If anyone could give me a little advice on carrer path

[Lia_owo]

Before I write this I'm sorry if this is not the place to ask this kind of question I'm just a little lost
Hey, I just reached 19 I finished school 5 months ago and got a job right after finishing school to save money for school whenever its for a degree or a couple of courses.

My problem is that for the last 5 months I've been thinking about what I do want to work as, I really like tech and its kinda the career path i want to take, i also enjoy playing with things like buildings pcs even to a custom level like metal work and chase metal work, i enjoy learning how things are designed and moving around as well.
I tried to do self thought python and i actually enjoyed it until i got to a point where i didn't know what to do and no one was there to teach me so i quit. *I didn't know who to even ask*
Same with networking, i did experience some server installment as my dad owns an office and when he bought all the server stuff the guy who installed them saw that I'm really interested in them so he was letting me help him and all, its kinda what i want to learn as well.

I'm just confused about what installing a server and making it run actually is like what do you actually do in that job. I tried searching online but couldn't really find anything so if anyone knows maybe what do they actually do, or any articles about it i would really appropriate it, i would also really appropriate if anyone could give me some advice about career path, im still pretty confused and i really wanted to go to the pre courses but sadly my work doesn't really let me have any off days.
 

Thanks ♥, sorry if some of my sentence don't make much sense my English is not the best.

and again im really sorry if this is not the place to ask

[Lurick]

I can't speak to a lot of it but the network and server side I can. Being a lab tech or data center tech (more common) isn't all that fun after a whiel, you rack and stack and plug in cables and that's about it. You don't really do anything on the configuration side, that's usually a network engineer or server admin who's going to go in and configure it and set it up or in some data centers you plug it in and a script takes care of all that, either adding it to a cluster of servers or bringing up more hosts for VMs, or whatever the business needs. Rack and stack isn't all that fun after a few months, I've been there as a lab person and sure it's nice to see all the gear but beyond that there isn't much too it, no challenge to learn and grow. Servers and network gear is just a box with blinking lights, being able to orchestrate an entire network deployment or server deployment and manage that or bring that up, problem solve when things break, question new designs and figure out if they are worth the time/money/energy, that's the fun stuff to me. There is nothing wrong starting out there though and lots of people have and I know several who were lab techs who make great engineers today so don't let me come off as saying "don't try to do this it's boring" because having the knowledge of how things physically work is important too to visualize things in the field.

 

I'm a network and validation engineer, I try to break stuff/problem solve/etc. every day for the most part and it's got its ups and downs but I still love what I do after almost 9 years on the job. Being able to teach yourself and knowing how to ask questions is integral in the field, google is your best friend for a lot of questions when you're just not 100% sure and being able to say "Well I tried x, y, and z and couldn't get this to work and I think a or b might be it but I'm not having much luck either, any tips or pointers" to another engineer as opposed to "I'm stuck, can you help" and them find out you haven't tried is detrimental for a lot of people because they just don't try to put themselves forward to fail and be open to learning new things. Never be afraid to ask the right questions or google the less important questions

[Fizzle]

First thing to understand is what ever path you take 90% of it is going to be drudgery, the trick is to find something where that last 10% is truly awesome.

 

IT has been largely commoditised and is rarely that stimulating these days. Tech support can be interesting to the right person though most of the time you will be just fixing the same 10 problems over and over.

 

IF python didn't put you off then programming is more lucrative than building servers but let me tell you about Cyber Security. Massively in demand. Seems mysterious. Actually dead easy to understand.

 

If you are the academic sort then university & a masters in Information Security is a good place to start. As I'm a brit something like this course is well respected. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/postgraduate/information-security/information-security/

 

If you are the more hands on techy sort then you my friend should become a hacker. Wait wait stay with me here. It is actually a respectable and legal job, open to anyone. You will probably need a suit at some point, no hoodies required.

 

Couple of ways to make money as a hacker:

1. Join a consultancy, becomes a penetration testers, get a salary, hack something new each week. After a few years you could be earning $$$$$$ (assuming you can find the bugs) Thought 5-10 years is more likely.

2. Go for bounties, no salary but, try several websites a week, get paid for results. Check out Bugcrowd or Hackerone for what is on offer but low end rewards for a critical bug are $2000 and I've seen people who make very respectable cash as freelancers this way but it is far more dependant on results.

All completely legal (because you got permission), you even have to pay your taxes.

