>Well here's a confidence-building approach. I turned 24 this month. I have been programming professionally for 20 months. I worked at my first job out of college for a bout a year until I finished everything they could imagine they wanted. When my workload there started dwindling, I sent out resumes for full-time and contract positions.
>
>I got 1 interview for every three resumes I sent out and was offered the job at every interview I went to. I now maintain 3 contracts (one is my former fulltime employer) with more coming when I finish these, and have more work then I can handle. I tripled my income over my fulltime position, and now I make my own hours, don't have a boss and choose my projects. I currently do 85% of my programming in VFP, but my efforts are quickly moving to WWC and internet programming.

>I not only get calls by word of mouth, but I am still getting the same revamped offers I turned down 8 months ago.


Wow... No wonder you're smiling in your picture! At 24, I had just gotten married and had 3 years of college ahead of me.

>>>VFP is a good skill to have, I think. No, there's not as much call for it as VB. But there's less competition, too.
>Which works out well for a skilled VFP programmer. I find that VFP rates are consistently higher then VB rates here.

What are rates for a VFP programmer? I realize that's going to vary widely by region and experience, but just generally, for someone with about a year of experience?


>The key here is, don't dive... ease. I dove and it worked out well, but from what I hear, that's not always the case.


Well, I definitely don't plan on diving in. I have a nice job at low but not terrible pay. I'm not about to just quit and take my chances. Besides, our product's latest version is my baby, started over from scratch. I couldn't bear the thought of someone else finishing it. :)

But with only one product, my workload will dwindle eventually, too, and I'd like to be prepared at that point to have a go on my own.

>
>One more thing Michelle-
>The single most important thing for you to become a successful ($$$) developer is your ability and willingness to learn. This means studying ALL the time. When I got out of school, I was relieved that the studying was over, but it turns out that I didn't really know what studying was. I don't read the newspaper anymore, I read manuals and tutorials. Mastering VFP is great and its a good goal, but don't let it be your only learning goal. Learn HTML like the back of your hand. Learn SQL till you can spew queries as fast as you can talk. But Visual Studio and play with VB and J++. If you can afford it, set up an NT server at home that you can use as an SQL and webserver. IN just an hour or two a day of extracurricular learning, you can go miles.
>
>When you have the confidence that you know programming (not just VFP) then you can walk into a room and reek of skill, if you want. 5 years is all the time in the world, but don't let it go to waste.


I know ending school isn't an end to learning, but it's an end to imposed learning. Now _I_ can decide what I want to learn and how fast I want to do it. And I don't need to waste time learning stuff I'll never use again. I've only been out of college 5 months, but so far it seems like the only mistake I made in the opinion that everything was worthless is in regards to the software engineering class. I wish I had paid more attention to that one. But pretty much school wasted 6 years I could've spent in productive learning.

Ok, rant mode off. :)

Thanks,

-Michelle