Introduction
Title – What is your job title?

Senior Developer

What is your role about?

I’m a Java programmer for a financial exchange, in a company that runs in a very Agile way. We’re a small-ish company, about 80 people, half of whom are in technology. Because we’re trying to create the fastest retail exchange in the world, technology is absolutely fundamental to our business.

We’re pretty much a pure Java shop, we do use some libraries and tools, like Spring and GWT, but fundamental computer science, domain driven design and mechanical sympathy are more important to us. What that means is we’re constantly challenging ourselves to write code the “right” way, so it’s easy to maintain and quick to run (turns out those two things are usually the same thing) – well designed, well tested code is key to creating the sort of platform we need.

We use agile techniques like pair programming, which keeps us honest. It’s quite tiring, and sometimes goes against what you want to do as a developer – sometimes you want to sit alone with your headphones on and just churn out code. But pairing tends to lead to better thought-out code, and forces you to do the right thing like writing your tests first.

We’ve worked quite hard to create a culture where developers spend most of their time writing code – meetings are at a minimum, and interruptions are restricted to those that are vital, for example production issues. It’s also recognised that the bottleneck when creating good code is not the typing – it’s not about sitting and bashing out as many lines of code as possible. It’s normal (and encouraged) for us to spend time discussing design, drawing on whiteboards, and chatting to other developers who might know an area of code better – this works much better for us than having formal design sessions or meetings, but it does take a bit of getting used to. The office is not silent by any means, and you’re free to jump into another pair’s conversation if you have something to add – it’s a really great way to learn and develop but it takes practice to switch contexts and to be able to filter out what’s not important.

We generally work 40 hours a week. I’m involved in recruitment as well, because I’m obsessed with finding the right people for our team, but that means that sometimes I do stuff out of hours like attending LJC/GDC events, but this is as much for my own development as for my company’s development. One week every two months I have to be on call, which does mean phone calls late at night, but it’s voluntary and we get paid extra for that , so that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to take.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?
I love the coding, the problem solving. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a test go green, or the output you expect on the screen.

In this place, I love the guys I work with. There are about 18 developers split over 4 teams, plus BAs, QAs and systems guys. Regular rotation between teams means not only do you get to know lots of different areas of the system, but you get to work with everyone at some point. Everyone here is really smart, and you can learn from all of them – the senior guys always have experience that I can benefit from, and the juniors are great at asking questions which actually get you thinking about your assumptions – is it really the right way to do something?

In general what I like about working in financial markets is that most companies in this area really understand that technology is a differentiator to their business – having smart people working with the best tools can directly impact the money the company makes.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

One of the things I don’t really like about many companies in finance is the arrogance – sometimes they think simply because they do have smart people and money they are naturally doing thing the best way possible. In fact, quite often they are producing code/products as fast as possible, which leads to a maintenance nightmare.

Something I wish I had understood much earlier in my career is that it’s quite different working for a company where you are in the IT department (i.e. technology is a supporting role to a business that does something else, like manufacturing or media or banking) vs working for a company where technology IS the business (for example, a software firm, a technology start-up, a gaming company). If you’re lucky, you can find companies in the first category that really understand the direct impact technology can have on their business. But if you work for the second category of business they have no choice but to work out how to leverage technology to the full potential, it’s their business differentiator. The reason this is a good place to be is that the technology part of the organisation can a) see how their work is valid and b) is empowered to have conversations about better ways to do things, stuff you can buy/do to increase developer productivity etc.

Career Path
What is the standard career path/qualifications?

My career has been:
Undergraduate placement -> Graduate -> Developer -> Senior Developer

I’ve had a number of titles over the years (“Web Engineer” – what’s one of those?? “Principal Consultant” – which means very different things at different consultancies).

As “just” a developer you don’t need anything to get started. A degree in a technical-ish subject (e.g. Computer Science / Computer Science with …) is useful, but your degree will not prepare you for the Real World. In fact, it was only when I started working at LMAX, nearly 10 years after I graduated, that I started using the real Computer Science knowledge I learnt back then.

I have friends who have started as developers or systems guys straight from school, and there are only a few companies who will discriminate against you for that.

I think the *most* important thing that set me up for my career was my undergraduate placement. Some companies offer paid internships / year-in-industry jobs, I did mine at Ford – I worked for them for three months between first and second year at uni, and I worked for them for 15 months between second and third year, taking a year out. My course was not a sandwich course but most universities (like mine, Sussex University) will allow you to take a break, especially for work.

I learnt far more about how to manage my career at Ford than I did at university. I learnt the difference between theory and practice; I learnt that being a great coder is not enough (sadly), you need to *show* people you’re great somehow; I learnt that you need quite a different discipline to be able to code 9:00-5:00 on a weekday rather than in the hours you feel creative. I was lucky because Ford takes investment in their undergraduates (and graduates) very seriously, so we were encouraged to make time to network, to meet people, to be mentored. There was very little in the way of formal training, but that’s how work usually is. Instead, they gave us the tools for building our careers – that usually involves connections with real people, not going on training courses and passing exams.

What are the prospects?

I graduated in 2001 and I’m still “just” a developer. I’ve been a team lead, I’ve been a consultant, I do evangelism, but in all that time I only ever had a formal promotion once, from Senior Consultant to Principal Consultant (it’s just the amount of money they can charge for you). But for all that, every job I’ve taken has also given me a pay rise. So you can continue with the same role but earn more, simply for being better at it.

I can do anything I want though – I can start my own company; I can be a contractor; I can go back to consulting; I can stay permanent but work at any number of companies (big/small, in pretty much every business domain you can think of); I can step back from the code and move into architecture; I can progress through team lead to management; I can move sidewise into business analysis or automated testing. The only caveat I would say though is that if you don’t drive your career in those directions, you will probably continue to be some form of developer for as long as you enjoy coding.

Making the leap into any one of those other areas needs you to try that out a bit (many agile teams, for example, let you pick up some responsibilities that aren’t coding), see if you like it and push that side of things on your CV or within your organisation. Sometimes this needs you to invest your non-work time in it, whether it’s by reading books, joining user-groups and meetups, attending conferences – anything which will let you find mentors in the area you’re interested in.

In your experience are you aware of any differences your role has between industries/sectors?

Yes, definitely.

The biggest difference that I’ve noticed (and I mentioned this earlier) is being a developer in an organisation where their business is not technology vs being a developer in a technology company.

For example, at Ford I was in the IT department. Ultimately the company makes cars, and our job is to support the company in making high quality cars efficiently and sell as many as possible.

In a company like a startup where the technology is the business, a developer has a fundamental, direct, and usually visible, impact on the business – a new feature on the application, functionality working faster, improved usability etc.

To me, the difference between these types of roles is that at the end of the day, when you work in an IT department, you need to do what “the business” needs. There is scope for innovation if it will clearly improve the business, but you’re quite far removed from the people who actually give money to your company (e.g. customers who buy cars). When technology “is” the business, there is much more of a demand to try out new stuff and think of ideas which will drive that business.

Personally I prefer working for a technology firm, and not because companies with an IT department are bigger. I’ve worked for small firms where technology was an enabler but not the core business – these are cool because your users sit in the same office as you and you have scope for innovation, but it’s still not as cool as seeing the feature that you worked on being directly responsible for bringing in more customers/money/etc.

Reflection and The Future
What was it like coming into the industry?

This actually deserves a blog post on its own, so I can’t do it justice at all.

Being a programmer is not sitting in a darkened room coding alone for hours. It’s not munching pizza and talking geek, although actually that’s a perk I rather like if I can get it. It *is* being sat at a computer for 8 hours a day, which was not my idea of fun when I was 17 and on the basketball and athletics teams. But then, accountants, architects, marketing gurus, customer service people… they’re all chained to their PCs these days too. The only people who get a respite are managers, and that’s because they’re forced to sit in meetings all day.

