Comment by austin-cheney

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.

scarface_74 19 hours ago

You’re still doing software development. That’s not a major transition.

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austin-cheney 16 hours ago

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.

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- hn_throwaway_99 14 hours ago
  
  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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  austin-cheney 11 hours ago
  
  > "project management" as you put it
  That is like saying “doctor” as you put it. It’s super cliche for people in software to title themselves as principal or expert or famed ninja grand wizard and yet simultaneously not know how the real world works. Project management is actually a real thing, seriously. It’s not just some imaginary invocation like lawyer or teacher. People actually do that for a job and get paid real money. Unlike software where developers pretend to be qualified against their own imagined baseline there is actually a license/cert from a universally recognized governance body.
  This kind of nonsense is why so many developers that don’t have imposter syndrome want out.
  If you want to see what real project managers do then peer into construction where they manage billions of dollars in assets with critical timelines that have multimillion liabilities.
  
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- scarface_74 16 hours ago
  
  What an I missing? You said you were writing “enterprise APIs”.
  
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  ecshafer 16 hours ago
  
  OP said he "Runs operations for an enterprise API". My guess is that they are running a team that manages an infrastructure platform which developers in their org target. My guess is that this involves a team which manages deployments to multiple clouds / regions / data centers, some load balancing configuration, etc. using some software like Akana or some IBM product.
  
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  stonemetal12 15 hours ago
  
  He could be clearer about what he does. He did say "Last year a recruiter reached out to me about a work from home job writing enterprise APIs." He doesn't mention going from writing APIs to operations management. Which seems to be where the confusion is coming from.
  Though that is my understanding of how you make a big career change. Do your current job in a company that does what you want to do. Then change roles rather than jump to the role you want straight. Kind of beat the chicken and egg problem, of needing experience to get a job and can't get experience without a job. A job that is adjacent to the one you want is "second hand" experience.
  
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brutus1213 19 hours ago

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?

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austin-cheney 16 hours ago

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.

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- [removed] 16 hours ago
  
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Dachande663 19 hours ago

Sounds like a reserves position, probably in S6/Signal Corps given the description of dealing with IT.

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- austin-cheney 16 hours ago
  
  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.
  
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