Hi all

I'm 31 and fresh out of University having finished a Computing & IT degree, I'm pretty ignorant of the career paths and their pros/cons so wanted to seek some career advice.

The main modules I studied were:

- Java programming
- Web Technologies
- Software development
- Ebusiness technologies
- Developing concurrent distributed systems
- Software engineering
- Also have experience with basic webpage design and using databases.


What I'm looking for in a career:

- I highly value the freedom of being able to work remotely in the future. Not so important now but would like it to be an option later.

- I like to produce a finished product and be involved in multiple aspects of a project.

- I enjoyed developing games with Java, studying concurrency and also the system design process from the software engineering module. I disliked the web technologies module, reading and learning endless standards and working with backend server technology was pretty tedious.

- I recently learnt HTML/CSS and designed a website for my brothers business. I got a lot of satisfaction gathering the specs through conversation, designing the webpages and relaying information and conferring with him to get the product design right.

- Earning top money is not so important to me but would like to end up on at least £30k after a few years grinding.


I also have a few concerns about career choices:

1. Are regular programming jobs losing value due to cheap outsourcing? If I were to program remotely is it possible I'll be on £8-10/hour in the future?

2. Would taking the software engineer path dampen any chance of working remotely in the future?

3. Is website design still a reasonable option with a bright future? A recent search of mine suggested the pay was pretty low, many people used templates, and that new automated technology was creating websites.


Really appreciate any career pointers and tips, and sorry if this info is a little vague.

thanks.

Web design: low pay, make websites pretty
Web dev: nearly same pay as regular programming, make websites useful

Thanks Noodle

Anybody else got advice on remote programming careers?

It's hard for me to comment because I'm just not that familiar with your degree or the industry in the UK. From the little I have to go on, my impression is that your degree and experience is pretty basic.

Assuming that is correct, then here are my best guesses:

1. If you have only basic skills and only want to work remotely - its going to be hard to make meaningful money. You'll always be competing with the rest of the world - many of whom will be willing to work harder and for less money than you would like.

2. I don't know what you mean here. I'm a 'software engineer' and work remotely. But 'software engineer' can mean vastly different things in different places.

3. Website design in the terms of basic websites is not going to have a bright future. Websites are significantly more interactive (and will keep going that way) and use a lot of more advanced features/functionality. And for simple websites - its like you said, people make a lot of good tools for getting something up and running quickly.

Take this all with a grain of salt, especially because like I said I don't really have any context for what you're asking about. But in general it seems like you'll need to work on more advanced skills.

I'll also add that a good way to get better remote jobs is to first get a non-remote job and eventually transition to working remotely.

The low end of the 'working remotely building websites' world is very low.

Even you would enjoy web design and not creating web apps it would be advisable to have those skills. At later stage in your working career if you notice you can get along with webdesign you can focus on it maybe just try to maintain your webapo coding skills if yomotivation.

for me it comes down to a lot if language if I even enjoy coding. I tried C# and PHP and didnt enjoy the latter. C# was ok. Once I started using python I just loved it straight away. Now trying to learn Python Flask (simple yet powerful web framework) . I realized I wouldnt mind building web apps in the future since I like the language and frameworks. However if my only option would be PHP I would just leave it. I also enjoyed with canvas and should I had focused on javascript more I could had looked at NodeJs as an option.

Obviously choice of language can depend on how many jobs there available but you could just experiment with different languages, frameworks and even if you would focus on design you could also build some web apps with a language you enjoy using and framework which makes everything simple. (If one exists)

Hopefully not coming across as dick so with that stated, I think the idea of planning for the later stages of your career is pretty much impossible in software development. in my view the big drawback to a career in software development is that it is necessary to have a mindset of seeking to constantly keeping up with the pace of technological innovation. The pace of technological innovation is rapid and appears to me to be increasing. Your post touches on this actually. You have covered c#, PHP, Python, and now are learning a new framework for Python. I guarantee you that you will be learning a lot more new things. That is good but the nature of this business is that skills get obsoleted and when your skill set goes largely obsolete that can present some problems in being employed. So the idea is that today's application framework/language can and often does go obsolete in the future. You will need to stay ahead of the curve to keep relevant. My experience is that many companies aren't all that interested in your personal development, they find a position for you where you are productive and reliable. Once that happens you are more or less on your own in progressing technologically. With some companies personal development is definitely a consideration so in my mind that is an important consideration when accepting a job offer. Basically stating that what you are doing today in software development can be obsolete in the not too distant future and you need to be aware of that constantly. You will definitely spend some of your free time keeping pace.