I didn’t realise programming was collaborative – it’s a team game. I didn’t know that you need people skills to get on in this job. I had no idea that actually, because your output is limited to the little box on your desk, it’s *more* important than a lot of other roles that you go out there, make contacts, meet people, and look good at your job – whether that’s because you’re inside a massive organisation where the people who decide your promotion don’t even know your name, or if it’s because your small organisation needs you to go into the wider world to shout about what you do to bring in sales or new recruits. Most importantly, you need to do that to nab your next Perfect Job. Or Good Enough Job.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

Not really. I like to wing it – if I’m not enjoying myself, or not learning anything, I try something else. There’s always new technology and always new companies. You’ll learn the next big thing when you need to, that’s what we get paid to do.

What I’m saying is, although I am aware of some of the current thinking about The Next Big Thing in technology (e.g. cloud, functional programming, other JVM languages etc), I don’t have a view on where the industry is going or plans on what to learn next to future-proof my career. I prefer to let my current role determine what I’m going to focus on, rather than learn the next fashionable thing. That’s not to say that’s the correct thing to do, it’s just that personally I think technology changes so much, and the requirements of your current role can change so rapidly, that it’s a full-time job to stay current let alone worry too much about the future.

But that’s my personal approach. I guess it doesn’t stop me getting a feel for trends, by attending conferences, being part of user groups, and reading blogs. But I don’t have any clear thoughts on what the future might hold for me or for the industry, I’d rather deal with it when it gets here.

Once upon a time Hibernate was the Next Big Thing. But I’ve managed twelve years of professional coding without ever having to use it (purely accidentally). I’m glad I never used my own time to learn it, because that would have been a waste of my precious spare time. But I do know what it is, what it does, and why you might want to use it. That’s enough for me.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

I wish I knew earlier that all jobs are not created equal. My Java Developer job at Ford was very different to my Java Developer job at Touch Clarity. Interviews and probation periods are for both you and the company – you’re there to see if you want to work for them. And do not be afraid of moving -there’s always another job, another thing to try.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

Yes, lots of people. Some are colleagues I met along the way, some are people I met at the LJC, some are friends of friends. Books, blogs and conferences have also inspired me. People, whether they’re your peers, mentors, or people you are mentoring, are more important to your career than any technology or skill you learn.

Experience Timeline
Apr 2011 – Present: Senior Developer, LMAX Ltd
Jan 2011 – Apr 2011: Senior Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Feb 2009 – Jan 2011: Developer, LMAX Ltd
Oct 2008 – Feb 2009: Senior Developer, BSkyB
Jul 2008 – Sep 2008: Travelling in the US
Feb 2006 – Jul 2008: Principal Consultant, Detica (formerly Evolution), London & New York
Nov 2005 – Feb 2006: Business Application Engineer, Egg Banking
Apr 2004 – Nov 2005: Developer, Touch Clarity
Mar 2002 – Apr 2004: Analyst/Developer, Ford Motor Company
Jun 2001 – Feb 2001: Web Engineer, Common Purpose
Jun 2001: Graduated University of Sussex, Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence, BSc Hons (1st Class)
Sep 2000 – May 2001: Analyst/Developer, Alpha Thames Ltd (part time contract during third year uni)
Jun 1999 – Sep 2000: IT Undergraduate, Ford Motor Company
Jun 1998 – Sep 1998: IT Undergraduate, Ford Motor Company
Oct 1997: Started University of Sussex

For more details of the sorts of roles I’ve had, feel free to check out my linkedIn profile:

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/trishagee

Introduction

Title – What is your job title?

Technical Architect

What is your role about?

I worked for a software house, designing large software systems for clients. Each system is built as a project, lasting perhaps 18 months, where we go through the whole lifecycle: specify requirements, design the system, write the code, test, integrate, test again, train the trainers, put into service, support. A large project may have over 100 people on it, though not all developers. Sometimes I would join or leave a project part-way through — typically a project has more staff in the middle. At specification time, if I am not actually writing the specification, my work involves doing feasibility studies and starting the design, and monitoring the requirements to make sure that they are clear and not impossible to implement — checking that the chosen software packages will do what is asked.

The design is done iteratively, adding more detail as we go. The exact method of documenting the design tends to vary from project to project, depending on the views and experience of the senior staff (both client and supplier). It is a mixture of descriptive text and diagrams. The next stage is writing the code and unit tests. I tend to get given peripheral tasks, as I am a bit expensive to be given standard coding. But for peripheral tasks I am good value because I can be relied upon to complete the work with minimal supervision. For example I spent about 8 weeks in one project generating test data for performance testing. Then we integrate the software in staged releases, and get a whole system working. Again I sometimes do peripheral tasks like once sorting out the configuration of the proxy servers. Then the developers tend to move onto a new project, but some of us stay to nursemaid the system, diagnosing problems and fixing them.

At the detailed level the work is varied: sometimes sorting out a mess created by someone else, sometimes doing constructive work. There is a lot of learning — the requirements (sometimes hundreds of pages), how the planned system works, how the products work which make up the building blocks. The output from your work is almost always a Word document as well as code. We are team based, but you usually do the individual tasks on your own.

Almost all projects were either Microsoft-based or Java-based. I went down the Java route. I used Perl for ad-hoc programming.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

Doing a design and writing code and seeing it all work. Working on something which is going to be useful in the real world. Working on something large.

You get a lot of variety in a software house, moving from project to project. There is a lot of design work as well as programming, and you may be using several programming languages. The work is always challenging — if it starts to get repetitive, you write a program to make the computer do it.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

I never like doing unnecessary work, eg spending twice as long getting something done because a foolish decision was made previously. We all make mistakes, but it still annoys me. For example senior technical architects who know less about the technology than I do, and don’t get on with the things which really need doing, and don’t admit what they don’t know. Poor requirement specifications caused by an unwillingness to accept that they were taking the wrong approach. Incompetent staff generally. Having a whole project scrapped, though I was lucky that this didn’t happen to me very often: in one case I was pleased it was scrapped, as the main architect was going in completely the wrong direction.

Career Path

What is the standard career path/qualifications?

In my company there was a tradition of having no formal job titles. There was no formal promotion, just a pay rise most years. You only needed a job title for your business card for external use, and in later years they were dropped on cost grounds for staff who were not primarily customer-facing. Generally a project is staffed up with a bunch of people in a pyramid, ie more people at the lower costs, with a range of skills. The people are assigned as required to tasks as the project progresses. You often learn a new skill rather than getting someone in from outside, because you need someone who understands the system being built, which is often very complicated. I called myself a Technical Architect eventually as that was the generally accepted term for someone in my position. I never got a qualification after my BSc.

A lot of programmers become team leaders who manage a team of say 5 people, and do technical tasks as well. More senior managers manage full time. There are many other roles, eg requirements, standards, managing the reviewing process, testing, development environments, training, security, purchasing, hardware.

What are the prospects?

Sometimes it was difficult for me to get onto a project because I was too expensive as a developer, but not experienced enough as an architect. You often do better going into management if you have the skills and enjoy it; I had neither. But in later years I built up a reputation and I was kept fully employed, though earning rather less than others of my age.

In your experience are you aware of any differences your role has between industries/sectors?

I don’t know — I stayed with the same company too long.

Reflection and The Future

What was it like coming into the industry?

I started as a hardware engineer, and it was difficult to find out at interview time what I would be doing. The managers who interviewed me didn’t know where I would be deployed, and couldn’t commit themselves. But I had a good first year. The project was half way through, and they were commissioning the prototype hardware — I held the oscilloscope probe and the senior engineer looked at the circuit diagram and the oscilloscope screen, and told me where to move the probe “The input data looks OK, check the clock on pin 6, yes that’s OK, now the output on pin 10, no that’s stuck at zero” then we would pull the board out and get the magnifying glass out and remove a solder blob. This was a good way of seeing real example designs that worked.

Then I moved into writing specifications, and then into software, almost entirely self-taught.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

Software houses always play down the amount of bespoke code in a system, because of the perception that bespoke code is more expensive and less reliable than COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) products. But there is, in my experience, always loads of coding to do. So there will always be a place for programmers in one-off systems as well as software products.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

My advice is to do what you enjoy. Keep your ears open, make friends with everyone, and you can move in the direction that suits your skills and temperament.

