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New Grads Shun IT Jobs As "Boring"
whencanistop writes "Despite good job prospects, graduates think that a job in IT would be boring. Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy? Surely with so many (especially young) people being 'web first' with not just their buying habits, but now in terms of what they do in their spare time, we'd expect more of them to want to get a career in it?"
And good riddance! We don't need 'shiny object' people in this business.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I'd probably agree with them.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Then again, if most folks look at computers as an appliance, who wants to be an appliance repairman? Seriously - how many folks wanted to work for the phone company in the 60s and 70s?
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
I would have gone into Economics.
Or maybe Forestry...
If I had only known the IT world would turn into what it is now, I'd do something else. Too much politics... To much hype...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
According to Computer Weekly, this is apparently not a new trend. In the TFA they link to one of their own articles from 2001 that says basically the same thing.
The TFA goes on to quote someone as saying, "We need to show [young people] the variety of roles in IT and the importance that IT carries today. IT is at the heart of business these days and there are real opportunities now to have a career in IT which will ultimately lead to a position on the board."
A position on the board? That is supposed to be "not boring"?
Sure, there are plenty of jobs in IT that allow for creativity (game design, many coding projects, etc.). But, in fairness, a lot of IT jobs involve running cabling, fixing routers, database entry, coding really dull projects, etc. that most people WOULD find pretty fucking boring.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"Spair time?"
Seriously, this is ridiculous.
"spair time"? Seriously, who edited or approved an article with that in the summary, not to mention the punctuation?
Maybe THAT's why IT jobs are boring - you're required to spell!
We are all using X86 CPUs. It looks as is we will all use Windows or a version of Unix.
Yea it has become a stable and rather dull industry.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Well, what do you expect? IT today is boring. It was exciting once, but today, it's routine. Especially at the lower levels.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that a site that proclaims that it delivers news for nerds appears to be accusing Bill Gates of making the IT industry appear nerdy?
What's IT? I'm about to be a new grad. When I hear "IT" I think of tech support for a company, keeping machines running, or working in a data center. Those all sound pretty boring to me (except the last one, if the data center were sufficiently large).
I'd rather do software development, CS research, something along those lines. Heck, my dream job would be working on low cost communication infrastructure in the third world. While I'm sure that all technically falls under the realm of IT, to me that's always be something different. Maybe that's just me, but "IT" to me has always been the boring stuff.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I'd say timothy must find proofreading to be boring.
I loose my mind!
Seriously though. I don't know if I should be concerned or not. Part of being young is working with the mistaken belief they can become millionaires working for World Peace. (or whatever their heart's desire) Part of it also is they don't comprehend the complexity of the underlying delivery systems.
Now, if the Bank of Mom and Dad does not sustain their magical thinking, then they'll get in line pretty fast once they have to choose between washing their clothes or eating.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
And it's not because it's nerdy (as the summary opines). It's simply because its about maintenance of poorly-designed shit. You might as well call it glorified janitorial work.
In contrast, creating new stuff, as actual programmers and engineers do -- that's interesting!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
All you do is sit and type all day and have absolutely no respect from society. It's worse than being an accountant.
FTA:
Non-IT graduates think a job in IT would be "boring,"
despite its good career prospects.
IOW:
People don't enter fields that they aren't interested in.
Film at 11.
Shit, I wish my job was boring. When something breaks it gets so exciting I worry that I'm going to keel over dead.
Anyway, the damn snowflakes need to suck it up. What entry level job isn't boring? You put in your crappy dues, so that you get a better job down the road. I've worked all kinds of jobs, and they're pretty much all boring, even things you wouldn't think would be boring. I did a stint doing wildlife tagging, where I got to roam around on a four wheeler shooting things with a tranq gun, and that was astoundingly boring...99% of the time you just sat and waited and let the mosquitos gorge themselves on your blood.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Surely with the number of young people who crave their very own automobile, you would have a large number who want to become mechanics! read: consumption of a commodity != desire to produce commodity. If it did, I would be in the petroleum business.
Back in the late 90's/early 2000's WAY too many people were jumping into IT because it was the new field du jour which was supposed to make those starry eyed high school kids (some even drop outs) rich with no real effort. Them oversaturating the industry with underqualified and uninterested workers half-killed IT over here. It almost felt unfair working on my Computer Science degree with people who flat out hated computers and always wanted to copy each other's programming projects to pass classes, simply because they though that was the way to go for a good job. The industry could use a bit of thinning out if it means that we're left with actual bright and enthusiastic people who really do like doing this type of work.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"Despite good job prospects, graduates think that a job in IT would be boring. Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy?"
Could be because "IT" includes mundane jobs.
Just b/c these younger people buy and live online does not mean they're in any way qualified to work in IT. Sure, they might not be interested, but lets not make an unnecessary connection that they should be in IT b/c they grew up with a mouse at the end of the umbilical cord.
Boring no, repetitive yes.
I suppose repetition could lead to boredom.
Ok nevermind.
My limited experience was installing new machines in an office building one summer. For the first few weeks, I imaged disks. This consisted of reading The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide and pushing enter when prompted. The rest of the summer was spent teaching people how to use their new machines. I'm sure there is more to it, but I have a suspicion most of the work is dealing with PEBKAC.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I don't have enough fingers and toes to count all the IT folks I know that are unemployed or underemployed right now. This article is more mystifying than all the "engineering shortage" bullshit I've seen thrown around.
yeah, there are jobs out there if you want to make a crappy salary and work in a military regime. If not, might as well go for a different line of work.
"But over 60% of non-computing students do not wish to enter the sector because they think it will be boring."
Who cares what non-computing students think? I can think of dozens of other job sectors that I suspect would bore me stupid, that's why I had the sense not to study for qualifications in them.
I suspect that these graduates all have a nasty shock coming to them anyway, courtesy of real life. Most jobs are "boring" in some way. That's why you get paid to do them rather than doing them for fun.
That means about one-third of the non-computing students think IT is exciting.
Nothing to see here, move along....
This is what happens when you have 5% unemployment over a sustained period of time. In my neck of the woods, where unemployment is even lower, high school kids have their pick of summer jobs. They learn they can be picky about where they work.
This is not necessarily a bad thing (low unemployment is better then the alternative) but it does bring with it a certain attitude in the young.
Those young whippersnappers should try haying in 95 F (35 C) weather. They would learn to appreciate an IT job, I tell ya.
Computers were nerdy WAAAAY before Bill Gates came on the scene.
Seriously, BillG gets way too much recognition and way too much blame. All he is is an obscenely rich, lucky bastard who happened to be in the right place at the right time and played his cards just about perfectly.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm not a big fan of Bill, but blaming him for making IT look nerdy....? C'mon. I think we as a community handle that pretty well ourselves.
There are some exciting jobs in IT. Unfortunately they fill fast, so the vast majority of us are stuck with the tedious ones. (CareerBuilder is filled with database administration jobs. Frown.)
What entry level job isn't boring? You put in your crappy dues, so that you get a better job down the road. I've worked all kinds of jobs, and they're pretty much all boring, even things you wouldn't think would be boring.
Well, you get folks like Steve Jobs and other employers who only want folks who are passionate about their work. It's really hard to be passionate about something you don't like. You can't have it both ways. Either pay your dues and be bored with a sucky job, or do something you're passionate about.
or the day would drag on for even longer.
Sadly many IT jobs are boring, consisting of pressing F5 repeatedly on various websites throughout the day.
Some jobs within IT are very interesting, because they are creative and require actual brain utility. Programming is the obvious example. Hell, even coming up with good configurations for sysadmin can be interesting. Point-and-clicking windows admin stuff must be dire though, and is probably where this negative image is coming from.
In much the same way as I find car mechanics boring, I can see why some people would find programming boring, because they don't appreciate the creative aspect. However being paid a reasonably good wage in an in-demand industry to sit inside at a computer is pretty damned good, even if you don't get to ride a road crusher or steamroller, or fly fighter jets (which I imagine is pretty boring for the 95% of the time you are on the ground actually).
Oh, and memo to students: Work is that boring thing we'd rather not do that allows us to pay the bills, buy that exciting car, buy that house to do up, eat that thrilling meal with friends and have a great time, etc. Get over it, but if you do stay away, demand will surely mean higher wages for us already in the industry.
For the first 20 years, being a developer was cool. You were a hero, you worked during emergencies, you had a bit of freedom as a result, the pay was decent- never superior unless you became a contractor. And there is/was a problem with constantly becoming obsolete and having to retrain a lot more than other professions.
I finally left to be project leader and then a team leader. I see my developers suffering from the boredom.
