Dear lj

[jossish]

If your work were going to pay for you to go and learn a programming language so you had some kind of technical knowledge that would help you with managing IT projects and potentially with moving up the career ladder within IT, what would you learn? Bearing in mind you only have some feeble HTML and CSS knowledge and have struggled to pick up anything else through lack of good teaching & understanding.

Comments

[jossish.livejournal.com]

I think pretty much anything - I had a conversation with the director this morning and he essentially said that in terms of working here, if I want to stay in IS, I need some experience as an analyst, some as a project manager, and some as a technical person to give me credibility as a manager. Whether I agree with that or not, I would like to try and learn a programming language because I've struggled with trying to learn in the past and I'd like to know if that's because I just can't do it, or if it's because I've had bad teachers.

He suggested Visual Basic but that seems to tie me very much to Windows. I know Java is hard, so not that. I need to find out what else our developers use & therefore what might be useful for me in terms of working here (as well as being a transferable language for other workplaces), but I thought I'd ask the internet too, cos the internet is smart!

[grendelyn.livejournal.com]

I had to do that stuff too -- I did all web development for about a year before I got into hardware.

You can't go wrong with VB or Java, but neither is really terribly exciting, IMHO. (VB is pretty important though.) Is there a hardware/CISCO/infrastructure kind of track?