Unlike the U.S. Norway has a very good economy, a higher standard of living and lots of money so consumers don't pay for the recharge (this is called an incentive for the Perry minded types). Nuff said: http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...

I just read thru a lot of these noobs ranting about old programmers learning new tricks to get a job.

First of all it appears you have no formal training just the abiltiy to hack.

In my estimation in contemporary software dev trends this is an advantage (especially in the eyes of HR or the employers).

Where I WAS working the 25 year old English degree M$ admin guy completed the first installment of the lynda.com beginners tutorial for Java and the next day was promoted to Java dev.

It works! Right now the kid is being spoon-fed brain-dead easy issues so the management believes he really can code (the project narcisist does an OTS pointing to which buttons to push).

If I asked this kid questions about machine arithmetic vs human arithmetic (3 questions or so...) he would not get past the first machine question: Can computers divide? It would just be eyes-in-the-headlights!

So, yes, go ahead and hit the online or brick-and-mortar for training.

I recommend Java for one because of all the JVM based frameworks out there right now (see devrates.com).

And, because the employers want a rediculous stack of techno including Java.

If the University Computer Science depts want to slam something for the demise and de-professionalization of the Software Engineer then they need not look any further than:

• Corporate America, all military branches and the U.S. Gov. in general for supporting the worst programming OS and platform in the world: MS .NET and the related hodgepodge of glued together tools ever devised under the name of: Software Engineering.
• The U.S. Congress and Senate for allowing the abuse of the 1950 H1B Visa Act. And, for allowing large finanical institutions to outsource and offshore their huge Java based (web-based) business applications to China, Pakistan and India et. al.
• http://www.comptia.org/ what's-up-with-that? A few weeks in some center or school and you have an A+ certification or MCSE! Let's see one of these vocation school Software Engineers design and install a wire-wrap card into an AT bus (EISA if you are up to it)! Let's see just one of these Geek Squad types write a single line of Assembly language and explain in detail what is happening on the registers and memory while the program is executing?
• I was an ANSI C programmer for 7 years in a heavy duty Research Facility. And, Java saved my programming career. I would have quit by now with all the frustrations that are allowed in C++ and ANSI C. C is a great tool for Systems programming and smaller projects but the ever bigger Enterprise level applications are still written in Java and its FrameWorks spawned from Sun Microsystems Java JDK. Java VM and the new JDK concurrent classes and folks like: http://www.azulsystems.com/ are putting a serious implementation into what is possible using Java. I don't see similar inroads in any other language
• Quoting Peter Lin of Jakarta Apache JMeter project:
  I find .NET fine for simple applications that are easily outsourced, but for large enterprise applications it's lacking in most areas.