As a member of small teams, I had significant responsibility. Whether driving progress by organizing meetings or maintaining/creating/understanding a large percentage of specific technical information, I often had such responsibilities. Sometimes I was the only person working on technical aspects...
@Mike I actually hope so, I absolutely LOVE the work I'm doing now and if I can keep doing it indefinitely it would be great (I'm technically on a 6-8 month assignment)
@Mike I have software background but am working in an engineering organization (so no other software people at all) basically implementing a system for them
from a career perspective I think I want to basically be able to quickly prototype projects for people to help them actually define what they want (lol stakeholders think they know what they want lol) more quickly and help their projects succeed instead of all being ridiculous trainwrecks of back/forth when people realize they had no clue what they wanted when they wrote "specs"
I for some ridiculous reason like working directly with end-users and helping them figure out what they want - as long as I can do prototype work to help them figure out functionality/processes, I have no interest in being a BA and doing BS work
@enderland If it's a niche market give yourself a consultant title and quadruple your rates. You'll get to do the same thing for more money and nobody will question you.
Interestingly enough my wife is a banker and is currently looking at a position where she'd get to travel and be the go-between for a set of programmers and various banks as they implement loan systems. Her techno-babble brought a tear to my eye.
From her chatting with the organization it seems like a position they have a hard time filling as well. Nobody wants to be the person that has to be half tech half customer support.
I'm also at a non-tech shop where I'm essentially the entire IT department (have one other person but he hasn't written code in probably 20 years so and has no sysadmin type experience). One of my favorite things is because we're not a software shop I get a lot of varied projects and really get to pick my own stacks.
@Mike yeah this is because in my experience, most developers want to code all day and not deal with stupid people (which many stakeholders are, more just ignorant since they have no clue how to develop) which means you get people who are totally and utterly incompetent trying to manage software projects
plus as people who are remotely competent at development you can basically pick a job you want to do as long as you are ok with moving or perhaps lower pay
also for the record it's great when you are worried about how to implement something and then realize you already wrote a generic method to do it. There are some things in coding which just are wonderful feelings, this is one of them to me - more sweet when it's 30 min before you are planning on leaving :-)
a wonderful feeling indeed, I will say I really wish I had at least one other developer to keep me in line though, I find it hard to police my own code
@Mike same. that's why I chill here, people here are so much more knowledgeable and experienced than me and it's awesome (I'm having to learn database stuff too and dba.SE is equally helpful)
"Read a text file, do something to it, save it" I know! I'll use a message bus, persistent queue to back it up, IOC container to go ahead and locate everything for me. In fact I should go ahead and make a library that has all of this ready to go. And a library for that text file. On top of that I really need to abstract the idea of the filesystem...
I am starting to program and I am wondering what are ALL the steps I need to take to be able to write a program all by myself.
The Whiteboard
The Whiteboard