It's mostly SOX. It's also a view of developers as generic by management. Executives do NOT WANT heroes. They want grey reliable processes that consistently take 3 times as long (and are not random between 1/10th as long and 10 times as long without anyway to predict it).
Programming in business is just not fun like it used to be. It's okay- but you code about 1/10th as much as you used to because of all the paperwork overhead. And you are a LOT more accountable. this is a good thing for slackers but it stifles the good people.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
Life requires labor. Civilized life requires even more labor. Most of that labor is unpleasant in some way. We face the grind anyway, day after day, because it keeps the ball rolling, and because it gives us the money we need to do the things we actually like doing.
If you manage to find a job that you actually like a lot, that's great. If not, hopefully you will be strong enough to accept the realities that most people face, get a boring job, be useful, and earn a decent living.
This means I get to be a bit picky when I need a job.
The Places with lots of PHB's and TPS report driven office are boring. Even more so when you spend more time of paper work then real work.
the exciting fast paced life of working the drive through at the local burger barn for minimum wage.
In 1999, I was debating what to do for my college career, aerospace engineering or IT. I had two jobs in high school, one working for a mom and pop ISP, the other working for a software company as a "junior network administrator", and was programming in c++ for fun, so I knew what IT was about. I also had an extreme love for space.
I figured, push comes to shove, IT was something I could pick up without a 4 year degree, if I needed something to fall back on, but aerospace engineering you really needed that piece of paper (and then a masters, and probably a PhD if you want to do the cool stuff). Plus, as an engineer, a lot of times you get to write or maintain code if you are in the design world, so you can incorporate elements of IT into your job as needed.
I have never experienced an ounce of regret.
It's all about expectations held by new grads.
New grads expect to be given the lead developer role, the keys to the server room, and a license to print money.
Guess what? It doesn't work that way.
You will start by being the windows reinstaller, cable puller , desktop lugger, etc.
Pull your weight, and then you graduate to 2nd level helpdesk.
Still pull your weight, good, now you can do some php development work for the web guys.
You have a useless piece of paper, and most of you have little to no experience. Expect to start at the bottom of the ladder/food chain.
I was once chatting with someone at a party. They asked me what I did. I said I wrote software. They then said "Isn't that boring?". I said "No, it's generally interesting, and even fun on occasion. What do you do".
"I'm an accountant."
Or maybe Forestry...
Sounds like you didn't want to be an IT drone. You wanted to be.... a lumberjack!1. bill gates doesn't work in IT, he was the CEO of a huge company, which couldn't be less related to IT.
2. bill gates is worth billions of dollars. There's nothing boring about having billions of dollars.
3. IT jobs are boring but they beat the crap out of day labor, warehouse, etc. in about every way... so I would seriously consider how much work you think a job should be before you turn down an IT job.
stuff |
People working in IT are like appliances. You do what you are programmed to do and get no respect. I had several IT jobs and finally realized that I had to leave the field. The job sucked and everybody was an asshole when things broke.
I mean really? The man is the poster child for why you SHOULD get into IT... I don't think anyone looks at Bill Gates, with his billions of dollars, happy family, and from an outsider's point of view "good life," and says "Nope... don't want to be a nerd like that!"
People think it's boring because, generally speaking, it can get VERY monotonous. If you don't like programming (regardless of how you define the word), you won't like IT. If you don't like long hours trying to figure out why something isn't working on 1 out of 1000 machines, you probably won't like IT either. I'm not going to get into a "You might be a redneck if..." stream here, but I think you get my point.
If the corporate world is honestly having problems finding IT people, they should either (A) Outsource to a reliable partner, or (B) offer more money. Long story short, IT is like any other job on the planet, if you offer people enough money, they'll gladly do it.
That's the kind of dull I can get behind.
Having to support 10 different wonky platforms and trying to make a cohesive infrastructure from them?
I'm glad those bad-old-days are over.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
You only have a problem with it because you're in the industry. You see, a bunch of us who really liked other things discovered that we needed to make a living, so we went into IT. You people here on /. love to make jokes about liberal arts majors saying "You want fries with that?" because that's all that they're qualified for. Well, I got news for you. A well paying career is going to attract folks who need something to pay the bills. Just ask Doctors and Lawyers. I would LOVE to be a full time artist but the field is so saturated that there are 3 qualified people for every job. No thank you! I knew a Doctor who is a classical pianist - a very good one. But he wanted a family and he knew that he couldn't have one on a musician's pay. What, you want him to go on welfare because he followed his passion?!?
So you "they only got into it for the money" people should shut up.
Mod article headline as "Obvious"
Boring or not, IT is the core of many a business now so it's not like it's going anywhere. If new grads look upon it as boring and choose to stay away from it, fine. Those already in the industry will have better job security and those willing to enter can expect better benefits and pay. Supply and demand, baby.
I am curious, some people sound like the only entry level IT jobs available is support? I am too old to understand, my first programming job was not exactly easy to find, I spent a couple of months, 6 maybe. After that, I am on easy street.
Maybe these new grads are in smaller city? I live in large city all my life, and have no idea how tough it could be in smaller city.
GOOD, get out of my vocation. Go flood the nursing schools or whatever is the flavor of the week profession at the moment. Now if we can get around to clearing up all these Paper Certifications floating around we can really get to business.
Maybe they avoid IT because so many people like the submitter don't know how to spell "spare".
I think IT would be the perfect job for me. I'm very interersted in it, and next year, i'm going into network management, wich is more about computer hard- and software then just networks ;).
Either use all 7 of the words or leave george alone.
Spair today, gone tomorrow.
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
Every now and then I get a twinge of "oh god, I'm really still working at the computer lab in college but with bigger machines and 10x the pay." Then I think about other jobs.
Lawyer.. HELL NO. Unless you end up doing fancy litigation it has to be one of the worst jobs in the universe.
Medical.. bleh. Boring? Is performing the same knee surgery over and over and over again not a bit rote? If you end up in primary care you at least get to help people 1-on-1. Help them take drugs to counter their lack of exercise, smoking, etc. Med school. ick. I think it's 40% of doctors say they wouldn't recommend the career to their children. That's one hell of an endorsement.
MBA? Interesting idea, would probably shortcut a lot of time in getting into the upper echelons but I can't stand posturing, game playing, and management speak so would probably not do well there. I'm an engineer.. in a self-taught sort of way. I look down my nose at MBAs.
Oh yes... wicked hours and professional attire for all of the above.
About the only thing I think would tempt me would be some form of design/electrical engineering. So I've picked up a couple books on the same and will start tinkering that direction. If need be, I'll go to grad school.
For the moment, however, I'm wearing shorts and flipflops, am decently paid, left alone, showed up at work at 10, and have a little web stack I can call my own. I have, admittedly, a bunch of mind-numbing, syntactically sensitive technical problems to work on but with each passing week I add a lump of knowledge and maybe a tool or two to solve future problems.
If everyone wants to stay away.. fine by me! I'll just be in demand all the more.
Y'know, I think I've written myself into a better mood.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
While there are few jobs within IT where your college education really feels useful (i.e. architecture jobs), for most of them, a college grad is either grossly overqualified because he/she paid attention in all those theoretical classes which have no bearing on corporate IT and is a geek that could have done most of the jobs without college, or grossly underqualified, because he/she took a CompSci/Eng program just for the money, and failed to pick up the necessary practical skills outside of class during their education.
I would go so far to say that if you want to work corporate IT, a 2yr program should be sufficient. If you want to work in the technology industry itself, creating or supporting lower level stuff than end-user apps, then a college education comes in handy. For those jobs, a formal education is real useful, and employers in the computer industry expect you to pick up most of your skills via OJT, so previous practical knowledge is actually less useful than with IT employers.
For me, my first job out of college with a freshly minted CompE degree was top-level support for a company making network routing equipment. Never mind I had never actually seen a router before in my life... It wasn't a problem, since the work was so low-level that pretty much nobody was expected to come into the job having the required protocol analysis skills. Having a well-rounded CompE education came in real handy for picking up that stuff in a hurry.
Most of the development work in Corporate IT is churning out one DB App after another. Most of the other work is sysadmin, DB admin or user support work. I just don't see the relevance of the broad theoretical knowledge provided by a college education there.
I can't imagine doing my job for a tech company well without my CompE degree, and I can't imagine what I would do with my degree at most of the customers I deal with.
SirWired
Perhaps IT would be less boring if every office had a Beowolf cluster or two.
Unless it was a Beowolf cluster of boring machines...
...IT professionals find new grads boring, too.
