i've just been made redundant

See the tragic deskilling of our labour force..

*Shudders* I'm glad I don't have to read or debug your Perl code, young man.

I'd say the chances of getting a C++ or Java job other than a graduate post are approximately nil at the moment unless you have a lot of experience in the languages. I'd stick with the perl if I were you. In what sort of context were you using it in your old job?

I have sacrificed my entire life to the idea of Working With Computers and now I've realised that I have absolutely no computing skills, knowledge or talent and no interest in computing. Still, there's nothing else I could do instead, so maybe my parents are right that I should go back and finish my degree, not because it would give me any computing skills (certainly not useful job skills) but because employers might not realise that. Actually the entire concept of jobs and careers and so on terrifies me even if I assume I could get one, but that's because I'm hugely selfish, so I won't rant.

*gurgles*

I wonder whether I should even respond to this thread as I can only present myself as a worst-case scenario to Michael, and scare the bejesus out of him. Fact is, I've been a programmer for eight years but I haven't had a job for 11 months. The market is probably the worst it's been in a decade.

*However*, I don't have the fancy 21st-century skills you seem to have (strong-ish Oracle, PL/SQL, SQL*Forms [but nothing like the latest flavours], moderate Unix/OpenVMS scripting, weak and fading Fortran, Pascal, dim and distant VB, C, C++), and what skills I do have have gone a bit rank and crumbly in the last 3 years. I also can't claim to have been looking 100% of the time since I packed in the Roche job.

I've let agencies do most of the work, which has its drawbacks (prime amongst them being you have to deal with agents, but I find showering after a particularly harrowing 'pep-talk' helps) - they are, of course, on commission and aren't about to let your CV be forwarded for some lame application support role in the West End (but I don't mind! It's enough money! And not that much pressure! And a nice location! I can wear jeans!) when they can send you horribly out of your depth for some senior analyst position half-way up a skyscraper in Docklands, where you'll be made to feel like a kid with learning difficulties.

Of late, my only remaining selling point appears to be my recent-ish pharma background, which means I get job leads on the Kent coast or Cambridge or deepest Berkshire or freakin' Switzerland (some of them not even programming roles, but data bloody management), when the main reasons I elected not to apply for a contract renewal at Roche were [i] to get out of pharma and learn something new and [ii] to avoid the five hours of commuting.

Er, this isn't very constructive, is it?

Yes, Planet Recruit and JobServe will bombard your inbox with fiction every other day, but there *are* probably gems in there if you can be bothered to wade through the tripe (or can set a very clever boolean filter at the JS web-site to catch the genuinely relevant stuff - hey, you're a programmer, should be easy). I think one of my (eight) interviews last year came from a JS ad. With yr skill-set I honestly think you should be ok.

I'm giving up on IT altogether, meanwhile.

I just found out I'm not being made redundant. I'm being kept-on as part of a vastly reduced team. I should be relieved, but instead I'm just very underwhelmed

Vastly reduced team always good for morale

Especially if the team's workload isn't reduced by a similar amount.