My first degree that I obtained was in Broadcast Journalism. On one of the first days of class the professor told us that in 10 years only two out of a hundred of us would be working in journalism because everyone else would leave. I looked around smugly, feeling sorry for those other 98 people who were wasting their time.

Fast forward 10 years, and everyone I know who did actually get a job in journalism is doing something else. I never actually got paid to do journalism. I had internships and I worked at a community radio station for three years during which the only payment I got was an autographed copy of Fahrenheit 911.

I keep hearing that hiring for programmers is insane. I keep hearing that we are not outputting enough programmers for all the positions available and that if you learn stuff like iOS, you will be high in demand.

Madison does not yet have a large iOS community. You can program in your basement and hope you create Angry Birds, but large scale iOS operations are few and far between.

I am bringing this up because I am being contacted by recruiters. Most of the jobs are completely insane, which get trashed. Occasionally I get one that isn’t perfect, but not bad either.

I have had two of these in the last few days. Both of them are at Microsoft shops where they want you to use Microsoft. They both pay okay. One of them is kind of far away.

Last summer when I was unemployed and had not dedicated myself to going back to school I would have jumped at either of these opportunities, but right now I am looking at them going, “Meh.”

I don’t know how picky I get to be for my career. I still feel the panic I had as journalism major who graduated right before the recession hit and saw all the newspapers and TV stations go out of business and having that as a paid career disappear. Part of me feels like if I turn down something that isn’t exactly right the hubris gods will smack me down.

I am just afraid that I am going to go onto a path that I don’t want to be on. If you take, lets say, a VB.Net job even if you don’t like VB.Net, it’s hard to find a job utilizing a different language because all your experience is in that. I don’t want to get stuck in a job using a language I don’t like because I am afraid that I won’t find another one.

I don’t have to worry about this an awful lot right now because I have school and can’t really commit to anything yet. So I get to pull a Penelope and weave my shroud while I keep my suiters waiting while I await my Odysseus coming home. Just worried about what happens when time runs out.