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The Workplace

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    Do I have this right: You took 2.5 years off, then you spent 1 year part-time learning, then you spend 1 year working in an outdated stack, and then you were finally able to get your career back on track? Commented Jul 17, 2020 at 13:39
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    The year of part time learning was simultaneous with the first job - as the phrase "In the meantime" indicates. They only had a partially outdated tech stack and the job was VERY well-paid. I took 2.5 years off between jobs. Old job ended 2015, new one started 2017. I have not considered myself to have a "career" since .. well probably ever really. I have jobs. Some good some bad. I used to be a contractor - a gun for hire, so I guess I am not too fussy? Commented Jul 20, 2020 at 15:18
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    @kpollock Sorry, the structure of that sentence was so complex with parentheticals and hyphentheticals that I had a little trouble parsing it. There is a huge difference between what I wrote (2.5 years not working at a cost of 2 years getting back on track) vs what actually happened (2.5 years not working at a cost of 1 year off track, but only slightly and well paid). Commented Jul 20, 2020 at 18:14
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    @stannius: It's quite possible to have an interesting career (well, interesting to me - tastes differ) without working with the latest fad toolset. I make a good living doing mostly C (with additions like CUDA), and have even dealt with a bit of Fortran in the last couple of years. They may seem "outdated" to some, but there are employers who'll pay well for people who can deal with them. Or consider that COBOL programmers are currently in demand: cacm.acm.org/news/… Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 3:53
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    @stannius, sorry, maybe speaking German for the past 5 years has made my English sentence structure even more complex or confusing. Learning German was one thing I did during the 2nd year off. That first job was in German (nobody there spoke English!). I actually had 3 decent job offers, all interviews in German. I would definitely advise anyone to budget a year to learn another language. Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 8:28