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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

> I offered up my time for free providing my expenses were covered

Those two things do not mean the same thing.

> Experience in Tool/Language X is a stupid thing to ask for

I'm pretty sure my experience with Perl won't allow me to write useful C within two days, no matter how experienced my coworkers.

It would've been much more interesting to read about how he actually found his "jobs".

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Considering how much it usually costs to hire a contractor, this really is free. If you win tickets to a concert you still have to pay to get there, but the tickets are still free.

Paying a couple hundred quid to hire me for two weeks is free. When I said expenses, it was the cost of getting there and putting me somewhere to sleep (not hotels mostly, thankfully).

By charging that small amount, it means they're serious about bringing me in because it demonstrates commitment.

I paid for my own upkeep over this time and burned through the best part of 25k EUR - all worth it.

I understand that. I'm just a bit irked because i occasionally do actual free work for people who can benefit from my skills and do good or interesting things.

I found my jobs by writing a blog entry, the Internet did the rest for me - pretty boring really :)

Huh, ok. If you didn't have to search yourself, that explains why you didn't mention that part.

Yeah, it didn't see that important - the internet is quite a good place for doing things like this - thanks to Twitter and other places where people share things the calendar was booked up for 6 months within a couple of weeks

Your experience with pearl will probably let you learn to write decent C ahead of needing it.You know you're going to be interviewed, potentially, take a couple of weekends and learn it.

Unless you're a genius you're not going to learn decent C skills in a couple of weekends from a Perl background. A couple of months would be more realistic.

> pearl

I see what you did there.

And as Joeboy says, it would be months. I can say this with confidence because i know enough about C to know how little i know about it. Just the thought of memory management and all the complexities involved makes my skin crawl.

Maybe - I can't help but feel you're all putting C on a pedestal though - thinking you're immune from memory management issues because you're not using C seems a bit weird.

I feel confident that if I was asked to do C at one of these gigs I'd have been able to deliver something useful. Perhaps less if it was C++ because it's a bit swiss-army knife and there are a lot more "don'ts" to pick up.

I'm not really putting C on a pedestal here. :)

I'm only saying: Some skills are so radically different that you cannot transfer easily from one to the other. To give a counter example in the other direction: When i taught a former Lisp developer Perl, it took him 3 months to get to a good level, and 3 more to be on a very high level. And he's an extremely bright guy.

Then again, he had never done web apps before. Maybe the language matters a lot less if you're staying within the same problem domain.

"then they'll get on that stuff and make it happen providing they have some similar experience and you have an in-house knowledge pool for them to draw on." <-- some similar experience is probably another way of saying that.

If you asked me tomorrow to go and start doing system programming in a language I knew well, I'd probably be screwed. Ask me to work on a database engine, compiler or web app and I'd be okay.

I'm mainly focusing that ire on the typical enterprise stuff LOB stuff, where it truely is all the same and just because you'd been writing Foo v1 for three years doesn't mean you won't be able to write Bar v300

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