In all seriousness, if your notion of IT is patching network cables or parsing log files or working for the Geek Squad, then yeah, it probably IS boring. But at a certain level (such as systems architecture and software development - to name two), information technology work can be as challenging, as fascinating and as richly rewarding as any other career. Like a lot of professions, IT is what you make of it.
Welcome to the age of entitlement. :-/
I think the person who summarized this article is confusing the popularly (poorly) used generalization of the word "IT" with the industry definition.
Spelling mistakes aside, IT really has little to do with 'web first' outside of providing the beast for web applications to run on. If you really want to think 'web first', you would probably get yourself into web application development, which tends to be more creatively oriented than IT , although I won't eschew the fact that some IT engineering feats require a great deal of creativity. In my mind, computer science grads who entered the field because of a "web first" mentality are more likely to enter that field than IT.
I wonder what the statistics are for people graduating with web application specializations? May be a little too early to have that kind of data at hand...
I needed a laugh. Thanks.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
No, it's because Bill Gates slowed innovation in the industry to a crawl. Well, he and all those people who broke end-to-end model of the Internet using NAT, dynamic IP addressing, deep packet inspection, "no servers" policies, proprietary data interchange formats, etc. And don't even get me started on digital video and cryptography patents.
"IT" has come to mean "IT inside the company you work for". We have all these wonderfully powerful information processing technologies at the edges of the Internet, but can we make new and exciting uses of them? Not many. Why? Because of the problems I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
So yeah, it's a boring job.
http://outcampaign.org/
way to go kids. keep demand up!
I'll take fries with that burger....
IT is boring.
Sure, you're busy but after a few years the intellectually challenge goes away.
IT is a suckers game. Don't play.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In case no one has realized this yet:
More demand with less supply just means that our salaries go up!
Those so called slackers weren't copying, they were actually developing a form of distributed revision control! Think about it. The more people you let copy your work, the more likely you can get back an exact duplicate or even an older revision, in the case that your copy becomes corrupt. :)
Ah, sorry, I'm a little off topic.
I guess my eyes hurt if i don't take my recommend break from my LCD every 3-4 hours but atleast I don't have a slipped disk/broken bones/nail through the head/etc that you may get at any other jobs. I know someone who likes their simplistic job at the local paper mill, but their hand recently went splat when a multi-ton item pinned their hand against the wall.
I also prefer the behind-the-scenes IT position. I get all the fun of trouble shooting without all the 'fun' of working directly with the average person. I get to transfer/transform database data/scema from a Student Information System (SIS) into our local storage and custom tables for each customer. This results in me figuring out each SIS and fixing the problems that the customer may add into the mix.
It is repetative, but somehow always new.
I have been working as a software developer for 27 years.
I wish I had taken my 6-year-old self's career advice and become a plumber.
I'd be retiring this year.
Instead, I get to look forward to 20 more years of "boring" software development.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
"IT" is to Computer Science as lube technition is to Mechanical Engineering. Someone with the cert to mind Cisco routers or diagnose your breaks isn't going to have the skills, probably, to build design a router or a hydraulic system -- and for those who DO have that education, doing that sort of day-to-day maintenance is a boring waste of time.
its the same in any field. A highly skilled artist isn't going to find designing a display of beans at the grocery store particularly stimulating.
I agree with those who have said "Oh well, more work for me". The fewer folks who are interested = better long term job and salary prospects for us. You must admit that only about 20% of the folks you deal with in IT actually know what their doing anyway. They spend much of their days directing the 70% who don't really understand what they are doing but know how to follow instructions and then they spend the rest of their time cleaning up after the 10% who are complete morons.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
Gates made IT tedious and boring, but this job description has nothing to do with culture/image. The reason I use Linux is because it permits me to constantly evolve and shape my environment and network, to make progress and generative change. If I had to keep fixing a broken environment I could never improve, I would go mad. If I'm in IT, I demand to be in a knowledge worker role where I can shape the systems I work in.
Reading the story preview and responses shows how insular slashdot is:
1) Bill Gates is responsible for making the field nerdy? What, the rest of us are smooth-talking jocks, and that Gates guy is dragging the average down? Get serious, please.
2) Most people do not like to work on logic problems all day. It's boring to them. You can spin this however you like, but in the end dealing with computers is cold and dry - no people skills, no art, no expression. It's all 1s and 0s. The exceptional areas (e.g. web page designer) are the ones where we see too many people, as it seems to make IT more exciting.
3) Like many other posters have said or alluded to: jobs are boring. There aren't enough fun jobs to go around, and even the fun ones have very large boring sides to them. Do you know how the basketball greats stay great? Hundreds of shots a day. Hundreds. From all parts of the court. That's sports - you can pull examples from whatever job you want, they all get boring.
finally, like many posters have said - fine by me. I get a rich field to pick from.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
If IT jobs were boring, we'd spend all our time reading ./.
I think the perspective on IT is distorted. alot of graduates have probably never had hands on experience with IT. the place where the action happens can often be pretty shrouded, and alot of the transparency some may see with other fields of technology isnt there. i dont remember a NOC tour being offered at my alma mater.
if all you see is the guy in the closet racking a switch, or the IT person in the library fixing windows, it probably cant help but insist "this is not a career."
AGREED! Apparently, concepts such as hunger and homelessness haven't hit home with our new spoiled overlords...
Who needs the competition? Not me, not India.
/LabMonkey09
As a programmer, I have:
1. Worked with Artificial Intelligence.
2. Done internet backbone programming.
3. Been an anti-terrorist (gov project)
4. Been a crime fighter (AFIS-FBI)
5. Monitored and Operated Gas Turbine and Steam turbine electric plants.
6. Created tons of web apps for the State of Florida (Y2K)
7. Worked on the National Science Foundation's - National Science Digital Library
8. Worked in the Banking/Retirement/Stock Trading industry
9. Presently work automating the work of "people on the floor" in a large company's billing department.
I know, some of these sound great, and some were great. But, not all of the jobs that sound great were, and not all of the jobs that sound like crap are. I an interview, remember, you are interviewing THEM. If you do not like what you see, save the interviewer some time, ask for your resume back, and politely leave. I have.
And if you do accept a job that tuns out to be crap, immediately start looking for a new job. As you can probably tell, I have done so on numerous occasions!
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
CEOs don't get paid a fortune because that's what's needed to convince them to do an arduous job. They get paid a fortune because they're in a position to directly control how much they get paid, and they like being paid a lot. Think "pirate", not "drudge".
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Sadly, many people think of IT as a job of last resort: if I can't get anything better I'll go into IT. Sadly, a lot of IT companies take on this sort of individual and both sides end up hating the deal.
Even if your job is dull, that's hardly a problem - afterall that's why people have hobbies
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Thank you.
Each to his own taste, but in my experience IT is incredibly boring.
I work as a video game programmer. It's fun and challenging and plays to many different fields in computer science.
Back when I worked in IT, 90% of the chores I did were repetitive and dull. The more hardcore/low-level stuff I did was typically trying to figure out how to get someone else's poorly-documented API to do what I required. Domain expertise was a lot more valuable than problem-solving ever was.
IT workers are the grease monkeys of the future.
Dan.
"Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy? "
Of course, there were only superstuds and male Adoni working in the industry before he came along.
Bill is also responsible for making priests look like pedophiles, making Muslims look like terrorists, and making crack whores look toothless.
I do server software support for IT administrators, and even though in most cases I could run circles around them and do their jobs far better than they could, there's no way in hell I'd want to. IT = Dealing with end users, which is something I will NEVER do again.
"Oh, Florida. Just think, somewhere in this state, right now, Jeb Bush is eating a live puppy."
Spair - n. The air found within the spare tire in your trunk.
Don't knock it till you've tried it. Just be sure to wash your hands carefully and use sterile equipment. It can be a lot of fun!
The same advice probably applies to self-catheterization as well.
When I first got into computers it was exciting and new. The first computer at my work place was mine, an Apple ][. What could it do? Anything! Look at this Visicalc thing! Then I stuck a CP/M card in and got dBase II. That allowed us to build a complete accounts payable and payroll system (once we got to dBase III). More computers followed. I thought it would be very cool to get a computer on everyone's desk! People were interested and amazed at what you could do with one of these small desktop boxes. More people got involved. Then came Ethernet! Yes! We're networked! And what about gophers and email? And what was this www thing? It ws an exciting time when hobbyists and enthusiasts drove innovation and spearheaded the drive to compute the world. They were seen as intelligent, innovative saviors. To open up a box with a new computer and smell those polymers wafting in the air still gives a sense of progress! The future has arrived (it's just unevenly distributed--William Gibson) but we were evening the distribution! We were changing the world, increasing productivity.
