What is the best career route for someone sick of testing

processzombie

Hello, I have need of some general career advice, specifically hoping that someone could describe to me in depth what it is like to work in the top IT fields I am aware of (development, networking, security, linux), and which one's would be the best fit for my personality. I am interested in learning about the technical aspect of each career path, but am also interested in what the political/social environments are like, how competitive they are, and just the general experience of what it is like to work in each of these fields.
I originally wanted to be a developer, but now I am wondering, I tried to be a developer but got moved to testing. I do love to code, but am now wondering if that career path is going to be too much for me to handle. The reason is that with development, it seems like job performance is more open to interpretation, as multiple people review (and have power over) my code, which is very frustrating. I would think that in other fields with more of an operational bend, less people will be asking you questions as long as your configuration is working and it doesn't break. Things are clear cut, which will be better for my long term mental health

Please let me know if I'm dead wrong. If someone has time to describe their experience in the other tech fields, it would really help me out. Thank you so much.

jcundiff

QA and Change Control are going to be part of IT regardless of which career path you choose. Things in IT (like life) are never black and white... there are 100+ shades of gray in between. You are always going to have to be able to explain your self and your actions even if your configs are good. You are always going to have leadership above you questioning why you did what you did and how you did it. just the nature of the beast

scaredoftests

I also think it is the type of company or boss you work for. In addition, I agree with @jcundiff.

processzombie

Thank you very much for your replies. You are correct, I'll never be able to completely avoid questions from leadership. I'm realizing this now.

But what about the work itself? Are the results of good configs immediately apparent? Also, I would think that other fields have a requirement of memory and repetition. Not that development also doesn't require this, but more creativity and refinement are involved. I believe my personality more fits into the land of "this is your job, you're supposed to know how to configure this because you are certified, now do it." This makes a lot more sense to me and is easier to wrap my head around.

What is the security field like? I'm assuming it can get very frightening if there is a security breach.

Is networking a work with your hands job? What's it like to work in a back server room? My guess is like, the server goes down, the customers start calling, you go over the logs and find out if you can fix the problem from the server, or you need to go out to the customer location and fix something.

Anyway its like I'm looking for something like, if you have the education, you know what to do.

Again thank you all for your time, it was very helpful so far.

yoba222

People are going to be people no matter where you work. Sometimes that certain combination of people get together and terrible things happen no matter what the field. That's just life.

jcundiff

processzombie wrote: »

Thank you very much for your replies. You are correct, I'll never be able to completely avoid questions from leadership. I'm realizing this now.

But what about the work itself? Are the results of good configs immediately apparent? Also, I would think that other fields have a requirement of memory and repetition. Not that development also doesn't require this, but more creativity and refinement are involved. I believe my personality more fits into the land of "this is your job, you're supposed to know how to configure this because you are certified, now do it." This makes a lot more sense to me and is easier to wrap my head around.

What is the security field like? I'm assuming it can get very frightening if there is a security breach.

Is networking a work with your hands job? What's it like to work in a back server room? My guess is like, the server goes down, the customers start calling, you go over the logs and find out if you can fix the problem from the server, or you need to go out to the customer location and fix something.

Anyway its like I'm looking for something like, if you have the education, you know what to do.

Again thank you all for your time, it was very helpful so far.

Sounds like you are looking for help desk/NOC/SOC with no desire to go beyond... these are entry level jobs and at best pay is going to top out in the 50s (top out, not start out) Most Networking jobs require you to review what you are doing before you do it... those 'configs' are going to be a change and as such will be thoroughly questioned (vetted) in a change control meeting before implementation at least... most orgs, you are going to have to test, be peer reviewed, go to the change board for approval, then implement in test environment before you even think about pushing it to production... security is going to be questioned even more so due to its nature.

Sorry, this is not the answer you are looking for, just the hard facts of our profession

beads

As far as security goes your going to have to be more specific as security is actually huge field and one that everyone practices but few concentrate.

Depending on what your doing in security and the type of framework your working with HIPAA fines start at 10k a record while the GDPR (Europe) fines start at a cool 11.8 million per breach. Both regimes ramp up the pressure a bit but it depends on the culture and fit of the organization.

If your good with coding, QA and writing reports why not look at penetration testing. Basically the same fundamentals just a different venue. Also meet many burned-out ex-penetration testers who went back to doing coding as well.

Forensics/Incident Handling would be more hands off but is almost a sideline in security these days above helpdesk with similar pay.

That's just off the top of my head. We would need a bit more information to help but that's a start.

- b/eads

TheFORCE

To add to that most servers are now virtualized, you dont visit the server room much and you dont manually restart a machine or swap a drive. So you actually need a lot of extensive knowledge. You dont want to be the guy that configures S3 and leaves the passwords and keys in the config files like the Viacom engineer did.