Many many many companies are getting away from working remotely altogether. I used to work from home twice a week, then once, and now 0. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by remote though... do you mean telecommuting from or do you mean working from the smaller office on projects which are driven and owned primarily in the larger headquarter office?

What is the motivation for you to be working in an office versus remotely? Increased productivity because... People get help faster? Are more competitive? Don't want to look lazy?

Nobody likes PHP. I don't see how anyone could. Its like PHP tries to make things that should be easy more complicated than it has to be.

I can think of one guy who likes php
http://hackaday.com/2016/01/26/the-d...lzsec-hackers/

heres another guy who likes php,
http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/p...mediacy-of-php

Is this the career advice and working remotely thread or the care advice about working remotely thread?

Well, either way, advice needed.

I'm near graduation with a 2-year degree and have a non-related part time job that pays pretty well. But I hate it. Like, am literally unable to sleep without drugs the nights before work. It also takes a lot of time away that I could be using for doused studying.

I've done extremely well in school, but we don't have a lot of focus on web technologies and it seems like mostly web jobs around here for new grads, particularly with associates. As such, I've been studying Odin project on and off for the last 8 months at various paces.

Considering there's only a few months left in school, I'm contemplating quitting my job so I can learn the hell out of web dev and use built up savings to pay the bills. We ran the numbers and we may not even need to dip into savings, but it's a possibility. Likely our tax refund would more than cover the lost income.

So should I take a couple months off work to really hammer down on Odin and get some solid portfolio of web apps going for when I interview, or is it better to keep the job I hate and be employed when looking for an unrelated job later on?

tia for any tips

Well assuming you don't have a great time estimate for when you'll be hired, I would say having steady income would be preferred.

Not only that, but the longer you're unemployed the bigger the work gap gets on your resume and the harder it becomes to explain.

I work remotely, have been for about two years now. I'm a freelance web developer, so work on a project by project basis. To be honest, if you want to work remotely you should prepare for temporary contracts, as in my experience most remote work is freelance, which is great, as long as you prepare for periods of time when you don't have much work, as well getting ready for juggling multiple projects at once. It can be tough, but I like the freedom it brings (I'm about to take a month long trip to China in April ...) The thing about freelance work is you have to really put yourself out there, make an online portfolio for your work, or create a blog using something like this, get on Twitter, get on LinkedIn, get a business card, and network!! Networking is probably the most important thing about freelancing, you want your clients to recommend you to their friends etc. That way they do the work for you ! The goal is to have people asking you to work for them, rather than the other way around, but it takes time... just keep at it.
I'm happy to chat more about this with you.
How have you been finding work recently?

I wonder what the quality standards are expected from people working in certain hourly rate brackets, like:

$6-10/hour as opposed to
$11-15
$16-20
$21-25 etc.

in a field you're familiar with, though I think I'm a bit more interested naturally in database development.

According to the 2015 Payoneer freelancer income survey, the average hourly rate charged by a freelance programmer is $20-24 depending (but only slightly) on the field, which is close to the average rate of a generic freelancer ($21).

Skill	Avg $/hr
Mobile progr.	23
Web progr.	21
DB progr.	22
Game progr.	24
Developer	22
QA testing	20

So, even though the breakdown of the population by hourly rate has been made for freelancers in general, not for programmers specifically, I guess that the income distribution among the latter is quite similar to the general distribution, which is as follows:

Price, $/hr	% of freel-s	Cumul. top %
0-5	21	100
6-10	21	79
11-15	14	58
16-20	12	44
21-25	8	32
26-30	6	24
31-50	10	18
51-100	8	8

It does hint how one who is in the top 50%, top 30% etc. by perceived skill should price the services, but it certainly doesn't tell what skillset is needed to enter the top 30% etc.

Are there such income breakdown reports for specifically freelance programmers?

Also, I've come across a curious blog post (don't mean to promote the blogger, haven't read his other pieces) warning that the services of outsource programmers might be of too low quality even for their low price.

I'm really surprised that programmers from poor countries are so neglectful. Even though they're not as hard-pressed to earn money as those poor things from developed countries who have to pay huge bills, they all need to establish themselves in the common market and they can all do high quality job if they put enough effort in. So I guess that, if especially for those who intend to remain single, it's very possible and has a very positive life EV to both be a responsible and accurate dev and outsource themselves to a cheap country in an appropriate time zone.

I wonder why the Indian freelancers mentioned in the article were so bad at real-time support - when the working day ends on the US East Coast (5 PM), it's only 2:30 AM in India, and of course they could work until at least the local midnight (they're doing the business at home, after all) to cover all the requests coming from the East Coast prior to its local 2:30 PM, which is quite enough to solve most problems on the fly.

