiquated system that was this old Java system and not using any of the newest and greatest stuff. What did I do? I started building a tool that made it so that—

a build tool that made it faster for us to do the build of the system, but what technology did I use to do that? I used the latest ASP.NET MVC web development technology to do that. I had a similar job at HP and we had this old tool that we were maintaining and ASP.NET was coming out just at that time.

I created a test tracking software to help an internal tool, not the actual product that we're selling and I created an ASP.NET MVC. Use that technique in order to—

to move yourself over to the new technologies where you're still going to get paid to do this and it's still going to be valuable. In the meantime, you don't have to be hungry looking for a job because you're looking for that perfect ASP.NET job which you don't even have the skills yet. You can be developing those skills while you're getting paid and actually providing value to your team and to your employer. Take the wind forms job is my advice and hey, learn ASP.NET by creating some tools on the side. All right.

Hopefully that's helpful to you. If you have a question for me, you can email me at [email protected]. If you haven't subscribed already, click that—click it. Click the Subscribe button. I'll talk to you next time. Take care.