Anything in development that doesn't require dealing with customers (which I am inept at) or speaking French (which is a common requirement here).
I will happily code in Java, C, C++, perl or learn something new, but everyone I see wants me to have recent experience in whatever tiny subdomain they are working in. I find it very frustrating.
One thing I've found to be a bonus skill in the past years is being able to do different kinds of sysadmining. In my current job our production servers are purely Linux and Sun machines and you'd be surprised at the number of engineers and "datamaticians" (read: short term programmer/developer/computer guy education) who have written *NIX off as being old and Linux off as being "just a toy".
If we take a look at a slightly less noble part of my personality we find that I've also gotten far by promoting my skills at the expense of others'. I took a piece of advice from a friend who told me that I tended to be a bit to "feminine" when it came to trusting my own abilities. She basically told me to brag rather than be modest. From my experiences at job interviews it looks like the company will also be bragging about how well ordered they are and so on... and in the timespan between the first job interview and the actual hiring you will have more than enough time to touch up on those skills that have become a bit rusty.
I know it's a sneaky and not very honest way of doing things, but if you know you can do the job well then I say that for the sake of ourselves the end justities the means...
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Date: 2004-11-29 03:37 pm (UTC)I will happily code in Java, C, C++, perl or learn something new, but everyone I see wants me to have recent experience in whatever tiny subdomain they are working in. I find it very frustrating.
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Date: 2004-11-30 01:11 pm (UTC)If we take a look at a slightly less noble part of my personality we find that I've also gotten far by promoting my skills at the expense of others'. I took a piece of advice from a friend who told me that I tended to be a bit to "feminine" when it came to trusting my own abilities. She basically told me to brag rather than be modest. From my experiences at job interviews it looks like the company will also be bragging about how well ordered they are and so on... and in the timespan between the first job interview and the actual hiring you will have more than enough time to touch up on those skills that have become a bit rusty.
I know it's a sneaky and not very honest way of doing things, but if you know you can do the job well then I say that for the sake of ourselves the end justities the means...