Some reasons to be excited about working as a dev in industry:

  • What you write gets used millions to trillions of times or more.
  • Every day has a new challenge and ways to show creativity.
  • You are never "on call" and hence no pager.1
  • You are the absolute highest tier of support.2
  • Aside from the occasional request above, you do not deal directly with support calls.3
  • You can listen to music while you work.
  • No GPA, scrambling to register for class, waiting hours in line to find out a book you need is out of stock.
  • Celebrate how all your teachers were wrong when they said "you will need these literature analysis skills in real life!!"
  • With a few keystrokes you can implement the next "new hotness", fix a long standing customer issue or raise the industry standard in your specific area.
  • Access to proprietary code.
  • Access to people with more experience who will show you cool new coding and design tricks.
  • Salary, vacation, benefits, perks.
  • Flexible hours.4
  • Certified smartness.5
  • Never have to grade tests, papers or code.6
  • Movie star celebrity status with your customers.7

This isn't meant to be a jab at other jobs, just a list of stuff I like having (and not having).

Notes:

1.       Ask a system administrator or any other support person if you do not know how much fun this is.

2.       This can be a good or bad thing, but I have generally enjoyed helping people solve problems that have even the most trained tech support individuals baffled. With access to source code and debuggers, it is much easier to see what exactly is happening internally and figure out why the bug is occurring and finally come up with a work around that works for the customer. Not all requests for support from devs have this glowy, happy ending but the ones that do make it a worthwhile effort.

3.       Mom, of course, is an exception to this.

4.       This is dependant on your company, manager and project. But generally it’s not like a retail position, where if you don’t clock in at 8 and leave by 5, or don’t schedule your lunch to work around everyone else’s, you’re in for a talking to.

5.       Public perception of smartness starts at Rocket Scientist, then “Brain” Surgeon, then Software Engineer.

6.       As a lab instructor at RIT, I loved to teach coding and loved answering questions about programming but I never found grading to be much fun.

7.       Walking down the street, people will be chanting your name in your head, but customers that love to use your product will love to ask you questions about it when they find out you wrote part of it.