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Choosing Your Next Programming Job — Perl Or .NET?
Trebonius asks: "I have just received two job offers in the same day. The first was for a job coding in Perl on Linux/UNIX platforms, for a small but very cool company around 120 miles from where I live. They play Half-Life together in the off-hours and the people I've talked to there seem very happy with the job and work environment there. I'd be making smallish web systems, and I'd basically have total control over the projects on which I work. They offered me 20% more than I make now. The second offer I received is for a huge nationwide company opening an IT office a couple blocks from where I currently work. They're an all-Microsoft shop — VB, C#, .NET, SQL200*, etc. I'd be a very small cog in a very large machine. They offered me 66% more than I'm making now. Benefits are essentially identical between the companies, so that's not a big factor. I'll also give the Perl company a chance to make me another offer, but what should the threshold be? How do you folks balance the desire for a fun job with the need to pay off debt?"
Most of my work experience is in Microsoft development, though not by choice. It was my first job out of college. In my own time, I run Linux, write in PHP, Perl, MySQL, etc. I don't like developing in .NET much, but I'm used to it, and the money's good.
How do I choose? The money issue is huge, of course, and I think I'd much prefer the Perl job in terms of development preference and work environment. However, I've got the impression that Perl web development doesn't have the future potential in the professional world that .NET has. A search of Dice shows a lot more .NET jobs. Would taking the Perl job hurt my prospects in the future?"
How do I choose? The money issue is huge, of course, and I think I'd much prefer the Perl job in terms of development preference and work environment. However, I've got the impression that Perl web development doesn't have the future potential in the professional world that .NET has. A search of Dice shows a lot more .NET jobs. Would taking the Perl job hurt my prospects in the future?"
Would taking the Perl job hurt my prospects in the future? .Net job. However. If you are a good programmer I don't think you have anything to worry about; you will be able to fit into any programmingjob now, or in the future.
I'd go for the Perl job and worry about prospects later.
By asking this question it seems that you value prospects over fun in what you do. If that is the case, go for the
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
Vasectomy, or frontal lobotomy.
It seems to me that your heart is set on the Perl job. Are you waiting for someone to give you permission to choose the lower paying job that you think you'd enjoy more? Life's too short, go for the Perl job, you know you want to :-D
For me, being happy doing my job is worth a lot. I've recently switched from a job that paid a lot, but the environment and management really sucked. Now I'm working part-time, making about 25% of what I was making at the other job but the environment is great.
Life isn't really that long, you need to do what makes you happy, as long as you are not starving. Going to a job you don't like every day is a mistake if there are more personally rewarding alternatives.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I have worked for large corporations (22,000 employee bank) and very small companies (12 people) and my personal preference is to work with small groups of people who are fired up by interests similar to mine and who are good fits personality-wise.
:)
The big company was more financially secure, carried more prestige, and offered great and solid retirement options. On the other side, it was next to impossible to affect change, my contributions (while recognized in the form of raises and titles) didn't really make a big difference to the overall picture. Even coming up with a system that saved 1.2 million a year in expenses warranted only an 'attaboy'. Because, in a company controlling 60 billion in assets, 1.2 million isn't really that big a deal!
The small company offered much more freedom, personal responsibility, and allowed me to make a direct and substantial impact on the bottom line of the whole company. I was in direct communication with the owner of the company, not to a manager with a senior manager with an executive with an executive vp to the CEO.
Best advice: Play to your strengths and go with work that motivates you. You will spend about 60% of your life at work. You should spend that time doing things that motivate, inspire, and energize you.
- Oakbox
disclaimer: I am a programmer for career coaches
Not just answers, the correct questions.
[ ] Perl .NET
[ ]
[x] Death by ooga booga
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
try to install a linux distribution for PCs without the Perl packages and see if it will work ...
