Let your coworkers know that you are aspiring to move into development.Īsk for a meeting with your boss or manager, and frankly tell them that you’d like to move into a software development role and that you are willing to do whatever it takes to get there. My first piece of advice for you would be to go ahead and make your goal known as widely as possible. Let’s talk now about some strategies other software developers and I have used in the past to make the transition from a non-developer technical role to software developer. Sometimes, though, you may have to move to a completely different company to escape the box you’ve been put into. The more you can involve yourself in the software development side of the organization and take on more programming tasks, the more that other people in the organization will start to see you in the new role. ![]() You will have to be patient, and realize that although it will take time for perceptions to change, they eventually will. This can be extremely frustrating-especially if you’ve outgrown your previous role. In the software development world, in particular, there is usually a sharp distinction between software developers and testers (or QA).īecause of this bias, coming into a new company as a software developer is often easier than transitioning to a software development role from being a tester or other position. Once you have a role within a company, people tend to always see you as that particular role, regardless of your skill set or how you grow. Perhaps the biggest hurdle you will face in switching from QA or some other technical role into software development is the perceptions people have of you. Thus my role was switched to software developer once again. Once I was working with the development team, they didn’t want to give me back. When a big deadline came up, the software development team asked to borrow me as a resource to help meet the deadline. I didn’t take any credit and only tried to make him look as good as possible.Īfter a few weeks of this, he started telling his boss how much I knew about C++ and how it seemed like a ridiculous waste to have someone who knew this much about software development writing test cases. When we’d chat about some of the problems he was facing, I’d come over to his cubicle and give him some tips and help to get his tasks done. This time, I was sitting next to a fairly new software developer who didn’t have too good of a grasp of C++. Later in my career, I went through a similar experience when I couldn’t find a software development job and again found myself at HP, this time in the role of a QA test lead. I was eventually asked to write printer tests, and thus I officially became a programmer and got an actual programmer title. It didn’t take long before the software development team became interested in pulling me in as a resource to show them how and what I was doing and for me to do more of it. Pretty soon I was filing detailed bug reports with snippets of printer code, indicating exactly what printer language commands were likely to be behaving wrong and causing the errors. Then when I looked at errors, I would go through the printer test and modify them, using my understanding of the printer languages to test my theories about why specific printer language commands were causing the problems. I spent my own time and any downtime to learn both PCL and PostScript. The print instructions were either in PCL or PostScript, two popular printing languages. ![]() I asked to have access to the actual print instructions which were sent to the printer for each test. ![]() I wanted to know what caused the differences, so I started digging a little deeper. We were just supposed to look at flagged differences and decide if they were a big deal or not. I’d go through stacks of printed tests, which were compared to a “master” printout that had already been flagged, and I’d look at the differences to see if they were known issues or new bugs that had been introduced in the latest printing firmware. Initially, my job was brainlessly simple. I had been a self-taught programmer and had taken a year of college in a computer science program, but I couldn’t find a job as a programmer, so I started a job doing QA as a contractor for HP. The first time I made the transition was when I had just started out in my career. I made the transition myself-in fact, I had to do it twice. Making the transition from QA or some other technical role to being a software developer can be extremely difficult. I decided to dedicate a whole chapter to this topic because it’s one of the most common questions I get asked.
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