Would I be suited in a career in IT?

Hi,

I am in my matric year at the moment, I was thinking of doing a course in IT (Software development).

I have a passion for computers, I was learning some php last year, I stopped because I gotta pass matric. What would one need in order to do a career in IT? Im interested in Software Development. I do not do IT in high school, I do Computer Applications Technology, im working on my mathematics alot, every day i practise maths.

So, if there are any IT people out there, what would one need to be able to do Software development?

no, don't think you're suited for a career in IT. In fact, I will fight to see you stay away from IT as much as possible. It's a soul sucking ruthless industry to be in, so unless you don't enjoy your life, I say DON'T go into IT

Have love for technology and be willing to work work long hours. A lot of IT work required downtime and customers usually give downtime after hours or on weekends. it's 10pm and I'm working on an MPLS/Voice project and I have to be at work early tomorrow. You really have to have passion for it

AcidRaZor said:

no, don't think you're suited for a career in IT. In fact, I will fight to see you stay away from IT as much as possible. It's a soul sucking ruthless industry to be in, so unless you don't enjoy your life, I say DON'T go into IT

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lol why do you think he's not suited for it? He has passion for (at least) computers

You just need a passion for I.T
I would suggest you do a degree and not one of those funky programming courses. Math is a prereq. for university entrance.
Companies tend to employ people with a strong math foundation (second year maths will do).

If you enjoy programming in php, I believe you would be very much suited for I.T.

Good luck on your Matric

ngadao08 said:

Hi,

I am in my matric year at the moment, I was thinking of doing a course in IT (Software development).

I have a passion for computers, I was learning some php last year, I stopped because I gotta pass matric. What would one need in order to do a career in IT? Im interested in Software Development. I do not do IT in high school, I do Computer Applications Technology, im working on my mathematics alot, every day i practise maths.

So, if there are any IT people out there, what would one need to be able to do Software development?

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Why software development if you don't know what it is.

I suggest Binging or Yahooing to get some info.

AcidRaZor said:

It's a soul sucking ruthless industry to be in, so unless you don't enjoy your life, I say DON'T go into IT

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Lol, AcidRaZor is quite right. I.T can be very stressful and you spend most of your weekends and nights working.

There is no definitive course imo. You really need to think about what you expect from your career and look at a 1 year, 3 year and 5 year plan at least. If you have the opportunity to study and don't need to start working right away I would always recommend completing a degree;that is if you are certain of your desired specialization. This will ensure future growth in your career. You should also think about which environment you feel more comfortable in, i.e. Hardcore programmer, delivering projects and writing complex algorithms on a regular basis or being client facing, working with people and producing conceptual designs and architectures related to specific business problems and then communicating your concept to non-IT people.

More than being technical, a problem-solver, loving computers, gadgets and code, you need to be good at time management, prioritizing, and you have to be task-oriented. You also have to be a good learner, a team player and a good teacher. You need to be balanced in terms of your personal skills, technical skills, social skills and business skills.

Gone are the days of IT people being sticked (stuck?) into cubicles or basements and expected to chug away continuously crunching code. You need to be a well-rounded individual. If you're too much of an extreme in any area, you will become a liability to your employer, and they will try to get rid of you by making your working life hell (because the law makes it very hard to fire incompetent people).

Also, if you can do the above, you'll enjoy your work, and your employee will love you, and reward you for it. If you can't, it will suck your life and soul and you will hate your job. Also, you need to find a company with the right type of culture and the right type of people.

Saajid said:

More than being technical, a problem-solver, loving computers, gadgets and code, you need to be good at time management, prioritizing, and you have to be task-oriented. You also have to be a good learner, a team player and a good teacher. You need to be balanced in terms of your personal skills, technical skills, social skills and business skills.

Gone are the days of IT people being sticked (stuck?) into cubicles or basements and expected to chug away continuously crunching code. You need to be a well-rounded individual. If you're too much of an extreme in any area, you will become a liability to your employer, and they will try to get rid of you by making your working life hell (because the law makes it very hard to fire incompetent people).

Also, if you can do the above, you'll enjoy your work, and your employee will love you, and reward you for it. If you can't, it will suck your life and soul and you will hate your job. Also, you need to find a company with the right type of culture and the right type of people.

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well said. Also be willing to learn... continuosly

Centronix said:

lol why do you think he's not suited for it? He has passion for (at least) computers

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It's nothing personal to him specifically, but meant to warn him of the danger. I'd rather shoot up heroin every day for the rest of my life than recommend ANYONE go into IT. If I had a time machine I'd go back in time and bludgeon myself over the head enough times to make sure I turn out a janitor or some kind of noble profession that has set hours you work in and nobody demanding all of your free time WHILE you're on vacation OVER A WEEKEND (even though you're willing to offer it up to help them out) and then reprimanding you with a written warning for pitching up an hour late on a Saturday morning (did I mention this was during my 3 week vacation and a public holiday that Monday?) including "use of language" when I bitched about the promised "we'll be out of here by lunch, so you can still make plans" turned out I had to cancel all of my plans and still be there at 18:00 and then got told "if you don't want to be here, then just go", to which they probably thought I would take it up as a threat and stay (with the hole "or else undertone") so I ****ed off. A written warning. A ****ING WRITTEN WARNING.