Well.....Mission accomplished.
Now there IS a computer on every desk. Now there are more servers than you originally had computers. Now without a flashy web site you are hopelessly behind. Now everyone wants in on the action to tell you what to do. Now if you're down for a second it's all your fault and heads will roll. Now IT is a subservient class with deadlines and 'management.' The corporations, big and small finally got over their wide-eyed enthusiasm and ignorance of the field and yoked it in--hard. It has turned from an art to a science, from innovative to expected, from bleeding edge to basement cubicles.
The same thing happened with electricity. The same thing happened with radio. And now it's happened with IT. It has gone fom a hobbyist paradise to a mundane backwater. Too bad. Life was better then.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
A very little study of psychology will prove out that people have different personality types. Studies and data such as this would be much more useful if they were correlated against that kind of information. The fact is it is natural for large numbers of people to find working with computers unrewarding. Certainly any 'kenestitic' learner has a genetic disadvantage in this field as does anyone who is so heavily left brained as to not be able to comprehend the machines below the level of the artistic/ languistic abstraction they represent. Not to say some of them wouldn't do well in 'computers' , but they would need to find a sub-field that fit their specific abilities. I've often wondered if the 'gender bias' in the IT industry is not mostly an effect of this kind of issue. Perhaps there are just fewer females to whom this type of work is appealing. I've never seen any real numbers to know one way or another.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
..more money for me!
That I've had in the last few days include walking to someone's office and showing them that their computer has a power button for when the screen shows 'No Signal.'
On the other hand, I've done some interesting things with servers, wiring, fiber, SAN's, etc. If you like it, you like it. If you don't, then do something else.
Thought this was the technology to rule them all. Don't U get excited about Java specs and making a twinky router take 1% less energy to sleep?
I've done a lot of development. I can think only of one project that was boring. *That* project eventually shipped with our main project and was instrumental in getting me a nice raise that year.
Moral of the story: Boring = money. Frequently.
The controller at your company. Interesting job? Probably not. Well paying job? Definitely.
How about the facility manager of your building (i.e. head janitor) - Interesting? Please... 6-figure salary? Absolutely.
Life is not TV or the internet. What you see there has *NO* correlation with real life when it comes to jobs, or much else, for that matter. Nobody cares if you're interested or not. Nobody cares about your interests at all. Only performance matters. A fact which is going to come as a *very* rude shock to the "millenial" generation (and has to the one's I've fired after two weeks).
Cheers!
Everyone is on the web now? So what? Everyone drives a car and not many aspire to be auto factory workers. Everyone has a phone, and that doesn't drive people into the telecom industry. Everyone uses a toilet, but I don't see people lining up to work for the sewer company.
I'm confused as to the whole basis of "more people use it, so more should be wanting to goin into that as their industry." People choose work because they like it (or think they will) or they want the money/prestige that goes with it. Often people choose to do something other than what they already do a lot. Haven't you heard people say "I've been XXX all day long, I don't want to do that at home." That implies that becoming a plumber will sour you on doing the plumbing around your own house, or coding all day long will make you tired of coding so you won't keep your website up to date.
Learn to love Alaska
I started college as a journalism major. In my second quarter, we were each assigned a classmate to interview. Mine was a girl who had entered college as a CS major (a path which I would tread backwards on less than two years later).
Her reason for switching: "I didn't realize it was just programming all day".
I don't remember whether I asked her what she expected or what she said. I suppose that has something to do with why I didn't stay in J-school.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
let them keep thinking that. I tried to convince a nephew that programming is cool, keeps you constantly challenged, makes the days go by quicker, like playing video games for a living, etc.
he chose accountant! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
let them stay out of the field. i only have about 25 years til retirement. :P :)
while i'm sure that this is completely bill gates's fault, i would also like to attribute high gas prices and cancer to the list of societal ills he is responsible for.
any objections? ok, good.
ôó
Although my primary goal as a kid was to be a game programmer, by the time I was old enough to actually pursue the career I realized what a crappy job it is with long hours. So I do web development instead and was careful when choosing jobs to ensure I'd only be working mon-fri from about 9-5. That gives me plenty of free time to spend time with the family and work on my own personal game/web projects. I also make enough that my wife doesn't have to work and we can still have nice things.
As long as the pay is good and it doesn't ruin your life then it's a good job. An "exciting" job that ruins your homelife isn't worth having either. And unfortunatly, most high paying jobs either demand long hours or they're "boring" tech jobs.
The other thing people tend to forget is that all jobs are pretty boring. It's the people you work with that make them enjoyable.
Work Safe Porn
- Software developers are like automobile engineers: exciting work, developing new products that customers will want.
- IT workers are like auto mechanics. Nothing to do until something goes wrong. If some engineer did something wrong, you'll get a steady stream of work patching up their mistake.
Yeah, sure, there are a few auto mechanics with incredibly great jobs (like working for a Formula 1 team). But the vast majority of IT jobs are as exciting as changing oil at the corner gas station.A lot of service jobs do involve a high level of skills. If you don't believe me ask your doctor.
The fact is we've gotten really good at manufacturing. So good that the manufacturing we need can be done by a lot less people (just as agriculture now requires a lot less people than it used to). Services are a lot harder to optimize because you can't stockpile them.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
90% of the time it is boring, repetitive and soul-sucking--like most jobs. Then I go home for the day and spend time with family and friends.
No statement is true, not even this one.
Sometimes the level of detail required in my reports seems like this:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
The coding itself is actually very good where the work/paperwork ratio is concerned, but the other stuff I do is terrible...ooh I logged out and logged back in on this user's PC to un-hang it, I better make a note of that. Oh I just helped someone set up a job on the copier, better make a note of that too!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
If you don't pay them, they can't afford to do the job, no matter how much they like it.Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Summary:
The first line of TFA:
Maybe that's why they're non-IT graduates. Why in heck would someone want to study for a profession that is not interesting? My God, we've got enough people who are miserable in their jobs; why try to convince more of them to do the same?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
to a bunch of jr high kids.. and the message I got from them was "sitting at a desk all day must be so boring".. which is something I never really thought about until I'd had a job for awhile.. sitting at a desk all day truly sucks.
Good thing all the new grads in Eastern Europe and China and India don't think the same way as these guys. These are the same people who will be complaining about IT jobs going overseas, in a few years.
Look at all the discussion here. Each comment was made by someone who was a little bored at the time and bounced over to /. to see what was up.
There might be a, shall we say, kernel of truth here.
my insights may be modded Funny, but at least some of my jokes are modded Insightful
This is especially true the lower you are on the ladder. When you are entry level, you are probably doing help desk most of the time along with setting up new machines. Sure, when you get that eight core computer in, the computer is probably pretty exciting to check out and play around a bit while you install what is needed, but after a few installs, it's simply repetitive -- just like all the other computers you have set up and will continue to set up. Maybe you get to write reports. You'll definitely awe your friends with how you successfully joined 10 tables to create your latest report.
I think IT gets more exciting and interesting when you reach the point where you are creating solutions to new problems. There is a great deal of responsibility but a much greater feeling of reward and satisfaction. I think the saying about the lead dog having the best view is true and not just in IT.
I enjoyed reading the comment where someone said that IT is like janitorial work.
All the article notes is that a proportion of NON - I.T. grads *THINK* that I.T. would be boring.
Where is the news here? Very poor summary.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
"Thank you for calling, how may I help you? I see. *sigh* Click 'Allow'. There you go, have a nice day."
"Thank you for calling, how may I help you? Oh really? *sigh* Click 'Allow'. Thanks for calling."
"Thank you for calling, how may I help you? Oh for Chris-- *sigh* Click 'Allow'. Yeah good, bye."
It's 'spare,' not 'spair.'
You guys are crazy, IT is super exciting! Last Friday I had preventative maintenance which was a blast! Then just yesterday I sat around all day waiting for something to break. Last but not least today was the best yet; I restarted some DTS jobs and cleaned up a log file!!!!
Would I say that IT/IS/MIS/ISS is boring? You bet your ass it is, however, that isn't always the case. You might go weeks without anything major going on, but then all of the sudden youâ(TM)re flooded with things that need to be done yesterday. Like any job it has its ups and downs, itâ(TM)s just that in our case poking around on the internet to keep up on technology is a requirement ;)
Making the NBA look tall.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
They would be right about that. I used to be too busy to be bored, then some business genius decided to send the non-boring part to some other shore. The only part of IT that was NEVER boring was the making of PL/1 or REXX code ...
Anything that takes more than the average 'smarts' to accomplish is considered nerdy in our culture (America).
