I started my IT career in hardware support, moved to Unix OS support (for a vendor), crossed over to doing sysadmin and finally moved into development. I think that my background in support has been extremely valuable. Knowing how to deal with end-users, understanding their problems and building and integrating solutions that are maintainable all flow naturally from that background.

As a sysadmin, I found there were plenty of opportunities to develop solutions that delivered significant time savings both for me and my users. Once I had a few of those under my belt, I felt confident enough to take on a development role. Luckily I found an employer who was prepared to give me the chance to prove myself.

There's no magical level of attainment that you have to reach first. When you feel ready to make the move look for the opportunity. Of course you may need to start in a junior role.

In reply to Re: perl programming for a living by grantm
in thread perl programming for a living by tcf03

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.