Your Degrees
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Yeah, I've hit a few bait-and-switches in my decades of programming. The most memorable was one hook that I never bit, but I knew a lot of people who did. There is a certain job niche that straddles the line between technical support and programming. It involves taking technical support problems that have worked their way past "Is the computer plugged in?" and "Did you try clicking the 'clear' key and retyping" and all the other operational causes and are now suspected of being gen-you-wine programming bugs. People in this position are supposed to figure out whether this is a bug, and if it is a simple one, fix it. If it's at all complicated it is sent on to one of the "real" programmers. Employers always want to hire programmers for this position, but no programmer (other than a really desperate one) would take the position. So employers often resort to practices that range from the slightly deceptive "this is a good foot-in-the-door position from which you can move into the programming department" (reality: when it snows downstairs, we'll call you) to the bald-faced lie "this is a programming position" (once a month they let you change the label on a control on one of the forms) Anyway, I was working for a company who had a huge application that was so old it had to be written in Kernighan Ritchie so that it could be compiled on all the different operating systems that their customers used. The decision was made to rewrite the code, and we were all excited about it, but then were were told that the actual rewrite was going to be outsourced to India, and that we would all be "promoted laterally" into this other "programming" position, which involved supporting the rewritten code. Talk about adding insult to injury. When I told them I had no interest in the position, HR asked me, in a condescending tone, if I understood that I would no longer be working for the company if I refused the "transfer". I assured them that I fully understood the consequences of my action. The company tried to prevent me from drawing unemployment by saying that I had "quit" the technical support position. Didn't work; the unemployment folks were onto them. Many kudos to them. A couple of years later, I was looking for another job and had a headhunter bring up a programming job with this same company. I asked her if she was often called to fill this position, and she confirmed, with surprise at my keen sense of insight :) that the turnover at this position was phenomenally high. Six months, on the average.
Francine D. Taylor wrote:
I've also seen things go the other way, though not without effort and ambition. My first job out of college was data entry. The company president kept asking me to type out these confidential form reports that could not be saved on my computer, only to a disk that he kept. I told him I could write him a computer program that would allow him to input and store the report information on his personal computer, so that no unauthorized eyes would violate its sanctity (I phrased it more diplomatically, of course Smile Thus I worked my way into creating a PC programming department within the company (it was a mainframe only shop at the time) and ended up reporting directly to the company CEO.
That's a good story.
I didn't get any requirements for the signature
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Hello, fellow Projecteers. I've been lurking on here some time now and I think this is the best place to ask my question. I graduated last June and started working a couple of months later. I'm working 4-5 months now as a Dynamics NAV (a.k.a. Navision) developer. Got hired to work out a .NET project, but two weeks into the job my boss says to drop it because it's too expensive for me to work out. He gives me several NAV assignments and wants me to specialize in NAV. Personally, I hate NAV. It's old, it's clunky, it won't work without a dozen hacks, the development language (C/AL) is limited and frustrating (I'm used to C# from school and personal projects). Now I'm looking for another job, but every interesting job I encounter asks for a masters degree or experience as a programmer. My question to you: What is your degree? What do you do / did you do as a programmer? How did you get to this point in your career? Do you think it's worth to obtain a masters degree?
I never got a degree. Started programming back in the mid eighties, when programmers were a lot scarcer. Never had a single employer who cared whether I had a degree or not; it was always about the experience. Hopped through a long procession of companies (some contracts, some chapter 13s, some layoffs), operating systems (DOS, Unix, Windows, various miniframe ops), languages (too many to list), industries (lots). I take that back, there was one company that required all employees to have a degree. I didn't. They hired me anyway. Here's my suggestion. Stick with your current job, but take classes and do .NET programming on the side. It's important that you be able to list .NET on your resume if you want to get a job doing it. No, not important. Vital. Form your own "company". Volunteer to write programs for your church, charitable organizations, anybody who hasn't got a big budget for their needs. Then list your experience with your own company on your resume. Don't lie about the work, just don't mention that you didn't get paid for it. You get three benefits from this. One is the experience. Two is that it looks good on your resume. Last but not least, you get to feel good about helping out your community. If it isn't .NET that you want to move toward, that makes things harder. Other languages aren't as readily portable and easy to install onto PCs, which is all that most small organizations have. Still, you get the idea. Experience is the key, not education.
