3.3 - Skills

I have about 5 months to find a new job. So far my efforts have been weak. I have discovered that most people who are looking for "software development managers" think my management skills are exactly what they need, but they are looking for someone who will still be doing technical work as well. The range seems to be somewhere between 20% and 50% technical, which means I really need to upgrade my skills to be competitive.

Somehow, after 15 years in IT, I managed to miss out on Visual everything. I can talk intelligently about object oriented programming and design. I've written quite a bit in ASP.NET (C#!) without using Visual Studio (long story). I've taken several online courses in Visual Studio, and ventured in on my own a few times, but I'm really still not comfortable in that environment

For example, in the online courses, they have you clicking all over the place in the development tool for five minutes or so, then the instructions say something like "click here to see the code you developed." So I click there and see a line of code I could have typed in about seven seconds. As a guy who prides himself on concise, efficient code, it just doesn't feel quite right.

Microsoft has this long and glorious history of making really difficult things easy and really easy things difficult, and it seems to me they've taken my simple text editor and replaced it with a screen full of menus and buttons. I'm frustrated... and off topic.

Anyway, I signed up for a Visual Basic.NET class at the local community college, and went to my first class last night. I figure I'm probably the oldest guy in the class and as educated as the teacher, but I think it's the only way I can force myself to learn Visual Studio. I've already learned a couple things that could have kept me from looking like a complete idiot in my last interview.

With all four of us going to school, it's going to be an interesting and educational fall.