Slashdot Mirror
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?"
The economy is still slow without a doubt. It's hard to find constant work even for those who are skilled and experienced. I was fortunate enough to make connections near the end of the dot com boom, and recently those connections have begun to pay off. My income has more than doubled in the last 6 months, although work is still inconsistant. If I didn't have the experience beforehand, or I didn't make those connections, I'd probably be flipping burgers right now.
I doubt many employers want a mediocre jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. You're better off selecting one or two specific areas and focusing on getting experience within it. Most of the technicly adept and smart employers know that tech certifications are pretty much a bunch of BS, but some still require it if you want to get your foot in the door. The same goes for degrees. Either way, couldn't hurt to have it.
And btw, FP bitches!
The downside is that you have to leave Boston. Well one of many downsides......
I only got a good job going through the "front door" approach once in my life. I was 14 years old.
20 years later, everything worth getting came from being aggressive with marketing myself and finding unexpected leads. I would recommend possibly getting a book about Cold Calling. There's one especially good called Cold Calling for Women that's really good for men or women. There's also a classic book called What Color is Your Parachte. It's geared toward people who maybe want to switch careers, but it's got good discussion of finding jobs as well.
It seems to me that going the "normal career route" in the I.T. field is inherently problematic simply because our field changes so rapidly, and few employers want to keep up with constant retraining. So we've got to think differently from other workers, even if we're slogging through the office right next to them.
The way you get the big payoff is you think outside the box. Become your own entrepreneur. If that's too much hassle, enjoy your $13/hr wage.
Murray Todd Williams
I was able to get out of that trap by doing volunteer stuff at night to get experience and references.
to find a rich woman to live off of. I don't know where to get certified for that though.
I currently have a decent paying job and am relocating to the south where I have been unable to get a single interview. Where my wife will be working, the IT manager said they could get 2 of me for the pay i am currently making. Definately not a good thing for me. I am currently thinking of learning some programming languages to maybe start in that field as i have a growing interest in that. But who is gonna hire a programmer with no skill who needs a certain set of income just ot make the monthly bills?
Networking.
As in, expand your personal contacts, not connecting together computers.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Seriously, if it's about the cash, find a new career. Make it something you enjoy, because you'll be spending a large part of your life doing it.
You kill your boss to move up the ladder. I suggest this for a poor economy, too.
If you don't have a degree, and you can't seem to get anything better than entry-level and dead-end jobs, going to college would probably be a good idea. The degree alone won't solve your problems, but not having a degree gives the overworked HR drone sorting resumes an easy way to categorize yours... as a NO. Which could explain the lack of any interviews. (By the way, picking up a book on resume-writing might be a good idea as well.)
Furthermore, if you're going to go to college, the best time for that is during a weak economy (like now). You don't want to spend that occasional window of 4-5 years when everyone else is making money, by sitting in classes and paying money instead.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Learning more and more languages/technologies/protocols
In my opinion, a mile wide/inch deep skillset gets you nowhere. If a resume passed my desk with 50 million skills and 5 years total experience, I am going to question that resume right to the circular file. But maybe that's just me.
Move out a Boston.
Big cities think in big company ways. You have management and underlings.
Get to some smaller city where you can work for a smaller business, learn the entire business and move up from there.
At aim for smaller companies ones without a set corporate structure that has no room for you anywhere but the bottom.
t
You'll never find it in this economy. What I can suggest is to find something you really ENJOY doing (i.e. programming/games/support/whatever), and work hard to get that job, and then sit tight and wait for the economy to pick up. At least then you'll get some enjoyment out of your job. If possible look for something with a future for moving to a place where you want to go (or pay scale you want to go) so when the economy picks up, at least you'll be first in line..
Mod +5 Drunk
No wonder you're making $13/hr. We're hiring like mad but won't touch someone without a degree. Even if it's in a related field...I don't have a CS degree but have a couple in physics. Don't bother with the certs...get an education in the field you're trying to get a well-paying job in. I interview candidates in my current job and I can tell you that a degree is worth more than the cert (as well it should be).
I have an MS cert which I will never, ever, EVER use, yet its listed proudly on my resume next to my Solaris and other tech certs. Why? Because HR drones OCR your resume and do text-searches on it. If you don't have the magic words, you never even make it to the real decision makers.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Would it be worth it to get a degree in MIS or CS?
I really hope this isn't serious... how exactly did you plan to get very far in a field you have no formal education in? Trust me, I am a firm believer that "clues > certs" but in the case of a university degree, it's a no brainer. I really hope this was a troll submission...
We pay our cleaning lady $50 to clean the house once a week, which takes her from 3 to 4 hours. She is 25 years old, doesn't know how to move a mouse or type on a keyboard.
At $13 an hour and a bunch of certifications, I think you are probably in the wrong company or doing the wrong stuff.
Boston is a dying area for techies, like Silicon Valley, less jobs every year. Beefing up your resume won't help much if there's insufficient need in your environment.
Hit up your local temp agencies for temp IT work. Once you get a temp job make yourself indspensable and the job will follow.
This guy is way out there
I'm a Macintosh (mostly) sys admin and there is plenty of demand for my skills. Windows sys admins seem to be a dime a dozen. Find a specialty -- even my dog has his CCNA and MCSE.
Keep computers in your basement as a hobby. I am wrapping up my BS in Business this spring, likely startting MBA next year. Why be Dilbert when you can be the Pointy Haried Boss?
My biggest problem is I am too good at what I do (I build Oracle/MS-SQL DB's for health care facilites). I also make enough money that the ROI on the MBA doesn't look that great. I'll have to work hard on forgetting what I know to be an effective manager. "I heard Mauve has more RAM". heh. Can't wait!
