@Ice^^Heat said:
I am still studying for a degree, but I have had a few parttime jobs along the way. All of them were Microsoft oriented: SQL Server 2005, IIS, ASP and so on. Now I was always under the impression, that the "stack" doesn't really matter when it comes to being a good programmer.
...
I actually think you've hit the nail on the head with that comment. It's a subtle point a lot of people miss, and unfortunatly, due to the opacity of developing software you're gonna be suprised just how little a lot of people know when it comes to programming (If you build a bridge out of balsa wood, people can see it's rickty and unstable, but if you build some software like that, so long as it does what it's supposed to noone (outside the software world) will ever really know or care as it's just that 'computery stuff').
Unfortunatly, not really understanding what you're doing (apart from at a higher overview level) has become an accepted part of coding, and a lot of the tools out there are designed to make it easier for people to not know.
As an example, in this office there are several people writing web based applications, but I think only one of them has any real idea of how webpages work, now I'm not expecting everyone to be intimiate with the inernals of HTTP, but by using development tools to hide some of the underlying plumming the subtalties of why you do something can often be lost. (EG, a web page is a stateless 'one time' thing, so any notions of state or interactiveness have to be bolted ontop of the underlying request/response architecture; knowing this can help you write better applications).
Maybe I'm just a luddite though (we use IBMs websphere here, and I really really shy away from using it, but then again I can get by with Editplus and a macro that runs Ant and bounces tomcat, and I feel I have a better understanding of the way things work because of this.)
To be honest, if your half way competent it's probably possible to blag most stuff as you'll find it easy enough to pick up.