Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

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First off, if you aren't moving away from a skill-set into another skill-set, you aren't 'changing careers'. Get that out of your head.

Second, technology is technology. Yes, it would be nicer to have newer languages on your resume, but any language is a language and having old languages on your resume is better than none.

Third, if you give up after only 6 months, it'll look really, really bad on your resume.

And finally, I have a feeling English isn't your first language. You made quite a few grammar mistakes. This wouldn't be such a problem if the rest of your text didn't seem English-native. It makes you sound uneducated, when the opposite is probably true. If you intend to work in an English-speaking company, or heavily interact with English speaking techs on the internet, brush up on your English.

As for the advice...

Keep your job. Use your free time to learn 'newer' languages. Contribute to open source projects, or start a project of your own. (Contributing is significantly easier because it has built-in direction: Just look at the bugs list and start fixing them.)

Don't rely on other people to teach you. This is a really bad lesson that school teaches and it makes improving your skills a lot harder. That's not to say you can't learn from others, just that you shouldn't be relying on it. Teach yourself and take advantage of mentors as you find them.

Your response seems overly-critical for someone who's simply looking for advice. I have a few issues:

Quitting a job within a year won't look particularly bad on your resume; quitting multiple jobs within a year will, however. I left my first job after 3 months and I've never faced a problem because of it.

There's no need to berate him on his English, especially if he's moving to London - as long as it's clear that English isn't his first language, or that he's dyslexic, then he won't be judged harshly there.

There's no point sticking with a job you hate if you have the means and freedom to move on. Being young allows you to change your mind before too much depends on you having a stable job.

@op: Look up on what's currently in demand in London (Java, probably) and start learning in your spare time. Check up on a few UK-based recruitment websites (http://reed.co.uk has a good list of programming jobs). It's totally possible to change your area of expertise; I currently work as a Ruby/PHP developer and I have a first-class degree in design :)

In my initial response I was actually going to write that judging by his written English he would have no problems getting a job in London. I've certainly interviewed and worked with loads of people with far worse English than he exhibits in his post.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I didn't say I would like to change career. I just said I would like to change area, meaning from old mainframe-like technologies into recent technologies.

I don't agree that technology is technology. Would you hire a developer with experience in PL/1 to code in C? Would you hire a developer with experience in Cobol to program Java? I guess you wouldn't. Yes, I know object-oriented programming, functional, logical, procedural and scripting... But is that what you read in job posts? No, you read specific languages, tools and technologies.

I didn't give up after 6 months. I had a part-time job during my MSc for 6 months in order to pay my studies/expenses. Then I have been working for 2 years for a financial institution. And now, after those 2 years, I realised I cannot find what I want inside the organisation and I want to move.

I am not English nor native in English. I understand my English isn't perfect, but I have never worked with native English speakers nor lived in the UK (or any other native-English country). My experience tells me that you will only become good at a language once you live in the country and hear it from native speakers. Nevertheless, I think my English is good enough to perform my job.

If you read my post, you will see that I already learn "newer" languages in my free time and I am already a contributor to an open source project (for 3 years).

Moreover, I don't rely on people on teach me. I strongly believe that by simply working with senior folk, you will learn day after day. That is what I want to have.

I've been working for three years and three months, and am currently working in my third company.

I started out coding PHP at company 1, continued coding in PHP for company 2 and transitioned there to working on a Python project. At Company 3 I am working on Java end to end.

Granted, all projects I have been working on are web development projects; however a senior programmer at my outfit with six years of exp started out as a embedded systems engineer.

I think the short answer to your question is : It's possible. Keep your chin up, and keep looking.

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