 

Getting started.. google learn to hack, there is quite a lot out there. Fairly safe and easy place to start is https://google-gruyere.appspot.com/ some Google fellows made a vulnerable cheese shop to have a go at. There are a lot of sandboxes with instructions out there, very accessible and you can get quite competent on the free stuff. Lots of great communities. Try reddit.

My career path was, drop out of school .. twice. Find out most jobs are crap. Go back to school, do a computer science degree. Find IT is more dull than I thought. Do a masters in Information Security. Find I had a lot of free time. Get really good are World of Warcraft and learn to hack on the side. Applied to a large consultancy. Told them about my raid leading skills and the 25 man HC Lich King kill in the interview (yes I did put it on my CV, so many life skills in raiding). Got hired as a professional hacker. Got good at hacking. Got hired by a bank.

 

Good Luck

 

Edit: Oh yes and the number one rule of hack club is .. keep it legal, you will probably want to go for security clearance at some point, banks don't hire people with criminal records!

 

[Bombastinator]

The general rule is pick up every scrap of education you can stuff into yourself.  The younger you are the more generalized it is.  One kinda wild one is math.  Not everyone can do math and a lot of people can only do it up to a certain level.  The higher the level you can do though the more rarified the kind of work you can do and generally the higher paying it is. I topped out at calc for example.  Calc is kind of a break point for a lot of the sciences.  You can do it and you can be an engineer, or you can’t and you do something lower level.  There are some sciences where you can do things without being able to do calc.  Like some kinds of biology. 

Edited August 21, 2021 by Bombastinator

[Fizzle]

7 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Like some kinds of biology. 

Your not wrong about the maths. Friend of mine got a PhD in some deep biology field, still a lot of maths and stats courses required. She is making good money now... AS AN ACCOUNTANT!

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, Lurick said:

*snip

^^^ This is some great advice. Ive been doing datacenter hardware for 4 months and seriously within 3 weeks I was already bored out of my mind. Like so bored it makes you really depressed. I make $84k/yr but money is absolutely worthless when everyday is a boring boring grind of cabling a server, updating firmware, and doing the same shallow tasks that lead to nothing. I absolutely fucking hate it and want nothing more than to leave and do something I enjoy

[Bombastinator]

10 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

^^^ This is some great advice. Ive been doing datacenter hardware for 4 months and seriously within 3 weeks I was already bored out of my mind. Like so bored it makes you really depressed. I make $84k/yr but money is absolutely worthless when everyday is a boring boring grind of cabling a server, updating firmware, and doing the same shallow tasks that lead to nothing. I absolutely fucking hate it and want nothing more than to leave and do something I enjoy

Sounds like there’s a night school engineering degree in your future 

[BuckGup]

47 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Sounds like there’s a night school engineering degree in your future 

Actually working on moving into the cyber security team. I am infatuated with fraud and solutions work

[Lia_owo]

15 hours ago, Lurick said:

I can't speak to a lot of it but the network and server side I can. Being a lab tech or data center tech (more common) isn't all that fun after a whiel, you rack and stack and plug in cables and that's about it. You don't really do anything on the configuration side, that's usually a network engineer or server admin who's going to go in and configure it and set it up or in some data centers you plug it in and a script takes care of all that, either adding it to a cluster of servers or bringing up more hosts for VMs, or whatever the business needs. Rack and stack isn't all that fun after a few months, I've been there as a lab person and sure it's nice to see all the gear but beyond that there isn't much too it, no challenge to learn and grow. Servers and network gear is just a box with blinking lights, being able to orchestrate an entire network deployment or server deployment and manage that or bring that up, problem solve when things break, question new designs and figure out if they are worth the time/money/energy, that's the fun stuff to me. There is nothing wrong starting out there though and lots of people have and I know several who were lab techs who make great engineers today so don't let me come off as saying "don't try to do this it's boring" because having the knowledge of how things physically work is important too to visualize things in the field.

