The Future of IT in America?

tomocoo asks: "As a young person considering various choices for the future career I'd like to pursue, IT and computer science continually reappear near the top of the list of fields I'm interested in. In fact, one of my only hesitations is the suspected ease by which programming and other related tasks can be sent to other countries for pennies on the dollar. How much of a threat do the readers of Slashdot feel outsourcing is to the American programmer? Should I and other young people be pursuing something more specialized or have I simply been watching too much CNN?"

Comments

There will be a job for you

[dracocat]

I have been hearing about the doom of the industry for a very long time. The fact is, is that IT and Computer Science follow a cycle.

Will there be a high paying job waiting for you the moment you graduate? That is impossible to predict, but long term you are almost assured to find a healthy career waiting for you.

Proof that the offshoring is an overexagerated issue? Look at average salaries of graduates. They may not be as high as you want them, but compared with any other fields they are consistently towards the top. Even now, with so much media attention focusing on the downturn in the tech economy, I doubt you would receive very much sympathy for having to receive a starting salary of over 51k. (Starting Salaries)

Anyone complaining about the lack of jobs and low pay in the industry is an anomaly. I am not saying it is their fault, but there will be people that simply have bad luck finding a job no matter what field you look at.

In short, the reason there is so much noise is simply because some people have unrealistic expectations of both finding a job and the pay they will receive. Take that away and what you have is an industry on a whole that is actually more healthy than a lot of others.

All of that being said, it is always better to specialize if your goal is more money. Almost any job will base your pay based on your expertise in the area they are looking for. If a job is looking for a C# developer and you have a little knowledge of everything then you will get paid for having a little knowledge of C#. If on the other hand you are a Java expert and have been doing nothing but Java for the previous 5 years you may not get that C# position at all, but when you find a company looking for someone with knowledge of Java you can definitely expect a higher pay.

Re:There will be a job for you

[mcrbids]

I'll be glib. I'll be gleeful. And I'll be right.

Make your own damned job. It's the American way. Start your own business, hang a shingle, make some sales, do some cold calls. It hurts at first, contracts don't come with a 401k. But, pretty soon, you get the whole customer-relations thing figured out. Then, not too horribly long after that, you get the whole tax/accountant/bank thing figured out.

Next thing you know, you're swamped with highly paid work! You've stretched your wings, you've gone out, you landed a few key contracts, and suddenly, you have more work than you can do.

So then you figure out hiring and firing. It's a painful lesson, as you often really like the people you're firing. It can be very expensive, if you miscalculate and pay people to make up stuff to "look busy". But, if you come even close to getting it right, it pays, too, and sometimes quite nicely.

If you're half as skilled as you make out to be, you can follow this path, and make better money than your graduate peers in as little as 5-10 years. You can be independently wealthy (retired, never work again) in as little as 20 years.

That's the American way.

Do you want to be the kind of person who mopes when you can't afford your own private plane for at another year? Do you want to be the kind of person who ends up paying more in "recreation" than most people earn in their jobs? Do you long for the stability of knowing you can never be fired, because you're not only the boss, but the owner of the business?

Take your skills, and find a way to market them. A business license costs around $50 in my home town of Chico, CA. A fictitious name statement and accompanying bank account can be had for around $300 most places in California. Everything after that is up to you.

When you take the time to dissect business models to see which works for you, you grow in ways you can't easily convey. When you shoulder the responsibility of keeping the show running, even when your cashflow is bleeding red, you become a bigger, more capable, and more powerful person. When you run the show, you become a bigger, better, more capable, more responsible person in ways that years of college can't even begin to approximate.

I strongly recommend that you turn your frustration into success, and turn your own personal lemon juice into sweet, refreshing lemonade!

Once you've done this, the whole idea of a "job" just seems... well... stupid...

Re:There will be a job for you

[FredFnord]

I'll be glib. I'll be gleeful. And I'll be right.

Glib, and gleeful. And right for you. And a bit, sorry to say it, self-centered, because you assume that something that would work for you would work for anyone. There are people who are comfortable doing this sort of thing and people who aren't. And if you aren't, you're not going to succeed at it. And of course, the possibility of doing this sort of thing depends on not too many other people doing it.

