I recently bounced a quick 10 Question GeoGeek Q&A off Jim Barry. You may know Jim via his Twitter handle @jimbarry or you may also know him as the Developer Outreach Team Lead with Esri – Thanks Jim for being a good sport!
{Glenn} – PC or MAC?
{Jim B} I’m a Mac
{Glenn} – Coffee or Tea & Beer or wine?
{Jim B} Water. Especially in beer form.
{Glenn} – ArcGIS or QGIS (or other)?
{Jim B} I’m an Arc
{Glenn} – iOS or Android?
{Jim B} iOS
{Glenn} – ESRIUC or FOSS4G?
{Jim B} Tomorrow I’m headed to my 21st EsriUC. I’ve never been to a FOSS4G event, but I expect to soon. Hopefully May 2016; I hear it’s currently a toss-up between Philadelphia or Raleigh for the FOSS4GNA event next year.
{Glenn} – If I was to look on your bed table or coffee table, what are you currently reading?
{Jim B} A short stack of Wired and ESPN magazines that trees gave their lives to create (unfortunately). And Rene Rubalcava’s recently published “ArcGIS Web Development” book actually.
{Glenn} – On the job front, is your company hiring or have you recently made a hire? Also, are there any challenges you face in hiring Geotech talent?
{Jim B} The Esri Careers site is always stocked with stuff, so there’s always hiring going on, both to cover natural turnover but also continued growth. The biggest challenge I have when hiring for my team is to find folks that are both left and right-brained. You’ve got to be personable, engaging, communicate well, and creative, and at the same time very technical and logical. That’s an uncommon mix. My team is therefore very small.
{Glenn} – I’m a College student wanting a career in “GIS” what words of wisdom can you give me? Also, I often get people asking what courses or prof. development can I suggest. Is there a short course through Coursera or code academy etc… that you would suggest for a geogeek?
{Jim B} 1. Stay balanced and expose yourself to all of the major components of GIS: Data, Carto, Analysis, Coding. Also learn how servers and services work.
2. Tap into the community, especially online: GIS StackExchange, Esri’s GeoNet, this new community that just started at gisdevs.slack.com, and of course Twitter. And for learning and networking, meetups and conferences are always good when you can get to them.
3. As a GIS guy who learned coding later, sure, a ton of good resources out there. My favorite one getting started in web technology was W3Schools.com. Start with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Oh, and learn how to collaborate using Git/Github.
As for the job market, I’m biased on this because it’s where I started, but working in end-user tech support for GIS users for at least a year or two is hands-down the best way to jet-pack your skills and jumpstart your career. You’ll get 30-40 problems thrown at you per week, most you’ve never seen before, most you would never see working “in GIS” on your own, most using different technologies. On top of the tech skills you’ll absorb, you’ll also become an effective and efficient problem solver and a much better communicator, verbally and in writing. Learning how tools work is important; but learning how they break and what to do about is much more so.
{Glenn} – I’m a bit of a skeptic regarding the economy at the moment and don’t view things as being completely rosy. How do you see the current business climate unfolding?
{Jim B} When GIS is implemented in a way that makes or saves money and resources, or otherwise helps you accomplish whatever you’re trying to do, there will probably be a need for those skilled in using those tools. The GIS job of the past was in knowing how to munge data, analyze it, and present those results and recommendations in clear actionable ways, most often on a map. Your job today is to push the power of GIS data and tools to your users in services and in apps, exactly when, where, and how they need it, without them needing specialized skills or even know that they’re “doing GIS”. 100 years ago you almost needed to be a mechanic to own a car, now you don’t. There’s still a need for auto mechanics and GIS professionals, because what’s going on under the hood is complex and engineered, but not everyone who can benefit from it needs to be.
{Glenn} – Can you share a snippet of what’s exciting and/or on the horizon for you or your company?
{Jim B} Now that Comic-Con is over, the annual EsriUC is next week in San Diego. We expect about 18,000 folks there from around the world. Every year there is a whole lot of new stuff to absorb. Videos from Monday’s Plenary session should be up later in the day or so. Other than meeting lots of people and seeing their incredible work, the most exciting thing to me at the moment are ArcGIS’ Web AppBuilder and AppStudio. These tools are a great way to most quickly deliver maps and tools to end-users in a way tailored to whatever they do and need.
Thanks Jim!
