Career information interview - School project

[michaelp]

Dear members of compsci.ca,

I am in grade 10, and go to Thornlea Secondary School, which located in Thornhill, Ontario.. For a school project in the subject Careers, we have to do an interview with a person that has a job in a career field that we are interested in. I am interested in Computer programming/Computer science and thought that asking someone who is one compsci.ca would be a good choice.
The questions required for the interview part of the project are as follows:

1. How did you decide to choose computer scientist as a career? Who motivated you to enter this profession? What external or internal influences helped you with this decision?
2. Was you choice planned in stages or steps or was it the result of chance or unexpected developments?
3. What challenges or obstacles, if any, did you have to overcome to reach your goal?
4. What changes and trends have affected and are affecting this field? How?
5. What education and/or training are required for your present job?
6. What steps did you have to take to obtain your present job?
7. What are the tasks and responsibilities of your present job?
8. What are the most stimulating and challenging aspects of your job as well as the most frustrating aspects?
9. What skills and personal qualities are required to be successful in this kind of work? What skills/experiences from your leisure activities help you in this career?
10. What is the starting salary and the average salary for this field?
11. What are the opportunities for advancement in this field? What is the outlook for jobs in this field now and in the future?

Also, if you could say the name of the name of the company as well, assuming you work for one.

I appreciate anyone who would answer these questions for me to help me with my school project.

[Insectoid]

Make it up. That's what I did. Got a 90-something on it.

Also, nice to see you again Michael!

[revangrey]

Insectoid @ Tue Mar 09, 2010 9:48 pm wrote:

Make it up. That's what I did. Got a 90-something on it.

I have yet to see anyone who didn't make it up >sigh<

also to michaelp, just include alot of detail (long answers) and you will get >90.

I got 100 but the teacher liked me

[jbking]

Just to be kind, here's some answers to those questions:

1. Computer Scientist isn't a career to my mind. While one of my majors in university was Computer Science, I enjoyed solving problems and this presented an opportunity to explore that more. It was mostly self-motivation to become a software developer as when I was about 11 my parents stopped taking a great deal of interest in my educational pursuits. I had better scholarships to study Math and Computer Science than Biochemistry so I took the money would be why I went into Computer Science as a subject to study at university.

2. Partially planned and partially unexpected developments. I didn't know that I'd do so well in getting scholarships but it was nice. I also had some hard times in university with developments like dropping out of co-op for example that wasn't part of my initial plan. There were some 3rd and 4th year courses I had planned to take that weren't available when I would have taken them due to provincial cutbacks so there was some improvision there as well.

3. Well, initially Waterloo for Math and Computer Science wasn't one of my 3 choices for university. I had Waterloo, Western and Brock for biochemistry as my 3 choices initially but remembered that I had done so well in these Math contests that maybe that should be one of my choices. I also had to get used to not living at home and adjusting to life in a dorm. Having to justify my answer and dealing with a dramatic shift of my place in the class were a couple of other things I had to handle. In my frosh week I got my first Algebra assignment and it involved rings and other things that I hadn't really seen before. It was humbling to go from nearly top student to bottom of the class, but I survived. The co-op not working out would be another challenge I had as I had a horrible experience at Royal Bank for a couple of months back in 1994.

4. There are lots of changes affecting this field, which I'll constrain to Web Development since that is my area of expertise. There are new browsers like Chrome as well as new versions of IE and Firefox to discover how to handle quirks that each has in addition to using CSS, JavaScript and other standards that may not be universally the same,e.g. what looks good in IE may look like crap in Safari. There are also bigger trends like cloud computing, outsourcing and virtualization that may impact my work in various ways. There are also new practices being developed involving updating how to use Agile ideas and practices as where I work is trying to get more formal in their processes and this brings about some new challenges. Globalization has a role in this too but I've seen that for years as back in the early 2000s, the dot-com I worked had developers from Russia doing some work that I contributed.

5. My Bachelor's degree is a large part of the formal requirement for my job. However, there was also knowing HTML, JavaScript, C#, and other stuff that is part of my job that is my responbility to know and use. I've also had training on Sitecore 6.0 which is our new CMS that my current project uses that I have a certificate to show I did finisht the training for it. There have also been various consultants that have come in to help with other software like Coveo as well as a couple of guys from Thoughtworks to help boost our development skills here.

