This time a little more serious ones…

As you already know (because I told you a few times), I loved Code Complete, I read it twice from cover to cover, and I read a random section whenever I have the time or I'm bored.

Today I opened it at chapter 33, one of my favorites, which deals with Personal Character.

In subsection 33.3, you can read:

If your workload consists entirely of short-term assignments that don't develop your skills, be dissatisfied. If you're working in a competitive software market, half of what you now need to know in order to do your job will be out of date in three years. If you're not learning, you're turning into a dinosaur.

You're in too much demand to spend time working for management that doesn't have your interests in mind. Despite some ups and downs, the average number of software jobs available in the U.S. is expected to increase dramatically between 2000 and 2010. Jobs for systems analysts are expected to increase by 60 percent, for software engineers by 95 percent, and for computer programmers by 16 percent. For all computer-job categories combined, about 2 million new jobs will be created beyond the 2.9 million that current exist (Hecker 2001). If you can't learn at your job, find a new one.

And it's very funny because yesterday I confirmed that I am leaving my current job for (hopefully) a better one.

I want to give all of you the same advice, don't wait until you are too out of date with current technologies to realize you made a bad choice, staying some place you are comfortable, just because of that, because you will regret it.

The article extract talks about the U.S. but it's just like that in Argentina, where I am from, every company I know of is having a lot of trouble finding good people to hire, so choose a place you are happy with.

Remember, it's supposed to be fun!