A future for classic VB/ASP contractors ?

[AdamBrunt]

Hi all,

Been looking around recently at various contracting vacancies.

Ideally looking for 'classic' VB and ASP [ ie not .Net ] development work and there is some stuff around local to me offering £200/300 per day on 3-4 month contracts.

This all sounds great in theory but do people think there is a long term future for VB6 and ASP contractors ?

Also, is there much "work from home" IT contracting work available or is it all office based ?

TIA for any help.

Regards,

Adam Brunt

[RhinoBull]

...there is some stuff around local to me offering £200/300 per day on 3-4 month contracts.

That reminds me the Y2K chaos - yes there was a lot of work for COBOL programmers but for how long? 2-3 years at most and after that there was almost nothing.
VB6/Classic ASP skills are great but you need to learn something else - .Net perhaps or Java...
There wouldn't be much work around soon.

[FishGuy]

Its best to stay upto date with the latest technologies, ASP Classic is a great grounding and why no get work in it now, but at the same time learn the new stuff, .Net should be pretty easy for you to move accross to but even that is evolving, the sooner you catch up the better.

[bgmacaw]

The problem is that not only are opportunities gradually drying up, particularly for good contract work, but that if you do land a perm job it's likely to be a VB6 ghetto. That's where you work on maintaining a monster app that has 200+ forms and modules and is very unstable and poorly architected. No new programs of any consequence are being developed since all programming resources are devoted toward keeping the 'monster' fed. Working in such a place is often unforgiving toward even small mistakes and is full of nasty office politics as well. And, all the while, your skill set is falling further and further behind the marketplace.

[superbovine]

The problem is that not only are opportunities gradually drying up, particularly for good contract work, but that if you do land a perm job it's likely to be a VB6 ghetto. That's where you work on maintaining a monster app that has 200+ forms and modules and is very unstable and poorly architected. No new programs of any consequence are being developed since all programming resources are devoted toward keeping the 'monster' fed. Working in such a place is often unforgiving toward even small mistakes and is full of nasty office politics as well. And, all the while, your skill set is falling further and further behind the marketplace.

heh... I had one of those jobs. It was a CRM/Doc mangment/Order system on a SQL 6 backend, plus it was originally written in spanish with variables names in Catalan and was translated into Arabic.

[Hack]

bgmacaw is right. There will be jobs for VB6 programmers for quite a while to come, but, all you are going to be doing is maintence on existing applications that the owners don't want to take the time and expense to upgrade to VB.NET

Get your foot in the door of a .NET shop, even if it is only an Entry Level position. You will be much better off in the long run.

[Al42]

bgmacaw is right. There will be jobs for VB6 programmers for quite a while to come, but, all you are going to be doing is maintence on existing applications that the owners don't want to take the time and expense to upgrade to VB.NET

Not always, Hack. I tend to write about an app a week, and all in VB6. I'll probably start running 2005 in about a year, just to get my skills in .net back, then ask them to spring for the full-blown compiler, so that we can keep up with the latest <mumble>. Keep my skills current on their dime.

But I'm still being pushed to come up with all sorts of new things in VB6 every day, and having to come here to learn how. (We now download and keep a daily record of currency exchange rates for a bunch of currencies, with a little app that I got the basics for from a few posts here.)