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IT peoples: Tell me about your career...

21:30 / 24.08.08

Sup y'all,

Do you work in any field of Information Technology? Graphic Design? Network Engineer? Programmer? Represent your professional 'hood here.

Whether you're an O.G. programmer or a help desk guy who resets passwords all day, tell me a bit about what you do, how you wound up doing it, and where you see your career going.

Who's making more money than you, what are they doing, and how did they get there?

What type of formal education prepped you for your work, and is that typical for your professional peers?

If you did "computer science" at uni, how did you narrow your focus down?

What sort of foundational skills did you / could you teach yourself? And any recommendations for independent / free learning resources?

If you had to start from scratch, what would you recommend as the quickest, cheapest path towards an IT career that offers job security and a decent salary?

Help a guy out. This overworked, frustrated, and underpaid social worker needs a career change STAT.

14:55 / 26.08.08

I'm a Unix/Linux SysAdmin and have been for 10 years (been in IT 11 now). The pay is good and the position usually comes with benefits. Downside includes on call, late nights/weekends, sitting desk job, often with socially challenged people and confused management. Mostly in urban areas but more options for telecommuting now. Getting vacations in a small company is like pulling teeth because of lack of redundancy. In large companies there is often a painful amount of politicking around technologies that interferes with, you know, actually solving problems in a timely fashion. It's pretty portable skill set but now degrees in a related field are often required. I snuck in through a call center out of art college and got thrown into the bullpen with a group of drill sergeant Solaris SysAdmins. Painful but effective.

I've worked in big, medium, and small (ultra small) profit and non profits. Trade off seems to be between stability and creeping entropy. In big companies it's very hard to get things improved without crisis and in small often it's always in an artificial crisis reflecting the CEO's moods. I've had to become very zen regarding High availability and bleeding edge production environments.

If you like problem solving and don't mind office work it can be fantastic. However be aware that many people in the field have a wide range of neurological styles. I've been head hunted because I have solid skills but mostly because I can work well with many varieties of people. That and I will go fix a server at 3 AM when paged.

I'm plotting my escape within the next few years and have been taking classes on my vacation times. I've never done well with a desk job and need to escape the Fattening while I can.

15:04 / 26.08.08

Graphic Design?

Don't do it.

15:06 / 26.08.08

a. Why not?

b. Why didn't somebody tell me this before I declared my major?

15:56 / 26.08.08

Simply put, when a business begins to look for ways to cut expenses, the design department is usually one of the first places they look to make cuts. With so many businesses in the US struggling right now, (am I right in thinking you and Mr. E are in the US?) it makes for a helluva tough job search for graphics peeps. And I'm speaking from experience here. I'll be going on my second interview in two months tomorrow, and those two months have been an eternity for this husband and father. If they want me, they'll want me cheap I'm guessing.

Look, this is all coming from a guy who left his cushy corporate gig when he saw his department shrink and shrink and shrink, got let go from one ad agency when the real estate market took a dive, and just got let go from another ad agency when their sales dropped by 30%. So, I'm bound to be a little biased and more than a little bitter about the design job market. Thankfully, I've had a steady freelance gig that just about takes care of the mortgage each month, and an occasional photo retouch gig here and there. It's nowhere near as bad as it could be, but it could be a damn sight better.

It's probably not too much of a worry if you're still in school tho, Liger. The market's a cyclical thing, and there might be better opportunities once you're out of school. You might even have an easier time finding an internship in this market, which will greatly enhance your marketability once you're ready to find a job.

16:04 / 26.08.08

I'm a fairly standard programmer type.

People are good at it if they have the right kind of intelligence, analysis, memory and attention to detail.
It's only fun if you are working with people who are both good and nice - I expect that's just like any job, and it's very easy to get unlucky.

I got into it pretty much through fluke, getting some experience in a gap year job which decided me to go for a course including compsci at college. That company took me on after my degree and that gave me enough experience to be minimally credible and competent.

The initial technical/formal learning part is both not very difficult and not very important (except perhaps as credentials). Much more important in the long run is continuously developing through experience a good aesthetic sense or instinct for what the right thing to do is. This doesn't make you a better programmer but enables you to solve problems in reasonable time, when it might take an inexperienced person several tries to find a good approach. The corollary here is that you tend to view any of your work that is more than three months old with some horror.

Before you try to get started as a programmer I'd suggest that you read some books and talk to enough programmers to make sure it's something you'd enjoy doing. After that, the quantity and type of work available probably depends on where you live. You'll need lots of experience, or a degree, or preferably both. You might be able to get experience through consultancy work or jobs for friends, or get lucky like I did.

Oh, one last thing is that you can only really get decent practice by doing real projects. Working on contrived book examples is usually not very helpful - try to find small things you could do with a computer program that you are genuinely interested in getting to work. It's the only way to learn.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

16:33 / 26.08.08

It's probably not too much of a worry if you're still in school tho, Liger. The market's a cyclical thing, and there might be better opportunities once you're out of school. You might even have an easier time finding an internship in this market, which will greatly enhance your marketability once you're ready to find a job.

That's good to know. I've already got a secure full-time union job and my interest in graphic design is more to supplement my existing BA in fine art (Useless? You bet!).

