Shooting myself in the foot

HaVoC

Ok I went to a job interview recently, it was for an analysis programmer position.
My problem is that the system their using is 15 years old and works off a dumb terminal. What’s more is that the system/language that it is using is propriety to the company.

So what do I gain by being employed by these people am I better not taking the job if I get offered it?

Bare in mind that my current job is jack of trades tech in a factory, where I do a bit of coding, nothing of any great complexity though.


PS

mods move to work forum if ya have a problem

damnyanks

Depends, what are your career plans? What do you eventually want to do ?

HaVoC

My Career plan , would be to become a developer in something like the area of j2EE or .NET and maybe later move onto contracting.

Kernel32

I would be wary of this. I recently ran into a small bunch of guys who were laid of from an insurance software company. They were using a propriety language similar to Pro IV. They are now unable to find work. They had 6 figure salaries when they got laid off. Propriety is only useful if its from the big guys like Peoplesoft.

HaVoC

That’s exactly my fear Kernel32, the language is a 4gl language similar to SQL, so I wouldn’t even be able to reuse there design methods in an other job.

Got a phone call from the recruitment agency asking how I got on, I said I needed to seek advice on taking the job, I am going to turn it down if they offer it to me .. I think.

Afuera

If you get offered the job, why not tell them straight up that you're not too keen on getting pigeonholed into their propiatry system and ask them if they have any plans to migrate things in the future? If something like that was in the pipeline then you could pick up some valuable experience going through that whole procedure.

If they don't seem to know what they want to do for the future or their not willing to be flexible then there's probably not much scope in taking the position there.

The Corinthian

My gut feeling would be to walk away. Proprietary systems and languages can be a useful niche to carve out for yourself, but as with any niche the number of jobs in them (while well paid) are very small. If you already had a few years of a mainstream language under your belt, you could always return to that if things didn’t work out, but as you’re a jack-o-trades at present, that means that you’ll have nothing to fall back on if the market in the proprietary system / language is dead.

Additionally, I’d be very suspicious of any company that refuses to upgrade it’s systems even after 15 years, as this type of stagnant approach may well spread out into other areas (such as HR).

Hobbes

HaVoC wrote:

That’s exactly my fear Kernel32, the language is a 4gl language similar to SQL, so I wouldn’t even be able to reuse there design methods in an other job.

You haven't seen the full system yet but 4gl+SQL are both used in the industry. You could use those to learn more about other systems. There is nothing stopping you learning about other technologies while working?

The only way I'd see dropping the job is if the pay/benefits aren't that good.

The Corinthian

Afuera wrote:

If you get offered the job, why not tell them straight up that you're not too keen on getting pigeonholed into their propiatry system and ask them if they have any plans to migrate things in the future? If something like that was in the pipeline then you could pick up some valuable experience going through that whole procedure.

I’d be very weary about this. Whenever getting a new job or signing a contract, any promises are either on paper, otherwise it’s just conversation.

I’m not saying that these guys will lie - they might genuinely be planning a migration in the future - but if it comes to it and they decide they can’t justify the expense of a migration for even the most benign of reasons then they simply won’t.

After all, they’re not going to migrate their system because you want to learn new skills. I’m afraid that’s simply not a factor.

Hobbes

The Corinthian wrote:

Additionally, I’d be very suspicious of any company that refuses to upgrade it’s systems even after 15 years, as this type of stagnant approach may well spread out into other areas (such as HR).

Quite a lot of companies don't upgrade thier systems for quite some time. I had seen government/insurance IT departments running software systems older then me. One of my earlier jobs actually had hardware systems in place that were built in the 1970's, simply because to rebuild the systems from scratch would cost too much both in design + day to day business. It worked out cheaper to hire qualified contracters for insane cash.

Even now some customers I work with are using software thats 8+ years old and refuse to update, and some of those that do update can take a year or more before the process is allowed go through the system.

The Corinthian

Hobbes wrote:

Quite a lot of companies don't upgrade thier systems for quite some time.

I never denied that a lot of companies don't upgrade their systems for quite some time, only that I’m suspicious of such companies.

Of course, sometimes it can make sense not to upgrade for decades at a time, but quite often such upgrades are not done because of internal stagnation and / or short-term penny pinching. Many State and large private bodies suffer from the former, where internal politics and managers with nothing to gain from such a move (other than hassle) will shy away from it.

As for the ‘spending pounds to save pennies’ syndrome; I wrote, for example, a system for a company back in 1994 that was finally upgraded in 2004. They didn’t upgrade it not because it made sense not to do so or that it would even be cheaper simply to hack it, but because they didn’t want to allocate the budget for an upgrade, even though it was cheaper to do so than the alternative when a cost-benefit analysis was done on the system.

Systems are like cars, sooner or later you’re going to have to buy a new one, as the old one will become both unserviceable and unusable. How long that takes varies and some well-designed systems can indeed continue being used for decades, but from experience, most are not kept on for the right reasons and hence my tendency towards suspicion.

sailorfoley

If you want to learn .Net my advice would be to try and get a junior position somewhere. .Net is fairly handy to pick up and if you have prior programming experience, a lot of the concepts are similar.
Best of luck

Question: "When do you learn XML?"
Answer: "When you open your mind beyond windows"

HaVoC

sailorfoley wrote:

Question: "When do you learn XML?"
Answer: "When you open your mind beyond windows"

hehe that sig is from my college project days last year came from w3 schools I think

I dont really mind what i do .NET ot java as long as I learn stuff I can use later on in my career

*havoc wanders back to irishjobs and continues to spam CV's

sailorfoley

If you keep an eye on irishjobs.ie you could find start up companies that are willing to hire people with little experience because they can't afford to pay top dollar for experienced guru's. this way you could get experience and learn as you go along.

Not for the faint at heart however!

bpmurray

Is this 4gl really proprietary? Or is it just something you haven't come across before? For example, something like Informix 4GL has now migrated to EGL, an enterprise-level language used to migrate to J2EE; ACCELL is still quite popular & runs on a bunch of different DBs, no longer tied to Unify DB, etc.