Protect your job...perhaps by learning new tech goodies
It is in the news so much recently that there is no avoiding the fact we are either in or about to go in to a recession (here in the UK that is). There is already job losses in the tech industry, wether these losses were going to happen anyway, and now is a good time to blame the economic outlook is not a topic I am trying to cover; this has been covered here. What I am trying to address really is how do you protect your job? And if you do loose your job, how do you improve your chances of getting straight back in to employment?
As you are most likely aware, ASP.Net MVC has gone beta and Silverlight 2 is out. Are you going to learn about them. What about all the other new and not so new goodies that are coming out of Microsoft?
This is my simple attempt at placing where I see these new technologies laying. Personally I am mostly working in the web world, although up until quite recently I have been moving more in to the windows development world. As it seems that Microsoft is concentrating more on web stuff than Windows stuff recently, it would be in my best interests to stay up to date with these new web related technologies and instead of becoming a jack of all and a master of none, not devote too much time using the new Windows stuff.
Scott Hanselman has now published the results of his survey looking into what .Net technologies were being used out there.
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SurveyRESULTSWhatNETFrameworkFeaturesDoYouUse.aspx]
Taking out WebForms and WindowForms, it seems that the respondents are mainly using AJAX, ASMX, WCF, ADO DataSets and then Linq to SQL. Interestingly MVC is ahead of WPF even though it is still in beta, could we expect this number to shoot up when it gets released in its final form?
As the tech industry squeezes itself, opportunities may arise for the developer wanting to learn this new stuff. Projects can be put on the back burner leaving what would be development time passed over to maintenance and leveraging the technology already in use. Part of this time could be spent learning or researching for possible future projects, perhaps creating dummy test projects which could then be demoed to the higher ups. This may be the time to go back to our primeval instincts and get the upper hand to survive what the scaremongers say could be a very difficult time ahead (it could also turn out to be not as bad as they fear, but we don't have the power of hindsight).
It is of course down to a number of things as to why a person may become unemployed, it's just that it may be in your interest to better position yourself to try and fend that situation off.