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Ask Slashdot: Career Advice For an Aging Perl Developer?
New submitter ukrifleman writes: I've been doing UK based perl, JS, light PHP and JQUERY dev plus Centos/Debian sys admin on a freelance basis for over a decade now. Mostly maintaining older stuff but I also undertook a big, 3 year bespoke project (all written in legacy non OO perl). The trouble is, that contract has now finished and all the legacy work has dried out and I've only got about 2 months of income left! I need to get a full time job.
To most dev firms I'm going to look like a bit of a dinosaur, 40 odd years old, knows little of OO coding OR modern languages and aproaches to projects. I can write other languages and, with a bit of practice I'll pick them up pretty quickly. I really don't know where to start. What's hot, what's worth learning, I'm self-taught so have no CS degree, just 15 years of dev and sys admin experience. I've got a bit of team and project management experience too it's quite a worry going up against young whipper snappers that know all the buzz words and modern tech!
Am I better off trying to get a junior job to start so I can catch up with some tech? Would I be better off trawling the thousands of job sites or finding a bonafide IT specialist recruitment firm? Should I take the brutally honest approach to my CV/interviews or just wing it and hope I don't bite off more than I can chew? What kind of learning curve could I expect if I took on a new language I have no experience with? Are there any qualififcations that I NEED to have before firms would be willing to take me on? I've been sitting here at this desk for 10 years typing away and only now do I realise that I've stagnated to the point where I may well be obsolete! Have a question for Slashdot's readers? Take a look at other recent questions first to see if someone else has had a similar question. And if not, ask away! The more details and context you include, the more likely your question will be selected.
To most dev firms I'm going to look like a bit of a dinosaur, 40 odd years old, knows little of OO coding OR modern languages and aproaches to projects. I can write other languages and, with a bit of practice I'll pick them up pretty quickly. I really don't know where to start. What's hot, what's worth learning, I'm self-taught so have no CS degree, just 15 years of dev and sys admin experience. I've got a bit of team and project management experience too it's quite a worry going up against young whipper snappers that know all the buzz words and modern tech!
Am I better off trying to get a junior job to start so I can catch up with some tech? Would I be better off trawling the thousands of job sites or finding a bonafide IT specialist recruitment firm? Should I take the brutally honest approach to my CV/interviews or just wing it and hope I don't bite off more than I can chew? What kind of learning curve could I expect if I took on a new language I have no experience with? Are there any qualififcations that I NEED to have before firms would be willing to take me on? I've been sitting here at this desk for 10 years typing away and only now do I realise that I've stagnated to the point where I may well be obsolete! Have a question for Slashdot's readers? Take a look at other recent questions first to see if someone else has had a similar question. And if not, ask away! The more details and context you include, the more likely your question will be selected.
Agreed. Your selling point is your knowledge of business as well as technical skills. That combination is ideal for project management or business analyst, and you can get certified relatively quickly.
http://www.pmi.org/certificati...
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
If you plan on staying with Perl, I would highly recommend checking out Moose and the other derivative packages that append object systems to Perl 5.
http://moose.iinteractive.com/en/about.html
Using Moose along with helper packages such as Moose::Exporter, Method::Signatures::Simple allow you to write classes that are familiar to classes in other languages but do things that have yet to be implemented there.
Once you start using a modern object system in Perl it's hard to go back to the old way of doing things, and you shouldn't have to.
I hit this decision point about 10 years ago (soon I'll be 50). Every manager I've ever worked for who moved on from being a crusty coder, sucked as a manager too, where as managers who did what they did because they loved it, where almost always really great. As the technologies I knew well began to fall to the wayside, I didn't not want to become a reluctant manager or lead. So I started over. And I have continued to do that every 3 or so years. Short of using a compiler, there is not one thing I do today that has much of anything to do with what I did 10 years ago, but I love what I do just as much. That's the trick - keep yourself engaged in what makes you excited. If that is managing teams - great. If not, don't become one of "those" mangers that lost his spark.
Nothing evolves faster than the word of god in the minds of men who think themselves divinely inspired.