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Techies Keen to Keep Jobs In the Family
Stony Stevenson writes "IT staff are 'overwhelmingly' happy to recommend their profession to their children, a survey has found. Three-quarters of nearly 1,000 IT professionals surveyed said that they would 'definitely recommend' a career in the business to their offspring. Around 70 percent also felt that their jobs are secure, and that they are expecting a salary increase next year. The survey also found that 86 per cent of respondents expect to move jobs voluntarily in the next three years."
To hell with the tech industry.
Being a professional artist is where it's at. You all laugh, but know that automation will replace you all much sooner than it will replace the artist.
Muah ha ha.
In related news, 75% of all firefighters would recommend their profession to their children. 80% of all police officers would recommend their profession to their children.
Duh. Everyone wants their kid to do what they do. My father (when he was still one himself) wanted me to be a sign maker.
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Is it me, or is this an example of perfect Slashdot fodder? The article throws out a small handful of statistics, referencing a survey but not bothering to link the source (Since only five Slashdot readers would bother following the link) and performing no real analysis, leaving the dual tasks of Thinking and Putting Things Into Perspective in the hands of the readers.
I'm not particularly approving of this, mind you. At least, tell me where I can get the survey, so that I and the other four guys can look into it...
I'm a programmer. My viewpoint is the opposite. I'm always feeling a bit worried in some part of my mind that H1-B visas or outsourcing will diminish the jobs in my field. At the least interesting and/or well paying ones. Even without that worry it seems like programming jobs last 1 - 2 years tops before something dries up at the company you are at. Not a career I would recommend to people unless they really loved tech and didn't feel that strongly about another career.
I have to wonder what planet these people read their news on, but I hope they are right and I am wrong.
Ever heard of a 'sign painter'? Chances are, if you're much under 30, you haven't. That's because about 25 years ago, sign painters were replaced with computer-aided manufacturing technologies. Those who failed to learn computers and vinyl-cutting equipment (and had no other relevant skills) went broke really, really fast.
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Father-to-son bonding and passing a trade down has been something that people have been doing for ages. Apart from keeping the job in the family (not really an issue any more), it really allows the parents to boast to their colleagues about their children. Fathers also like it that their kids take interest in their work as it gives the father a good feeling that his son admires him. Then there's always the hope that your kid will do great and you can get some of the ego-shine.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Coolest screensaver ever. In the ~4 years since I first downloaded it, I've run it at work, on my laptop... always get positive comments.
http://www.electricsheep.org/
No sig for you!!
Art made by a computer, with no formula. Enjoy. http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/swarm-paintings-non-human-art/
To be honest, he may be right.
At least when it comes to graphics/games, I have noticed that half of the work is making the engine (physics/game) and the other half is the actual graphics nowadays (from textures - models). Story-writers/musicians fall far behind in the necessity for these jobs, since a game tends be based off a story already as is (so fine tuning it is all that's left), and musicians can be a dime a dozen believe it or not.
Kudos to you being an artist, and good luck.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Slashdot is chock full of libertarians until someone talks about jobs going away, and then everyone is a die hard socialist.
It's called competition, and you know what? It's going to take jobs regardless of who you vote for...Fighting supply and demand is like fighting gravity. Other people in other countries want to do the work for less? They're going to get jobs.
Trying to vote people into office who will protect your industry with regulations and tariffs is as likely to destroy the industry as anything else; witness american textiles, american steel, and the travesty that is the american auto industry.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
More art made by a computer:
http://www.thepaintingfool.com/
It's impressive!
So, in today's dollars, pay will shrink over time -- but cutting pay is a huge no-no in the business world. Wage freezes + inflation will create the same effect with much less impact on employee morale.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ok I'll bite. I'm considering the source of your post, which is you. You, that is, a person who has been employed in the industry he claims is "done" for a, not embarrassingly long, but fortunately long, 28 years. What am I missing? It's hard to find employment in one field for nearly three decades. How does this demonstrate that the field is dying? Just because people with an agenda say something doesn't make it untrue (or true). You have to look around and see for yourself, and when I do that I see a whole bunch of very well-employed persons (though lots of them seem to be whiners for some reason I don't yet understand) in a field that is very much not dying.
I hope my kids come nowhere near IT. The difficulties caused by the dot-com-bust in conjunction with excess H1B's at the same time left a bad taste in my mouth. I had a coworker get replaced by an H1B, and it was one of the saddest work-related moments of my life.
.... AGAIN.
Yeah I worked at Crisco *cough* I mean Cisco and about 6 months
before the bubble burst the vast majority of new hires were
visa holders. I got canned 6 months after the bubble burst,
and most of the Visa holders kept their jobs.
Most were NOT H1-b though, apparently through some handy loopholes
they have setup a HUGE list of Alphabet Visas, and what follows
is an abridged list of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_visas#Select_List_of_the_Various_Types_of_Visas
So as for not wanting your kids in IT, it doesn't really matter
cause what the corrupt congress wants is to be able to bring
in any type of labor to replace you at any type of job for
any wage.
