Advice on job seek

casualguy

Hi, I'm looking to attain an IT related job. I completed msc in software development in September 2013 & haven't made use of it as I have been helping out at home, father passed away last year.
Does anyone have advice on a way forward to get back into an IT related job?
My only experience is 9 months with EMC as a technician & that was only end of quarter work. I'm 34 yr old living in Cork.
Would it just be wise to do another course to up-skill? And if so, any recommendations?
Thanks in advance.

Graham

What development have you done? What languages? Any examples? Any GitHub account showing your examples? What additional learning/practice since you graduated?

casualguy

Only college projects, most recent was a REST api in java. Main languages are java & c++. Also have experience in web development, javascript, jquery, css, html 5. I have a github account with some code examples from the api project.
I haven't done any extra learning since, which is the main problem. I also have to remain in Cork.

John_C

An employer will want to see how good you are. A git account with projects from 3 years ago won't count for much.
If you're confident doing a simple project yourself, pick something useful from one of your hobbies and code it up. That will give you a sample of your work to show employers. If you're not confident doing something like that, it might be a good idea to sign up for a course.

Another point to consider is; what did you do before the MSc? If you have domain specific knowledge (i.e. did you work in finance, education, health etc...) that's a big plus for software companies in the relevant field.

14ned

casualguy wrote: »

Hi, I'm looking to attain an IT related job. I completed msc in software development in September 2013 & haven't made use of it as I have been helping out at home, father passed away last year.

Firstly my commiserations to you on the passing away of your father. My mother took some years of palliative care by my siblings and father to die. It punches a big hole in your career.

Does anyone have advice on a way forward to get back into an IT related job?
My only experience is 9 months with EMC as a technician & that was only end of quarter work. I'm 34 yr old living in Cork.
Would it just be wise to do another course to up-skill? And if so, any recommendations?
Thanks in advance.

I hate to be brutally honest here. But you've got to look at it from the perspective of a potential employer sifting through hundreds of applications. The average time they read your CV for is something like six seconds. In that time they'll spot your advanced age, yet you are not even Junior Programmer role ready yet. You have no portfolio of your work. You have taken no obvious CV building steps since you graduated nor is there any obvious interest in IT as a personal passion before you took the MSc, and they don't have the time to care why not. They'll almost certainly pass on you because there are far less risky and more conventional CVs in that pile.

I think you will be exceptionally lucky to find any programming role if you stay in Cork. Call centre technical support is likely the best you'll get, and once into that you'll likely not leave it ever if you stay in Cork.

My best advice to you is that if you want to get into a well paid programming role in Cork within five years then you're going to do a few year stint elsewhere where there is a huge shortage of cheap programmers and where your age and maturity will be seen as an advantage with excellent prospects of rapid promotion, not evidence of fecklessness. The obvious location is London.

A lot of Corkonians (I speak as one myself) need to do a few years in Britain building their CV if they want a cushy job in Cork. Teachers especially come to mind, but almost everyone I know who graduated in compsci in Cork had to do a stint abroad before they could get up the career ladder in Cork. One friend of mine bought a house in Cork, got married and had children in Cork, all whilst working in London. For eight years every Sunday evening he flew to London, worked five days there and flew back home Friday evening, it's actually about the same cost as living and commuting anywhere in South East England. He finally got a very very cushy job here in Cork and he's now a very wealthy man. But he paid for it, he missed most of his children's early years, and he had a lot of problems with his marriage which are now solved. Still, you gotta do what you gotta do to provide and survive and in Cork you're always competing against all the other Cork people willing to commute to London. That's the bar you've got to match and exceed.

Anyway best of luck with it.

Niall

krazyklown

As someone who has done grad interviews for my employer recently, I have been shocked at how little passion some candidates have for IT and how little programming they have done outside of coursework.
If you really want to find work, there are loads of things you can be doing to build up your cv - open source projects, personal projects, following blogs and online tutorials, create your own website. As a grad without experience, you need to put together something you can talk about in an interview. For me, the key is a passion for tech and drive to learn.
As regards age and maturity - in the last year and a half, the team I am in hired three people between the ages of 28 and 36 who all changed careers by going back to college and doing either a masters or a primary degree. They are great additions as they are bringing their previous career experiences into the mix.
As regards the gap between graduating, so long as you have a reasonable explanation it can be overcome. (I graduated in 2004 and didnt get round to working in the industry until 2011). Take anything remotely technical that you can get for now.
I agree with the previous poster, that you may need to relocate in order to find something suitable.

Hollister11

krazyklown wrote: »

As someone who has done grad interviews for my employer recently, I have been shocked at how little passion some candidates have for IT and how little programming they have done outside of coursework.
If you really want to find work, there are loads of things you can be doing to build up your cv - open source projects, personal projects, following blogs and online tutorials, create your own website. As a grad without experience, you need to put together something you can talk about in an interview. For me, the key is a passion for tech and drive to learn.
As regards age and maturity - in the last year and a half, the team I am in hired three people between the ages of 28 and 36 who all changed careers by going back to college and doing either a masters or a primary degree. They are great additions as they are bringing their previous career experiences into the mix.
As regards the gap between graduating, so long as you have a reasonable explanation it can be overcome. (I graduated in 2004 and didnt get round to working in the industry until 2011). Take anything remotely technical that you can get for now.
I agree with the previous poster, that you may need to relocate in order to find something suitable.

I'm in 3rd year of a degree right now. I have a website with personal projects, and I have been achieving a 2:1 all throughout. I all teach my self using Team Treehouse.

Can I ask how would following blogs help you get a job?

Also is it important to have projects on github? I ask, as i never use it really tbh.

Graham

Hollister11 wrote: »

I'm in 3rd year of a degree right now. I have a website with personal projects, and I have been achieving a 2:1 all throughout. I all teach my self using Team Treehouse.

Can I ask how would following blogs help you get a job?

Also is it important to have projects on github? I ask, as i never use it really tbh.

The right choice of blogs helps you keep up-to date and/or see development from another perspective.

GitHub is valuable for showing/sharing your work/abilities.

krazyklown

Well, put it this way, if you are following the latest trends or claiming knowledge in a particular area, theres a handful of names you could drop into conversation to demonstrate your knowledge - eg for .NET / MS stuff Scott Hanselmann, for general programming theory & concepts martin fowler (these guys have blogs and would be well known in the sphere they are specialising in). Personally, I am subscribed to a couple of things, which i find is a good way to learn and keep knowledgeable on whats happening in the areas i am working in.
I interviewed someone recently who claimed they did a lot of self development. I asked how and they said they follow blogs and tutorials online, so naturally i asked which ones. They couldnt name any which reflected poorly on the candidate.

14ned

Hollister11 wrote: »

I'm in 3rd year of a degree right now. I have a website with personal projects, and I have been achieving a 2:1 all throughout. I all teach my self using Team Treehouse.

Whilst having a degree matters, I've never seen any grade other than a first class honours ever matter in post-interview discussions. In some ways a bare scraping pass is the second best grade to get after a first, it's likely to draw attention to all of the rest of your CV which if strong will make the grade unimportant.

Hollister11 wrote: »

Can I ask how would following blogs help you get a job?

I after twenty years of commercial experience still regularly read blogs by acknowledged leaders in the industry because the biggest thing you realise with experience is how little knowledge you have. I also regularly watch the videos of talks at conferences I don't attend, and I follow the standardisation proposal papers posted to ISO WG21 for C++ standardisation.

It's part and parcel of learning how to think and speak like an expert in any field. You need to be familiar with the issues, and names behind those issues to excel in any professional discipline. It's effectively the engineering equivalent to keeping up with research medical papers like in the Lancet for doctors.

