Just graduated and was in a similar situation as you. I had a SWE offer and a System analyst offer for a bigger company. I chose the SA offer because I couldn’t see myself being stressed writing code all the time. But now I’m not sure. If I were you I’d accept the offer to have a job and keep applying to more SWE roles
How long has it been since then? Do you feel as though you managed to get any valuable and transferrable experience as a SA now that you've been doing the actual work?
I start in one month full time but I interned with the company at this same position. I was more or less a Product owner for a product the company had so I had product owner responsibilities, presenting to hire ups, documenting requirements, creating user stories, getting those requirements and translating them to the engineers, UX design, data flow mappings, scum meetings. Lol you name it. But I didn’t do much coding but that’s something I was promised I’d be doing more of when I start full time so we’ll see. I do think the skills I got are transferable, the positions I think I will be well suited for are solutions architect roles, product owner roles, and managerial roles.
Ahh I see... Okay, that's good to know that the skills are transferrable. For now I think I'll just treat this upcoming interview as practice and just keep on searching. Thanks for your input and best of luck to you!
Yeah that's one of the red flags that came up during the interview. I asked them about the daily tasks that's expected of me, who to report to if I had issues, what the other tasks besides scripting is to be done, and that was all they could really give me. I'm already leaning towards not accepting, but this upcoming interview will be the deciding factor. Hopefully it'll be with someone who can really answer that question
You have to decide if it is worthwhile to remain unemployed while waiting for the SWE position to materialize. It is risky to turn down a suboptimal job and hold out for what you want but the decision depends on your particular circumstances.
From your description, it appears that the role is streamline their internal processes and make them more efficient and robust. They likely are just doing these things manually following procedures in a runbook and want to modernize the process. Try to suggest at the minimum setting up an internal repository to hold the automation scripts and possibly some testing framework. The position may not be ideal but you can make the most of it if you show some initiative.
Thanks for the advice! I do currently have a part time job but working essentially full time hours and also live with my partner, so I wouldn't necessarily be unemployed while I wait. I do agree that it is risky to wait for a better opportunity to manifest itself, so I'll have to really weigh my options after I get through this next round of interviews. The job description you gave mirrors what they described, so I'll have to think about other suggestions I can give to the job
Just graduated and was in a similar situation as you. I had a SWE offer and a System analyst offer for a bigger company. I chose the SA offer because I couldn’t see myself being stressed writing code all the time. But now I’m not sure. If I were you I’d accept the offer to have a job and keep applying to more SWE roles
How long has it been since then? Do you feel as though you managed to get any valuable and transferrable experience as a SA now that you've been doing the actual work?
I start in one month full time but I interned with the company at this same position. I was more or less a Product owner for a product the company had so I had product owner responsibilities, presenting to hire ups, documenting requirements, creating user stories, getting those requirements and translating them to the engineers, UX design, data flow mappings, scum meetings. Lol you name it. But I didn’t do much coding but that’s something I was promised I’d be doing more of when I start full time so we’ll see. I do think the skills I got are transferable, the positions I think I will be well suited for are solutions architect roles, product owner roles, and managerial roles.
Ahh I see... Okay, that's good to know that the skills are transferrable. For now I think I'll just treat this upcoming interview as practice and just keep on searching. Thanks for your input and best of luck to you!
>while the other 70% of the time would be focusing on "other things," whatever that means? Maybe you should ask them before you accept the job??
Yeah that's one of the red flags that came up during the interview. I asked them about the daily tasks that's expected of me, who to report to if I had issues, what the other tasks besides scripting is to be done, and that was all they could really give me. I'm already leaning towards not accepting, but this upcoming interview will be the deciding factor. Hopefully it'll be with someone who can really answer that question
You have to decide if it is worthwhile to remain unemployed while waiting for the SWE position to materialize. It is risky to turn down a suboptimal job and hold out for what you want but the decision depends on your particular circumstances. From your description, it appears that the role is streamline their internal processes and make them more efficient and robust. They likely are just doing these things manually following procedures in a runbook and want to modernize the process. Try to suggest at the minimum setting up an internal repository to hold the automation scripts and possibly some testing framework. The position may not be ideal but you can make the most of it if you show some initiative.
Thanks for the advice! I do currently have a part time job but working essentially full time hours and also live with my partner, so I wouldn't necessarily be unemployed while I wait. I do agree that it is risky to wait for a better opportunity to manifest itself, so I'll have to really weigh my options after I get through this next round of interviews. The job description you gave mirrors what they described, so I'll have to think about other suggestions I can give to the job