Eastern Europeans like me are in an even better spot as the time difference is merely 7 hours in summer and 5 PM EST is the midnight here

And it's not like one needs to be extra-focused when talking to a customer; I'd rather be most focused when I write and test code, which can be done in the morning.

@c00n : Based on what you know, how closely does price tie into code quality? Given a pricing tier, could I make an assumption about code quality that would be almost universally true?

Hmm, I know barely anything, I just surf as a bit of research, you know.

I'm not sure if you're asking from the consumer or freelancer point of view.

I reckon the price is highly correlated with the quality, but as a consumer, you have enough time to look into a potential contractor's background, e.g. learn if his alma mater teaches programming well, look into his github commits and prior contract works and see if they're well-written, learn what his working hours are and whether he's going to offer you real-time support most of the time, etc.

As a freelancer, again, you need to research your immediate competitors and make an offer that beats theirs, not necessarily in terms of pricing.

As far as I've understood, savvy customers tend to avoid cheap workers as they realise that the quality of such work is terrible. The avaricious pays twice.

It's the same as with any other market - the price gives a first-order approximation to the expected quality, but fundamental insight gives a much exacter assessment than just pricing analysis.

Regarding my forum name, see the explanation in the second part of this post.

Java is your best choice, since that is the main language you know. You should advertise your interest and expertise in Java.

That leaves open a lot of options. For example, Android Studio is Java. Most big data solutions such as Hadoop are programmed in Java. Then you have other languages based off the JVM such as Scala, Groovy, and Clojure.

I worked in IB IT for 13 years, after 10 I switched to semi-presence in the office and last 2 were completely remotely.

One of the posters above said it correctly, work remotely if you are looking to be a freelancer. Otherwise, the path to working remotely is to work a normal office job, find your niche, be really good, demonstrate you can work completely independently and have a strong work ethic. At this point you can pitch working remotely. It does need a special set of circumstances, for example if you are in a sattelite location of your company and the main/core team is somewhere else.

If you want to be a programmer and the rest of the team is in the office, I would not recommend remote work as pair programming and programming with peers who are top notch in their field is such a huge advantage that could never be leveraged when working remotely. Communication is also way way harder if you are working remotely and the old guard of managers just still like to see people physically at their desks and this will skew extra pay or promotion decisions.

Outsourcing is completely overrated. I witnessed first hand how a decade of outsourcing has created nothing but technical debt and frustration amongst the skilled onshore staff.

From what it sounds like your best skill and what you enjoy most is the discovery phase of a project where you gather requirements to make the right design decisions. For this reason, I would stay away from webdev as a full time career path, you would sell yourself short! Asking the right questions is such a rare skill. I have seen many people who made close to $100k who were simply unable to ask the right questions when dealing with a problem. Couple this skill with being able to code in Java and looking into a job in banking as a developer might not be the worst idea allthough this will lower your chances of working remotely unless you find a special set of circumstances.

Hope this help.

I just don't get what type of work free lancers are given. why doesn't an IT/dev company just do it themselves as opposed to out sourcing to one guy? Or is it work like some guy (fish?) has an idea for an app and wants you to build it? or are we talking really basic stuff like bar needs a website?

I guess, the main reason behind outsourcing is greed. It's hard to decide to pay $75 an hour to an American employee (subject to social security taxes) when a Russian contractor with a uni degree is happy to do the same job for $25 an hour (because he can still feed a whole family if he earns $1500 a month, let alone $3500).

Also, sometimes tasks come up that aren't within the employees' areas of expertise, and it's easier to outsource the tasks to someone knowledgeable than to hire a new qualified employee.

Hey guys - new to 2+2 thought I'd share some advice on career path + remote work aspect of software development.

Source: Was in large companies for 10 years then went out on my own with a business partner. Now run a consulting firm specializing in enterprise software development.

Career Path
There are really two different career paths that you can take in this industry. One is joining a company and being a salaried programmer building stuff for the company or its clients. The other option is contracting and being hired for specific jobs and charging either an hourly rate (referred to as Time & Materials- T&M work) or a fixed price for a project. The latter has a higher chance of success for being remote but would involve travel.

Company Man
Best place to start with a company if you're literally at the level "I learned HTML/CSS and made a website." or "I did a project for school using Python and integrated it with a database" would be an internship. These get you real world experiences that academia just doesn't (and can't) cover. This year to two year stretch of being an intern should be some of the hardest work you ever do, by your own volition. Don't settle for the tasks they give you, make sure you complete them but seek out more. Talk to developers, have them give you more tasks, work long hours and LEARN. The focus that you put towards an internship will make the difference of starting out at $30k a year or $50k a year.

