Comment by austin-cheney
20 hours ago
I was a 15 year JavaScript developer. Now I run operations for an enterprise API system at a large organization.
My career stagnated as a JavaScript developer. Most of my peers were afraid to write original software which made it really challenging to do anything until I was finally laid off from worst of it. Everything had to be little more than copy/paste from some enormous framework into an enormous mono…monster of stupidity. If you ever proposed sanity people would get irate because it threatens to expose that nobody has idea what they are doing.
Simultaneously, though, I have a part time job in the military. In the military I learned networking (routers and switches), operations, security, management, and more. I still maintain my security certs and have a clearance.
Last year a recruiter reached out to me about a work from home job writing enterprise APIs. I passed the interview using my knowledge of data structures and the inner mechanics of WebSockets from years of writing personal software. For most of my career as a JavaScript developer it seemed the only way I could program at all was to do it on my own outside of work.
Since then they promoted to lead operations and at the same time to be a team lead in a different organization.
You’re still doing software development. That’s not a major transition.
Not really. Operations is, at best, 5% software and more like 90+% project management. It is handy being able to write original applications on the fly to automate some of the insanity because there are multiple things happening simultaneously and many things to account for.
But in reality that's just a natural career progression for like 90% of people as they move up the ladder.
There are actually very few people above around age 45 or so that write code for a majority of their day (percentage-wise), and that includes people who still consider themselves in "individual contributor" roles. E.g. even a principal engineer is going to be spending a majority of their time reviewing code, doing systems and architecture work, mentoring more junior developers, organizing more junior developers, etc. When I was a principal engineer a huge part of my job was "project management" as you put it.
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What an I missing? You said you were writing “enterprise APIs”.
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Curious about the military job (and other services including Police Departments). Are you eligible for pension/benefits as a presumably civilian subject matter expert? How does one get such a cyber gig?
Its Army Reserves. Yes, I am already locked in for a pension. I am not a civilian. I am completely interchangeable with full time military, evidenced by my 5 military deployments.
How does a person get such a job? They join the military.
When I joined cyber wasn't a thing, because I am old. I joined the first cyber organization shortly after it formed and was a member for about a decade. I was promoted out of that organization and shortly thereafter a formal cyber organization was created, not just a few units. By that point I had become an officer doing more generic systems integration and physical communication infrastructure things.
The biggest difference between the military side versus the corporate developer side is that military tends to run towards problems. The goal is have everything working so that you reach steady state and don't have to do high visibility work. High visibility is bad, because it suggests you are failing something important. Corporate developers, on the other hand, tend to be either trend chasers that want high visibility yet low effort work until things fall apart and then they run away or are long term employees that want boring steady constant employment.
Sounds like a reserves position, probably in S6/Signal Corps given the description of dealing with IT.
That's it. I have been an acting/deputy brigade S6 on and off for years. Its more people and expectation management at that point than anything directly technical, but you are still expected to be an expert, like being a corporate associate director. I just promoted out of that and am looking for the next thing.