Working with programming languages you DON'T like

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寮、 2022/09/08 — technology, jobs, webdev

People who follow me for long enough know what I’m specialized in PHP and C.
There are times where there are no available jobs in these 2.
One option would be to just take a few days off and consider it a little vacation.
However, what if there will be nothing available for weeks?
Monthly bills won’t wait for jobs to be available.

In that case, the best you can do is to take jobs in these languages, and be up front about not being as experienced with these languages.
Often times clients won’t mind as long as you already have lots of experience in another language that’s similar enough.
I too have to work with other languages sometimes, whether it be languages I have very little experience with (C++, Go, C#), languages I have never worked before working on a certain project (Ruby, Lua, Swift), or languages I outright hate from past experiences (JavaScript, Python, Java).
At the time of writing, I’m ASSigned to a Node.js project, what a nightmare of a framework and language!
One function I get written in under 1 minute in PHP takes me 3 days to make in Node.js, because of the sheer amount of bugs that get created as you fix them, code being all over the place, asyncronous programming (fucking kill it!), and so on.
But so far I’ve been able to handle it somehow, and usually the pay is better for soy languages than they are for actually good languages, so I sometimes have to deal with it.

My advice is to just at the very least give it a try, if you fail, the client or you will just pull out, and it’ll cost nothing to the client, and you’ll have a more peaceful mind.
And if you succeed, it counts as experience, which in turn gives you bragging rights for your next projects, and clients will be more likely to get choose you.
Because even if you only need to know PHP and MySQL, clients will still put more value into someone who also has experience with C, JavaScript/Typescript, Python, Java/Kotlin, Ruby, Go, Lua, C++/Carbon, Rust, Dart………
The more languages you have experience with, the better rep you’ll receive.