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This is not an easy question to answer and this will probably turn into a long post but here we go. Currently I run a team of Salesforce and Full Stack developers for a 50 person startup in New Hampshire and recently have hired from Goons straight out of college for the Full Stack team. I have been working in Software Development in Corporate IT jobs and Product Development for over 10 years at this point so have a bit of experience to pass on. Is Software Dev a good career to move into? Yes with a few buts. There is a skills gap in the area and while you hear about people coming over on H1b visas taker jerbs and all that there are way more out there than there are people coming in to fill them. I moved from Britain to take up a position in the Boston area in 2012 not only due to a gap in skills needed in software dev but because I had a lot of customer facing experience and being able to deal with non technical people as a technical person is a useful place to be. So there are jobs, they are generally good jobs and the exceptions I will go over, the wages and benefits tend to be good and there are opportunities for upward mobility to a point if you want to be a pure developer and further up in to management if you wanted to go that way. You also can work in almost any industry since everyone has some investment in technology at this point. The main split with the types of jobs is between Corporate IT and a Development Shop. Corporate IT will have you developing tools for that business, extending and maintaining other software they buy and has more potential to give you exposure to a number of different technologies and products. I started in Corporate IT and learned a lot of skills across a lot of different things which set me up well later to be able to do a lot of work with system integration and high level designing of systems and software products. However in a corp IT job you are very much a cost and are there to provide tools for Sales and Marketing to be able to sell the product. You won't get a lot of respect from the higher ups in the company as they are likely all Sales and Marketing people who are perpetuating the culture of crapping on IT. You generally can work up good relationships with the people using the tools you work on as you will be their savior when everything is broken but Director, VP and Exec level they just wish you would make everything 100% reliable so they didn't have to pay you anymore. These are the kinds of jobs that you hear getting outsourced a lot for short term gains so the execs hit profitability targets and bail before their replacements have to institute a project to rehire a local IT team to unfuck everything. This might sound cynical but I have seen it 3 times already. Other frustrations with corp IT include having to deal with vendors of lovely products that refuse to unshit them and you cannot move to something potentially less poo poo (p.s. all the alternatives are poo poo as well) because your boss signed a 5 year contract with them to get a better rate so their boss would give them a bonus. Having to deal with non technical people asking for impossible things. I was once asked to make a server psychic so it would know that a file was corrupted before it downloaded the file to check it for corruption. They didn't understand that the origin of the data should check the integrity of what it generated then tell us it was time to grab it and yeah that was only Monday of that week. Final frustration would be dealing with corporate politics that you have very little input over yet negatively impacts your life. An example of this would be a CMO forcing through the purchase of a certain tool that we knew wasn't going to do the job we needed it to because he was golf buddies with the CEO of the company that made it and they needed a North American sale to trumped about in the Marketing magazines. Good things about Corporate IT. Companies tend to be bigger and more mature, might have a bonus structure and better benefits due to scaling costs. Since it will be a sales and marketing company primarily they will be events held that you will get invited to, I had a few trips to the Caribbean payed for the company to do sales kick offs in April because they wanted someone in IT to tell them about all the cool things they would be getting to help them sell more and blah blah blah fruit smoothy on the beach with a BBQ for a week whatever. The other type is the Developer working for a Product Engineering department of a company that sells software. Note I said sells rather than makes software because again every company is a sales company. This can be for an established software house like the Oracles and Microsofts of the world or for a smaller startup like who I work for. It varies company to company and there are plenty of stories about lovely things happening to people at Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc... etc... but they tend to be more engineering focused companies so you tend to have a little more say in how things work and your input might get a little further up the chain. Most of what I said about corp IT applies apart from having tools shoved into your lap by non technical people, instead it will be the technical people doing it and a lot of the time it is either automation which makes you job easier or some other tool that you might or might not use. In Software Dev for a Software company the major complaints will come from pressure to deliver new features to a timeline so they can be sold to new customers and help keep current ones, timelines are super important and form the main part of THE GREAT GAME!!! The game basically is you over estimating how long everything will take because you know that someone will push back asking for it to be done sooner because they promised it to a customer and didn't ask you first. In my job this is where currently I just laugh at them and leave because I have the authority to dictate those timelines and do all I can to protect the off hours of my staff. However that is because I have been in situations where you are compelled to do long days and weekends and it sucks balls while being indicative of lovely planning. I plan everything out months in advance and organise things into little buckets people can shuffle about to make themselves feel good. Sadly this is not the norm but there we go. BigPaddy's list of Tech Jobs to never take: - Games Developers: Just no, they will work you to near death and when you no longer perform throw you out and get in some more bright eyed youngsters to flog. The crunch is the norm not the exception and very few people make their way up from a code monkey to the hot poo poo designers you see at E3 over promising and underdelivering. - Consultancy Firm: The Cap Geminis of the world where you will be a replaceable cog as soon as a cheaper cog comes along. Throw in that every quarter your performance will be judged and if they feel like they have to put you in the bottom 10% out you go. Finally you have to deal with dumb customers whow ill not communicate properly and blame you for everything. - "Solutions" Companies: Similar to Consultancy firms but smaller and usually hired to do development work that the client didn't plan correctly and oh poo poo it needs to be done now now now. High stress, low payoff and you spend you time fixing other peoples poo poo and being at fault when it doesn't work anyway and misses the deadline. Right I need to go to a meeting where I tell people why my team are busy and to not bother them under penalty of death. I hope the above is helpful and not too negative I just wanted to press the reality of the industry. I am sure someone will be along to tell me I am wrong any minute now.
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Aug 16, 2017 15:28
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feedmegin posted:Maybe Google yourself a Python tutorial or something, play around a bit, see if it's something you want to be doing 40 hours a week every week? It's free. This is a good idea and after that if you wanted something more structured with support https://www.udemy.com has a number of courses for different languages and technologies that would be a good start before looking into a Coding Bootcamp to get something to show you abilities rather than a full on degree. With udemy when you sign up you will get discounts (like $85 courses will be $10). This is a common occurrence, never pay full price for any udemy courses.
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Aug 16, 2017 18:33
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22 Eargesplitten posted:They hit the software programming side of things pretty well, but IT isn't all programming. There's also infrastructure (ops) work, which is keeping the networks / servers / whatever running. That's less programming, although there will likely be some since Microsoft is pushing towards using scripting more often, and Linux has always been about that. If you decide programming is not your thing then as the above says there are other things in a tech job. Networking and getting experience with AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Heroku etc... is a good thing to look into but more traditional infrastructure isn't going away any time soon. 22 Eargesplitten posted:There's also support, but abandon hope all ye who decide to spend their lives telling people to restart their computer. Don't do this to yourself.
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Aug 29, 2017 12:56
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Che Delilas posted:There are certs, but they don't really mean anything to most people. So good news, you'll really just have to prove that you can hack it. Being someone who hires developers I can tell you that I don't give a poo poo about certs since I have done a lot of them and now they only last a couple of years exist only to make money for the vendor. Some look for them and will put them on their job reqs but honestly as long as I don't think you are trying to bullshit me and answer my questions with the answers I want to hear I will give you a go.
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Sep 3, 2017 20:36
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