Hey,
I originally had my heart set on Graphic design, but i thought about Programming, and just wondered how hard it is to do?, and what qualifications do you need to start learning?, and how many of you have a full-time job,? is it hard to get a Job?, and what do you develop for windows or mac, and (if you don't mind) how much do you get paid, i was told i could earn up-to £40,000 if i chose to become one, is that estimate real?
Many thanks
There are a lot of different types of development. Some pay very well and some pay poorly (relatively speaking). As somebody else mentioned, DO NOT become a commodity programmer. That is, don't specialize in something generic like JSP...development is being outsourced in greater amounts every year to countries where there are PhD's willing to work for less than you.
Specialize in something that's still novel or requires on-site development and you'll keep your value high. I personally work in EIM (enterprise information management) which is a treacherous area. A lot of the low level work is moving to India, so to stay ahead I need to move into the analyst/architect roles. (I'm 24, so I'm not too worried yet.
🙂)
But there are strange niches that pay extremely well. I've heard of Excel macro developers making lots of loot ... which surprises me because I don't think of that as "real" development.
There also very different work environments. If you work at a game company, for instance, you'll need to know a lot of calculus and vector math, plus you'll probably work many hours a week -- especially during crunch periods. In finance, on the other hand, I rarely work more than 45 hours and we generally do only basic algebra. (I majored in Econ, by the way. So a CS/Math degree is not strictly necessary to become a developer, if you have some academic expertise and good experience.)
I personally think that information security is a good area to be in. Otherwise, try to focus on analyst, architect, or project management roles. These are jobs that won't go overseas so easily. Embedded systems can also be profitable, if you're interested in that kind of thing. I think its still a big market which hasn't come of age yet.
As far as salaries go, I can't convert USD to GBP in my head, but here in the states people my age at my company make 50-60K + bonus. People a few years older than me make closer to 90K. I work at a consulting firm. My impression is that for people who work full-time, the salary curve starts higher but is shallower.
In terms of "how hard it is to do"...well it really has more to do with you than with the job. I suggest you learn how to develop in C -- no GUI, just focus on the standard library and console I/O. Compile from the command line, etc. The reason I say this is that you'll learn a lot of fundamental concepts.
A language like Java will hide you from pointers and pointer arithmetic. Learning that kind of indirection is crucial for being a good developer, even if you use nothing but Java the rest of your life. You should also be familiar with allocating and managing memory. Java hides that from you as well by garbage collecting. If you can wrap your mind around these fundamental concepts, and learn a little about computer architecture (how processors work, how a compiler uses the features of the processor to implement high-level language concepts like data structures, function calls, etc.), you are more likely to become a good developer.
My biggest warning to you is that development may get tiring quickly, especially if you work on a big project. You'll spend more time troubleshooting communications with others than you will on actual development. Where I work, even as a low-level person, I spend more time doing things like going to meetings, writing documentation, asking for requirements clarifications, managing builds and deploys, and testing my code than I actually spend writing it. I work on a project with about 200 developers, and so this overhead is necessary to produce a quality product...but it grinds on me at times.
And while there is a lot of cool software being written out there, most of it is plain boring.
