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What to specialise in for final year?
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12-01-2017 12:55pm#1
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Without a doubt, Data Science is by far the best pick, though you'll need to append a Masters in it after graduation. Why?
* Software systems: I assume they mean systems programming. It's a good niche, well paid, but not very liquid.
* Mobile apps: very liquid, but there is no doubt that there isn't much margin left in this niche. You won't be well paid, but likely will always find a job. Hard to move out of too once you're into it, and I see very little progression in terms of pay rising in it. It's likely to become commodity programming mostly done by developing world programmers.
* Cloud: pretty illiquid, and it's really mostly an admin/janitor role. You are rarely going to be seen as adding value, but rather like with all admin roles you'll be seen as a cost overhead. On other other hand, like with all janitorial roles it's really hard to get rid of all of them, so once you're in it's likely good employment at pretty good pay for a long time.
* Networking: top people in this get paid a fortune, like €1600 a day for long term contracts. Thank hedge funds. Long, long road to getting up to the top though earning that money.
* IoT: there is a fair bit of growth in this right now, quite a few juicy consulting gigs around. To be honest I think the real money in this is for industrial IoT. I think the consumer stuff hyped and a fad. Industrial IoT is really standard industrial automation, and I think that systems programming course would be far more transferable than a specialist IoT course teaching stuff which is already obsolete and irrelevant.
* Data Science: the industry is absolutely crying out for these recently, and growth is likely to keep going upwards for years maybe decades to come as businesses grapple with ever bigger data. Pay in this niche is already amazing, once you have the degrees you have a guaranteed job (though you'll need to leave Ireland) and data scientists are seen are value adders beyond compare, so you'll be treated very, very nicely with all sorts of nice perks and people kow towing to you. But as I mentioned, you'll need at least an additional Masters after graduation to be considered.
Best of luck with your choice!
Niall
What makes you think it's an admin role?0 -
What makes you think it's an admin role?
It's kinda hard to describe until you've been in the industry long enough.
In programming there is definitely a segmentation between those roles perceived to create value versus those perceived to be a cost overhead of doing business. So the former involves solving tricky problems with beautiful code. The latter also involves solving tricky problems with beautiful code. But the difference is in how you are budgeted and perceived and treated by management. In the latter the general term is "operations", or "reliability". In the former the general term is "R&D", or "sales".
There are pros and cons to both, and neither is better than the other necessarily. In operations/reliability/admin programming you're a sort of janitor maintaining the systems which keep the company doing business. That means you are valuable because without janitors the show stops. In R&D/sales/dev you're developing (new) products and services to be sold to customers. That means you are valuable because better talent makes more exciting new products and services which gets more customers sooner paying more.
But as much as you do the same stuff in both types of role - writing code, writing test suites for it, research and developing new architectures and solutions as you refactor the solutions - they're also not the same. Management doesn't see you the same, and that means different glass ceilings in terms of maximum pay and promotion. It also means different treatment when the company needs to fire people.
If you want to look into this more, research Google Site Reliability Engineering and the many interviews and resources on how SRE is different but same to Google SWE. Historically speaking devops was the poorer relation to dev, pay was lower, esteem lower, but certainly in SV in recent years that's flipped and now devops pays a good bit more than dev, especially good test engineers who are as rare as hen's teeth in SV.
Most of the remote work contracts I've pulled in from multinationals these last few years have been in hybrid dev/devops type roles because surprisingly enough, people who can straddle both worlds are so rare they need to bring in specialist contractors like me and pay me silly money to bring their ecosystem into modern tooling and processes. It's a particular problem for SV startups trying to scale up and finding their tooling, test and processes can't keep up with the code complexity growth, so I get brought in to scale up their code development support processes and to refactor their support code with new implementation where it's become unfit for purpose.
Hopefully I made sense. If not, do say.
Niall0 -
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