Career change: programming / IT questions

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GauzeGuy

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GauzeGuy
I wanted to get some advice from those here, as I know quite a few of you are in IT related careers.

Prior to working 15 years in health care, I was going to school for computer programming. The short story is, I took an EMT course and managed to get myself off track. :wink2:

Fast forward to today, I'm definitely done with the health care profession. The patients were great for the most part, but I could care less for the paperwork and politics. I teach classes presently (hence my screen name) and do well being self employed.

That said, I'd like to look into the computer related careers again. What choices are out there that have good long term prospects? What type of training / certification / etc is required for entry into the field these days?

I realize those could be some pretty involved questions, but any pointers in the right direction would be most appreciated. Thanks!
 
Look into www.sans.org . Security is one of the fastest growing markets and with your medical experience it might get you into some good positions. Next on the list would be Mobile Applications development. I receive up to 15 emails and calls a day from recruiters and potential employers. Keep in mind that I am not even looking for a job these are people contacting me from Linked in and other places.
 
rkdF250 said:
Look into www.sans.org . Security is one of the fastest growing markets and with your medical experience it might get you into some good positions. Next on the list would be Mobile Applications development. I receive up to 15 emails and calls a day from recruiters and potential employers. Keep in mind that I am not even looking for a job these are people contacting me from Linked in and other places.
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Cybersecurity. Windows and *nix system administration a bit of network expertise with CISSP certification, write your own ticket.

Of course this now means being on call 24/7, dealing with hostile attacks, sometimes you don't even recognize, living on the CERT website....

This is so important right now that there's an annual international yearlong contest for high school students to learn the defensive methods funded by Cisco, SAIC and Northrop-grumman, among others.
 
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Thanks for the suggestions...

murphey said:
Of course this now means being on call 24/7, dealing with hostile attacks, sometimes you don't even recognize, living on the CERT website....
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That right there would pretty much kill my interest, as in demand as the skills set is...

More up my line of interest would be the mobile application development, possibly web development also. One thing is that if I continue my existing business for any length of time, my site (especially the back end processes) is in need of serious revamping. If I get myself back up to speed on current HTML plus asp / php, whatever, that could kill two birds with one stone.
 
GauzeGuy said:
More up my line of interest would be the mobile application development, possibly web development also. One thing is that if I continue my existing business for any length of time, my site (especially the back end processes) is in need of serious revamping. If I get myself back up to speed on current HTML plus asp / php, whatever, that could kill two birds with one stone.
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Any web or app development is work that can be ported off-shore at less than half the salary you would consider taking. Any kind of soft development or commonly stealing the app/web development and modifying it is being done in India/China.

Network admin, Unix admin, VM-ware architecture, security admin, and some highly specific device driver coding is about all that's left in the US because the hardware still sits in the corp headquarters, and won't be sent offshore for security reasons. So - basically from a high perspective, the sustaining engineering is about all that's left in the US.

There may be pockets of web development and app dev being done in the US, but it's very small scale, or ad-hoc which winds up on Google play, etc.
 
docmirror said:
Any web or app development is work that can be ported off-shore at less than half the salary you would consider taking. Any kind of soft development or commonly stealing the app/web development and modifying it is being done in India/China.

Network admin, Unix admin, VM-ware architecture, security admin, and some highly specific device driver coding is about all that's left in the US because the hardware still sits in the corp headquarters, and won't be sent offshore for security reasons. So - basically from a high perspective, the sustaining engineering is about all that's left in the US.
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Okay, yeah I shouldn't be surprised, unfortunate as it is. Thanks for the reality check!
 
GauzeGuy said:
Okay, yeah I shouldn't be surprised, unfortunate as it is. Thanks for the reality check!
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He's incorrect. As I stare at 120 or so app/web developers with job requisitions out for dozens more and fighting tooth and tail with other employers in the area to retain them.
 
bartmc said:
He's incorrect. As I stare at 120 or so app/web developers with job requisitions out for dozens more and fighting tooth and tail with other employers in the area to retain them.
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I hope you're right. I know a bunch of web developers who have been out of work for many, many months. Several of them have applied for jobs on monster and other boards, and never hear back. Not sure what's going on but I'd be happy to hear of a real job in the US that involves web dev cause I can pass on legitimate ones to some buddies who could use the work.
 
docmirror said:
I hope you're right. I know a bunch of web developers who have been out of work for many, many months. Several of them have applied for jobs on monster and other boards, and never hear back. Not sure what's going on but I'd be happy to hear of a real job in the US that involves web dev cause I can pass on legitimate ones to some buddies who could use the work.
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If they have ADF experience, send them my way.

