Moving Up the IT Ladder in a Poor Economy?

Andy asks: "As almost anyone who joined the IT industry on the tail end of the Dot-Com boom can tell you, trying to move up in the industry for the past couple of years has been like jogging up-wind in a hurricane. I have sent resumes to countless numbers of employers only to still be working in the same $13/hr. low-end outsource support job as when I started (and $13/hr. doesn't get you too far in Boston these days). Learning more and more languages/technologies/protocols has merely resulted in a larger skill set on my resume, with pretty much the same level of experience, and no new interviews. Has anyone else been able to get out of this sort of slump, either during this economic slump or a previous one? Should I just continue the path of learning as much as I can and applying for jobs? Would getting a cert (maybe an RHCE or some Cisco certs) help? Would it be worth it to get a degree in MIS or CS?"

Comments

screw ...

[torpor]

... all that other advice:

Write Code.

Treat it as the #1 thing you do.

If you're not writing code, or computing some process, or having something run somewhere that does something, then move out of the way. A whole lotta code is still left to be written, computers still have a looooong way to go, there is an infinities worth of things to do with any single one of them, great and small alike.

So, like, write code.

(... what i should be doing instead of boing-nut'ing around on /. ...)

Re:It's who you know, and what you know

[dnahelix]

enter: The Chat Room