It’s been almost one year since I started working on my first job after graduating with a Batchelors Degree on Computer Science.
My job requires me to work on E-commerce websites which use salesforce commerce cloud and I don’t like using it , nor do I feel any desire to learn any sort of web development. Everyday I wrap up work feeling like I’m not cut out to be a developer… it feels like I’m stagnating.
Towards the end of my degree I was aware of the fact that my interest in fields like Machine Learning, Data Science, AI and software development were diminishing. I wanted something different, at that time Cybersecurity was the only field that really appealed to me, so I applied for a few jobs and none of them wanted freshers. Since money was tight, I had to find a job and I ended up becoming a web developer.
Right now I’m learning on the side for certifications like CompTIA Security+ (not necessarily for the certificates) in the hopes of landing a job in cybersec. I also have some Linux knowledge, but I doubt it is anywhere near the level required for a professional. I understand that cybersecurity is a broad field, so I’m still figuring out what job roles I should be looking at.
I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing here, perhaps I should also consider jobs like devops too.
Any advice is appreciated.
Everything in IT infrastructure is done “as code” now. If you know how to code, but want to do something with real hardware and solve real problems, I’d go that route. To be more specific, IT Storage has a massive shortage of people, and it is weirdly neglected as a target career by younger folks.
I know how to code in python, powershell, C, REST APIs, etc., but I cannot stand just sitting and coding for any length of time. HOWEVER I do like writing snippets of code to solve problem and automate infrastructure. Look a NetApp certifications, Pure Storage, or one of the other leading vendors. If you’re already familiar with S3 protocol / Object Storage, look at those options. I had a position open that paid $120-140k starting salary that we had open for 9 months last year until it was cancelled. We interviewed a mountain of people, we just couldn’t find a solid candidate, and the bar was pretty low. Storage is also becoming a more and more critical part of security, as protecting intellectual property stored on storage is critical for practically every major company.
What would one search in job search engines for these roles? What are the job titles?
This sounds interesting. I’m wondering if you could go into any more detail about what you were trying to do with your opening, and what needs you are seeing out there around storage specifically. I have a small software company and I’ve been under the impression that storage is pretty much taken care of at all levels by the existing commodity services, but maybe I’m just talking to the wrong people or missing something important. Thanks.
I’m referring to BIG storage, private clouds, data lakes, etc. For example, my primary customer, In three years we’ve grown the object storage footprint by 100 petabytes. The rest of the global footprint across 110 sites is another 95PB. Commodity services do not scale, and global data transmission is typically custom tailored to the user requirements. Thinks like a 1st pass at the edge in 15 remote test sites, each crunching 100TB of raw data down to 10TB for transmission back to core, and that process happens on a clock. Other binary distribution uses cases, transmitting 50GB jobs from other continents back to core for analysis. It’s all still custom. Then there’s all the API back end work, to build out all the customer accessible storage APIs, numerous challenges there.
I’m trying to wrap my head around this - I’ve been stuck in the mickey mouse line of business world where a company may have like a few TB of transactional data in a decade - and I kind of want out into the real world. A few questions if you don’t mind, what kind of customer needs this amount of storage, what kind of data is it, and are you mostly building on top of S3?
My IT guy was in love with security. Took classes, attended conferences. Took a solid drive towards it. We got hit with a serious attack. 2 months of forensics and cleanup later he lost his taste for it.
You’re still early off on your path you’ll probably go through a few more types of jobs before you figure out what you really like.
Having development chops makes you a superpowered sysadmin it also gives you a good start on DevOps and cloud architect roles.
Look into CI and Build systems. Look into aws and azure. Saltstack and ansible. Nginx and Apache. C# and java. Proxmox and VMware, Stay familiar with open source stuff.
If something in that alphabet super products brings you the least bit of enjoyment start working that into your resume.
We don’t really use things like salt or ansible anymore in devops/sre. It’s all about pipelines with stuff like argo and terraform.
Kubernetes is the way forward too. There development energy being spent on that space now is huge as well so there is always something new and interesting happening.
‘we’
I’ll give you kubernetes. It would be kind of irresponsible to ignore it in the current landscape.
But there’s still more puppet out there than you can shake a stick at. And no established DevOps engineer wants those jobs.
It’s not like Ansible isn’t still active. What I’m mentioning isn’t the way things are going and or the newest technology. But that stuff, it’s still all over the place out there, and there’s no lack of companies that need engineers for care and feeding. That 5-10-year-old tech is a great advantage for someone looking to work their way into the industry.
Especially for someone fresh out of the gate, I probably roll up in a place with enough kubernetes, ansible, salt, and cloud formation to make my resume look interesting.
Get a license for commercial electrical installation in 18 months and graduate with a garaunteed job and make $70k/year minimum lol
Any time I’ve thought about switching from web dev, being an electrician always looked the most appealing. I second this option.
Maybe look into GIS work and try to get on with a municipality or regional government. Not sure how it is in the US but in Canada there are plenty of GIS jobs open all over the country, it’s easy enough work if you have a good understanding of (I think) Python. Plus maps are fun, at least I think they are.
Just to add to this, if you’re interested the main program I see being used is ArcGIS. QGIS is another program that’s similar but free and open source and good to practice on to get the basics of spatial mapping down, but there are some things that are different between the two that is not a 1:1 transfer of skills.
