What do I do with my career considering recession everywhere and dislike for my current job?

Question

I work for a very good company and my salary is very competitive considering my less experience and pay structure followed in my country - India.

I have 2 years of full time experience. In addition to that I did 2 internships, 6 months each, 1 in my company using C++ and the other in a very good semiconductor company on ETL development using Oracle, PL/SQL and .NET.

After my internships, I always wanted to work in a product development team, coding, which will improve my coding/language skills. But unfortunately, I did not know the profile better and since I was a campus/college recruit and the company was very good and pay was awesome, I took the job.

But later when I started working, I realised it has more to do with support kind of work, with no develoment work. But that wasn't too easy for me, so initially it was interesting as I got to see state of the art systems and the power to manage those under my hands with which I felt proud and happy for some time. Then after about 7 months of work, when I approached my manager about Team/Group change, I was told about company policies when it comes to changing teams and he said I should wait a little longer. During that time, I got a chance to go to the US for a business visit to start a new support team in India and I felt very happy for that. So I went there and somehow I got so much interest and again came back to India and did good work for another 8 months. I got an above average increment and also a surprise midterm raise. After some time, I found that my work was not very interesting and I had very little, ugly support work to do since our counterpart team did most of the job which were due to many factors, 1 person was also chucked out from my team.

So I started looking for options in my company in the development arena, but there were no openings (or) I couldn't even know one opening as they were very limited and getting filled internally. So I applied outside for development jobs outside, but did not have any luck. I did attend many interviews and also did well after good preparation, but I wasn't lucky. I have been hunting for a job for almost 4 months and not even got one. I am very depressed right now and I feel it has already started to show on my performance in the current job. I have reached he saturation point that I cannot work do this work any longer.

I also fear that my support profile for 2 years will stop companies from looking into me as a developer, but I have good aptitude and coding, language skills. I even cleared went through all the rounds in a very good company for a development job, but I was rejected due to my non-interest towards doing support cum development, which was due to ambiguity in their JD and my misunderstanding.

I am not sure about how to approach this scenario. Please help!

Answer 1

If I were you I would find a job which will pay your bills, then use your spare time to create the kind of software you love.

This way, you don't have any concerns about paying your rent and you also get to work in the field you enjoy working in most.

If you don't have any ideas about where to start, you could get involved in an open source project like Firefox.

Answer 2

You're from France?

Doing "no-dev" work is dangerous since you can join the ranks of those who have many years of experience but not much of experience. Will be difficult to find a good job then.

Basically, I'm in the same boat. Thinking of publishing my resume on monster and registering on linkedin. May harvest something.

Answer 3

Keep your current job. Talk to your bosses about your desire to do more development, and see if they do anything to make things better. In the meantime, search for a new one, which better fits what you want to do. Things might take a while, but don't let that get you down. Even if it takes you a year to find the right job, well, that is better than the year having passed and your not having found the right job.

Answer 4

Friends that know you and your quality of work in the industry you want to switch to will be your best ally. Send them an email asking for recommendations for people to talk to and companies they might know of that are hiring, or looking for good programmers to talk to. Companies don't have to have an "opening" for you to apply based on a recommendation.

Write a good cover letter, explaining your love for software, and how it's been your life-long dream to work on a great programming team, and how you accepted support jobs as a way to jump from one industry to another.

Mention in your resume any open-source project you've been involved in. If you haven't been involved in any, find some and join. Become friends with the developers. They will often be tied to other people in the programming industry, and will recommend you based on your open source work.

Answer 5

Volunteer! Enhance your portfolio, make new networking contacts, and sharpen your skills in a way that will not require you to quit your current job. Something will come along, eventually, and you'll be well prepared for it.

Answer 6

Employers look positively on prior experience and ESPECIALLY good on examples. Do volunteer work for not-for-profits and build a portfolio. Build a site that showcases your talents, keep your resume up to date and work on emergent techologies (CSS, AJAX, jQuery, PHP, javascript, whatever you want to work with).

Look for major companies who are looking to fill developer positions. The major companies can spend money for newbies who can develop skills over time. Smaller companies have to squeeze every bit out of their developers, and don't make good jumping-off points.

Job search sites like monster help as well, occasionally you'll get a call because of them!

Answer 7

Make the support into a plus by showing in your cover letter how doing support has helped you in being better at the design stage of development work. Show how you have learned better design from the problems encountered in maintenance. Best if you can give a specific example of a poor design choice that you improved to make the system not only work better but be easier to maintain. If you go the open source route to get development experience (and that is a good suggestion), then relate what you learned in your support job to how it improved your ability to do dev work in the open source project. This shows that while yes you have been doing support, you are taking it the one step farther by using it as tool to help you think of ways to be better at development.