Development Advice

RealistSpy

Hi all,

I am hoping someone can help. I enjoy software development and it's my bread and breakfast, also regardless of language. As part of my personal development I am hoping to start focusing in a specific area but I can't decide and I don't want to be jack of all trade. I stopped Java after my 3rd year in college to learn C#. Can anyone advice me?

My current stack or development area:
I do a lot of socket - client and server development (Work/Home).
Visual Studios - C# windows - Desktop
Xamarin - C# for mac and linux - Desktop

(Home)
Python - All platform
Google App Engine + Python + NoSQL DB - Web and Mobile
Javascript
CSS (Bootstrap)

Opencv using C++ but might switch to python

Areas I enjoy developing for:
Client & Server side desktop applications
Cryptography - Encryption & Decryption - Hoping to do a masters in Cyber Security.
Machine Learning
Teaching
Managing projects - Documenting, Planning...FURPS+ etc

Goal:
Project Manager or as high as possible
Current: Graduate? SDE 1year+ experience

bpmurray

Your goal is frankly weird: why on earth would you want to be a project manager rather than a software engineer which is clearly where your interest and skills lie? Anyway, at this stage of your career I'd suggest keeping it as broad as possible. You have JS & CSS which are in good demand although I would definitely look at resurrecting your Java - many, many more opportunities than C#. You could start looking at mobile - iOS / Android and Cordova as well as native dev.

The reality is that most real-world applications use a client-server model, with Java and some framework (Spring, Hibernate, JSF, ...) on the server, connecting to an RDMBS (NoSQL is rather rare) and a web-based and/or mobile client front end, often connecting over REST. Learning all of that, making it scale to cloud-sized populations (millions of concurrent users), that would be a pretty good goal.

RealistSpy

Is project manager to above the software engineer as progression?

EamonnDunne

RealistSpy wrote:

Is project manager to above the software engineer as progression?

They are completely different career tracks.

Aswerty

Also just to point out, people can go into project management very quickly after leaving college – if not straight away. There wouldn't be any prestige associated with it like there would be senior and principal engineers/developers (though PMs on large project are often key personnel). My general take on it is you are better off learning your craft before moving into a PM role if that is what you want. Also PM roles are more people oriented than anything else; you will often have deadlines but insufficient clout to get things moving so you have to be persuasive to keep things ticking along.

In terms of advice; do what you enjoy the most. You can find work in everything you listed as being familiar with.