There is no amount of money in this WORLD that will EVER bring back the blood, sweat and tears (including pieces of soul) I poured into that company.

VG008 said:

Lol, AcidRaZor is quite right. I.T can be very stressful and you spend most of your weekends and nights working.

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Exactly. No amount of passion will curb the slow transformation into an empty shell of a man 10 years later. No amount of money is worth it.

I have a passion for programming and do it as a hobby AND work and I would ALWAYS recommend against going into the industry. Always.

Saajid said:

More than being technical, a problem-solver, loving computers, gadgets and code, you need to be good at time management, prioritizing, and you have to be task-oriented. You also have to be a good learner, a team player and a good teacher. You need to be balanced in terms of your personal skills, technical skills, social skills and business skills.

Gone are the days of IT people being sticked (stuck?) into cubicles or basements and expected to chug away continuously crunching code. You need to be a well-rounded individual. If you're too much of an extreme in any area, you will become a liability to your employer, and they will try to get rid of you by making your working life hell (because the law makes it very hard to fire incompetent people).

Also, if you can do the above, you'll enjoy your work, and your employee will love you, and reward you for it. If you can't, it will suck your life and soul and you will hate your job. Also, you need to find a company with the right type of culture and the right type of people.

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You forgot to mention that in South Africa, you also need to be a graphics designer, server administrator AND tea lady all wrapped in one with at least 5 years of experience in a similar field: http://itjobs.mybroadband.co.za/jobs/web-developeradministrator/

Oh, and if you're still adamant to go into software development. Make the recruitment agent understand you are a PROGRAMMER NOT A ****ING GRAPHICS/WEB DESIGNER. Also learn SOME server skills if at all possible as it always helps to understand the hardware where your **** will run on and debug which is the bottleneck or not but don't fall for it being a requirement, ****!!!

AcidRaZor said:

You forgot to mention that in South Africa, you also need to be a graphics designer, server administrator AND tea lady all wrapped in one with at least 5 years of experience in a similar field: http://itjobs.mybroadband.co.za/jobs/web-developeradministrator/

Oh, and if you're still adamant to go into software development. Make the recruitment agent understand you are a PROGRAMMER NOT A ****ING GRAPHICS/WEB DESIGNER. Also learn SOME server skills if at all possible as it always helps to understand the hardware where your **** will run on and debug which is the bottleneck or not but don't fall for it being a requirement, ****!!!

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Good point. You need to be well-rounded in your IT skills as well. It's good to know a lot about servers, hardware, graphic design, web design, and a whole lot more. Obivously, you will specialise in software development, but any good IT person knows a bit about everything (or that should be your aim). That sort of experience will come with time. IT is the one field where you will NEVER get bored, you will ALWAYS be learning, and you will ALWAYS make mistakes. That's what I love about it, and to a degree, what I sometimes hate about it.

So, to the OP, how round are you? Can you roll with whatever they hit you with?

To AcidRazor - perhaps you don't have the right type of personality for a long term career in IT. Or perhaps you are working for a k@k company. Or perhaps a combination of both. Loving coding and software development is not sufficient enough on its own. Perhaps your company is trying to get rid of you, but you don't know it yet?

Qualifications and experience is what you need, experience is more important.
You could try to find a company where you start as a junior with no pay ( but you'll need to know ppl who know ppl, that's how I started but even then no one likes to train juniors ), do this is to get experience and a reference.
Carry on learning php, website development is the way to go.

IT is frustrating, I work 8-5 but it's manageable and I don't have to work weekends unless it's an emergency.

Hey, if you really enjoy maths look into Process Control.

A great combination of engineering and software

Saajid said:

To AcidRazor - perhaps you don't have the right type of personality for a long term career in IT. Or perhaps you are working for a k@k company. Or perhaps a combination of both. Loving coding and software development is not sufficient enough on its own. Perhaps your company is trying to get rid of you, but you don't know it yet?

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After the written warning I quit myself and moved back to Cape Town. They wanted to offer me more money. ****ers went belly-up 2 years later just as I predicted (but hey, who listens to the ****ing primary guy who started as the first employee anyway right?)

Anyway, I can't do decent graphics design or cut up from an image to html to save my ****ing life. You work with people who specialize in the field. Can I change html and designs when there's little to no graphical changes? sure. Can I code in over 8 languages and possibly even more? Duhr. Am I actually GOOD at it? **** yea. Can I setup a server and make it hum for you? In my sleep. Can I make a helluva cup of tea? Yup.

There are cheapskates who would love a one-man show, but then the reason why they're probably looking for a one-man show is to replace a former one-man show who probably got fed up working 24/7 and still getting shat out for being behind schedule.

But hiring 5 monkeys when 1 expert can do the job in a quicker time (with less bugs, if at all, with more efficient code) requires a specialization in a field. I chose programming with my secondary being database design/servers because they go well together.

If I were required to do graphics AND cut-ups AND programming I'd never even know half the **** I do today when it comes to programming/servers etc.