The main mistake I regret was in my last year at university: the professor suggested that I do a special project for/with him, and I turned him down because I thought it would be easier to get a top mark with a taught course. I didn’t realise that the professor would have given me a good mark whatever happened as long as I made an effort. But I expect I would have gone into industry anyway (the alternative was to be an academic).

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

Some of my colleagues were inspiring. But mainly I just learnt about the things that I found interesting, and always tried to produce good work.

Title – What is your job title?

Software Architect

What is your role about?

The best description I have ever read of what an Architect should be can be found here. The main responsibility of my job is that I am expected to cross the divide between technology and business while being expected to be able to answer all the technical questions. Principally I am a developer but my responsibility to be aware of so many different projects makes it difficult to directly contribute code very often.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

That it combines the best of the worlds of startups and big industry. The problems we have to solve are generally the really interesting ones: how do you offer the best service to your customer while balancing the demands of performance, scale, security, regulators but we get to solve them in a way that is not normally seen in a major company.

Your Saturday afternoon becomes very different when you realise that you have up to 4 million customers betting many millions of pounds on your applications and to do this they are hammering them to pieces. For example, we see up to 88,000 requests per second across the entire betfair.com estate at peak times so your application can’t just work, it has to be fast, reliable and deal with load at internet scale.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

How changeable things can be. The industry is at the whim of regulators so some of our solutions have to make compromises that you would never design in if you had complete freedom to do it your way.

There is also the fact that some people see the gambling industry with a slightly negative cast. It’s not for everyone but what is?

What is the standard career path/qualifications?

The standard technology career path at Betfair is: Intern – Associate Developer – Developer – Senior Developer – Technical Lead/Principal Developer/Software Architect

As far as qualifications go, we do have a graduate scheme and like most large companies we prefer graduates and respect the amount of effort it takes to get degree but given that some of our best employees did not go to university (or in some cases not even finish secondary school!) we also look for other signs that we think signifies quality.

What are the prospects?

From a company perspective they are as good as you want them to be! Betfair is one of the UK’s dot.com sucess stories since it is just over 10 years old and still expanding: we currently serve 140 territories in 17 languages and this will only increase. We deal with cutting edge technologies at a scale that most companies can only dream of and this experience makes you very employable.

From the more general perspective of an Architect, they are also very good. To get to the role normally requires several years exposure to how things actually work. Not just the code or development knowledge but also the knowledge about your hardware and your network can be just as important. The business knowledge is critical too since you have to be able to understand the hot button topics of your company. Luckily the types of issues tend to be similar across all companies: performance, scale, ease of use, cost of development v maintenance, reliability and disaster recovery, compliance, audit and regulatory to name a few of them. This makes architects very valuable for many businesses.

In your experience are you aware of any differences your role has between industries/sectors?

The role of Architect can vary hugely and not just from industry to industry but also within different sized companies within the same industry. In the worse case scenario, you have the ‘Astronaut Architect’ who make technical pronouncements from upon high without actually working closely with the developers who have to turn the abstract into application. In the best case you have Architects who are directly invested in the success of a project, from concept to cash, and who work side-by-side with their developers. The role of an Architect is that of an influencer but in a technology company that means he/she can become very powerful.

What was it like coming into the industry?

I was several years out of University before I started working in IT so I had no illusions about what I was getting myself into. For me the worry was that as a self-taught programmer I would be missing chunks of knowledge about development. I found that the enormous knowledge area of development meant that everyone is far more collaborative than competitive and this meant that I could contribute immediate while being made aware of what I didn’t know and what I would have to learn. I love what I do with a passion and wouldn’t want to do anything else – except possibly be the next David Attenborough!

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

Cloud is taking centre stage more and more but this is more a reflection of the combination of two things – performance/scale and flexibility. As the industry becomes more mature we now have to delivery faster and to a wider audience that ever before. Cloud allows us to do this in that it allows simple prototypes to be rolled out to a platform that is inherently scalable should the application be a success.

Dealing with teams in multiple locations and in multiple timezones is another topic that is important and becoming more so. The world is a smaller place than it used to be and getting smaller. We are also in competition with a larger population of developers than ever before and in a knowledge based industry like ours, the smartest and hardest working will win.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

Follow excellence. It doesn’t matter what you are doing if you are doing it the best it should be done. This more than anything else will define your career.

You should never feel that you become stereotyped as a certain type of developer – it’s up to you to take control of your career and you do that by learning. You should have a hunger for new knowledge and everyone should have a list of things that they want to try or learn.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

Having a great mentor is a must. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve met several people that have taught me so much. Also, you should never underestimate a constant drive to improve.

On a practical note – nothing beats getting involved. Get a github account, fork someone else’s code and get stuck in. Start contributing to open source even if it is documentation but get in the game. Not only is your CV improved for it but you as a developer are much improved for it.

Title – What is your job title?

Chief Technology Officer, usually abbreviated to ‘CTO’.

What is your role about?

The requirements of the job vary massively depending on the company you’re in, but you could probably sum it up as being the public face of the tech team to everyone else – both internally (the board, the investors, the finance people, the sales team) and externally (the customers, job applicants, the press), so you need to be able to speak the language (and DSLs) of the other areas of the business as well as your techies. You’re responsible for everything that the tech team does, and all the tech decision-making, so you need a broad knowledge of everything from web development to database scaling and linux sysadmin, plus the people skills to be able to manage a team. I’m in a small startup, so I still get to do a lot of hands-on tech work too. In an average week I probably spend a total of 2 days coding features, maybe a day on infrastructure work and tech planning or research, a day speaking to clients, a day planning and managing the team and our projects, and the rest is taken up with internal meetings.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

There is always, always, something new to learn, and the nature of startups means that it attracts a certain kind of person – someone with an entrepreneurial streak, who enjoys testing themselves to see how far they can push their limits. In contrast to large companies with hundreds of developers where you can feel like a very small cog in a very big machine, in a startup every day your work has a directly visible impact on the fortunes of the company. Your mistakes are painfully visible, but the triumphs are entirely yours too. When you do a good job, it has an equally visible positive impact on the company. Decisions have to be taken fast, and the whole direction of the company can change frequently until you find a business model that works. I love building and growing teams, and the friendships you make in a small team with big ambitions, amongst people you trust and respect, will stay with you for a long time to come.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

In startups particularly, budgets are incredibly tight. You virtually never get a training budget or any structured skills development, and there is often no-one to turn to if you get stuck – you constantly have to think on your feet and if you don’t know how to do something that urgently needs doing, you just have to find out – and you’d better be a quick learner! But I kind of like that, it keeps me on my toes and stops me getting bored. You need to be highly motivated, and anyone who says ‘..but it’s not part of my job description to do that!’ does not belong in a startup. It’s also possible for sucessful startups to grow too quickly – I worked at Freeserve in the first dotcom boom, and every cliche that was going round on joke emails about “you know you’re at a dotcom company when…” was painfully relevant. My team had 4 developers and 8 managers, and with repeated takeovers I sat at the same desk for two years and worked for four different companies. I went back to small companies after that and have never gone back.

What is the standard career path/qualifications?
I arrived at a CTO job through a random walk of increasingly senior developer roles, and I kept getting the senior dev roles through consistently having strong ideas about how things could be done better. In large companies there can sometimes be a “them and us” attitude between the tech team and the other areas of the business, and techies can sometimes have little respect for their managers, but this mainly comes from a belief (misguided or not) that the manager would not be able to do the technical job – so having worked my way up from junior dev helps a lot. I remember very clearly the point where I realised I’d become a manager, when I got to Friday afternoon feeling exhausted from a frantically busy week, but I hadn’t fired up my IDE once – there was no denying it by that point!

A CTO needs to have a good understanding of many different areas, from the very technical through to the very commercial – business/finance and industry trends, plus you also need to be able to understand your clients businesses. So a varied background is a big plus. A few years at at least one development agency, where you get exposure to many different clients and business models, is a great way to learn.

What are the prospects?

Everyone in the startup world is hoping for The Big Exit – where your company is sold or floated for a big pay-off, and your hard-earned share options can be cashed in for a big lump sum payoff. However, for every Google or Facebook there are hundreds or thousands of small startups that didn’t make it and went out of business or just stagnated into anonymity – so make sure you take your jobs for the right reasons and enjoy your work in its own right, treat the prospect of a lucrative exit like entering the lottery rather than a certainty or even a likelihood, and you’ll have a great time along the way whatever happens at the end.

In your experience are you aware of any differences your role has between industries/sectors?

In startups, particularly web / tech startups, the CTO is able to (and/or has to) stay more connected to the technology than in larger companies or other industries, where it is a much more “strategic” and/or financial role.

What was it like coming into the industry?

I got my first coding job on graduating in 1996, and was hired specifically because I studied physics and hadn’t studied software engineering. The boss believed that trained software engineers needed to “unlearn” a lot of what they’d been taught in university in order to adapt to the “real world”, and that physicists had more transferable problem-solving skills. I don’t know if I’d necessarily agree with that these days – it’s a long time since I was at University, and the advent of Big Data has brought academic CS rigour to the fore recently – but I would say that the ability to get things done and get things finished is rarer than you might think. I’m now at the stage in my career where some of the tech problems I’ve tackled in the last few years have made me wish I’d had some more formal software engineering / comp-sci formal training, but it took me ten years to get to that point. The most useful lessons I learned from my first job where things I didn’t even realise I’d had to learn until reflecting back much later – general business things like how you’re expected to behave at work, how to take minutes of a meeting, how to handle difficult customers, how to cope with pressure, and how to get someone to tell you what they actually need from this system you’re building for them rather than what snazzy UI tricks they saw on some website and really want on this internal invoicing system…

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

The hot skills right now are mobile app development, “new-wave” front-ends (e.g. HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript applications) and Big Data techniques like map/reduce. However, they are tools not ends in themselves, and no one solution is right for every situation.
The state of the industry right now is similar to that of the first dotcom boom, around 1999 – the rapid growth of new models and technologies has led to a “democratization” of the sector, where it’s been possible for small companies and one-man-bands to move quickly and outpace the larger companies. It’s perfectly possible at the moment for a single person to make a good living writing, say, mobile apps in their bedroom, but this wasn’t always the case and it may not be for too much longer as the bigger players catch up. Also we’ve had some recent big IPOs (stock market flotations) of companies like LinkedIn, to mixed results – the imminent Facebook IPO will be watched closely as an indicator of the health of the marketplace. But it’s certain that whatever happens economically, smart pragmatic tech people will always be in demand.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

Treat all people fairly and with respect, whatever you may think of them in private – it’s a surprisingly small world, people change jobs frequently, and the same names keep coming up again and again. It only takes a minute to gain a bad reputation, and unless you’re lucky you might never lose it. Don’t try and blag your way into something, you’ll be found out quickly unless you’re very smart – be honest about your skills and limitations, sometimes “I don’t know (…yet!)” is the right answer.

When I’m hiring developers, the most important thing to me is not “what skills do they have?” but “do they think in the right way?” – it’s far easier for a good coder to pick up a new language than to teach someone who knows language X how to be a good coder. Don’t get to attached to any particular methodology or approach, as the community changes direction frequently and today’s hot ticket will be tomorrows legacy code that everyone hates. Try different approaches and iterate the ones that work.

Ultimately the best way to learn is through doing – someone who has written and released their own project, whether it’s a small library or a mobile app or even just a hand-coded web site is always going to stand out over those who haven’t – so get coding! Participating in open-source projects is also great experience. Test-driven development is a very good habit to get into sooner rather than later, and I would highly recommend internships as a way to learn how things are done in industry and why they are done that way, along with how to work as part of a development team.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

Two great books to read are Joel Spolsky’s “User Interface Design For Programmers” and Steven Skeina’s “The Algorithm Design Manual”. But most importantly, read the blogs relevant to your chosen discipline, blog and/or tweet about your interests and the tech problems you face, and ask intelligent questions. Be interested in everything, and you’ll be surprised at the connections you make.

What is your job title?

We have a very flat structure at 7digital and believe that working as team removes the need for having individual titles. So, I could call myself whatever I like, but I’d probably choose Software Developer.

What is your role about?

I’m part of a team of 8 people working on 7digital’s public API. We work in an agile manner aiming to pair program as much as possible, using a TDD approach. We break down our work into the smallest releasable feature (also known as a Minimum Marketable Feature) and use a Kanban board to track progress. Each morning we have a 15 minute stand-up where we talk through the items on the board, as a team, and update each other on our progress. At this point, we can raise any problems we’re having and even swap pairs with the aim of spreading the knowledge of implementing the feature throughout the team. The pair working on a feature will analyse the requirements and note down the Acceptance Criteria for the work to be considered complete. Then, we go through a Ping Pong Pair Programming pattern, where one person will write a test, based on the Acceptance Criteria, and the other person will write the code to make the test pass. It can be very demanding to work in this manner, but we found that the overall quality of the code produced is far higher and far less likely to contain bugs. We also have the build and deployment system fully automated, so on average we will release a feature to Live at least once a day. This makes us very responsive to change and also, as a developer, it feels good to see the changes you made going to Live regularly and having an impact.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

As I stated above, I enjoy making an impact; seeing the changes I’ve worked on being useful to others using the API. Also, I enjoy the fact that a programming role encourages you to keep learning and pair programming has taught me a lot about how others work and think – there’s a lot you can learn from you teammates and a good discussion is always welcome. I also enjoy the ability to be able to tinker with code. There’s so many Open Source and cool technologies out there that you can easily just pick up and start playing with – in fact, I find that I want to play with many that I often don’t know where to start!

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

There is a tendency in the industry to see software development as something that you can just chuck more people at and crank out solutions, no matter the cost to quality and time and often resulting in burnout – the infamous Death March project. I’ve had a role just like this, it was one of my first development roles out of Uni and hence I was fresh-faced and eager to impress. The timescales of the project were woefully optimistic, the specifications lacking and allowing for huge amounts of scope-creep, and a constant threat from “above” that if the project failed that we’d all be out of a job. I remember working 80 – 90 hour weeks, including weekends and overnights all in the vain hope of meeting the ludicrous deadlines. It’s a strange position to be in; you can see the failure happening, everyone around you can, but you are urged to push on, no matter the cost, even bribed with promises of bonuses that never materialised. Before long you are in it to help out your teammates (how can you go home and leave them working?) and this then reinforces to the management team that this dreadful pattern of working is acceptable. We worked on the first project in this manner, and a second one, by the time the third project came round the whole development team had quit. It took me months to once again enjoy coding, but I am far more aware of the warning signs of a Death March project and will not allow myself to be in that position again.

What is the standard career path/qualifications?

I think people can get into Software Development with all kinds of backgrounds – it’s the passion which is important. I personally started off with the “standard” route; I took “A” levels and then a BSc in Computer Science, but my first role was not a development one but a junior project management role. It was not what I wanted, but I was happy to have a job straight out of Uni. My time in that role reaffirmed my desire to be Software Developer and soon enough I moved into the Development team in a Junior role. My Team Lead was helpful and he took the time to get me up to speed with programming in a commercial environment. I also read books, blogs and travelled down to London regularly to attend User Group events – I learned everything I could and I believe it is this desire to keep learning and better myself which enabled me to get the role I have today.

What are the prospects?

There is a strange perception that in order to progress, one must move out of development and into a management role of some sorts (either people or projects), but I feel that this is incredibly wrong – programming is what I love to do and it is what I am good at. I could of course move into a management role, but I have no desire to. Alternatives, are to continue to gain more skills; a deeper understanding in technical areas and become more of an “expert”. At 7digital, there is no pressure to move away from what you are good at, in fact becoming more skilled is the preferred way to progress.

In your experience are you aware of any differences your role has between industries/sectors?

One big difference is our ability to release often. As a web based client, we can push out changes with great regularity, with no need to package up the product and send it out to users. Also, our clients are very varied; from bedroom developers using the api to hack together a mashup application, to commercial users such as Samsung using our API to build their app into a wide range of mobile devices and we interact with both directly.

What was it like coming into the industry?

