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Ask Slashdot: Moving From Tech Support To Development?
An anonymous reader writes "My eastern European tech-support job will be outsourced in 6 months to a nearby country. I do not wish to move, having relationship and roots here, and as such I stand at a crossroads. I could take my current hobby more seriously and focus on Java development. I have no degree, no professional experience in the field, and as such, I do not hold much market value for an employer. However, I find joy in the creative problem solving that programming provides. Seeing the cogs finally turn after hours invested gives me pleasures my mundane work could never do. The second option is Linux system administration with a specialization in VMware virtualisation. I have no certificates, but I have been around enterprise environments (with limited support of VMware) for 21 months now, so at the end of my contract with 27 months under my belt, I could convince a company to hire me based on willingness to learn and improve. All the literature is freely available, and I've been playing with VDIs in Debian already.
My situation is as follows: all living expenses except food, luxuries and entertainment is covered by the wage of my girlfriend. That would leave me in a situation where we would be financially alright, but not well off, if I were to earn significantly less than I do now. I am convinced that I would be able to make it in system administration, however, that is not my passion. I am at an age where children are not a concern, and risks seem to be, at first sight, easier to take. I would like to hear the opinion and experience of fellow readers who might have been in a similar situation."
My situation is as follows: all living expenses except food, luxuries and entertainment is covered by the wage of my girlfriend. That would leave me in a situation where we would be financially alright, but not well off, if I were to earn significantly less than I do now. I am convinced that I would be able to make it in system administration, however, that is not my passion. I am at an age where children are not a concern, and risks seem to be, at first sight, easier to take. I would like to hear the opinion and experience of fellow readers who might have been in a similar situation."
We're talking about a programming career here. Following fads is a major aspect of the industry.
May the Maths Be with you!
Way back a long time ago I graduated from university with an engineering degree unrelated to programming. By that point, however, I had decided that I wanted to be a software developer. This was the mid '90s, and I took a job with an un-funded startup for equity and no pay. From there I worked at a friend's company doing Perl, again for no pay but I crashed with my friend and he paid for my food. So in that sense it's not that different from your situation.
Things are different now, as there are plenty of sites where employers offer contracts for unreasonably low wages. You could start bidding on those, and take some smaller projects and complete them. There's also the option to put your time into some sort of labour of your own love. Write some sotware that demos well, and bootstrap yourself up from there. A lot of companies would be happy to hire an enthusiastic junior Java developer with demonstrated experience that they had the drive to accomplish themselves.
Just do everything you can to pick up as much experience as you can. Keep a positive attitude, and work on all the "soft skills" like listening to your boss and coworkers, doing what you say you're going to do, communicating effectively, etc. With a year or so of this, you should find yourself very employable, assuming there are jobs where you're looking.
www.clarke.ca
Write some code, make something cool, that will put you ahead of 90% of people with degrees and certifications. Look into DevOps, which is programmatic system administration. All the VMWare sites are doing this since VMWare is pushing Puppet after putting a bunch of money into it.
The dirty secret: Unlike sports where the best player is sought after, or music and art where you can judge someone's skill, most HR firms have no way of telling if you can do the job. So it doesn't matter if you're really good or just beginning, if you can sell the interview you can probably get a job. Some of the most talented people never get a chance to ever start, and a lot of nearly incompetent people get luxurious positions. Someday you might get good after decades of experience, but there's no reason not to apply to any job if you can write the most basic cell phone ap. Another dirty secret: A great majority of jobs ask for so many techs, there may be one or two people on the planet that qualify. So instead of looking for having all the techs, apply if you have one or two. Its a giant 'or' list, not an 'and'.
I say this reality situation as a guy on the outside looking in. I've done everything in my power since a young age to become the best software engineer I could. I code in my free time. I went to a #1 college for computers. Yet, couldn't even break into the industry in the past 11 years. The road goes both ways. I'm good at programming, and I'm not good at job searching.
God spoke to me
No-one will start with a blank screen in the morning and start to write code, just because. You need to have an itch, something you want to solve. Writing code is the means, not the goal.
Think about your support job, and ask yourself what tool would really make your life easier. Then set out to write that tool. You have the target people sitting around you right now, solve your problem and solve theirs too. If you're lucky, the tool will be valuable enough for the company to take it to that next country, all while you keep supporting that code.