Believe me that when you interview with any big tech multinational like Google, an inability to speak as someone familiar with the outstanding issues in any programming discipline means instant refusal. You won't even be invited back for more interviews after lunch.

Hollister11 wrote: »

Also is it important to have projects on github? I ask, as i never use it really tbh.

We wouldn't even consider hiring a junior programmer without an extensive history of participation in open source anymore. Not worth the waste of time when plenty of candidates out there have invested the effort. We even had a candidate recently with seven years of commercial experience under his belt which we felt had insufficient proof of passion because his github had become stale. What swung it for us was that he could explain that because he had been taking a part time Masters whilst holding down his day job. We hired him, and he's proved to be a good hire, learning and catching up quickly and knowing when to ask the more experienced engineers for advice.

That's what you're competing against nowadays.

Niall

Mr_Muffin

I see the word 'passion' used often when it comes to development.

Is every developer that is in employment 'passionate' about it? Aren't there any that just see it as a job/a way of providing income?

beauf

14ned is looking for the cream of developers IMO.

Tbe best people in any industry are passionate, interested. The rest maybe professional, and competent, but many are not.

In my experience about 10~50% are passionate about development. My problem with people who are not that interested. Is that they tend not to be comprehensive about solving problems doing things. By that I mean they do what they were asked to do, but don't really think of the bigger picture when working. But perhaps my perception and experience is tainted by the places I've worked, which have always been part of a larger company. In that development was not their core business. I would expect in a pure development house, you'd get a better developers.

That said the other 50% who just get the job done and don't think anymore about it can be perfect content. Just because you aren't the top 20% in any industry doesn't mean you won't have a happy and productive career.

srsly78

The ones that care about their profession get the best jobs and best progression, this applies in most fields.

beauf

srsly78 wrote: »

The ones that care about their profession get the best jobs and best progression, this applies in most fields.

I've never found that to be true. Since being good at your job only gets you so far.

Ludo

Mr_Muffin wrote: »

I see the word 'passion' used often when it comes to development.

Is every developer that is in employment 'passionate' about it? Aren't there any that just see it as a job/a way of providing income?

The majority are not "passionate" about it in any company I have worked for. Most people see it as a job. And that includes people at all levels. There are always some passionate people. Some of them are good, others are not. Just the same as those who are not passionate to be honest.
Then again I am in the older age bracket ( over 40 now :eek: ) and have much more important things to do in my spare time than muck around in github. Then again, I never did anything like that when starting out either but it was unheard of then and guess what...it doesn't really matter either way I find. Most of the best engineers I have worked with would most definitely not be classed as passionate about the job and would never get through some interview processes these days as they would laugh at you if you said they need to spend their spare time coding. It is a pity it is gone this way but it has.

casualguy

Appreciate all the responses, not as intimated about the task at hand now, but I do agree with Niall to some extent in moving outside of Cork. I got 89% in the main programming module in msc(beginning to think this doesn't matter), had links to github & a personal portifolio webpage on my cv, but only got two interviews developer wise in the first year. At the time I was working with EMC & doing an open source project (which I may finish now). It can be pretty demoralizing & I am always thinking the gap from my first degree & my age are going against me, which tbh I don't blame the recruiters for skipping over me.
Also for the tech roles I got interviews, 2 questions have come up every time.
Why are you going for this job when you have sw degree? (implying will you stay around if something sw comes along)
Do you think you could work under someone younger? (impossible to say until I experience it)

This may sound like sour grapes, but they are my experiences thus far.

beauf

Maybe you should de-emphasis the development aspect of your CV when applying for those jobs. You should tailor your CV for every job. I dumbed down my CV for certain jobs and it worked ok. Once you are in it doesn't matter then if you move.