I didn’t know what to expect, and as I stated above, my first role was not in Development, but the advantage this gave me was to be able to see the role of a Developer in the industry before I moved into Programming. My first year as a Programmer was filled with a lot of learning and re-learning. I knew all about Object Oriented development, but I had no concept of Design Patterns. I could write code, but knew nothing about Source Control or how to effectively work in a team on a single project. I was afraid I would get it all wrong, afraid I would break something, or accidentally delete the production database (I’ve actually done this once – so, ensure you have backups!), but I had a supportive team and a desire to learn and so I read everything I could on the subject areas I was missing and soon enough I was a productive member.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

There is a lot more scope in the industry these days for individual developers to create Apps, such as iPhone or Android apps, but I personally feel that there is a lot to be gained from working in a team. Also, Open Source is becoming a bigger part of everyday development, with more Open Source tools being used in commercial development.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

If I was to enter the industry today I would try to take advantage of all the resources out there to learn all of the bits that a degree does not cover (design patterns, pair programming, TDD, source control). There is so much information and code out there for people to look at that they can try to reduce the big learning hurdles in moving from Uni to the industry and feel far more confident in joining a role. Also, I would look for roles specifically aimed at Juniors with mention of mentoring, or at least pair programming which will get you up and running rather quickly. Also, take advantage of local User Groups – go along to learn new areas and to make contacts. Also, watch out for Death marches!

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

The London .Net User Group exposed me to TDD and other technologies and are well worth attending. Also, the ACCU are a great group of developers who have generally been coding for a long time – they are primarily C++ coders, but I find it good to have a different perspective, which is another point I want to raise: try not to get sucked into any echo chambers. It is easy to find a group of like-minded developers and believe that theirs is the only way to view the world. Join groups using technologies and languages you are unfamiliar with, stay open to new (and old) approaches and try to read as many viewpoints as you can.

Title – What is your job title?

I don’t have a formal title, I can choose whatever title I want as I run my own business. I’m considered to be a Java Performance Expert. I’m also a Java Champion, which is a formal accolade; you have to be voted on to the Java Champion list by Oracle. There are a few hundred of us Java Champions globally.

What is your role about?

I can choose where to focus my skills, and that changes over time. For a while I focused on short-term consulting, which meant you have to use your contacts and your online presence to generate customers who want you to consult about various aspects of Java performance: it can be very low-level implementation, or it can be troubleshooting their current performance issues, or reviewing the design and architecture of their systems. For a while I focused on training, which means building your own training courses and advertising to gain customers and provide those courses.

Right now I’m focused on long-term consulting assignments, which means I will be at a customer site from half a year up to several years, working on the performance of a specific project and seeing it through to the deployed production system. That tends to involve a lot of performance monitoring of the system, a lot of performance testing (it’s part of non-functional testing that is increasingly recognised as crucial to the success of a project), and often tuning and troubleshooting. I also spend a proportion of my time researching and writing for my newsletter (published every month without fail for more than ten years) and occasionally writing for other publications.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

I love the troubleshooting and tuning – you have challenging problems which need all your skills and experience to figure out and fix, and then the outcome of seeing things running smoother, faster, smaller and trouble-free after fixing is very gratifying. Most software developers seem to prefer developing greenfield projects (i.e. helping build a system from scratch), but I love being thrown into already existing projects and fixing other peoples code. It’s probably important to enjoy that aspect if you want to be a successful roving troubleshooter – fixing other people’s code is quite different from fixing your own and many people find it difficult to get into. You need to be quite non-judgemental, it doesn’t matter about the existing code quality or whether or not you feel it
lines up to good coding practices, your only target is to fix it so it achieves the performance targets, leaving maintainable code.

My favourite issue is a concurrency bug in using HashMap which randomly results in infinite loops occurring. Because almost all developers use HashMap as their default map, and it is used so extensively in code, it can easily get used in multi-threaded code by accident (it is not supposed be used like that, HashMap is not thread-safe, you should instead be using something like ConcurrentHashMap). When this happens, there is a small chance that the concurrency bug will get hit, and it’s not obvious when analysing what is happening that it has been hit. I’ve fixed more than one production system where they were previously having to bounce a service because of occasionally hitting this bug.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

I don’t like the constant language wars we have in our industry, I have an opinion that you should use whatever is appropriate for the job, and the almost religious devotion to a particular programming language that many in our industry have is quite annoying. I also don’t like the wasteful way we keep re-inventing every aspect of the software industry. For example remotely executing procedures across machines has been re-invented again and again (RPC, CORBA, HTTP, REST, and those are just the most popular, there are hundreds of less popular ‘standards’).

On the “running your own business” side, don’t underestimate the amount of effort you need to put into generating business, doing the admin, avoiding messes. The buck stops with you; you gain the rewards of your own work, but you also have to deal with every aspect of running a business and that takes a lot of effort.

What is the standard career path/qualifications?

You don’t get to be an ‘expert’ in anything without first becoming very competent at it. There are no formal qualifications – when I’ve interviewed for people to do similar work as I do, I don’t care about what qualifications they have, I’m looking for an in-depth understanding of how and why programs are behaving and misbehaving. You need to understand which tools let you see what is happening in a running program; how to interpret the output of those tools to infer what is happening and why, and then understand how to test changes to fix the issues you identify.

My experience is that developers who are considered competent by their peers, and who have
worked for a while in some specific area, have been highly interested in that area, and are willing to focus in that area, are then capable of becoming an ‘expert’ in that area. To extend that to become recognised as an expert by more than just your colleagues, you have to then disseminate your expertise to many organisations, possibly by publishing written work that people read, or some software that becomes widely used, or some techniques that are followed by many in the industry, etc.

What are the prospects?

If you become someone who is considered an expert in any niche IT area, you can usually choose what you want to do. You can focus on training, consultancy, working for an organisation or for yourself, speaking at conferences, these and more options are all open to you.

What was it like coming into the industry?

I didn’t realise at any stage of my career what I was moving into. Each time I shifted up my career path, I was open to new options, and willing to take the risk involved – sometimes monetary risk, sometimes the serious risk that you might dead-end by not having relevant or recent experience for your next role. It can be pretty scary to just stop money-earning work and spend time developing something different (as I have done several times such as when writing my book, when developing training courses, etc.). My advice – always be open to potential new things, investigate them when they crop up, and be prepared to be adaptable. Sooner or later options come your way, and it’s better
to have the choice to choose that option should you want. You’ll only have the choice if you are open and adaptable and prepared to change.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

In the medium term, the JVM is a fantastic platform to be working on, whichever language you might be using. I use Java. I often look for new languages because Java is not the ‘perfect’ language, but I haven’t yet found one that is better. When one comes along that is better, I’ll move to that language – I’m pretty sure it will run on the JVM though.

Information technology hosts the professions of the future, the use of software is only going to increase for the whole of this century. More and more, the software engineer’s job will be to integrate technologies that are available, to produce the precise solution needed for a given task. So you’ll need to know what’s available and how to combine things so they work to your will. Most software engineering will become more like engineering – the things you build will be mostly other people’s components which you slot together and then maybe 10%-20% of your own bespoke code to transform the components to what you need.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

My advice to those entering is to try and get competent in programming and understand how to integrate resources on the internet into whatever you are doing.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

Be willing to help out others without expecting reward – eventually this will come back to help you out one way or another. And keep yourself up to date by continually reading about what is happening in the industry and in your area of work and skills – I.T. is a-fast moving continually evolving industry and it’s important to keep your skills updated or you fall behind and become less employable over time.

Alex has played a key role in the development of Gamer Camp (www.GamerCamp.co.uk), a postgraduate (MA/MSc) training scheme for aspiring game developers that simulates a graduate’s first year in the games industry. Due to start in September, the Pro version of the course is endorsed by the likes of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Rare, Codemasters, Blitz Games Studios and FreeStyleGames.

Title – What is your job title?

My official job title is Course Lead – Technical on Gamer Camp, which is delivered at the New Technology Institute in Birmingham (part of Birmingham City University). I have 15 years experience of working in the games industry, as both a programmer and a designer, and I guess that my role would map to somewhere between Lead Programmer and Technical Director if I were still making games for a living.

What is your role about?