JON
You ask whether it's "worth it" to get some more training or a degree. In return, I'd ask what you're trying to accomplish. Do you want to be a software engineer, given you don't have a computer science background? I've known a few excellent people in that situation, but they are VERY rare.
Also, before blaming the economy: is your resume excellent? Please post it online and I'm sure you'll receive some constructive criticism from the Slashdot crowd....
im only 18 but im finding easy to find IT work in small town usa, i dont have any certs, but i know my shit. people will pay outrageous sums of money to have a comp know it all in their office.
Maybe this will change when I finish school next year, but damn, I would kill for a salary of $13/hour at the moment.
Currently, one month's pay at that rate that would pay my rent, food, utilities, cable, phone, gas, and 6 months of car insurance, with a sizable chunk left over.
Probably couldn't support a family on that amount, granted, but for anyone (single or splitting costs) not living right near a giant city, $13/hour would be awesome.
Learn about a specific industry and become proficient with the tools that they use.
For example, learn about sales/marketing and learn how to code with either IRI or AcNielsen or both. Learn about finance and Bloomberg APIs, etc.
You'll do MUCH better if you come across as someone who understands business but also knows how to code as opposed to someone who's just a god at coding.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Above and beyond all get experience and know the basics.
:-)
I finally went "professional" with all my computer knowledge in '98. No degree, no certs, just what was in my head from being a computer geek for 15+ years. Started out being an intern (at 29 years old) for a local security consulting firm and from there have rose through the ranks, worked with some of the countries brightest, and am now in a 100+ a year job as a Senior Network Security Engineer. I credit it all to wanting to learn everything, experience, and picking a niche' (security) to focus on and to excel in.
The above wasn't an ego trip just hopefully a nugget of guidance.
What do you *want* to do ? You want to climb the ladder of IT jobs, fine. I hear you. But, higher up the ladder, you don't get an easier job. You may get paid a bit better than $13 an hour, but your expectations will increase accordingly. What are you happy doing ?
I often kicked myself for graduating when I did. I got out of university about an year before the dot-com boom died. This was in 2000. People who graduated a mere year before me were in positions like "architect" and "senior team lead", I was a lowly developer. You can take all the experience you want, but some (most?) places DO look for prior management experience and even if you did nothing except crunch code, you were called an architect, so you get your foot in the door.
I had to go about it differently. I was a lowly developer. I tried to vary my skillset and technology. No job was too controversial, too risky, too cutting edge. I asked for (and got) all the mad projects, with high risk and high gain (and an equally high chance of failing). I am not sure if this will work for you, or even if you want to, but if you're looking for experience, then think carefully about accepting risky jobs. At startups, underfunded companies and the like. Don't expect to double or triple your salary today. Just keep getting that all important project, real-world experience. Contribute to open source projects. Keep your coding skills fresh. Make an effort to learn some technologies in depth. Call me troll if you like, but for now, Java and .NET both seem to be fairly good bets. Each month, each year you spend building up your resume, you're also in contact with coworkers who work in technology. Network. Get a reputation for good work, for not being a slacker, for being a knowledgable, reasonable person to work with.
I've gotten 3 (out of 4) jobs so far purely because of someone I knew who knew someone else who had a vacancy.. or from old university contacts .. or from old coworkers who knew I was looking around for another place...
The difference between you and a lot of other people ? You've got less to lose.
Good luck
I graduated in March 02 from getting a technical degree in Java Programming(along with a few certs) and was in a very similar situation that you were. I finally had a brain storm and started sending in resumes to jobs in marketing departments that had internet marketing groups. I positioned myself as the guy who interface between tech needs and business needs. It's worked out great so far.
I've been keeping my programming skills sharp by freelancing when available and working on interesting projects for my website. In another 6 months I'll start looking for a programming job again but now I'll have 2 years experiance managing people, working out budgets, working on business strategy and an established protfolio of freelance work.
This approach probably isn't for everyone but for it's made this recession bearable.
that I've noticed anyway, is that the percentage of people who are employed in IT and in over their heads hasn't really gone down a lot since the dot com bust. I still run into people all the time who don't know squat. Of course, I also work for a gigantic corporation...
Certain parts of the country have been hit much harder than others. So instead of being in competition with 200 resumes you'll be in competition with 5,000. Look for a job in alternate locations or be willing to relocate. Its hard and kinda crazy to leave your family and friends but since you're starting out the experience might be worth it. You can come back "the victor". I did this.
Or you could find some non profit orgs out there and offer to spruce up their systems and get them going - for free! It could wind up being more experience and responsibility than you might even get for money. Great references too! And a song in your heart. Proves to yourself that you know all you say you do on the resume.
The finaly point is to DO SOMETHING. Just sending out resumes and learning are not enough. Use some of it in creative ways or at least try to.
Good luck.
I started my own business too, and it enabled me to move way up the ladder in the past two years: from tech support to Webmaster. I had confidence in myself. I was willing to fall flat on my face and fail. I took a chance. Worked hard. Treated people right. Was honest. It paid off.
One tip: when you have many skills, and little experience, tailor your resume to the job you're applying for. If they want an ASP developer, don't tell them you can do ASP, PHP, Perl, and some JSP. Tell them you can do ASP.
Then, to add to that, tell them you work well with other people. You're not selfish about your turf. They're looking for a quality person who can do the job. Show them that you're a quality person that can do the job. Then, when you get the job, be a quality person, do the job.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Yourself, your abilities, a product, your product, just learn it. A professional salesman is a hard employee to find and they're expensive once you find a real one.
This might sound trite but it's the truth.
My "order takers" calling themself's "salesmen" make 45-50k. My real salesmen make 80k+.
And no, it doesn't mater what you sell (see above)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I recently did a paper for a Human Resource Management class in which I interviewed two hiring managers in from two different software companies.
I asked how they would rank their candidates on based on education, experience, and certifications.
