So I'm starting with a company out in cali in sept and I actually get to pick want to do. About 30 or so business units will come to me and I interview the managers and if I find their group interesting I can work for them.
But I'm a little worried. A lot of my friends picked safe business units, even though they don't like what they are doing exactly. They work for the same company just not in california which is their main headquarters. So they only had 5 business units to pick from and 90% of all the new hires wanted to get into the business unit that was doing java dev but they only had one open spot so the others had to pick other less enjoyable business units.
I'm not a fan of C or embeded programming, I like more web based and high level things such as java/c#. No one really uses C++ in the company so the 2 main languages are C and Java, not to mention all the web techonlogies out there.
I get paid the same either way, start out at 75k which isn't bad even for cali standards but the econ sucks really bad and everyone is firing people left and right. I'm safe for a year but after that year if my business unit goes down basically I either get fired or relocated.
So do you suggest I pick a business unit that I'm really excited about or do I pick somthing that is making money and a safe business unit? I have a feeling I'll peform much better if I enjoy what I'm doing but then again if I lose my job that won't be very fun either. I can do C programming, just like I can do any other language I just find I can do somthing in Java much faster and get more out of it for the time spent. Thats just me though. I was raised on C/C++ but once I got a taste of java I was hooked.
I worked at IBM for about a year as a co-op and I was doing z/os programming which bored the hell out of me. I was good at it and I exceled at the co-op but I didn't enjoy work. It was a safe job becuase there arn't many z/os programmers out there especially young ones, its like a dying breed. But I wasn't having a good time because I was bored of the product I was making so I didn't except the job offer.
Any suggestions welcome.