This is because the people with average or less smarts have to make fun of the smart people to feel better about themselves, and since the percentage of smart people is so small, the dominant ideology takes hold.
Basically:
Are you a smart kid in grades K-12 who likes science? Nerd. Percentage of kids: 15%
Are you an idiot who plays second string on the football team and who's brain can't grasp anything beyond business classes? Cool. Percentage of kids: 85%
I'd rather be a nerd. Of course most of the population would think IT or science is boring, because they can't mentally do it so they demote it to boring or nerdy. Additionally, 74% of statistics are made up on the spot.
What I find amusing is that almost everybody watches cable tv or uses a cell phone, and they do not realize that is all thanks to the computer/aerospace/electrical nerds for putting together the rockets/satellites/programs/etc that makes it possible.
Engineering in all its facets (from civil engineering to mechanical engineering to chemical engineering) is sometimes considered "boring" too.
From what I understand this is because you need a lot of background knowledge, and unless you're extremely good you won't find much scope for technical innovation. You'll primarily be applying knowledge, not inventing it.
E.g. in the case of structural engineering using standard components, standard materials, and standard constructions. It's only when you work for a specialised engineering design company that you get to do state-of-the-art finite element calculations on brand-new structures. Other companies just use standard design rules to dimension standard components in standard structures, the trick being to satisfy all requirements in the cheapest possible way in the least possible time. Day in day out.
So you'll generally have to find expression for your creativity by getting things done on time and within budget instead pushing the envelope, and as soon as you're doing that you'll tend to shy away from wild innovation.
With software development there simply is a lot of (to me elegant and beautiful, to others dead and boring) scientific background knowledge you should have (algorithms, data-structures, compiler design, finite automata, complexity theory, concurrency theory, discrete mathematics, and numerical mathematics) supplemented by more applied knowledge like the principles of software engineering, in-depth knowledge of at least three programming languages (C, C++, Java), some experience with the object hierarchy underlying modern GUIs, and probably a lot I forgot.
And when you've done all that and appear for your first job, you may find you'll be on some project team and entrusted with responsibility for building component X of subsystem Y according to specifications someone will give you. You write your code, construct your test-cases, and verify correctness, document your functions, check in your code, and rush off to the next specification you'll implement because you've got to meet productivity standards or you're out.
This might seem a little pessimistic, and I'm sure that in many companies who use a seat-of-the-pants approach to software engineering things are more exciting. Like being given a huge poorly documented codebase to maintain. But generally speaking I don't think it is. There is (thankfully) an awful lot of this engineering-type work in software production, and only those who excel will, in time, become the lead programmers, designers, and system architects who actually dream up and shape end products.
Some people, and especially those who dream of designing a new supercool system to fly aircraft do indeed find the prospect of maintaining payslip applications on mainframes, automatic teller machine software, book-ordering software and inventory management systems, and crufty little custom data-entry packages boring. And perhaps they're right.
As I see it, most software engineering tends to be a bit unspectacular when done right, and excitement mostly enters the equation if you make serious mistakes. Of course there will be exceptions, like the Mars landers. But not everyone can be a programmer at NASA.
Some IT jobs are very boring. Some Web jobs are also boring. I'd much rather be bored, sitting in front of my computer w/ headphones and good coffee, w/ a nice looking secretary, than waiting tables, serving coffee, or being an annoying salesmen.
Some IT jobs are challenging, which can be interesting, depending on what challenges interest you. If you're not interested in being challenged, then I guess, I'll take fries with my burger, thanks.
If I was right out of school, I'd want to partner-up w/ some people close to my age, start a small venture, and learn to make it a fun place to work. It may not be google, but it doesn't have to be a mortuary, either. One of the coolest jobs I had was working 2 doors from the beach, writing code, and watching all the hot women roll around all day. Very distracting, but also very motivating to get my work done and get out of there. =-p
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
The part that is questionable to me is the "good job prospects" part. There are good prospects it seems if you live in India, but what I see is a shrinking job pool in the U.S.
The only boring jobs in IT are IDS/IPS when nothing is happening. All others are pretty exciting.
Computer programming was once nerdy, but it's not any more.
Modern professional programming has gone waaay away from inspiring visionaries, genius, creativity, and mystery, and waaaay over to the bureaucratic, unchanging, stifling, rigid, and controlled.
But, on the plus side, you don't have to wear a suit and tie. So I guess there is that; One vestigial remnant from a glorious day in the distant past.
"Alan Kay? Ken Thompson? Just what the hell are you talking about?" -- just about every coworker.
What is devastating to me, is to know, from first hand direct contact, what kinds of things computer programming can be. And also to know, from the pragmatics of the existing order, that we won't make much progress towards even envisioning possibilities.
Our noses are rubbed in the gutter of entrepreneurs and the seekers of riches.
Who I seek out are intuitives, artisans, feelers, creatives, math nerds, and inspired programmers.
Artists form art coops. We need programming coops. Not just across the Internet -- in the material world.
As it should be. If you want new and interesting problems, work in Technical Support. Or become a Software Engineer or Computer Scientist.
Then again, I've always worked at smaller organizations and therefore IT work has always had a great deal of variety. I have a very strong creative drive, but can't do graphic arts worth a shit. Database development, web app development, troubleshooting (at least the truly oddball problems), and helping others has been very rewarding for me personally, if no so much financially. I've always been able to provide what my family has needed, but never buy that Porsche. Oh well, I prefer riding my bike anyway.
My problems have always come from the Peter Principle (I'm just not a good supervisor or middle manager) or the inevitable expansion of my dream "one person IT shop" job into being just a cog in the machine.
I think those dream "one person IT shop" jobs are gone now. My definition of IT (support, hardware/infrastructure, DB and Web App development) just isn't done on a personal scale anymore. The small companies just outsource to big churn shops.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
Maybe because recent college graduates that go into IT get paid pretty poorly compared to their peers? Unfortunately, I am a fairly recent college grad, work in IT, and get paid pretty poorly, and it's causing me to re-think my career goals. Before anyone says anything, I am looking for a new job, just haven't had much luck yet.
It really doesn't take long to learn everything to learn about the job. Most of it gets to be routine.
And you are never actually doing anything real, you are supporting others who actually make the money in the organization. That's why IT is seen as a cost center and cut to save expense or sent overseas. So I gave up on IT.
I'm curious about this meme. Do you say this to discourage competition? Wouldn't your time be better spent working on your CV?
Laws of Demand and Supply. If supply is limited because new people are not coming in and the demand is static or rising, then price increases. More money for me, let the sheep dwell in the highly competitive 'fun' industries whilst I'm earning twice what they earn.
Fine by me
I recently graduated with a CS degree and four years working for a tech support team at my university (my "experience"). My department is clueless (punchcard programming FTW), so I'm on my own at this. What are some good jobs? Any advice at all? Thanks so much.
i myself am a young person, and i spend the vast majority of my (and everybody else's) time in front of the computer. at school, if people have a computer problem, i'm pretty high on the list of who to go to, and i like that just fine. However, getting a job in it seems like the most boring thing imaginable. I spend enough time in front of a computer, and i don't want work mixed in with that. i would much prefer a cool job like something in biochemistry. Making pigs glow in the dark sounds infinitely more rewording than running helpdesk.
Where's the future in it? All the jobs are going to the new slave labor from India, working at rates well below a living wage for people who have to actually PAY for their education. Why go into a job with no future? You can still do IT as a hobby while you do something that pays the bills.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
"Surely with so many (especially young) people being 'web first' with not just their buying habits, but now in terms of what they do in their spair time, we'd expect more of them to want to get a career in it?"
I don't see how you can logically draw this conclusion. Prior to the Internet, we lived in a very TV-centric society (from an information flow point of view), and not everyone wanted a job in TV.
We live in a very car-centric culture now -- how many people do you see clamoring to design car parts or work in gas stations?
Just because there's a generational shift toward something "new" doesn't necessarily imply that everyone wants a job working in that field.
blog |
Geez -- you would think that nobody on /. owns a mirror! Gates made the profession look nerdy?!?!?!
Denial -- it's just a river in Egypt, I guess... :^) :^) :^) :^)
The TV (like the internet) is a window. What's interesting is what's on the other side. It's the content that interests, not the enabling mechanism. If you spend a lot of time with your eyes trained at a window, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are fascinated by glass.
Eric Baird
Low supply high demand, means more pay for the shrinking talent pool (a.k.a more money for me).
Or maybe they will start to outsource the jobs which sucks.
Non-IT graduates think a job in IT would be "boring," despite its good career prospects, according to the Career Development Organisation (CDO).
Good thing they're not IT graduates then. Yeesh.