While one preferred education over experience, they both agreed that certifications were a distant third and worthless without the corresponding experience.
However, since labor is a commodity and we are currently in period of high supply and low demand, you aren't going to get as much as you might want to.
There are a lot of very experienced and very educated people going for the same positions you are. As one manager put it, "Right now I can get an incredible amount of talent for a third of their last job, simply because they need the check and benefits."
These days, you either need an impressive degree, an impressive amount of experience, or a combination thereof.
As someone said above, your social networking skills are important, too.
Good luck.
555-1111...ring...ring...
Hello! My records indicate that this number is registered to an eligible single female in my area code. As an eligible single male, I wanted to take this opportunity to extend a special, one-time off...*click*....
sigh...
555-1112...ring...ring...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
It's very simple. The IT industry in the US is largely now a low-paying, blue collar job. If you want to make more money, you're gonna have to do something else. Find a new profession. There's nothing that you can do about it. Get over it.
This is the sagest of the posts. Applications and interviews are made to hire $13/hr people. You need a good solid niche, general smarts, and attitude.
Being a genius in a box does crap. Network.
Jim Weller
For a second there, I thought this was a dating technique for lonely geeks.
Working in IT sucks. There is no "normal career route." Unless you mean:
1. Go to school to obtain sheepskin
2. Apply everywhere
3. Relocate across the country to the one place that took you
4. Get pidgeon-holed into an absurdly narrow field of work (like IBM DB2 Index Optimizer), get treated like crap for 5 years, and get laid off once your field becomes sufficiently obsolete.
5. Unemployment, Ramen, Plasma Donation
6. Lather, Rince, Repeat.
I think I'll become a college professor.
dinner: it's what's for beer
1) A certification can be taken away from you. Which is what happened when MS switched from NT4 to win2k. A degree from an accredited institution cannot.
2) A cert means your are familiar with a particular technology. You are qualified to be a code monkey or a hardware monkey. A degree means you understand more than that just where the buttons are.
If you want to move up the ladder, you need a least a 4 year degree. All but the lowest levels of management are out of reach to you right now. A degree shows that you
1) Have been trained to think critially.
2) Have a background in theory
3) Have been trained to communicate (English classes are NOT a waste of time).
4) Were forced to deal with people who do not think as you do, with other priorities and values.
5) Have the patience to slog through 4 years of work before getting your reward.
6) You know how to work independently and also as part of a team.
The best combo is degree + exp. + certs. But it looks like you have experience, and with a degree that should help. I assume that while in school you would let the certs lapse, but if you can keep up on them you would be in a great position. And you may decide that there is more to life than technology and go into a completely different field. Be happy at what you do.
In our situation, we hired a guy with certs but no degree and he had to work independently. He cratered out. THen we hired a guy with both a degree and certs and I *am* impressed.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I was in california and could not find a tech job to save my life, so I moved to colorado. Same deal there. An offer from a family friend to move out to a small town in Arkansas turned out to be the best thing ever. There was a major shortage of knowledgable people here and finding work didn't take very long. My first job only paid $12/hr but consider that I also rented a 3 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood close to shopping and schools for $550 a month and gas was a good 50 cents cheaper than california.
I did my job, met people, tried my best to get known as a great tech and I now have a great job as a System Admin that I love to death. The cities are full of people looking for your kind of work. Get out of there and go somewhere that needs people that know the things that you do. Of course, you won't find any software companies in small towns but you will find TONS of businesses that have to use computers and networks to get their jobs done, and all those people need someone to work on their computers.
Most small towns have a few computer repair businesses that take care of the businesses but the days of walking in and fixing a computer quickly are over. It takes time to get to know someones network and software and you can't do a good job if you're charging an hourly rate like the small computer support businesses do. These areas are perfect for convincing a business that they will save money and get better service if they hire you as their admin. Show them all the things that need to be done on a daily basis like following security advisories, updating computers, checking security, etc.
The company I work for pays me quite well and they said their past 3rd party support cost them 3 times as much as I do, and more gets done quicker. Before they would have to wait to get something fixed, sometimes up to 3 days. Now things get fixed immediately and revenues are up because of it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I just had this same conversation with someone working on a PMP certification. The certification MAY help you get past the resume scanners in HR, but being able to demonstrate a history of successful projects is what will get you the position. I would recommend getting involved with some OpenSource projects as a great way to show that your ready and able to be successful in a field where team work is now 80% of the game.
My answer to my friend is below:
50% of all serious (those worth at least $3 million) IT projects still fail. Something that has not seriously changed since the 60's when Brooks wrote the seminal text on the subject (The Mythical Man Month). These projects are not failing due to a lack of in depth expertise or paper certifications, they fail due to basic issues involving interpersonal communications and a mis-alignment of rewards.
In my experience projects get into trouble when the staff is not fully versed in identifying complexity (a basic problem that the engineering profession addresses directly). In conjunction with a failure to translate that complexity into an appropriate risk assessment (usually the result of poor team communications and/or inexperience) which is where a well versed technical manager comes to play. Followed by an unacceptable delivery which is often times the result of a counter productive award system.
Having a PMP says that you are well versed in the lexicon of Project Management and communicating with other PM's. It does little in helping you effectively communicate with end users, line of business staff, or management. The same can be said for Oracle certified DBA's and MS certified software developers.
This answer is going to cost me an arm and a leg in karma, but what the heck. That's what it's for, right?
Show some employer loyalty.
I just did a hire about 4 months ago. We chewed through resumes for about 6 months before we found someone that we felt would fit. Something that we noticed and ended up using as a filter rule was whether or not a person would stick with a job for more than 6 months. Generally as a rule of thumb, you really want to stick out a job, unless its absolutely hellacious, for about three years. I'd really recommend five, to be honest. That way you're not viewed as someone contaminated with the so-called 'Dotcom Disease.'
