software Development

Eh? Strange question.
Software development is a very broad career area and there is definitely a lot of work in all areas of this in the EU and in Ireland. Pay is good, better in some areas than in others…database development will pay better than game development for instance. Promotions will depend on the company you work for / the number of people in the company / your ability / etc .
Hard to say any more unless your somewhat more direct in your query.

demand is high for software programmers at the moment so when demand is high salaries go up….

Aphra.

What do you guys and girls think of Software Development?
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It’s fun.
You must always be thinking.

It’s not like making sandwiches for a living where you can switch off at work; you are always solving new problems. You must like solving new problems, and being challenged… some people don’t like this in a job (wierdos :-)

Do you think its a good career to go into?
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If you like the act of developing software (make sure you have programmed before choosing it as a career), like communicating with people (cliched, but true), like tackling problems you don’t always know how to solve ahead of time, then yes, it’s a great career.

If you don’t fundamentally like thinking on your feet and solving problems; and don’t like not always knowing what the correct thing to do next is, then you could hate it.

It’s worth noting that from a career point of view, the messier, less elegant areas of work often tend to pay better. In other words, if the programming you’ve done has all being on your own small code projects, you must realise that in the real world the more paying jobs involve big complicated nasty systems that aren’t as elegant to work with.

Job availability in Ireland or EU?
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Excellent, certainly at the moment and for the last 2/3 years.
However, many of the jobs at the moment in Ireland seem to be for j2ee/.net web tier development roles. Some people like this stuff, and some people don’t. There’s also a fair bit of systems integration around.

There aren’t as many high end tech jobs in Ireland as you might think from the press. A lot of multinationals that have created a lot of the jobs, and get a lot of good job creation press, do work here that is not very technically glamorous, such as localisation and testing.
Ireland has a pretty lucrative software industry, but most of the large tech presences do their cutting edge R&D elsewhere, which is worth bearing in mind.

Anyone know what the payment is like?
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Irish job sites have decent salary survey information, or start reading ads.
Roughly, you could expect to start on 26-32ke as a grad with decent university qualification, go 40/45ish with 3 years experience, 50 with 3+ experience in the field of the job you are applying for. Going beyond that requires serious specialisation, or extended climbing in a big company, getting into technical management etc.

Salaries have increased a bit in last 2 years.
Salaries can be dramatically better in parts of UK, USA (er, before the dollar died). (x1.5,x2)

What about promotions in work?[/quote:2f72eabaae]
Depends where you are working. People tend to advance over time in the large companies, become senior engineers, then team leads, and so on. You would spend increasingly large amounts of time managing projects and people, and must less time writing software.

This all applies to software industry as a whole. Games industry is quite different, in terms of salaries, careers etc.

I guess the big ones would be the likes of Embedded systems, Multimedia, Telecommunications, Computer Networks, Network Security and Business Applications. However each of these areas will have various sub-disciplines in terms of both the applications developed and the languages used to do so hence the above comments on the area being so broad in general.