...working in an IT department is. There's a big difference, the way I see it.
I don't fit the article's demographic since I went to school and graduated fully intending to go into IT, but speaking from my experience, it isn't the industry or the work that bores me, it is the environment in which I have to do it. There's only so many times you can repair Outlook before you start to resent the ignorance of your users for making you have to repeat such mundane work when there's much more interesting things out there to be done. After working technical support and then being a system administrator, I decided very quickly that if I didn't change my career path, I'd soon become an artist-- painting the wall with my brains.
Monotony aside, most of the work you do is totally thankless. Nobody cares, much less thinks about, that beautiful load-balanced SQL cluster you just put into place and how much it boosts performance and how it has an amazing up-time. IT people only have visibility when something is broken. The IT infrastructure may be important to the business, but the people who keep that infrastructure intact aren't valued or respected. Part of this has to do with the image that many IT professionals give (i.e. the neck beard-sporting slob who has never worn a tie in his life), but it also has a lot to do with the nature of non-technical people. They only remember the 1 day where all email was down... not the 364 days when it was working flawlessly.
I don't know about anyone else, but I get bored listening to non-technical plebes ranting about how important it is that you drop everything to restore their deleted PowerPoint presentation. That's the kind of work that gets schilled out in IT departments, so, as far as I'm concerned, fuck that noise. Now that I'm doing consulting, I'll never go back. It lets me focus on the technical challenges I enjoy without all the IT department bullshit that goes along with it.
There are definitely corners of the IT Profession that are ridiculously dull. If you want to know if what you do for a living is boring, try saying what you do while looking at yourself in a mirror. That right there is what you are.
"I change tapes in the backup machine and start the automated build process for a living". Everything you do can and should be done by robots already.
What is sad, though, is that when a field becomes so mindlessly dull, that's exactly the sort of person that works within it. The kind of person that works there for a paycheck and nothing else. And there's really no good reason for it either, considering what tools we have at our disposal. Teleconferencing, remote management...there's no good reason besides stodgy old farts that don't want to learn how to do something braindead simple as to learn how to use the conferencing or chat feature in their IM and insist on having you in your cube to assuage their fear of you goofing off at work. If you get your job done in IT, it should be fairly obvious as networks and databases wouldn't be broken all the freaking time. And that doesn't even cover what managers can do in regards to cross-training and research projects to keep people interested.
Kids come out thinking it's all Dilbert and Office Space. The key to Dilbert and Office Space is that those are two fine examples of what you shouldn't ever allow yourself to become. That's the whole point of both.
I think this phenomenon is mostly due to the fact that most IT jobs are boring. I know its a radical, outlandish theory, but it has a firm basis in fact. How many people do you know that work in IT and mostly surf the web for a living? Answer: a lot.
Boring...or insanely stressful and overly demanding of your time.
Do you think you could have outlined the post without the stupid reference to Bill Gates? Oh, I forgot - this is slashdot.
For once it would be nice to have a post without the diatribe.
But then again, aren't most jobs? If they are fun, its not a job.
Besides, fewer kids coming into the market? That's a good thing as we are over loaded now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Higher the demand, the lesser the skill pool and the more unpleasant the work - the more money you'll get.
"You mean during the heyday of Bell Labs, when they were dumping money into R&D, and inventing things like a little language named C, a little operating system named Unix, the electret microphone, the CO2 LASER, and the first 32-bit microprocessor? Yeah, who would want to work there? "
No, he means the phone company. Why are you bringing up a research laboratory?
The problem with most views is that they don't look at the evolution of technology as a way of 'spicing up' IT...
Storage is often looked at as one of the most boring areas... we've gone from parallel scsi, to FibreChannel and now we're moving to FCoE (FibreChannel over ethernet). Disk arrays aren't just dumb raid boxes, but require knowledge of applications so the storage engineer can provide the right DR solution to the application owners (offsite replication, snapshots etc..).
With servers we've gone from client/server, to the 1U 'pizza boxes' of the dotcom era, and now we're moving into virtualized servers (VMware...).
Even with telephony, we're moving from old PBXs to VOIP and converged networks (Voice, data and storage), there's something there for the networking folks as well.
If you look in the mirror and say, "I've been doing the same thing for 5 years and I'm bored of it." Don't quit IT, just find somewhere else in IT to transition to. And don't blame your mgr, the industry or ComputerWorld, go ahead and blame yourself for not realizing you could get off your butt do something a bit more interesting.
Entry-level IT jobs usually mean a whole lot of grunt-work, answering to morons who are living proof of the Peter Principle, and having to listen to users who don't know their ass from their elbow coupled with no desire to learn the difference lest they be held accountable for it.
It's because it has become a very mundane trade. Most folks in IT (and I'm not one) have less than a four-year diploma, and do less-than-exciting fetch-and-carry tasks all day long. Of course, there's much more to IT than that, but that's what people mostly see, including college kids who work summer jobs or internships.
It's similar to the practice of architecture. Architects have this "cachet," but in reality only a VERY few architects ever attain those high-rung jobs where they design dazzling buildings and have Hollywood celebs attend their ribbon-cutting ceremonies. The great majority of them work in mundane jobs "designing" cookie-cutter buildings for mass production (BSW Architects in Tulsa, Oklahoma does all the "architecture" for Wal-Mart, for instance. Big shiny office, the partners make lots of money, but the majority of the designers toil in relative obscurity turning out site-adapt plans for the handful of prototypes they use).
Many kids planning careers in architecture get turned off once they experience the REAL WORLD of working in an architectural office. I think IT wannabes are pretty much in the same mindset once they've seen they're not going to be working on the next version of "DOOM" (even if they go to work for ID).
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Actually I would expect just the opposite, it's the mundane everydayness if IT and the web which leads to it's preception as boring.
Show me an IT project which could be thought of as cool and breaking new ground, there aren't really any. There are incremental improvements, over what went before but nothing like 60s 70s and maybe the 80s when every new project was something new if only in a geeky way.
IT has become a commodatity market, good for lowering prices, not good for making interesting work.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
In a lot of cases, you don't need a lot of major skills/education to become a janitor or a farm-hand. Yes, you have be dedicated enough to do the job, but it's not often something that takes a lot of brains, or - depending on the actual tasks - brawn. It does take the ability to put up with some things beyond which other people are willing to do though, and I've actually seen some janitors that get paid pretty damn good.
Yep Mike Judge has it correct and we are headed toward an idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/). Smart is no longer respected. If you want respect be a thug or pervert. Even better be good at pretending to be someone else. Be a manipulator of people and you can make millions but actually create something LOL!
In the 60's while huge advances were being made the title of scientist meant a lot. Now it is a negative.
...DB and Web App development) just isn't done on a personal scale anymore. The small companies just outsource to big churn shops.
Totally wrong - the big churn shops increasingly outsource to the specialists; either sme specialist businesses or individual contractors, because even though their hourly rate is a lot higher, they have the benefit of knowing what the hell they're doing.
Most IT departments today just dont do much in the way of innovation. If Technology isn't the main thing a given company does, odd are it will think of the IT Department as simply people to call and fix those minor annoyances.
A computer savy graduate doesn't want to spend his time running network cables and resetting passwords. It would be like a mechanical engineer getting out of school and wanting to work in an auto-garage.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Why are people with university degrees "looking for jobs?" These are the people who should be *creating* jobs.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
IT industry shuns new graduates as "lazy."
"In 1925 Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of AT&T were consolidated to form Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. as a separate entity."
Aside from that, however, in normal conversation, when one says "phone company", one does not mean "research laboratory" and vice versa. I realize slashdotters have an overwhelming need for pedantically analyzing everything in hopes of finding some inconsistency to point out in order to prove their intelligence. In this case however, it would be difficult for an intelligent person to claim that when one says "phone company" one means "research laboratory".
There is a reason it's called work, and not play.
All jobs are boring. That is their nature, because you are essentially forced by your need to survive to do that which you would not voluntarily do without compensation. Even when you ARE doing something you would voluntarily do, control as to when and how you do it is stripped from you, so it becomes boring anyway.
Work will always be boring. Just work doing something you have a talent for. It won't make work a daily joy to do, but it will make it more tolerable. If you're lucky, sometimes it will even coincide with what you WANT to do, and then it actually does become fun. It just won't remain that way. :)
We actually have a rule to get someone within a year of graduation, or on the way to graduation. The requirements seem a bit dumbed down, but it's in systems programming. The pickings have been slim so far. Good luck.
