Not luck
There is a recurrent angst I feel every time I think I could be working daily in a decent programming language. Usually the management people believe the choice of programming language is irrelevant, but we developers know better. Languages shape our thoughts.
Today I found an interesting post about getting work using non-mainstream languages.
Well, unlike Java jobs or C# jobs or VB jobs, where one can scan the newspaper or go to dice.com, these magical jobs are not the ones I get when recruiters solicit me (three times a day). No, they appear between the cracks of the sky when it rends in two. All but one contract (that did come from dice.com) came from the company CEO pulling me aside or phoning me out of the blue from the materials I had published inside the company where I was employed, or from my web-sites on programming languages.
This basically means you must be a reference. You must blog a lot or, better yet, write even a book. When your name is said in a company meeting, somebody of the team must already have heard of you. Needless to say, this is not easy at all.
Usually and because of the exclusivity of the work it takes anywhere from at least 3 months to 2 years to secure these kinds of contracts, so the adage “Don’t quit your day job” is an appropriate one here. When I do get these contracts, however, they usually last longer (3 years) than the Java/C++/XML/web-services-code-grinder ones (that usually last around 6 months), and the peer group is much more intelligent, genteel and just plain more interesting than the code-grinding crowd. Is is harder to find these magical contracts? Yes, they are rarified air. But are they worth preparing for and then finding? Definitely.
Here we see that even after all this work, it is still very hard to find these dream jobs. You can wait as long as two years to get one, simply because in most companies the management employ Java/C#/VB drones anyway, as they are cheaper and easier to find. Only when they face really hard problems they start thinking of alternatives.
This post only reinforces what was already in the back of my mind for a while: The least hard way to earn money and be happy at the same time is to start an own business. Now if I could only move my lazy ass…
geophf:
Thanks for your analysis of my entry. I concur.
You also wrote: “This post only reinforces what was already in the back of my mind for a while: The least hard way to earn money and be happy at the same time is to start an own business.” I would caution you from my experience: I didn’t start my business until after I had a customer with a check waiting for a TIN. On top of that, having a business in functional/logic programming very, very rarely attracts interested customers. So one must, at times, resort to helping them over and above what they request. For example, I had to manage the entire life-cycle of a project from requirements to maintenance, including invoicing and payments, in order to write a system that they needed in my LoCh (Language of Choice). And as you note, having published works and testimonials opens pathways from interested customers to you, as it has for me.
On the other hand, I have been to the PADL/POPL/FLoC symposia, and there is quite an interest in academe in your part of the world in functional and logic programming. Enough interest to send large contingents of presenters and participants to another continent. “Interest” does not automate the business process, not at all, but where there is interest, it may be a bit easier to put forward the right business case if you listening to the right decision maker with the kind of problems you like to solve.
21 September 2008, 1:58 pm