The Q+A below is from a discord discussion we had.
Hi! Welcome everyone! I am the author of the book Essential Software Development Career + Technical Guide. This book is probably the culmination of 10 years or so of writing various articles. I had always thought about doing a book one day, but I thought it would take a while to have enough material. One day, I put together all of the articles I wrote and realized it was probably close to enough material for a book. So, I just started writing, and it didn’t take too long at that point to finish it. I’ve had about 30+ years of professional experience working at companies like Citigroup, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, AT&T, AT&T Unix system labs, and more. I’ve been coding since I was a kid. So, I have about 48 years of coding experience in total. My main language of choice today is C#.NET on asp.net. (Used to code in C++/C).
Question: I’m thinking of choosing one path to get specialist in. Which one do you see having a better future ?!
My answer on which path to choose is often what do you like AND is that skillset marketable in the area you plan to live or remote. Search for jobs on indeed.com for the skillset and compare it to other skill sets. If there aren’t at least hundreds of jobs that may be too few for your area. Also check that the pay is what you desire.
Question: Next question I have is in which area it pays more between Front end and back end Developement?
That actually is a really great question. I honestly haven’t done a comparison of both. We have full-stack developers on our teams. Some are good at the front end; some are good at the back end. The pay is pretty much the same in my company. But not sure if that is true everywhere. All the previous companies I was at pay was comparable, I think.
Question: I would love to hear your thoughts on what is the key to a successful career in software as well as how to stand out? I’m going to come from a different field without a CS degree but I want others around me to not see my as liability, rather someone who is reliable.
Passion is one key. Learning ability is another. If you didn’t come from a CS career that’s fine. One of the best developers I know didn’t either. Go back and try to pick up some of the basics on algorithms and data structures , understand how things work at the lower levels will give you great insight into how things work and perform at the higher levels.
Why I say passion, is passion drives people to do extra work on side coding projects to keep learning because they like it. Passion also means you take pride in your craft and I can tell you do.
Question: In your opinion as someone coming into the field and wanting to land that first job with a focus on the backend, what would you suggest as a project that would stand out?
Any sort of interesting coding project or contribution to an open-source project where they can see your code can help. While I’m not a fan of certifications in general, to land a first job, I might find some inexpensive ones from well-known companies. For example, if you were going from a C# job, a Microsoft Certification might help you get in the door. In general, most certifications don’t matter and expire rather quickly, so as I said, I’m not generally a fan, but they can help initially. Right now, coders are in high demand. It shouldn’t be too hard to get in the door with an entry-level job. I’ve heard of people just out of boot camp being offered (a great starting salary) in the NYC area. Over the years, I’ve kept a portfolio of projects I have worked on in my spare time or for work. (Though more of it now is media kits of the products I worked on for different companies rather than code I can show). I use that whenever I’m interviewing. A trick I use for certifications because they expire so quickly is to still include it on my resume after expiration as “Used to be Microsoft Certified C#” or something like that to at least get something out of an expired cert if I spent the time on one. The only certifications I’ve seen places actually require are AWS or Azure certs for some shops that use their cloud services.
(Note software engineering can change fast – so can’t say certifications won’t be more important in the future at the moment it’s only really needed if you see a lot of job descriptions are asking for them.)