I find that I learn best in a structured classroom setting, and my workplace has agreed to pay for the classes, so it's all good. But I'd feel much better about going back to school if I thought there was some chance of turning it into a positive career change.

16:35 / 26.08.08

Here's a question:

Should I learn PHP or Python?

I'm not a programmer, but have diddled around with applications for computers since they came on cassette tapes.

And, as Finklestein alluded to above, now is a good time for someone in publishing to have a secondary skill set.

16:37 / 26.08.08

The happiest graphic designer with steady income I know is the in house designer for a t-shirt company. He has a lot of fun helping people who come in from various charities with a cocktail napkin drawing for their design. A lot of his less fun work is helping the printers prep really shit designs that come from out of house people who don't grok the way t-shirts are printed in layered inks. It's a steady job and they always need the graphic designer. He's got a fat 401k I'm quite envious of.

Another friend is a freelance photographer and graphic designer. He goes and does shoots then tweaks the images for ads and brochures.

The other kind I know is a web graphic designer. This from the outside seems like a merge of basic programming skills (and not so basic) with graphic know how. These folks are a layer of glue, a very important layer, between the back end programmers and what the end user ends up with. Often they become UI designers.

It's a weird thing but once you can prove you have the ability to learn new systems and software you are more likely to get a good gig. While I have a giant list of name brands on my resume/CV those tend to change fast enough that recruiters are looking for the ability to pick up new technologies. I would never in a million years expected to be wrangling a rack full of virtualized servers ('lectric boxen dream about EMF grass).

The tech changes, the skills underneath remain the same. As stated up thread being to find the break in the workflow or come up with a new one conceptually is the important thing.

First tier support is almost always a great way to get into IT. It has a high burn out rate because of customer ranting but if you can grab the phone by virtue of data entry skills and the ability to read manuals you're in.

If someone asked me what job to get into right now I'd say IT is pretty saturated with kids coming out of school. It's the experienced people that are in the position to make good cash. Every one else gets dinky salaries not worth the stress, IMO.

16:39 / 26.08.08

PHP is pretty universal. Plus if you learn PHP you will be able to make LN that much more shiny! (and so have a place to tinker with PHP now even)

17:06 / 26.08.08

Looking to learn some web design stuff myself, actually. Skills in print and web are almost mandatory now, and I'm severely lacking in the latter (I can design for the web, I just don't know how to make the pixels go.) So I'm looking into acquiring Flash and Dreamweaver, and learning to do some coding stuffs.

I, too, may wants LN tinker toys.

A fall of geckos

18:03 / 26.08.08

If you're choosing between PHP & Python, it's worth considering the fact that - for the most part - they have different purposes and uses. PHP is a web based language. It usually works in conjunction with a database, allowing you to create forums, content management systems etc...

Python isn't primarily based on developing web applications, but can be used for web based programming - there are a lot of web frameworks out there. It's not restricted to web use though.

I originally studied English Lit, and got into web stuff as a copywriter and html writer. I've only learned to program properly over the last few years, as I decided that I was likely to make a better programmer then a designer.

I learned to program through a load of php and javascript night courses (mostly at City University), and I've enjoyed it throughly. I took a slight step down in pay to get into a full programming job, but I think it's likely to pay off in the end, and I've found the job satisfaction to be a lot higher then in my previous roles.

18:38 / 26.08.08

Should I learn PHP or Python?

Python. I'm the webmaster for a site built on it, the things we do daily is far and beyond what we could have done in any kind of php framework.

19:03 / 26.08.08

Python. While both are successfully used in the real world for doing lots of different and cool things, Python won't make your head explode with frustration at its poor design and documentation.

18:38 / 28.08.08

Though I know many many perl web masters that will have to have that pried from their cold dead fingers. I think they still consider PHP newfangled.

08:15 / 25.09.08

Hii can anyone recommend any good websites for searching for IT jobs? I've tried a couple, but without much success (either offers for 20K (which is too little) or 60K banking jobs (which is too much, and I probably couldn't do the job anyway.)) So far I've tried JobServe, JobSite and a couple of others, all without success.

A fall of geckos

10:54 / 25.09.08

Hi - I've mostly used Jobserve (which you mentioned) and CWjobs. I subscribed to both for email updates, and methodically applied to just about everything that came near my desired role. It took about 3 months to find my first contract, and I got a permanent role about one month after that ended.

Most of the jobs are being advertised through the job-sites by agencies. It's worth noting who, at the agencies, seems to be successful in finding possible roles and interview, and then using them as a main contact. If you can build relationships with some of the agency reps, they're more likely to work for you & possibly remember you later - when I left my contract role, it was fairly easy to get further interviews from the same agency.

16:17 / 25.09.08

So if *was* to start hammering PHP into my head, does this look like a good place to start?

16:49 / 25.09.08

I've found a few Python sites already.

18:53 / 29.09.08

I came across an old copy of Dreamweaver today. Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0 to be precise. I installed it and am working thru the tutorials now. So, in a very general sense, I'm beginning to learn web design. However, is teaching myself with a very old copy of very old software going to help me in the long run? In other words, if I tell a potential employer that I know Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0, will I be laughed out of the building?