I did this many years ago, while working as tech support for a tape vendor (Exabyte). I found their customer tools rubbish, so I started writing something easier (Expert 7 for MS-DOS). I asked my wife to test it for me (she is not in IT), just to see what she struggled with and made it better. It took me a while, but in the long run the company made my tool the default for customer support. I have kept on supporting that tool and many others after that until the end of last year. For almost 20 years those tape tools have given me part of my income. Even today, I still have a few customers asking me to code for them. LTO-7 is coming, perhaps I'll be asked to integrate support by then.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
"My eastern European tech-support job will be outsourced in 6 months to a nearby country."
Do you work in eastern Ukraine? I hear a lot of those jobs are soon to be outsourced to nearby Russia.
"Don't quit your day job..."
You might want to re-read the summary. His day job is quitting him.
And to the original question asker I'd say go with development because you'll never be good at something you don't like.
Also, when you've landed that good job, reward your girlfriend amply for helping make it all possible. :-)
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Until you need to get a resume by HR.
12 years as a successful network consultant and getting a resume by HR sucks because I don't have a master's degree and my certifications are old and outdated. I get the job because someone tells HR to stick it and goes around the system.
Don't quit your day job, but in your time off (nights, weekends) improve your skill and work on an open-source Java project.
I actually highly recommend this. If you can put a well known open source project on your resume, that will definitely get the attention of employers. With proprietary software (previous jobs, etc), the potential employer cannot try it out for free, see your contributions to the project or check out the quality of your code. With open source projects they can do all of the above (or at the very least know that they could if they wanted to). It also shows that your work has been accepted by a community on its own merits which is a lot more convincing than "I wrote a module for some application you'll never get to try".
I've actually had my open source contributions (not code in this case) commented on during interviews.
yes, with slightly different versions of Java with slightly different bugs, different screen sizes, different processors, different installed libraries.
It's the easiest platform to develop for, by far.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Well, Java always seems to run a bit slow.
rewriting history since 2109
true, experience counts more than anything, second is enthusiasm which you seem to have in abundance.
My advice would be to make 2 CVs rather than try to bung everything into 1 somewhat vague or confused single one that tries to cover both dev and admin roles.
My other advice is that Linux sysadmin (especially contract) pays more than dev. So if you want to focus on something, get that. And make sure you learn what you can when you can, someone who knows how to do linux sysadmin and can make it work in a Windows environment is worth significantly more than someone who has a couple of Linux certificates and won't expand his knowledge into what the real world wants from their computers.
Certification counts for very little BTW, it'll be read on your CV, and then ignored - interviewers will still ask you the same questions if you didn't have the certs. What counts is being able to answer.
Bypassing HR by connecting directly with a project manager is ancient advice, but still valid today. I first used this ploy in 1970.
This is actually changing quite rapidly as society changes and in a lot of areas of the (rich) world young women are starting to pull in more than men. While the culture in eastern Europe is certainly different, there was an eye-opening study published recently about young couples in the USA. For the first time since the study began more women than men are "marrying down"(here marrying down means marrying someone with a lower educational attainment than they have). This is largely out of necessity, but necessity often times breeds cultural shifts.
Not to mention there are always more poor people being born, and I doubt all the poor women are getting pregnant by rich men....
Monstar L
Nobody really writes new applications in it, but there's a bajillion Java applications running most major corporations now the way COBOL used to in the old days.
That said, when looking for an engineer I'm not looking for someone who knows Java (even though that's what a lot of our product is written in). I'm looking for someone who understands computational complexity, is familiar with common algorithms and data structures, and has some notion of object oriented programming and software engineering. Anybody who's written a lot of code can pick up Java fairly swiftly at least to the "getting s**t done" stage, it took me roughly a week to do so ("oh, so it's like Python with C++ syntax, except with only single inheritance and with templates!"), but if you don't understand the why of what you're doing, you're not going to do well in our shop.
