Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Threaten to delete the PBX. Nobody knows how those things work.
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IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
- Thread starter Traak
- Start date
ShakyJake
<Donor>
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You can quit?
Usually being forced into management means you are overpaid for your current position.
Brahma
Obi-Bro Kenobi-X
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Maybe. But I really hate managing people. Not quitting for one reason, they hired the best director I've ever worked for in my 25+ years in IT.
ronne
Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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Isn't some level of management kind of inevitable though? Like how long can we realistically be "in the trenches" so to speak?
I've been in this game for 15 years now and have worked my way from literal Geek Squad to some nonsensical title at my current job (I think it's cloud infrastructure engineer?). How long am I going to be willing/able to keep up with shifts in technology though? I got VMware/Veeam certified back in like the 2016-2018 era, because that's what all our infra was running on, and was our primary focus for new deployments. But now? That shits all on the way out, and AWS or whatever flavor of not-my-cloud is the future.
I can probably keep up with this round as we migrate more towards a K8s based system run in AWS, but what about the next big shift in 2025? Or 2030? I'm gonna get sick of this eventually, or just be too old and boomerish to keep up, and what then? Do you just age out eventually, holed up in your tiny corner of some fortune 500, closely guarding your aging VMware systems from being offlined just so you can look useful?
I feel like the only logical move as I get older is to move away from hands on and more in to management roles.
I've been in this game for 15 years now and have worked my way from literal Geek Squad to some nonsensical title at my current job (I think it's cloud infrastructure engineer?). How long am I going to be willing/able to keep up with shifts in technology though? I got VMware/Veeam certified back in like the 2016-2018 era, because that's what all our infra was running on, and was our primary focus for new deployments. But now? That shits all on the way out, and AWS or whatever flavor of not-my-cloud is the future.
I can probably keep up with this round as we migrate more towards a K8s based system run in AWS, but what about the next big shift in 2025? Or 2030? I'm gonna get sick of this eventually, or just be too old and boomerish to keep up, and what then? Do you just age out eventually, holed up in your tiny corner of some fortune 500, closely guarding your aging VMware systems from being offlined just so you can look useful?
I feel like the only logical move as I get older is to move away from hands on and more in to management roles.
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in my current industry, non-management is certainly possible. Lots of
Control
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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On the other hand, I think we're actively hiring RPG programmers... If you don't mind doing old stuff, someone will pay you to do it because something somewhere relies on it.
Fucker
Log Wizard
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LMAO. Company I worked at had an old guy with two computers. No one knew what they were for. He retired or something, the computers were turned off and no one noticed.
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wamphyr
Molten Core Raider
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Is it really viable to learn to program when you are 42 years old and get a shitty programming job ?
I know a tiny bit of C++ that I learned in highschool 28 years ago, but it just the basic of the basics, like declaring variables, the IF, For and While commands, and that is about it.
The thing is I picked a wrong job that is rapidly collapsing (English-Romanian translator), and all the hiring add in Romania are for coders. Can I do it at 42 ?
I know a tiny bit of C++ that I learned in highschool 28 years ago, but it just the basic of the basics, like declaring variables, the IF, For and While commands, and that is about it.
The thing is I picked a wrong job that is rapidly collapsing (English-Romanian translator), and all the hiring add in Romania are for coders. Can I do it at 42 ?
ronne
Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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Control
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Youtube or torrent some beginner React (or whatever tech you want) tutorials. Bash your head against them until you can make something useful or you decide it isn't for you. If you can build something useful and point at it, someone will hire you.
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ShakyJake
<Donor>
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Pretty much what I did. I transferred from a call center to a department that was tasked writing VB6 scripts -- I was 41/42 at the time. From there I made the effort of learning .NET and C#, wrote various utility apps for our department and then was moved to engineering a couple years later. Got promoted to senior engineer this past spring with a sweet six figure salary.
And, by the way, at the time only had a high school diploma.
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Kharzette
Watcher of Overs
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Control
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Both of those seem to be based on something changing at some point, whereas I think we're dealing with the opposite here.
Fucker
Log Wizard
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The woman who ran the email servers where I worked was a secretary and got into IT at base level and moved up. She was in her 40's when she started that.
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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I've got clients like that. Women that started as receptionists and somehow wound up 20 years later as VP of Telecom for a Fortune 500 company because no one else wanted to handle the 'phone switch' which grew and grew until it encompassed globe-spanning call centers and dozens of IVRs and adjunct applications and CRM integrations etc, as vendors worked to integrate and migrate all the companies they purchased along the way into the existing systems.
Some of these women are very smart and others are... holy shit , not.
Some of these women are very smart and others are... holy shit , not.
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ronne
Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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Sounds like all of It. Like 20% of the workforce actually knows what they are doing, everyone else is just clicking buttons and following a script built by someone smarter than them.
Probably myself included.
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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