Hello everyone,
Basically, my situation is that I graduated with a liberal arts bachelor's degree and I've fallen into an online marketing position. While the job isn't strenous and the hours are care-free (no one cares if I come in a few mins. late) the pay is low and there really isn't any upward mobility. I've done a lot of HTML and I thought about getting more involved in the technical side of things, so I thought about Java and took some classes at the local university to perhaps change careers.
I had been applying to a number of places and I've gotten a few bites (even one offer, but the pay was a little lower than I was expecting) but I keep looking at Java offers on many Internet sites and, although there seems to be plenty of them, every one of them wants a million years of experience dealing with a million different technlogies. Am I really looking at an uphill battle with no CS degree and no experience?
Secondly, I was contacted for an interview last month with a particularly small company. It wasn't coding in Java per se, but more Perl/PHP work. Even though it wasn't exactly my skillset, I still agreed to meet with the company. However, the place was very hard to find and I made the fatal mistake of showing up late for the interview. Knowing that this was pretty much a deal-breaker, I offered to "reschedule" (i.e. he can blow me off) but he insisted on having the interview. After 5 minutes of me talking, he decides to cut me off and say to me "you have no passion for this line of work."
This disenfranchised me to no end. I barely opened up Eclipse or looked at any serious Java code for a good month, month and a half after this. I've been wondering if he is right. After all, I haven't really finished any sort of project to showcase any employers. I've been reading lots of books, working examples, taking classes all in my spare time but there really isn't anything significant I've completed. After coming home from a long commute, I try to concentrate on building something but I just end up surfing the Web or watching TV because I'm so tired. Maybe this isn't for me.
I've been looking at NYU's Master's program in Direct and Interactive Marketing. Maybe that's more up my alley. Maybe that's where I will be able to find a job, rather than trying to hunt for some IT / jr. programmer position where I could be canned in 3 months. I dunno...
I'm not sure what I'm really asking here. I guess only I can really answer if this is something I'm cut out for. Although going for an MS in Direct/Interactive Marketing may be a better career move, I'm not exactly jumping up for joy about it. And I'm finally starting to look at code or tutorials again.
If there's anyone with any sort of constructive criticism or words of advice, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks.
--Brian
