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find it even more difficult to find a job by the time the next batch graduates and then you will find yourself getting outdated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.

Starting off with Infrastructure Management

One career option that is quite a remarkable one in the IT services field is that in Infrastructure Management. The job in this domain deals with management of IT infrastructure both hardware and software.

Broadly speaking we may classify service providers in this area into two groups:

1. Those managing both hardware and software
2. Those managing only software

The first category of service providers comprises of data centers, network service providers etc that have the hardware installed in a facility that they manage. They manage at least the basic service providing software that is installed on top of this hardware.

The second category of service providers comprises of organizations that have people managing only the software that is running on such hardware infrastructure and almost all of these people would be doing this management remotely.

Typcially the software management would deal with 

1. Management of server operating systems (Unix/Linux, Windows or even operating systems in virtualized model). We will talk about virtualization in a separate post.
2. Management of databases (for example Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL or any other database installation)
3. Management of software applications (for example mail servers, or any other applications that are made available to people over the internet). there are thousands of such applications that are used in this manner by people as individuals as well as by organizations for their business processes.

An Infrastructure Management professional may be dealing with any or all of these in their day to day work and would tell you that it is extremely challenging work. What makes it challenging?

For one, most of the time the software that is running in this model is extremely business critical for any organization (think about banks running their applications that cannot afford even a second of downtime). 

Professionals may have to deal with hardware failures, software failures, upgrades, updates, migration of software and many other operations that involve lots of planning and careful execution (taking and restoring huge backups among other things).

All in all, this makes this career path among IT professional very interesting with daily chunks of problem solving and opportunity to take very serrious responsibilities in ensuring that the businesses of today run without a hitch.

A few interesting links that the readers may explore for further information are:

• Wikipedia - Data Center Infrastructure Management
• (Youtube Video) How do they do it - About Facebook Data Center

Exploring Career Options for IT freshers

These days I get a chance to meet and talk to a lot of fresh graduates in Bangalore. They are generally 2013 and sometimes 2012 graduates.

I find that most of them are looking for a job in "Java" or "Testing". A smaller set of people mention Microsoft technologies and even smaller set of people say that they want to work on "SAP" and some new technologies in the field of mobile and "Big Data". None of them have heard about "Infrastructure Management" that has been a fast growing business for several IT services companies.

When I explore to find out what they understand about the kind of work profile in any of these technologies it is quite sad to know that they have little to no clue about what people in these profiles will do, what will be their career path etc.

Hence it will be useful if through a series of blog posts we provide some information about each of these career openings in the field of IT. I refrain from using the term "career path" because for the fresh graduates of this year, the career path will most probably be radically different from what most people in the industry have had and probably we cannot estimate correctly what that might turn out to be.

Over the next posts we will aim to take up some of these areas in the IT domain and try to explain to the fresh graduates what they entail.

The Careers Section

These posts covers information about several career options in the domain of IT.

The objective here is to present what people do in real life in specific roles in this domain. Most of the time what we know about a career option is based in what a senior, a friend or a relative would have told us and in most cases the information may be incomplete, biased by personal experience or most times influenced by personal beliefs.

One of the best ways to get this information in an unbiased manner will be to get the views from several people from a particular field and thus get a wider and deeper understanding of what that career option entails.