I want to be only a developer!!

How many times we hear this from the fresh graduates just out of college, looking for an IT job and rejecting some job offer that may not be a profile for a java or .net or some other programming language developer. I, for one, hear this very often from fresh graduates these days.

But there is another take on this, and that is my personal view about the situation.

I think if you want to be a developer but are getting your first break as a tester or an infrastructure management engineer then it may still be worthwhile to take up that job.

What will you gain?

• For one you will gain professional experience
• Then of course you will gain money from the job
• The job will also give you the time and the environment to understand much better what people do in various profiles in IT companies and you can make a more informed decision about what you want to do in your professional life

In a nutshell, you will have several avenues to explore once you start on a job in the IT industry and keep a keen lookout for what you would like and prefer to work on.

If you are actually good at programming you will not give that up even if you are not getting a break as a programmer in your first job. In fact, the keen programmers are generally busy picking up new skills by creating apps on different software platforms or writing code to make some piece of software. They will generally be spending time outside of their formal jobs to gain new knowledge and to hone their skills. After all so many excellent open source projects are done by people in time outside of their formal jobs.

Now what will you lose if you do not take up the opportunity for starting on your first job?

• For one you will lose on possible professional experience
• You will lose money
• You will lose the opportunity to make a more informed decision about your career preference
• You may spend time looking up for jobs that you might have otherwise spent learning new skills
• If the job scenario is challenging for fresh graduates, as it is this year for the IT graduates in India, you may find it even more difficult to find a job by the time the next batch graduates and then you will find yourself getting outdated

Again, I say that this is my personal opinion and may be different from that of many others, but I feel strongly that one will learn a lot from any professional experience especially on one's first job.

There are several examples of prominent people around who have found success in their professional life doing something quite different from what they started their careers with and leveraged all their experiences in previous jobs as stepping stones to their success.

So, take a pause, think rationally rather than emotionally about taking up that first job and move on. In a professional career of an average of 40 years or more, the first few months will not count so much towards the technical knowledge that you will acquire but much more for the professional experience that will help you shape your career.