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Hmm, maybe this is a good place to ask about this: I'm looking at two master's programs at the same school. One is in Information Systems and the other is in Human Centered Computing. The IS program is focused heavily on systems engineering, analysis, and integration (as opposed to most IS programs which are management oriented), while the HCC program includes a fair amount of integration, but seems to focus heavily on UI development, ease of use, and user experience. I'm a Network Administrator right now, but I'd eventually like to get out of the computer janitor role and into the development and integration side of things. Nothing against the *admin path (God knows it pays well enough), but I've always been more of a designer than a maintainer. Does anyone have experience with either of these kinds of programs? I'm particularly interested in the HCC one, since front-end development was always my favorite thing in my CS classes in college and I majored in a social science; however return on investment is also important to me and I'd like to make sure that the degree is actually as useful in the job market as a degree in IS. psydude fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Apr 11, 2012 |
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Apr 11, 2012 03:38
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I'm fairly certain everyone around here will tell you that the way to get in to development is not through more Info Sys education. Either get into a development oriented program or start hacking away on personal and open-source projects until you have a portfolio and network of people that know your work.
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Apr 11, 2012 04:16
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What Paolomania said. If your goal is to get some front-end UI work, (or is it not that, is it to get into the "integration" side of wtf is integration ahhhhhhhhh) then employers will want to know that you can write Javascript, HTML, CSS, and use tools like less, some server side language depending on architecture, know how HTTP works, and are capable of writing Javascript that sends stuff to the server and shows stuff in the web browser. Getting some bullshit Human Centered Computing degree or Information Systems degree is not going to help with any of that. It really doesn't make any sense to spend time learning stuff that has nothing to do with getting poo poo done at work and acquiring a signaling mechanism doesn't matter one bit after the first nanosecond of a phone screen.
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Apr 11, 2012 04:20
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There are important psychological concepts behind good UI design that you'll never really get by just tinkering on your own. If your goal really is to go into front-end development, the HCC degree could be very helpful. Especially if it includes things like cognitive psychology in the curriculum.
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Apr 11, 2012 05:10
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I need to make it very clear that development is literally pumping out (reliable, stable, "good") code - you build poo poo, plain and simple. Systems integration on the surface seems to have a lot to do with development, but they share maybe 20% of everyday tasks. Integration is oriented around gluing stuff together. The closest experience most developers get into the everyday mundane crap of systems integration is sitting in meetings with 3+ other teams talking about how to pass variables between services and what sort of common APIs and services to use. For system integrators... well that's 50%+ of your job. Horrifying, isn't it? Welcome to my life for the past 3 years. As for "integration" there's bazillions of definitions of how that works so it's helpful to know what the actual tasks and additional functionality is. It can be anything from making some REST calls and feeding that back into a text output file (I poo poo you not, there's guys I know that do this at $200+ / hr - welcome to enterprise!) all the way to ripping apart existing code and building new app modules / plugins consisting of new code entirely. Most "integrations" tend to be on the former side of difficulty in technicals and almost everything that's difficult is the politics or dealing with broken software built by sub-par developers that exist in large companies. I've found out the long and painful way that it's really.... not development and that it can make you pretty dumb at actual development. For a construction analogy, developers are the ones doing the hard, necessary work of actually building software, and system integrators are responsible for getting multiple sets of teams to agree on building plans and to iron out differences whether they're political or technical in nature. This tends to almost only matter in huge gently caress-off companies because they're the only ones that acquire companies often enough that it's a big concern. Otherwise, most developers do stuff like supporting some vendor's OAuth service, 2-factor authentication, or merely accessing some API as everyday stuff that's somewhat tangential to their primary task of building a product or service. With that said, if you're doing HCI and IS sort of stuff, you're going to be headed closer to what they want for MLIS degrees (more about information architecture)... what they want librarians to have today. Otherwise, you may be able to wing it in UX / UI design but because almost everyone will want you to be a good prototyper, you'll be typically tasked with development as a primary duty rather than writing about what makes one kind of color better than the other for some text output. You will not be staring at a text editor for more than half a day with the former track - you'll be in meetings more, trust me. I say all this as a recovering systems integration "developer." It really isn't about writing software and I had the distinct impression for the longest time that I'd be led to opportunities to do it because software systems and IT systems from a general systems perspective are hardly different, but the reality is that development actually mandates knowledge of data structures and algorithms to do anything more than trivial stuff while you can go very, very far doing integrations without having the faintest clue why quicksort could ever be faster than an insertion / selection sort. The actually somewhat interesting integration gigs I've done were always when I was a pure developer, absolutely never when I was a consultant. In that road it's always been about "we bought software x, y, z... they don't do what the sales guys told us they'd do together... fix it." Do you know what I'm doing to go back to being a developer? Writing crap I'm going to put on github or online, that's what. Old sites I wrote 7+ year ago that never really took off might be back on the table for me, hell. I suggest anyone else trying to get anywhere close to development to do the same. Just loving code, it's the only way to prove you can do anything in the end and it'll go further along in terms of networking opportunities and interviews than a degree would. Even for large companies degrees are just a form of barebones gating in hiring to avoid systematically hiring that really awful neckbearded guy that really doesn't do anything which is fairly common among smaller companies.
