Comment This is really extrange (Score 4, Interesting) 1245
(posted it somewhere else but the formatting was awful)
Two and a half years ago I was switching jobs and an Ask Slashdot on the topic gave me a few hints on how to do it well and it's been great since then. Now I have a new offer and am in the middle of a very hard decision:
I'm a programmer. I think I'll be a programmer all my life. When I do tasks in the real world I envision solutions almost as code. I was born to write code, and have done so for over 10 years now. But being a university drop-out my future has always worried me: I know people don't hire older programmers, and being 27 this is something that's hainting me.
So my current employer made me an offer to manage a new office in a town where it would be fairly easy for me to continue my university studies where I left them; but, as fate has it, I was given another offer to stay in the city I'm in with a higher pay (more than double of what I make now, almost three times) and a really high rank (Executive Manager of a really big company). When we got to the point of my lack of university degree, they downplayed it and said they could help me continue my studies, but as I see it is not a priority. Now, in the middle of this dilemma is the whole relocation problem.
My question would be this: How would you play it? I'd love to make a lot of money, but if I take the Executive Manager position I'll most probably never write code again, and may still not have a diploma; but if I take the lower, manager position with my current employer I'll be really comfortable in an environment that I like, but may never have a chance to climb up that higher in the positions ladder.
I tend to think that once I've gotten to the higher positions the university diploma will not matter much, but I'm not certain on how true this really is.
Two and a half years ago I was switching jobs and an Ask Slashdot on the topic gave me a few hints on how to do it well and it's been great since then. Now I have a new offer and am in the middle of a very hard decision:
I'm a programmer. I think I'll be a programmer all my life. When I do tasks in the real world I envision solutions almost as code. I was born to write code, and have done so for over 10 years now. But being a university drop-out my future has always worried me: I know people don't hire older programmers, and being 27 this is something that's hainting me.
So my current employer made me an offer to manage a new office in a town where it would be fairly easy for me to continue my university studies where I left them; but, as fate has it, I was given another offer to stay in the city I'm in with a higher pay (more than double of what I make now, almost three times) and a really high rank (Executive Manager of a really big company). When we got to the point of my lack of university degree, they downplayed it and said they could help me continue my studies, but as I see it is not a priority. Now, in the middle of this dilemma is the whole relocation problem.
My question would be this: How would you play it? I'd love to make a lot of money, but if I take the Executive Manager position I'll most probably never write code again, and may still not have a diploma; but if I take the lower, manager position with my current employer I'll be really comfortable in an environment that I like, but may never have a chance to climb up that higher in the positions ladder.
I tend to think that once I've gotten to the higher positions the university diploma will not matter much, but I'm not certain on how true this really is.
