Career as a Software Developer
Day in the life as a Software Developer

Name:	Windsor Fanning
IT Specialty:	Software Developer
Job Title:	Application Developer
Company:	Tribune Media Services
Degree:	B.S. Computer Engineering

Q. How long have you had your degree?
A. I graduated in 2004.

Q. Do you feel your degree adequately prepared you for your technology career?
A. For what I currently do, I believe my degree over prepared me in some areas (i.e. digital circuit design which I don’t use in my job), and prepared me adequately for the software design that I do.

Q. How many years have you been in the IT field?
A. 3 years.

Q. Have you ever worked in a field outside IT?
A. Somewhat. I worked at a Boys & Girls Club for 9 months, doing IT related things, but still had responsibilities that weren’t IT related.

Q. In what way did working in other fields prepare you for the IT field?
A. Ironically, working with kids/teens helped me learn how to better work with people in a professional environment. Also, the business environment that I worked in helped me better appreciate the professional environment that one is exposed to in IT.

Q. What personality traits and skills do you possess that you feel help you in your specific IT field?
A. Friendly, able to receive direction, appreciative, attentive to fine detail, rational, and, depending on the situation, able to stand firm on a position or capable of negotiating.

Q. What steps does someone go through to get a job in this field?
A. The first step should be obtaining an education related to the specific area of the field that one is looking to get into. Secondly, putting together an effective resume and applying to desirable jobs is necessary. It can take time to get into the field, so a couple of job moves may be required before one gets to where they want to be professionally.

Q. What are ways to advance in your field?
A. The ability to learn new technologies and finding ways to work on various types of technologies is definitely helpful ways to advance in the field. It is important to develop skills in a particular area, but one doesn’t want to get absolutely locked in to a specific position for the rest of their career.

Q. What is the most enjoyable thing about your job?
A. Even though it’s just TV and Movie listings, knowing that the products that I personally work on is impacting the satisfaction that someone else is able to derive from it to enhance their life is a positive. Along with that, having a few co-workers that I get along with is a positive.

Q. What are your daily tasks like?
A. Always actively checking email (lots of spam filters to delete email from local co-workers whose job tasks don’t relate to mine). Periodically check up on the production status of the product I work on (the Systems Group does an excellent job, but I take personal interest in knowing the stability and performance of the product). Answer questions from management; explaining how processes are put together so that they can accurately report what I am doing. On occasion, running reports for sales people, so they can report on the success of the product and know the success status of a customer so they can communicate well with a meeting with the customer. On a daily basis, I’m developing something, whether it is directly impacting the production code of the product I work on, or if it is something to assist in some form of production, or monitoring. Recently, I’m getting into new development, so I’ve been spending time working on XML Schema design. When I get the chance, I investigate a technology that is new to me and find a way to apply it to the product I work on so I can learn it.

Q. What skills do you use at work?
A. Analytical skills, communication skills, understanding human psychology so I know when to better to assert effort in influencing the direction of product design.

Q. What percentage of your day do you spend working independently or in a group?
A. It can vary widely from day to day. I would say I communicate with a group about 75% of the time, even though I may be doing my own work, it’s nice to bounce ideas off of another person. When I first started, I’d say group work was 0%, but the group has been reformed a couple times since I started.

Q. What is one thing you didn’t know about your field before getting into it that you wish you had known?
A. Coming from an engineering education background, the concept of ethics and the amount of analytical ability required to succeed educationally I think has helped me out in what I do, but not everyone around me has the same educational background as I do, so some people aren’t necessarily as sharp as they should be at figuring out what they do.

Q. If you were a person getting ready to choose an IT major for college, what advice/guidance would you give them to help them decide between all the fields?
A. I’d say, if you do engineering, go into a specific field that you can achieve Professional Engineer status in. Most importantly, understand exactly what kind of job you should be doing for the degree you want to obtain. For example, I knew many people that thought that a Computer Engineering degree would give them the skills at setting up computer systems, when they could have just gone to a 2 year school and gotten a different degree for that.