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!

Title – What is your job title?

Senior Consultant.

What is your role about?

My role is to work with clients to help them identify what they really need, advise them, provide options, and help them to achieve whatever they want to achieve in the most efficient way.

OK, I know. That was not very specific or helpful. This is because the role of a consultant can vary quite a lot. Different consultants may choose different career paths. Some follow a more business oriented career, advising clients on strategy, marketing, investment, finance, etc. Some follow a more process oriented career, emphasising project management, Agile Coaching, training, business analysis, requirements, etc. Others prefer a more technical career path, working more often as developers, technical architects and team leaders, mentoring, etc. In my case, I took the more technical path so normally I do what I like doing, that is writing code, regardless of my position in the project. Although I was a hands-on developer on all my assignments, many of them had elements of mentoring. Some times I also got involved in customised training courses for clients, like TDD, Agile, etc.

I work mainly in Agile Java projects. Technologies varies quite a lot since every now and again we are working for different clients, different industries and completely different systems. Sometimes clients already have something in place and the technology stack is already defined. In this case, we often use whatever they are using to start with but we always try to make suggestions if we see that other technologies or frameworks should be used instead. Some other projects, mainly greenfield ones, we generally have freedom to choose the technology stack we judge is the best for the problem.

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

In my view, the best thing about being a consultant is the amount of technologies and business domains that you are exposed to during your career. Because of the frequency that we change projects, we end up being exposed to a lot of interesting problems quite early in our careers, giving us a great understanding of many different software projects.

Networking is definitely another very positive aspect of being a consultant. As we move from project to project, client to client, we end up meeting a lot of people, in different organisations, what can be very useful as you progress in your career. The more people you work with or for, the more options you will have in the future.

Another important point is that, as a consultant, you need to be sellable. This may sound a bit negative, but if fact, what it means is that you need to be at the top of your game, knowing the latest technologies, methodologies and trends. The more you know, the easier it will be for a consultancy to place you in a project (sell you to a client). As the consultancy companies recognise that, in general they have different mechanisms (training, conferences, internal talks, events, etc) that you can take advantage of to improve your skills.

Because your peers are also moving from project to project and using different technologies in each project, it is amazing what you can learn from them. The variety of information shared among consultants about projects, businesses, methodologies, technologies, etc, is absolutely priceless. There is always someone doing something different somewhere.

What are the negative parts to the job/industry?

The main complain that consultants have is that in general you don’t have much saying on where you are going to be sent to. Once you decide you want to work for a consultancy company, you need to be aware that travelling is always a possibility. A few lucky consultants get to stay for a long time on projects close to their homes but in general this is not the case. If travelling or long commute is not an option for you, you really need to think hard before becoming a consultant. For those living in big cities, like London for example, in general this is not a big problem since the majority of the clients will be there anyway.

According to your level of seniority, years in the company and history of projects you delivered, you can refuse to go to some projects, in case you don’t like the project (less often) or if the commute is bad (more often). However, this is a card that needs to be played very wisely since you don’t get to play it more than once in a short period of time.

In some projects, you may be seen as an outsider by a few permanent employees. Some feel threatened by your the presence of a “consultant” there, since you may be “exposing” problems in the current process and software. It’s part of our job to deal with that and do whatever we can to be seen as another team member, a person that shares the same goals, and not an outsider.

Career Path

What is the standard career path/qualifications?

This varies quite a lot since consultancies may offer different type of services and they will need people that are more specialised in some areas than in others. Services offered may include software development, project management, training, coaching, business advise (strategy, finance, investment, etc), auditing, etc. Some consultancies tend to work more on the “consulting” side of it and tend to engage with clients at a more senior level (CEOs, CTOs, Directors, etc). Other consultancies are more focused on software delivery and tend to engage with clients at lower levels (directors, project managers, head of departments, etc). And, of course, some consultancies do a bit of both.

I’ll just talk about consultancies that focus more on software delivery since that’s my background.

My title is Senior Consultant but this is a reasonably vague title. Many consultancies, internally, distinguish their consultants by grades. Each grade has different ranges of salaries and responsibilities and we take on responsibilities on projects, in general, according to our grade.

For people aspiring a more technical career, in the entry levels you are expected to have a good knowledge of a programming language (in our case Java or .Net), most common frameworks, good understanding of Object-Oriented Programming and you would be working as a team member (developer). As you move up through the grades, you may take roles where you will be leading teams, be the technical architect, enterprise architect, Agile coach, etc. At the higher grades, besides all the technical knowledge you will also have some extra responsibilities like writing technical proposals, pre-sales, project inceptions, project management, manage clients expectation, etc. However, some consultants manage to reach the higher grades and remain totally hands on. That’s the path I’m following.

To be successful as a consultant, you need to be a well-rounded professional. Just knowing a programming language well is far from being enough to be a good consultant. You are expected to have knowledge in many different areas since you never know in which project you will end up and which position in the project you will have. And regardless what this project is, you need to be ready. Of course that we all know that is simply impossible to know everything that is out there but at least you need to show that you have the motivation and drive to learn whatever is thrown at you.

Besides the technical skills, another thing that is very important for a good consultant is soft skills, due to the amount of iteration with clients. I’m still working to improve mine.

What are the prospects?