Make your own damned job. It's the American way. Start your own business, hang a shingle, make some sales, do some cold calls. It hurts at first, contracts don't come with a 401k. But, pretty soon, you get the whole customer-relations thing figured out. Then, not too horribly long after that, you get the whole tax/accountant/bank thing figured out.

If you're lucky. And you're cut out for that kind of thing. And you're lucky. And you're not in a market that's oversaturated with people who can do what you can do. And you're happy to work fifteen hour days, seven days a week, at the beginning at least, because that's what it's going to take to satisfy some of your more demanding customers. And you have enough money to get you through the first year. And you don't accidentally alienate your first employer though not doing something they assume you will know to do, because you're not experienced. (Pleading inexperience doesn't work; they only want people who are experienced.) And you don't get a company that signs a contract and then doesn't pay you for eight months after you finish the job, when you can't really afford the time and money to sue the hell out of them. And you don't get companies that make you give them a cost up front and then continually add features while you're working. (I lost two clients that way, because I told them I wasn't going to put in extra work that wasn't in my contract for no extra money, and they said, 'Well, then, I'll find someone who will.')

And the sorriest thing is, you only get a chance to run into those problems at all if you're lucky, or at least not unlucky.

It's really the smugness and superiority that drive me nuts. 'It was right for me, obviously it's right for everyone!' I've tried it. It's hard, it's nasty, and it's not a situation that fits every personality type. I made it okay for a couple of years, but I was delighted to return to a job where I was working 40 hours a week for decent pay and had health insurance that couldn't be cancelled (three times) for no reason other than a single, low-cost, low-mantenance health problem. I like to have a social life that doesn't require me to choose between it and sleep on any given day. I like to have coworkers to interact with, and to ask when I have a problem, and to go out to lunch with. And God, do I hate billing.

Perhaps this is the business model of the future: work 15 hours a day every day with no health insurance and no guarantee that you'll actually be paid before you starve to death or else you won't have a job at all. If it is, I will probably live through it for as long as I decide it's worth living through. But don't try to sell it to me as some kind of goddamned paradise because I know what hell looks like.

-fred

Up, not down

[Marlow the Irelander]

As I understand it, IT employment in the US is increasing, not decreasing; you'll have a better chance if you develop skills in things like project management rather than just being a code monkey.

Re:Up, not down

[GoofyBoy]

As the AC clearly points out, you need more than just coding skills to stay employed. You also need interpersonal skills.

Young People.

[sglider]

I am one of those young people. I'm finishing up a stint in the Army, and going back to finish my final year of my BS in Computer Information Systems. ( I was mobilized during my senior year of college.)

I firmly believe that there is plenty out there for me -- but not in something like programming, rather I believe my talent lies in being a Systems Analyst for a business, or something both technical and managerial in nature.

Sure, the off shore folks have us beat when it comes to programminng, no doubt about that -- but that's only a problem if you want to be just a programmer.

They still need people to lead and manage these teams of programmers, and perhaps that's where the value of the American IT professional is.

IT.

[Anonymous Coward]

IT: run as far away as fast and as you fucking possibly can.

If it's what you want to do, do it.

[deanj]

Don't worry about what CNN is saying. They're not programmers. If you're a decent programmer, you'll always have a job.

Here's the bottom line, though:

If programming is something you love to do, then do it. If it's just something you want to do because you've heard it'll earn you "big bucks", don't.

Not that you can't make a good living...you can. It's just that unless you love something, you shouldn't go into it. You might be able to handle it for 10 or even 20 years, but unless your heart is really into it, you'll regret it long term.

Good luck.

Learn what you're good at.

[crhylove]

And you'll be useful to somebody. Get really good at something, and you'll be useful to everybody. Almost doesn't matter what field. Whatever it is you REALLY enjoy, there is a way to make money at it, and a way to make yourself valuable in that field. In fact, if you REALLY enjoy it, create something new and market THAT. That's the way to make real money. I don't know anybody who makes a lot of money solely based on their education credentials. I'm sure they exist, but that breed is becoming rarer and rarer.

rhY

Re:Learn what you're good at.

[eddeye]

Whatever it is you REALLY enjoy, there is a way to make money at it, and a way to make yourself valuable in that field.

If that were true, we'd all be pornstars.

Make sure you can write.

