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…
I’m going to recommend you become a sysadmin. I work for a Marxist political party in Europe and we can always find developers, but infra people like network engineers or sysadmins with a leftist mindset are almost impossible to find. And there is a lot of beautiful FOSS out there already but you need people at the helpdesk and sydadmins to get it adopted by users in an organization. Otherwise your movement will get lured into a Google or Microsoft ecosystem.
Being a sysadmin is a lot less sexy but I feel we have a lot of people developing open source already, and not nearly enough people at the front line interacting with users (1st and 2nd line helpdesk). Sysadmins are from the beginning of their career directed towards closed source and private ecosystems. The rule today is to use Windows with Active Directory, Office365 and put your servers in the cloud. We desperately need people with a Marxist understanding of political economy and the role of private property, who are able to link this to the ownership of the means of production via hardware and software.
Your WLB will depend mostly on the organization you work for. You want to find a job that can be combined with participating in social movements? Go work for social movements! The pay is often worse, and you will probably have more stress, but you are advancing the class struggle instead of filling the pockets of Big Tech. And social movements, especially when they are still small or medium sized, usually have a bigger need for helpdesk people and sysadmins.
Whatever you choose, development, helpdesk or infra, put your beliefs above your salary. There is no wage that could compensate for the fact that when I go to work, I greet my colleagues with “Good morning comrade”. This is the best feeling ever.