Ok, now you have some experience. You've built features for websites that take in 1000s of visitors a day, you know the advantages of separating out design, data, and logic. You aren't quite confident in starting something from scratch but you enjoy digging in and learning from an existing code base. Congratulations you're an entry level software developer.

The biggest thing here is understanding your role. As an entry level software developer, you are the worker bee. You get **** done. It may be mundane, it may be hair pulling, but you push through and you get it done. You can't be as pushy as an intern trying to learn as much, but instead you talk to managers instead of developers. Have them start allocating you tougher and tougher tasks - yes a senior may be able to get it done in a day but after you have a week to figure it out you'll be that much more valuable.

Ok, now you're getting some real programming chops and you're starting to feel confident. Ready to become a senior software developer? Not yet. Now you have to move outside the warm comforts of code into how projects are actually run. Understand that when you estimate a task it has a real effect on the project. That not every task is equal and that they must be prioritized. Furthermore, understand that you're estimating too low.

You may say what? How do you know I'm estimating too low if you don't even know me? Trust me. You are. Even after reading this, you still will. Good estimation comes with experience. The best way to learn from it is to be retrospective about your tasks. Make an estimate, complete the tasks and ask yourself "What didn't I account for". The biggest issue you're going to have here is what is considered "Done".

Ready for a senior yet? Nope. Now time to consider the role of Quality Assurance (QA).
Is your task done when you complete it and save? No.
Is it done when you make sure it compiles? No.
Is it done when you run the site/app/system and do a run through to make sure it works? No.
Is it done when you review the task by logging in as a separate user that is not an admin, walk through the task, complete the happy path, go back try to break it with invalid inputs, going back and forth between screens, and anything else you can think of? Close.

The biggest thing that is going to take you from a entry level to senior is skill and proper dev testing. After you did all of that testing, it is ready to be sent to QA for them to do their job (hopefully they do a good one). Note that I didn't even touch on the following: what happens if someone is trying to hack the system and goes around the UI, what happens when the page/app is loaded 10,000 times in under a second, what happens when you lose internet connection while filling out the page? That's all part of QA's job (hopefully) and they'll let you know.

Ok so now you're producing good software, the managers trust you, the QA people have confidence in items that you're delivering, and you are estimating somewhat correctly. Congratulations you're now a Senior Software Developer (2-5 years later).

Understand your role. Remember you were a worker bee as an entry software developer? Well know your the best worker bee and you can assist other worker bees. You now have real responsibility. Managers will give you direction on what needs to get done, and if you don't do it - guess what - you're screwed. There isn't a nice senior mentor watching your back that will cover your ass. You are that person. Your job is to make sure every entry level guy gets quick responses (because they're worker bees so their questions matter), to update your manager on progress and issues (we'll get to that), and at the end of the day tackle the hardest problems that need to be solved.

The biggest challenge you're going to face here is your manager. Almost every senior starts up trying to cover up any fires that arise. Did one of the entry level guys completely break the system the day of the demo? The typical "new" senior response would be to go in and quick fix it before anyone notices... That response is wrong. But what if it only takes like 15 minutes? No... you're just wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Get use to the fact that **** will hit the fan, unexpected things will happen and some demos will fail. The biggest part of that is communicating it to your manager. The manager is your biggest ally or worse enemy. Armed with enough information they can wordsmith a response to the execs or clients that make you look like the savior of the company. That you single handedly found something that could ruin the company's reputation. --- or --- That you're recklessness and cowboy tendencies cost the company's reputation, that you didn't follow protocol and are obviously not experienced enough for the level of responsibility the company has given you.


--------- I just realized I've been typing this for more than an hour and I haven't eaten dinner yet, let me know if you guys are interested in more... I could go through what senior developer life is like, how to become a manager and what a manager life is like. As well as discuss the fundamental issue of how companies promote senior developers to managers. -------------------

Gun for Hire
Before you go out on your own and contract, understand this: you are a salesman. Your job beyond delivering quality work is to sell yourself. The biggest role in contracting is being an outgoing, interesting, involved, and passioned person. That means effectively speaking to other people and effectively summarizing why they should hire you.

I'll get into this more later if there is interest -- let me know!

Hope this was... insightful?

Cheers.

If you don't mind legendaryroots, i'd love to hear more on what is going to take to be "ready" to move from II to Senior.