We use very little outsourcing, too much of a PITA. Offshore Outsourcing has it's place but very little of the projects I've been involved in lend themselves to it.
 
bartmc said:
He's incorrect. As I stare at 120 or so app/web developers with job requisitions out for dozens more and fighting tooth and tail with other employers in the area to retain them.
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If the work can be done remotely from Colorado, I'm available.
 
bartmc said:
If they have ADF experience, send them my way.

We use very little outsourcing, too much of a PITA. Offshore Outsourcing has it's place but very little of the projects I've been involved in lend themselves to it.
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As in Oracle ADF?
 
docmirror said:
Any web or app development is work that can be ported off-shore at less than half the salary you would consider taking. Any kind of soft development or commonly stealing the app/web development and modifying it is being done in India/China.

Network admin, Unix admin, VM-ware architecture, security admin, and some highly specific device driver coding is about all that's left in the US because the hardware still sits in the corp headquarters, and won't be sent offshore for security reasons. So - basically from a high perspective, the sustaining engineering is about all that's left in the US.

There may be pockets of web development and app dev being done in the US, but it's very small scale, or ad-hoc which winds up on Google play, etc.
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Bah. There's plenty of work left here, depending on one's skill set.
===================

But my question to the OP is, of all the careers you'd want to change to, why IT? Most folks in IT about your age are looking at career changes to do something else.

If it's something you really enjoy there are tons and tons of opportunity for skilled application developers. Most will want someone with a bachelors degree in the field. Once you visit with your academic advisor he'll steer you to the right classes.
 
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murphey said:
If the work can be done remotely from Colorado, I'm available.
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We have some remote employees but they're grandfathered in. Even so I believe the last one I talked to spent over 50 nights in a hotel room this year.
 
I think there's a certain bifurcation of the market in the low skill and high skill sets. My company has a noticeable difficulty filling high skill set positions for Linux kernel internals and the like. We had to import people and we have remote developers in Europe who were thought essential but refused to relocate to U.S..

A few years ago I negotiated a transition from Linux kernel development to cloud storage development, and from time to time my old management asks if I'm bored with this cloud fad yet.

Most likely, this sort of situation repeats in all areas. For example, my ewil twin, er, namesake made himself a bright career from MySQL. He tours the country with lectures and writes books. In the same time, I'm sure thousands of people all around poke at MySQL, open a couple of cursors, and get outsourced.

Starting in IT is easy, transitioning from an expendable unit to a valuable professional is not so easy, I think.

It used to be that Open Source was the secret for success. You could join a good project and grow with it, while your peers slaved in their cubicles (well, you did too, as a day job). Then one day they had nothing to their name and you had a famous software piece that was easy to monetize. Unfortunately, everyone knows about this trick now. But it can still be powerful if executed with full intent.
 
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zaitcev said:
I think there's a certain bifurcation of the market in the low skill and high skill sets. My company has a noticeable difficulty filling high skill set positions for Linux kernel internals and the like. We had to import people and we have remote developers in Europe who were thought essential but refused to relocate to U.S..

A few years ago I negotiated a transition from Linux kernel development to cloud storage development, and from time to time my old management asks if I'm bored with this cloud fad yet.

Most likely, this sort of situation repeats in all areas. For example, my ewil twin, er, namesake made himself a bright career from MySQL. He tours the country with lectures and writes books. In the same time, I'm sure thousands of people all around poke at MySQL, open a couple of cursors, and get outsourced.

Starting in IT is easy, transitioning from an expendable unit to a valuable professional is not so easy, I think.

It used to be that Open Source was the secret for success. You could join a good project and grow with it, while your peers slaved in their cubicles (well, you did too, as a day job). Then one day they had nothing to their name and you had a famous software piece that was easy to monetize. Unfortunately, everyone knows about this trick now. But it can still be powerful if executed with full intent.
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nobody ever got fired for going with IBM. Open SOurce is a 4 letter world in the corporate world.

I used to roll my own monolithic kernels "back in the day" when I aspired to be a kernel hacker (The comments in the source code are amusing). Even wrote a Linux device driver for an obscure parallel port scanner using my experience. This was a $50 Wal-Mart scanner but I sure wasn't buying another one, the SANE project picked it up. I looked at MySQL "back in the day" (and have had encounters with it since) but they were preaching about how bad foreign keys were and why they weren't going to add them….. Yeah…pass. They still have the hair brained aggregates where you do not have to GROUP BY everything in the select clause….moronic..pass. Try porting that to another database. We went with PostgreSQL.
 
bartmc said:
nobody ever got fired for going with IBM. Open SOurce is a 4 letter world in the corporate world.
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That's great to hear, but irrelevant. My company makes 2 Billion dollars a year purely on Open Source and some of that revenue supports my flying habit.

bartmc said:
We went with PostgreSQL.
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Postgress was an Open Source project even before MySQL came about. Just saying... We employ one of its architects.
 
zaitcev said:
That's great to hear, but irrelevant. My company makes 2 Billion dollars a year purely on Open Source and some of that revenue supports my flying habit.


Postgress was an Open Source project even before MySQL came about. Just saying... We employ one of its architects.
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Yes, I'm aware PostgreSQL is open source, I contributed to some of the compatibility libraries written around libpq.

I'm an Open Source fan (all hail Richard Stallman) , have contributed to PostgreSQL and SANE, made my own edits to the kernel. My point was big business still want's someone with a ticker symbol to choke when the proverbial stuff hits the fan. My guess is you work for Red Hat given those numbers.
 
docmirror said:
Any web or app development is work that can be ported off-shore at less than half the salary you would consider taking. Any kind of soft development or commonly stealing the app/web development and modifying it is being done in India/China.

<snip>

There may be pockets of web development and app dev being done in the US, but it's very small scale, or ad-hoc which winds up on Google play, etc.
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There aren't software developers without jobs in the midwest (unless they are terrible).
 
jesse said:
There aren't software developers without jobs in the midwest (unless they are terrible).
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Here in Dallas, the I.T. job market is insane.
We have trouble keeping people because there is a lot of money being thrown around right now.

We have had to hire some really terrible ones because the above average devs are requesting big money and other companies will pay it.

I actually transitioned into mgmt and I have to hire developers. It is a challenge with the budget I have been given.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Here in Dallas, the I.T. job market is insane.
We have trouble keeping people because there is a lot of money being thrown around right now.

We have had to hire some really terrible ones because the above average devs are requesting big money and other companies will pay it.

I actually transitioned into mgmt and I have to hire developers. It is a challenge with the budget I have been given.
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It's not easy to find them here either, regardless of the budget.
 
A slight aside, but if you're moving to avoid politics and paperwork I'm not sure you'll find that they don't exist in IT. Depends on your precise role and your employer, of course.
 
tiger said:
A slight aside, but if you're moving to avoid politics and paperwork I'm not sure you'll find that they don't exist in IT. Depends on your precise role and your employer, of course.
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If you stay out of government work and avoid public companies. The politics and paperwork are minimal. I'll never work on a government contract again, too much of a pain in the ass. The last contract I did for GSA, they wanted a paragraph explaining what I did each hour I billed.

Corporate has mini bureaucracies and SOX can be a royal pain if you find yourself in the middle of it.
 
bartmc said:
If you stay out of government work and avoid public companies. The politics and paperwork are minimal.
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If you're an application or web developer at a smaller private company and / or avoid work on production systems, I agree on the paperwork side.

That said, I'm currently working for a privately-held company (albeit one that has revenue in billions). Some of the things that SOX is concerned with are just good practice, so while there may be no legal mandate we still have plenty of procedures / control. Which I think is great from the standpoint of a disinterested observer, but detest when I want to fix something.

I guess all I'm saying is it's probably to do with the size of the company more than the ownership. Small companies come with their own limitations too. The grass is always greener... :)
 
I can't belive that nobody made a "20% cooler" joke yet. It used to be that nerds worked in IT.
 
docmirror said:
Any web or app development is work that can be ported off-shore at less than half the salary you would consider taking. Any kind of soft development or commonly stealing the app/web development and modifying it is being done in India/China.
Click to expand...

Have you ever actually out sourced development to India or China? Because successful outsourcing of that kind doesn't have a high success rate, especially if the outsourcing company is small and trying to use one these cheap job shops.