We really wanted someone that once we've invested time, money, and training in to make a contribution to our projects for more than the time an intern would. Most !Dotcoms are similar in their opinions.
Actually, upon considering it, what this really ought to be relabeled as rather than 'employer loyalty' as 'resume care and feeding'. Your career will live and die by it. Take care of it and it will take care of you. Taking lots of short gigs to try to climb quickly scares off a lot of hiring folk.
I could go on ponticating, but I am sure that you're sick of it already. ;)
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
that's because of the outsourcing and work visas being issued. I am also from Boston, at the MIT flea market I heard of a guy who got laid off and they hired some guy on a year work visa from india to fill his job (This is HP).
time for a new labor movment, keep jobs here, keep money here (in Boston...all of you in India can fight globalization keeping WalMart and Microsoft out if you want, I have no problem with that)
If the 1998-2000 tech boom and bust taught us anything where you're either a driver or a passenger it's that we need drivers. Translation: new business models that make money in the short and long haul. "Nickel and Dimed" author Barbara Ehrenreich recently spoke at my school, saying: "You can't blame the poor economy on character defects alone. There's not enough money." In short, let's help the financial representation incorporate some good biz models (capitalism + sustainability + socialism = something short of outright greed) that bring in more money for everyone, not just CEOs, management and sys admins on a lofty perch.
So says an MCSE, CCNA, CCDA, A+, N+, Network+, WCSP, CCSA, and probably some others that I don't remember but are on my resume. Oh, and I haven't been without a tech job since just out of college in '98 . . .
I have none of that (well, I used to have the CNA, but that was back in '93). I have been employed every month since '90, making embarrassingly large sums of money (which I still manage to spend and remain broke-- go figure).
Everone has a story. Some are successful because of the number of acronyms on a resume; others (like me) are successful because... well, I don't know why I'm successful. I've been a damned hard worker, I'm good at what I do (programming, DBA, sysadmin stuff like email and web, and networking), but really there's nothing fantastic.
I think a lot of it has to do with you. Yeah, getting your foot in the door can be difficult. Me, I started my professional career as a student worker, first fixing media equipment (TVs, VCRs, microfiche readers, etc), then by running the library's LAN. I never got a degree; real work interfered, as I was hired directly from student work into the LAN position.
But, if you haven't been to school, go. Work as a student, make contacts in the area, build a reputation. Me, I'm one of those jack-of-all-trades that other people have said to avoid becoming. It's served me well: I can do anything at all.
But each person has a story. They are all different. Any advice we can give you worked for us; it might not work for you.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"Working in IT sucks" I totally agree. Get out before you get in.. plumbers make mad loot. Probably handle less shit too.
Well, you could move to India with all your skills and make $10K a year. Me, I currently work for AT&T as a support tech for voice messaging platforms in the local services division. It's a telecom/computer type of job, pays fairly well. But with the telecom and IT fields as bad as they are, I've enrolled in nursing school starting this fall. In two years' time, I'll have another associate's degree, but this one will guarantee me $23-$30 an hour, base pay, in a field guaranteed to have no shortage of jobs for the next 10-15 years, and a highly portable skill at that.
...and start worrying about who you know.
If someone knows you, respects you, and happens to come into a position to offer a job, it almost doesn't matter what your skills set is. On the other hand, if someone who is offering a job doesn't know you, you almost certainly don't have what they are looking for.
What are you doing outside of work? If you're not spending time getting to know your local colleagues (via users groups, seminars, book groups, etc. etc.), you'll have to rely on lucking into your next job...and luck is pretty hard to come by these days.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
A working knowledge of the local language where much of the outsourcing is going couldn't hurt. Yes, I know most of India's IT shops speak english as their primary language, but I suspect farmers in southern california are at an advantage if they speak Spanish too. Knowledge of whatever is spoken in Bejing or Bangalore is valuable in corporate IT today.
And the parent article wrote. "An RHCE is worth more than a Linux+ because its a damn site harder."
If the original question was "moving up the ladder". More detail-oriented certs may give you a stronger base at the bottom of the ladder; but to move up, you need management skills, not "how to read the manual of another router" classes.
I think most managers up the ladder are generalists, not specialists.
while my degree has been of great assitance, more than anything my experience has been the real bargain maker. Questions about degree's last less then a minute in your average interview, do you have one or not is all they want to know most of the time.
But job and real world experience are the goods employers will really ask you about, this is where youve got to be able to say youve done good work in the trenches. Working for smaller companies in IT/IS will give you great experience, even if its for less pay.
lots of guys take grunt jobs with "impresive" big companies and end up with resumes that are less impresive... can you say you designed, implemented and supported a new and growing network? or did you just keep the system running? Have you designed, and built applications or key components of them? or did you just fill in code?
Youll tend to get stronger experience working in less attractive jobs but demanding jobs.
While many people will say a jack of all trades resume is bad, the skillset can be quite usefull in creating a new company or helping one start, which may be a better option for you. The main problem with just "learning" skills without truly using them in a real world application is that your unproven.
Stay up with your education, and use what you learn to make real programs, shareware and so on, create a full-fledged (ecommerce,security,flash,CMS, etc...) web site for a small company who may not be able to pay you.
If you take the risk, and the lower paying jobs (or even charity cases!!).. youll find your work oportunities increasing quite quickly.
P.S. ..... go to night school... get the degree... its definitly worth it...
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
You'd most likely run into a lot of problems
:)
:)
:) :)
:)
with people's attitudes doing something like that
BUT, you would definitely get laid once a day that
way if you put in the requisite time calling.
Having worked in market research industry, I'd say your chances (depending
on personality and phone skills) are about 1 in 1000 calls saying yes.
Of course, you have to bear in mind the percentage of women and the mental state it would take to say
yes to a total stranger on the phone. Beggars can't be choosers, they say.