6. Apply for the job at a career fair. Answered the phone screen questions and went to the interviews.

7. Presently, I may get some support requests for areas where I worked so that is part of what I have to do. An e-mail gets sent into the support queue and someone assigns it to me and then I go and figure out what has to be done to fix it. On the other side is my development work which involves the new CMS that is still being put in place. This can involve new features, bug fixes or tasks for the project. Features are broken into stories which are bite-size chunks of work to get the desired functionality in place. Tasks are usually items relating to technical debt so that while there is a benefit, it isn't obvious to the product owner. Bug fixes should be obvious but if not, there is a piece of software we have where QA records various differences between desired functionality and current functionality that we have to resolve.

8. The stimulating aspects as figuring out how to get some things done. For example, how to do tagging, where you want a content item to be associated with a product or market in the system. How to code around matching up various tags and the pages that are the filters that rely on tagging. Integrating other systems like the search software or translation software has its moments of being challenging and stimulating as well. The most frustrating is when the business doesn't know what it wants and so we have to wait as otherwise we may build the wrong thing.

9. The skills are a mix of technical and non-technical. Knowing ASP.Net, C#, Sitecore, design patterns, SQL, XSLT, nAnt, nUnit, HTML, JavaScript, XML and CSS are all parts of what I'm currently using for technical things. Classic ASP, VB.Net, MS-SQL, and a few other things can be needed at times too as well as knowing how to pick something up from scratch as before this project I didn't know of jQuery but now I know some of it. Knowing Scrum, pair programming and various testing methodologies is also useful in my work. In terms of personal qualities, being a team player, having good communication skills, discipline to get the work done, pride in the work as that helps have a good quality when it is done, curious about how things work, analytical to know how to recommend a solution when multiple are possible to resolve something. Solving puzzles would be a leisure activity that is helpful for some of this. Playing card games with other people can also be useful to help keep some skills sharp.

10. When I started back in 1998, I was paid $32,500/year in American dollars. The current starting salary is something I have no idea but location may be important as I'd think a Web Developer in Windsor may not make as much as one in Toronto or Vancouver. As for average salary, almost any figure could make some sense as there is the question of whether you want to consider globally all software developers and whether you'd want an arithmetic mean, geometric mean, or median salary. If you took a geometric mean on a global scale, it would likely be a scary value given the tons of developers in Russia, China and India that would skew the results. By geometric mean, I mean taking the product of all salaries and then taking the n-th root of all those values which will likely be less than the arithmetic mean which is the sum divided by the number of items in the set.

11. Well, I'm likely more toward the senior end of the spectrum as I've been doing this for 12 years so I'm a bit of a old guy here in a sense. One could go on to do consulting where they teach others various practices or have classes like Jean-Paul Boodhoo does. There are also more techincal advancements like into architecture as well as general management within IS. Some may go on to be business analysts or quality analysts if they prefer that kind of work. I'd say that the outlook is good for the field if you don't mind rolling up your sleeves and doing some work. While some work will be done by those offshore, there is the need for some developers to be local and I don't really see this going away given how some people prefer to keep things close rather than try to outsource who makes the secret sauce that gives the company a competitive advantage.

I work for SMART Technologies in Calgary in their IS department, just to disclose where I work currently. Some of the above may be a little too advanced but if so, just let me know what needs rephrasing and I'll try to restate my answer to be a bit easier to understand.

[michaelp]

Your answers are great, thank you.

Also, I wouldn't have the time to make it up! It's due Friday, and I had a badminton tournament today(Wednesday), Math test Tuesday, Computer Science quiz tomrrow, and the Careers project and a History test for Friday.

Pretty sure I'll get a good mark though, since my careers teacher is one of our school's computer science teachers, and knows that I am good with computers. (He hasn't taught me Computer science though.

Again, thanks so much for your answers. Really appreciate it.

Edit: Also, name. If you can't reply by Friday, I'll have to make one up for you.

[jbking]

My legal name is John Brock King II, though I tend to go by J.B. unless legal names are required,e.g. if I'm dealing with lawyers.

[michaelp]

Thank you.