I got into IT at the end of the 70's and every day was interesting and fun until a bunch of large companies turned it into a commodity business. Ever since, there has been no real innovation. We're down to PC and Mac and even THEY use the same CPU now. CPU speed is has flattened out so they just throw more cores at you every other year leaving the only decent CPU to the Sony Playstation 3.
As for the career part, I have 4 (count em) managers that think Excel is a database and their only claim to fame is a degree in business administration (I have one of those too but also my Engineering degree).
The problem is not with IT, the problem is with the folks that count the $$$. They don't understand the technology and that filters down through almost every organization and stifles creativity (thus creating boredom).
If you want to be in IT and not bored, get a job in another industry and write open source software in your spare time. It will be both fulfilling and challenging.
Rant over.
Hollywood has ruined jobs for a lot of people. They are expecting to go into IT and be the superhero that they see in movies or TV that can save the business with the flick of their wrist.
I graduated with a degree in IT last year and I have yet to find a job, where are all these supposed 'jobs'?
You're really stretching it here. Bill Gates did not work in IT. Look up IT and Information Systems. He developed an Operating System, hardly IT work. Doing IT work for your average company would suck and be boring. Computer Science is far more exciting and cutting edge than IT.
Now I won't have to teach them b!7ch3s how to be a slackers and still GTD. But I do agree with the thinking that IT jobs no longer hold the elite/cool factor they did in 1997. Now a days it's, "Oh you don't like the spec? What do you mean vacation! Do the f@ck!n9 work or I'll replace you with a contractor who doesn't think he's a f@ck!n9 Rock Star, mister ""let's take our time and do it right!!"" But I could not imagine doing any other kind of work. I love writing code and hacking business logic. This shit is fun. It's like a RTS where I need to defeat the bugs by using mad logic and clever skills. Someone in real-life told me that want to be a computer programmer because it pays well and seems like a lot of fun. :\ Fail.
I like-a do-the cha-cha.
Not only because the "good" jobs are taken. Let's be honest here, where do you start in IT usually, unless you're the one-in-a-million exception? You start in some application cranking business. Personally, I could think of little that's less interesting than writing database apps with RAD tools or cranking out PHP scripts.
But that's where you start. And that's what young people get to hear about when they talk with their peers that have IT careers. They talk with database drones and script monkeys.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are really cool jobs in either area, but you don't get them without experience. There are interesting jobs in those areas, designing databases, optimizing them, writing the perfect script, fast and efficient, but ... well, I guess it's interesting for geeks but not people who don't have a little orgasm when their script runs 2% faster...
But usually you get to the more interesting parts (even if only interesting by geek standards) with experience. You won't get hired straight from college to write the game engine for an A grade game, design the next database for Google or write a kernel for the next gen cells (ok, I know someone who was, but he's certainly an exception. In more than one way).
But if you're not willing to put up with the work necessary to get there, you won't get there, and it won't stop being boring. But ... I dunno, I'd guess it's the same for pretty much every job.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most Universities encourage their grads to go work for large companies. This is usually due to the prestige of saying 'we have grads working for XYZ big company' and hoping that the company will donate money. This isn't the best working environment for everyone.
I had the opportunity to 'grow' with a budding IT department. The department went from a small/medium size department with no budget (read: we couldn't afford to buy jack) to a medium/large size department with a fairly substantial budget.
There was a major shift in operations as the department grew. The larger the department, the more 'off the shelf' software and outsourcing. This meant less creativity and more monotony for the IT staff.
It was a blast when I first started working there... always having to find some creative way to make something work the way our customers wanted it to. Now, the same positions entail little more than making sure servers and applications are running.... and if development work is needed, they outsource it.
I left and went to work for a small/medium sized IT department somewhere else and love what I do once again.
In my opinion, there is too much emphasis by the Universities to find employment at large businesses.
I think that the major issue with new grads are that they really don't know how big of an umbrella the term "IT" really is. They don't know how many different specialties there are. There are so many different fields of expertise in IT that it take a lifetime to list. Just of the top my head I can think of Security, Networking, Web Dev, Programming and so on. It's sort of like the medical field. There are literally as many different types of doctors as there are bones in your body. Of course you would think IT is boring if all you think of is Help Desk Support. It's up to the individual to make a niche for themselves and find a specialty within IT that exciting to them.
Because it means even more job security for me!!!
Many young adults starting and or finishing college now have grown up with computers in the house. Many also have a parent that is a IT professional. Or they know one of their friends whose parents are. Do you think they want to end up like them?
I have told my daughter that my in my job I do high stress work, on call 24x7x365 with work that is like repeatedly herding a new group of cats as new programmers managers come year after year with bad habits and leave with bad habits. Work I did sometimes a year ago is gone. Same mistakes, same assumptions over and over and over again.
Management has tried to make my job into a "follow the recipe any one can do it" in an attempt to render the cost associated with training and retention obsolete like the application everyone "had" to have yesterday.
And worse yet is not being thanked nearly enough. It is always more about what you did wrong to remember for next time. Than how you took users from having ZERO access to ANY data to having live data delivered 24x7 on a silver platter.
Or how about trying to talk to managers, users, programmers about WHY what they want is not simply point and click: "next, next, next and finish." The eyes glaze over and they simply don't want to hear it. They justify spending all that money for 300 page reports that they take the top page off and throw the rest away.
It is no wonder young people do not want to do IT work.
IT SUCKS MOST OF THE TIME!
But with all that many of us would not give it up for anything. I guess we really do have issues collectively to enter into this career.
I never really planned to be doing what I do. It just happened. So I buck up, slap the headphones on and build another database.
IT ruined my life, and made it better. Does that make sense?
I think you mean pay people as much to do them. No matter how exciting and fulfilling a job is you still need to be able to afford food and shelter for you and your family at a bare minimum.
If you pay attention to the "media", why go to IT in the US when your job will be outsourced or taken by a foreign contractor. Microsoft would much rather have H1-B, offshore, etc then paying for US grads. The kicker is that they're an American company. And MSFT is the only computer company that matters. yea, there's bitterness
I am a Linux/Unix system administrator, and have been for almost 10 years. I absolutely love what I do on a regular basis. Sure it can be frustrating at times, but so is every other job. Some aspects may be considered 'boring', but really that is personal perception. I find my work to be personally rewarding and interesting. No, it isn't for everyone, but then again, not every job is meant to be filled by just anyone. Not everyone wants to be an accountant, a lawyer, a pilot or a machine gunner. Not everyone needs to be a system administrator, a security consultant, or a software developer. That's fine. It is far more important for people to find what they love to do and make that their career.
I may be rationalizing, or remembering the kidless past as worse than it was. But you may also be rationalizing your decision not to have kids. In either case it's an enormous decision with huge effects on your life.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Old saying which still holds true. Emptying septic tanks is not a glamorous job, but the pay is really good.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As an undergrad working in IT as a student job, I can confirm that it is, in fact, boring. Infinitely more boring and less enjoyable than the other part-time jobs I've worked including apartment cleaning, table waiting, bussing and food delivery. At least I didn't have to deal with 5 30 ton A/C units constantly whirring in the background at the restaurant. Oh, and my coworkers had more depth in both jobs than comic book movies and WoW.
Most of IT, good IT, has been rendered boring by the application of structure and formalization to it. Back in the day, IT folks were seat-of-the-pants, contriving solutions on the fly, hacking live systems, being the hero in the closet that saved the day. Once IT became supremely important to the enterprise, it got controlled, structured, and rules came out. Standards and methodologies started controlling everything from server deployment to code writing. The job went from keyboard slinging console cowboys to geeks in a meeting room constructing project plans.
This is not to say that the IT that is performed these days isn't GOOD -- it is, far, far better than much of the code and product produced in the halcyon days of the industry. But it lacks the excitement, uncertainty, and massive heroics of yesteryear. This, more than anything, is what has rendered IT "boring" to most grads.
The excitement comes now from doing a job well, from taking the requirements and still coming up with the creative answers within the frameworks defined, and saving the day by knowing that niche information at the critical time. But gone are the days of a geek-in-a-corner, whacking out miracles and clobbering something together out of voodoo magic to the saviour of all.
Blog,Twitter
There are two mistakes with the post. One is that it is labeled "News." And the other is that the actual content isn't necessarily true. I am a recent grad and I am don't find my new IT job to be "boring." Subjective thoughts aren't news.
Same here. I figure the ones who think it's boring are the vast amount of grads who got into it because it was the cool thing to do, or becuase it pays well. Serves them right, and leaves room for those of us who are actually in the field because we're engineers by nature.
