Keen to hear stories from fellow IT geeks who moved out of IT dev. Even after after a year out where I vowed never return, I find myself back in it. Only been 6 months and already I’m zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Just seems so difficult to move out when you have done pure dev for 17 years.

What are the problems you find with your current work? Be specific.

Rachel

What are the problems you find with your current work? Be specific.

Find it soul destroying sitting at the same desk day in day out. Writing code that 9/10 ends up either being binned or you never see what happens to it. Always fancied IT strategy where you get to shape the direction of IT in an organisation and be influential with the powers at be. Being a code monkey is far from that.

I did:
IT Support
IT Dev
Requirements/Business Analysis
Architecture and Design
IT Strategy
Technical Lead
Team Management
Portfolio and programme management
More team management
Innovation Management

Now a Technology Strategist, customer facing.

That’s 24 years though.

Requirements/Business Analysis
Architecture and Design
IT Strategy

It does seem that the natural progression seems to be either the above OR to tech lead. Not interested in tech team lead. Tried it 10 years ago and didn’t enjoy the man mgmt aspect of it.

Freelance.

Still get to write code, but no politics and you get paid and take home loads more 😀

The option you’re looking at is either go management route into product management (expendable when shit hits the fan, despised by devs and testers), or an architect role. Those tend to end up being a team lead or product management role though and you end up doing mostly administration, dealing with employee issues and juggling plans in Project. Plus all the politics.

That said, go for smaller dynamic start up type companies and you’ll more likely get the role you’re looking for.

Or just go freelance and hell with it, write code, work from home if you can, get paid, buy bikes 😀

Though make it a consultant role and you can be more creative if the clients are up for it. Standard contract work through agencies are just after code monkeys, but plenty clients out there especially when agents aren’t involved, that are looking for people to solve their problems or produce a solution given a spec for a price.

Or just go freelance and hell with it, write code, work from home if you can, get paid, buy bikes

Haha. That’s what I am currently doing. And bought a bike. Great during the honey moon period, but the novelty has ended and now I am thinking the money is great, but feel a nobody in the organisation.

Consultant Vs Freelance. Only familiar with contract, what’s the difference?

Pre-sales / network design / customer support role?

Lots of interaction with customers, highly varied, still technical. Can pay very well or very poorly depending on how much the company values it’s customers….

I’m sat next to the LX Factory in Lisbon – I went surfing this morning and worked the rest of the day.. 50mb fibre in the apartment – here for 10 days then onto Berlin for a week… go freelance – choose where you want to work or what life experiences you want.. I used to live in Morzine and loved it but moved back to the UK with a lady and that didn’t work out and I’ve realised I don’t want to be in a fixed location so a portable office is a must for me.

Even if I only get 10 hours out of the week to do stuff in the place I am I’d like those 10 hours to be more memorable than the mundane routine… this is coming from a single guy however.. not sure how understanding a partner would be.. or children!

PS I’m a web dev..

Pre-sales

I have considered that, but have always worked for companies where customer is in house. Dare I say it, but I was wondering whether IT recruitment might be something to consider. Meeting clients / candidates and out and about.

@Alexxx

How do you get the work. Do you go through traditional recruitment agencies or have you built up a network of clients?

Consultant Vs Freelance. Only familiar with contract, what’s the difference?

Proper consultant is brought in for one off advice or projects and paid a fixed fee. The client is consulting you for advice, recommendations, design, and/or the code.

More work on your side to get the business though.

I bill myself as a developer consultant. It’s a fancy code monkey but I like to have input and advise on the architecture where I can. Though I’ve tended to end up dragged into ongoing projects and mostly writing code. I’m still often bound to a desk in client’s office and paid hourly or daily, despite trying to avoid it, though currently got a gig where I’m at home half the time.

Freelance/contract, just different names for same thing typically, though a true freelance may work at home or their own office and provide a solution for a project for a fee. Typical contract dev just sits in the same office as permies and does same code monkey job, but gets better money, less benefits.

Typical contract dev just sits in the same office as permies and does same code monkey job, but gets better money, less benefits.