Aswerty

casualguy wrote: »

Do you think you could work under someone younger? (impossible to say until I experience it)

The answer to that is an unreserved "YES". Anything else is shooting yourself in the foot. And honestly the age of your manager shouldn't matter - their competence does.

moycullen14

Ludo wrote: »

The majority are not "passionate" about it in any company I have worked for. Most people see it as a job. And that includes people at all levels. There are always some passionate people. Some of them are good, others are not. Just the same as those who are not passionate to be honest.
Then again I am in the older age bracket ( over 40 now :eek: ) and have much more important things to do in my spare time than muck around in github. Then again, I never did anything like that when starting out either but it was unheard of then and guess what...it doesn't really matter either way I find. Most of the best engineers I have worked with would most definitely not be classed as passionate about the job and would never get through some interview processes these days as they would laugh at you if you said they need to spend their spare time coding. It is a pity it is gone this way but it has.

This resonates with me far more than 14neds description. If you're passionate about IT and your working in non core (ie a company for whom IT is not their business - you know, about 90% of them) then you are in for a hard time.

The reality is that most companies don't give a rat's ass about quality, innovation and technical excellence in IT - even product ones. What they care about is what they SHOULD care about - the business, profit, turnover, customers, market share. If your goals are not aligned with the companies, then you will be disappointed. The reality is that you will spend most of your time maintaining bad code, written badly, using out of date technology & frameworks. But guess what? That's what companies want. Keep the show on the road.

What's important in most companies is the ability to get things done, get on with other people, not screw up and be dependable. I'm not sure where a passion for development comes into it. Passion for what? Shiny toys? New technology, advanced algorithm development? Chances are you'll never need or use any of it. The basic principles of writing concise code, clearly, simply and well is what is required.

The technology has got a lot simpler in a lot of ways over the years (The intellectual chops required to write large scale enterprise java is way less than would have been required to do the same in C++). IT has been dumbed down and the attractiveness of it as a career has decreased because of it.

The problem with Cork is one of size. There just isn't enough development of high enough quality to make it interesting. As others have said, you need to go away for a while (Dublin or, even better, London) will give you a lot more opportunities.

If you have a choice, go work for a product rather than a service company - you'll learn more. Avoid any company that uses Scrum(it'll wreck your head).

The above sounds a bit pessimistic but IT is still a good career. Maybe not as good as it was 20 years ago, but it still offers a lot.

14ned

beauf wrote: »

14ned is looking for the cream of developers IMO.

Tbe best people in any industry are passionate, interested. The rest maybe professional, and competent, but many are not.

I wouldn't actually say I was passionate myself personally. The day job is the day job and I feel very little enthusiasm for the code I write at the day job. I also don't feel much passion regarding C++ as a language, I could take it or leave it personally. But I also think my philosophy has a lot to do with being a contractor rather than a permie. I need to get hired every year or two, else my family starves. That means investing a lot more of my time is keeping myself competitive than say someone employed in a stable permanent job in a niche area hard to replace located in a small town where the job market is very illiquid.

My ideal job actually is to not have a job. I love my time between contracts. I work because I have to, not because I want to and that's very different to most people who seem to need work to thrive.

Niall

beauf

Working as a contractor gives you a sense that you are just a number on a spreadsheet. When you leave you just walk out the door without looking back.

moycullen14

beauf wrote: »

Working as a contractor gives you a sense that you are just a number on a spreadsheet. When you leave you just walk out the door without looking back.

Better way to look at is that you have a very explicit 'contract' with the client. You provide the time and expertise, they provide the money. I'm pretty sure most employees are just numbers on a spreadsheet, they just don't realise it.

beauf

What I meant was as an employee you get an inflated sense of your worth. As a contractor you know exactly your worth. All the superfluous stuff is stripped bare.

Its a very useful experience. Even if you stop contracting and go back to being an employee I don't think you ever forget that.

14ned

beauf wrote: »

What I meant was as an employee you get an inflated sense of your worth. As a contractor you know exactly your worth. All the superfluous stuff is stripped bare.

Its a very useful experience. Even if you stop contracting and go back to being an employee I don't think you ever forget that.

