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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.
(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.