Hi all this is aimed at the QUT students who read this forum, some IT duty tutors and I are planning to organise a few sessions where we bring in Industry people who are QUT graduates and have them talk about there job and about what subjects to do if you want to do that kinda job.

they will also answer questions and explain best way to get a job in the IT industry here in Brisbane.

we have been informed by the faculty that we first must gage how many students would actually like to attend such sessions, these sessions would be in the beginning of the semester. So this post is for that purpose and also to find out what you guys think about it and weather you have any suggestions.

serious Posts please.

I thought all QUT IT graduates got jobs in the States working for Microsoft?

Being an IT graduate I found it pretty ass first year out, I kinda jumped into it and wasn't really what I initially expected, kept getting told to stick it out it will get better... halfway through the course I thought about changing (but had nfi to what) so I ended up just finishing it to have something to show for the money I pissed into it :/

If you love software engineering with a passion and are good at it or are a linux networking freak you should have no problems landing a decent job. I quickly found out I am not one of those people :)
Anything else really I found it exceptionally hard to get into, EVERYONE wants like 3 years experience over qualification.

So for anything else you have to start at some random s*** kicker job and stick that out for a good while before you are going to be able to move up anywhere.


Woooooo computer tech/builder ftw :P

Honestly I'm considering investigating the jump to a different area than IT, I can't say theres much that interests me anymore unfortunately.

A university for the keeping-it-real forums.

so there's no jobs out there for newly graduated software engineers?

Gol there is pleanty just go to seek and search for "graduate" under IT and see how many programing jobs come up

Just graduated from BIT(sofware eng) and currently doing hons (part time now).
I got a programming jawb on my 2nd interview, afaik all that matters is marks, I sounded like an incompetent twat at the interview and they still hired me. maybe ppl just expect programmers to be socially retarded :D

Yeah i'll be in it tuffzubb since i'll be graduating this year.

cool so thats one person interested...

so there's no jobs out there for newly graduated software engineers?

On the contrary, thats what theres the most of. Like I said earlier, if you have the mind for software dev or are a unix networking geek who loves that text based stuff you should have no worries getting into something first year out.

I think of lot of BIT students quickly find out that programming and unix eats balls and is not for them and either choose a non-programming themed major or totally jump ship to a new course.

I majored in E-Commerce and yeah 99% of the jobs I was actually interested in want 3-5 years industry experience. How you get the experience in those particular areas I'm not really quite sure, just keep applying to a million things and hopefully you'll slot into some s***kicker job to get at least some kind of exp.

if you have the mind for software dev or are a unix networking geek who loves that text based stuff you should have no worries getting into something first year out

I concur

b sex!

In my experience

Experience &/ professional certs > degree

Other peoples experiences may vary.

big smile/firm handshake > degree

In my experience

Experience &/ professional certs > degree

Other peoples experiences may vary.

Yeah, that seems to be the way to go in IT. I know a guy who's 18, first year out of school, and is currently earning $760/week doing some IT stuff alongside doing some certificates and stuff at TAFE.

You can't always rely on simply uni getting u thru to the work.

so out of all the QUT studnets here only one of them (boohay) want us to hold this information Q and A sessions..

boohay ???

You can forget about him too then bitch.

yeah from my experience i could say uni was an expensive useless waste of time ... and i know this sounds corny but if you actualy pay attention you do learn stuff and it shapes your mind towards your proffession even if it may not be totally related

i had a gpa of 3 point something and got a job after 2 weeks of finishing uni, had the experience to back me and wasnt asked anything about my degree for the 9 different interviews i went for

For the job I'm in they wouldn't have even looked at interviewing me if I didn't have any qualifications. It was my experience that landed me the job though. Many larger companies just want you to have that piece of paper.

If you want a career installing, configuring, and supporting off the shelf products, you could afford to give the IT degree a miss

If you want to have the computer science background to go ahead and invent cool new stuff, from my experience the IT degree sets you up for this in ways that "experience" does not

That said, if you graduate without experience good luck.

