I have a degree in information systems which was a mix between business and IT. While I in my initial job search was really close on heading in the direction of becoming a developer, I instead landed a role as a business systems analyst as well as working with digital transformation. So basically I’m in the land between IT and the business. I do some super light programming for the platform I’m responsible for but I feel like it’s the kind of stuff you could learn in a day. I know some basic Java, Python and C# but not really enough that I’d see me landing a job that isn’t a trainee developer position or a job for newly-grads where the company doesn’t expect you to know anything at first.

While I don’t mind the social and more business-oriented aspects of the job, I’m kinda lamenting the fact that I didn’t enter into some trainee/junior dev job to sharpen up my programming skills and become a fully-fledged developer. I’d love to work fully remote and to be more flexible, e.g., not as bound to meetings and stuff which I currently am, or become a freelancer. Has anyone made a similar transition from digital transformation/adjacent areas to becoming a developer? Or am I just thinking too narrowly on what my options in this field are? Maybe there are many opportunities for fully-remote work in digital transformation, business system analysis and what not that I’m not seeing…?

  • invertedspear
    1·
    15 days ago

    Yes, it is by far the most flexible, and as a developer you are called on to do everything associated with development in the interests of cost savings and down sizing. I’m sure that this isn’t every company and maybe it’s a bit of a rant, but there was once a day where I wrote code, and it worked, and I then went in to write more code, repeat. Now as companies “streamline” a development team of 5 people may also be asked to do:

    • test writing
    • infrastructure/ ops
    • scrum master
    • business analyst
    • product owner
    • project manager
    • DBA
    • release manager
    • tier x support

    The part that gets annoying is when doing all these other jobs, there’s no time to write code, so I have to constantly call out that we’re behind with project x because my entire team is busy not being developers more than half the time. Flexibility is great when someone leaves and you have a hole to fill for a bit, but when those jobs never get filled, it gets real old real quick.