Gamer Camp is the brand name for an innovative new suite of industry driven courses developed by BCU at the NTI that are designed to bridge the skills and, most specifically, experience gap between traditional higher education and the day to day work environment within the games industry. The focus of Gamer Camp is on “learning by doing” in a realisitic simulated game development studio environment – working to schedule to create finished game products on current gaming hardware (e.g. PC, iPhone, and PS3) from realistic briefs, within specified deadlines, as part of a team.

My role as technical Course Lead is to drive the design and delivery of Gamer Camp’s technical curriculum, and to mentor and assess the students on the Gamer Camp courses. Most of my time is taken up with the year long Gamer Camp Pro MA / MSc programme, but I am also heavily involved in the 1 month Gamer Camp Nano courses that we offer. Our aim is that a student who completes Gamer Camp Pro should have the same skillset and experience as a graduate who has been working in the games industry for a year.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

The games industry is a very dynamic, innovative, and interesting industry to work in; the landscape of technology – in terms of both hardware and software involved – has changed radically in the 15 years I have been making games. It looks set to continue in that vein for the foreseeable future too; physical media such as DVDs seem to be on the way out, digital distribution and social networking websites have transformed (and no doubt will continue to transform) the way in which games are delivered and played.

Overhearing random people talking about how much they like a game that you worked on is a pretty great feeling.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

Like any hit driven industry the games industry has its ups and downs, I’ve been made redundant twice and worked for one company that went bust – and I’m one of the lucky ones! As well as a certain lack of job security, hit driven industries bring the threat of extreme overtime when pushing to meet deadlines for release dates (I once worked 200 hours overtime in 6 weeks) – an unpleasant, and generally unpaid, phenomenon that the industry has come to call “crunch”. However, to put that into perspective, I never once in 15 years woke up and thought “I can’t face work today”.

What is the standard career path/qualifications?

For programmers the typical way into the games industry has been a traditional Computer Science degree. However, it seems that the vast majority of Universities are no longer teaching C++ – by far the main language used to make PC and console games – as a core component of their CS courses; and so more and more “Games Programming” courses are springing up. Typically the basic career progression for a programmer would be graduate -> Junior Programmer -> Programmer -> Senior Programmer.

What are the prospects?

To move beyond Senior you would typically have to move into management (e.g. Lead Programmer -> Technical Director) or become a what most companies call a “Principal Programmer” which broadly translates to “Needs to be more highly paid than Senior in order to be retained, but not interested in Management”. It is entirely possible, though defintiely not common, to become a freelance – typyically freelance programmers in the games industry have exceptional skill at some monumentally crucial part of development – e.g. debugging release build crashes from disassembly and registers.

It’s also entirely possible to start your won video game company – and with the current digital distribution boom and the rise of very cheap high quality game making tools like Unity 3D, Torque 3D, and the free version of the Unreal UDK this is increasingly becoming the way that people decide to take their careers forwards.

Reflection and the Future What was it like coming into the industry?

I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was young – other than that I didn’t want to be a doctor like my dad. I decided on my degree Joint Honours Psychology and AI / Computer Science primarily because I had always been interested in computers, an intrest mostly driven by games.

As I came toward the end of my degree course I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, and had almost resigned myself to the fact that I’d spend the rest of my life working on application software unless I could get a research post and do further study in AI.

It had never occurred to me that working in games was an option, as I had always heard games were written primarily in assembler and I didn’t have any experience of it. However, the Sony PlayStation had came out in late 1995, and C was the primary programming language used to make games for it.

My AI tutor had a friend who worked in games and had said his company was on the lookout for AI graduates.  I signed up with a recruitment agency specialising in games and after a few interviews I got offered a position at Codemasters.

Whilst the CS aspect of the degree course I had been on was very practical by academic standards, it left me woefully underprepared for the day to day working environment I was about to enter. Many ‘best practice’ techniques I was taught at university could land you in a whole heap of trouble in the speed-of-execution-is-everything resource limited world of console development.

Also, I had decided maths was rubbish after being taught vectors and matrices during AS level maths and had purposefully ignored maths as far as possible since then. D’oh! Luckily for me, I am a very fast learner and I met some exceptionally bright people at Codemasters who helped me quickly fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

The industry has changed so much in the 15 years since then. There were only about 25 people working in the development department of Codemasters in December 1996, and they were working on maybe 5 games between them. Nowadays big budget games can have upwards of 200 people working on them.

I was lucky enough to start in the industry at a time when team sizes were small and job roles less well defined. I moved between design and programming roles for the first 6 years that I worked in the industry, and then settled down to concentrate primarily on programming when I helped to start FreeStyleGames in late 2002.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

The games industry has always been a very dynamic and changeable one. This is more true now than ever – current trends for downloadable games, games for mobile phones and tablets, and social games delivered via social networking sites like Facebook seem set to only increase in popularity.

Even more interestingly, several new ‘cloud gaming’ systems are currently emerging that allow users to remotely play games that are running on bleeding edge PC gaming hardware – one even achieves this within web browsers.

However, even with all this it seems unlikely to me that the traditional console model will be entirely superceded. Even if the games you play do eventually run entirely in the cloud, I think that there is a good chance that people like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony will still be selling you the hardware which allows you to access it all.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

Whenever I give talks to younger (16 – 18) students I always tell them: Now is the best time to make a game.

There are several very high quality game development tools available incredibly cheaply (or entirely free!), and they are all supported by lively online communities of users. Some of these tools allow a single game to run across all modern gaming hardware – iPhone / iPad / Android / Windows / Wii / X360 / PS3 etc.

Games made using these tools can make real money for people, and the low barrier to entry for this sort of thing has lead to a renaissance of creativity and freedom in games.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

I owe a massive debt to Richard Darling for giving me my first break, to Dr. Richard Ogden for teaching me about vectors and matrices, to Dave Thompson for teaching me many valuable lessons about programming, to the other founders of FreeStyleGames for letting me share with them in achieving our dreams, and to Oliver Williams at NTI for giving me the chance to be part of Gamer Camp and to benefit others by passing on my knowledge and experience.

In his spare time Edd is almost always working on at least one personal project. He is an adamant supporter of open source software and open standards and has recently founded the ‘qunit-test-runner’ open source project. He is also co-founder of an exciting new project called ‘Stretchr’. Edd also has a blog which he sporadically updates when he gets the time (http://www.eddgrant.com/blog) and has a passion for mountain biking and tea.

Title – What is your job title?
I’m a Software Engineer – I design and build software. My clients call my job various things such as developer, technical lead, team leader, build manager, technical architect, software consultant etc. I prefer Software Engineer since it encompasses the narrower roles and more accurately explains what I do.

What is your role about?
It very much depends on what the client/ project need; at the core I design and build software but there is also a wealth of fascinating work away from the development itself such as planning and mentoring junior colleagues. This aspect of my job can be really rewarding as it allows me to use and develop my people/ soft skills as well as developing my technical expertise. I also believe that having a broader involvement in a project allows me to make better project related decisions by providing me with a more comprehensive exposure to different project aspects, which would usually not be visible through development alone. Hence I like to get involved in as many of the following aspects as possible, obviously as the client/ project requires:

• Building the team : Interviewing and recruiting new team members as and when the team needs to grow. This provides an opportunity to build a team of people who will compliment each other’s skills and work well together.
• Designing processes : Designing and refining the team’s development build and release processes, selecting appropriate and productive development and project management tools.
• Planning the development : Turning business requirements in to chunks of technical work (user stories, use cases etc) and planning how this work will be distributed out across the team.
• Technical design : Taking the requirements and turning them in to a coherent technical design. Evaluating the most appropriate technologies, designing what our system(s) will look like, both in architectural and lower level coding terms.
• Mentoring : Day to day mentoring of developers, answering their questions, assisting them in their design and implementation work. Helping them stretch themselves and grow in the process. Reviewing work for both quality and appropriateness and ensuring it adheres to what we think we’re implementing (sanity checks!).
• Writing the code : The really fun bit! Implementing the design, writing the tests, working both alone and alongside other developers in actually ‘building’ the system.
• Dealing with problems : Being able to understand what’s really going on when things don’t behave as you’d expect them to and keeping a cool head when doing this in a time pressured environment. Being able to design and implement successful fixes to identified issues is also important.
• Integration : Liaising with system owners when integrating systems in order to design interfaces between the 2 systems.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

