Programming as a job task

tsimmns

So I'm current trying to finish up my degree in CIS from Thomas Edison State University as this was the fastest and cheapest route to go. My question is, one of the requirements is a programming class in C or better. I'm debating taking it through Straighterline and saving money and time. While it might not be the best method for actually learning to program in a month, for those of you that work system admin, help desk, or network engineer jobs does programming come into play? At work level and hob would you actually need to be an astounding programmer?

Kreken

While you don't need to be a programmer, knowing how to program is very beneficial. As either sysadmin or network engineer, you may be asked to write scripts to automate certain tasks. There are quite a few job postings for a network engineer which require scripting knowledge.

In C programming class, you will touch the basis of OOP. C in general is a very good language to lay the foundation with.

OctalDump

Yep. Being a good sys admin, net engineer etc means automating what can be automated. This is usually done with scripting languages, most of which are "c like". C and its descendants (c++, c#, objective c, et al) are everywhere. So if you 'get' C, you are more than halfway to understanding these other languages.

The other thing it helps with is understanding how all this computer stuff works under the hood. One programming class isn't going to get you all the way there - computer architectures, OS design, memory virtualisation, data structures, algorithm theory etc etc - but will open your eyes somewhat.