On the other hand, if you go to a club and just start walking up to women and ask if they'd like
to go home and sleep with you, you can get laid every night almost without question. You just
have to ask the right NUMBER of women.
Really though, if you want something in life you really need to speak up for yourself.
Unless you ask some girl in an offensive way with their boyfriend breathing down their neck, you'll most likely not get punched out
Worst case scenario is they say no. whooopee, big deal, MOVE ON lol, the faster you move through the
number of women the more of the evening you'll have to enjoy her
Yes, it IS that easy.
Hell, if I was female and even partially cute I'd probably be writing this from my private plane at the moment ROTFL
But I'm not long out of college at all, and I'm in a position now of sifting through resumes. When I look at them for IT positions, my first thoughts are:
* Do they have a degree? If not, and unless they have 7+ years experience, trash.
* Is all their experience in an LLC? I'm not dumb, I know lots of people try to strike it out on their own for a while, fail, and then count it as experience. While it is, I value it less than experience in a larger company where they answered to more than themselves or their best friend.
* Do they move around a lot? If they can't spend more than 2 years somewhere, why should I waste my time training someone who's just looking to constantly jump ship?
Finally, certs look nice, but right now everyone seems to have either certs or masters degrees, and honestly neither really make a resume stand out to me. I want to see real involvement in the SLDC, following at least several major projects that take a year to fully complete from beginning to end. It sucks, and I was in the same boat as you, but with so much supply and so little demand, everyone's incredibly picky right now.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
There are plenty of "actual" schools that will claim to have a "strong" background. The word to look for is accredited.
A particular program (say, Bachelor's in CS) will receive accreditation only after being reviewed by national standards bodies (ABET, in the CS case, I believe). It's the seal of approval for that degree, basically. Non-accredited programs from good schools might be okay, or they might suck, and you'll note that the diploma-by-mail spam is careful to point out that it's a non-accredited "school", which gives you an idea of what non-accredited degrees are worth.
Claiming acreditation without having it is fraud at the federal level, so if you get diploma spam selling you an acredited degree, feel free to take them to the cleaners. :-)
BTW, America calls them universities too. Multiple colleges accrete into a university.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I seem to recall that we decided to label the Vietnam Veterans as "baby killers." Those on the far right seemed to think of them simply as losers. Regardless, the way the army ran itself in Vietnam, they managed to mess with the heads of the soldiers fighting during the war.
The fact that no-one wants to repeat the aftermath of the Vietnam War is likely to cause a different reaction. The reaction after WWII was a boom of babies.
Regardless, we will have a large number of people re-entering the US economy. It could be that they will go on a massive post war spending spree, and create jobs left and right, or they might add to economic malaise. Regardless, the return of people going abroad in the war on terrorism will have a big economic impact.
I've seen a few posts saying you should leave the city you're in, but I'll take it a step further and say you should consider options in other parts of the world.
I'm currently finishing my degree in Computer Engineering, and my program consists of six 4-month work terms as well... The ones I did in Canada were fine, but I did a couple in Denmark, and they were practically begging me not to leave. I don't know if this is a large tendency or not, but if you have any contacts outside the US you could consider it.
Apparently, spelling ability doesn't matter either.
I know I'm probably coming in too late for this to be noticed, but I'll give it a go anyway. My suggestion is to upgrade your non-technical skills. People think of software as an antisocial field but, as practiced in the real world, it can be intensely social. I'm not saying you should go out and get an MBA, or that you should ever give up coding, or anything like that. However, if you really want your resume to stand out from all those other people who also have the requisite technical skills, there's no better way than to show some capacity for initiative, leadership, mentoring, etc. Open source can be great for that - not just writing something on your own, but actually coordinating a group of other people on a project. Just participating in such a project in a proactive and constructive way would set you apart from the hundreds of other technically skilled but socially stunted folks that every employer can find by the hundred.
That's just my two cents, of course, but it's the two cents of a guy who - unlike 90% of those commenting - actually has a decisive role in a lot of hiring decisions.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
With the economy still on the rocks and a bear chasing your ass, you've only got two choices:
1. Specialize in a specific element. Whatever that element may be, learn as much as you can about it. Certification is great and all, but hey, getting one takes some money and time... which any other john doe can do. The best example i remember is C++ programmers. Programmers make plenty of money, usually, but if you look around at job listings, those that are looking for high/expert skills in c++ are always unfilled but pay top dollar. Why? Cause there ain't many people that can qualify for those jobs. I know I can't. Same goes with Java. At the university I work for, there was a position open for a java programmer. That listing was up for over half a year, in the end they didn't hire anyone because none of the applicants were qualified enough.
2. Diversify, and I do not mean more cs. Your skills are far more valuable if you can relate it to another field. For example, bioinformatics. I have a couple of friends in that field and they've got cs classes up the ass but what sets them apart is the knowledge of biology, specifically genetics. Personally, I write code most of the day, not as a programmer but as a statistical analyst. When you branch out, your job possibilities open up.
Thats my 2 cents...
Military certifications are even easier (from an academic standpoint) than correspondence-schools. Anybody with a good short-term memory should be able to memorize enough garbage to ace a military certification test. And as anybody with a real military background can tell you, test scores are not in any way, shape, or form indicative of real technical ability.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
There are plenty of jobs, but they are no longer in Boston, or the Bay Area. Those places are wastelands, where there are 50 coders for every job. Get on a few job boards, and look in places you normally wouldn't go; Tennessee, Lousiana, Nebraska, Carolina, Arkansas, New Mexico, Iowa, Idaho, Montana, etc. They all have medium to big cities, but no one pays attention. Move somewhere cheap, get a decent paying job, and live like a king. If you miss the pax humana of the big city, buy a plane ticket and go there for a weekend each month. You can afford it with your new disposable income. Good Luck!
