Ask Slashdot: Best Training To Rekindle a Long Tech Career?

New submitter SouthSeaDragon writes "I'm a computer professional who has performed most of the functions that could be expected over a 39 year career, including hardware maintenance and repair, sitting on a 800 support line, developing a help desk application from the ground up (terminal-based), writing a software manual, plus developing and teaching software courses. In recent years, I've worked for computer software vendors doing pre-sales support generally for infrastructure products including applications, app servers, integration with Java based messaging and ESB product and most recently a Business Rules product. I was laid off recently due to a restructuring and am now trying to figure out the next phase. With the WIA displaced worker grants now available I am attempting to figure out what training would be good to pursue. I am hearing that 'the Cloud' is the next big thing, but I'm also looking into increasing my development skills with a current language. I wonder what the readers might suggest for new directions."

Comments

Re:Home-calling consumer services?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Heh, One experience I had illustrates the fresh developer vs seasoned. I was hired in to help a couple of younger guys that wrote an application so I could help speed it up.

One of the better guys was struggling to find out why his queries for data wasn't pulling back what he thought he should be getting. He'd been staring at his stuff for the better part of an hour before he asked me.It took him 2 minutes to explain his problem to me, and it took me two minutes and a whiteboard to scope out why he was thinking wrong.

He was pretty well taken aback and asked me "How the fuck did you figure it out that fast?"

I replied "Cause I had the same issue a long time ago and asked someone who knew what they were doing."