Learning another programming language question..

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

The problem I find is that with 15 years of web dev experience (of which 10 years is with PHP) I'm too skilled. The usual company logic is "Why pay for 15 years when you can get away with 3-5 years? What can 15 years really bring to the table?". My thinking is those companies deserve what they get

Thats why you need to move out of web development. I'n the 7yrs I've been deving in PHP, I only spent 12 mths as a web developer, the rest has been internal applications. Here you cannot be too experienced and the older, the better.

 

[Roo!]

Your comment reminded me of this: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com...techie-just-15-years/articleshow/17251620.cms

I don't agree with this article. Not from a defensive, self-preserving point of few but rather that a developer's tools, storage and transfer mediums may change but formal logic is formal logic and pitfalls, shortcomings and troubleshooting techniques (things I find separate a good developer from the rest) will always remain relevant and pretty constant.

 

[Roo!]

Thats why you need to move out of web development. I'n the 7yrs I've been deving in PHP, I only spent 12 mths as a web developer, the rest has been internal applications. Here you cannot be too experienced and the older, the better.

I agree totally with you. Enterprise is really where the big stuff happens, which is why I have jumped into a new job that's going to push my Java skills through the roof. Although I do sometimes feel that Java is the current world's equivalent to the 90's Cobol.
Great marketing got these companies to buy into it and now they are bound to it even though there are newer, more efficient methods to achieve the same goals.

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

I agree totally with you. Enterprise is really where the big stuff happens, which is why I have jumped into a new job that's going to push my Java skills through the roof. Although I do sometimes feel that Java is the current world's equivalent to the 90's Cobol.
Great marketing got these companies to buy into it and now they are bound to it even though there are newer, more efficient methods to achieve the same goals.

If I had to jump the PHP ship, it would be to Java. Its matured nicely and its found its happy place. PHP is only hitting puberty now, has at least 5yrs to go before it grows up.

 

[zippy]

I agree totally with you. Enterprise is really where the big stuff happens, which is why I have jumped into a new job that's going to push my Java skills through the roof. Although I do sometimes feel that Java is the current world's equivalent to the 90's Cobol.
Great marketing got these companies to buy into it and now they are bound to it even though there are newer, more efficient methods to achieve the same goals.

You should also consider writing apps for smartphones and tablets.

Currently about 16.7 % of cell phone users own smartphones.
http://mobithinking.mobi/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a#smartphonepenetration

It might be tempting to interpret that stat negatively by saying its a small market why bother, but actually that indicates room for growth.

Even in the US, less than 50% of mobile phones are smartphones.

The next step up from smartphones is a tablet. There is some market research that shows that its a natural progression for consumers to migrate to a smartphone, then to a tablet, although obviously not implying that everyone with a dumb phone will get a tablet

The biggest market is currently iOS for the iPhone and iPad, which requires Objective C skills. It's an easy language to learn, as its a subset of C. A lot of the difficult bits about C are hidden, such as memory management.

I say easy to learn, only if you already do development. And web design is not development
If you are getting paid to write code on a daily basis, then you can, with EFFORT pick up java, objective C etc.

Android is getting more popular. It's basically java.

Java and IOS are not that different although you can't share code.
http://m.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/developers-eye-view-smartphone-platforms-565

And let's not forget about HTML 5, although, even in the US, a lot of people feel that the risk of latency and dropping connections is still too high for many mobile applications that require regular networks just to refresh a screen.

 

[guest2013-1]

I have not researched this, but what would be a major reason for choosing either php/asp.net for a project?
Is it a skills issue or cost of the dev environment or something else?

It highly depends per company. For example, the company I work with now is a "Microsoft House", so everything has to be MS technology. Some others grew up with Linux etc.

The cost difference between Linux and MS is also something you need to look at (both in terms of maintaining/licensing etc), and if you have the skills in the company already, you'd stick with Linux.

So you won't go LAMP if you're already Windows based and vice versa (unless there's a shift to open source from management). Normally it's cheaper to get a PHP dev to do a quick site for you (there's millions of them) than it would be a MS one. So decisions are made on cost itself too.

But when it comes to web apps, the thinking is a bit different. For example Facebook is PHP/MySQL because it was free/open source and cheap to run/expand vs MS licensing etc.