TL;DR - Got as close to a dream job as I could have wanted, after 6 months lost it. Now, with only experience in Clojure and Scala, and seemingly stuck in Utah, not sure what's the best next course of action.
I'm putting this out there because of all the good experiences I've had over the years with people in the Clojure community. I very much value what you all have done and do. As best I can tell you're the salt of the earth. I'm a rather newly minted programmer. Six months on the job. I claim Clojure as my first language simply because I never saw my initial tryst with VB.NET and Visual Studio as being much more than tinkering/not really understanding. It's kind of a long and convoluted story as to how I got here, I can share it if anyone's interested, but for now let's just say that my 6 years of trying to learn Clojure in my spare time landed me my first official programming gig ... learning Scala. Being a bit tied to Utah (fiscally and family-wise at the moment) this seemed to be the best chance I had at starting my professional programming career on as close to my terms as possible, so I took it. I still like Clojure better than Scala (though I've learned a lot using Scala), but these last six months programming in a professional environment has cemented for me that I absolutely love programming. Being able to work in a code repository of functional, industry oriented code and doing real stuff that made a difference, I'll just say I never thought work could be so enjoyable, nor that I'd ever have the chance to work with so many smart and good people. Unfortunately, as an outgrowth of my newness, company politics and a change in team management I was told to look for a job elsewhere. I got right to work and applied to everything that looked anything close to what I then had. I was amazed, the first four I applied to all responded well. And as a plus they all were either using, or experimenting with either Clojure or Scala. Unfortunately, as unexpected as the job loss was for myself, it hit my wife even harder, we've not had an easy time our first 4 years of marriage on the economic side of things and emotionally she was rather paralyzed by this news. This combined in an unfortunate way with the fact that all four places quickly responded to me and, also in a difficult way, with a few decisions in how to approach the coding challenges I was given. In short, I was not terribly impressive for any of the four companies. Ironically the one company where I felt I did the worst has been the most understanding and is willing to give me a second chance after I take a couple of challenges they've given me. The problem I'm looking for help with is to know how to approach this in the best way that keeps me bringing in food for and keeping a roof over the head of my wife and son, all this hopefully without sidelining my career goals, to the extent that that's possible. While I can't go and do a hard ruling out of anything, the whole relocation idea to where jobs are would be an insanely tough sell. I'm not sure if anyone would take on a remote worker as green as myself. And here, where I'm at in Utah, is hardly full of companies ready to take some guy who has 6 months of Scala experience and only self-taught (and what most would consider 'hobby' experience) with Clojure. Aside from the fact that very few even know what those languages are is the fact that since I've been so focused on functional programming I'm really hard pressed to show people what I know and what I can do. And then finding someone willing to take a chance on me. I'd like to avoid the tech support jobs I've had before as they would both pay substantially less AND they would be significant distractions on the time for me to move forward and learn. I just feel like I'm on the cusp of being a very productive and capable programmer and, at the same time, like it's all trying to get away from me. I'm trying to learn and apply what I know in the time between applying for work and handling all the other miscellany connected with that and keeping my little family going. And while I can't rule out school I'm having a hard time justifying it in my mind when I feel like I'm so close to being a very capable programmer. I've really studied a great deal on a significant number of things, everything from Relational database theory to things like REST and HATEOAS as well as having used a little of Instaparse a previous job (one of the big helps in getting the Scala job). Most recently I've been dabbling in Om and Pedestal in my own time, I've also gotten my hands wet with a bit of CSS & SASS. And, while not entirely connected to coding, I grew up around Illustrator and Photoshop and am very conversant in Graphic Design (but most of my experience is for printed mediums). Any advice or suggestions? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
