I haven't worked "in IT" outside of software development, and I don't even have a great idea of what the various jobs are. Anybody had one or more IT jobs outside of software development?
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I started out doing tech support.
From there I worked my way up to developer support (helping developers integrate with our API) which had me realize that I wasn't happy just supporting devs, I wanted to be a dev.
Oddly, I've wondered if moving into a tech support like role would be helpful in my developer career.
🤔
It will surely help you if you are allowed to debug in deep.
Rather just giving pre documented answers.
:-)
I definitely feel like having that background helped me in my developer career, it gives me an empathy towards the end-used that I find many devs lack.
My first job out of college was managing and vetting collaborative tools for use inside the company - instant messaging, live webcasting, web conferencing, eLearning, etc. Once a tool was selected, I'd develop implementation/deployment plans and documentation which required coordination with other IT depts like Security, Architecture, Help Desk, Desktop (in cases where the software had to be installed on all employee machines).
I also worked in accessibility. There was a group that hired mostly hard-of-hearing/deaf employees, so I helped deploy an application that converted text to ASL for them, and devices that allowed employees with cochlear implants to listen to live webcasts and learning modules because traditional headphones would interfere with their implants.
After that, I worked for an accounting firm managing the live webcasting tools and services internally and externally. This was the most challenging because there were so many moving parts and dependencies. For one, video was a such a huge burden on the network, so the Network team hated us =). But we'd work with them to deploy internal CDN technologies from Cisco, Riverbed, etc. I got to work directly with the executives in the company, learned about audio/video production, learned how to work under pressure and troubleshoot in real-time.
In hindsight, these experiences helped me a lot by understanding how end users use and learn new technologies that are presented to them without much choice really, and also how companies procure technologies for internal use.
Non-dev IT jobs for me were:
Construction Worker
Call Center Employee (most miserable ever)
This was definitely the worst job I ever did. But I had the option to work part-time here, I could focus on studies, started doing full-time software development not long after I took this job :)
Band Worker at Ford Factory (I left after a few weeks)
Apparently, retail marketing is my JAM.
Currently I'm basically creating the marketing department at the store I'm at - this includes social media, graphic design, building a website, in house marketing, working on the floor... and everything changes week to week and its INSANE. But I'm good at it, and for some reason I enjoy it.
It's a weird one, for sure. But it's what I'm doing. :P
One of my many duties was to support cisco switches, so I guess that qualifies as IT.
Anything from configuring switches to troubleshooting issues, to updating firmware, etc. Seemed pretty cool to me.
If I ever need to setup a managed switch at home, I am trained to do it lol.
By the way if anyone is interested in learning cisco stuff for free, just sign up for a free account, and then google for packet tracer labs.
netacad.com/courses/packet-tracer
Abattoir - carrying pigs off hooks onto hooks in back of lorry, and pushing half cow carcasses on hooks down rails.
Some factory that made amongst other things wheelchairs. My temp job was sweeping floor and moving stuff.
Pie factory - putting bits of pastry into slots in a conveyer belt, injecting gell into pork pies and lifting trays from one rack to another.
After that, majority of time as a multimedia developer, technical designer and automation testing.
I have had an internship position called “IT Attestation” for three months in a public accounting firm. Unfortunately I hated every second of it because it doesn’t provide any sort of technical growth or career development path. I got the returning offer that year, but ... nah, I politely rejected, and dashed out of the door when no one is looking 🤪
Two things in the internship that killed this path for me:
Saying no was a super easy decision.
Frankly speaking, it was nice to dive into my accounting/finance friends’ world a little bit. I sort of understand how/why they need to talk, work, dress and perform in certain ways. This was also learning ;)
I interned on a hardware support/sysadmin team for one of the largest logistics companies on Earth. It was pretty difficult but really fun.
At the same company, I also interned on a "Business Intelligence" team, which was kind of like a step between working on a dev team and a data science team. A lot of web portals, SQL reports, and ETL work.
After that, I worked as a pseudo-DBA at a different logistics company.
Somewhere in between those jobs I started writing JavaScript and did some PHP and Python development for an ecommerce company (they paid $8/hr). I dropped out of college and went on to full-time software development about 8 months after that!
Retail & cashier at the parking office of my alma-matter.
Ironically, the parking job got me interested in long term development, because in service of my duties, I made an Access database that kept track of Appeals meetings, decisions, scheduling, etc. Was even split between front & back ends to let me work from the front counter workstations as well as my desk in back.
I was given a commendation from the police chief for my ingenuity. Then when a coworker was struggling at a mail merge for something else that I used to do, I realized that my existing DB could be thinned down and modified in less than a week to automate most of the tedium of that process.
For that, I was written up and threatened with being fired for having gone above my pay grade, doing the work of a "developer" when I was being paid less than an assistant manager of a popular video game pawn shop.
In my defense, I took the commendation as encouragement and was just using MS Office as our organization had a site license, and the previous mail merges were all done with a table in a Word doc instead of an Excel sheet…
Before leaving, I also was able to document the entire function of my DB and the appeal clerk's process, which likely also threatened the manager of the department, who had also chastised the whole office for not being keenly aware of the diffs in the parking rules book, despite none of us knowing that changes could even be made between years or by whomst.