Possible Duplicate: Going from PHP to Java I have been working at my current job
ID: 639693 • Letter: P
Question
Possible Duplicate:
Going from PHP to Java
I have been working at my current job for about 4 years. I have been doing PHP for twice as long. I am completely self taught (with lots of internet and friends help).
I recently found a job posting for a Java developer and I am wondering what I need to know about Java to prepare. I took 2 college course on Java so I am looking a little beyond Hello World stuff (actually just installed Eclipsed and wrote it again). I hear they also do Flex so anything on how Java and Flex work together would be great as well.
My first step is going to be to remake a project I built in PHP using Java.
This is similar but the answers aren't very specific. Going from PHP to Java
Thank you and I apologizes if this should be community wiki.
Explanation / Answer
I don't think your problem is going to be learning java, since you're probably more than capable of downloading eclipse and opening a book and reading, trying examples, etc. I think re-implementing a php project in java is a good starting point. But the problem is likely going to be finding a job in java. Er....or rather finding a job that someone will hire you for at a price you'll find acceptable.
It's like this. I was doing c for several years and I wanted to get into .NET. So I learned it on my own. I was actually pretty good at it at the end and so I started job shopping. Then I realized that there were two problems:
The places that wanted to hire me were not willing to pay anything close to what I was already making. They were essentially low-balling junior engineer positions. So they didn't care what I knew.
The places that were probably going to pay an acceptable rate started in with "On, C is a procedural language, and .NET, well it's object oriented. Are you sure this is something you can handle??" And nothing I could say in an interview was going to convince them that I was capable. In retrospect I'm not sure why they brought me in to interview, but...anyway!
So what happened? Am I still coding in c? No, but I did find a job in c++ (I was later told that even in this case they felt I was a risky hire). And then my next job after that was c++ officially, but I ended up getting moved to a java project. And now I mostly do java. I've forgotten all the .NET stuff I learned several years back.
I'm not sure what the take-away is, except that it's really hard to move from one language to another (and especially when the languages are as different as php and java). Not because you're unable to do the job, but because of the risk you represent and the biases of hiring managers.