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| from Java developer to middleware consultant(IBM) |
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| agoyal112 |
 Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 9:56 am Post subject: from Java developer to middleware consultant(IBM) |
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Newbie
Joined: 23 Jan 2013
Posts: 2
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I am having around 8 years of total experience in which major portion is a Java and J2EE development. Lately I find custom application development is not what I aspire to be in future. Also for last 2-3 years, I have been working on technologies like websphere MQ, websphere message broker, web service development. So I came across world of integration/middleware technologies. I want to provide valuable inputs on following points:-
1. Does it make sense for me now to stick to middleware/integration profile? How is the future of my skillset-kind of professionals?
2. What should I supposed to learn to make chances of getting a good middleware job? I am based out of India(NCR region).
3. Generally does middleware jobs are of support kind of nature, I meant does it outside working hours job? |
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| Vitor |
| Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 10:22 am Post subject: Re: from Java developer to middleware consultant(IBM) |
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Grand High Poobah
Joined: 11 Nov 2005
Posts: 26093
Location: Texas, USA
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I don't offer career advice for reasons obvious to those familiar with my career but my observations are these:
| agoyal112 wrote: |
| 1. Does it make sense for me now to stick to middleware/integration profile? How is the future of my skillset-kind of professionals? |
Java will live forever, not matter what I do.
| naio wrote: |
| 2. What should I supposed to learn to make chances of getting a good middleware job? I am based out of India(NCR region). |
You should have a good grasp of middleware concepts as well as the technologies like WMB. Architect level tend to do better than developer level, though I have no direct knowledge of the region you speak of.
| naio wrote: |
| 3. Generally does middleware jobs are of support kind of nature, I meant does it outside working hours job? |
If you're doing a support kind of middleware job then yes. If not, no. Unless what you're doing is running late. Like the world you're currently in.
_________________
Honesty is the best policy.
Insanity is the best defence. |
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| T.Rob |
| Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 11:22 am Post subject: |
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Acolyte
Joined: 16 Oct 2001
Posts: 56
Location: Charlotte, NC
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I'll take a stab at answering here as well.
| Quote: |
| 1. Does it make sense for me now to stick to middleware/integration profile? How is the future of my skillset-kind of professionals? |
If you read back through the history of MQSeries.net or the Vienna List Server, you will find that both communities seem to have evolved through a maturity progression at about the same pace and roughly in sync. First, it was keeping channels up and running, backups and basic architecture. Then it was version-to-version migration, Message Broker and Java. Next it was clients, security and pub/sub. It is very likely that the new growth markets (EMEA and BRIC countries in particular) will go through similar progressions, but at a compressed rate due to the vast amount of accumulated knowledge on the web. I would think that a skilled practitioner local to these areas could do well by anticipating the maturity level of the customer and walking them through the different stages.
| Quote: |
| 2. What should I supposed to learn to make chances of getting a good middleware job? I am based out of India(NCR region). |
I don't know your region, however there are a few things I can offer that are generally applicable. First is that if you plan to be an admin, study WMQ programming. If you plan to be a programmer, study WMQ admin. The two disciplines complement each other very well. Companies that seek to save money by sending admins only to admin training and devs only to dev training are quite common and so a practitioner who understands both disciplines becomes very valuable very quickly. This is because you do not administer nor develop in a vacuum. Each of these teams is more effective and efficient when they understand what the other team requires of the system and of them.
Make sure you understand the fundamentals of messaging. Too many administrators and designers insist on functionality that messaging does not, in fact can not, provide. Prime example of this is zero recovery point between primary and DR data centers.
Make sure you design disaster recovery and security in up front and implement them in Dev or Test environments. Attempting to "turn them on" in Production is prone to failure. In fact, ignoring DR until after Production implementation is how most people get to a requirement of zero recovery point in DR which, as noted in the linked article, requires breaking the laws of relativity. If you can break the laws of relativity, it isn't your career we should be discussing. Ignoring security until Production implementation is a great way to insure it goes into Production with no security.
| Quote: |
| 3. Generally does middleware jobs are of support kind of nature, I meant does it outside working hours job? |
Most admin work is done during the day but the actual changes are always made during a change window, typically overnight or on weekends. Some groups do both admin and operations. Some split up Ops (24x7) and admin (days mostly). It depends on your shop.
Of course, you can always do what I did and write a best selling reference book on MQ. Then you can live off the royalties. Just don't make the mistake I did and write the book as a "work-for-hire" which assigns all the royalties to the book sponsor. And of course, it would actually have to sell a lot more than mine. In fact, don't try to get rich writing a reference book. Forget I said anything about that. Just figure on working a lot and try to avoid the Ops team if you want to work day shifts.
The one other thing you should know is that, no matter what goes wrong, it will always be an MQ problem. If that is going to be an issue for you, then give up now and go back to being a developer so you can blame all your program errors on MQ. But if you stay in the MQ admin profession, you will spend your entire career defending your reputation and that of your system from people who are reluctant to consider that their home-grown app is more likely to have lost the message than the commercial app with 20 years of optimization and 10,000 customers using it every day. The danger here is that the one time you get too confident and proclaim loudly that it isn't MQ is the one time it will be MQ and you'll go down in flames, never to recover your career and spend the rest of your life on night shift explaining to developers why they need to print linked exceptions. Not that many of them ever will.
