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How to Keep Your Job

Posted by timothy on from the for-certain-values-of-job dept.

An anonymous reader submits: "Dave Thomas of "Pragmmatic Programer" fame presents the first in a series of slides based on presentations about how programmers can maintain job security in this time of increased competition, cost cutting, outsourcing, etc. He makes several excellent points about things many programmer may not think about such as the dangers of over-reliance on one company or sector, the importance of diversity of knowledge, the fact that foreign programmers CAN produce quality code, and the fact that time does NOT necesserily equal value (the Everquest Syndrome) when it comes to software engineering. There is a lecture that goes along with the slides, but a great deal can be learned from the slides alone. Worth the read..."

2 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Dave Thomas? by frankjr · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The Wendy's guy is a programmer? Wow.

  2. Keep your job? by ptaff · · Score: 3, Redundant

    Focus on cross-platform languages and libraries.
    You may not keep your job anyway, but you'll be flexible.

    The market for programmers slowly moves away from Microsoft. If you code in Visual Basic, you can be sure that only Microsoft-oriented companies will employ you.

    Companies more and more switch to non-Microsoft solutions, meaning that they must switch programmers too. Knowing UNIX is becoming more and more of an asset; you might not know all the intricacies of bash or emacs, but if you code in perl you can be employed by Win/Lin/Mac/UNIX worlds...

    Whenever possible, go for java instead of C#. Go for PHP instead of ASP. Learn to use as little platform-dependant code as possible.