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by xpto123 4229 days ago
As far as I can tell, you really did change careers. Your are now a systems administrator and not a software developer anymore.

Did someone convince that its all the same thing or something? Maybe a a manager in some services company or a commercial? If they did its just not true, when you stop coding from the point of view of employers it changes everything.

Employers want persons that are coding on their previous job for developer positions, they always stay away from people that stopped coding.

I know this first hand because I stopped coding in a similar situation for a while, and later I had to answer a whole lot of questions on why I stopped it, we want someone who is an 'active' developer etc.

going from developer to system administrator, business analyst or tester is easy, but going back is very hard even in a market where very few developers are available.

If you don't want to stop development I would advise you to switch back as soon as possible, because have no illusions this could be the end of your developer career. Good luck.

Edit: a full stack developer is a developer that does both backend and GUI development, but not a developer that also does administration I am not aware of any term for that case.

1 comments

If I had to choose between:

"I developed everything from 1 page parallax websites to custom CMS's, Wordpress installs as well as maintaining the local office equipment"

and someone who did that in addition to Linux systems admin for a few years, I'd choose the latter every time.

Also to your point on "full stack dev", I don't see how someone who can't write Bash scripts, write/manage monitoring tools, configure servers/software, and set up automated cloud deployments could be considered full stack.

In Australia, if you apply for a 457 visa as a software developer, you must show 3-5-10 years of experience in software development, "or a closely related field". It's much easier to be in the first situation than having to demonstrate the field is closely related, e.g. they don't specify DBA nor team lead on that list.

Of course if you apply with humans, they may understand that a master of Linux and Java dev adds a lot of value to a dev team. But HRs aren't humans.

Isn't system administration a "closely related field" to software development, at least from the point of view of the people reading the visa application?