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Guidance for an experienced smalltalker

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mani kartha

Guidance for an experienced smalltalker

Hi,

First of all, this is not a technical doubt in the sense that it is not related to a code snippet, class or an IDE. But I think my doubt can be cleared only by experienced professionals in smalltalk.

I am a smalltalker with 9.5 years of software development experience (fully in smalltalk). I prefer to work in the technical side of software projects rather than the managerial side. But now I find it difficult to get job opportunities as even Senior Software Engineer job requirements find me as over experienced.

I suppose some of you are managers/employers and can tell me,

what do an employer/manager expect from an engineer with <10 years experience

1) designing,coding and debugging skills ?

2) domain knowledge?

3) soft skills like ability to communicate with team/client?

4) skills like other programming languages/tools?

5) work permit in US/Europe (since I am in India)

or something other?

I have 5-6 similarly experienced(VWST,Squeak,Pharo) friends with me and will it be easier to find work as a team ?

How can a team without a proven expertise (only those who had worked with us know about us) get a software contract?

Do we require mentor ? Do we need to have a business Development Manager ?

I am not asking for shortcuts but for a proper direction to proceed.

May be it will be easy to get some small software contracts by switching to other languages but we wanted to stick on to smalltalk as we all believe in the strength of smalltalk

What i wanted to know is, whether it is possible to grow together as a team with smalltalk skills, otherwise we will have to switch to other technologies or try to grow individually.

Thanks in advance

Mani S Kartha

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Alexandre Bergel-5

Re: Guidance for an experienced smalltalker

Hi Mani,

Here how I see the things: having a strong visit card is crucial. Such a visit card could be of different nature: leading an open source software engineering project, regularly including bugs fixes in a major project, writing books, accurately answering emails in mailing lists, solving hard problems, writing research papers, doing screencasts, etc. A visit card is made of one or more of these ingredients.

What I see around me is the following: people who have written a popular framework (e.g., magritte, seaside, athens, zinc, moose, amber) do not have and will surely not have problem to find work. This works well for students, young or experimented engineers. This is exactly how I am pushing the students and young engineers with whom I closely work.

There are many many needs around there.

Cheers,
Alexandre

On Jun 7, 2014, at 11:04 PM, mani kartha <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Hi,
> First of all, this is not a technical doubt in the sense that it is not related to a code snippet, class or an IDE. But I think my doubt can be cleared only by experienced professionals in smalltalk.
> I am a smalltalker with 9.5 years of software development experience (fully in smalltalk). I prefer to work in the technical side of software projects rather than the managerial side. But now I find it difficult to get job opportunities as even Senior Software Engineer job requirements find me as over experienced.
>
> I suppose some of you are managers/employers and can tell me,
> what do an employer/manager expect from an engineer with <10 years experience
>
> 1) designing,coding and debugging skills ?
> 2) domain knowledge?
> 3) soft skills like ability to communicate with team/client?
> 4) skills like other programming languages/tools?
> 5) work permit in US/Europe (since I am in India)
> or something other?
>
> I have 5-6 similarly experienced(VWST,Squeak,Pharo) friends with me and will it be easier to find work as a team ?
> How can a team without a proven expertise (only those who had worked with us know about us) get a software contract?
> Do we require mentor ? Do we need to have a business Development Manager ?
> I am not asking for shortcuts but for a proper direction to proceed.
> May be it will be easy to get some small software contracts by switching to other languages but we wanted to stick on to smalltalk as we all believe in the strength of smalltalk
>
> What i wanted to know is, whether it is possible to grow together as a team with smalltalk skills, otherwise we will have to switch to other technologies or try to grow individually.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Mani S Kartha
> _______________________________________________
> Esug-list mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.esug.org/mailman/listinfo/esug-list_lists.esug.org

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Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu
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