As a company you're lucky if the graphics designer you have can also cutup stuff into html/css. That is why there's different categories (which recruitment agents love mixing up because they don't know what they're talking about)

Graphics Designer - The dude who does the layout of the website, most probably trained for websites as you get guys who are trained for advertising/magazine layouts too (so even those words can be split up into 2 further proficiency/expertise)

Web Designer - The dude who takes **** from the Graphics Designer and cuts it up into workable/efficient HTML/CSS code. Usually a good graphics designer would take on web design as a secondary skill and work on that to become an expert in, complimenting his chosen field in IT.

Web Programmer - The dude who does the interaction between database and front-end. Makes with the JavaScript and dynamic nature of websites. Not necessarily required to be a database developer as well, but it's damn well required if you want to have any sort of oversight when projects get bigger.

Database Developer - He makes the relationships between tables and stored procedures sing. Normally a good Web Programmer will also adopt this as a skill, but not required. This guy will usually also know how to make things run quite fast and would be responsible for queries on data etc. Servers and tweaking database settings, knowing indexes/keys etc is required for this IMO.

Then you get the Project Manager, dude responsible to oversee/chat to clients/communicate needs and get his team in line and goal orientated/motivated to complete a job *without* having to work insane hours or overpromising a client with no idea of how much actual time something will take to complete (Project Managers in general are *******s unless they come from a programming background)

I'm not even going to mention Business Analysts as they're a waste of space and oxygen (for some reason usually women as BA's with no ****ing logic, they do make good test subjects for possible bugs in code programmers might overlook, but in my experience the only requests they have is aesthetic "move this button here")

Anyway, there you have it. a HEALTHY and efficient IT team (I didn't even mention the poor technician, trust me, he is in the dungeon somewhere) that could ROCK the world and clock in insane amounts of work for 1/5th of the price.

As soon as you hire inexperienced mother****ers who can barely speak English thinking "now I can get more clients and/or free up some time" you are sorely mistaken. Your primary team will be so busy "teaching" the new guys and fixing their **** up's, that they won't get to their own work and would then need to work overtime, which is never approved because it's unforeseen and your "own fault" for not managing your time better.

Anyway, enough ranting.

stoymigo said:

Qualifications and experience is what you need, experience is more important.
You could try to find a company where you start as a junior with no pay ( but you'll need to know ppl who know ppl, that's how I started but even then no one likes to train juniors ), do this is to get experience and a reference.
Carry on learning php, website development is the way to go.

IT is frustrating, I work 8-5 but it's manageable and I don't have to work weekends unless it's an emergency.

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There any open positions in this fantasy land you work at?

I have been coding for close on 25 years now and still love it to bits. Could not think of anything else I would rather do. Waking up on Monday AM is not a schlep.

Yes, sometimes I have to work long hours and weekends, but not often. And when I do, I get compensated for it (helps being a contractor).

The last 10 years I have not expected to full fill multiple roles. I code and that's it.

It is an awesome field to be in. Good luck with it.

AcidRaZor said:

It's nothing personal to him specifically, but meant to warn him of the danger. I'd rather shoot up heroin every day for the rest of my life than recommend ANYONE go into IT. If I had a time machine I'd go back in time and bludgeon myself over the head enough times to make sure I turn out a janitor or some kind of noble profession that has set hours you work in and nobody demanding all of your free time WHILE you're on vacation OVER A WEEKEND (even though you're willing to offer it up to help them out) and then reprimanding you with a written warning for pitching up an hour late on a Saturday morning (did I mention this was during my 3 week vacation and a public holiday that Monday?) including "use of language" when I bitched about the promised "we'll be out of here by lunch, so you can still make plans" turned out I had to cancel all of my plans and still be there at 18:00 and then got told "if you don't want to be here, then just go", to which they probably thought I would take it up as a threat and stay (with the hole "or else undertone") so I ****ed off. A written warning. A ****ING WRITTEN WARNING.

There is no amount of money in this WORLD that will EVER bring back the blood, sweat and tears (including pieces of soul) I poured into that company.



Exactly. No amount of passion will curb the slow transformation into an empty shell of a man 10 years later. No amount of money is worth it.

I have a passion for programming and do it as a hobby AND work and I would ALWAYS recommend against going into the industry. Always.

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That's rough. I think your employer is full of kak. Good thing about IT is highly skilled people are always in demand. I hope you resigned. My ex employer didn't want to pay for my ccie studies so I told him I'll be looking for another job as I wint grow in that environment. He said ok. 2 weeks later I handed in my resignation

Dont take their nonsense. You are not there to them a favour

VG008 said:

Lol, AcidRaZor is quite right. I.T can be very stressful and you spend most of your weekends and nights working.

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I rarely work weekends and nights. In fact I can't remember the last time I worked late. About 8 months ago I had to come in for a Saturday.

To op: There is a lot to IT. Coding, systems admin, database administration etc.

Coding can be more creative. You need to be able to understand a process and work out how to provide a solution. You need to be able to listen to what is required, deliver and make them happy about what you have done. You also need to give them confidence that you can solve their problem. It therefore does require people skills. Something too often ignored.

Can't comment on the other aspects of IT.