jmakin, what do you want to do?

Javascript is what I'd recommend if you're mostly interested in programming in the future. Learning more languages/concepts is always helpful. Sure, you could do it yourself but that could probably be said of any entry level class.

Windows Desktop Administration sounds painful to me. I'm not hugely anti-Windows its just that <Any OS> Desktop Administration doesn't sound that exciting. If its a step on your career path - so be it, but otherwise I'd skip it.

If the Network Sys Admin class gives you an overview of Unix/Linux and you've never done anything like that, it could be an interesting option for you.

That's a good list. How do you interview prospects to ascertain if they have at least some of these qualities? A caveat, from what I have experienced, the interviewing process at many places seems like it has little to do with finding candidates with these qualities.

Windows desktop administration would be a horrible choice. It is a dead end and I've had a fair amount of experience with Windows kernel mode development.

Unix/Linux system administration be better in my view.

With that said I'd opt for the javascript course even given your reasons for not taking it.

First, I think its really hard to interview people. Like super hard. So being really good at interviewing doesn't mean you won't hire bad people or miss hiring great people.*

Here's sort of what I look for:




* As a side note, one of my biggest interview related pet peeves is places that make internal candidates do a full interview process for an internal promotion and make the decision based on that interview. If you've been able to observe and work with a person you know so much more about them than you'll ever know from an interview. It just seems ridiculous not to use that information.

Are you suggesting that people do not use their experience working with someone to make the decision and the interview process is more than simply a formality? Seems like that is rarely ever the case. While a company may make people go through the full process,(which might exist as a platform to give more power to managers to make hiring decisions) it seems like that is only procedural, and unless you are legitimately outdone by another candidate, your experience with the person interviewing you will trump the interview itself.

Not as rare as you would think. I most commonly hear about this at large companies and government jobs. Places where the appearance of impartiality / fair hiring is more important than actually hiring the best person for the job.

I have one friend who works at a place where the interview is a preset group of questions complete with a scoring criteria for each question and the interviewers only job is to score the candidates. Highest score gets the job. And the best part is that one of the interviewers is from HR and has an equal say even when hiring experienced professionals.

The topic of interviewing came up with my friends from the company next door who I eat lunch with and basically everyone says it is incredibly hard.

Maybe interesting scenario:
2 finalist candidates out of about 10 for a SQL financial role

Candidate 1 - Young guy recently out of college, a couple years of work experience. Some experience with SQL but not much with finance. Seems like a hard worker and a fairly smart guy.

Candidate 2 - Older (50 yo) guy who had been teaching for ~20 years and was now in the process of changing careers. Had some finance experience, but limited with SQL, but said he thought he could pick it up fairly quickly. Seems like a very intelligent guy and was probably a good teacher.

Who do you choose?

I have to go with the standard "It depends".

Did she have them write actual SQL?

I don't think she had them do much, it was mostly based on potential and ability to be trained and improve.

Yeah, then thats the real problem.

I wanna be a software developer but i'm concerned the Javascript class will be really rudimentary stuff that'll be a waste of time.

Ok, then I'd definitely skip the Windows course.

The Javascript course probably won't be *that* rudimentary. There are a lot of differences between Java and Javascript and learning them will be useful.

Having too much programming exposure when learning programming just isn't possible.

Sysadmin experience will be a benefit if you end up in a non-windows java shop, I have too small of a sample size to say for sure but it seems that start ups are generally not windows based java shops.

I don't know a single start up (or even small company) that is a windows based java shop. I can think of 20-30 that aren't off the top of my head.

Learning Javascript is the best play imo. Windows is useless and you are going to lose the Sysadmin experience because you are going to go back to Windows after the course.

+1

Okay sounds like a plan

I will say I was involved as a consultant with one company that was a small java shop, but got purchased by a large multi-billion public company, and it was not a windows shop. Had a very strong linux infrastructure.

I would have went with the older guy but not because of his life experience. Being able to teach that long shows a lot of potential for being able to clearly explain things to others.

If you can't explain something to someone and make it crystal clear it doesn't mean you're bad at explaining or a bad teacher, it just means you probably don't know the material well enough.

Sometimes it means you aren't a good teacher though.

Very interesting, good post. Thanks.

This is absolutely true. We have a ton of programmers who are fairly productive but I know would get lost in recursion or pointers. They also will never make good architects and tend to produce badly organized, hard to maintain code - unless you watch them pretty closely.

Maybe there should be a worker bee CS track and an architect CS track.

jmakin, Javascript and it's not remotely close. Of course my opinion could be colored by spending an entire day at Node Summit listening to how Javascript is going to CHANGE THE WORLD.

If you do any kind of web development you will need Javascript. You will never need to know windows administration in the real work as a developer.

Recursion in web apps is a major pain in the ass. I've been redoing a site for a start up for the last ~6 weeks and basically the biggest feature is this tree of items, that needs to be displayed in a form with different choices (select/radio/checkboxes) depending on the level and a bunch of conditional stuff (with tons of hiding and animating). I think that form has like 700 lines of jquery... ugh. That being said, I don't mind working with pure jquery very much, even though I've spent a lot of time with angular lately.

It would have been relatively easy if we had said there would be say a max level of 4 items, but they were insistent on having the capability to go higher if needed.

On the bright side, that form, and the admin interface for populating the tree works great and we are about to launch. I also don't really mind this 70 hour week I'm working to get everything finished when I get paid by the hour.

Also, knowing javascript is hugely important to make any web app a remotely enjoyable experience.

I haven't spent enough time with node to know whether or not I will spend time learning it well, but all the front end stuff can be very tricky and vitally important. I think back end code is largely much easier than making a site work on even just the range of modern browsers. I also find fringe cases much more difficult to deal with on the front end.

I also really enjoy javascript at this point, makes web development fun.