As a side on my current contract I have managed to convince the dev team that using CI is of real benefit. I have shown them the benefits in a short period by getting Jenkins configured and modularising some of their code. Going into an org as a Dev Ops evangelist would be interesting. Short project, get to influence key stake holders and maybe be an org wide proposition.

I moved from dev to business analyst, but it was a natural progression because my dev work was never just coding and always involved a lot of analysis and working with other business areas. Eventually I got a contract that was purely analysis and just continued down that path.

If you go contract and do project work, BA or IT analyst can be a real jack of all trades job. Being able to turn your hand to lots of different stuff and pragmatic problem solving are probably the key skills for the sort of work I do, and there can be a fair bit of variety in the sort of projects I work on. I’ve done a long term transformation project that has run for a couple of years, going from early doors terms of reference and requirements gathering, right through to build and delivery of a financial services business 2 years later, and I worked on various different aspects of the business over that time. Still do a wee bit of coding to help with analysis work now and again.

It depends what you enjoy, but if you’ve got some analysis skills from your dev work and you have the communication skills to talk to people in other business areas, you may be able to translate your experience into analyst work. It’s a fairly low risk option as well, because you should be able to go back to dev if you try it and it doesn’t work for you.

It’s the transition aspect that is tricky. IT recruiters always want to just get bums on seats and are never interested in helping you find a different role. And I am not one for blagging it as that’s not me.

I’ve been doing it for 7 or so years – built up a client base and some of them have retainers which is handy for guaranteed work but it’s probably only 30% of the monthly. If the products good you’ll find the work, I’ve not got my own site and I’ve never gone via an agency so that must mean there is a fairly decent demand for web devs!

I did scale up to have a fixed office with a couple of staff but found it quite stressful so reassessed and now much happier being on my own timescale and delegating to reliable freelancers when the load is too much

Any personal questions fire me an email

Depending where you are in the country the DevOps thing is useful/interesting to get into. Plenty going on in the community side of things in London, lots of meetups frequented (or sponsored) by recruiters etc. Plus working with some of the more fun bits of AWS/Azure is nice if you like that sort of thing. I’ve moved into more of a dev mindset despite being from an infrastructure background (currently an infra tech architect at a web company), the lines are becoming ever more blurred with the amount of automation now involved.

Sounds like you are just working in the wrong type of company.

Go and work in the front office of an investment bank and then report back that it is boring…

Go contracting – get paid decent £££ for them to put your code in the bin.

As @kcr says though, if you have a good background in dev, maybe move into a BA role. Lots of opportunities, and so few good BA’s out there.

Dev to strategy is a big jump… Most often several intermediate steps between including roles like solution and enterprise architecture IME. Like Beej, I have had several roles in IT, although not quite as many! I came in sideways from the business side and not technical but I had several roles before I took shared responsibility for IT strategy.

Go and work in the front office of an investment bank

Did that for 10 years. Got fed up with the big egos of other devs and the constant bun fighting over whose solution was the best one. There was always too much waste and I always used to say myself “would they waste this much time in fighting if it was their money they were spending”.

Unfortunately, a role with a small company is most likely out of the question. I have such a bad memory in my mid 40s I don’t retain API related knowledge well.

Sort of in a parrallel world/industry but the big question is are you the sort of person who can be customer facing 😉 If so then the strategy/archetecture/pre sales is the place to head. A deep technical knowledge (or a good poker face) and the ability to get requirements out of people so as not to shaft the people delivering or the margin is a tricky job but really rewarding. Nearly every project I work on is different these days but the core skills I gained mean I can do it more comfortably than some.
Being the guy who can speak tech and the one who can speak to normal human beings is a rare quality, so many great tech people get bogged down in either the detail or elegance of their solution they forget what the problem is – I don’t care if it does 10% more than we asked it’s 2 months late and now pointless type situation. So probably start looking for those kind of roles internally where you know the players and the tools or externally where you can slot your tech in a build on that.

