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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

I spent about 4 years of my early career working with Ada in the aerospace industry (specifically, I worked on the GPS satellite program). It was rather career-limiting because I ended up as a young engineer with a lot of experience in an extremely niche language.

It took a while, but I was finally able to escape and start working with more modern technology (involved a lot of self-learning on side projects and finally finding a rare employer that believed engineers are capable of learning new skills).

I do occasionally get emails from recruiters looking for Ada programmers - they're exclusively for legacy maintenance. Fortunately, I'm in a position to ignore them now :)

As a language, Ada isn't bad. I'd prefer it over C++ or Golang for sure, but there just isn't enough interesting work going on using Ada to warrant investing time in learning the language.

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Ada is just a language. The 99.99% of the experience you've acquired there perfectly transfers to any other domain or language - only uneducated HR gatekeepers won't recognize this.

Unfortunately in my experience that "only" represents a somewhat large percentage of HR or hiring managers.

Then (after you make sure you learn enough of another language to not embarrass yourself) be a little bit creative in your resume/CV in order to pass that stupid filter.

(by which I don't suggest to lie, rather to make sure you mention you have some experience in popular language even if your primary job didn't use it. E.g. mentioning the side projects that made you learn C++ will let a recruiter tick that box)

I agree, I see nothing unethical about tailoring your various job-related communications to the type of person you're speaking with. Especially at large firms, HR employees are often quite literally just looking to check off boxes. Obviously you should not outright lie, but we engineering types have a tendency to take these sort of questions too literally.

I use C# at work. I've programmed in Java here and there and have done some small projects in it, but we don't use it at my office. If I apply for a Java job, and the HR rep asks me during the 1st round phone screen if I have Java experience, I'm going to say yes. When I speak with a more technically minded person, I can go into the full story, because they have the background necessary to put it in context.

This comment feels more idealistic than realistic.

Companies rarely want to pay for someone to learn on their dime unless there's a specific gain. It typically takes 3-6 months for an engineer to become truly effective and that's with domain knowledge transfer.

Domain experience is valuable and allows speed to get up and running.

one of the issues that does matter is how/where you are applying the language. Ada use is super niche so unless you're looking to stay in the same domain it does matter. As an educated, non-HR gatekeeper I do care about the context of your experience.

It's a brilliant language and due to the fact that it can limit you in the eyes of employers is one reason why I'm dabbling with other languages (including Go) and also a syntax for a new one inspired by Ada.

> also a syntax for a new one inspired by Ada

I suspect that you wouldn't agree about the desirability, but I've long thought that doing a simple substitution on some of the terminals in the Ada grammar to turn it into a curly brace language would do a lot for adoption. For someone to do it the right way would mean a tool capable of also doing the reverse substitution on a curly brace text, which would produce output that could be consumed by "legacy" (non-curly brace-aware) compilers. With the rest of the grammar and semantics all staying the same, this would mean a level of fluidity that would allow existing Ada programmers and the programmers working in the hip new "Attica-B"† dialect to work together on the same projects with no more friction than the way that a lot of people already use gofmt.

† Get it?

> their just isn't enough interesting work going on using Ada to warrant investing time in learning the language.

You can help change that -- by doing interesting work! The nice thing about open source and self-directed projects is that you can use what you want based on its own merits, and leave bandwagoneering for when you have to find a job.

I've done that.

I don't know, if I'm trying to create an open-source project with the intent of making something that becomes useful and popular, I'm not sure I'd want to artificially limit the number of potential contributors by picking an obscure language.

That said, I don't really have a strong enough desire to get back into Ada anyway. I'm a big fan of Clojure and Kotlin at the moment :)

It sounds like instead of using he right tool to solve the problem, you create the problem to use the tool :o

That's how you determine which problems a tool is good or bad for: try solving problems with it, irrespective of whether it's the right tool.

How's the $$$?

I was a fairly junior software engineer at the time. And took the job only because it was 2008 and I was unemployed. Had never used Ada but the employer (rhymes with "Going") didn't seem to mind. My mother was kind of enough to supply me with all of her old Ada books when she finished laughing about me taking a job using a language she had long since left behind.

The money was about... market rate for the time. Not good, not terrible. Better than taking a job completely outside of my field.

And precisely because it's a niche language, and you have the experience now, you should definitely accept those legacy maintenance requests, as a freelancer, and ask for big bucks. You're wasting opportunities here.

Ada is/was heavily used in the defense/aerospace industry. Most of these legacy maintenance requests come from defense contractors who do not want to pay top-dollar for expertise. They want to put butts-in-seats to soak up billable time and keep the govt customer just content enough not to cancel their contract.

So they'll happily hire anyone with a clearance. If they can't find someone who already knows the language they'll eventually just hire someone who doesn't and let them figure it out on the job. Defense contractors do not pay big bucks for niche skills on legacy maintenance programs. Not to mention, it is some of the most boring work in the industry.

Let me tell you a story. 25+ years ago there was a bid in my city about how to renovate the main postal office. Architects all over the city did their bid, as requested by law, including the biggest of them all who had basically the entire local council in his pockets.

At the time I was a student, and was working as simple designer (AutoCAD) for an architect teacher who just opened his private architecture firm (6 months prior only). But the guy went to the board in question in last day, with a different bid. He proposed them bigger changes, not just renovation of exterior walls, but also design changes of interior space. Now doing that he made them go back to Ministry of Internal Affairs where the entire project instead of being billable as simple renovation, was changes and the entire budget would qualify for a superior plateau inside the Ministry levels of budgets. It jumped the qualification from (roughly estimated for today's $$$) $1M to $5M. And my boss at the time won. For next 6 months I worked my ass in AutoCAD to do all the changes and I am very proud of it even today, as it still stands as is currently.

Now here's your take of my above story. Get interested in their proposals, see what is about the projects and see if they can't actually be helped to jump to a bigger plateau of prices within government. You have the technical expertise, maybe it's time to create your relation expertise as well. They will jump through hoops and all if you bring them something to bill to something much higher their client (the defense department). Then you can really enjoy a bigger pay. Good luck and have fun.