Barely a decade after Microsoft, I too have finally given up on Office development.
The holidays are over and its time to, at least appear to, look for a contract. I’ll still chuck my cv in for any sensibly paid Excel/VBA/.net contract but a. there aren’t many around at all, b. I think the competition might be quite stiff, c. I’m not investing any other effort in this area.
What am I doing? well…
iPhone development, in a word, or two.
Why? I realise I am very late to the party, and most of the streamers have already been popped, but I still think there is some mileage. I have a reasonable level of confidence that over the next 3-5 years this is still a viable skill, even if it is in the throes of a move from objective-C to Swift.
In a way I regret milking Excel/VBA as long as I did and not jumping ship sooner, as I think the golden years of app dev are behind us. But I’ve made a decent living from one long tail, I’m not above setting my sights equally low again!
The great thing about iPhone development over say SAP Hana (apart from from the lifetime of death march tedium) is the accessibility, assuming one has a mac of course.
I can sit on my arse at home, develop apps in areas that interest me, publish to the app store and sit back and wait for the avalanche of money to trickle in…
Well that’s the plan anyway, but here I am on SOS instead of xcode…
I will link from here if I decide to blog about my exploits, but I won’t drag SOS off topic as I know some people still find value in the content we created here.
Please leave a comment if you too have jumped ship, and what to, or if you are staying in the Excel/VBA world, and why.
cheers
simon
Smurf on Spreadsheets 