This thread is deteriorating and I'm afraid this email is going to
sound a bit pissy. It's really not intended to but I'm just not sure
how to respond to this line of thought without getting personal (and
Eric and I got personal the last time this topic came up - I'm just
not a very sympathetic soul sometimes...).
Delete or read on at your peril. Sorry.
On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 9:32 PM, Eric Roberts
<ow...@threeravensconsulting.com> wrote:
> I am sure you also make a lot more than I do (combined household that
> is...especially if your wife has an MBA...mine is going for her CAN
> certificate) Sean ;-)
Charlie clearly reads better than you do - my wife does not work; I am
the sole breadwinner. My wife hasn't worked in over 11 years (because
I asked her to quit the job she hated - no one should do a job they
don't enjoy).
Do I make more than you? Almost certainly, I'm afraid. Over the years
I've invested in my career, paying out of my own pocket to take
training courses and go to conferences, as well as dedicating enough
of my personal, non-work time to learn new technologies and improve my
marketability. I expect I'm also waaayyyy older than you and just have
more experience. I started in IT in about '82 while I was in college
and I've been doing full-time IT for about 25 years now.
I love technology. I've always loved technology. It's been my passion
since I was a kid. I started with programmable calculators, then a
correspondence course in Algol 60 (at my school - seriously!). At
university I learned Basic, then Pascal, then about a dozen other
languages. A friend gave me a job doing C programming after college. I
pushed hard to work with C++ ('92) and then Java ('97). Recently I've
pushed myself to learn a new language every year on my own time
(Groovy '08, Scala '09, Clojure '10). Some of those I've been lucky
enough to use at work as well. I buy a lot of books to improve my
skills - they're tax deductible BTW.
Every CF developer should buy and read "Seven Languages in Seven
Weeks" (and do the homework!). My copy is just out of reach right now
but it's close by. It's an investment in yourself. Learn Ruby, Io,
Prolog, Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell and apply them to your CFML
programming.
Anyone you look up to as an expert got there through hard work and
self-investment. There's no magic. It's about hard work and
priorities. You choose whether to improve yourself and what you'll
achieve. CFML has been very good to many of us here - it's enabled us
to make a living doing something we might never have thought was
possible. But it shouldn't all be about CFML - don't expect CFML, or
ColdFusion, or Adobe / Macromedia / Allaire to hand you your career on
a platter... you have to invest too.
Hmm, that sounds a bit like a sermon. Sorry, I warned you :) If you
read this far, thank you. We make ourselves what we are. We choose to
be better... or not.
--
Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://getrailo.com/
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive."
-- Margaret Atwood
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