So I am a web developer, have been for the past 2 years since I finished my degree. Long story short I am on my second developer job and I am not sure I even want to be a developer any more, or if this is just the second job where the developers have been undervalued, overworked and not given enough time to complete tasks. I guess most places are like that! I think I prefer hardware (and OS stuff) to software development but I don't think a life as tech support is the life for me. I was thinking of trying to become a system admin but I can't seem to find any jobs available in my area and moving away is simply not an option for the next few years. So guys and gals, what is out there? what could I be setting my sights on? What do you do? Help to cheer me up
Just out of interest how old are you and what sort of skills do you have? The company I work for are looking for peepz just down the road St.Neots
I actually just removed my location due to potential employer snooping I am 24, and have 2 years experience in development. Mostly ASP.NET, C#, some VB.Net, MS SQL Server Management Studio. More recently I have been doing a lot of PHP/MySql.
I was a large server technician for a while, but I'm not sure how you get into it any more-I got in in 1998 and rode it for a while, then went into support and sales. Life changes, mostly-though I did a fair piece of design type work as well. With the skill set you have, I should figure that some employer will treat you halfway decently-is it that you hate the work or hate the treatment?
Operations is a good role if you're not sure what you want to do. It gives you the freedom to be a sysadmin in the morning, a DBA in the afternoon, a developer the next day and so on. I loved working in operations. It has everything so if you get bored easily it's a good role. An excellent platform to spring from into a more specialised position once you know what you want to do. Pro tip: Fastest way to find the operations type roles I've found is to search job sites for ITIL certification, they almost always mention wanting ITIL certs. I guess the corrollary there is to read up on ITIL, be able to speak coherently about ITIL concepts and that will be enough - IMO very few companies actually implement ITIL verbatim but what it does do is give people a language to be able to talk about how they want to shape their IT org. You will need to be good with people - operations are the glue in the middle of a large company's IT org, you need to be able to demonstrate having good attention for details. Familiarity with a broad range of technologies is more important than being great at only one thing. A history of successful project management is very beneficial - at your age you can use examples outside the workplace as well. Just an idea but from my experiences I'd wholeheartedly recommend it.
You may want to look into a consulting/contracting company. The company I work for has a systems and development branch (as well as a few others) and we get sent out to companies to work for anything from a week to years usually to work on a specific project. The client we get sent to depends on our skills/preferences - I'm a developer, but I have done plenty of systems stuff in the past. In my experience though, web development companies (that don't do anything else) are always quite high stress get-stuff-out-the-door-as-quickly-as-possible places.
Shame you want to get out of dev work. I think we're looking for someone with that skillset. Drop me over a CV
Second this, I work as an IT Consultant at a big tech firm and I get such variance in roles. I worked as a Java/J2EE developer for 6 months, and now I'm currently a technical lead/Application Specialist dealing mainly with Websphere MQ, but also on a lot of technical meetings with the client (which suits me perfectly). Friends of mine in the same company work mostly in development, and move to different projects for different types of development every 6-12 months. My time as a developer was the right amount of pressure, I felt like I had the right level of support, and no-one was unrealistic about expectations, although I feel this might more be the industry (a Public Sector/Defence client), as the Developers I worked with in the financial sector seemed a lot more rushed. Ultimately the good point about a big firm is that you can change your mind on what you want to do, and the company supports your pursuit.
Thanks for all the input guys, I haven't been on for around 5 days so didn't reply sooner. I have been trying to get my head down and just smash out the current project but been dealing with a lot of distractions and self doubts so it has been proving difficult. This means I am going to have to start bringing my work home this week to get things back on track, which obviously doesn't help in the long run. I am going to try my hardest just to push through this project, or at least these few project milestones and then I can relax a bit more and think seriously about my next steps. You have given me some things to think about and a consultant role is looking in the right direction. I am still a bit reluctant to give up on development because I think I am just having issues with moral due to the way the company is setup and how much value is put on certain jobs/people. Hopefully I can get through this bad spell and stop being a grumpy bugger because it doesn't suit me one bit
