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Dismantling the Myth of IT Being a Dead-End Career
Lam1969 writes "Robert Mitchell says CIOs and other IT managers continue to bemoan what they claim is a shortage of good technologists. He suggests beefing up salaries and convincing young people that IT is a viable long-term career path would help to change this sentiment. Mitchell also says the threat of offshoring is overstated; rather, the problem is industry and the media have been 'complicit in propagating the myth that IT is a dead end.' From the story: 'First, the dot-com crash shattered the illusion that those in high-tech jobs would always emerge from economic turbulence unscathed. Now, students are hearing that a four-year degree in programming or engineering doesn't matter because all of those jobs will eventually go offshore to foreign workers at very low wages. A generation has been dissuaded from pursuing what is in reality a very promising career choice.'"
On the other hand this is a good thing for the computer science departments of universities, for less students means that they can do less job training and more actual computer science. If you aren't convinced that real progress in computer science isn't being made any more I encourage you to watch this video. In it you can see all the aspects of the modern computers that we know and love being demonstated oh so long ago, only with less polish. Sadly research hasn't proceeded much beyond this in terms of software. The problem is that the typical student in a computer science course doesn't want to learn computer science, they just want to learn some Java/hot language of the momement and get out into the workforce. This is where bad programmers and bugs galore come from. However if those who simply want a job leave then a computer science degree will once again have meaning, and better software will be produced. Trust me on this one, I'm surrounded by CS majors who think Java is the best language ever, and are unable to program in anything else.
Philosophy.
Whilst much of industry looks to hire youthful IT staff rather than older workers, it has the ironic effect of putting people off a career in IT. As not many people want to work in an industry where finding a job when you are past forty is difficult.
Encouraging older workers will also encourage new young workers. BTW. I fall somewhere between these two groups.
One of the things that always troubles me with the Outsourcing debate is how it regards IT and software development as an entity in itself, rather than one that must deal with others. By this I mean both dealing with the business you are in and also the other departments in your company. By making IT a commodity, it can be offshored or outsourced easily. When it's a specialty, that becomes difficult to impossible.
If you are developing a piece of medical software such as an EEG recorder, you need to have some understanding of the science of EEGs and the medical background in which they are used. Likewise, a piece of financial software requires detailed knowledge of financial systems and the rules and regulations that govern them. This sort of knowledge keeps the development "in-house" and keeps you employed. I do agree that simple development jobs should be done by the most efficient and appropriate people, normally either recent grads or outsourced developers. I mean, you wouldn't waste the Technical Architects time getting them to write basic code.
Someone looking for a career in IT needs to be constantly challenging themselves by learning new skills, and not always IT related ones so that your specialty keeps you needed. IT has never been an industry that rewards those that keep still (hell, if it did I would still be bashing out BASIC on my Vic 20!) but those that stay ahead of the game. Do this and you will have a career.
I'm sick of coming across people who got into this industry without any interest or aptitude because they thought it was a gravy train and didn't like us geeks getting all the money... I'd be happy to see a return to the glory days of unwashed pizza eating nerds -- jeek
(Applies to Italy, but maybe to other countries too).
I'm near my Bachelor's degree in CS, and I'm as glad to enter IT as to enter a pool full of hungry sharks. If I'm able to, I'll take some other job; journalism, for example, or become a teacher. Why?
Of course, money isn't the problem: you earn quite well, at least compared to the standard factory workman. Rather, it's because IT (at least, here in Italy) don't do anything related to my fields of interest. Most of them offer consulting via new technologies (but that is a lot far from being IT), some web application development, a little bit of Java here and there, and no real challenge. Mostly, they deploy pre-made systems (often Microsoft or IBM products), and just stand there watching other - foreign, mostly US - companies steer the wheel at their leasure.
I mean: a lot of engineers are glad to become DBAs, or to do remunerative jobs programming cell phones applications with J2ME. Most of us CS students, however, have an interest in software engineering, for example, or algorithmic complexity, in compilers, operating systems, networks and so on.
Sadly, innovation in the IT field is almost as stone dead, here in Italy.
We need some spark of interest to enter IT, not just building boring systems to manage a warehouse. Bring in the innovation!
So: IT *is* a dead-end. Doing paperwork and SQL for the rest of my life? Writing Java applets or Flash actionscripts? Are you kidding? It's not work, but slavery.
As many, many others born in the first half of the '80, I remember writing BASIC games like Snake on lonely Saturday evenings, when a child. Playing with LEGOs and reading a lot. All this is lost for the new generations... both due to increased complexity (when the model you grow up with is Final Fantasy two-thousand-fifty, who's going to program a Tris game in console?) and changes in our society (general disinterest, maybe because scared by a too complex world).
42.