Congratulations, you are now an MQ admin.
_________________
-- T.Rob
Voice/SMS 704-443-TROB (8762)
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| lancelotlinc |
| Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 11:55 am Post subject: |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 22 Mar 2010
Posts: 4941
Location: Bloomington, IL USA
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 12:04 pm Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| lancelotlinc wrote: |
| Its a blast if you are paid by-the-hour. WMB consultants in NYC get $325 per hour. |
There's a difference between "charge" and "get paid".
Very few consultants actually get paid the full amount that their customers get charged.
Regardless of locality.
I'll say what I always say on the general topic - the only fundamental fact in IT is that everything changes.
It's reasonable to expect that some notion of something like "middleware" will be a viable career option for the next several years. It's unreasonable to expect that you will never have to learn any new facts or technology that you don't know at this exact moment.
It's reasonable to expect that what you're doing this year is not at all what you will be doing 5 years from now.
So plan for change and plan to keep learning and plan for "the next" thing.
It's the Agile Method applied to careers. |
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| Vitor |
| Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 12:16 pm Post subject: |
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Grand High Poobah
Joined: 11 Nov 2005
Posts: 26093
Location: Texas, USA
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| T.Rob wrote: |
| Of course, you can always do what I did and write a best selling reference book on MQ. Then you can live off the royalties. Just don't make the mistake I did and write the book as a "work-for-hire" which assigns all the royalties to the book sponsor. And of course, it would actually have to sell a lot more than mine. In fact, don't try to get rich writing a reference book. Forget I said anything about that. Just figure on working a lot and try to avoid the Ops team if you want to work day shifts. |
But it is a very good book. Not such a good source of income I conceed, but very good. 
Now there's a burst of truth...
| T.Rob wrote: |
| spend the rest of your life on night shift explaining to developers why they need to print linked exceptions. Not that many of them ever will. |
I do that during the day. Repeatedly and sometimes quite hard. I remain constantly amazed by how many Java applications, frameworks, 3rd party products, etc that "don't capture the linked exception" for a variety of stupid reasons suddenly develop the ability under proper motivation.
(I found your comments instructive and have personally good results from the "if you're not recording the error code I'm sending, how do you expect me to help" line. Developers can get very tangled trying to explain to non-technical management how a linked exception isn't just a code)
_________________
Honesty is the best policy.
Insanity is the best defence. |
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| agoyal112 |
| Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2013 10:09 pm Post subject: |
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Newbie
Joined: 23 Jan 2013
Posts: 2
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| Thanks all esp. T. Rob for wonderful insight. I have been in J2EE development for a long period of time. It is a websphere app server based environment and consumer facing Order management based applications which also integrates with other third parties. This is my experience with project: in the beginning of project, there used to be around 50 java developers, 3-4 J2EE architects and management guys. During course of time, our client for which we were developing application engaged Oracle as a new vendor. Now oracle started to sell their product ADF for agile web 2.0 development. So it took lot of IBM server based business in its pocket. So now overall there are more designers on the whole team than developers...some design using ADF(front) tool, I design using WMB (middleware).....so I am getting feeling that down the line :- "vertical and area" focused tool poses a challenge to custom application development(J2EE environment) as companies need to be more agile, shorter time-to-market and less budgetary. and hence lesser jobs in custom app development than if we are aware of many tools....So I want to understand if my assessment is true or not. |
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| lancelotlinc |
| Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 6:09 am Post subject: |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 22 Mar 2010
Posts: 4941
Location: Bloomington, IL USA
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You are the only one who enables your success. Your actions will determine how successful you are and to the height you will rise.
As a side note, our company heavily relied on Visa workers and just after January 1, all our Visa workers started getting Visa extension denials. Therefore, a significant influx of WMB people will be arriving soon to your location. We used a common contracting company which supplies a large number (4,300+) of WMB developers across the US. Apparently, the INS has identified this company as non-compliant since the company used residential addresses for work locations of its contractors. Part of the INS requirements of placing Visa workers is that the company must host a business address in the city in which the Visa workers work. The company for the last decade or so got around this by using the residential address of one of the workers as the business address. INS caught on and hence the massive Visa denial action.
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Save $20: Coupon Code: MQSERIES_READER |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 6:14 am Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| lancelotlinc wrote: |
You are the only one who enables your success. Your actions will determine how successful you are and to the height you will rise.
As a side note, our company heavily relied on Visa workers and just after January 1, all our Visa workers started getting Visa extension denials. Therefore, a significant influx of WMB people will be arriving soon to your location. We used a common contracting company which supplies a large number (4,300+) of WMB developers across the US. Apparently, the INS has identified this company as non-compliant since the company used residential addresses for work locations of its contractors. Part of the INS requirements of placing Visa workers is that the company must host a business address in the city in which the Visa workers work. The company for the last decade or so got around this by using the residential address of one of the workers as the business address. INS caught on and hence the massive Visa denial action. |
And so consequently there's going to be a large demand for skilled Broker personnel in the US... |
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| Vitor |
| Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 6:20 am Post subject: |
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Grand High Poobah
Joined: 11 Nov 2005
Posts: 26093
Location: Texas, USA
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| mqjeff wrote: |
| lancelotlinc wrote: |
You are the only one who enables your success. Your actions will determine how successful you are and to the height you will rise.
