| HN Mirror

There's also pigeonholing. I've seen it happen plenty of times. If you helpdesk even momentarily, to pay the loans and get some food, you'll never touch an IDE again professionally until you scrub that from the resume. Replace some dude's mouse and you'll never compile source code for pay again. Ever. You're done with paid software development forever never to be permitted to return. I've seen it happen to decent enough programmers...

Looking at ops post history he's a C++ robotics guy and HR will never let that resume past unless its a specifically C++ Robotics position. In IT you gotta treat your successful past jobs or degrees like other professions would treat a minor cocaine habit, well, uh, sure I accept that a long time ago I wrote Perl, way too much Perl, did lines and lines of it, but that was a bad time in my life, which is over, and my true calling, as my heavily doctored resume indicates, is I've always been a Scala guy. Even when I started computer work in 1981, my first 23 years in computing, I was really was a deeply stealth Scala guy, I always knew back when I was writing Z80 assembly code decades before Scala was invented that I really wanted to program in Scala, I just had to kind of do it in Z80 assembly the first few years. Did I tell you how when I was writing MVS CICS mainframe code I was totally writing it just like I was using Clojurescript Hoplon last week? Yeah totally man, really. Well anyway its all good now and my parole officer, er, I mean life coach, says I've turned my life around. Sure I do a line or two of Perl on the weekends or when I get really drunk, just like everyone else, amiright? but it never negatively affects my work life. Thank God that Larry Wall tattoo I got in prison err, I mean when I was doing lines of Perl, is on my butt and not my face, that would be totally awkward to explain at interviews. Sniff. Oh geeze I hope you guys aren't gonna be like IBM where they tested me at the clinic to see if I still had a problem with recreational Perl use, sure I came up positive and I still say that test was rigged. I mean you run SLOCCOUNT on anyone's entire github repo its gonna come up positive for a couple lines of Perl, everyone does it and I'm actually a lower risk because I did lines and lines of Perl until I couldn't handle it, and after treatment I'm totally better and less likely than some rando off the street to get addicted to Perl, I gained a lot of wisdom and experience the hard way, and I can grind awesome prison shanks out of a plastic spoon and oh sorry got a little off topic there we were talking about how I was a Scala programmer for 23 years before it was invented. And a damn good one too aside from doing a couple lines of Perl on the side, but I'm all good now. Yeah its crazy and the last paragraph was a little over the top but it really is the only profession I know of where you have to downplay past success like other professions would try to hand wave away a minor drug problem.