Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Making BIDs (Blessings in Disguise)

   As some of you already know, I am no longer with Rosetta Stone.  Long story short, I've been "let go".  Tragedy, you might think?  Comedy, in some ways, perhaps.  But I'm hoping to making it a turning point of my history.  How?  By making it a BID -- a Blessing In Disguise.

   Those of you who have seen my code blog, codosaur.us, know I like the Ruby programming language.  (I'll try not to make the rest of you get eye-glazed from geeky details.)  But I just spent the past almost-year working in ActionScript.  Getting let go, frees me up to pursue Ruby, before it starts requiring five years of prior experience like most Java jobs.  You could say I missed the Java boat, and don't want to miss, if you'll pardon the expression, the Ruby yacht.  :-)

   It's not just me, either.  When you were a child, your mama probably read you many stories in which events that looked bad, turned out to be good, and sometimes vice-versa.  But unlike in this book, or this blog post, sometimes it takes an active effort to make it so.  That's where the daring, subject of this blog, comes into it.

   How so, you may ask?  Well, I have a lot more experience in some other programming languages -- literally decades in C.  So, it would probably be a lot easier for me to find work there, right?  Yes, for now... but let's look a few years down the road.  Suppose Ruby takes off like Java took off (and I think it will).  Then I'd be locked out of another language, going obsoleter and obsoleter.  A little more daring now, by pushing harder to land Ruby work now than I did for landing Java work while Java was getting hot, rather than falling back on C, can set me up for a much better career later.

   As usual, it's now your turn!  What disasters have you turned into blessings?  What disasters do you think you could have turned into blessings, had you dared?

2 comments:

  1. Sorry about the job loss. I interviewed at Rosetta Stone 4 years ago after SunRocket went belly up. I can't remember why, but I remember not pursuing it because the job wasn't for me (I did pass on the contact to a colleague at SunRocket whom I thought was perfect for the job).

    Even though I haven't done Rails yet (getting there), I too am a convert to Ruby.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Are you free Tuesday evenings? NoVaRUG has formed NewbieOnRails, a Tuesday evening class / study group at Reston Town Center. Dave Bock is leading it, with Russ Olsen along for additional guru advice. Most of the students (about six IIRC) already knew what Rails was but had not used it -- in fact some hadn't even installed it (successfully). I'm sort of in the middle -- done a few things so I can help out (played Substitute Teacher last time), but can still learn from Dave and Russ.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.