It's definitely a humbling experience. Competing on the global market against people who will work for $8/hour forces you to focus like a laser on the exact value you'll contribute to a client. Luckily, for now at least, most remote C++ work is driven by those with pretty deep pockets where your expense is usually pocket change for them, and their main demand above all else is what bringing me on will contribute to their bottom line. So, for example, right now being out of contract, I'm in early negotiations with two hedge funds looking to bring me on to rip out and replace their low latency networking software layer. I'll need to spec the eval work to decide on what work would be involved so I can give them a quote and an estimate of what benefits they ought to reach. Then come contracts, and if all goes very well and no alarm bell rings for anybody at any stage, comes the work and getting paid.

A fair bit of the time I have to tell a potential client after expending the time to eval their problem that I can't help them given the time and disruption budgets they've set. But that's part and parcel of being in business, it's the same for architects or dentists or any other professional in business on their own account. In many ways, it's really permanent programmers which are the oddity. Imagine dentists being employed as permanent staff in large firms which only provide dentistry!

Niall

beauf

The dentist Analogy doesn't really work. A permanent programmer will usually will have a vastly greater knowledge of the companies existing software and business, than a contractor. Something might take months if not years to accrue.


When I was contracting there seems to be a demand for people who would work on site at least some of the time. Perhaps that's different now. Been a while since I did it.

14ned

beauf wrote: »

The dentist Analogy doesn't really work. A permanent programmer will usually will have a vastly greater knowledge of the companies existing software and business, than a contractor. Something might take months if not years to accrue.

At the political/org/management level all of which are as important as coding to delivery of a codebase you are 100% correct. I was being slightly facetious

At the raw codebase level, well you'd be surprised. I've sat opposite people who worked for twenty years on the same codebase and couldn't answer a single question about anything outside their direct responsibility. In particular, I remember one engineer who had maintained their proprietary regex implementation (as in, it wasn't standard regex, it was a custom DSEL implementing the same thing and the entire product used it). Knew that regex like the back of his hand. Knew absolutely zilch about modern programming, or anything outside that custom regex implementation. Knew he was unreplaceable you see, so no need, he'd never ever get fired unless the company folded. He was set until retirement, and could do the absolute bare minimum. Interesting guy actually, his big passion in life was bird watching which he spent absolutely every possible moment doing, two marriages failed due to it.

My point is, once you've seen a lot of codebases 80% of the time you can dive in pretty quick and not horribly break the product. In some ways you're more effective than the permies because you've seen the same dysfunctional code patterns lots of times, and you know what standard approaches will fix them with a high chance of success. But I've definitely seen some codebases where I've quite literally turned to the client and refused the contract unless it was a complete rewrite from scratch. No point getting sued for failure to deliver.

beauf wrote: »

When I was contracting there seems to be a demand for people who would work on site at least some of the time. Perhaps that's different now. Been a while since I did it.

99.9% of C++ contracts worldwide want you onsite. And 99.9% of C++ contracts in Ireland are considered a permie hiring strategy by the client, if you're not willing to go permanent after six months they won't hire you. That's why almost all of my business is done outside Ireland, and especially the US where a professional contractor is valued as a profession of its own instead of being thought of as failed or flawed permies trying to get a permie job.

Niall

beauf

14ned wrote: »

...At the raw codebase level, well you'd be surprised. I've sat opposite people who worked for twenty years on the same codebase and couldn't answer a single question about anything outside their direct responsibility. ....

My point is, once you've seen a lot of codebases 80% of the time you can dive in pretty quick and not horribly break the product. In some ways you're more effective than the permies because you've seen the same dysfunctional code patterns lots of times, and you know what standard approaches will fix them with a high chance of success. But I've definitely seen some codebases where I've quite literally turned to the client and refused the contract unless it was a complete rewrite from scratch. No point getting sued for failure to deliver....

Agree 100% with all of that.