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

Rebellion

[peipas]

You have this idea of how your child should be and what they should like, and then they shatter your dreams when they start playing sports and getting girlfriends.

Re:Rebellion

[CogDissident]

Sure it will. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_art

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.

wow

[damn_registrars]

They found 1,000 IT professionals that have offspring?

Re:wow

[morgan_greywolf]

They found 1,000 IT professionals that have offspring?

An interesting coincidence is that none of them have Slashdot accounts.

Well of course! I'm part of that 75%

[Anonymous Coward]

Three-quarters of nearly 1,000 IT professionals surveyed said that they would 'definitely recommend' a career in the business to their offspring.

I'm part of that 75%.

I would unhesitatingly recommend a career in IT to my offspring, were I having kids.

Except that I don't want kids. So I would also unhesitatingly have a vasectomy, were I planning on having sex.

Except that this is Slashdot... So even the sex part is a pretty big stretch.

But if I were to hypothetically have sex, and if I were hypothetically not going to sterilize myself to prevent kids, and if I were hypothetically to have kids, then by all means, I'd be damned if I wasn't going to get at least some measure of revenge on 'em.

In other news

[corbettw]

75% of IT professionals hate their children.

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.

Steve Jobs?

[rackrent]

Well, if I were related to a guy with that much money, I'd like to keep him in the family as well!

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/

Consider the source

[walterbyrd]

I have been in IT for an embarrassingly long 28 years. I have seen shortages, and gluts, of IT workers. I have seen strong economies and recessions, I have seen technologies and products come and go.

But one thing never changes, those with a clear agenda: dice, msft, ibm, robert half, tech schools, etc. always claim that IT is great field, and now is a great time to get into IT. These claims are often backed up with some sort of dubious numbers. Speaking as somebody with a degree in math, who has worked on credit scoring systems, and the like, I can assure you that there are people who can make the numbers say whatever somebody wants the numbers to say. Did you know that every time a company requests an h1b, another 5 US jobs are created? It's true, it was in a think-tank report, and bill gates quoted those statistics before the US congress. But, you never seem to see these "happy happy joy joy" surveys from those who don't have an obvious agenda.

Often the claim is that there is some new technology, that will take over the world, and in the near future there will be desperate shortages of people who are qualified to support that technology.

IMO: unless something unforeseen, and unforeseeable, happens, stick a fork in the US IT job market - it's done.

You can probably find a dozen of these types of optimistic articles on any given day. Here is another one from exec at dice.com:

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid183_gci1313503,00.html?track=NL-973&ad=639083&asrc=EM_NLN_3643525&uid=1339323

I have no career, and recommend it.

[gobbo]

In the spirit of 'work to live' I have avoided careerism. Ten years ago I wondered if I was shiftless or a novelty addict. Now that I'm middle aged with kids, I realize that I'm just a stereotype gen-Xer and I hope they will be influenced by my dilettante ways.

I've been: a landscaper, fisher, youth care worker, performance poet (yah, for real), factory worker, journalist, university instructor, tutor, warehouse grunt, retail sales manager, documentary producer-director, web designer, database programmer, substitute teacher, administrator, driver, and IT hack at various startups, plus odd jobs and 'hobbies that pay.' Right now I'm carrying various IT contracts and getting ready to open a computer service and home theatre business in a small but underserved market.

Naturally, I'm better at some of those things than others, but I only suck at a couple of them and do well at most. Mostly, though, the kids have seen me with computers and cameras, and hear these strange stories about my past. Hopefully, what they'll get from it all at the least is a sense of independence and adaptability, and to focus hard on what is at hand.

What I really want them to get, though, is the ability to combine creative insight with technical facility, for I think you're partly right: in a mass-produced world, what is in short supply is well-executed creative expression.

Teach your kids to think clearly, to keep playing, and to adapt--because you can't predict the job market at this rate of change.