In 2005 I was a successful vb developer having lived and breathed basic since my freshman year in hs 1980.

A funny story:

It was 1988, my mentor from Brookhaven National Laboratory was pestering me over using QuickBasic 4.5 versus Borland Turbo C. He wrote two programs that compared the efficiency of each language and showed me the results. The C guys would tell you the results. Well when I looked at the code:

Keep in mind I'm using C# so it isn't C but to a VB programmer it looks as insane:

for (int i = 0; i
{
Console.WriteLine(i.ToString());
}

Please don't flame me on code mistakes, I'm not being paid to code right now and 3/4 through a beautiful Coors 9/16Oz pack.

When the ASP.Net Bible came out with only C# code for .Net 3.5, I realized that I needed to take a second look.

I can promise you this, If you take the plunge on C# and even come close to mastering the art of enterprise C# / .Net Development, you will never want for work.

C# kenobi your are my only hope. To all of the VB.Net developers out there who disagree, I say, "i++"

"The only thing worse then existing, Is not existing"

I worked as a desktop tech for one of the largest telecom companies in the United States. My job was to support all of the remote CO's in their territory.
The redundancy of the Internet and our total telcom infrastructure is a myth. There are three locations in my state alone that would probably take out Southeastern United States. While some of you might think I'm be careless by posting with my real slashdot account I actually wouldn't mind getting a call from Homeland Security.

There are about thirty locations in the US right now that are completely unguarded and for all intents and purpose an easy target. The good news is that it would take about thirty seconds for those in the agency I can't mention to realize a critical junction in our infrastructure has been compromised. Still you could time them all to go of at the same time.
What me worry?

I have to start by saying that I am extremely biased. Even though it is only a few hours away, my wife won't let me visit the Edison museum in Fort Myers for fear I would burn it down.

However Edison was a truly dispicable man. You can say what you want about Gates, Jobs, Elison, Zuckerburg and others but they are businessmen and often nasty businessmen.

Edison spent years trying to discredit A/C including killing animals as large as an elephant.*

One of his inventions was the electric chair which by it's very design is a device to kill.**

The nascent movie business actually pulled up stakes and moved 3000 miles to a little CA town called Hollywood because Edison's thugs would destroy any film or equipment being used for movie making unless he got a cut.***

I could go on but I think I'm getting a tad emotionally attached to this post. I think all of us are. Have you ever seen so many four and fives?

* Jan. 4, 1903: Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point.
** Edison's Menlo Park Lab Invents the Electric Chair.
*** Edison's hires goons to shut down movie filming.

Yes I know, it's now.

I apologize for coming in late but I've been offline longer than usual. At forty-six I receive at least five phone calls a day and anywhere from six to ten emails every day asking if I am available for work. To be fair I only do contract work and usually only take three to six months contracts, so I must agree that a person over thirty will likely never get a full time position at any company unless they are willing to work for much less than they deserve.

That being said, I can only offer the following advice in remaining in demand as a software engineer even into your forties and beyond. I'm being brutal for a reason so unless you have a clear rebuttal don't reply..

1) And this sucks. If you haven't been programming almost your entire life, twelve, thirteen possibly as late as sixteen, you don't have a chance.
2) You have nothing to do with open source, shareware, kumbaya software, game programming.
3) Don't even try to be a jack of all trades, pick a poison and stick with it.
___a) Case in point. I bit the bullet at Sprint circa 2002 and focused exclusively on .Net, which at the time was not even close to being a sure thing.
___b) I hated C the first time I saw it in the fall of 1987 but was smart enough to realize that C# was the future if you wanted to develop MS software.
4) This is probably the worse part of staying relevant after 40. While I love my wife and children, I don't have any hobbies, I don't go to movies, I don't read fiction. What I do is read Slashdot, shameless plug, and make sure that I am one of the first people anywhere on this planet that masters any new technology coming down the pike.
5) HTML5, HTML5, HTML5, HTML5 and in the MS world MVC3 / Razor.
6) 51Degrees, 51Degrees. If you are over forty and don't know what that is your getting very close to being too late.

You do realize if I was paid the same amount of money I am making know, I would go back to building mansions in the Hamptons.

I started programming in High School thirty years ago and yes it was GW-Basic but it was programming. There is such a high demand for developers that companies are starting to hire junior developers with two years experience in .Net and C#. We need to start offering programming as an elective in all US schools, even it it is just html, javascript and css as a starter.

You start teaching High School freshman using Microsofts Express software, by their Junior year they will be interning at Fortune 500 companies and very likely will start working at graduation. Depending on their abilities and especially if they are a natural programmer, there is no limit on what they can make.

This should also be true for any other language currently being used in the business world.

"How do you know if you've never tried it?"