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Apr 11, 2012 05:11
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One of the highest paid employees in our organization is a HCI person. They are incredibly important to the process of software development. But they do not actually do the software programming, testing, debugging, or deployment. They make mockups. They think about how things should work and then tell it to the software developers. They use it, to make sure that it is working right, and they spend a lot of time talking with people about how to improve it, why it is worth improving, and so on without offending the sensibilities of the developer who worked hard on getting the code out in the first place. A masters degree in HCC or HCI would not be useless. But I would also say that it is not a big stepping stone in to software development. There are also a lot fewer jobs, as it generally takes a lot less people to make up features than it does to implement them. If you really want to do development, and you are going to go back for a masters degree, get your degree in computer science or software engineering. Those are the degrees that will make you money. They will unlock doors that will otherwise be closed to you. Chances are, if you enroll in a CS masters you will have an opportunity to specialize. And in that degree you can specialize in HCI. A degree is more valuable than some people seem to think. It is rare that you would be able to find a job outside of web development without either years of experience or a degree.
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Apr 11, 2012 08:10
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necrobobsledder posted:I need to make it very clear that development is literally pumping out (reliable, stable, "good") code - you build poo poo, plain and simple. Systems integration on the surface seems to have a lot to do with development, but they share maybe 20% of everyday tasks. Integration is oriented around gluing stuff together. The closest experience most developers get into the everyday mundane crap of systems integration is sitting in meetings with 3+ other teams talking about how to pass variables between services and what sort of common APIs and services to use. For system integrators... well that's 50%+ of your job. Horrifying, isn't it? Welcome to my life for the past 3 years. It can be frustrating because such problems are out of the realm of coding. Yet having studying and working on that area myself, I could say it can actually be fairly interesting and satisfying if meaningful thoughts and practices are applied to it. Better organization and methodology applied to relationships between humans can have a huge practical impact on how much code developers can actually get done and released. That's why I got interested in that field, because as a dev I got so sick of wasting time doing rework, guesswork and debugging of systems that aren't even under my control, or finding out that the customer wanted something different entirely. Applying test driven methodologies to business processes at a level higher than code, and even the simple practice of involving developers in planning discussions instead of handing them a poorly understood task without context, can have a drastic effect. Perhaps I'll make a thread about it sometime in the future, it's really an area neither most devs or most managers don't intuitively pay much heed to. pigdog fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Apr 11, 2012 |
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Apr 11, 2012 09:50
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I have a degree in software engineering, but most of my experience since then has been IT helpdesk and sysadmin. At my previous job I made some room booking software for the school I worked at using PHP, and at my current job I've done a few projects using Python. I made a database for the HR and finance departments (using Django/MySQL) to keep track of personnel, funding/grants etc, and also created some scripts to import a bunch of data in XML from an API, extract the useful info and save it in a database. I've been considering for a while to move into being a software engineer rather than carry on down the sysadmin route, but I'm wondering what kind of things I could apply for, as I've never had a job that's specifically been a programming job, it's just something I've done in addition to my normal duties. With this in mind, do I stand a chance at getting a programming job above entry level?
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Apr 11, 2012 14:12
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ryo posted:With this in mind, do I stand a chance at getting a programming job above entry level? Above entry level? Probably not. You've written some software, which is a good start, but chances are there are junior developer-sized gaps in your knowledge.
