Whirlpool

Yesterday all us developers got dragged into the boardroom to basically be told "you're all being made redundant" - which means I'm now off job hunting over the next few days/weeks.

For the past 3 1/2 years I've been employed as a senior Java dev (with another 5 years of Java, PHP, C etc), though we've only been dealing with SE (though lots of very complicated things in my role - multithreaded apps, writing binary flash files... stuff like that, and have been using glassfish/JRun for its SE features) - but haven't touched EE for more than investigation, or any of the technologies which tend to go hand-in-hand these days - Hibernate, Spring, Struts, those kinds of things.
They're pretty much checklist items on every EE job out there.

That said, I'm not sure if I really want to stay doing Java work, and thought it might be a good chance to swing in a different direction - possibly .NET.

What I'd like to find out is how many companies would be likely to consider someone who's only done .NET stuff for uni courses and little small projects of their own over the years once or twice, if they've been heavily involved in Java for the past years?
Similarly, if you were to bring someone on with that knowledge, what kind of salary hit or role demotion might you expect them to take?

My thoughts on this are that languages and the like can be quickly and easily picked up by any good developer, as can new technologies and patterns - we do it all the time - and when we've hired people we've had this in mind, having hired Java people for ActionScript roles, PHP people for Java roles - but I'm worried other employers might not see it the same way.

Can anyone comment on their own recent experiences with this kind of thing when looking for new jobs or career changes?
Might this alternatively need to be something a lot of learning and playing around with might be necessary for before going around hunting for jobs?

Zero  writes...

Can anyone comment on their own recent experiences with this kind of thing when looking for new jobs or career changes?

Our technical architect was from the java world i helped him with the asp.net/C# basics. Knowing the same concepts which transcend languages made things very very easy. In about 6 weeks time he was producing much better code, though you would expect that from an architect….

If a had the choice between a good VB6 Developer and a good JEE developer for a .NET project - I would take the JEE guy every time.

C# syntactically is very similar to java and is a core .NET language.

You're right about good developers can move fairly easily between languages, the hard part is proving you're a good developer.

When I've been interviewing people I try and ask them generic algorithm and computer architecture questions and tell them to use their favourite language for examples. I'd rather have someone who gets the fundamentals than a guy who knows the intricate details of a particular C++ compiler.

C# and Java are very similar, but be careful about people who say, "it's easy to pick up." There's quite a few subtleties that make a big difference. e.g.: int and Int32 are exactly the same in C#, which can be surprising for Java devs who think they're writing fast code using unboxed ints when they're not.

just as an aside, I have been a .net developer for the last 5 years, haven't touched java ever, but in this new job i started in recently, I was required to make a few changes in Java. Coming from C# to Java there was really no huge differences syntactically, except some things were called different names (like stringbuffer as opposed to string builder).

Honestly, I don't think you'll have any problems if your employer knows anything about employing developers, as it's been mentioned before, decent developers should be able to move between any language pretty easily.

lomaxx writes...

Coming from C# to Java there was really no huge differences syntactically, except some things were called different names (like stringbuffer as opposed to string builder).

As of Java 5, StringBuilder is available in addition to StringBuffer. StringBuffer is designed to be thread safe and thus many of its methods are synchronised. This is not the case for StringBuilder which is generally faster and appropriate for use in single-threaded applications. If you already know this I probably misinterpreted your post but thought I would point it out.

I've worked with more .Net than Java - but find the syntax and way of doing things pretty similar.

You should have no real problem picking up .Net

I don't think you will have too much issues getting a .net role.
It is a matter of whether you are going to keep bagging .net coming from a java world :)

C# is a big amalgamation of different programming languages, but mostly Java, so you won't have any trouble picking it up. Personally I think it is generally an improvement on Java, so you might find it fun.

Doing web forms with ASP .NET is a different matter, and can take quite a while to get the hang of. There are some annoying and complex aspects (page life-cycle, way too many high level abstractions of otherwise straight forward HTML etc). If you've done web development in PHP or even old ASP, you might actually find this is a bit of a liability and you'll be doing a lot of "forgetting everything you know".

So you might find yourself 6 months back on C#, but 12 months back on ASP .NET. It could be worse though, and there are plenty of jobs around at the moment, so hopefully you'll have no troubles.

I was offered a C#/.NET position for my current job, with only C/C++ experience. A co-worker only had Java experience before starting as a C# developer.

It seems few companies, unfortunately, are willing to take people on without experience in the language they use, but there are, thankfully, a few companies out there that will. And I'd bet that these companies are actually better to work for, at least in some ways, as they understand that your approach to development, design skills, problem solving abilities, etc, are what is important, not just knowing the language syntax or libraries.

Hi Zero,

At the company I work at, our architect is all about fundamentals as opposed to the language per se. So it will be pretty easy for you to dive into .NET. Also just for the heads up, if you're interested, my company is hiring right now. So let me know if you're interested.

Winston.