• The excitement of being responsible for designing and building a system from scratch.
• Getting to work with great teams of talented, passionate and driven people, making some great friends in the process!
• The great feeling you get when you figure out a complicated problem, then the even better feeling when you identify the solution write the tests and prove your idea works.
• Pushing and developing your own limits, both technical and personal terms.
• Working on different projects with different clients is a great way of getting exposure to a wealth of different technologies, businesses, methodologies and people.
• Getting involved in technical communities both online (e.g. JavaRanch/ StackOverflow) and in the real world (e.g. London Java Community/ Android Community). Meeting new people and sharing ideas together. This is something which simply does not exist in many other engineering related disciplines and it is a great benefit for the software community.
• Attending interesting conferences, getting to speak and share your ideas in front of other developers.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

• I believe keeping your skill set up to date is vital – technology moves very fast and clients often want skills in specific technologies. Sadly, some employers don’t place value in allowing staff time to develop their skills, so to excel as a software engineer this sometimes has to be done in your own personal time.
• When stuff goes wrong: It doesn’t matter how meticulous you have been or whether it’s even code that you/ your team has written, At some point in your career something uber-critical will go wrong with a live system, senior people will get involved and someone may not treat you with an adequate level of professionalism. At this point it is your responsibility to remain calm, rise above it, give up your evening or weekend without fuss, assess the issues and fix the situation. Actually this can be an incredibly rewarding activity but it can also be a good test of someone’s mettle!
• Family, friends and extended family wanting you to fix their computer every time it breaks

Career Path
What is the standard career path/qualifications?
A typical route would be to study a computing/software engineering/computer science degree, either at BSc or Masters level. Some degrees offer a year of industrial placement as part of the course – personally I think this is invaluable since it offers an opportunity to obtain real-world work experience and also to find out what you enjoy doing. Many employers also look favourably at candidates with placement experience over those without it, particularly in the current job market.

What are the prospects?
The prospects for a successful software engineers are exciting and varied. As time moves forward so does our dependency on computers, hence software engineers are in demand in all sorts of industries in both the private and public sectors. Work is often exciting and can reward creativity and achievement. Work is also generally well paid. One caveat I have seen is that some companies have a tendency to push their most talented technical people in to managerial roles irrespective of whether it’s appropriate for the individual or not, however this is not the case across the industry and many employers have dedicated technical capabilities right up to the most senior levels.

Reflection and The Future
What was it like coming into the industry?
Exciting! I wanted to learn, demonstrate my potential and get involved in creating software. What I really wanted was the opportunity to own a piece of development – something I could put all my effort and creativity in to and something I could take pride in. I don’t think that has changed much – I still have a passion for learning new things and I still find each piece of development just as exciting as the first one!

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?
I hope that Java and the JVM are able to weather the storm that has recently beset them, they still remain fundamentally relevant to modern software development and have a near ubiquitous presence in software projects across the world. However I would like to see Java become more independent moving strongly toward existing in the open source space and with fewer ties to companies who have more proprietary interests at heart.
Whereas a few years ago we were seeing huge CPU clock speed rises, more recently we are seeing rises in the number of cores per chip. Those wanting to harness this power will need to be well versed in concurrent programming so I would imagine there will be a strong need for developers with these skills in the future.
We are also seeing an increase in the need for systems which scale to degrees which would not have been easy to achieve without very expensive infrastructure. With this in mind I believe that the way we store data will be challenged more widely in the future, with more systems making use of schema-less Databases over their traditional ‘relational’ counterparts. It seems that several cloud APIs are already beginning this movement which I believe will yield some very interesting projects in the future.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

• Dabble: Start your own personal projects – learn new technologies, patterns, languages and stimulate your own creativity in the process. Try writing a blog or designing your own website. Don’t forget that anything you create which might be worth sharing can potentially be added to your CV to differentiate you from other candidates when applying for a job.
• Open Source: Open source software is critically important in the larger world of software. Get involved in an open source project, meet the other project developers, contribute a bug fix or a feature and you’ll understand how important it is.
• Get involved in your local technical communities; they’re a great way to meet people and to further enhance your skills.
• Investigate: A good software engineer knows why something works, not just that it works. Don’t be afraid of investigating issues yourself but also of asking questions of your senior colleagues to enhance your own knowledge. Be scientific in your approach and prove your doubts empirically through testing.
• Enjoy yourself: If you’re going to do anything for a number of years then you need to make sure you can enjoy yourself whilst doing it.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?
I have found inspiration in several colleagues and mentors over the years. Through our ongoing interaction these people have nurtured and challenged my thoughts and ideas which has in turn inspired me to learn new things and develop my skills and ideas. This has been of great benefit to me so I try to continue the cycle wherever possible with my own colleagues and mentees.
Open source software inspires me. Open source stimulates healthy competition amongst projects, this leads to technological progressions which in turn lead to better software for the masses. Furthermore open source provides free access to software for those who can’t afford or do not wish to use the equivalent proprietary products. Personally I find the Ubuntu and Spring Frameworks open source projects particularly encouraging since they demonstrate models of good practice and both sustain successful businesses through which they deliver free and open software.
I am particularly inspired by Google’s efforts in pushing the adoption of open software and standards. Google is raising the availability and accessibility to data and software across the world, they also put a lot of money in to open source projects and support the software community to an extent that I seldom see elsewhere. I wish there were more companies who adopted this approach.

Title – What is your job title?
We’re too small to have formal job titles, if I had to pick one, it would be Software Engineer/developer and Systems Administrator.

What is your role about?
I was the first employee at a small hedge fund. I’m responsible for engineering/architecting our software platform and services and also for keeping the servers and batch processes running, and everything inbetween including testing, debugging and release management. Mostly I spend my days designing and coding on my own, I know the broad direction the software needs to take so I’m pretty much left to my own devices to fulfil those business goals. We’re a small company (three people, including me), so we have to be able to change direction quickly, as a result, the software needs to be able to change direction quickly, so it has to be designed in such a way that components can work together easily, so we use good OO design principles (e.g. dependency injection) and the lighter agile methodologies (e.g. continuous integration with Maven/Jenkins, test driven development using JUnit and JMock).

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?
I have the freedom to code how I want to and to use any toolkit that is appropriate. That said, one has to ensure that current and future functionality can still be delivered as we don’t have budget to spend time on coding anything that won’t be used, or that will become a maintenance headache.
Working at a startup is great though, you get to wear many different hats – last week I was spec’ing a new server and then this week I was shifting furniture around the office!

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?
If you work for a startup, you have to accept that you’re not going to have the same access to resources as you would at a larger company, there won’t be a dedicated training program, or budget for the latest piece of kit and this can get quite frustrating. Also, there’s not the same job security as in a larger company, when we first started, we were subletting office space from an adult education college, and we came in one day to find that the building’s owners had changed the locks! Situations like this (or occasional cashflow problems – I’ve heard stories of people in other startups getting paid late) can certainly be unnerving, and they’re not for everyone.

Career Path
What is the standard career path/qualifications?
I think people find themselves at startups through all manner of different routes. I ended up here because I had worked with the founder previously, and we bumped into each other at a company reunion. I think the main qualification is that you are someone that knows how to get things done (see Joel on Software on getting things done). My background is that I have a computer science degree and served time in different roles from junior software engineer, to technical lead, which seems to be a reasonably standard career path in any department doing software development. As for the hedge fund side of the business, for us, my lack of knowledge in this area wasn’t a problem, however I think a more usual approach in some of the larger, more famous funds would be for someone to first get exposure to finance before they are welcomed into a hedge fund. This would often be done on things like graduate training programs in an investment bank, or perhaps an internal transfer to a trading department, I’ve found that the more senior you get, the more difficult it is to find an employer that is willing to train you on business skills (and “finance” is a massively complex subject), as the more they are paying for someone in terms of salary, the more they will want and expect that person to come in and start being able to talk to their business leaders in their own language.

