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by naivepiano 3709 days ago
OMG I remember interviewing for a company asking all the right questions and talking about nice tech stacks and whatnot. People were nice too. Then I got an offer and I accepted it. First day in the job I figure that their main tech/language was TCL (of course they never mentioned it in the interviews). Stayed 2 weeks and went off running. The possibility of being stuck with some backwater tech killing off your future prospects is yet another of the freaking traps in this job.
2 comments
dkopi 3709 days ago
"First day in the job I figure that their main tech/language was TCL (of course they never mentioned it in the interviews)."

And you've never asked?

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naivepiano 3709 days ago
Of course I did. They lied with "java".
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pc86 3709 days ago
Don't you think it's much more likely that their stack is largely Java but you were working on a largely TCL piece of it, than it is that they decided to lie and trick you into taking a job you wouldn't otherwise want?
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naivepiano 3709 days ago
No - I don't think that because I stayed there long enough to make sure that the lion's share was TCL. What they said they meant with "java" was that they were going to rewrite the thing in java (this -4 years later- is yet to happen afaik). Even if it were that I was to dive in their TCL hell still I was tricked big time to agree to that. I'm afraid though that this was not that uncommon as there are numerous backwater positions (aka "legacy") that are in desperate need for maintainers.

Note: that's not to be racist against TCL but things being what they are in the trade - spending 3 miserable years with TCL expertise to show in my CV would be suicidal.

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gaius 3709 days ago
Your username is well chosen - Tcl is a very underrated language. I'll wager they engineer rings around their competition. Good luck with the Java. You know it's the new COBOL right?
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naivepiano 3709 days ago
Tcl may be the best language in the known universe (highly doubt it) but try running a job search for it in linkedin. Then do the same for java. I'm not the damned CEO you know. I need to think of my own employability/career.
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JustSomeNobody 3708 days ago
That is the saddest part of our industry. There are so many cool and interesting technologies we'd like to work with, but we can't if we actually want to feed our families.
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