Software engineering. I was actually surprised at how few people I’ve met in software engineering that originally came from IT. It can be an advantage because a lot of newbies in the field have no idea how infrastructure works at the enterprise level.

I was in IT Ops for 12 years and made it to the Director level. The further up the ladder you go, the less you work with technology and the more your ability to deal with corporate politics and leadership skills matters. I actually didn’t mind that part. I enjoyed helping my team grow and develop their skills. Changing jobs at that level often means packing up and moving halfway across the country. That was especially true before the pandemic. I came really close to doing that. Then the pandemic hit and the company I was negotiating with suspended all hiring. I was actually relieved. Honestly, I didn’t want to move my family halfway across the country. That’s when I decided my career in IT was coming to a close.

Software engineering isn’t for everyone. To excel at it, you gotta understand that it really is an engineering discipline. It’s relentless problem solving. It pays well when you get to a certain level but the attrition level early on is fairly high because people get into it thinking it’s easy money not realizing that 2 out of 3 projects they’ll be assigned to is just being thrown into some dumpster fire of a code base, that someone else set ablaze, and expected to make something of it. Half the time management doesn’t even know what they want the app it to do so in that respect it’s not that different from IT Ops.