The bottom line is, if someone somewhere can do the job for
less they have passed legislation to get ppl into the country
to work for fast food wages, and some Visas like the L1 have
>>> NO LIMIT
yes, NO LIMIT, that is right.
All the US company has to do is rent a tiny piece of ugly
space in the foreign country and they as a multinational
can flood the US market with cheap labor like Tata.
Scam De Jour, Scam of the Day.
Deja Moo, You have heard this Shit before.
The Congressman have taken the corporate cash, and sold us
down the river
It is business as usual, the working class get screwed
because the corporate scum have figured out it is cheaper
to bribe with political donations than to pay the workers.
Visa reform is needed NOW.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Let me clarify "non-idiot". A non-idiot is someone who:
By and far, the people I've known who are dissatisfied with IT fail in one or more of those areas. It's a simple formula, and it probably goes for many fields, not just IT.
I would recommend IT to my offspring (should I have them) because it is a good field. What other career opens so many doors? Want to work with big equipment and simulators, you can! Want to work with small, high-tech equipment, you can! Want to work in the medical field and meet that hot rich doctor so you can retire early, you maybe definitely can! IT is everywhere, and you can work from any place from NASA to a local mom and pop setup. I think there are very few fields that can offer that level of flexibility!
So is IT "done", no way!
I'm in the same boat. Every time a young hopeful asks me about the tech industry, I give them my cold, hard version of the truth: run away, run like hell!
In any career, you'll have fanatics at both ends of the spectrum. Me, I'm into computers because I was a computer freak for the first 25 years of my life, and now I'm stuck with no other milkable skills. Today I'm mostly indifferent. I like computers as toys and tools for scientific creativity, but the work has become old, repetitive and thankless. The pay sucks, job security is a laughing matter, everybody winds up hating you, and you hate all the ones that don't.
I'd much rather tell someone about the negative aspects of a career, than to blindly glamorize it like religion. If they're tough enough to see the pessimistic points as challenges, then they're both insane and motivated, which is precisely what you need to work any client-facing job.
It's one of those careers where you rarely ever get a compliment for a job well done, but everyone wants to rip off your head and fuck the wound when their email skips a beat. I'm not the most well adjusted fellow in the first place, so I tend to develop this explicitly vengeful distaste for the common whiney client. Homicidal fantasies are my way of coping with the daily stress. I'm perfectly fine with people who don't know or understand tech, but that patience flies out the window the moment they start arguing.
Thing is, you get the same bullshit in any service-oriented career. Mechanics come to mind, as well as doctors, bureaucrats of all shapes and sizes. The sticky issue is that, at least in my experience, there are a LOT of morons in any industry, which means often times the client really is smarter or more competent than the service provider. That means for the remaining 20% that truly are experts, we take the flak for the other 80%.
You'd think doing I.T. stuff in bars and clubs would be fun, right ? It stops being fun right around the 3rd time I have to repeat some basic immutable concept to the end-user like "No, you can't use a scanned image of your Visa card's magstrip to pay your tab". That's right folks, I had to explain the concept of magnetic storage to a cocky little martini-snorting iPhone-humping trendy douche. Three times I explained the facts, and he still complained that we were being uncooperative. As a rule, we don't do manual transactions (fraud is all too common in bars), and this guy's scanned image of his card gave new meaning to the term "Photoshopping." I mean, a physical card can be forged, but that at least requires skill, equipment and/or contacts. Photo editing requires a computer or a Kodak booth.
Hell, if they accept that bullshit in stores, I could easily fabricate doctored images from the wealth of credit card data that goes through my business any given week. Hell I could write a short PHP script to cook up the image every time a transaction goes through, then email it to my iPhone! That's just plain ridiculous.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I think your first statement is true for the time being, but I think it's changing. As the tech industry continues to mature, we'll see increased specialization -- and narrow roles are ideal for offshoring. I have a contact who runs a small offshorin company that specifically serves small businesses. What he has done is hired tech staff in India who perform narrow roles, but do so for multiple clients. So then, instead of paying local labor $120-$180 an hour (depending on the function), they pay his company $105/hr -- and his cost, including management, works out to about $90/ tech hour. Note that any work require on an urgent (same-day, not overnight) basis is billed out at $150/hr, so his clients can get urgent service when required.
Anyway, my point is that offshoring can work for small companies when done correctly -- the trick is to outsource the offshoring.
As for the current "shortage", I think that has more to do with the demographics of tech workers. There are plenty of experienced tech workers, but a shortage of young (inexpensive) IT professionals -- the floor-workers, so to speak. Some of this has to do with the offshoring scare, some of it has to do with the changing nature of the industry & the appeal to students, some of it is due to the dotcom bust... but I think the biggest factor is the growth of the industry. There is simply more demand for tech workers than there was 5 years ago because tech is becoming an unavoidable aspect of modern business.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai