Before I came into the job I now have, I was a database administrator in the military for eight years.
Early into my military career, I was advised by other peers that I needed to take advantage of military assistance and the GI Bill and work on my degree in case anything were to ever happen.
I took their advice and 6 months before my medical discharge, I graduated with a degree in computer science.
Now, I am a software architect in the steel industry with approximately 12 years of experience in software development and IT.
In my current, civilian job position, I manage a co-development project between an offshore software development company and an internal software development team.
My job consists of meeting with various stakeholders of the company, taking their requests and turning them into functional software.
One of the biggest misunderstandings about software development and software architects is that our job is relatively difficult.
Most people do not realize how much effort and work goes into taking their business processes and turning them into software.
When it comes to job satisfaction, I am overall, pretty happy and pleased with my job.
I truly love what I do, but it comes at a cost.
It is difficult to find balance in the software development world between work and personal life.
This is especially true in as the steel industry that never stops.
As the business evolves, so must we.
This causes a never ending road of software releases.
I love my job.
I have always loved the challenge of software development.
My current position as a software architect is relatively new to me and it is a brand new challenge.
Although, new challenges excite me, I feel that I really liked programming better than leading programmers.
One thing that is somewhat unique about my situation in the military and civilian life is that I basically maintained the same job during and after the military.
I know this is not always possible for most people.
I guess you could say, I got lucky.
I started writing software in high school.
At the time it was mostly science projects.
I think the seed of love for programming was planted then.
It definitely can seem mundane to some people, but to me you can solve one problem in millions of different ways.
That makes this job really interesting.
If I could go back and do anything differently I would have probably focused in on Artificial Intelligence.
As a programmer, it is difficult to not be interested in that.
It really is the future of computing.
One of the hardest lessons that I had to learn when going from the military work force into the civilian workforce is that not everyone was meant to be trusted.
Having come from the military I kind of assumed that people would treat each other the same way they did in the civilian world.
I put way to much faith in some people at work that inevitably lead to me being blamed for things I didn't do.
Transitioning from the military, I always believed that the corporate world was this strange place where the grass was always greener.
The most important thing I have learned since school is that simply working hard is not enough to succeed.
A lot of my success comes from my ability to sell myself and my accomplishment to my superiors.
Being in this field makes me find myself in odd situations more than I ever imagined.
For example, a horrible decision was made recently that ended up turning into the best decision.
We had to make a split second decision on how to handle a bug in our software.
Almost immediately after we applied the patch to the software I knew we had made a huge mistake.
The strangest thing about it is that it actually corrected a few more bugs than designed and ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made.
I get up every day and go to work for the challenge each day presents.
The company I work for is in start-up mode and everything changes.
I think my proudest moment in my current job cannot be summed up in one particular moment.
It is every day.
Every day I find a unique way to solve every challenge presented to me.
The biggest and most frustrating challenge at my company is the politics.
It is difficult to get much work done when you feel like you constantly have to prepare ways to prove that you are doing your job.
My job is extremely stressful and I definitely have not found a way to maintain a good balance.
It is something that I struggle with every day.
I find it is extremely difficult to let go of work and thinking about it when I come home.
At the moment, I am being paid about what an average software architect in my area gets paid.
That being said, however, with the work load I have, it does not seem like enough.
Another thing that could change is vacation time.
I have not taken a vacation in 6 months.
I get roughly two weeks a year paid vacation, which is the same that an administrative assistant without a college degree gets.
To work in the software industry as a programmer, developer or architect, you have to have a college education.
The most important skill you can have is a desire to learn and a tenacity to keep fighting in any situation for solutions.
I think the military helped me the most with all of this.
I got my degree while on service and I learned to always evolve with the situation because of the military.
If I were recommending this line of work to a friend, I would tell them to always do what you say you are going to do and always do it the same way every time.
IT is a 24/7 job and it is better to spend the extra time doing something right than to constantly suffer through bad software because of shortcuts.
If it were up to me in the future, I would like to be in charge of a large software development project and possibly a software development company.