| - Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first? I really liked video games. I remember some skills I learned as a very young child and teenager to do things like play Warcraft 3 online, install cracked versions of games, play on WoW private servers, host my own Minecraft server... So then after being an aimless teenager I went to the equivalent of a community college to do "IT" at 20 years old. I learned things like windows/linux sysadmin, networking, printer management.. I never ended up finishing that degree though. - What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more? I am basically an SRE. I was doing sysadmin for my company for about 2.5 years but put my foot down and decided that having work thrown over the fence to me by devs was not a good long term career plan. Now I've been doing software development, but it's not user facing feature work. It's been a lot of improving application monitoring/debuggability/operability (distinct from usability). It's not really my dream job, I've sort of figured out this company by now and I'd like to get a more difficult job. - How did you break that first-job barrier? I made personal friends with one of my teachers who basically coached me through how to get past the very difficult interview process in IT. Then I applied to internships on my university job board and got lucky eventually. My boss later admitted to me that I wasn't hired because I had the best credentials, but mostly because I had a wide skill set and he had a gut feeling about my work ethic. - What were you doing before this? I worked at a moving company and played an obscene amount of Starcraft 2. - Any tips for the rest of us? Trying to get into IT is easier than trying to become a developer. You can start in help desk and work your way up, there are certifications for the specific technologies you will be working on (doing Cisco networking? get CCNA, doing cloud? Get the AWS solutions architect). Once you get good at IT related skills, you'll actually pick up a lot of key software development skills without even realizing it. There is an embarrassing amount of time I have spent explaining things about git, SSH keys, layer 3 networking, HTTP, TLS... to very smart and qualified developers making triple my salary. I did horrible end user support for my first little while. It's OK when you start out to be explaining to people how to connect to the VPN because they can't read a wiki page with screenshots, just make sure that you realize the job is a stepping stone for you to continue building skills. Once you get the job you cannot rest on your laurels. |