Slashdot Mirror
Traveling Jobs in IT?
wed128 asks: "I am currently a freshman at Penn State University, studying for a Computer Engineering degree. However, I look at the graduates ahead of me and many of them are cubical warriors. This doesn't really bother me, however i'd like to see the world before being confined to a cube for the rest of my life. Are there any jobs in an IT field where I can travel? How would I go about getting the right contacts regarding this? I have 4 years till graduation, so this isn't a direct plea for a job..."
Large corporations have their own IT staff (but many are out sourcing lately...)
Most of the people in IT who travel are either desktop support or engineering folks. The travel is pretty much for a year and only during rollouts. i.e. rolling out 15,000+ new computers to all of a companies employees.
Those that do this sort of rollout generally rack up the frequent flyer miles to the point that they always upgrade to first class and they always travel free for vacation. Of course that means in the peak of the travel session you will be home once or twice a week if you are lucky. Try 4 times a month to see your significant other...
Other jobs where you travel would be consulting gigs where you are *THE* expert and you need to go all over the place to save other peoples bacon and for the privilege of having a *specialist* flown in, the customer will pay BooKoo bucks! But as a recent graduate you can kiss this sweet job goodbye because these are rather rare positions and only earned through years of hard work.
Those who say they love travel will hate it after a few months! Dealing with airports, car rental, and hotels can truly suck over time.
Fresh out of school? Want to see the world? Try being a missionary IT guy and go to Africa and other remote locals to setup networks for the locals. This is about as smart as joining the US Navy to "See the World" and ending up on a submarine for 6 months at a time underwater!
Peace Corps
yeesh - that was easy = next?
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
There are also some "fly-in" jobs that are based in Montreal, and I believe there are some too in Vegas and Amsterdam. Check it out ! :-)
I have a friend I met while travelling who works from home for RedHat. He managed to persuade his bos shat since he was working from home why couldn't he move his home around. He then spent 3 months travelling across the US on a moter bike, 3 months living in Scotland, a month in Egypt, 4 months in Australia (where I met him) and 3 weeks in South East Asia. He still put in a full day's work and uploaded his code every day by taking his laptop to an internet cafe.
I haven't done it yet, but I am interested in doing it sometime perhaps a few years from now. The stipend is minimal, but you will get to see a part of the world you normally wouldn't.
It will give you an appreciation for the opportunities you have here in this country. You will have a much better perspective on the world and it will make you a better person for it. You will suddenly stop caring so much about having the latest video game system and start volunteering your time and donating to charities. The words "digital divide" take on a whole new meaning...
work the standards "circus". you get to travel to meet face to face to discuss technical issues on a standard. meet with other engineers in the same field/expertise, etc.
at this point in your life, you can get "in" with standards committees by doing a LOT of free work for it and presenting proposals and results. the university would pay for it and you can hook up with professionals in the field for a job that would be about the same...
do some work, travel to present results (usually in very nice locales...), rinse and repeat.
work that for a bit and you'll have more air miles than you know what to do with. especially since you've hit a lot of cool places already.
just be careful of getting stuck in the standards "circus"...
some good ones: ISO MPEG... ISO JPEG...
good luck!
Yeah, but that isn't really "travelling" as in "seeing lots of places", more like seeing lots of airports and taxis, and customer machine rooms. trust me, a machine room in London looks exactly like a machine room in paris, and all airports look the same these days.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Try the UN - they have people flying all over the place all the time. They will work primarily in Africa, South America and Asia (ie rural development areas) and you will be doing stuff such as setting up wireless broadband networks, teaching locals how to use technology, and pushing lots of Linux and Open source Software to its limits. You won't make lots of money, but you will gain lots of experience, get the good feeling that you are actually using technology to help those who most need it, and you get to see some interesting places.
The UN job site is currently showing 20 IT related jobs. Have fun.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Forgive the bitterness... I've been on the road 80-90% since spring. As a father and husband, traveling the world lost much of its glamour. I say goodbye to my family again in a few hours.
