Programming or networking as a career?

danish pasterys

Hi I'm trying to reach out to any programmers or network techs out there tat can give me sum insight to the job

I enjoy making simple webpages using html but one programmer turned me off it sayin how hard the job was an tat he has to constantly upskill, I'm currently doin a networking course and its ok finding it a bit dull due to all the theory and no practical labs but i don't know what to really focus on as a career

Any insight on either field appreciated

Basically I'm tryna find out what wud be the easier job to grasp and have a less stressful life

DieselPowered

danish pasterys wrote: »

Hi I'm trying to reach out to any programmers or network techs out there tat can give me sum insight to the job

I enjoy making simple webpages using html but one programmer turned me off it sayin how hard the job was an tat he has to constantly upskill, I'm currently doin a networking course and its ok finding it a bit dull due to all the theory and no practical labs but i don't know what to really focus on as a career

Any insight on either field appreciated

Basically I'm tryna find out what wud be the easier job to grasp and have a less stressful life

Hi, I have experience of both. Plenty of work in Networking all around.
With Websites, very interesting field, but a lot of work needed to make some money out of it. Ok as a side job. Networking is a demanding area of employment, but you get to work on a lot of interesting projects. Its hard to get good engineers. Better career prospects with Networking behind you - its not that difficult to grasp overall and will provide a rewarding career path with some interest.

thanks.

KonFusion

danish pasterys wrote: »

Basically I'm tryna find out what wud be the easier job to grasp

Whichever one you enjoy more.

danish pasterys

DieselPowered wrote: »

Hi, I have experience of both. Plenty of work in Networking all around.
With Websites, very interesting field, but a lot of work needed to make some money out of it. Ok as a side job. Networking is a demanding area of employment, but you get to work on a lot of interesting projects. Its hard to get good engineers. Better career prospects with Networking behind you - its not that difficult to grasp overall and will provide a rewarding career path with some interest.

thanks.

Thank you for that reply its certainly giving me a bit more enthusiasm known I'm learning a valuable skill, Im enjoying my course so far and goin on to do a net tech Degree in DIT which includes CCNA and work exp. I enjoy the more practical hands on type of thing anyway.
Guess ill continue to experiment with making web pages in my spare time so

Cheers

DieselPowered

danish pasterys wrote: »

Thank you for that reply its certainly giving me a bit more enthusiasm known I'm learning a valuable skill, Im enjoying my course so far and goin on to do a net tech Degree in DIT in sept which includes CCNA and work exp. I enjoy the more practical hands on type of thing anyway.
Guess ill continue to experiment with making web pages in my spare time so

Cheers

In Networking you have main vendors as follows:
- Cisco (Hardest of them all, but gives you great understanding)
- HP Networking (HPN) (A-Series)
- HP Procurve (E-Series)

In websites, you should look into Joomla Content Management Systems or Wordpress

josip

Stress levels will depend very much on the company you work for. A lot of programming projects have frequent releases. Releases=stress. Also a lot of programming jobs would have an overhead of documentation, review meetings, testing and support. So the amount of hands on time you have writing new code.could be as low as 20%. At least that wouldn't be unusual for server side programming or (thick) client side. I don't have any experience professionally at web development.

mark_k

I was also torn between networking and website development when I was starting out, in fact I still am! I work as a network engineer for a financial ISP, it was a small startup company which is now owned by a large group.

It's fairly relaxed most of the time, we can have weeks or months where nothing goes wrong and its great, but then there are weeks when everything just screws up at once and it gets a little stressful. Day to day jobs are mainly doing diagrams (Visio is open 80% of my time!) and some configurations for new customers.

The great thing about being in a startup is that you get to expand your skills to, I get to do a lot of R&D on stuff for network monitoring, lots of sys-admin on work Linux servers, and I have a side project for our company which is a mini web portal written in Java EE6.

fergalr

Most of your choice should come down to what you enjoy, as Konfusion said.

Broadly, I wonder if the relative number of networking jobs is going to decrease over the long term, and consequently whether its going to be less attractive as a career.

There might be relatively little network administration around in 20, or maybe even 10 years time, although thats a long time ahead to be worrying about.

Programming is higher up the levels of abstraction.

azzeretti

As said, do what makes you happy. However, I started as a network engineer (Cisco, 3Com etc) and moved into Sysadmin (Windows, then *Nix) before moving into development (and then back to Sysadmin and mainly consultancy!)

As a result I think there is a fair bit of overlap between the two and having a firm understanding of networking can really stand to you in dev work. I done quite a bit of socket programming and wireless authentication development and the years of networking really stood to me and I found that some of the devs around me (that didn't know networking aswell) struggled with some of the basic concepts. This gave me a bit of a head start with some projects.

I find both can be rewarding, especially when you find yourself truly understanding certain concepts - the same for anything I suppose!