IT programming bods - jobs

[Kickstart]

Hi

Mainly aimed at those who work in support / development of in house software.

How much bureaucracy is there involved in your company?
How long does it take to put a change from development into live environments (both general developments and emergency fixes).
With emergency fixes, once live is that it, or is there more bureaucracy to put it live officially.
Is there any real chance of career development where you work without becoming a team leader / manager.
Do you operate a system where changes go in when done / required, or as a big bang with loads of other changes on some kind of schedule.
Does the acronym ITIL mean anything to you.

Feel free to add more info.

All the best

Keith
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing

[zaknafien]

[Kickstart]

[sickpup]

Question is how much of a move are you willing to take?

A lot of the London computer centres have moved up to Ipswich and a few to Norwich over the last few years as well as the old Slough development areas and Winnersh triangle.

How many choices do you have where you are?

[Kickstart]

Hi

Trouble with moving to somewhere like Ipswich is that my better half works in Sheffield (commutes over weekly), so we would both need to move jobs. Slough and the like are just basically outer London as far as I feel, so not greatly appealing.

Real thing I do not want to do is jump to another place, take a pay cut, cost myself a load in moving and land up somewhere as bad or worse as I am now. Used to be a decent enough place a decade ago. Now they are more interested in producing bureaucracy than producing anything useful.

Latest idea is that they want us to count the number of lines of code to see if it equates to an industry standard ratio of errors to lines of code (irrespective of how simple or complicated the lines of code are).

There are a fair few places locally. Telford is no further than I currently commute which is where the Inland Revenue systems are developed. However I suspect I would be better looking for a smaller company which cannot afford to throw away 3/4 of their budgets on useless bureaucracy.

All the best

Keith
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing

[sickpup]

My sister works at the BIG BT place in Ipswich and gets paid a very ridiculous amount to turn hard drves on and off. She got the job with very little experience and after the extras was getting paid in the high 30G's

Sometimes the big companies are worth it for the lack of work and high wage.

[Kickstart]

[colin1]

Obviously I know little about IT, but maybe if you worked for a company where IT was their core business, the managers would have more of an appreciation of IT and so would be less tiresome to work for.
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colin1 is officially faster than god

[Kickstart]

Hi

Not sure. To an extent the the opposite seems to be the case. As they have become more useless they have tried to seperate IT from the business more an more.

The business bods on a day to day basis are pretty sick of it as well. What used to be able to be done quickly now takes months and loads of forms and useless levels of management. Result is we keep finding business people who have been emloyed to write MS Access systems because it is far quicker and cheaper to do that than even just filling the forms in for IT section to do anything.

All the best

Keith
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing

[sickpup]

You make it sound remarkably like your company is about to go broke through bureaucracy.

[colin1]

No they just pass the costs on to their customers and most dont realise they are being fucked over.

He works for a utility company so they wont be going bust. Huge income.

Anything which was at one time run by the government supports a large bureaucracy.
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colin1 is officially faster than god

[finpos]

It's a sticky situation you're in, but not a new one.

You need to look at it from the opposite perspective. The bureaucracy may seem misguided, but it's been carefully thought about and implemented for one of a number of reasons:

1 - It's needed for statuatory reasons
2 - It's needed to get a contract
3 - They want to reduce development/maintainence costs either by offshoring or de-skilling. By the way, that's your job I'm talking about.
4 - It's actually been put in place by the IT Management to stop rampaging requirements/change requests plus associated disasters.

To somebody like your self, who is wanting an interesting day to day job these reasons are not relevent. Unfortunately, the people running the company don't care what you want - you are an overhead to the business and easily replacable. Never forget that there are a heap of young folk plus half the asian subcontinetn willing to do your job for less money.

Don't assume the company is going down the drain - If all this was loosing the company money, it would be got rid of quickity-quick.

Your only real option is to move to a smaller, more dynamic company where these things are not so important (yet). Unfortunately, these are becoming very thin on the ground.

That, or management for you. We all become what we hate...

finpos.

[Jesus_Christ]

[Kickstart]

[kawakid]

I've worked in a programming role and a varied role for a long time now.

My first work experience was as a programmer in the defence area. (Nothing special, just financial stuff). The change control and testing, were long processors, 2 systems. Everything had to be tested in test, by yourself and 2 seniors. Then forms filled in past to ops team for them to put live. (Mental).

In my current job for a large firm, but very small in IT ie 3 people to 1500 employees!!. I'm very much an all rounder, I still code, but not daily. As i'm the only coder, I pretty much do what I want, when it comes to testing,implamentation etc. With large stuff, i'd get the users to test it. But most of my work is background work. ie interfaces between systems, that users don't see.

Both styles of companies have their bennefits, working for my 1st employer, gave me lots of experience and knowledge working in a big team. But you never had ownership.

In a smaller company, you are more valued and more key.

One thing is no matter how good your code, try looking at it after a few years, i've been at current place 9 years.

Always remark your code and I mean go over board. It will save so much time in the future.

Make sure you have good backups and you save you work hourly and save as different versions. It can help immensly when you feck up.

In my small (in IT terms) company, there's not much chance of promotion, there's no team leader as such. There is a computer manager, but he's not very technical. He mostly looks after finance systems etc. They do keep upping my pay and i've tried to leave twice, but been counter offerred.

However a large firm, there would be more promotion hopes. To be honest i'd try to get in to a government job. My time there was too short (year out from uni), you are treated the best, lots of hols , flexi time, 35 hour week, final salary pension.

Wish I was still there now.

Good luck.
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I've a twin and a 4.

[Kickstart]

Hi

Cheers for that. Been at this lark for about 19 years now, through a variety of companies as well..

[MarJay]

[MarJay]

If you want something where you are rewarded for writing software, and you want to write software for a fascinating industry, you could come and work here.

I hear we don't pay our developers too badly either... Particularly not experienced ones!
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Remember kids, bikes aren't like lego. You can't easily take a part from one bike and then fit it to another.

[Kickstart]

[finpos]

Based on my own personal experience of others I know, this is the dilemma you are in:

If you go for one of these "interesting" jobs, you won't get it, not because you don't have the skill or talent, but because you don't fit the correct profile of young, eager, dispensable, and most importantly cheap.

Worse, if you go to a small company that lacks the processes you're trying to escape, your road to glory (aka promotion, payrises) may involve actually introducing that very same methodology.

Bottom line is that with very few exceptions, you won't get paid well for being a good engineer. No manager really wants powerful, expensive engineers they can't get rid of - you become a risk to the business.

If you're past 30 and want promotion, you need to spot the companies "hot topic" and get onto that sharpish. Unfortunately, the hot topic is often soemthing like ISO9001 or this awful sounding TIL of which you speak zzzzzzzzz.........

The moment that has most affected my my working life is walking into the office of the engineering company I started at 20 years ago. It was full of guys in their mid 40s, all electrical and mechanical engineers, gods in their days, but now with no prospects and desperately clinging to their desks for as long as they possibly could. I realised that one day that could be me, and I have a semi-successful half-arsed plan in place to make sure it doesn't. Over the past 5 years, this plan has become central to my life, and explains why I have the shittest bike/car of anyone I know, and yet earn more than any of them.

Finally, you've got to incorporate into your thinking that after 20 odd years of doing the job, the novelty has simply worn off.

Now, I have a really important planning document for a project that will shortly be canned to write...

finpos.

[Jesus_Christ]

[Kickstart]