owinebarger

A recent thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1176962 about a Giles Bowkett blog post went long on the solicitous nature of the article but ignored the most interesting claims:

  Most programmers I know seem to respond to job searches
  by learning new programming languages. The logic there is
  pretty weak. "I can't get a job with a language I know, so
  why don't I see instead if I can get a job with a language
  I don't know." Learning new languages is a good thing, but
  there's a time and a place for everything. It's never a
  matter of your skills being stale; there are still COBOL
  jobs out there. If you're good at programming, and you
  can't get a job, the skill to improve is not your
  programming skill but your job-getting skill. If you've got
  a task that requires two skills, and you have one of those
  skills down solid, but you suck at the other skill, the
  thing to do is not spend even more time perfecting the
  skill you already have down solid.

As someone thinking about working in programming after not doing much real programming for a few years, I am interested in whether he's right or not. I am actually planning to dive into learning a new language or relearning C++ with its current set of metaprogramming features and extensive libraries.