Is production support a good choice to start career?

[Santosh Hema shekar]

Hello,
I am fresher and i got placed in a company. In my company most of the freshers are getting production support project, but i want to be a developer. If i get a PS can i get along with that ..... can i shift from production support to dev......??? I m gud at programming and i m planning to take SCJP in April'12. For boosting my dev career please do suggest sum more certifications....
Please help me out.... I m very much worried about my career



Thanks and Regards,
Santosh

[Ayub ali khan]

Hi Santosh,

production support will surely add value to your experience. This will be good opportunity to learn lot of good practices and good way of on job training for you. You will also get opportunity to enhance some of the features you might support.

Thank you
Ayub

[Manikandan Swaminathan]

Hi Santhosh,

Being a fresher,i would strongly suggest you to go for a development project,because only in dev you can learn completely.This does not mean that you cant learn in production support,you can.. but the learning will be different - like UNIX related,application troubleshooting related etc.. which is NOT you look for something at this point in your career(As a fresher).
Also,remember moving from dev to production support will be very easy,but the reverse is NOT TRUE..I have myself been in prod support project but was not able to learn at all...
So, please go for a development project which will give you a very strong base for your career.

All the best

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Can someone elaborate on what "production support" means in this question? I ask because where I work production support is done by developers and includes development (bug fixes, enhancements, etc.) It involves knowing the system really well and is not done by the most junior/newest members of the team.

[John Jai]

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Can someone elaborate on what "production support" means in this question?

In my earlier support team they had categorized the levels of support as L1, L2, etc.

L1 team checks the status of the deployed applications, make calls to the product users to get clarifications / convey resolutions on the production issues. They also create weekly reports needed by different teams.

L2 team were responsible to identify the root cause of the issues, work on the tickets created and classify the tickets (such as code fix required, deployment issues, etc.).

L3 team were fixing the code fix issues and giving support for any critical issues when needed - constituted of developers of the application.

[Ayub ali khan]

I agree with you Jeanne, production support would include bug fixes, enhancements, etc. This again will depend on the nature of production support.

For some projects I have seen that production support people would monitor some routine tasks (eg:mainframe jobs). Check if there are any support tickets regarding any failed jobs. In these cases there is not much scope for bug fix,enhancement etc..

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

I see. So L1 is completely operational and therefore not development at all. Thanks.

[Vishal Hegde]

Me also working in production support ..but at times i take help of Senior Sftware specialist incase i have tiniest dubts related to core java/JSP and Servlets....hoping a get a switch in java domain

But i have learnt a lot from it with respect to the infrastrucuture of the company, have seen some cool web apps for monitoring Servers for instance Nagios have communicated with all sorts of people..It has really been a good experience for me and helped me improvise my communication skills which is the key aspect to earn your bread and butter I was also a fresher so joined the cmpany and its almost been 2 years and I just love the bonding we have with my collegues no matter how much we point fingers on others for other mistake I love working with them

[Alberto Vasquez]

I've seen some of the responses to this topic and I want to provide a bit more of a balanced response. If what you're trying to do is become a great Production Support guy, the answer to the question is a definite "yes!" If what you're trying to do is launch a Development career, the answer is more like "maybe."

From experience running Production Support teams, the best Support folks come with good Development backgrounds and the converse isn't necessarily true (you won't become a great Developer by doing Prod Support, though you might be more conscientious about the code you write). Sure, there is something to be learned for Developers in Support. For example, you'll have a better view of how systems are architected and will have some insight into the environments where applications run, but unless you're doing something like Level 3 Support (bug-fixes), don't expect to be able to code elegant solutions. Even with Level 3 Support, the design decisions are already made for you. I would say, if you want to launch a Dev career, get a Dev position. There's plenty of them out there.

Prod Support has processes and a discipline of its own. These are complementary, at best, with what you'd learn when doing Development. For example, in Support, you won't really learn how to put together code in an Agile process, but you will learn how to effectively manage incidents and restore service quickly.

If you'd like to learn more about Production Support, check out http://www.prodsupportblog.com.

[nidhi kurien]

I am in prod support and frankly i dont think i am cut-out for this kind of job which does not technical skills other than UNIX and SQL. I actually would want to switch to machine learning or AI. Found out about AWS speciality certifications. Could i get more info on the same and other paths i can choose to reach my ultimate aim?