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Apr 11, 2012 14:37
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Mobius posted:There are important psychological concepts behind good UI design that you'll never really get by just tinkering on your own. If your goal really is to go into front-end development, the HCC degree could be very helpful. Especially if it includes things like cognitive psychology in the curriculum. It does. The reason why I considered it is because I have seen some user experience/UI design jobs that were requesting (but not requiring) HCC degrees. necrobobsledder posted:Thanks for the info. Believe it or not, I actually wouldn't mind all of that (it's one of the reasons why I was looking into integration type stuff in the first place). My second job involves a lot of coordination of teams and resources from different backgrounds, so I'm used to playing the politics game and actually kind of enjoy the dynamic workload that it provides. ComptimusPrime posted:If you really want to do development, and you are going to go back for a masters degree, get your degree in computer science or software engineering. Those are the degrees that will make you money. They will unlock doors that will otherwise be closed to you. I'll look into it. The problem I forsee, though, is that I only have about half of a CS undergrad degree done (I got up through data structures and discrete mathematics). I think most programs would require me to take a lot of undergrad courses at the graduate price (the other problem is that these courses are mostly offered during the day, instead of at night). However, I guess it does come down to ROI, and I do remember hearing that a master's degree in CS is pretty worthwhile. psydude fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Apr 11, 2012 |
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Apr 11, 2012 14:53
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pigdog posted:That's why I got interested in that field, because as a dev I got so sick of wasting time doing rework, guesswork and debugging of systems that aren't even under my control, or finding out that the customer wanted something different entirely. psydude posted:Believe it or not, I actually wouldn't mind all of that (it's one of the reasons why I was looking into integration type stuff in the first place). My second job involves a lot of coordination of teams and resources from different backgrounds, so I'm used to playing the politics game and actually kind of enjoy the dynamic workload that it provides.
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Apr 11, 2012 15:28
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A couple weeks ago I interviewed for an entry level programming job. I have no real programming experience and was struggling on the interview questions trying to relate my previous experience with ArcGIS to them looking for someone with SQL experience. They also asked about principles of good and bad web design and a question where they had to lead me to say you can use CSS to solve that problem. (How would you design a website with 10 pages of information without using a scrollbar?) Before the interview I was asking for help in the C++ thread for a rock paper scissors project in Visual C++. I ended up using that as my code sample http://codepad.org/PozGoGat and explained to the interviewers that I did a smiler project in Visual Basic in college and wanted to see if I could do it in C++ all these years later. I think I had a real weak interview and realized that I should really update my personal website to practice CSS and JavaScript. Yesterday I got the call and they want to offer me the job. I'm about to leave a comfortable job to something much more challenging. I'm a bit nervous but keep telling myself they wouldn't have hired me if I can't do it. I start in five weeks and was given some general topics to look into while I wait... like C# because the shop is converting to .NET, Team Foundation for code control, SQL stored procedures. I'm starting to wonder that if I'm the one who got the job, how out of it were all the other candidates?
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Apr 13, 2012 16:31
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Developers are in very strong demand, finding good ones is difficult. And the mechanics of different languages and frameworks are not as important to know as general software design skills and critical thinking ability.
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Apr 13, 2012 18:07
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How is $68k for about an hour east of NYC? Just got an offer.
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Apr 13, 2012 21:15
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$68k is good if you are still in your first few years. @Crazy Mike Sometimes (a lot of times) companies will hire someone with less experience that they think has a lot of potential for the future. In fact, sometimes, a lack of true experience can be a benefit, as it is the only excuse that is a good reason for not knowing the answer to some questions. Just work hard and you will probably do fine.
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Apr 13, 2012 21:23
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Otto Skorzeny posted:How is $68k for about an hour east of NYC? Just got an offer. I recall you mentioning it being embedded work? Seems on the low end for a fresh grad these days but if you like the firm and the nature of the work, I wouldn't worry too much about comp.
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Apr 13, 2012 21:24
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Otto Skorzeny posted:How is $68k for about an hour east of NYC? Just got an offer. In PA or NJ? I live in NJ and I was making 65k when I was a completely terrible developer. If you're reasonably experienced and know your poo poo, 80-85k is much more reasonable. Keep in mind that NJ has a pretty ridiculous cost of living; my old one-bedroom apartment was $1200 a month and it was far from swanky. It's probably worth more in PA, but I can't say by how much. New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Apr 13, 2012 |
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Apr 13, 2012 21:27
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Ithaqua posted:In PA or NJ? Answering a few posts at once: This was in CT. I'm a fresh grad as of May, it would be embedded work. Company culture is nice, people work 40 hour weeks more or less (!), my position would be about 80% software 20% hardware (most of their other engineers, of which there are about a dozen in this department are much older and are ~80% hardware).
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Apr 13, 2012 21:42
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Otto Skorzeny posted:Answering a few posts at once: I can't vouch for accuracy, but according to http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html, CT is roughly as expensive as NJ (in some cases, more expensive!). 68k for a fresh grad is very reasonable.
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Apr 13, 2012 21:46
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Otto Skorzeny posted:Answering a few posts at once: Was 68k their offer? No harm in asking for a bit more, but seems reasonable for a fresh grad.