... for better or worse, Perl5 is the next COBOL ;) meaning there are huge custom apps built with Perl that won't be replaced in a hurry
as far as I can see, the demand is not great, but quite stable
My own personal and highly subjective opinion of this is - .Net, you are going to worry that Java is going to continue its dominance, if you spend all your spare time mastering .Net, Java AND Perl to hedge your bets, well, it might be a new framework in Ruby or Python that all the cool kids are talking about next year. But if you are skilled enough, there is always going to be some jobs available in your favourite language, and you are probably going to pick up the new technology fairly quickly if you have to.
don't worry too much about making strategic choices. I think as programmers, we all have a small nagging worry that one of the technologies we didn't pick is going to dominate the market, and cause our hardwon skills to become obsolete. But no matter how hard you study and try to keep up, that worry is never going to go away. If you pick
Pick a technology you like. If you get a job in it, fantastic. You are having fun, and you are earning money, and getting experience. Now, you can spend some time reading up on other languages, but if I were you, I'd concentrate on enjoying life.
Now, the remaining question of what to value most - the money or the job enjoyment, that you can only answer yourself, and is the very essence of an economic transaction.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
... and see if you're happy with the result. If not, switch.
Fleur de Sel
Believe it or not, language is not that big of a factor in whether you like your job. As proof, I offer that I've been working 2.5 years in a ColdFusion job, and while the language feels like I'm trying to perform surgery with rusty tools, the work is interesting and challenging.
Here's a few questions, and my advice based on their answers:
1) Are you young? Take the higher paying job and work like mad for 5 years while living like a pauper (small apartment, used car which you paid cash for, but wide broadband and good computer). Your time in the cubicle farm will be rewarded with getting home and being able to go frag someone. You'll either pay off all your debt, develop a huge savings, or some combination thereof. This will establish the financial stability today which can permit you a lot more freedom in your job choice in a few years. This is the path I'm going, and I'll have my mortgage paid off 3 years from now (5 years after I opened it).
2) Are you willing to relocate? If not, you do NOT want that Perl job no matter how good it looks. 2.5-3 hours of driving a day will sap way more of your life than working in a corporate environment. Every single day you will arrive at work tired, and every single night you will get home exhausted. I drive 1.5 hours now, and this is absolutely my upper limit. Something most folks don't really think about is that they get errands done during the week, which I don't have time for even with my (short compared to yours) drive. That means my weekends get sapped up getting stuff done which most people get done during the week. Opportunities for relaxation become few and far between. During the week you'll get home from work and just crash on the couch until you fall asleep, exhausted. My drive takes more out of me than my work day does, by a long shot.
3) Do you have a wife and/or kids? You're going to want to take the job which provides sufficient financial stability, while giving you the most time with them. If not, refer again to question 1.
4) How many hours are generally worked by the employees of each location? I've seen small companies which generally work 40 hours and no more, and I've seen big companies which are this way. Also I've seen small companies which expect each person to put in 70-80 hours, and I've seen big companies which expect each project to meet its deadline no matter how unreasonable. Total amount of free personal time is way more important than how much you like the work you're doing.
5) How busy are the people at each place? Too busy as in #4 is bad, but too slow is just as bad. Nothing is worse than trying to muddle through another work day with nothing to do, and nothing interesting to keep your mind occupied, while you surf work-friendly sites such as Slashdot, and hope your web usage doesn't get high enough to raise eyebrows. This will actually lead to a state of mental apathy which is very hard to shake, and which can seriously cripple your career for years. We've had people like this, and have had to get rid of them because we could never depend on them to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time even though once upon a time they were firecracker developers. 3 or 4 years in a job like this can ruin a developer, sometimes forever.
I hope these thoughts help. Largely they're based on my own personal experience, but to some extent they're also based on having been a developer manager for a firm which contracts most of our people out to other companies (hence my experience with point 5).
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
one thing you can not buy is more time. It wasn't clear to me whether you would actually try driving 120 miles each way, or whether you would move closer, but if it's the former, that's about 1/4 of your waking hours you'd be spending in the car. I did this for a year. It sucked.