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
I've never meet a hiring manager that doesn't move former military guys to the very top of the resume pile
I'm a network admin, and one step below the guy who does the actual hiring at my job. The last three tech support positions that we filled with ex-military applicants, because we once felt the same way about them, all turned out to be duds, and all three were just alike in personality and professional demeanor. In the interview, they all seemed very competant, yet humble and eager to learn and play on the team, but once aboard, all three had one and only one goal in mind: to see how fast they could push their way to the top and see if they take over mine and my boss's jobs. Rules and procedures be damned... those were just a hindrance to their goals. We had a constant mess just cleaning up all the unauthorized, unlicensed software they kept installing all about the organization and fixing all the network shared filesystem ACLs that they'd open wide up to full access to everyone because they thought ACL management was too big a hassle. One of them would deliberately install more unlicensed software on the users machines after each time my boss busted him for doing it. They turned out to not be team players at all, except when they got together to conspire against our boss and undermine his authority. My boss is an ex-Marine, and he swore he'd never hire another ex-military tech again if that's the way Uncle Sam is making them these days. Our two best, most productive, sharpest, and easiest to keep-in-line techs hired since then are a couple of typical total geeks. One is a complete Microsoft fanatic, and the other is a totally rabid anti-MS Linux & BSD fanatic. Thet get along great at work, no sh!t.
I agree that a degree doesn't matter much with people who have experience. It is not necessarily even programming experience, but business experience that can make them valuable.
One of the best DBA's I've ever worked with is Keith Grey, who up until his late thirties or early fourties was predominantly a welder who'd built up a good business doing custom signs. Then he got exposed to computers and got "the bug."
He's learned the skills to use the tools (mostly Oracle), but always from a business-need perspective. You have no idea how much difference that makes in the success of a project and the buy-in from the users -- he can talk to them, and honestly believes their problems are more important than the technical issues.
I've worked with other examples of stellar non-degreed consultants, and more than my fair share of "Masters" and "Doctorate" grads who couldn't program to save their lives. (The worst added "#include <stdio.h>" before every I/O function call -- stunning for "18 months" of C programming and a masters degree.)
A university degree tells you the junior candidate was able to not only put up with a bunch of coursework they weren't interested in, but that they did the job well enough to pass. If you've ever tried to get a prima-donna programmer to write documentation, you know how important it is that staff be willing to do the parts of the job they despise.
I find that a degree with 3 years experience is usually comparable to 5-6 years experience without a degree. I consider most certification and vendor-provided exams to be useless when selecting staff. Anyone who needs a cert to be confident in their skills doesn't know their stuff well enough.
Granted, that attitude won't get you past the resume skillset filters in an HR department, but they aren't the ones who'll be making a hiring decision. Better you should partner with a reputable consulting agency than try to pad your resume with certs -- a good agency gets candidates through the HR filter based on the reputation of their own screening process.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I've met many degreed peoplel that didn't know squat and many without degrees that really knew their stuff. And conversely as well.
What that means to me is what the person has done and their potential for learning is more important than whether some school gave them a gold star or not. You can apply yourself and learn a great deal in or out of school.
Sure, you can't judge recent grads too well by this measure, but they have little experience anyways.
A degree is more valuable in computing now than it was 15 or 20 years ago, mainly because coursework has caught up. But even so, 4 years in school doesn't beat 6 to 8 years real world experience if the person is sharp.
It's called a "jobless recovery" - this kind of recession doesn't see new jobs created because things are now more automated. At least, there won't be any jobs created that you'd want to work. Care for a job in the growing field of fast-food service, anyone?
Good luck "moving up" with only a bachelor's degree in today's IT market. When entry-level positions are requiring bachelor's degree + several years of experience, and they get filled by people with masters degrees and half a decade of experience on top of that, you should be fortunate to be employed at all - many of us are not, myself included.
On the upside, there will be a slew of baby boomers retiring in the next couple of years (provided they're able to, considering they've probably driven themselves into debt throughout their lives, not enabling them to retire). There will also be much less people graduating with their bachelor's in IT due to the slump. Combined, that means there will likely be more positions opening up in general, providing a management shortage (provided the positions don't get antiquated with their last inhabitant), and a decreased amount of "fresh blood" looking for work.
I'd say chances are good that things will improve - at least marginally - within the decade.
I doubt that's too encouraging, though.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why not work on a project to keep your skills and mind sharp, make networking/people connections, show employers you can work on a project, successfully, without constant supervision, and at least let your next employer know that you were pro-active not re-active and that your attitude wasn't of bumming around wondering when your next entitlement was comming from. (Feel free to define "entitlement" for yourself. It could be many things.)
I was shocked when I started my present job, where one 4 year degreed CS graduate told me that he would never work on an open source project because he would never want to lose control of the code he wrote. The shock was not that he wanted control of his code, but that he would use little else but open source programs and that he was not very forward looking to his next job (which he wanted in software developement - talk about losing of control of code) nor the recoginition of open source's growing part in software use, and recipricating back to that which he so freely uses.
While I am currently unable to contribute code to any open source project, I have contributed my translating abilities to one: BibleTime - Spanish translation. Once I get better at C and C++, I will absolutely be contributing to open source projects. Heck, maybe I can find a niche to fill and start my own open source project someday.
I think that people have to examine the total cost of a 4 year degree. Figure that a IT worker probably gets 25k a year at the minimum for a person with no degree, at an entry level job. Each year at a private University costs about 40,000 a year with food, housing, books, tuition, and misc bullshit. The average stay at college is now 5 years for a Bachelors especially for long programs like engineering, cs, and business mostly due to increasing credit counts and more required academic courses (as opposed to easier electives) which increase the likelihood of having to repeat classes. That is 200k for a private college degree. Add to that 5 years of missing out on a shitty 25k a year job and its $325k. The question is whether a person is really going to make 325 thousand dollars more over their working life with a degree than without. In most industries the answer is probably hovering around the just barely mark these days because so many college grad's still end up working shit jobs unrelated to their major for less than 50k and often less than 35k.
