Tuesday, December 8, 2009

To Blog, or Not To Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog post.   Sometimes I wonder if I should even bother.   In my profession, which is computer programming, they say you ought to do a blog to get your thoughts and ideas out there, be visible and searchable on the web.   In the same breath, they say to be careful of what you post on the Internet because a prospective employer might search on you and you don’t want them to find anything questionable.    Kinda takes the fun out the Internet to have to worry about stuff like that, lol.

I would do a professional blog except that my most recent experience in the profession was with antiques, VMS, BASIC, COBOL and Visual Basic 6.0 (which, if you know anything about it, was replaced by VB.NET long ago).   Not much motivation there to blog about that stuff.    Besides which, I recently “outsourced” and no longer have a job, even one working with old languages such as those.  

I suppose I could rail on about outsourcing in general and my situation in particular, but the severance agreement was conditional on not badmouthing the company, nor do I really wish to do so.   They made their choice, whether I agree with the merits of it or not.

Being unemployed in a down economy is no fun.   Add to that, the profession that I have my years of experience in is by and large being off-shored and outsourced, making jobs harder still to find.   And there’s the relative obsolescence of my skills, technology changes so fast and one big drawback to staying with the same company for 7 years is a lack of opportunity to learn the latest and greatest.   In retrospect, I should have found a new job years ago, one that would have given me the chance to get experience in the technology I need to know to get and keep a job in my profession.  

So, here I am with years of experience, the natural abilities to learn and excel in my job, but without the experience necessary to get a job that would allow me to do that.     Even in an up economy the likelihood of getting a job where they’d take a risk and give me a chance to prove myself is slim, I don’t expect to find such a job now.    

Maybe if I were more of an A type personality, things would have turned out differently, I don’t know.   If I had it to do over again, I’d never have become a computer programmer.    Always wanted to be an engineer, should have done that.  

I suppose everyone gets to a point in their lives where they see every life decision as a misstep, wish they could change things, and struggle to convince themselves that they can change things from here on out.   I’m there, now, and it’s hard.

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