As a side note, our company heavily relied on Visa workers and just after January 1, all our Visa workers started getting Visa extension denials. Therefore, a significant influx of WMB people will be arriving soon to your location. We used a common contracting company which supplies a large number (4,300+) of WMB developers across the US. Apparently, the INS has identified this company as non-compliant since the company used residential addresses for work locations of its contractors. Part of the INS requirements of placing Visa workers is that the company must host a business address in the city in which the Visa workers work. The company for the last decade or so got around this by using the residential address of one of the workers as the business address. INS caught on and hence the massive Visa denial action. |
And so consequently there's going to be a large demand for skilled Broker personnel in the US... |
It's an ill wind...
_________________
Honesty is the best policy.
Insanity is the best defence. |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 6:39 am Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| Vitor wrote: |
| It's an ill wind... |
Well, if you hadn't eaten that cabbage and haggis... |
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| Vitor |
| Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 6:58 am Post subject: |
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Grand High Poobah
Joined: 11 Nov 2005
Posts: 26093
Location: Texas, USA
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| mqjeff wrote: |
| and haggis... |
English dear boy, not Scottish. And even they don't touch the stuff any more. Deep Fried Mars Bars are the new staple.
_________________
Honesty is the best policy.
Insanity is the best defence. |
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| RogerLacroix |
| Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2013 2:05 pm Post subject: Re: from Java developer to middleware consultant(IBM) |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 15 May 2001
Posts: 3254
Location: London, ON Canada
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| agoyal112 wrote: |
| I am having around 8 years of total experience in which major portion is a Java and J2EE development. Lately I find custom application development is not what I aspire to be in future. Also for last 2-3 years, I have been working on technologies like websphere MQ, websphere message broker, web service development. |
Are you asking because you are bored or because your wife wants you to "move up" the management chain (i.e. more money)?
I've been working in the middleware space since 1989 and I am sure I will be working in it for many, many more years. In the 90's, I went through this.
Middleware will always be about making a square peg fit into a round hole. Nature of the beast. That is why we are happily employed. 
If you do not like custom coding then look to do other things like administration or design work or get into management (be a project leader).
| agoyal112 wrote: |
| 1. Does it make sense for me now to stick to middleware/integration profile? How is the future of my skillset-kind of professionals? |
The first thing YOU need to decide is what do YOU want to do? If you want to "like" your job then find something that YOU want to do.
| agoyal112 wrote: |
| 3. Generally does middleware jobs are of support kind of nature, I meant does it outside working hours job? |
You mean you don't like 2AM phone calls? By the way, nobody does. Being on call is a "backend job". If you do not want to be on call then get a "frontend job" i.e. designer, architect, etc..
Regards,
Roger Lacroix
Capitalware Inc.
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Capitalware: Transforming tomorrow into today.
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| lancelotlinc |
| Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 5:43 am Post subject: Re: from Java developer to middleware consultant(IBM) |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 22 Mar 2010
Posts: 4941
Location: Bloomington, IL USA
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| RogerLacroix wrote: |
| If you do not like custom coding then look to do other things like administration or design work or get into management (be a project leader). |
Funny but true: those that have no idea how to code become managers and architects and try to tell the people that do know how to code that they are not coding correctly.
Managers need to stick to managing and let the people who write the code write the code.
Another true story: my boss thought one day, we're using too many compute nodes and not enough route to label nodes. So he hired a contractor and told the contractor how to construct the message flows. Now we have a bunch of message flows that go in circles using route to label nodes rather than a linear progression of the logic through compute nodes.
Circular logic is usually not more efficient than linear logic.
_________________
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Save $20: Coupon Code: MQSERIES_READER |
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| bruce2359 |
| Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 6:14 am Post subject: Re: from Java developer to middleware consultant(IBM) |
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Poobah
Joined: 05 Jan 2008
Posts: 9406
Location: US: west coast, almost. Otherwise, enroute.
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| RogerLacroix wrote: |
The first thing YOU need to decide is what do YOU want to do? If you want to "like" your job then find something that YOU want to do.
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You need to differentiate between your job and your work.
The job is the hours, the boss, the co-workers, the company politics, the (lack of) management support, the (lack of) opportunity for professional growth and development, the (lack of) travel etc..
The work is the challenge, the puzzle, the hardware and software (WMQ, WMB, whatever), programming, network, o/s, etc..
I've worked for small, medium, large, and very large organizations; and in a variety of disciplines. Each has their benefits; and each has their costs.
At times, I've loved the work, but hated the job. At other times, I've loved the job, but was bored with the work. On occasion, I've had a good balance.
I am happily a consultant. "Consultant" is code-word for "sometimes unemployed."
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ב''ה
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi. As we Worship, So we Believe, So we Live. |
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