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Not true. The technology *is* important. It's hard enough to get a job when your resume is packed with the latest and greatest. Many times in the past few years I've been told that if you don't have the technology that the job requires on your *last* job (who cares about the others, apparently) you can forget making it through the HR screening process. It used to be that you just had to be a good programmer. I took jobs doing languages that I had no experience in, learning on the job. You just can't do that any more. It has to be on your resume first. Leads to a lot of dishonesty in resumes, IMO.
If you are a developer with a decade of experience in the trenches with *any* programming technology I defy you to find it more than a couple of weekends challenge to pick up a new language / technology enough to work with it.
Francine D. Taylor wrote:
It used to be that you just had to be a good programmer.
Good shops still hire good programmers. Bad shops go through some silly hr or recruitment buzzword ticking process.
Yesterday they said today was tomorrow but today they know better. - Poul Anderson
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Hello, fellow Projecteers. I've been lurking on here some time now and I think this is the best place to ask my question. I graduated last June and started working a couple of months later. I'm working 4-5 months now as a Dynamics NAV (a.k.a. Navision) developer. Got hired to work out a .NET project, but two weeks into the job my boss says to drop it because it's too expensive for me to work out. He gives me several NAV assignments and wants me to specialize in NAV. Personally, I hate NAV. It's old, it's clunky, it won't work without a dozen hacks, the development language (C/AL) is limited and frustrating (I'm used to C# from school and personal projects). Now I'm looking for another job, but every interesting job I encounter asks for a masters degree or experience as a programmer. My question to you: What is your degree? What do you do / did you do as a programmer? How did you get to this point in your career? Do you think it's worth to obtain a masters degree?
My degree is in CS but I started developing at such a young age (12) that I was already experienced in many langs before I ever started school; I say that because I have no doubt I would have ended up doing the same kind of work with or without a formal degree, although I will say that much of the formal CS education (things like algorithms, data structures, operating system architecture, the more arcane theory behind relational databases) etc are extremely valuable, I'm not sure if I would have learned them had I not studied at a university. If your goal is to be a software developer as long as possible, then no a masters is probably not going to help your cause so I would not invest a great deal of time or money into that. However if you ever plan to teach or otherwise work in academic environments, publish books, etc it can definately help. It could potentially help at the mgmt level as well. I have toyed with the idea of getting a masters in software engineering, more or less for fun than any sort of career expectation, but I keep getting stalled by the realization that there is almost always something that I could be spending my time learning that is much more relevant to the kind of work I do. Does that make sense? I like all the academic stuff, but I don't think that graduate level classes tend to have that "indispensible" quality that some of the under grad classes like I listed earlier have. Regarding NAV, I've never worked with it but still can relate, I've often found myself in situations where I'm faced with a stodgy old technology which is uninteresting and hard to work with. I'm now in my 40's so for the most part if the job is not aligned with my own career plans I basically tell them how I feel and move on to something more aligned with my professional/personal goals. When you are first starting out you are building experience so that can be tougher -- yes you can expect that kind of thing for the first decade or so of your career. I remember working in proprietary languages that nobody else was using and hating it, and I still do lots of things that I don't really care to do, but I expect that I will be spending a certain percentage of time working on things that allow me to retain my passion for programming. If I am expected to do what "the man" wants 100% of the time and he's not showing any respect for my own career development, then I simply go elsewhere. Be sure and at least explain this to him before you take off, give him the chance to make it right. He might have thought t
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If you are a developer with a decade of experience in the trenches with *any* programming technology I defy you to find it more than a couple of weekends challenge to pick up a new language / technology enough to work with it.
Francine D. Taylor wrote:
It used to be that you just had to be a good programmer.
Good shops still hire good programmers. Bad shops go through some silly hr or recruitment buzzword ticking process.
Yesterday they said today was tomorrow but today they know better. - Poul Anderson
Sorry to rain on your parade, but by that definition the programming market is full to bursting with "bad" shops. Your chances of actually finding a job available in one of the "good" ones is practically zippo, because those are the sort of shops who know the value of their programmers and are willing to work to keep them. Of *course* any good programmer can pick up new languages immediately. For my first real programming job after graduation I was hired to do C. I had never even heard of the language at the time. In six months I was the lead programmer. It doesn't *matter* what you can or can't do, when you are trying to get an interview. What matters is how well you match the requirements of the people screening the applications. When they're looking at a stack of resumes up past the brim of their thermal coffee mug, who are they going to weed out first? People with no experience. Who goes next? People without relevant experience. Then people without very *recent* relevant experience. Now they're down to just a few dozen. If they're lucky.
