[Courses] [Careers] Diverse Hats

[Poppy Casper]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 19:20:49 +1100, Mary <mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2005, Poppy Casper wrote:
> > Discover what you need. If you need the room to be creative, you'll
> > never be happy in a job that doesn't provide that.
> 
> Do you ever want to move out of tech support into another role? What do
> you see as the most creative IT roles?
> 
> -Mary
> 
I would love to move out of support into either Q/A (Testing) or
Project Management - I have some experience and skills in both after
making it through this Beta project.  My problem with either is that
I'd have to leave my company and/or the city I live in to do them. Job
growth here has shrunk with a combination of layoffs/companies closing
their doors and my own company becoming more corporatized and rigid
about moving within the company. I know that eventually, I will be
ready to give up the friends and family that I have here and move to
someplace with more job growth, but I've come to realize how
desperately I need to have a steady social structure around me. It's a
painful balance.

As far as creative roles, I think that support is one of the most
creative that you can get - support or programming. Testing is pretty
well defined as tedious and boring repetition most of the time, but in
support, you have a chance to find creative ways around a problem. If,
after release, this module doesn't do exactly what the user expected
it to do, you've got some leeway to find a way to get the user to what
they expect within the limitations of the software. Programming, of
course, being actually writing the code, has a lot of creativity in
the sense that finding the most efficient way to get a module to do X
requires creative thinking. However, there's a lot of restrictions
placed on commercial programmers in the market right now, and the
programmers really don't determine what the program is and will do.
Not in a commercial environment like the one I work in.

---Poppy