
What truly sucks
is that I was brought in to convert classic ASP web pages and their supporting legacy VBScript code into .NET and C#. 3 weeks after being hired last summer they fired the director who hired me. 2 months later I was assigned to a manager out of the Toronto office, a team that was maintaining old code - the stuff that WASN'T going to be converted. All attempts to prove some of this stuff should have been kept and converted failed, as did all attempts to get onto a team working with more marketable IT skills. Numerous recruiters that I've talked to this year have told me how screwed I was because of my age and lack of "being current"; they all sympathized that I was being held responsible for the decisions of previous employers not being "current" in languages and software packages. Unfortunately, there's very little I can do about it - learning something on your own is nice, but ask anyone who has been to an interview in the past several years how much weight being self-taught is compared to having used a language at a former employer.
"Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from."
-- E.L. Doctorow