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."

Comments

In related news...

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:In related news...

[asc99c]

Dunno bout that. My mother warned me never to become a teacher - that is properly stressful because you're really affecting peoples lives, and the pay isn't good. My father warned me IT was boring and to do something else more interesting. My wife's parents warned her being a nurse was very hard work for not enough money and being in the police was too dangerous.

Even so I went into IT, and my wife's sister is training to be a nurse. I think the main drive to follow in your parents footsteps comes from the children not the parents.

Re:In related news...

[FrozenFOXX]

I agree with you about children following willingly. My father seems to have done his best over the years to discourage me from IT. Nearly every day he'd come home and I'd ask about his job he'd tell me about how moronic most of his coworkers were, how he wasn't getting enough money, and so forth.

Thing was that I didn't care in retrospect. I latched onto the best parts I could and used them and my own curiosity to fuel my own desire to be in IT. While your parents having the same profession and encouraging it can have an impact, I don't think everyone just, "does what their parents do."

Re:In related news...

[BarryJacobsen]

I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and become a teacher until teaching became professional babysitting. As someone who works for a school district and is actually in different classrooms hearing different teachers (K-12) teach all day long teaching is one thing and one thing only: what you make of it. It's like Project Mayhem - you determine your own level of involvement - and it's blisteringly obvious to any observer which category any given teacher is in. Those that want to make a difference in children's lives do so.

Who ARE these people?

[assertation]

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.

Re:Who ARE these people?

[BLAG-blast]

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.

Interesting, I guess it depends on what part of the field you play in. With H1Bs maxing out after a few months, I don't worry about loosing my job to any hack with a work visa. Out sourcing, well can't say I worry about that either, while there have been some success in a few areas, I hear far most negative stories.

Also, if you're actually good at what you do then it's not hard to be in the top few percent of your field/company. If you've got plenty of experience and an ability to learn, there are almost always companies in need of your services. Always new techs emerging, always issues with older techs that need addressed. I'm pretty sure I can do a better job than a small team in India or China.

Electric Sheep

[aztektum]

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/

Re:Rebellion

[CogDissident]

Art made by a computer, with no formula. Enjoy. http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/swarm-paintings-non-human-art/

Re:Rebellion

[VeNoM0619]

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.

Re:Rebellion

[Red Flayer]

All the technical jobs are being offshored to India, Brazil, Argentina, etc. and anyone who keeps their job will likely get their pay continually cut.

Pay will not be cut. Instead, those with a knack for managing offsite teams will be promoted (with or without a nominal raise) and others will be laid off. However, those laid off and looking for a new job will find that pay for equivalent positions will climb more slowly than inflation.

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.

Re:Rebellion

[billcopc]

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.