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Old Ed wrote:
Just choose wisely...
I'm aware of that part and the choices that I make now, will last me a long time. That's why I want to make a balanced decision.
Old Ed wrote:
NAV (whatever that is)
Microsofts ERP packet: Dynamics NAV
Just one thing though... "Experience working on ERP systems" can have a high return on investment in your CV! For the records, here's my story! :) It begins with me running out of cash when I got out of college. Then I found a job ad for a project that was 3 months late to ship and they figured it could only help to throw me (fresh out of college) into the mix. Over the following 4 months, my two colleagues got fired and about 2 years later, I had built them two magnificent pieces of software I'm still maintaining on contract. Then I figured I had reached the top at that company and I couldn't learn anything else there so I left and went back to school to get my degree. I could have gotten another job, but I think it may remove the "glass ceiling" in my next jobs. I'm still there now working on lots of different projects (I joined a club working on an autonomous robot!) and having a lot of fun! In the end, having fun is all that really matters anyway.
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DavidCrow wrote:
I really enjoy the new challenges
Good for you, you like coding in C++ and Java. I'm stuck in C/AL code. It has an IF, REPEAT and SWITCH statement, nothing else. I think it's boring and it's not teaching me anything new. You could say it's a lesson in humility, but basicly I'm just writing code that gets records, adds or multiplies something and then writes the result into another table.
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Hello, fellow Projecteers. I've been lurking on here some time now and I think this is the best place to ask my question. I graduated last June and started working a couple of months later. I'm working 4-5 months now as a Dynamics NAV (a.k.a. Navision) developer. Got hired to work out a .NET project, but two weeks into the job my boss says to drop it because it's too expensive for me to work out. He gives me several NAV assignments and wants me to specialize in NAV. Personally, I hate NAV. It's old, it's clunky, it won't work without a dozen hacks, the development language (C/AL) is limited and frustrating (I'm used to C# from school and personal projects). Now I'm looking for another job, but every interesting job I encounter asks for a masters degree or experience as a programmer. My question to you: What is your degree? What do you do / did you do as a programmer? How did you get to this point in your career? Do you think it's worth to obtain a masters degree?
My background is engineering. (PhD - Mechanical). Started coding in the 1970's. Mostly writing analysis and modelling code, but some machine interface and control stuff as well. I can't say I have a lot of sympathy for you. There are lots of development systems out there. C# is just the latest of a long list of system you will encounter in your career. Some are application specific, some are legacy. C#, or any .NET system, is a minority in the programming world. If you're aspiring to be a professional programmer, then part of what you will be paid for is deal with odd-ball, undocumented and buggy systems - there are lots of them - that were probably written with the best development environments of the time. Let's hope that you're C# programs stand the test of time as well. Lots of code dies an instant death as soon as a user sees it. About having to do hacks - at some point the limit of any system will be pushed. If you look at some of the C# articles on this site you'll see lots of hacks that the authors though were good solutions but ended up having some unintended consequences (a euphemism for bugs), as pointed out in the replies. Being a programmer is not about the languages you know. It's about organizing the project correctly and expressing it in the clearest (meaning most reliable) code you can wrangle up. As a NAV programmer, trying to accurately interpret the needs of accountants and managers ("the clients") without going over-budget is good experience. Good luck on your career, whichever way you go.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
Of course it sucks. You just graduated. Everyone starts on the bottom. Welcome to Reality 101. Not to sound overly harsh or nasty, but that's the norm.
I don't want to come over as a know it all, but I knew that. :) That's also the reason I don't just quit and go back to living it up at home and look for another job full time.
Jim Crafton wrote:
It takes time to get good. Time, effort and patience.
This raises another question: How do you know you're good? You've been coding stuff that works for 10 years now, ok. But who tells you your code is good? I was thinking that more education would give me better skills (cause my code would literally be reviewed and my flaws would be pointed out to me, thus learning from my mistakes).