Large companies can make outsourcing work by setting up a full development team overseas, as does Oracle for example. They do that by paying top dollar for their overseas devs.

That's why there is still a large demand for software developers here in the United States.

Network admin, Unix admin, VM-ware architecture, security admin, and some highly specific device driver coding...
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Those are great skill sets, but they are certainly not the only positions open to U.S. developers.
 
Mobile app development, especially iOS and to a slightly lesser extent Android are skill sets in great demand in the United States.

I promise you that if you can write a really good mobile application you can take that to any of the major U.S. centers of software development, show it to a small company, and be hired. There's lots on places where you can learn this skill, if you've got the knack to learn programming.

Disclaimer: Most people don't have the knack, or they have the knack but find programming to be boring beyond words and hate it.

I became a developer after 20 years in the Air Force. I really was tired of working in a huge bureaucracy, plus my resume would never have gotten past a big company HR screen anyway, because I was more than five years out of college with no commercial experience.

Back then Windows desktop apps were the hot property, so I was able to find a small startup here in Austin willing to take a chance on me based mainly on a demo project I wrote that had pretty graphics.

That's the approach I suggest to latecomers to the software development role.
 
JimNtexas said:
Have you ever actually out sourced development to India or China? Because successful outsourcing of that kind doesn't have a high success rate, especially if the outsourcing company is small and trying to use one these cheap job shops.

Large companies can make outsourcing work by setting up a full development team overseas, as does Oracle for example. They do that by paying top dollar for their overseas devs.
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The traditional joke about outsourcing goes like this:

"Chinese:

Me: do X, Y and Z
Them: ok
Me, week later: how goes it?
Them: did you mean X is Z and Y is not?
Me: what?!

Indian:

Me: do X, Y, Z
Them: thank you Sir and have a wonderful day
Me, week later: how goes it?
Them: beautiful
Me: did you finish X?
Them: we are analyzing it

Russian:

Me: do X, Y, Z
Them: why do X, when you can do N?
Me: customer wants it that way
Them: tell the customer he is stupid; here, take N"

It is funny because it's very true.

Another problem with Indians that I grazed was that they are ridiculous job hoppers in Bangalore. It's just the part of the culture there, apparently. Most of them stay in a company for 6 months, which is hardly adequate to let them do anything of value. A small proportion tries to move "up" by becoming a slave driver over the 6-monthers.

However, we had a great success with an engineering center in Brno, Czhech Republic. Very nice people there, doing a great job.
 
GauzeGuy… Use your healthcare background to your advantage. Get into the MIS/HIS end of things… building user pages, training end users, front end/back end support, hardware support for a hospital system or major insurer. ALL insurance claims have to be filed electronically. Electronic Medical Records are mandated. All sorts of data collection and abstraction ("meaningful use") is now required…. This is one aspect of the IT industry that will stay domestic, and will keep boots on the ground locally/regionally. Its rare to find someone who speaks "nurse/medic/doctor" and "IT" fluently. Most learn a little of one as a "Second language" but are never fluent.

Keep in mind I'm a healthcare guy, not an IT guy, so if my IT phrases are off, there will be 10 folks along in a minute to correct every detail
 
Doggtyred said:
GauzeGuy… Use your healthcare background to your advantage. Get into the MIS/HIS end of things… building user pages, training end users, front end/back end support, hardware support for a hospital system or major insurer. ALL insurance claims have to be filed electronically. Electronic Medical Records are mandated. All sorts of data collection and abstraction ("meaningful use") is now required…. This is one aspect of the IT industry that will stay domestic, and will keep boots on the ground locally/regionally. Its rare to find someone who speaks "nurse/medic/doctor" and "IT" fluently. Most learn a little of one as a "Second language" but are never fluent.

Keep in mind I'm a healthcare guy, not an IT guy, so if my IT phrases are off, there will be 10 folks along in a minute to correct every detail
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The EMR systems that were rushed to the market because of the stimulus spending are ATROCIOUSLY bad. Good money to be had there, I did some work implementing NextGen (Not the FAA Variety). It is HORRIBLE. There is a huge demand for that. But, I had to work right beside 2 physicians… A programmer and a physician should not work together.
 