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Apr 13, 2012 22:35
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Ranma posted:Was 68k their offer? No harm in asking for a bit more, but seems reasonable for a fresh grad. Yeah, it was their offer. I might err on the side of asking for relocation cash rather than a salary bump unless that's a crazy thing to do.
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Apr 13, 2012 22:41
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Otto Skorzeny posted:Yeah, it was their offer. I might err on the side of asking for relocation cash rather than a salary bump unless that's a crazy thing to do. it's not crazy, but asking for money that goes on the salary history has the not-really-obvious side effect of given you a bit more money each year you get a percentage-based salary adjustment.
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Apr 13, 2012 23:42
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Otto Skorzeny posted:Answering a few posts at once: A decent sized chunk of CT is considered part of the NYC metro area, so the cost of living and salaries will both be much higher than elsewhere. I would say 68k is pretty good as an entry level around here, but you wouldn't be too out of line to ask for a bit more or a relocation. Quebec Bagnet fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Apr 16, 2012 |
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Apr 16, 2012 08:56
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I've been offered the opportunity to go through The Startfast Accelerator Program with a group. Anyone have any wisdom/insights on this sort of thing? It would mean dropping my paying job and life and moving to New York.
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Apr 17, 2012 04:37
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The group you're with matters more than the venture program you get entrapped into
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Apr 17, 2012 12:12
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Adahn the nameless posted:I've been offered the opportunity to go through The Startfast Accelerator Program with a group. Anyone have any wisdom/insights on this sort of thing? It would mean dropping my paying job and life and moving to New York. I opened the page and my "scam" alarm started going off immediately. [edit] I'm not saying it is a scam, but it came off as disingenuous and shady.
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Apr 17, 2012 14:52
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I got a degree in politics. I had previously dropped out of Cal Poly's CSC major after a year. I am currently trying to learn programming. Doing Codecademy (pretty far through it) to learn JS, I've been watching screencasts on things like DB design, I'm going to read through the Python tutorial and a Django tutorial and build a little website I've had an idea for (legislator lookup for stances on internet issues, planning on making it a PAC). Additionally, I used to do a lot of web design as a kid, but now have forgotten most of it/most of what I knew has depreciated (i.e., the last time I was designing, tables were considered the norm means of coding a website). In the past month I went through a couple screencasts/tutorials on CSS/HTML5. Currently, I haven't completed or started a project in years. This lookup-website will be my first site since I was in high school. I would like to work for a software company. Should I: A) Work on my projects, build a small portfolio, then go interview. B) Go back to school to get a relevant degree. C) Look for a job requiring no real experience (QA?) and work my way up. or D) Go to law school like I planned and specialize in tech law or something.
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Apr 17, 2012 14:55
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Adahn the nameless posted:I've been offered the opportunity to go through The Startfast Accelerator Program with a group. Anyone have any wisdom/insights on this sort of thing? It would mean dropping my paying job and life and moving to New York. Have you looked into this thing more closely? It looks quite shady (for want of a better word). On a slightly related note, I thought the mentor on the bottom right looked a lot like Steven Seagal, then I looked at his name 
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Apr 17, 2012 15:22
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Sparta posted:I got a degree in politics. Do A/B/C at the same time.
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Apr 17, 2012 19:07
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tef posted:The group you're with matters more than the venture program you get entrapped into I know the developer. He's a great guy and a solid programmer. In other circumstances that didn't involve moving, I'd jump at the chance to work with him. As far as the incubator, he checked it out and said it's a great thing. Searching for Startfast Accelerator Scam doesn't show anything suspect. Does anyone have experience with startups? Do you guys feel that they grow your skills in ways you won't see from an established company? Or is this really an "it depends" thing?
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Apr 18, 2012 02:32
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*sigh* so I think I botched yet another technical interview. I don't know why but I can write code just fine but when I get asked over the phone I have an overwhelming desire to not write/say the right thing.
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Apr 20, 2012 23:30
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How do you put OSS development on a resume? "Contributor to Mozilla"?
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Apr 21, 2012 01:16
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NovemberMike posted:How do you put OSS development on a resume? "Contributor to Mozilla"? It may help if you say (quite briefly) what you actually did.
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Apr 21, 2012 01:39
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shrughes posted:It may help if you say (quite briefly) what you actually did. Just some bug fixes for the auto-tools team at mozilla. It's just kind of odd because it isn't really a job but it also isn't a skill, it might fit under some kind of a "experience" category?
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Apr 21, 2012 01:41
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NovemberMike posted:Just some bug fixes for the auto-tools team at mozilla. It's just kind of odd because it isn't really a job but it also isn't a skill, it might fit under some kind of a "experience" category? It's evidence that you're an actual programmer who can do actual things.