I've worked in the field before and I'm doing said degree right now and believe me, if you're talking "getting things done", you'll learn much faster if you just get a job in the desired field. And read some good books like code complete. I'm getting that degree for many reasons including that I would love a job in programming language research (my final project is going to be awesome!), etc. Anyway, if you don't like it there, it's a good enough reason to leave. All that really matters if that you enjoy yourself. If you start compromising on that, you'll be doing compromises all your life. The simplest rules make the most efficient algorithms ;)
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Hello, fellow Projecteers. I've been lurking on here some time now and I think this is the best place to ask my question. I graduated last June and started working a couple of months later. I'm working 4-5 months now as a Dynamics NAV (a.k.a. Navision) developer. Got hired to work out a .NET project, but two weeks into the job my boss says to drop it because it's too expensive for me to work out. He gives me several NAV assignments and wants me to specialize in NAV. Personally, I hate NAV. It's old, it's clunky, it won't work without a dozen hacks, the development language (C/AL) is limited and frustrating (I'm used to C# from school and personal projects). Now I'm looking for another job, but every interesting job I encounter asks for a masters degree or experience as a programmer. My question to you: What is your degree? What do you do / did you do as a programmer? How did you get to this point in your career? Do you think it's worth to obtain a masters degree?
Your questions were: What is your degree? What do you do / did you do as a programmer? How did you get to this point in your career? Do you think it's worth to obtain a masters degree? Not one responder answered your questions, so I will. I have a degree in History and a Masters in Finance. Primarily writing sql code for financial institutions, banks and insurance companies. Studying, studying, studying and networking. An advanced degree matters when you want to move up or consult. I chose consulting.
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DavidCrow wrote:
What this would say to me as an employer is that when things get rough or don't go your way, you leave.
He said he was hired as a .NET developer... If he was told from the start that it was a .NET position, and they suddenly throw him a curve ball and stick him with something completely different, I think that's justification for looking elsewhere. At best, the employer just didn't know what they wanted. At worst, it was a bait-and-switch.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)I disagree strongly - if hired as a .NET Developer, should be perfectly justified in looking elsewhere. In the UK, such actions by an employer count as grounds for constructive dismissal (i.e. an employee leaving because of unreasonable action on the part of an employer) and rightly so. I hope that such grounds apply elsewhere. Otherwise, where does this all stop? Being hired as a developer and expected to pure data entry? Is that acceptable?
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Your questions were: What is your degree? What do you do / did you do as a programmer? How did you get to this point in your career? Do you think it's worth to obtain a masters degree? Not one responder answered your questions, so I will. I have a degree in History and a Masters in Finance. Primarily writing sql code for financial institutions, banks and insurance companies. Studying, studying, studying and networking. An advanced degree matters when you want to move up or consult. I chose consulting.
Actually I did answer all three of his questions, I addressed what my degree was in, what I do and how I got there, and my opinion on when it is a good idea to obtain a masters. Not trying to be combative but you said "not one responder answered your questions", which is not true at all, lots of people did. Perhaps not using a pop-quiz format where every answer is delivered on a single line in the exact order asked, but that requirement was unstated :)
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I disagree strongly - if hired as a .NET Developer, should be perfectly justified in looking elsewhere. In the UK, such actions by an employer count as grounds for constructive dismissal (i.e. an employee leaving because of unreasonable action on the part of an employer) and rightly so. I hope that such grounds apply elsewhere. Otherwise, where does this all stop? Being hired as a developer and expected to pure data entry? Is that acceptable?
Well, in my contract it's phrased as "Software Developer" and my official title is "Software Engineer". No mention of the language, framework or program. Besides, I'm customizing an existing packet to suit the needs of our customers, so I'm still "developing" or "engineering" software. Just not in the strict sense that I thought I was going to be doing. Plus, I don't blame my boss. He had a project and the project got dumped, so he uses the available asset for something else. I just don't like the something else in this case.
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DavidCrow wrote:
I really enjoy the new challenges
Good for you, you like coding in C++ and Java. I'm stuck in C/AL code. It has an IF, REPEAT and SWITCH statement, nothing else. I think it's boring and it's not teaching me anything new. You could say it's a lesson in humility, but basicly I'm just writing code that gets records, adds or multiplies something and then writes the result into another table.
KenBonny wrote:
Good for you, you like coding in C++ and Java. I'm stuck in C/AL code. It has an IF, REPEAT and SWITCH statement, nothing else. I think it's boring and it's not teaching me anything new. You could say it's a lesson in humility, but basicly I'm just writing code that gets records, adds or multiplies something and then writes the result into another table.
Perhaps you could always amuse yourself by creating a cross compiler. When you were done you could write C++ code, run your compiler and the output of that would be C/AL. Or write a straight up code generator which takes some custom source and generates the patterned code.