Is production support a good choice to start career?

Hello,
I am fresher and i got placed in a company. In my company most of the freshers are getting production support project, but i want to be a developer. If i get a PS can i get along with that ..... can i shift from production support to dev......??? I m gud at programming and i m planning to take SCJP in April'12. For boosting my dev career please do suggest sum more certifications....
Please help me out.... I m very much worried about my career

Thanks and Regards,
Santosh

Hi Santosh,

production support will surely add value to your experience. This will be good opportunity to learn lot of good practices and good way of on job training for you. You will also get opportunity to enhance some of the features you might support.

Thank you
Ayub

Hi Santhosh,

Being a fresher,i would strongly suggest you to go for a development project,because only in dev you can learn completely.This does not mean that you cant learn in production support,you can.. but the learning will be different - like UNIX related,application troubleshooting related etc.. which is NOT you look for something at this point in your career(As a fresher).
Also,remember moving from dev to production support will be very easy,but the reverse is NOT TRUE..I have myself been in prod support project but was not able to learn at all...
So, please go for a development project which will give you a very strong base for your career.

All the best

Can someone elaborate on what "production support" means in this question? I ask because where I work production support is done by developers and includes development (bug fixes, enhancements, etc.) It involves knowing the system really well and is not done by the most junior/newest members of the team.

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Can someone elaborate on what "production support" means in this question?

In my earlier support team they had categorized the levels of support as L1, L2, etc.

L1 team checks the status of the deployed applications, make calls to the product users to get clarifications / convey resolutions on the production issues. They also create weekly reports needed by different teams.

L2 team were responsible to identify the root cause of the issues, work on the tickets created and classify the tickets (such as code fix required, deployment issues, etc.).

L3 team were fixing the code fix issues and giving support for any critical issues when needed - constituted of developers of the application.

I agree with you Jeanne, production support would include bug fixes, enhancements, etc. This again will depend on the nature of production support.

For some projects I have seen that production support people would monitor some routine tasks (eg:mainframe jobs). Check if there are any support tickets regarding any failed jobs. In these cases there is not much scope for bug fix,enhancement etc..

I see. So L1 is completely operational and therefore not development at all. Thanks.

Me also working in production support ..but at times i take help of Senior Sftware specialist incase i have tiniest dubts related to core java/JSP and Servlets....hoping a get a switch in java domain

But i have learnt a lot from it with respect to the infrastrucuture of the company, have seen some cool web apps for monitoring Servers for instance Nagios have communicated with all sorts of people..It has really been a good experience for me and helped me improvise my communication skills which is the key aspect to earn your bread and butter I was also a fresher so joined the cmpany and its almost been 2 years and I just love the bonding we have with my collegues no matter how much we point fingers on others for other mistake I love working with them