The Rise of the Citizen Developer

I've been seeing a lot of articles about this recently and I thought it was worth a post, since it's something I have been noticing in my day job, too.

When I left University (granted, with an English Degree, but I think this applies to Computer Sciences too), and throughout the course of my education both at school and University, I was told how much value my degree would add to my job hunt. I was told employers wouldn't look at my CV if I hadn't got at least that 2:1 and I'd been to a red brick. Personally, I was always sceptical about the value my, almost entirely self-taught, literature degree was going to add to a career that wasn't research or teaching, and that's a concern I think was justified given the cost of a degree. What my degree (with its 4 contact hours a week) did allow me to do was broaden my extracurricular activities and actively make myself more employable. When I got into recruitment (a career, by the way, which doesn't normally require a degree), I realised that a degree is often similarly irrelevant in software development job hunting.

When I screen a CV on a first glance I'll look at most recent relevant experience and technical summary, and I won't even notice education on a first look unless it's something for which I'm specifically screening. I would rate an obviously strong github profile or a clearly passionate summary paragraph above a 2:1 in Computer Science where the person had not been coding outside of that. And that's because from my experience I think employers do too.

I was reading that Google announced last year they were no longer looking at GPA scores when they select candidates, preferring portfolios as a better benchmark of future job performance. Thus rises the "citizen developer" (coined by tech company Gartner). There's an argument to be made that all developers are in a sense citizen developers, because personal improvement is a continuous thing, even once you've secured a job, so I guess the crunch point centres around how you enter the market - as someone formally educated or as a freelancer turned full-time.

This doesn't happen just on a junior level (i.e people getting into their first job), and I'm seeing an increasing number of people career switching around the age of 30 to pursue their true passion which had, up until that point, only been a recreational hobby. People are training themselves either by freelancing or through formal courses from Sales backgrounds, Teaching backgrounds, Linguistic backgrounds. Most people going for a complete career 180 in this way seem to go down the formal route - I'd speculate because it seems time efficient, structured, and because they can afford to. A career change of that nature is a serious decision and I guess a formal educational course seems like a decisive and serious action point to support that. For entry level roles however, I'm sceptical about the advantages a formal education provides. I think more value is added by coding courses (like Makers Academy, General Assembly, Coderwave etc) than traditional degrees, as they are cheaper, more targeted and more intensive in many cases, besides which they will almost guarantee finding strong performers a job afterwards (based on my experience of University careers services I feel they are weak at this kind of post-study support).

I would suggest that young development hopefuls think very carefully about their path into employment, and really do their research, particularly given the hike in University fees the year before last. University, in my opinion, gives the student more in life experience than in educational experience. Before you get stuck in, consider your options and remember there is more than one route to life experience!  

AngularJS

Last night I was at Google Campus for my first AngularJS event. Mind = blown...

This was the first event I'd been to that took me properly out of the recruiter sphere and into the hardcore tech one. Jeans and trainers abounded, the food was delicious, the small talk was technical and mostly incomprehensible... and I was the only girl.

I actually think it's a shame for the industry! There are certainly female developers, I met lots of them at Codebar, so I wonder why they don't come to such events? If the only girl who makes it there is a technical recruiter... well there are issues surely! The event was really oversubscribed so I only got a space at the last minute, though when I got there empty chairs were plentiful from dropouts I guess. There was a space of at least one empty chair's width around me during the presentation - I wondered whether nobody wanted to sit next to a stranger, or just a woman. It's kind of sweet though rather than offensive, and everybody I did speak to was very nice.

The talk itself (and prepare here for probably horrendous inaccuracies) was basically a demo of how you can use angular in partnership with Umbraco to extend your back office UI. You create your own options which you can separately define using JS, HTML, CSS and which you can then use in the back office. It's useful because it allows the frontend developer to focus on that, rather than having to know C# which such actions would previously have required. Or maybe that's a bad thing? It's definitely a useful thing for the majority, because you can do more faster, but speaking from a purely objective position really in an ideal world a developer would understand every possible way to perform a function, no? This makes sure that work is always being done in the smartest way, not just the only way you know? 

I'm probably not entitled to have opinions about this kind of thing yet, but I guess in summary what I thought is - angular is clever in that it allows you to do something in JavaScript that you'd previously have needed C# for. BUT... if that is anything like, say, android wrappers like PhoneGap, then the best applications are still created via a purer (defined as - the most appropriate for the task at hand) method (native apps on mobile perform better and look better) and so maybe taking more shortcuts using tools like using angular would not be ultimately the best way to work.

I'm probably wrong about that - they're probably not comparable things... If I'm wrong please somebody tell me! But as a wider point, surely it is true that the more full stack you can be, the better? That's a whole other post...

Anyway, this is definitely becoming like a stream of consciousness... and it's getting on for 9:30... so til next time.