The key to making it in IT is to stay relevant. I have been developing mobile applications for over 10 years and stay up to speed on all the environments, tools and related server OS and hardware. I do enterprise level development that includes everything from web, mobile, server and client applications. Hope this helps you jake a decision. Tool sets (c#,vb,java,XML,SOAP,WCF,c++,j-script,xamarin,visual studio,,,,many more)
 
zaitcev said:
The traditional joke about outsourcing goes like this:

"Chinese:

Me: do X, Y and Z
Them: ok
Me, week later: how goes it?
Them: did you mean X is Z and Y is not?
Me: what?!

Indian:

Me: do X, Y, Z
Them: thank you Sir and have a wonderful day
Me, week later: how goes it?
Them: beautiful
Me: did you finish X?
Them: we are analyzing it

Russian:

Me: do X, Y, Z
Them: why do X, when you can do N?
Me: customer wants it that way
Them: tell the customer he is stupid; here, take N"

It is funny because it's very true.
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:yes:


I'm about 30 years in as a developer. Started out doing assembler on 6502, and now I'm mostly database architect work. I need to become an expert on Hadoop/Mapreduce next.

I keep a FTE and my consulting work going. I consider the consulting to be my retirement plan, as I don't expect to ever not be working at something.
 
JimNtexas said:
Have you ever actually out sourced development to India or China? Because successful outsourcing of that kind doesn't have a high success rate, especially if the outsourcing company is small and trying to use one these cheap job shops.

Large companies can make outsourcing work by setting up a full development team overseas, as does Oracle for example. They do that by paying top dollar for their overseas devs.

That's why there is still a large demand for software developers here in the United States.



Those are great skill sets, but they are certainly not the only positions open to U.S. developers.
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Yes, I work with them, and am on the hiring committee at our company for this and it's a serious problem as you have said. But - it's still being done. Millions of lines of code that were once the exclusive province of the US, and some Euro coders is now being done in India, and to a lesser extent in other third world countries. However, the need for admins in the US has grown as the pace of the installed base has grown and will never, ever be outsourced.

The gen pop has very little understanding of what one mistake in a BGP entry can do to the entire planet's ability to communicate via the internet. I can't/shouldn't say more about the situation, but buggie code from offshore is a real threat to much of the infrastructure here in the US.
 
tlglenn said:
Behavioral health software development. There's a lot of work for me.
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I'm not familiar with the health care domain*, but I have to think that if the OP got some good basic software development training, (Junior College would be fine) and then made a useful iOS application and got it in the App store that he'd have zero problem getting hired as a developer.

I agree with the posters who have suggested leveraging the OP's medical background.

----
ETA: Disclaimer: I was employee #5 at Dr[insert former U.S. Surgeon General's Name].com. Fortunately that gig required no particular knowlege about anything really.
 
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bartmc said:
nobody ever got fired for going with IBM. Open SOurce is a 4 letter world in the corporate world.
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I have not found this to be true in the slightest. The most obvious example is Apache. I would put $20 that every Fortune 500 company runs it or something written by the Apache Foundation. Even if they don't know it.

Another would be BIND. You can guarantee everyone who uses the Internet is served something by a BIND server, every single day.

"Open source" doesn't equate to "unprofessionally written".

I'm no RMS, I believe there's a time and a place for keeping some of your source code to yourself, but there's plenty of things that are way better written in the open-source world than the closed, too. And vice-versa.

If a company judges code by its license alone, it's about as dumb as throwing out candidates without certain social checkboxes without even reading their resume'. Sure, you'll find someone to match the requirement, and miss some incredibly talented people you need along the way. Same with software.

A dollars and cents example: HP pays something close to seven figures to their top Linux exec and he oversees a whole division of the company. They wouldn't keep it if they weren't making enough money plus profit on top of it to pay all those folk.

If the only people you're meeting in IT are actually convincing you that there's no use of open-source in their companies there's either someone hiding it from them, they're clueless, or you're not touching a very big subset of "IT" on a regular basis.

Even back when I worked at an all Sun shop, everyone used OpenSSH on them. Solaris' SSH left way too much to be desired until they felt that squeeze for a number of years. IBM? Massive Linux consultancy and hardware sales. Oracle? Has their own Linux distro based off of RedHat's. Apple? OSX may be spawned of BSD, but the toolset is largely from the open-source world.

Look a little harder. Read the mail headers from Office 365 sometime. That's enlightening. Even Microsoft themselves, arguably the biggest company with a business need to avoid open-source, continued their Hotmail habit, and frontended O365 initial mail delivery with BSD and postfix, last I checked.
 
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