I have been a network engineer with no degree for many years, but I did have a lot of certs. It’d be nice if there were something similar for programming. But I’ve never seen anyone care that much about the engineer title. I’ve always thought it’s someone who understands his craft/engine design in and out, but doesn’t design it himself. The architect designs it. The tech can perform documented solutions

IANAL but i’m pretty sure that even without an NDA anything you develop on the job is considered IP of the company. However, as long as it’s not a blatant copy paste(a rewrite), it’s hard to legally enforce that because they have to prove damages. Meaning that if they shelfed the idea/program, even if it’s a blatant copy paste they can’t do anything.

What programming language? You might have to back to basics. I know what you mean though. That was my frustration as well. The basics aren’t covered well enough on many courses, and learning in a browser IDE adds anxiety when following tutorials if you don’t know how to set up your environment.

If it’s with Python, maybe I can help. Getting your environment set up is the most important part. I like to use pycharm, it forces you into virtual environments but that’s a good practice to follow and gives you plenty of practice with the basics since you’ll have to install your dependencies for every project.

Sometimes the dependencies change, and it’s nice to know what version you previously used vs how the new package version works.

Bruh on one post people are bandwagoning rust and then on another post people calling it esoteric 🤣 hard to see what’s what past the hype. I mostly code in Python though so I might need to find out for myself

That’s great. That’s basically the route I’m looking to take, though my background is mostly with networking, so I have some catching up to do in sysadmin skills. Thanks for your insight! I’ll give you a follow (idk if that exists in the fediverse lol) and maybe follow up with you later. It’s great you’re willing to be a resource for the aspiring engineers. That’s the kind of spirit I try to embody.

Totally agree. It’s important to remember that good recruiters sell good stories, not resumes. You want your recruiter to say “wow, this kid is ambitious and well spoken. Sounds like he’s a prime candidate for this role.”

That helps the hiring company too. It signals that they can get tenure from this potential hire and that they’ll be eager to start contributing ASAP. I’ll take an ambitious, eager professional over a grumpy, grizzled veteran any day.

Dang, I thought it was easier to break into programming. Did you have any formal education? I totally felt that, I had to climb through the ranks one painful step at a time.

If I had the chance to follow my dreams, I would have been a paramedic, followed by either park ranger or some form of rescue team. Unfortunately, as a poor immigrant, I had to focus on pay, and paramedic pay was only about 2x minimum wage where I live, so I decided not to follow my dream. Thankfully I ended up in something else I enjoy. All that to say, you’re a hero in my book, and I’ve always thought paramedics should be paid significantly more.

I don’t think it’s necessary to give a reason for ambitions, such as financial goals. If it’s not true, a good interviewer will sniff it out and catch you off foot. Self improvement should be part of basic intuition for any professional. It’s also not necessary to elaborate on why you’re leaving, this is risky territory for a young professional. I’d answer this by focusing about what initially excited me about the role, how much I’ve grown my skills and expertise, and what I’m looking for in my next role. That speaks for itself without trashing your company. I agree with everything else you said.

You can talk about what you’ve previously worked on that excited you, what kind of role or technologies you believe you’d excel in, and how you feel you’re ready to transition into a role with more responsibilities. You can tell the truth without speaking negatively about your employer. Even the worst job is something to be grateful for, you got experience and were allowed to (for a time) grow into your responsibilities. The need to complain comes from a desire to “get even” so it always looks very negative.

Also, four years is a long time to spend at a company that isn’t helping you meet your goals. Part of maturing professionally is knowing how to ask for more responsibilities, how to make sure you’re credited/rewarded as well as communicating properly with your leadership so they can help you meet your goals.

If you get some “down the road” platitude, then start thinking about other options. If you’ve been excelling in your duties for more than a year and you’re no longer being challenged, that’s about when it’s time to move on.

These days, you should probably be either getting promoted or changing jobs every 2 years at most, 1 to 1.5 years depending on how ambitious you are and how strongly you can demonstrate your skills.

Good luck

Yeah, in my case, the decision to hire me had been made, but HR would of course onboard me. I got kind of blindsided as the person who asked me wasn’t the person who would be making the decision, she was basically a proxy. I asked what the range was and I got some generic “it depends”… I checked most of the boxes for skills but I don’t have a degree and for some reason that’s off-putting to large companies. Anyways yeah it didn’t feel right to be pushy so early

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT86J7mpN/

That was basically how the meeting went lol

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT86J7mpN/ This is basically a shot for shot remake of how the meeting went down

I appreciate the advice. I’m certainly happy with the raise, just trying to think ahead

I’ve heard from some friends/family that are trying to break into entry level cybersecurity or programming roles and it’s extremely difficult right now, why do you think there seems to be such a high demand for skilled workers but seemingly no demand for entry level?

lmao I was thinking the same. Like damn I gotta start working some on some defense contractor stuff

That’s great, can you elaborate what you mean by ops>devops? Do you support infrastructure or applications? I know devops is kind of a catch-all term now for automation, did you work on understanding cloud deployments from the POV of the servers/application or from infra?

I only ask because some of what I do is considered “devops” in the sense that I’m working on network automation, but a lot of times when I hear people discuss devops they’re talking about supporting applications

I think you’re right. Despite my bandwagon fandom, I Believe Go is more appropriate for my needs. I think a compiled language with more intuitive parallelism is what I need

Thank you, great response. Based on your opinion and another, I believe I will focus on learning Go. I mostly need the benefits of compiled languages in order to easily distribute, as well as easier parallelism, as I’ve always found that to be a pain in the ass with Python. Not sure if Threading, Concurrency, or Asyncio are the “best” way to handle threading of non CPU intensive tasks, such as sending a request and waiting for a response. But I know that it seems since Python has taken so long to attempt to allow easier bypassing of the GIL, you get a lot of decent ways of doing something, but no great ways.

yes, I’ve seen how mangled python code can be, some of the code that our automation team uses barely makes use of functions or classes, which has made working on other people’s python code a nightmare. There’s one application that is thousands of lines long that I’m pretty sure I could condense into a few hundred lines.

Perhaps that’s a drawback of people who use python, they are not typically focused on the scalability of their code until it is actually used in prod. I believe for this reason, I would prefer a language that is compiled.

Last question, is using Rust on Windows as difficult as it seems at face value? It looked like to me that for using rust, it’s preferable to use linux or mac, as they don’t require you to install a compiler. For some reason, my org requires me to submit an exception for being able to install rust on my work computer. Is there anything that is inherently risky about using Rust, or is it because once the code is compiled, it cannot be reverse engineered?