IT career advice needed - what to learn?

[Ethilrist]

Yeah, but that’s why they pay you the big bucks.

[edwardcoast]

@filmore

To be honest, I don’t see programming as a viable career for you. Being a good programer takes a certain personality. It’s not just a matter of learning certain skills, it’s a way of thinking.

It would be like if I said, “I’ve never played music before, but I see that rock stars make a lot of money. What are some good chords to learn so I can make a living as a musician?” Certainly I could learn to play, but people who had a natural gift for music would play so much better than me that they would get all the paying gigs. It’s the same way with programming. The people who have a natural tendency to be programmers will be so much better than you that it’s not likely you’d get hired as a programmer–especially starting so late.

However, there are many, many other ways to make money in IT without programming skills. The easiest way is probably to get into an area that does testing. You won’t need to program. You’ll need to be familiar enough with computers and the task so you can setup and run testcases. Some programming skill can be useful to automate some tasks, but in general you don’t have to be a coder to be a tester.

What I would recommend is look to see what the IT companies around you are hiring for in non-programming jobs–testing, documentation, usability, support, etc. See what tools or languages they need and get familiar with them as much as you can. It sounds like you have friends in those companies. Ask them if they know of any jobs.

One thing about working with computers–it’s all about solving problems. All day long, you’re trying to get stuff working and figuring out why stuff that’s supposed to work doesn’t work. You cannot be a person who gets easily frustrated. You can easily spend all day on a problem like trying to figure out why some text is showing up as blue instead of red. If you don’t enjoy problem solving, working in IT isn’t for you.

Very good advice! I would also like to add, that in IT there are jobs in sales, help desk and other supporting roles which don’t involve actual programming. Just knowledge of the computers and applications. Since you have worked a professional musician, I’d think your performance skills would be a great asset for sales and help desk since you have to deal with people and communicate with them. Also, you most likely have very good interview skills and that’s very important too. Especially in IT, where many are introverts.

The other thing to keep in mind, is a huge project of something like 300 people, there are only a small percentage that just do coding all day and everyday. Many are involved in other supporting tasks for IT which aren’t nearly as technical as coding.

[Nava]

@bump

A slight dissenting voice here… QA needs a particular mindset FAR more than programming does. QA is that branch of IT that embraces tedium and doing the same shit over and over, to see where something will break.

Not over and over… over and over changing one detail. Then another detail.

Usually I’m the only person in my teams who has any actual training in test design; some have encountered multivariant design previously, but it’s two tops, so I have to explain it. Hopefully one of the Big Bosses gets it and we get to do it. The designs people normally want to go to are the exhaustive types where if you have a process with 10 steps, and each process has three possible options, your design involves going through each of the possible combinations:

aaaaaaaaaa
baaaaaaaaa
caaaaaaaaa
abaaaaaaaa
…

I get tired just thinking of it; I’d be wanting to gouge my eyes out by the 15th step. Yet I’ve even had customers who insisted that testing the new production system had to involve running a production order for each of their 450+ products, rather than running one for each type of order on one hand and checking your master data (product specs etc) on the other.

(Multivariant design, in this case, means choosing a few combinations which cover all possibilities for each step, but also which correspond to situations you can actually encounter; then you fill up some other cases to look at interactions. For example, aaaaaaaaaa, bbbbbbbbbb and cccccccccc don’t cover all possible interactions but do cover all basic options; if it turns out you’ll never do cccccccccc but you will do cccaccccbc then you do this one instead and add some cases where you do c in 4 and where you do c in 9).

I’ve met many people in my field (functional consultants; we’re IT according to the end users and no-way-IT according to the Networks guys and the programmers) who joined it in their 40s or even later; I was 33 when I got made one through an internal promotion and 36 when I signed my first contract as one.

[Ethilrist]

@bump

A slight dissenting voice here… QA needs a particular mindset FAR more than programming does. QA is that branch of IT that embraces tedium and doing the same shit over and over, to see where something will break.

Also bear in mind, OP is a musician… this might be the PERFECT IT job.