What are the prospects?
For my role as a startup developer – who knows! That is one of the main things I love about working at a startup, you just don’t know where you’re going to be in a few years time, it all depends on the direction the business goes in. What I’ve also found in working at smaller companies, is that the management are usually very amenable to people trying out a role, or cross-training into another role, I’ve seen people start out as developers and move into project management, department management and product management. Working at a smaller company, you are quite often able to set your own goals and (if it’s a great company) work with your managers to help you achieve those goals.

In your experience, are you aware of any differences your role has between industries/sectors?
There are definite differences between working as a software engineer at a startup to working in a more established company (say, older than 5 years), mainly, (depending on the company, of course), the access to resources would be much greater. In smaller companies it’s a lot more likely that you will be asked to do things that are bigger than your level of experience or skillset, that said, those achievements are more likely to be recognised.

There are also differences between being a developer where the end product’s users sit in the same room as you, and the end product gets shipped on a CD somewhere else. When your users are in the same room, you are far more answerable for your own design decisions (and mistakes!), because the impact is more visible, and therefore quite often has a tangible cost associated with it, so there is far more responsibility and accountability.

Reflection and The Future
What was it like coming into the industry?
Once I graduated, I found moving into the software industry unsettling, because I thought that I would be asked to do things beyond my capability and I thought I might flounder. This turned out to be true, however, I didn’t flounder because I didn’t appreciate that I would surrounded by bright people that would help me figure out some of this stuff. Moreover, this has remained a theme throughout my career, it’s one of the things that I now enjoy – when you’re constantly being challenged, it forces you to keep on learning. This has helped me enormously with working at a startup.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?
I think the software industry has definitely changed over the last few years, when I came into it, it seemed there weren’t very many smaller software houses out there (at least not in London), because a lot of development was going offshore. I think that trend has declined, with a lot of big companies bringing development back onshore because they need people not only in the same timezone as the business units they serve, but also in the same geography, so they can walk over and speak to that person if there’s something they don’t understand – email and instant messaging will only get you so far. Also, I think the “app” markets (Android, iPhone et al) are changing things a lot as well, it has opened up massive consumer markets to single developers or small teams, and we are seeing lot more smaller development shops opening up on the back of this, meaning that if you want to stay purely technical, you can, whereas a few years ago, it seemed the main route was up into consultancy/management, now there’s a wider choice.

Hedge funds, and the wider finance industry, have been through a stormy couple of years, so I think because of the increased scrutiny they have come under, they will focus on being more professional with their software engineering practices. This is following a wider trend in the software industry, it seems there is – quite rightly – a heavier focus on methodologies and tools to help make software production more deterministic in terms of bugs and timescales.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?
I landed my first job on the back of an internship in the summer between my second and third year, so I cannot stress strongly enough that internships are a great idea, and well worth investing the time to find one. If nothing else, it gives you a feel for what it’s like to work with software every day, and helps you realise what you might like and not like about the industry/role, before you commit to a full time job, so gives you more context when you’re applying for full time jobs once you graduate. An internship also gives you more to talk about when applying for jobs once you graduate, and sometimes the internship itself turns into a permanent job offer. The GDC is a great place to start when looking for internships, as they maintain a list of companies and available internships.

In terms of skills, I think it’s important to realise that staying in a development role will mean that you constantly have to learn new tools and practices. One of the best things you can do is learn how to use your IDE (Eclipse, Intellij, Netbeans) effectively, they are extremely powerful and take care of a lot of the boring bits of software development.

In terms of working within the software industry, something that took me a while to realise is that there’s a difference between companies where software is the main source of revenue, and ones where software is a support function to the main source of revenue. It has knock-on effects for the culture of the company and how engineers are paid and rewarded for their work. Hopefully hedge funds bridge the gap a little as a lot of them use machines and algorithms to make the trading decisions, so software is more fundamental to their bottom line.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?
Being a developer without a team, communities and online groups have been very helpful, notably stackoverflow.com. Also, I often read the Joel On Software and Coding Horror blogs, because they put technical comment in a business context, which I think is something that distinguishes a good developer from a great engineer.

What is your job title?

I wear many hats and therefore have a variety of titles.  I generally call myself a Java and open source consultant and let the client call me whatever they feel like!  Outside of directly paid work I am a community leader/organiser for various open source projects and technical communities, e.g.  The LJC.

What is your role about?

My role is incredibly varied but as an overall theme I try to help organisations realise the power of open source and technical communities. In London this typically means working with financials (and therefore the Java ecosystem) and start-ups (a larger variety of languages and technologies). As part of this theme I also work with teams to become more agile and to utilise technical best practices in our field (e.g. Source control, SOLID principles of OO development etc).

On any one day I could be writing code (mainly Java although increasingly a polyglot set of languages on the JVM), setting up project infrastructure, speaking at conferences, holding workshops, coordinating community activities, dealing with Lawyers, writing book chapters and much more!  It is fair to say that my role does not include as much day-to-day programming as I would like.

For the more technical side of my role I utilise a variety of agile techniques including Kanban for project organisation, BDD/TDD (JUnit, JMock and pals) along with Maven/Jenkins for continuous deployment and a host of other Java related tools.  On the server side I mainly program in Java using XML , Spring, Hibernate and JMS. increasingly I am utilising other JVM languages such as Groovy/Grails.  On the client side it is typically HTML, CSS and JQuery.

I typically work with a team the size of which can span from one to two members to 50+.

What are the best/most positive parts of the job/industry?

• Programming is incredibly creative and it is very satisfying to have a user happy with something you have built.
• Technical communities are amazing, the passion and ideas that are evident at even a casual meeting are not seen in many other industries.
• This is one of the few industries where your actions can influence so many in a positive way.  Even introducing a simple concept such as source control can make a massive difference to a large team of developers.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

There is an overwhelming lack of understanding of what software developers actually do and how their decisions affect the bottom line and/or flexibility of an organisation.  All too often, programmers are just seen as replaceable building blocks, trying to make non-developers truly understand that this is not the case, is difficult to say the least.

You constantly have to learn and update your skills in order to be relevant.  This can be seen as both a positive and a negative thing!

Career Path

There wasn’t a standard career path for me, coming from New Zealand you are typically forced to be a jack of all trades due to the small population size.  I started out by graduating with a Computer Science degree and an Information Systems degree.  I then joined a consultancy as a graduate developer, became a team lead and then after a couple of years joined the global Java R&D/Architecture team.  When I left New Zealand to travel I combined my experience from that consultancy and the various open source projects I helped run to become a freelancer, which I have done so for the past 6 to 7 years.

What are the prospects?

A wide variety but generally roles that require a broader skill set as opposed to say a deeply technical skill set, e.g.:

• A variety of architecture roles
• CTO
• Consultant/Management consultant
• Open source community leader/advocate
• Speaker
• Author

Reflection and The Future

What was it like coming into the industry?

I came in during the dot-com boom and also when Java and Internet/intranet applications were becoming a real possibility.  It was a very exciting and fast paced time, which of course crashed horribly.  A major challenge as a new graduate was picking up on all of the industry standards which were not taught at university and would also constantly changing.

I am still trying to figure out which part of my role will dominate the coming year but I am certainly never bored on a technical or non-technical level!

Do you have any thoughts on the future of your role/industry?

Open source it is now firmly a commercially backed movement and so there is a great feature for developers in this space.  Java and JVM languages are also looking to have a very strong future so the combination of the two will certainly be around for a long time yet.
Two new challenges which I think developers will face are dealing with cloud computing and at a lower level developing for multicore processors which means mastering concurrency once more.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

• Do it for the love but don’t be afraid to make sure that you can put a roof over your head!
• Never close your mind, always be willing to learn off others.
• Participate in your local technical communities early!
• Try to get an internship, work on an open source project or somehow learn to use the tools and techniques that are standard in our industry but are not taught in the education system.

Have you come across anything or anyone that has helped you move forward in the industry?

• I have been blessed by having several excellent mentors who encouraged me to make mistakes, to always learn and to “get stuff done”.
• Kathy Sierra showed me how to “Be Nice” and create passionate users.
• Karl Fogel taught me how to run a successful open source project
• The LJC, LSCC, GDC, CTO groups in London teach me something new everyday!