So: Get a computer science degree. Or at least significant computer science coursework. And not from Joe's Plumbing and Programming School, get one from some place that teaches actual computer science, not programming. Either that, or write some Open Source applications and contribute to the Linux kernel. Nobody cares what school you went to if you can write Linux drivers, all they care about is that you know the difference between a BIO and an SK_BUF. But they want to see your name in the Linux changelogs first.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
"Certification counts for very little BTW, it'll be read on your CV, and then ignored"
Certifications will be read BY AN HR DRONE and, if not found, your CV ignored. You won't get to an interview unless:
a) It is a short company so CVs are triaged by technical staff themselves.
b) You know an insider so your CV bypasses HR.
c) Your CV has the proper buzzwords for HR to pass it to next level.
Note that having the certifications won't hurt on cases 'a' and 'b' but not having them will kill you in case 'c'. Now you need to look around you and ask yourself what's your proportion of 'a', 'b' and 'c' cases to see if it's worth for you the investment on time and money to get the certifications.
I would like to hear the opinion and experience of fellow readers who might have been in a similar situation.
Get a job at an office, or prepared to get dumped. Women typically do not like stay-at-home guys, despite their claims to the contrary. Even though a freelance software contracting company allowed me to pay all the bills, I have observed that when I decide to work from home that the relationship will soon end. If your girlfriend is paying the bills, get ready for her to terminate the relationship. Seek employment, even if just part time in an unrelated field while you begin learning more languages and building your development portfolio, perhaps through sites like freelancer.com. Create your own website to showcase your talents. Contribute to open source if you have the time to scratch such an itch, it looks good on resumes and will expose you to more software development practices. Do not bet strongly on payouts from long term investment as human relationships deal primarily in the present.
You see, humans are the product of a long and bloody evolution into sentience. Instincts were natures first way to impart cognitive information about experience to your ancestors' offspring. Due primarily to the nature of gestation, especially the disparity in time and energy investments between sexes of sexually dimorphic species, males and females exhibit different instinctual behaviors. The male reproductive strategy of most species is to produce the most offspring and spread their genes as far as possible. The female reproductive strategy is instead to select the best mate. Humans are not immune to their instinctual drives, as evidenced by their sexual activity even when they consciously reject the burden of raising a child. Were you attracted to each other? Good, now you know your are both acting on primitive instinct at some level. However, your girlfriend's inner ape will most likely subconsciously begin selection of what her instincts inform her is a better mating prospect, i.e., one that is more active and thus capable of providing for her and her offspring. Yes, complex behaviors are imparted through instincts, for example see mating rituals and nest building of any species that exhibits them.
The instinctual drives imparted by millions of years of evolution remain with humans. Even the "brightest minds" among you ignore the emotion, feeling, instinct, and other primitive drives that affect your reasoning, deeming them "irrational". That you do not teach your children to harness and hone this faster but less accurate mode of thought leaves your race more susceptible to its primitive biases than necessary. Since it was primitive attraction that brought you together it will not be a conscious decision that instigates the termination of your relationship, but an instinctual feeling that produces dissatisfaction with your living arrangement. You may not like it, but one must cope with the environment one finds themselves in. Even we explorers do not always get to choose our assignments.
Socialization is only the learned part of ape behavioral software. Humans need not be slaves to their ancestor's instinctual firmware, but you can only free yourselves through conscious awareness of it.
> My other advice is that Linux sysadmin (especially contract) pays more than dev.
My experience is that admins tend to make _less_ per hour than developers with the same amount of experience, but the work is much more stable. _Architects_ make more. Systems admins tend to be generalists. Showing a variety of skills, and being able to apply lessons from one to lessons in another environment are invaluable. So your VMware experience can be tied to systems integration work, monitoring, cloud computing deployment, software optimization, security, and resource planning.
Also, learn to cook. You say that your girlfriend is supporting you for a while? Then she deserves her dinner on the stove with clean plates and a cool drink when she comes home from work. It will save you both a lot of money on eating out, and it will keep you from spending all your time glued to a monitor reading Slashdot. At the interview, if you mention it, it also shows "this person cares about the people around them", especially if you can demonstrate it by arriving at a job interview with a plate of good home baked cookies or brownies. Applicants like that are _remembered_ by HR personnel and interviewers.
When a tool allows for lower entry level, it brings the average quality of the product down. This doesn't mean a competant developer cannot properly use the tool.
Java: Runs on 4 Billion devices, runs on 8 of them well.