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Comment by 27182818284 | Hacker News Reader

In terms of straight, steady jobs: Java and .NET, and go to the Midwest. The latter part being a key that is missing from a lot of these HN threads. There are tons of great jobs doing enterprise-like stuff in .NET and Java in the Midwest that you simply don't hear about on Hacker News. They'll pay a full salary with benefits, and you'll be able to afford a house in a couple of years.

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> In terms of straight, steady jobs: Java and .NET, and go to the Midwest.

Huh, that's a good point. Some of my peers from college went to work in Arkansas for Tyson. I also recall other companies from that area (J. B. Hunt and Walmart come to mind) were having recruitment drives some years back.

There are many big organizations one doesn't normally associate with technology that do have large-ish IT departments and tons of programmers on staff, although knowing C/C++ is usually helpful as well.

Other things that are typically overlooked are strong DBA or sysadmin skills. It helps to have provable knowledge of the full stack regardless of where you're going.

I work for a large non-IT company in the midwest. People with the ability to translate between business process teams and development teams are always in demand. Also, although it seems to be looked down on by the hacker community, SAP/ABAP skills are good if you don't mind the enterprise environment.

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