After 25 years in IT, I was let go a few months ago because they "didn't need my position anymore", and was "replaced" by someone earning about half of what I was getting. This, after helping the company grow from 10 people to 85, and from sales of $100K to over $20 million a year. After creating a serverfarm which increased the capacity of our systems from 5 trnasactoins/second to over 20,000 transactions a second. I joined as Director of IT. In the beginning it was very hands-on. But management never listend to my requests for help, so I was stuck helping people via phone all over the world, maintaining and building the server farm, doing all the support on the PCs, etc. When I finally got help, it was help intended to replace me, which it eventually did. They then hired someone to "assist" my replacement. I've spent three months looking for a new job. So many of them have extremely specific requirements, so specific that there is no way I could even be considered. So now I've left the field. I spent the last 20 years not really liking my jobs and not realizing it. Having left, I finally realized that I wasn't happy before, because of the non-recognition of IT by the rest of the company.
A profession is an activity where one is treated as such. IT is not such an activity. We all know why. If you are going to spend 4 or more years in university, then get a degree in a profession, where you will be treated as such and not like an idiot in an open plan purgatory chicken battery like most of us nowadays. Also, professionals don't create solutions using patently wrong methods which were recognized as such 30 years ago. Schools are teaching interesting stuff these days, only in a real world business environment they are useless.
Not all jobs can be offshored. I'm outsourced to the government, and, because of the data I work with, my job can never be offshored. I suspect, thats true of some banking information, and probably true of a few other paranoid businesses, but I have no proof to that effect. So paranoia and security can, and will continue to keep some enterprise grade software firmly onshore.
Small companies are becoming increasingly IT aware. We're seeing the first of the IT generation reaching management posts in Mom and Pops, and Citywides. It used to be that the price of the hardware was the problem, now its the cost of the developers. For small to medium sized business the cost of offshoring is too high... unless you broker.
There is also the question of trust. Small companies rely on trust over legislation and buying buying power. It's difficult to build trust with a 7 hour time difference and a telephone (although Match.com would probably disagree). The small companies I know would rather deal with other small companies where they might be able to get preferential buyer treatment and loyalty, than cheaper multinationals.
To me this stinks of profit. Doing lots of small jobs for small companies (customising OSS, a Ruby on Rails web shop) plus maintenance is the new electronic frontier.
Western technologists can compete. We have the home team advantage: meet and great is more important than ever. We are, hopefully, well educated and well informed, giving us the ability to adapt and create new technologies that make us more effective and cheaper. But, you have to be able to deliver.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Within days the CEO of said nameless company that sold services and machines to businesses around the world was in the paper bemoaning the complete dearth of qualified IT professionals and begging congress to increase the number of H1B visas that he could exploit. I sent him a letter pointing out that I was an IT professional with glowing reviews from every manager with whom I had ever come in contact, sent references and let him know that I was availabe and would take a position anywhere in the world, including (especially?) ones that involved lots of travel.
He ignored me. There is no shortage of IT workers - for every open position there are probably 10 qualified applicants. (Of course, there may not be enough women or minority applicants...)
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
I'm in Denver, Co.
.Net experience preferred. Experience working with Microsoft SQL Server and/or MySQL. IVR development, design or quality assurance experience a plus
Like most places in the USA there is a huge shortage of nurses. There are full-page ads in the newspaper offering $15K sign-on bonuses etc. There is also a shortage of truck drivers, companies have huge banners outside their facilities advertising for truck drivers. I know nurses that make over $100K/year. According the news, truck drivers are making over $75K/year.
IT? Funny thing, no full-page ads, no sign-on bonuses, no big banners. In fact, it's quite the opposite. What jobs there are advertised are usually short term contracts with no benefits. There are few ads for IT guys, and fewer still give salaries, but the following describe a few ads I've seen (I swear I am not exagerating):
- MCSE wanted for one day deployment (setting up PCs), salary $16/hour.
- Experienced Web-Developer, PHP, MySQL, salary: $6.50/hour (Costco pays workers $17/hour, Wendy's pays $8.50/hour).
- Experienced Web-Develper, HTML, salary: $0.00/hour, but you are provided with beer when are finished.
- Web-Develper, HTML, salary: $0.00/hour, you are supposed to work just for the benefit of the experience.
I occasionally see a few jobs for helpdesk and technicians for about $10/hour.
Of course some jobs pay more, but good lord do they want qualifications. Consider this "entry level" job that is still on craigslist. No salary is given (typical) but the "entry level" part should give you a clue (I will bet real money that the janitor earns more) :
- Entry Level - Application Developer Call Centers
Strong background in object oriented application design, development and debugging. Java, Perl and Visual Studio
Date: 2006-03-15, 7:37PM MST
http://denver.craigslist.org/tch/142288447.html
Image how much better you would do if you put your efforts into a real career field such as law, medicine, aviation, or for that matter, driving a truck.
I'm a last year IT student and I'm wondering, how much should I jump ship?
On the recruiter seminary they mentioned that changing corp every 3 to 5 years is a good idea and that jumping faster would make it seem like you are gone jump ship anyway, so your not worth the time to recruit and train.
So do you think that switching every 3 to 5 years on average is a good idea? Or do you personaly jump ship faster or slower?
All indicators show that the human race is selectively breeding itself for stupidity.