
Ask HN: Ex VMware Support Career advice (transition to coding) - vmwaresupport
Hello everyone,<p>I have a very interesting situation. I completed a CS degree in 2011 and my original plan was to take some time off, then go back to school and complete a degree in Cognitive Science and do a masters&#x2F;phd. I am in the Toronto area.<p>This plan got derailed because I found a job I loved as a Technical Support Engineer for VMware. It was fantastic and years went by. I lost the desire to go back to school as most do and learned I have a passion for working on really hard problems.<p>Towards the end of my tenure, I became a backline resource called a &quot;Research Engineer&quot; and I got to work on some of the most interesting problems and political escalations (problems that take a lot of research in order to be able to progress on). Then they laid myself and several other folks off in the latest restructuring.<p>I did some career thinking, and I&#x27;d like to transition to software development. Although fixing interesting problems is fun and rewarding, I&#x27;d like to work on longer-going projects and build things. I&#x27;ve been spending time learning web development, right now Javascript&#x2F;Node stack.<p>I know that the word &quot;support&quot; has negative associations, but at the VMware level it was a really tough job. You can to be really smart&#x2F;talented to be able to learn the technology and be able to solve problems with it. One year at VMware is like 3 years anywhere else in terms of sysadmin&#x2F;operations learning.<p>Based on this experience, I think it may be appropriate to apply to Jr. Developer and DevOps roles.<p>Do you guys have any tips on how to make the career transition?<p>Note: I am in the Toronto area.
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mtmail
DevOps should be a good fit. "support" might have negative associations to
some but you can explain a couple of issues customers faced and it should be
clear you weren't sitting in a call center helping users to connect their
modem to the internet.

Maybe you can find a company that uses
[https://mesos.apache.org/](https://mesos.apache.org/) or similar.
[https://mesos.apache.org/community/user-
groups/](https://mesos.apache.org/community/user-groups/)

