Sorry to rain on your parade, but by that definition the programming market is full to bursting with "bad" shops. Your chances of actually finding a job available in one of the "good" ones is practically zippo, because those are the sort of shops who know the value of their programmers and are willing to work to keep them. Of *course* any good programmer can pick up new languages immediately. For my first real programming job after graduation I was hired to do C. I had never even heard of the language at the time. In six months I was the lead programmer. It doesn't *matter* what you can or can't do, when you are trying to get an interview. What matters is how well you match the requirements of the people screening the applications. When they're looking at a stack of resumes up past the brim of their thermal coffee mug, who are they going to weed out first? People with no experience. Who goes next? People without relevant experience. Then people without very *recent* relevant experience. Now they're down to just a few dozen. If they're lucky.

I never got a degree. Started programming back in the mid eighties, when programmers were a lot scarcer. Never had a single employer who cared whether I had a degree or not; it was always about the experience. Hopped through a long procession of companies (some contracts, some chapter 13s, some layoffs), operating systems (DOS, Unix, Windows, various miniframe ops), languages (too many to list), industries (lots). I take that back, there was one company that required all employees to have a degree. I didn't. They hired me anyway. Here's my suggestion. Stick with your current job, but take classes and do .NET programming on the side. It's important that you be able to list .NET on your resume if you want to get a job doing it. No, not important. Vital. Form your own "company". Volunteer to write programs for your church, charitable organizations, anybody who hasn't got a big budget for their needs. Then list your experience with your own company on your resume. Don't lie about the work, just don't mention that you didn't get paid for it. You get three benefits from this. One is the experience. Two is that it looks good on your resume. Last but not least, you get to feel good about helping out your community. If it isn't .NET that you want to move toward, that makes things harder. Other languages aren't as readily portable and easy to install onto PCs, which is all that most small organizations have. Still, you get the idea. Experience is the key, not education.

Not true. The technology *is* important. It's hard enough to get a job when your resume is packed with the latest and greatest. Many times in the past few years I've been told that if you don't have the technology that the job requires on your *last* job (who cares about the others, apparently) you can forget making it through the HR screening process. It used to be that you just had to be a good programmer. I took jobs doing languages that I had no experience in, learning on the job. You just can't do that any more. It has to be on your resume first. Leads to a lot of dishonesty in resumes, IMO.

Yeah, I've hit a few bait-and-switches in my decades of programming. The most memorable was one hook that I never bit, but I knew a lot of people who did. There is a certain job niche that straddles the line between technical support and programming. It involves taking technical support problems that have worked their way past "Is the computer plugged in?" and "Did you try clicking the 'clear' key and retyping" and all the other operational causes and are now suspected of being gen-you-wine programming bugs. People in this position are supposed to figure out whether this is a bug, and if it is a simple one, fix it. If it's at all complicated it is sent on to one of the "real" programmers. Employers always want to hire programmers for this position, but no programmer (other than a really desperate one) would take the position. So employers often resort to practices that range from the slightly deceptive "this is a good foot-in-the-door position from which you can move into the programming department" (reality: when it snows downstairs, we'll call you) to the bald-faced lie "this is a programming position" (once a month they let you change the label on a control on one of the forms) Anyway, I was working for a company who had a huge application that was so old it had to be written in Kernighan Ritchie so that it could be compiled on all the different operating systems that their customers used. The decision was made to rewrite the code, and we were all excited about it, but then were were told that the actual rewrite was going to be outsourced to India, and that we would all be "promoted laterally" into this other "programming" position, which involved supporting the rewritten code. Talk about adding insult to injury. When I told them I had no interest in the position, HR asked me, in a condescending tone, if I understood that I would no longer be working for the company if I refused the "transfer". I assured them that I fully understood the consequences of my action. The company tried to prevent me from drawing unemployment by saying that I had "quit" the technical support position. Didn't work; the unemployment folks were onto them. Many kudos to them. A couple of years later, I was looking for another job and had a headhunter bring up a programming job with this same company. I asked her if she was often called to fill this position, and she confirmed, with surprise at my keen sense of insight :) that the turnover at this position was phenomenally high. Six months, on the average.