I am a person who does a lot better in working environments than formal education environments. I hate school. I cannot stand it. I am a habitual underachiever. At work on the contrary I quickly become well liked and virtually indispensible. My current supervisor pretty much flat out told the guy who hired me that I was not going to work out for her at all when I interviewed. Within 3 days she went back to him and told him she "loved me." Now a few months later she wants me to go with her to her new job when her contract is up saying that she does not know how she can work without me.
This makes not going back to school and doing another 2 years of college bullshit, a lot more appealing.
I am a tech generalist but I mostly focus on pc config/repair and networking. I am working on my CCNP through cisco academy which is actually a great place to network with other people cause a lot of the other students and the instructors work for big companies and government agencies. At this point if I had to choose between having my degree and having my CCNP with a security clearance I would definitely choose the latter.
I think that working for a couple years and then perhaps finishing my degree in business is much more useful since I will already be employed and experienced and I can parlay my degree directly into a management slot.
The social solution to this is obvious. IT workers working nowadays are not working 40 hour weeks, they're working 50 and 60 hour weeks. Three IT workers working 40 hour weeks are doing the same amount of work as two working 60 hour weeks. If people working now cut back on the hours working, there would be more jobs. While the bosses and their sycophants always portray this as an individual thing between a boss and a worker, it is anything but. The bosses and owners have done massive lobbying as an organized unit to try to change the law so that the few IT workers currently eligible for overtime now won't get it any more. Since the organized IT worker force to counteract the well-organized, well-funded IT company campaign to to do this is weak and small currently, this law will probably pass and you will be worse off.
The IT bosses and owners are all acting as basically one organized unit and using their pull as such in Washington DC and elsewhere. The sycophants here are telling you that the hours of free work beyond 40 hours that you do is an individual thing between you and your boss that is your individual responsibility to be in a contract, and a union or the government should not come in and put pressure to help you out there. They also tell you to increase your skills (although, as you've said, it's done nothing for you), or to "network" more than the next guy to find the few job slots that open up - perhaps you can grab it faster than the next guy if you're quick enough.
Of course the real answer is you need to communicate and organize with other IT workers, and join or form some type of association, union, guild or whatever which acts independently but also puts pressure on the government. Otherwise you just have hundreds of thousands of individual little mice or birds running around trying to find diminishing pieces of food.
Instead of using a
If the job requires java and javascript, vbscript and c#. Than I use those tech's to build a resume to show off my skill with those techs.
And I can honestly say it made the difference.
Not to mention I was able to get my foot in the door with a cdrom WAY before the call back a paper resume requires.
My current resume release has a video interview a friend helped me shoot stuck right in it. Comes right up when they stick the cd in the cdrom. Answers most of the common questions one is asked in the interview process.
Not to mention tech testing and the character reference portion of the interview process is already answered.
A cdrom put me at the top of the stack, and I don't even have a degree.
"What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so mad you could bite?" - Mister Rogers
One item I would add to that list is documentation. You write code for the computers and write documentation for the humans. Managers and higher-ups can be so far removed from the code that they need clear, well formed and diagrammed documentation. Have a portfolio of clean code and good documentation for your future interviews.
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Certification programs are only slightly more worthless than degrees, if we're being honest with ourselves. Employers should really wise up and take into account the fact that any clown can drink their way through college doing the bare minimum and show up for the same commencement ceremony as the handful of students who worked their asses off. Because of their more specific nature, certificates can be more valid, but the only way to truly see if someone can do the job is to hire them and have them do it. You can probably tell who can't do the job without anything more than the conventional application/resume/interview, but even with that there are no guarantees. I know, life isn't fair, but fuck, we really need to fix shit like this. There are so many problems with how we look at things like hiring and education, and if we fixed those, I honestly believe that people would be happier and much better off in general. Not to mention everything could be more efficient in general, which would result in pay increases.*
*You thought I was some poor, naive bastard. Of course the pay increases would only be for executives because that is also how things work and that needs to be stopped now.
I am feeling fat and sassy
Although the typical IT job lasts about 3 years, a career is a very long time, so it doesn't make much sense taking a scattershot approach trying to find which fad will let you eke out a few extra pesos. Think long and hard about what you really want to do over the next several years, then decide on a course of action to get you to that goal. It could take a degree (and lots of intern work), or it could involve doing whatever it takes to get onboard that really interesting project you've read about. If you're not doing something you really love, you're just going to end up being a frequently laid-off, low paid, cog in some machine.
One piece of advice when interviewing a prospective employer: Take a look at the server room. The orderliness of that room is a very accurate indicator of the professionalism of the people you'll be working with.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
Not that a degree is necessarily going to get you everywhere (lots of people with degrees in the field are out of work lately), but it shows that you have breadth of experience, can learn well, can work relatively hard, and have experience working with others, expressing yourself, etc. (At one point, just having a degree -- in ANYTHING -- could get you a job -- in ANYTHING else. Annoyingly, I know people who are programmers who have degrees in such technologically relevant fields as FORESTRY.)
Anyway, a degree will also give you broader technological exposure than any path you focus on in a career path. You'll learn fundamental concepts that you won't likely pick up on the modern career path (like the concept of assembly language, or microprocessor operation, or how to determine the optimization of an algorithm, etc.)
ob.anecdote.amusing:
A non-degreed co-worker who is a coder and former MS employee asked once what he would learn from a college degree that he wouldn't learn just from career experience.
I responded, "OSes other than Windows."
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I have been desperately trying to hire smart C++ people with more than four years experience.
