Re: Freedom through Frugality: Sabaka's Journal
Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2023 8:51 pm
Hey Sabaka. Probably quite belated in terms of how it feels in your life but:
- Sorry to hear you felt you had to drop from the Army. I left the RN after a fairly short stint too (about 5 years in my case) but, like you, not in the way I would have chosen. You may wish to consider joining the Int Corps as a reservist, if you haven't already, on account of your linguistic aptitude.
- However, it sounds like this has also all turned out to be a classic case of "when one door closes, another door opens". I'm delighted to hear everything going so well for you, and congrats on your engagement
- If I can offer any advice on your tech career, being at a similar stage of seniority, it's that testers always seem to be the poor cousins of developers, even if they do nearly 100% coding/automation tasks. As a developer myself, I'm biased, but I'd recommend a pivot into dev work if you can find a suitable opening. Even if your desire is to do SRE/DevOps, coming from dev feels easier than coming from test. A good chunk of my dev work is to use Terraform to create infrastructure (admittedly all AWS so not as intense as managing traditional infrastructure) and have found this experience to be one of the things that is now starting to open doors to higher pay; that and having some demonstrable experience of cloud-first system design. If you can get that experience as a tester, great, but I haven't seen this sort of task be given to testers in the places I've worked
- Sorry to hear you felt you had to drop from the Army. I left the RN after a fairly short stint too (about 5 years in my case) but, like you, not in the way I would have chosen. You may wish to consider joining the Int Corps as a reservist, if you haven't already, on account of your linguistic aptitude.
- However, it sounds like this has also all turned out to be a classic case of "when one door closes, another door opens". I'm delighted to hear everything going so well for you, and congrats on your engagement
- If I can offer any advice on your tech career, being at a similar stage of seniority, it's that testers always seem to be the poor cousins of developers, even if they do nearly 100% coding/automation tasks. As a developer myself, I'm biased, but I'd recommend a pivot into dev work if you can find a suitable opening. Even if your desire is to do SRE/DevOps, coming from dev feels easier than coming from test. A good chunk of my dev work is to use Terraform to create infrastructure (admittedly all AWS so not as intense as managing traditional infrastructure) and have found this experience to be one of the things that is now starting to open doors to higher pay; that and having some demonstrable experience of cloud-first system design. If you can get that experience as a tester, great, but I haven't seen this sort of task be given to testers in the places I've worked