 

I'm a network and validation engineer, I try to break stuff/problem solve/etc. every day for the most part and it's got its ups and downs but I still love what I do after almost 9 years on the job. Being able to teach yourself and knowing how to ask questions is integral in the field, google is your best friend for a lot of questions when you're just not 100% sure and being able to say "Well I tried x, y, and z and couldn't get this to work and I think a or b might be it but I'm not having much luck either, any tips or pointers" to another engineer as opposed to "I'm stuck, can you help" and them find out you haven't tried is detrimental for a lot of people because they just don't try to put themselves forward to fail and be open to learning new things. Never be afraid to ask the right questions or google the less important questions

i was kinda thinking about the server building because atm i work at a minimum wage job, i tried to switch to sales to have more income but i don't got that type of personality, learning the course is 104 academic hours and i dont need to specifically go for a degree because my dad knows a lot of people that he can recommend me to. but i kinda get what you're saying building pc but having no room to do anything custom would also get boring for me.
I tried the google search of course and also discords servers and forums i think the main reason is because i wasn't really free i was learning a hour a day and sometimes missing up

 

14 hours ago, Fizzle said:

First thing to understand is what ever path you take 90% of it is going to be drudgery, the trick is to find something where that last 10% is truly awesome.

 

IT has been largely commoditised and is rarely that stimulating these days. Tech support can be interesting to the right person though most of the time you will be just fixing the same 10 problems over and over.

 

IF python didn't put you off then programming is more lucrative than building servers but let me tell you about Cyber Security. Massively in demand. Seems mysterious. Actually dead easy to understand.

 

If you are the academic sort then university & a masters in Information Security is a good place to start. As I'm a brit something like this course is well respected. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/postgraduate/information-security/information-security/

 

If you are the more hands on techy sort then you my friend should become a hacker. Wait wait stay with me here. It is actually a respectable and legal job, open to anyone. You will probably need a suit at some point, no hoodies required.

 

Couple of ways to make money as a hacker:

1. Join a consultancy, becomes a penetration testers, get a salary, hack something new each week. After a few years you could be earning $$$$$$ (assuming you can find the bugs) Thought 5-10 years is more likely.

2. Go for bounties, no salary but, try several websites a week, get paid for results. Check out Bugcrowd or Hackerone for what is on offer but low end rewards for a critical bug are $2000 and I've seen people who make very respectable cash as freelancers this way but it is far more dependant on results.

All completely legal (because you got permission), you even have to pay your taxes.

 

Getting started.. google learn to hack, there is quite a lot out there. Fairly safe and easy place to start is https://google-gruyere.appspot.com/ some Google fellows made a vulnerable cheese shop to have a go at. There are a lot of sandboxes with instructions out there, very accessible and you can get quite competent on the free stuff. Lots of great communities. Try reddit.

My career path was, drop out of school .. twice. Find out most jobs are crap. Go back to school, do a computer science degree. Find IT is more dull than I thought. Do a masters in Information Security. Find I had a lot of free time. Get really good are World of Warcraft and learn to hack on the side. Applied to a large consultancy. Told them about my raid leading skills and the 25 man HC Lich King kill in the interview (yes I did put it on my CV, so many life skills in raiding). Got hired as a professional hacker. Got good at hacking. Got hired by a bank.

 

Good Luck

 

Edit: Oh yes and the number one rule of hack club is .. keep it legal, you will probably want to go for security clearance at some point, banks don't hire people with criminal records!

 

That was pretty fun to read xd, I will give hacking a try in my home it sounds pretty fun to challenge my self with each project. 

I'll give it a try for a 2 weeks see how I handle it thx ♡

 

14 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The general rule is pick up every scrap of education you can stuff into yourself.  The younger you are the more generalized it is.  One kinda wild one is math.  Not everyone can do math and a lot of people can only do it up to a certain level.  The higher the level you can do though the more rarified the kind of work you can do and generally the higher paying it is. I topped out at calc for example.  Calc is kind of a break point for a lot of the sciences.  You can do it and you can be an engineer, or you can’t and you do something lower level.  There are some sciences where you can do things without being able to do calc.  Like some kinds of biology. 

I'm sadly pretty bad on math sadly, I'm sure that if I actually try I can succeed I never gave a thought about it in school.

Also yeah that's what I been doing with of the things I learnt online but online Is difficult to some point school is much easier, it feels like you have to go to school once you pay for it at least for me.

 

Thanks tho ♡

 

14 hours ago, BuckGup said:

^^^ This is some great advice. Ive been doing datacenter hardware for 4 months and seriously within 3 weeks I was already bored out of my mind. Like so bored it makes you really depressed. I make $84k/yr but money is absolutely worthless when everyday is a boring boring grind of cabling a server, updating firmware, and doing the same shallow tasks that lead to nothing. I absolutely fucking hate it and want nothing more than to leave and do something I enjoy

Right now I would say I make around 30ish k$ a year, I work 8 hours a day including Friday and Saturday which is weekend in my country and I hate my job customer service is not fun. I want to at least have smth that I can earn money to either learn or a buy house

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, Lia_owo said:

I'm sadly pretty bad on math sadly, I'm sure that if I actually try I can succeed I never gave a thought about it in school.

