I’m a little over half done my CS degree. I love programming, Linux, etc. I am considering getting CompTIA A+ and Linux+ this summer with pirated Udemy courses. I do coding projects too, like I am almost done my homebrew NDS game, threw together a Tkinter pomodoro app last week, and in the past I made a command line program that computes a readability score on a body of text. Finally, I am participating in 100 days of leetcode problems together with my CS club. So I’ve done a lot to move towards coding professionally.
The question is what kind of career should I go for to suite my goals in life. I would like to be able to own a place to live in Quebec (don’t live there yet) whether it is in MTL or a rural area, not sure what I want yet. So software dev. gets a point for higher income, I think, plus it’s what I’ve studied for, mostly. But it’s important to me too that I have free time outside of work and so can participate in social movements. Would working in helpdesk allow a better or worse WLB? Would it be more likely to be unionized and thus a better place from which to participate in tech labour struggle? I’d really like to achieve fluency in French and Chinese (currently a beginner and intermediate learner respectively) eventually, and maybe the IT world would have me talk to people more. Is it easier to break into than software, like, so much easier that it would be worth changing course, or just doing IT as a stepping stone for my first co-op (internship program in Canada) or two?
Interested in others thoughts on how to proceed here.
For the meantime I think I’ll start the A+ course because it can’t hurt, and keep working on my DS game, cuz it’s almost done.
I don’t even know if I want to do either of those professions, I could see myself teaching English too, to Francophones and Chinese especially as I want to learn those languages…
To start with I’ll answer your specific questions
Would working in helpdesk allow a better or worse WLB? This is very company dependent. In general though developers are usually able to clock out more often at the end of the day. If you go SysAdmin/DevOps/SRE when things break in the night it is you who gets the call. Again this varies wildly between companies, I’m in a DevOps/SRE role and have had that at 3 different places, one there was zero after hours calls, one was multiple times a week, and one was once or twice every quarter. So keep that in mind.
Would it be more likely to be unionized and thus a better place from which to participate in tech labour struggle?
Tech really isn’t unionized much. Helpdesk while often the seemingly most likely to unionize has the issue of people move up and out quickly and tech workers in general can move to new companies if they don’t like something and that is often easier than unionizing. To also echo @[email protected] the leftists on the more infra side are few and far between. It draws a lot of loners and reactionary people, the musk fanboy types.
Is it easier to break into than software, like, so much easier that it would be worth changing course, or just doing IT as a stepping stone for my first co-op (internship program in Canada) or two? It is easier in the sense that helpdesk is a grind(they call it helldesk for a reason) and places are always hiring. Pay will be terrible and you’ll be grinding some boring work unless you put in extra hours to move up and show you know stuff, or at least that is the general path. Lucking out into a SysAdmin role or a role doing interesting work is about the same difficulty as breaking into a software development role. There are usually less positions on the infra side, but also less people doing it.
As for my advice, you are still in school so keep learning. Use this time to try some new things to figure out what you’d enjoy more. Both roles are in demand and can have comfortable salaries. If you are thinking about linux and sysadmin work try standing up a small web server on one of the cheap cloud providers and see what it is like, then automate it. Once you’ve done that maybe play with some docker containers. As for an internship I’d suggest sticking with software development as it is more in line with your degree for the time being, if you are doing multiple internships(like one each year) then maybe consider looking for a more infra focused one if you don’t enjoy the development side