[daeg]

The best advice I can give you is have stunning writing skills. You will be writing every day. E-mail, IM, proposals, agendas, reports and presentations are part of any job, even if they are a small part. Some companies don't care if you have good writing skills, but no business will complain if your skills are higher than they want.

don't do information systel.ms

[Gramberto]

Computer Science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering are far more powerful degrees. They are also much hard than IS. I took some IS classes to learn some new things at a local state college. I thought the classes were a joke. The classes were easy. There was no low level theory at all. No you will never directly use the theory, but if you understand the concepts its much easier to grab a book and learn the practical stuff on your own. The same school has very hard computer science courses.

Even if you want to be a network engineer. You will learn ALOT more with a computer science degree. You can then do a minor in information systems and take a few classes that you are interested in.

Computer engineering is probably the most valuable to employers. The reason is that the barrier to entry is higher. For a network administrator or a programmer you can learn it without school. You really can't learn computer engineering without school.

Re:don't do information systel.ms

[joekampf]

No, most of us with our CS degrees are not creating the next processor, or the next programming language or OS. However, what I have found to be invaluable, and what makes ME more valuable than the masses of IS majors or even the offshore/inshore cookie cutter programmers out there is that I understand what is going on under the covers. So when I decide to use a feature, or create a system, I'll know how it will scale, what the implication are when the damn thing is running on something other than my desktop. I can't tell you how many developers out there have no idea about things like, threads, transactions, I/O, networks. What can go wrong when those things break or are not handled right and what that means to the system they are developing. Thus you get crap that has to be restarted every day, or isn't robust.

CNN and College

[pete-classic]

It's laudable that you are concerned about college, but you have the rest of your life to worry about job security. On the other hand the days in which you may bang 17-year-olds are numbered. Get your priorities straight.

-Peter

Re:Starting Salaries

[Brandybuck]

The starting salary only applies for those graduates who get jobs in the first place.

Having recently interviewed several candidates on campus, I'm starting to see why they're not getting hired. Most are unmotivated, but a lack of income will soon fix that. The real problem is that they don't have any real world skills. A university CS/CE graduate should either have enough hand-on programming experience to know which end of a compiler goes up, or enough theoretical knowledge to know the difference between the basic data structures. I'm not getting that from the candidates I'm interviewing.

Unless the universities straighten up, I think the future of university graduates is an extra year at DeVry/ITT just to get the skills to be employable.

Re:Starting Salaries

[jcr]

A university CS/CE graduate should either have enough hand-on programming experience to know which end of a compiler goes up, or enough theoretical knowledge to know the difference between the basic data structures. I'm not getting that from the candidates I'm interviewing.

I find that the quality of applicants varies enormously, even from the same school. I do see rather a lot of "grade inflation", but new CSEE graduates who had a 3.0 or better GPA are usually at least trainable.

What I try to seek out is whether a newly-minted CS degree holder likes the field, or just got steered to it by a guidance counselor. If the interest is there, the talent can generally be trained in.

-jcr

Re:Jobs in the Free Market?

[say]

No job in America is safe from this destruction to the free market.

This must be the least insightful comment on globalization I've ever seen. What constitutes a free market seems... vague. Do you really have any proof that government intervention in Canada is any less than in Mexico?

Here's a mind bending newsflash for you: The difference between the countries you want to trade with and the ones you don't want to trade with is that the non-tradables are _poor_, while the tradables are _rich_. You don't want free markets. You want protectionism, where the rich world is allowed to keep its benefits by keeping the poor away through immoral trade barrier.

So it isn't the free market that is being destroyed in the US, it is the protectionistic privileges. That's the true essence of the free market: it makes sure that cheapest (per quality unit) is preferred. And it's no way the US can remain cheapest without dropping some of its (relative) riches.

Re:Learn a new language?

[Evilest Doer]

Chinese and Japanese will be far more useful.

I would say that Chinese would be the best one to learn overall. The Chinese I have known tend to take it as a compliment if you speak even some Chinese.

The Japanese I have known seem to be offended, even if your Japanese is perfect. Plus, if your resume does not have you in the precise little required sub-group, they won't even consider you for a particular job. And I'm not even getting into the whole racism issue. The Chinese aren't perfect, but I've been treated a damn sight better by them than any of the Japanese I have ever dealt with.

***note to mods: This is not meant as a troll. I am simply explaining my own personal experience...

Re:Yeah, too much CNN

[rolfwind]

I don't know, they might have switched to BD/SM products;)