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Apr 21, 2012 01:46
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So, I'm about to finish my Freshman year as a comp sci major. No internships seem to have turned up on this side of the country this year, but no big - lets me work on some of my ancillary requirements over the summer and then really go intern-hunting Sophomore year. My question to anyone with Industry experience - what are some of the things you would say are most important, either to learn now or just in general, to be successful in the field? For a bit more clarity - I'm hoping to find a job in the Games industry in particular, though if it doesn't happen I won't turn my nose up at other good programming jobs. I'd be happy (particularly early on out of college) doing just general programming, though I've some interest in eventually moving onto things like Animation or Level Design.
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Apr 21, 2012 02:49
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shrughes posted:It's evidence that you're an actual programmer who can do actual things. Right, but I'm trying to think about how to actually phrase it on a resume. I was curious if anyone else with OSS experience had any examples of what they put down.
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Apr 21, 2012 03:17
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Why not just make it a new heading, "Open Source Contributions" then describe for which project and what you did and then link to the patch/pull request.
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Apr 21, 2012 03:20
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Spiritus Nox posted:For a bit more clarity - I'm hoping to find a job in the Games industry in particular, though if it doesn't happen I won't turn my nose up at other good programming jobs. I'd be happy (particularly early on out of college) doing just general programming, though I've some interest in eventually moving onto things like Animation or Level Design. So you want to move from being a general programming person (which, including non-games industries, has the friendliest job market in the history of mankind and much better pay) to later being in animation or level design (which makes less money and is more replaceable). Did I hear you right? Whatever, as long as you finish your CS degree I won't yell at you. Spiritus Nox posted:So, I'm about to finish my Freshman year as a comp sci major. No internships seem to have turned up on this side of the country this year, but no big - lets me work on some of my ancillary requirements over the summer and then really go intern-hunting Sophomore year. My question to anyone with Industry experience - what are some of the things you would say are most important, either to learn now or just in general, to be successful in the field? The general CS thing that makes you more useful than other programmers is strong skills in data structures and algorithms -- for example, being able to design your own data structures and algorithms, being able to invent new data structures, being able to implement them so that they're fast, and faster, for when you really need to burn CPU cycles. This makes you better at those kinds of problems specifically, it makes you better at imagining how your SQL query is going to perform, it makes you better at general high-level software architecture, and it makes you better at knowing whether a specific program is practically possible. The most unimportant benefit I listed was the first one. In addition to that, here are some surprisingly useful skills: - Being good at dynamically typed programming languages, like Perl, Python, or Ruby. Perl is the most useful one to learn. - Being good at statically typed programming languages, like Java and C#. - Knowing how to design an SQL database and do queries on it.  - Intricate knowledge of HTML and CSS and HTTP that can only be gotten by spending your high school years as a psychotic web standards zealot. - Being able to use regexes. - Being good at using C. - Being good at typing. If you're not a touch typist comfortable with a blank keyboard, force yourself to learn the Dvorak layout. The layout's not better, but getting a clean start is probably easier than forcing yourself to touch type Qwerty. There is anecdotal evidence that it also tends to reset bad posture habits. - Being good at not ruining your wrists. Edit: And here are some nice-to-haves: - Not being an arrogant little poo poo. (This is not in any way a comment about you, edit: definitely a comment about past-me.) - Being the sort of person who learned about functional programming (ooh la la!) and thought it was pretty cool, and did a bunch of it. Scheme or Common Lisp or Haskell, all are beneficial. Experience with this makes you a better programmer. (I said Perl was the best to learn for a similar reason -- it makes you a better programmer in ways that Python and Ruby do not.) - Skill at minimizing the amount of code. This is the general skill that people in constrained environments have extensively developed, but which is useful in general for making minimal, readable, fast, more robust code. People programming graphing calculators, or that weird 16-bit Notch assembly language, or doing embedded programming, or any situation where you want as little code as possible, have these skills strongly developed. - Generally speaking, a wide variety of experiences. I don't think I'd be the same kind of programmer I am now if I didn't have experience with QBASIC, System Reverse Polish Lisp, or writing a Brainfuck interpreter in LabVIEW. Edit: There's too much information here, so to identify the subset I most strongly believe to be useful, I have marked them with .
shrughes fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Apr 21, 2012 |
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Apr 21, 2012 03:55
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shrughes posted:So you want to move from being a general programming person (which, including non-games industries, has the friendliest job market in the history of mankind and much better pay) to later being in animation or level design (which makes less money and is more replaceable). Did I hear you right? Well, I suppose that shows you how much I know about the industry so far.  Anyhow, the rest was really helpful, thanks!
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Apr 21, 2012 04:20
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