Also yeah that's what I been doing with of the things I learnt online but online Is difficult to some point school is much easier, it feels like you have to go to school once you pay for it at least for me.

 

Thanks tho ♡

A lot of it is certification.  Proof that you know or can do various things.  One way to go is ignore school (which is sort of a certification) but get certifications.  It seems I am going to have to get several in the near future. 

[Lia_owo]

30 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

A lot of it is certification.  Proof that you know or can do various things.  One way to go is ignore school (which is sort of a certification) but get certifications.  It seems I am going to have to get several in the near future. 

Do server installment or Noc engineer usually ask for math certifications ?

I dont mind taking some courses in math i would rather work in everything else then what im currently doing 

 

[Lia_owo]

6 hours ago, BuckGup said:

^^^ This is some great advice. Ive been doing datacenter hardware for 4 months and seriously within 3 weeks I was already bored out of my mind. Like so bored it makes you really depressed. I make $84k/yr but money is absolutely worthless when everyday is a boring boring grind of cabling a server, updating firmware, and doing the same shallow tasks that lead to nothing. I absolutely fucking hate it and want nothing more than to leave and do something I enjoy

btw if you thought your work is shit, i woke up at 6am getting to my work its now 8am when i entered the office, apperently my boss didnt read my msgs and said they signed me for 12pm to 8pm

so now i gotta wait here for 4 hours and then start working 

[Brooksie359]

11 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The general rule is pick up every scrap of education you can stuff into yourself.  The younger you are the more generalized it is.  One kinda wild one is math.  Not everyone can do math and a lot of people can only do it up to a certain level.  The higher the level you can do though the more rarified the kind of work you can do and generally the higher paying it is. I topped out at calc for example.  Calc is kind of a break point for a lot of the sciences.  You can do it and you can be an engineer, or you can’t and you do something lower level.  There are some sciences where you can do things without being able to do calc.  Like some kinds of biology. 

The ironic part is that even when you learn Calc and become an engineer you basically never end up using it depending on what you end up doing. For me personally I never use Calc in a practical sense but alot of the calculations I do are based on calculus. Me I just plug in numbers and hardly ever actually go into the niddy griddy of the math anymore. 

[Lia_owo]

2 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

The ironic part is that even when you learn Calc and become an engineer you basically never end up using it depending on what you end up doing. For me personally I never use Calc in a practical sense but alot of the calculations I do are based on calculus. Me I just plug in numbers and hardly ever actually go into the niddy griddy of the math anymore. 

that makes sense calcs dont make human mistakes 

but thank you i might do smth math or increse my resume 

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Lia_owo said:

that makes sense calcs dont make human mistakes 

but thank you i might do smth math or increse my resume 

Calculus not calculator the type of math used for finding the area under a curve. 

[Bombastinator]

7 hours ago, Lia_owo said:

Do server installment or Noc engineer usually ask for math certifications ?

I dont mind taking some courses in math i would rather work in everything else then what im currently doing 

 

I don’t know. The math thing is part of the way college works, rather than certification systems

[LogicalDrm]

@Lia_owo, couple of your posts have been merged. When replying to multiple members, please use the "multiquote" function (arrow with plus sign). Keeps things tidyer.

[Lia_owo]

8 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

@Lia_owo, couple of your posts have been merged. When replying to multiple members, please use the "multiquote" function (arrow with plus sign). Keeps things tidyer.

kk will do ^-^

[A51UK]

This want I did, I love computer when I was kid and still do, but did not really know what to do in it. So I start a computer science degree that more or less the same in the first year but you can pick a route after first year, It give you a should an idea what area in computing you really into. The degree had two routes one was network / server and the other was software developer. I found network really boring in year one but love software developer, so want that rote for next two years.  

 

There a lot in computing more than just programming or network / server, a computer science degree show you a lot more and help you more them people who did not do one. 

[Bombastinator]

26 minutes ago, A51UK said:

This want I did, I love computer when I was kid and still do, but did not really know what to do in it. So I start a computer science degree that more or less the same in the first year but you can pick a route after first year, It give you a should an idea what area in computing you really into. The degree had two routes one was network / server and the other was software developer. I found network really boring in year one but love software developer, so want that rote for next two years.  

