Contracting: Accepting a job using older Visual Studio 2003... Career Suicide?

Question

I'm a contract developer and have been for the most part of 14 years. I just took a stateside lead developer role managing a small offshore team of developers.

Strike 1 was the environment... lots of contractors slammed into a small 16'x14' room. Seating is at tables. Hardware is so-so. I was able to overcome this by using my own laptop.

Strike 2 was the actual job. After I accepted it was presented that I would be spending the first month or so writing up tech specs -- not something I've normally done as that was handled by a permanent developer. But ok... I hate it, but I can do it.

Waiting on the next pitch to see if this is strike 3. But most of the current development is done on Visual studio 2003. Yep. Not 2005, not 2008, but 2003! .NET 1.1. What?!? I have suggested repeatedly 2008 for several of its features will make the task easier. But I get the "budget" reasons, etc. etc. etc. It's not yet a "NO", but not yet a "YES" either.

Had I known 1, 2 or 3... I probably would not have accepted the position. But the market is tight here and I don't want to go 2.5 months (my last long out of work period) without a job. Jobs are not rare, but they aren't plentiful either.

So my main question. If they decide to do this in VS 2003 and I spend six months using outdated technology, have I committed career suicide? Recruiters always want to know what version of what you used on each job... and I'm an honest guy. So six months from now, having been "behind the times" instead of "staying current"... does this community think that I've hurt my career? Since there was a lot of unintentional bait and switch going on, would I be wise to seek something else ASAP? I can live with #1 and #2. #3 I'm not so sure of.

Love to hear all opinions...

P.S. This is also VB.NET instead of C#. My background was classic VB and I'm "multi-lingual", but I consider VB.NET to be a foul-ball, not a full-fledged "strike". :)

UPDATE: Installed VS2008 Express for now and started some prototyping. We'll see how it goes from there. He said he ordered my Visual Studio installation, but didn't mention the version. I then told him I'd installed VS2008 and he didn't flinch. :)!

Answer 1

Sounds like this place would rate a three, four max on The Joel Test, a good indicator of a solid development environment. And I'm being charitable. All things considered, it's probably not career suicide, but it certainly sounds like the kind of place that by 11:00 the first day, you'll be hitting the job boards hard.

Answer 2

Some of our big clients are banks and financial institutions, running COM+ and SQL 2000. I don't think you're necessarily committing career suicide. However, it would be a good idea to do a pet project on the side where you play with new tech. Make it an open source project, to act as "proof" for when you start looking again.

Answer 3

Have you ruled out switching to the Express version? That would solve the budget problem. Speaking of the only one I've used, VC++ Express, what it misses relative to the Pro version is easy to replace with open source products.

Answer 4

Sounds like an excellent work environment and I wish you all the best. Ahem.

The fact is that VS 2k8 Express is preferable to 2003 professional. You can use the Express editions for commercial development.

Also, skus of Visual Studio 2010 beta2 have golive licenses, so you can use the Ultimate for architecting and switch out to the Express versions when the license expires.

Oh, btw, also not career suicide. If you succeed might even be good for bragging rights on your CV -- "Survived horrible working conditions and succeeded in delivering a useful product."

Answer 5

Think of those who write "COBOL" in their resume!

Seriously, in my opinion it will just say you can mantain legacy code, and that's not bad indeed.

Answer 6

It won't be career suicide.

But you won't learn anything new or useful. Talking about continuous growth and development, you will have wasted time.

You will probably hate every day of your work. Not for long though.

Answer 7

VS2003 is not that much of a problem, IMO. At least you can try to tell the recruiter "lots of experience with VS 2008 [from other projects]; in my last job, I was also designing and developing a foobar program in VS [not mentioning the version]."

In my previous job, I had to work a lot with Visual Basic 5 and Oracle Forms 6. Now how could I explain that to a recruiter? I was very lucky, though, finding a Groovy/Grails/Java job.

Answer 8

Just going by the headline, I would answer yes. Sometime around 1990 I ceased to have any mention of COBOL on my resume, for instance. But then you get into details and these "older development tools" are simply older versions of current tools. Ones that require a little more effort and skill to work with.

How on earth do you get "career suicide" out of that. If your resume reads VB, VB.NET, Visual Studio then you will get the interviews. Then when they ask what version, you honestly answer and instead of newbie who has only used the latest version, you get to show that you have some depth of experience using multiple versions of the tools.

In this specific case, tell the recruiter that you are glad that you took that 6 month contract because going back to using older versions really showed how much improvement there is in VS 2008. Because, it sounds to me that you have learned, precisely that.

Remember, recruiters are not just judging you by the tools that you used, but also by the problem domains that you worked in. Career suicide tends to come about because people stick to the same tools and the same problem domains. If you diversify in both areas, you won't have a problem.

Answer 9

Which testimonial picture would you rather paint for your next employer:

"Well, we had spacious surroundings, air conditioning, the latest hardware, the newest versions of the tools and the best programmers money could buy... oh.. the project? Well... I left before it could be completed."

OR

"We were crammed into this little room with old hardware and 6 year old software and everyone was REALLY stinky. But I rode 'em hard and we got the project done ahead of time and under budget. And, the software sold millions."

If you were an employer, which story would impress you?

Not all things you'll learn in life will come from Google searches (or the drivel you'll find on stackoverflow) and Microsoft's latest releases. You still have a (larger and much more important) problem to solve, you just can't use the keyboard this time.

I wish you success.

Answer 10

I took the word COBOL off my resume but I still bring it up when asked in interviews. It makes an interesting conversation piece because not many people believe it. I would stick with it, unless there is another option out there for you. Later when you find a good company is hiring you can use it as a sad puppy-dog where the only thing your future employer can do is save you from it. Actually things like this often seem to be great in interviews because you can show the person how much of a deep understanding you have for the IDE they use by comparing it to what was missing from VS2003 that is in VS2008 that really held you back.

Overall it is more important to still be programming so you don't have a gap in your resume. If I was interviewing you I would have more respect for you if you were able to stick in there even when things were tough but still stayed pragmatic and your learning didn't go stale.

Answer 11

I would not at all call this career suicide, if you look at the projects different companies have you always end up with a very old non-portable application...like some wicked .net 1.1 app (dunno why it shouldn't be portable but assume it as an example). It's valueable to know how the old implementations was so you can reflect on the changes that have come after. I started my career building websites in .net 1.1, but running a cms implemented in classic asp. After a while i ported the stuff...let's just say some of the old stuff from classic would have been nice to have in .net 1.1 (c#). Another job required me to know about .net 1.1, 2.0, Powerbuild and c++, though all new development was done in .net 2.0.

So at the end of the day...take the job but remember why you decided to accept it and be prepared to give good reasons when asked in a later interview. At the interview for my current job i flamed the application at my old job cause it was ancient and the technology was even older :)

Suicide NO, but beware!

Answer 12

You could try to compensate by writing .NET 3.5/VS2008 code in your own time, joining local User Groups and maybe even speaking at them - exploring areas of interest in the range of new stuff.

This would 'keep your hand in' so to speak; coding, speaking and blogging about it is evidence of your technical currency that you can link to in your CV/resume and bring up at interviews.