Also a 20 year SME I’m

Trainer
Consultant at various grades
Professional Services Manager X 2
Solution Architect
Solutions Team Manager
Professional services bid manager / sales non commissioned
…then moved to Sales and…
Pre sales
Bid Manager and now Account manager

So although not “code” based I’ve been fairly technical and in all my roles have has a mixed bag of office work, customer offices and home working. FWIW the variety is what I value the most – I’m rarely stuck in an office for more than a couple of days, usually have short hotel breaks but also as has happened over the last two weeks I can be almost constantly on the road. My customer facing challenge from professional services to sales has changed from “friendly deliverer” to a mixed bag of relationships. Some customers want to work with you, others think it’s a God given right to treat a Salesman like a “c”

As Mike says above – being able to translate technical into customer need and maintain people relationships is a skill, but I enjoy it – quite often I sit there knowing the answer before they do as we talk it through, and I’ve then got a very believable way of communicating that. In my current world it’s known as consultative selling.

I couldn’t sit in an office day in day out either. Do you have or could you look for a roll in professional services? It would give you that mix, your technical background will help and you’ll be able to ramp up your customer facing skills as time moves on. The solution architect role seems to fit – a chap with a good technical understanding of solutions who is able to translate a customer requirement to a deliverable solution.

13 years as a developer here. Good at it and enjoy learning, but every day seemed to be like this

[list]
[*]Pick up a requirement and set to coding it[/*]
[*]Realise 1/3 of the way in the requirement is dubious and there are better/easier/cheaper solutions for the customer[/*]
[*]Get gripped for pointing this out to the powers that be and suggesting we talk to the customer[/*]
[*]Write the remaining 2/3 of the requirement with spirit crushed[/*]
[*]Wait for a round of testing, upon which the change you suggested then gets said ah that’s what we actually needed.[/*]
[*]Get home and rather than chill out, spend some time learning the latest and greatest technologies, because god knows your employer wont pay for any training in it[/*]
[/list]

Now on the architecture side and have found a reasonable employer.

so many great tech people get bogged down in either the detail or elegance of their solution they forget what the problem is

Oh yes. I adop the ‘YAGNI’ (You aint gonna need it) principle. So many devs love to second guess requirements and deliver an over engineered, over budget and over late solution. Seen it time and time again.

Are you talking about architecture or strategy? The former is a natural transition from a senior dev role but I would imagine it’s hard to transition as a contractor so you’d probably need to look at switching to a permanent role first. Whilst the company I work for does have some architects that are contractors (albeit experienced when they were given the contract) the enterprise architects are all permanent.
Strategy I would say is more at the CIO or adviser to CIO level (lead enterprise architect etc.). But I’ve worked for a multi-national for 20 years so my view of the corporate world is a bit skewed.
Sounds to me like you want to try and find a start-up business and actually contribute towards something that’s successful and growing but I imagine those jobs are few and far between.

So many devs love to second guess requirements and deliver an over engineered, over budget and over late solution. Seen it time and time again.

We have this, every time a customer has a FR which goes through the proper channels, SW come back saying it would take 6-12 months and cost x £100k and they don’t have the bandwidth, so it gets rejected.

I then get the 80% core functionality working with a Bash script in about a week….

DevOps contracting could be an option then. CI CD is something lots of people should be focussing on these days.

I was technical, these days I manage a technical team (so yes there is man management) but also spend some time working on all elements of the job, Dev, BA, Architecture, PM, support, you name it, it comes my way. Salary is good although I could always do with more. Company is prepared to invest in people so I get training from time to time. Loads of red tape which is a pain, but overall that’s part of the job for big e-commerce type companies, if you don’t like it then there’s always contributing to open source projects – doesn’t pay as well though 😉

If I did it all again, I’d probably look more at plumbing or building though!

Yeah, I’ve been working my way through the same stuff.

A few years ago (6 or so) I transitioned from one bit of banking software to another that was more configuration based. I’d already been increasing my business (interbank payments) knowledge for a few years so, I knew what I was talking about.

At one point I was Dev Lead, but really didn’t enjoy the admin parts of the job. Now the App I look after has transitioned to another team, and they call be a Business Systems Consultant (wtf, I know).

I get to speak to people about what they want and developers about what they can actually do for the money available – then I write the spec. I also handle 3rd level support, and deployment stuff.

The key things (IME) are:
1) Have some business knowledge
2) Be able to talk to people who don’t get the “other” side (business/tech) in terms they can understand.