 

There a lot in computing more than just programming or network / server, a computer science degree show you a lot more and help you more them people who did not do one. 

College route means math. Calculus is often a weeder course.  Get past calc and things actually get easier.  The break point with creative vs merely carry and plug seems to be engineer, and you need calc for that, so with the university route calculus seems to be the thing to aim at, unless you’re already past it.

[A51UK]

4 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

College route means math. Calculus is often a weeder course.  Get past calc and things actually get easier.  The break point with creative vs merely carry and plug seems to be engineer, and you need calc for that, so with the university route calculus seems to be the thing to aim at, unless you’re already past it.

This is not all true, I did not do any Calculus when doing a BSc or on the MSc. We did do some maths much of it was base on logic.  

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, A51UK said:

This is not all true, I did not do any Calculus when doing a BSc or on the MSc. We did do some maths much of it was base on logic.  

My knowledge may be old. Calculus used to be a thing that couldn’t be done with a calculator and needed a mainframe. I could see that changing things.  May depend a lot on where you go.  

[The_russian]

4 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

College route means math. Calculus is often a weeder course.  Get past calc and things actually get easier.  The break point with creative vs merely carry and plug seems to be engineer, and you need calc for that, so with the university route calculus seems to be the thing to aim at, unless you’re already past it.

Most degrees I’ve seen recently don’t require Calc unless it’s something like mechanical engineering, highest I went is Pre-Calc. 

[Bombastinator]

36 minutes ago, The_russian said:

Most degrees I’ve seen recently don’t require Calc unless it’s something like mechanical engineering, highest I went is Pre-Calc. 

Always struck me as a strange requirement. A structural engineer would need calc too.  The eee engineers I know had to have calc but they’re old so it may have been a holdover.  I can see how calculus would be needed for something like chip or circuit design though.  Minimum materials and whatnot.

[wasab]

There are many areas you can go into if you are interested in computers. You can work with hardwares which isn't something I can comment on too much because I have little experiences with them. The few experiences I have with hardwares are just some basic adreno boards I did back in college for learning about combinational/sequential circuits. 

 

For softwares however I can offer some perspective. Personally, in the past, I had experiences with android mobile app development, Unix development in C and POSIX apis, and web development: both backend and front end as well as some databases and Linux server administration. 

Android app development is entirely self taught, I really enjoyed it.

 

Unix development is something I learned in college. You can unofficially self teach yourself the exact same thing with free online materials tho(just search Introduction to Computer Systems from Carnegie Mellon). I also enjoyed this. I understood much better how operating system, well Linux system in my case, function from an application developer perspective. 

 

Web development is just meh. I don't like this too much for various reasons. I learned this in college as well but honestly, YouTube tutorials and some online courses from Udemy teach these materials far better because online tutorials of them is literally everywhere and many are high qualities. You shouldn't learn this from schools anyways because they will become out of date quicker then they can be taught. Even my professors realized this enough that he mostly just talked about how internet and cloud works on a high/surface level and let us do all the self teaching on the nitty gritty implementations from YouTube videos or any other online/outside resources. 

 

What's funny is that companies nowadays mostly whiteboard you with leetcode style challenges on technical interviews so none of the above knowledges matter in such scenerios. Leetcode questions are boring as hell too. To get good at these, you need to have good knowledges of alogrithms and data structures which are real unsexy compared to the more interesting areas of software development, which is simply building cool softwares. However this is one area in which formal education might be a better fit instead of experimenting/learning on your own because the subject is very academic and math focus. 

 

As for what you will actually be doing on the job... Well, depends on the role. I am front end developer writing mostly react applications, a few python scripts here and there for DevOps, also some php for a few ecommerce platforms. I work with Amazon AWS because that is what my company used for web hosting. What you see on YouTube isn't too far off, although there are meetings and business related things which you won't see on a YouTube tutorials/Udemy videos. Like I said, I think web development is just meh. I dislike js, php, python and all these dynamic typed languages which I used for my daily work. Java and writing console applications in C is something I enjoy far more. I don't think my job is boring tho because the project I am working on is pretty cool. Oh, I work from home and I stare at a computer screen for 8 hours a day. If this doesn't sound fun to you, consider something that is more hardware focus.