Job Experiences

Post any programming job experiences you have so I know what to expect in the future.  I'm getting my feet wet doing freelance web work right now and I want to know what to expect when I land a full-time job or get some interesting work. 

Right now, I'm just tweaking Wordpress sites with some plugin recoding and saving 6 similarly ancient PHP e-commerce sites from the agony of a PHP4->5 upgrade.  I also have a side gig doing some microcontroller + PCB design work.  The freedom is great (I can work from home), but the client is some whackjob religious nut who apparently is addicted to prescription anxiety pills.  He also runs his shipping/customer service people into the ground like a true capitalist.  Ugh.  Luckily, once these jobs are done with, I'll have a portfolio to shop around.

So, now you.

I tend to agree with >>5, but I'm stuck in the boat for now so I'm riding it.

I do Drupal. I just kind of rolled into it, the people who employ me use Drupal so I learned it. I'm not going to say it's total insanity but the amount of crap layered on crap layered on crap (Drupal is written in PHP, we develop on Mac and deploy it on Ubanto, we use MySQL for everything) requires a certain Zen attitude to work.

The good thing about Drupal is you can learn to click together a site in a couple days, and that's what you'll be doing day in day out if you go into web development. Deploying maintenance updates is usually fingers crossed. Also expect to be doing an import from legacy systems every couple weeks (often from a bare database dump used by whatever custom built CRMs/CMSs they used previously).

On the side, I'm trying to figure out what other skills could possibly be marketable. I know a little of everything (being the /prog/rider that I am), but not enough to really say I'm experienced in it. I'm looking for something interesting that might blow up in the next 5-10 years, so that I can spend some energy on getting to know it. Interacting with a database and generating HTML5 gets old fast.