I suspect we are in agreement, however. Seeing the world is a state of mind, rather than being a tourist or worker bee abroad.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Having worked with a wide variety of USAF systems, and a somewhat smaller variety of Navy systems, I'm not sure that there's any reason to believe one service has a wider variety of systems than another. (Disclaimer: I wasn't a techie at the time, I was a medic, so I wasn't paying any more than an interested layman's attention to the details.) I'm also not at all sure that either looks better on a resume than the other -- both the AF and the Navy have pretty high-tech reputations. (Army and Marines might be harder to convince people, which really isn't fair, but ...) In any case, yes, the service -- any branch -- will give you all kinds of travel opportunities, some you've never even had nightmares about. Trust me on this.
An interesting kind of step in the opposite direction, especially if you've got a bit of a talent for fundraising, is geekcorps. Actually, in some ways, it's probably pretty similar to being in the service: in a matter of a day or so, you could find yourself whisked away from 21st c. America to someplace just out of the stone age, and you've got to deal with it. But the mission's rather different.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Here are some things I've done in between serious periods of technical consulting. Not for everyone, but every few years its good to go out and do something different.
Travel Writer. While you are still in school, take journalism and creative writing classes. Learn to sell your articles. Use your computer skills to create a website, and maintain your articles in a database or wiki where you can pull one up and quickly re-write it into a new article. Then every time you travel, make sure about 4 hours of each day are spent working on your article(s) of the trip. Take digital photos of lots of things, keep the captions straight. Research hotel prices, interesting things in the area (plagiarize directly from other travel guides, then verify, they often have intentionally misleading info), and keep a diary on some kind of mobile computing device. Make sure you have a website where you can try selling your articles in near-real-time, and if an editor wants a specific angle on a story, you can work it up while there. Start while you are still in school, to have a good base of editorial contacts.
Technical Trainer. For some products a company needs a trainer to follow up the sale with a few days or a week of on-site training. Good trainers are hard to find, good trainers with extensive technical background are very rare indeed. Only a few companies actually realise this and pay accordingly, but I know one who travels to cities all over the place and earns about 150k euros/year (30 weeks X 5,000 Euros). When he gets an assignment to a location he has never been before, he always adds a few days to his trip for traveling in the area. Needless to say, he is single.
Events Coordinator. Specifically, hi-tech events. There is a need to work alongside the other coordinators for things like internet access, power requirements, cabling, and speciality telecoms and satellite access. There is also a whole field around event security, providing the big burly guys with working radios, a command centre with computers and video surveillance, and other security related items. There has to be a hands-on techie to ensure smooth operation. Speaking multiple languages is also a key requirement, at least here in Europe.
There are lots of early career organisations, like the Peace Corps, or Ingenieurs Sans Frontiers, who will place you in a village somewhere for a year to earn some work experience. The only travel involved is in getting to the place, and back home after a year. But its a good way to see at least one other small part of the world. Take lots of language courses while you can, english only goes so far if you want to actually work in non-anglo parts of the world.
As others have pointed out, serious relationships and a travel career are mutually exclusive. Having children almost certainly means you need to settle down. So plan on having the travel career right after school, while you are still free enough to enjoy it, and expect to change into a cubicle job later.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Many people with middle-age responsibilities (spouse & kids) are looking to minimize travel. Travel requirements are seldom viewed as a plus, except by young people want to travel. I never thought about it before, but high-travel jobs might be the one area where employers favor recent grads (few responsibilities, willingness to live cheaply, flexible schedules, few complaints).
Believe me, the mystique of travel fades soon enough. I had an around-the-world trip in 1999. Nobody would do it this way in 2003, but at the time I travelled alone. As an added bonus, I was sick as a dog every step of the way. Sick in UK, sick in Switzerland, sick in Hong Kong, sick in China. Over the course of two weeks, I was miserable in all 24 time zones. If I tried such a thing today, I would have been stuck in the SARS quarantine.
I met some great people, and discovered that British Air has very nice seats in Business Class on their long-haul international flights. All of this is fine, but travel is a "defensive" game. You are defending your property and yourself against a number of threats, and you are mostly trying to prevent things from going wrong. It's a fun game to play, but the novelty wears off.