I agree with Thundercracker.

I think of lot of BIT students quickly find out that programming and unix eats balls and is not for them and either choose a non-programming themed major or totally jump ship to a new cours

Why would you do IT if you didn’t like to program? That’s like doing Engineering when you hate maths.

In my experience

Experience &/ professional certs > degree

The value of professional certificates vary on which certificate you get. At the end of the day you pay for what you get, if you pay for a cheap, common certificate it won’t mean a lot. Besides, I’ve known plenty of people with professional certificates who know nothing.

Experience will always beat education without experience, simply because you know the person with experience can deliver something. However, a solid education will teach you techniques that will improve your position down the track.

I’ll use a personal example; Recently I was consulting for a government organisation working directly under their user experience team lead. He doesn’t have any formal qualifications in IT, usability or design, in fact he doesn’t have any formal qualifications. He only got employed there to make web pages, he can’t even program. As such, he tells me that he has been stuck at about the same level for 3 years and has no real opportunity for forward progression.

It quickly became apparent that his only advantage was his experience with dealing with and understanding his specific situation (IE his managers).

Of course, this leads to a direct point about IT. The definitions for IT are very, very, broad. Professional certification leads to one part of IT while degrees often lead to other parts of IT. When I talk about IT, I usually mean either Interaction Design, Usability Engineering, Software Development or Physical Computing, because that’s the parts of IT I deal in every day.

I know a guy who's 18, first year out of school, and is currently earning $760/week

$39,520 a year. I suppose that's better than KFC. Is that on casual or full time?

Experience &/ professional certs > degree

Agreed to an extent, but still:

Degree+Experience > Experience > Just a degree

Most often, those who just have a degree aren't that useful. The ones with experience know just enough to hack software/hardware together. Those with a degree and experience tend to write better software and/or design better hardware because they understand what is happening under the hood, as opposed to just knowing interfaces.

Though I'm just stating the obvious.

last edited by parabol at 19:49:34 18/May/06

I got lucky (in a way) and was employed here in Cairns after I graduated from Sydney in '04. The working conditions are bloody awesome, pay is pretty average, but the experience in developing and supporting MFC / .Net / SQL Server / Crystal Reports driven applications is going to be worth a lot to me in years to come.

As someone who is in the medium term future going to do some graduate recruiting, I wish that Universities would drop their aversion to teaching Windows software development. Maybe its harder to get lecturers for? When I started work here I got a huge fat MFC book thrown at me and was told to be ready to write production code within a month (which is actually pretty generous).

If I have a piece of advice for a pending grad, it would be to find the time to add solid knowledge of C#, ASP.Net & Visual C++ to your generally *nix Uni qualifications. Write something that you can provide as a demo exe for a potential employer - programmers like to write code, so I'd be surprised if a potential recruit didn;t have something to show off, however trivial it might seem.

If you get through that you may as well chuck in some Visual Basic .Net but don't for the love of god become a VB 'programmer'.

Have a look at the vacancies on Seek and you'll see masses of openings for win32 programmers. This is because every nerd with a shiny new piece of paper believes that Linux is going to save the day somehow and doesn't know a HWND from a DWORD :)

last edited by Hogfather at 00:00:49 19/May/06

I got lucky (in a way) and was employed here in Cairns

Where in Cairns do you work?

I wish that Universities would drop their aversion to teaching Windows software development.

There seems to be a huge push away from Windows even from a usage point of view., almost every lab we have is an OSX box.

Maybe its harder to get lecturers for?

I don’t think how to teach it is the real problem. If I had to guess, I would say the problems lay in three key areas:

Common Windows programming languages, such as C# and VB are designed to simplify the creation of in-depth GUI applications. University is about teaching the science behind computing and there is a perception that GUI distracts people away from the science.

Windows does things in a very Windows way. Spending time teaching kids how to say do file transferring in windows you have all of the overhead of windows file handling to fit in as well.

The Universities mantra is that they are not there to teach skills, but concepts, and if you master the concepts in one the perception is that you can easily, and quickly, learn it elsewhere.

Write something that you can provide as a demo exe for a potential employer - programmers like to write code, so I'd be surprised if a potential recruit didn;t have something to show off, however trivial it might seem.

Creating a body of work to put into a portfolio is an excellent idea. Not only does it show of your work, but it also makes it obvious (to you) where you need to beef up your own skills. Which of course, you put into your portfolio … an so on.


last edited by typo at 01:19:07 19/May/06

Where in Cairns do you work?

If you are a developer in Cairns there's really only one place to work, Utamic Software. Website is pretty old and crap. I'm the product lead atm on Utamic's Manager application - factory management software.

There seems to be a huge push away from Windows even from a usage point of view., almost every lab we have is an OSX box.

Yeh we noticed this in Sydney. There were a few labs with win32 boxes that were used to teach low-level IT stuff like Office etc but that was about it.

GUI bit

Software is increasingly being written for laypeople who just won't accept command-line or clunky Swing interfaces. The sub-discipline of Software Usability would be best taught in a framework where you can if you wish to focus on the front end, such as .Net.

When it was taught to us at Sydney we used web forms over (from memory) a Perl script back end. The class spent more time wrestling with Perl and web development issues than front end usability metrics that were apparently the focus of the subject!

Obviously though you can also develop less GUI-driven applications and services for Windows by making use of the C++ libraries.

Windows does things in a very Windows way. Spending time teaching kids how to say do file transferring in windows you have all of the overhead of windows file handling to fit in as well.

Every language that a developer encounters will present its challenges. Part of being a competent programmer is being able to apply what you know to a new environmentr rapidly, making use of the tools that are made available to you. Teaching people almost exclusively how to write command-line C/C++ programs doesn't prepare them for the expectation of employers in the industry that you be flexible and adaptable. This has been one of the key challenges I've faced post-graduation.

A command-line MFC C++ program is quite similar to other C++ environments. You have full access to the STL and also have exposure to the MFC libraries. It would be a prime candidate for any sort of 'cross-over' learning.

When people talk about win32 development they usually focus on C# and VB, and forget all about MFC / C++. With Visual Studio 2005 Microsoft reaffirmed that they won't be dropping unmanaged C++ for the forseeable future and released MFC 8.

The Universities mantra is that they are not there to teach skills, but concepts, and if you master the concepts in one the perception is that you can easily, and quickly, learn it elsewhere.

IT and Engineering degrees are increasingly vocational, and the real-world success of alumni is one of the key performance metrics of these courses. Employment rates and median salaries of graduates is something that prospective students of a degree should be well aware of.

While all the above has merit, I personally think its just an academic culture of bias against Windows development. Microsoft makes Visual Studio available to universities basically for free - it was on every windows box at Sydney. Unfortunately nobody taught us how to use it!

Why would you do IT if you didn’t like to program? That’s like doing Engineering when you hate maths.

There are other parts of IT that arent as heavily programming related. I suppose stuff like static HTML still would fall under the "programming" category but is generally not considered as such by the hardcore software dev guys.

I don't mind writing HTML/ASP, however I just don't have the mind for java/c++ etc I personally just find it too tedious.

There are people who will guaduate with an IT-related degree (Information Systems Management major or something maybe) who won't necessarily get exposure ot programming again, or want to.

Its still important for that sort of grad to understand core stuff like object orientation and relational database concepts. There's already too many people in the industry whose eyes glaze over when you start talking about anything remotely technical.

thats true hogfather, while i did mostly c, c++ and java programming at uni its the conceptual ideas, good design techniques and db exposure that have helped me become profficient at database management

Maybe its harder to get lecturers for?

Nah I think it's simply easier to Unis to get Development Environment from Microsoft to teach students. Microsoft being Microsoft provides a pretty complete (R)AD environment which makes it easier for lecturers to get down to teaching the techniques than trying to find all the bits and pieces so students can develop in.

At least that's what I think anyway.