Good point, thanks for the book reference. Can I say again how much I love Anonymous Cowards, they are so easy to ignore.

Creating an account on Slashdot is so easy a caveman can do it and we won't ignore you anymore.

True story. My previous contract was with LPS - Aptitude Solutions in Maitland. One of the top developers there was a long haul trucker who after getting injured on the job was offered cross training. They gave him an IQ test and he scored in the 140s but they forced him to take it again because he was 6'4" 300 lbs and looked like he could snap your neck with one hand like a twig.

After realizing that he wasn't stupid they put him in a six month C class. Not C++, not C#, not objective C but plain old pain in the ass C. By the third month he was conducting the class when the teacher was out sick or otherwise.

So what the hell does this mean?

1) College will never teach you how to program in the real world, not now, not ever.
2) If you get a CS degree but can't program you may find work but it will never pay a high salary until you moved into PM.
3) The demand for natural programmers completely outweighs the need for a degree.

So what do you do?

This part is actually simpler than I thought when I started writing this post.

1) Whether you are a Freshman in High School or someone who has just graduated with a non-CS degree, your best bet is to endure the joy, the pain, the good, the evil that is C. Buy any book on it, download free compilers from anywhere and program, program, program. If you can successfully program seriously basic applications such as a Calculator or a Text Editor without putting a bullet in your head, you may very well be a natural programmer.
2) Pick your poison. I committed to C# in 2005 and have never looked back. Short term contracts for me have been the most lucrative and most reliable and generally speaking pay in the range of $45.00 to $75.00 per hour and usually last three to six months. The longest I went between contracts in the past three years has been about three weeks. I will defer to the Java, C++ developers on slashdot but believe that if you are highly skilled you will be successful in those languages as well.

I couldn't find your email so I'm just going to post. Please send me and an email at wdhowellsr@gmail.com with all of your issues with the Olive Gardens in Alaska. I walk by the entire management department for Olive Garden every day and although I've been there only two weeks they are serious about their brands. Being just a contractor I can't promise anything but an Olive Garden without bread sticks isn't an Olive Garden.

It's funny that you should say that because he asked me a similar question about the security failings of previous contracts and how I would overcome them. As I work with WCF often I talked about the problems with using the out of the box implementations and how encryption, handshakes and at the very least not publishing methods can reduce security breaches.

Now I wouldn't have shown him the security breaches but if you simply said that you know for a fact that many companies that you have worked for never change their passwords you would have been fine.

I know, that's exactly what I thought when the head developer told me that. But if you think about it, if you are the largest -- Insert Anything -- company in the world you are a target and if you have ever eaten at Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Long Horn Steak House, The Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze or Seasons 52 a single recipe or trade secret could be worth millions.

Olive Garden's Seafood Portofino with Minestrone Soup is without question the best recipe of it's type I have ever tasted, and don't get me started on the bread sticks.

Damn, now I'm hungry.

I'm currently working a contract with Darden Restaurants, the largest full service retaurant company in the world, and as you can imagine they are very serious about security. During the meet and greet the head developer asked me if I had left any back doors at my previous contracts. I looked at him strange because the thought never even crossed my mind which is the difference between a hack and a professional.

After I replied, he told me a story about a programmer interviewing for a position at Darden who had very good qualifications. He was asked the same question and immediately said, "Let me show you my back door", and proceeded to log into a company web site and pull up their web site administration page. The programmer actually seemed shocked when told that there is no way Darden could hire him.

There is a fine line between genius and insanity but stupid is all by itself.

Imagine for a moment that Apple actually created a separate Business devision and to be crazy let's also imagine that they don't follow the same sucks to be you atitude when it comes to customer requirements, just maybe, we might see a fully integrated Business IT Environment where things actually worked together.

Apple stays out of Corporate for one reason and one reason alone, they know that they don't have what it takes to hack it in the Fortune 500 world. When I was implementing MIcrosoft SMS 1.0 at Sprint in the late nineties, the software was so bad that we had a monthly "Come to Jesus" meeting where the top Executives at Sprint would rip several new holes in Microsoft Management and they listened and it was finally implemented because they knew their ass was on the line.

Apple's ass is never on the line and to be honest I'm glad it isn't. Do you know how many "Insanely Great" products in the last century never saw the light of day because either their ass was on the line or the inventor decided to bend over and take it. While Apple will never ever compete in the Corporate World, I think Steve rests in peace knowing that they still make "Insanely Great" products.

By the way no one in my family owns an Apple product though I'm leaning toward an iPad but don't like restrictive development rules. RIP Steve Jobs

Check your wireless networks and you will likely find the TSA showing up on your computer. They don't show up all of the time but they obviously don't care that you know.

This is why I shouldn't post at 12:43 am. My wife said I couldn't us the c word. Although I think it is fair to say the c word does require a good deal of work.