[Tichy]

To be fair, hunting a job while in another job is much trickier. It actually takes quite some time to write applications and so on (that's how I remember it anyway). Not saying it is impossible, but I can imagine that "just take any job" could be counter productive.

[gaius]

4-5 job applications per week you could manage while actually in full time work tho'...

[capital_omega]

Also, though a lot of people won't admit to it, he's putting himself in danger by taking a mediocre job. He can very easily be typecast into that sort of role for a long time.

[PonyGumbo]

Is it a bigger danger to work in a mediocre job than to have a two year span of unemployment on his resume?

[Tichy]

I'd say yes - I was pigeonholed as a Java Developer for 10 years...

[tansey]

Oh come on. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps if you don't like that. Find a hot new language and play with it in your spare time. Start an open source project with it. Contribute to the community. Then apply to jobs with that knowledge and skill set on your resume, and you'll break out of that role. Just have to want it.

[ihumanable]

Agreed, I worked in .Net and Java for a few years, decided I wanted to get back to PHP, started up an open source project, started talking about it and mastering the language in my free time. Now I work a PHP job that I love and I like to think having a couple thousand lines of example code out in the wild gave me an edge.

[capital_omega]

I don't know, but I think both are bad. If I were him, I'd probably bump the college degree by a couple years.