Over the years, after many different projects, a consultant will have a good understanding of different types of software projects, technologies and also will have met a lot of people working for many different companies. This gives the consultant a good variety of options for the future.

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

In terms of clients we work for, yes, there are huge differences. Working for clients where software is not their core business (a big supermarket chain, a media company, etc) is totally different from working for clients where software is their core business or is an extremely important part of it (software products, internet companies, telcos, etc). There’s also the investment banks, financial companies, government, gambling, etc. Each client will demand a different type of service and a different type of expertise. Some clients will ask a consultancy to help creating the process, roles and responsibilities, requirements, definite the technology stack, etc. Full freedom. Other clients, which have a more mature software capability, may ask a consultancy to provide help with a very specific problem. Sometimes they just need some good developers for a limited period of time. They may want someone in there to coach and mentor their own developers. That means, the role can vary quite a lot, depending on the client.

Reflection and The Future

What was it like coming into the industry?

Before joining my first consultancy company, I had worked for two small software houses and I didn’t know much about it. Job was announced in one of the main Brazilian newspapers. 800+ developers applied and just 34 were hired after a month long selection process, 4 phases, including a two week training and group dynamics. My two previous companies combined had in total 10 people. This consultancy company had more than one thousand employees just in Sao Paulo. Many thousands around the world. I was completely lost and a bit scared by the size of the projects. Before I was writing software for local shops and businesses and there I was working in projects for multinational companies and governments. Complete shock. New technologies, new people, massive projects, multiple teams involved, clients speaking different languages, etc. After a few months, I was quite comfortable there and knew that I had made the right choice. I guess that I was very lucky there, firstly because I was assigned to work on a very technical and capable team and secondly because for two and a half years I had the best mentor (my boss) that I could ever have asked for.

However, joining a modern and more agile consultancy company today is totally different, much easier and less traumatic, even when working on big projects for big clients. In general you will be working in smaller teams (even on long term projects) and following agile methodologies. The technologies used are accessible to every one. When I started, back in the 90ies, we couldn’t just go to a website, download certain technologies and install on our PCs. Many of the technologies were proprietary. There’s absolutely nothing to fear about joining a consultancy company today and the world is a much better place now.

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

I think that while there is a need for software development, consultancies and consultants will always have a place. However, the time where consultants were the only or the best specialists in the market are over. Due to the internet, open source projects, social networking, user groups, conferences, shared videos, podcasts, etc, any one, anywhere in the world, has access to the latest technology at the minute it was released. Consultants now, more than ever, need to be at the top of their game. Consultancy companies will need to do their best to get the best professionals in the market in order to survive. They will need, more than ever, to show to clients that they have the best people to work on their projects.

What advice would you give someone entering your industry?

The following advices are valid for any developer starting his or her career, regardless if he wants to be a consultant, the industry or career path he will choose:

- Firstly and most importantly, enjoy and be proud of what you do. Software development is a very cool profession. During your career, there will be many people out there that will be using and benefiting from stuff you created. And this is definitely really cool.

- If you think you studied hard during university, think again. You haven’t even started studying hard yet. Software development IS NOT a 9 to 5 profession. Be prepared to study hard, outside working hours, for the rest of your life.

- Always aim for jobs where you are going to learn more and not earn more. Preferable a place where you could have a good mentor. Be patient because money will come. If you are good and keep learning, you will have a very decent life throughout your career. If you just aim for the money instead of learning, you may get a good money now and be unemployable and out of the market in a few years time.

- Put a lot of effort on learning the fundamentals of software development instead of just learning the latest framework. If you have a good foundation, you will be able to learn any new technology much faster.

- Contribute to open source projects, learn from their code base and take the opportunity to communicate with other contributors.

- Always have a pet project (you may be excused if you are actively contributing to an open source project). Pet projects are great for you to try different technologies, techniques and methodologies. The cool thing about a pet project is that you have the power to do whatever you want, whenever you want, making it quite fun to work on. You don’t need to finish a pet project, in fact, you never will.

- Join you local user groups. The amount of stuff you learn and people you meet is just priceless.

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

Definitely the mentor I had early on in my career. He was an exceptional developer and like a father for all of us in the team. He could hit us as hard as he wanted but no one else was allowed to do it. He shielded his team (us) from all the external heat and pressure. Quality was non-negotiable. He was a true believer that “how it’s done is as important as having it done“, phrase that I use as my blog’s subtitle. He believed in the apprenticeship model, although we’ve never used the term. It was there and then that I learned the true values of what today is called software craftsmanship. I worked for him and on that team for two and a half years and by far it was, if not the best, one of the best teams that I was part of. My mentor gave me everything I needed to become the professional I am today.

Twitter: @sandromancuso

blog: http://craftedsw.blogspot.com

LSCC: http://www.londonswcraft.com

One of the major projects we have created is a series of career interviews with different professionals within the IT industry, with the aim of passing on things they wish they’d known when they started out their careers and hopefully giving some pointers to people just getting started. These interviews are with people that have been in the industry for a while or who may have taken the road-less-travelled to arrive at their career goal.

One theme we have found from speaking to different people is that there is no one standard career path, to highlight this, why not start with a mindmap of different (and by no means, exhaustive) routes for software careers

James Bowkett and Barry Cranford