70% of the resumes I got had no professional C++ experience. Either college only experience or unrelated experience (network admin, web design)
20% lacked really basic knowledge. Had no idea what STL was or what a binary tree or hash table was.
The other 10% had a myriad of problems. I don't think I'm being too picky; these were real problems.
Hey, if you know some smart C++ people that want to work in Austin, TX, I'd love to be proven wrong!
I've read a millions sites and articles and forums like this that give you the impression that there are great people everywhere but that's really not what I see.
Several pieces of advice:
1. Learn *everything* you can about a real technical domain area that has nothing to do with computers. People don't care whether you can program -- they care whether you can program WHAT THEY NEED.
2. If you are a US Citizen, haven't sold (or consumed) pounds of cocaine, and believe that honest people on the inside of the system can make a difference, GET HIGH LEVEL CLEARANCES. There is a serious shortage of talented pepole (or untalented warm bodies, for that matter) in this area.
3. Present yourself, not as a computer professional, but as a business professional.
Supplementary info:
1. Seriously, who cares whether you know the latest object-oriented, distributed, web-based, googlephonic technology. What people REALLY want is someone who can bring those talents to bear on actual applications that they care about.
I have been a software engineer for a bunch of years, but the best projects I've worked on (and where I have been most valued) were ones where I had to actually learn something about what it was I was writing programs about. When I went back to graduate school in CS to get a Master's degree, I ended up working with people in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, working on algorithms for DNA and protein sequence comparison. Since then, I have spent *much* more time reading and learning biology than software.
2. Before I went back to grad school, I worked on military projects involving imagery compression and algorithm optimization. While checking the assembly code generated by the compiler was important, it was every bit as important to understand fundamental aspects of the imaging system involved, from the point of view of optics, error correction, and end-user (imagery analyst) needs. This was cool work, and important for our guys on the ground in the middle of nowhere.
There is currently an **extreme** shortage of dedicated, knowledgeable people with clearances in areas of national importance. Acquire these clearances, and you will never want for employment. Plus: CAN'T BE OUTSOURCED TO FOREIGNERS.
3. Somewhat along the same theme, be a provider of valuable services, not just a computer guy (gal). Right now, I have a contract with the Natinal Institutes of Health, doing research into diseases that affect millions of people. The reason I got this gig is not because I am a sharp systems engineer (which I am), but because I can *communicate* with the biologists and MDs who have very real and difficult biological and medical problems which can only be solved through an understanding of the problems and the shrewd application of computer technology.
I didn't have the resources for an degree of any kind.
I, too, engaged in "lateral mobility", hopping sideways from support job to support job, learning every step of the way, but eventually, you reach a glass ceiling and the realization that support is designed specifically to burn workers out so that advancement isn't necessary.
The only way out was to start thinking like a competitive businessperson, partner with other hungry compatriots also found in dead-end positions (although in different fields), and go into some tech business or other on your own.
I've only had one bon fide w2 "job" for a total of about 6 mos since 1999, and that was just because it was there. Nevertheless, I had to push hard entrpreneurially to get that position. It wasn't a job - it was a deal. Jobs, to me, are for making new contacts and raising capital for whatever business it is you're really supposed to be in.
It's hard, but unlike the job treadmill, there's a future that isn't dependent on someone else.
I'm not saying certifications aren't worth it. I just have no experience with them, and I've never met a client that asked me for one. Granted, my clients are small...
In a different world, back when big iron still ruled, I had that same low-pay job. I was the tech support for a bunch of PhD reservoir engineer types. I was the one who wrote much of the code to produce and help process their data. In those days in that place that made me slightly more acceptable than the cleaning crew. What got me out of that and jump started my career was writing something so useful and technically challenging that several sane managers refused to let me attempt it or to ask the "real programmers" to do so. When I delivered it, done in my spare time and over convalesence from an accident, and it worked and was hugely useful, the tune changed. I had a team built around me and my ideas. I took a couple of years and answering a manager's claim that I was not a real programmer without a couple of degrees by presenting him with an outside job offer claiming I was indeed a "real programmer" and for 60% more than he was paying "real programmers" to boot. To get there I read every manual I could get my hands on, force-fed myself theory and practice at the MS level and dared to hack big.
Go for it! Make yourself stand out. Don't just be another specialist weenie. Show them guts, skill, determination and spirit. Even in a down market that gets noticed.
In today's competative job environment, being a specialist is the surest way not to get hired, especially in light of how rapidly software developement and IT continue to progress. Granted there are a few niche jobs for highly specialized professionals, but most job postings I see list required/desired skills that simply didn't exist, or were merely academic 5 years ago.
In addition, I've learned more since getting my degree and working as a software engineer than I ever learned during my formal education. This leads me to the belief that pigeon-holing your self as a (Insert Language Here) Programmer is BAD BAD BAD. The first Language I learned was ADA 95, then Modula 3, C, C++, Java, SML, Perl. Since graduating in '01 I haven't used any of those languages except for C, while learning a slew of new ones on the job. I've picked up Powerbuilder, XML, php, VB and C# as required as well as MFC and DLL programming techniques.
The process of acquiring programming skills in a new language was a painless process becuase a technical education is as much about learning HOW TO LEARN as anything else.
Also, the single most overlooked IT skill is written/verbal communication. If you're the greatest programmer ever but write worse than your average 3rd grader you'll find yourself in that $10/hour tech support job.
Writing a coherent, professional resume, cover letter, and correspondance are all pre-interview interviews. I've been in charge of some IT hiring in the past and when a piss poor resume came across my desk it was met with directional flatulance and a trip to the circular file. The content was virtually irrelevant. I should be able to read a resume and not still have major questions about an applicants skill sets or experience.
"I don't know" is an important answer, if it is followed by a clear understandng of how to clear up the gap in knowledge and get things done.
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Open mind, insert foot.