When people picture where software developers work, they often picture big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, or they picture up-and-coming startups a la Silicon Valley. Although many of Dev Bootcamp alumni do work at companies like those (including Google, Facebook, and Apple), what about folks that want to be software developers and work for other types of organizations? Hospitals, schools, newspapers, museums, arts groups, banks… everyone needs devs, right?
Here are a few stories of Dev Bootcamp alumni who work as developers in non-tech companies:
Will works at a planetarium:
“I was fortunate enough to land a job at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago after DBC as a front-end developer (even though I focused on the back-end at Dev Bootcamp). I found that many of the technologies overlapped; not a day goes by when I don’t utter the phrase, “this reminds me of Ruby”, so it’s nice to see those similarities. My job is to help make our Zooniverse research pages work. Zooniverse is a collection of pages that uses everyday people/citizens to help universities, space agencies, and other research institutions to classify subjects. Data usually comes in the form of images, and users are asked to help classify the subjects based on what each image reveals. This helps researchers get a tremendous amount of work done efficiently with the help of users. Working at the planetarium is great because I get to learn about space and science while I work. I also get to take advantage of what the planetarium has to offer in terms of shows, lecturers, and special events.”
Lesley works at a trading platform:
“dough, Inc is made up of multiple parts: dough, Tastytrade, and potential future projects. I work on Tastytrade.com, a financial/trading/options education and media site, hosting 8.5 hours of live streaming original content five days a week. We keep the site going so the rest of the company can keep filming and producing. There is always something going on: puppies in the office, beer brewing, special guests, etc. A typical day is stand-up at 9:15am when we go around and give a breakdown of what we did the day before and plan to do today. We also have our product manager let us know if customer support has run into any issues. After that, we break off and head to do whatever projects we’re currently working on. Sometimes there are planning meetings, having to talk to other departments to understand a problem, how they’re using a piece of software, things they hear from clients. As of right now, we mainly deal with Ruby, Rails, Coffee Script, and Ember on our main non-mobile platforms. We have some trading wizards here who are really interesting to talk to, and the rest of company thinks the dev team does magic all day long.”
Nathan works at a public radio station
“Both my first gig and my new position are at companies that aren’t traditional tech companies. The first place I worked had never launched a web app before and I was the sole dev preparing it to go live – so the biggest challenge was learning how to anticipate timelines for bug fixes and new features when I was also busy diving much deeper into Ruby and JavaScript. These days, at Minneapolis Public Radio, I’m surrounded by exceptionally talented senior developers, and while Minnesota Public Radio’s focus is not on producing software, the company itself has been digital for many years. This leads to both an experienced understanding of schedule, and an expectation for high quality, fast products. My main language is Ruby here since I am a backend engineer, but that also means I am learning a lot more about databases (SQL) and servers. I’m also beginning to learn Java and PHP so I can do maintenance on old applications as well as rewrite some of them completely in Ruby.”
Alex works for a hotel chain
“Hyatt is obviously known for being a hospitality company but we are currently in the process of changing that… we’re planning to put Hyatt technology on the map! This task has become a huge project and I was fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor. Because the tech side of Hyatt was so new when I was hired, my team and I were granted a lot of freedom to decide for ourselves the work environment we wanted and it resulted in a perfect mix of ‘corporate’ and ‘startup’ style and feel. I’m a full stack developer on the Marketing Engineering team, which has 4 devs, 2 QAs, 2 UX designers, a product manager and a business analyst. The new web app we’re building is a node based app, and most of the coding I do is in JavaScript and jQuery primarily, which I love, but we also code in Dust, SASS, Java, Spring/Springboot, JSP, a little bit of ruby and python, and basically whatever language we want to use to get the job done. When we’re not pair-programming together to get a tough coding task done, we do lots of impromptu knowledge-sharing meetings that we call ‘brown-bags’. I’m pretty sure the ‘corporate’ people here are totally jealous that the tech people get to wear whatever we want to work and they can’t!”
Leah works at a publishing company
“I’m a Ruby on Rails Developer at Simon & Schuster, the book publishing arm of CBS. I found the job through another Dev Bootcamp alum (and we now sit across from each other at work!) Our team is responsible for all things digital at S&S: this means we work on projects like maintaining and developing new features for all of our e-commerce sites; managing the data flow from a book’s inception to its appearance on our site and sites like Amazon; and developing workflow tools for editors, marketers, and other internal team members. I worked at a tech company as an analyst before attending DBC, so it’s been really interesting for me to now work in a tech role, but at a non-tech company. The culture is a little bit more old-school than the stereotypical tech company, but there are some positives to that: because our team’s been around for a while, there are really well-defined processes around who is responsible for what, and how new features are chosen and prioritized. And as the little tech bubble inside a non-tech space, we (along with our awesome product team) get to educate the rest of the company on cool dev things like Agile processes and the wonders of Git.”
Matthew works at a research library
“I work at PLOS (Public Library of Science), nonprofit open access publishing platform for researchers. I work on one of several agile teams in the engineering department. My team is currently three engineers and a UX designer, as well as a product and project managers. My day starts with some morning work, followed by standup at 10, give or take, followed by more work. Generally we have good chunks of “maker” time, and aren’t interrupted by meetings except for necessary items like sprint planning and sprint retrospective every two weeks as well as a weekly software team meeting for all the agile teams to check in. I use Ruby/Rails and JavaScript (Ember.js) mostly. This is my first full-time engineering position after DBC.”
Tech companies can be fantastic places to work, but they’re not the only options for new software developers starting their careers. Web development is an extremely transferable skill set that you can take in virtually any direction. Want to work in the arts, the sciences, education, non-profit, finance, healthcare? You can be software developer in any of those fields. The sky’s the limit.
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