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Ask Slashdot: Advancing a Programming Career?
AuMatar writes "I've been a professional programmer for 10 years. The startup I work for was recently bought, and while I was offered a full-time job, I opted to accept only a six-month contract. At my most recent job, I was lead developer for a platform that shipped tens of millions of units, leading a team that spanned up to three geographical areas I've done everything from maintenance to brand new apps. About the only thing I haven't done is been lead architect on a large system. What else is there to look for in the next job so it won't just feel like the same challenges all over again? I'm not interested in starting my own company, so I'm looking for suggestions assuming I'll be working for someone else."
I would look around for the opportunity to break in to the education field. There is no field more challenging and the real life experience you would bring to the classroom would be invaluable to the students.
Every developer hits that point eventually. And your choices aren't necesarily limited. Assuming you're ok with a pay cut.
There are plenty of opportunities to move in the direction or Project/IT management. That's the direction I've gone. 15 years of seeing poorly run projects and trying to get them back on track has left me pretty well practiced for taking the reigns.
Switching over to the networking side of the house isn't a bad option either. There's some learning involved, and you're not going to start out as a senior architect, but you can get work with the ancilary skills you've developed.
All industries can benefit from exceptionally bright solution developers. Look into 6-Sigma training and advance your career into process improvement.
And if all else fails, get out of the office. Find yourself a lumbar jack gig, maybe come camp counciling in the summer, park maintenance in the Everglades, etc....
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
My overused response to a lot of questions is: Unask the question.
You've got a lot of technical and lead and coordination and probably management skills you've developed. So instead of asking where should you go next, ask what do you enjoy the most?
It may be that you do want the challenge of a lead architect position, in which case you might be looking for a startup company. I have no idea how people get to that level. Some are bottom up evolution, and some are top down revolution type people.
It may be that you want the joys of integration or release management, or something along those lines.
Basically, in a nutshell, ask yourself what makes you happiest and pursue that. Worst case scenario, you've wasted a few months. Best case scenario, you grow into a beautiful butterfly...
The only problem I see with freelancing is that he specifically says he wants to advance his career. When you're a freelancer, people tend to want to hire you to do the thing you did last time. It's just the nature of the beast; you're probably going to get a lot of jobs by word of mouth, and the word of mouth is going to be "when we needed that same thing, we hired this guy -- you should hire him, too." Also, people tend to underestimate the amount of hustle it takes to be a freelancer. You're always thinking about your next job, which means you tend to be reluctant to turn down paying work. These two factors make it very easy to fall into a rut.
Breakfast served all day!
I would really suggest you look into game designing and not programming. The latter is crunch work that can be done by almost anyone and in the long run extremely annoying. Designing is fun.
I did games for 17 years and I disagree with that statement.
There are parts of game development that can be done by almost anyone, and those parts suck. Things like shitty game AI and front ends. Things that don;t take any insight, just hours of monkey work.
Then there are the parts that separate out the chaff, the low level optimization and driver stuff. I did the latter for almost all of my career and it was a blast. Every five years or so a new generation of hardware comes down the pipe and you get to wrap your head around a whole new set of problems building on the knowledge and experiences of before. Going form the old 8 bit stuff all the way to current consoles has been a hell of a ride.
As for game designers, I've only worked with a couple that weren't idiots. The biggest problem I had with them is their inability to think about their decisions ahead of time and require the devs to actually build the bad ideas before understanding how awful their decisions actually were. The good designers were a blessing to work with. They had a clear vision and an understanding on how to get there. The projects with good designers you build once. The projects with poor designers get built two or three times on the way to final and are usually poorer for the effort.
If you think you could be a good game designer then GO FOR IT! The industry needs you.
Almost anybody I've ever known who has moved onto being the lead architect isn't handling much (if any) code anymore. You're operating at a different level ... the overall design, the components that make it up, and working with the dev team to sort out problems. And, of course, working to define the requirements, use cases, and all of the other stuff like that.
Which is fine, but from what I've seen you can stay as an actual Programmer for so long, and then people expect you to move into architect/management roles to oversee the people who now do the coding. Your job becomes big-picture kind of stuff. Sometimes they look at someone of a certain age who is still writing code and wonder why you're still doing that.
If you're looking to solve new and interesting problems without feeling like you're doing the same thing over and over ... well, maybe what you want to do be doing it is working with a consulting company? The breadth and depth of your experience gets used for many different problems, it definitely changes often, and you get called in to help clients solve problems and develop solutions
Not saying consulting is for everyone, or that it's even the best choice out there ... but when I 'graduated' from a previous job as a programmer and got into consulting, I found I got to work on different projects, provide different insights into them, and then work towards the overall solution.
If you've been doing the kind of dev work you describe for long enough, there's a remarkable amount of soft skills you've likely picked up that are very marketable ... you don't need to know everything about everything, but knowing a lot about a lot of things actually makes you quite useful as a generalist skillset, with the ability to delve deeper when the need/occasion arises.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Here is the problem you are about to face... Next time you work under someone, you are going to second-guess everything they do. What you need to do it to ask your company to send you for management training, my guess is that based on how you phrased things you have never had any. After that you need to take the time to figure out how to explain to your subordinates how you want something done and let them do it. You may think you are the best person to do something, but if you can teach 5 or 10 (or more) people to do it the same way, that makes you far more valuable to the company and will get a you a larger paycheck as well. You just need to figure out how to do it all in a way that does not stress you to the point of snapping and eventually it will become easy and natural. All that being said there is nothing to stop you from trying to teach the occasional night class at a local college.
I can sympathize with not wanting to start your own company.
Marketing, accounting, networking, hell just coming up with an idea all things I very much detest. Being a wage slave sucks in a lot of ways but at the same time: you show up, do the thing you love (for the most part) and get paid enough to be happy. You don’t have to worry about how it makes money or where the next project is coming from... that’s someone else’s job.
If you can partner up with a guy who has the same passion for wearing suits and working in power point as you do for cranking out killer code... then maybe it would be alright.. but having to deal with all that stuff yourself (in addition to actually writing the software) sounds like a nightmare to me at least.
Obviously some people enjoy the whole package.. but we don’t all have that entrepreneurial drive, and I think going that route just to get more interesting coding projects is a bad move.
I think that would inevitably wind up a Steve Jobs / Steve Wozniak situation - in the best case, if the endeavor were really successful, he would gradually leave you in the dust and replace you. Whoever manages the money and touches it first has all the leverage. Might as well work for a larger company with more stability. (Granted Wozniak never had to work again, but Apple's level of success is unusual to say the least).
Take some time off and reflect. Slashdot isn't going to provide you with any wisdom for something that is a function of you and your feelings.