I used to be one of those people that think "degree is a piece of paper" but after having done it and having been working in IT for 10 years I personally feel that I'd still be just another code hackers if I didn't go to Uni. I found myself frequently used techniques taught in the S/W Enginerring/Datacom course - selectively depending on the situation. It also improves my understanding of the fundamental stuff as well.

Naturally if you're only of those people that can self-taught (I hate those people! :)) then you can do this simply by reading books and practice. But, for the rest of us, a structured larning can go a long way to improve your understanding and skills.

At least that's my personal experience anyway.

If you are a developer in Cairns there's really only one place to work, Utamic Software. Website is pretty old and crap. I'm the product lead atm on Utamic's Manager application - factory management software.

Ahh cool. The reason why I ask is I have a friend who works in Cairns City Council.

Software is increasingly being written for laypeople who just won't accept command-line or clunky Swing interfaces. The sub-discipline of Software Usability would be best taught in a framework where you can if you wish to focus on the front end, such as .Net

Don’t get me wrong, I agree completely. Universities should, at some level, teach some skills that can be directly related to vocational skills specifically, GUI application development. Some courses do exactly that, when I went though my program we dealt in VB and C# at some point. Although, we didn’t go very far in it (and I was a s***ty, s***ty programmer then), but at least it was some exposure.

Every language that a developer encounters will present its challenges. Part of being a competent programmer is being able to apply what you know to a new environmentr rapidly, […]
When people talk about win32 development they usually focus on C# and VB, and forget all about MFC / C++. With Visual Studio 2005 Microsoft reaffirmed that they won't be dropping unmanaged C++ for the forseeable future and released MFC 8.

Specifically, I was talking about the differences of Windows C and ANSI C. ANSI C is lean, lightweight and it doesn’t have any messy parts, while Windows C has a lot more baggage.

Don’t get me wrong, once I got into the Windows Groove it was ok. However, when you are teaching kids say, networking in C, windows would be a poor place to start.

IT and Engineering degrees are increasingly vocational, and the real-world success of alumni is one of the key performance metrics of these courses. Employment rates and median salaries of graduates is something that prospective students of a degree should be well aware of.

The group of 8 are about to start making a major move towards the MIT/Stamford Science/Arts/Professional degree approach. Which puts IT in one of three camps: IT is really business; IT is really maths or IT is really Liberal Arts. That makes me very sad. Sad in the pants even :(

While all the above has merit, I personally think its just an academic culture of bias against Windows development. Microsoft makes Visual Studio available to universities basically for free - it was on every windows box at Sydney. Unfortunately nobody taught us how to use it!

I don’t disagree with you, however I think there are other truths to the matter.

There are other parts of IT that arent as heavily programming related. I suppose stuff like static HTML still would fall under the "programming" category but is generally not considered as such by the hardcore software dev guys.

HTML isn’t anywhere near programming, it is simply text formatting syntax.

There are people who will guaduate with an IT-related degree (Information Systems Management major or something maybe) who won't necessarily get exposure ot programming again, or want to.

There is a problem with limited exposure to programming …

Its still important for that sort of grad to understand core stuff like object orientation and relational database concepts. There's already too many people in the industry whose eyes glaze over when you start talking about anything remotely technical.

… and that’s exactly it.

If you want to get into the non-technical side of IT, do eBusiness. Even TAFE teaches its network engineers programming principles. f***, we teach Multimedia* students how to program.

* For the record, the MM students who learn their lessons often create crazy awesome s*** that they couldn’t have done without programming.

I think what it comes down to is you get from uni what you put in:

if you are there for the degree, you get the degree, but thats it.

if you are there for learning, you get the knowledge.

And honestly from what I can see, at least 8 out of 10 students that have gone to uni straight from school:

a) went to uni for the degree
b) dont really know what they want to do
c) dont have a solid concept that they are paying for what they are doing
d) want to be spoon-fed the content

Where as it seems at least 8 out of 10 mature age students are the exact opposite.

a) went to uni for the degree

I'd take the much more jaded opinion of "a) only went to uni because their mother made them".