I'm double-majoring in CS/EE because that's how I work. I just picked up a car with a froze up engine, mostly so I could take it apart, figure out how it works, and put it together, hopefully making it work better and get a working car out of it. That's how I've always worked, that's how I always will work. I have little sympathy for those that don't have that passion, but got in the field for other reasons like money or cool factor.
Oh, and also...get out of my back yard!
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
I'd tally up your comment count over the years, but I don't have time to figure out how to weight the average posting rate of 10 sockpuppets.
Reading the comments here and pondering the article I was thinking about my own relation to IT. Yes, it has gotten tedious. But that could be the Baskin Robins effect kicking in after 8 years of professional web work. What was bright and flashy and avantgarde back then is a comodity today.
But that's not all what's to this issue. A big point today is that computers are rarely used for computing nowadays. They are communication devices, surrogates for books/libraries and data stores. Real computing, as in "Automating specific tasks as to help the people involved along" is only a fraction of the actuall work nowadays. And lets face it, folks, *thats* what makes computers and IT fun. When you acutally speed up the data migration process some secretary has to do from 10 hours per day to 10 seconds per day. You get straight to a *real* problem that *real* people have to go through great pains to get solved, you look at it and you automate the damn thing. Everybodies happy, the secretary gives you a huge hug the boss loves you and you take home a decent paycheck and feel great. ... When was the last time that happend?
Today we have huge application stacks and have to build, setup and maintain massive pipelines for software developement and deployment, each element with its own tedious details that all need to be covered, before we even get the end-user connected to the automation process, let alone are able to develop on the damn thing without some bizar bug somewhere deep inside making our life hell.
I do web-stuff. With the OS, Apache, mod_php, php, MySQL, [Fill in your favourite web framework here], the Browsers, JavaScript, Mail, deployment automation, Devtools, remote debuggers the stack I have to deal with today has a minimum of 7 large layers that are impossible to overlook for a single person. No wonder the job is fucking boring. That's because I am no longer in control all of the time. And no wonder the customers understand less of what I'm doing and no wonder it takes longer and longer to get to the meat of what makes small business ERP worthwhile for all involved.
*This* is what makes IT boring and tedious for me. I kind of miss the times of the text interface, where GUI desktops where just a fad and you actually felt like having achieved something at the end of the day. It takes much more effort to get that feeling nowadays, and it doesn't allways work. On top of that we have to get used to working in teams. We are slowly but surely leaving the steam age of IT. Jacks of all trades - even in the web business - are quickly going the way of the dodo.
Just the other day I reviewed a contract where I'm going to drop LAMP/WebFramework/Ajax hodgepodgeing for a pure ActionScript3 focused job. The industries gotten huge, and is moving faster by the day. One-stop universal IT handyman heroes have finally turned into the equivalent of plumbing jobs. All else is professional work, serving professional pipelines. And yes, that means they also are somewhat boring at times. I bet Gutenbergs printing press only was exiting until his assistants where printing number 56 of page 200 of the bible.
At least we'll stay in business, as I can't see IT growth stopping any time soon. And with the younger ones thinking of IT as boring - all the better.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It reminds of scene from the show Spin City. The Mayor was talking about how bad his first job right out of college was and I quote " I don't know how I survived making only $75,000 a year." I think all college grads are made to believe that because you graduate from "blank" University you are something special. Distorted reality is being taught. you soon find out how the real world works and put in your time then if you do it right you can be the big money guy.
I'm taking computer science - I love the math, the logic, and the abstract thinking really tough problems require.
Listening to this, it sounds like the industry side of this is boring crap where you don't apply any of what you learned in school. Is this really accurate, or did a lot of the complainers not really enjoy studying / not good at it?
Any help would be appreciated - if I have this shit to look forward to then I'm going straight to grad school.
:)
I can't help it, this article reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where the certified public accountant wants to become a lion tamer.
Dude, if you spent the last four years of your life qualifying to work in an industry you now consider too boring to consider... Look, I got no sympathy.
maybe I.T. jobs looks boring for that "grads" because of the fact that I.T. its no only "MAC OS BEATIFUL GUI", also is to get the hands dirty and use the command line in the most of the cases.
If your biological imperatives told you to have sex in order to have children, would you do it? If you had lived a hundred years ago, when contraception was difficult and uncomfortable, would you have chosen celibacy?
-- Support a free market in the field of government
A lot of the people I grew up with now have kids, and they all think their kids are the best thing ever to happen to them. Even those whose personal finances are going thru some rough times.
Kids are expensive. But the standard of living, the stuff you can buy, isn't the most important thing in life. At least, not in most people's lives.
If you have an SO, for how much would you sell him/her? Unless you have a figure in mind, you don't think that standard of living is the most important thing either.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
There are no boring jobs, just underpaid workers. Another problem is all the poorly trained Indian IT "professionals". I have nothing against Indians, other than majority of their computer guys suck ass. They work for peanuts, drive the wages down across the entire industry, and on the average do a lousy job. I know many here don't want to bring up this subject so not to offend anyone, but most of you know exactly what I am talking about.
I've always had the opinion that IT should include as little clerical work as possible that cannot be automated. Therefore I've spent almost as much of my time writing scripts and programs to take data I know is in existence and putting it in lots of clerical reports over time as I have manually writing them. I mean, I do other things as well but if I didn't handle the reporting side automatically (for the most part) I'd have given up and left too.
However, to me, its this kind of thing that makes IT interesting - the ability to turn around the facts and figures, massaged and ready whenever some boss or other who doesn't understand IT for anything other than Excel comes along - more quickly than they would expect. The problem is to keep managers who know nothing out of the data - except maybe the odd reporting table and you are winning. Back who I started my first programming job this was easy - they didn't know what things were capable of and with a few reusable databases we could show them. Nowadays its a cat fight with every third party vendor to keep the automation we have and with every dumb know it all manager to stop them changing to systems that won't work.
Unfortunately manipulating the organisation into a way of working that allows data to be reused is half the battle in IT. The systems and services we run are largely about this - creating, storing, protecting and making the data as reusable as possible. If you see a system that does nothing to help - dump it! If one takes too long to develop - dump it! If one stores the data in a proprietary and incompatible manner when it doesn't need to - dump it!
IT is no longer a place to sit back - its getting quite as cut-throat as many boardrooms as we are effectively competing with a plethora of third party vendors. In this climate I can see why people want to leave, however, I quite enjoy it.
Nerdy? Jesus christ someone is so obviously sucked in to Apple's advertising it's not even funny. Maybe it's because the media gives it a bad name. We've been nerds for a long time and I would hope that any student with an ambition of getting a bachelors or a masters degree in anything computer related would be a nerd. and proud of it too.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Suddenly your not just a cost anymore.
Getting the first version out the door is often very painful.
I wouldn't do that again. (Taking an internal project 'commercial'. Just start over using the internal project as a working prototype and building a new team, perhaps with key members of the old one as a skeleton. If you don't get support for that walk^m^m^m^mrun away.)
Much easier to just start with a place that has software development expertise up the management chain.
I've been both places and even though generating revenue will change the level of respect an internal development team gets, it won't really change much.
With an IT carrier you will pretty much always be a cost. (Excepting IT contract shops, where you will be livestock to be traded.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you're stuck in a big company job driving you nuts with boredom... look for a small company that needs help. The small company relies on each person to do the work of twenty - often twenty different types of work (sales, engineering, quality, shipping). Big companies have enough people to redundantly slice up any one job across twenty people. So it's very boring and very quickly and fraught with lots of politics (boredom begets politics - no other way to spice up the day).
Or start a business in your field in your spare time (at home or while surfing at work, it seems). Then you're the one person creating the whole business. When you're successful you can then hire a few people to do the drudge work. With a bit more success you are suddenly a CEO getting 10-100x the pay for not doing anything. But you created a business that employs hundreds of people. (different issues if it's an inherited CEO position by a "professional manager").
Rather than staying bored, look for alternatives. Downsize your lifestyle so you're not a slave to the credit card or mortgage and take a few more chances. Your largest liability is being bored in a job where you are not growing professionally, nor caring to do differently.
Dream up a money saving project that can turn around your company, or double sales, and try implementing it (you'll need to work through all the other bored workers and their "nope won't work here"/"tried that two years ago"/"Joe didn't like that the last time someone suggested it"/etc.
Work is only as boring and lifeless as you wish to make it. "Just whistle while you work"..those darn seven dwarves.
If you don't know that you want to work in IT before you even begin college, then you certainly as hell should stay the hell away from IT. The one thing I cannot stand is seeing people get hired to do a job that they learned from a textbook rather than through personal desire. To anyone that thinks the job is boring, it is, stay away. It's just one big nerd fest. Greasy skin, greasy hair, greasy food, and 7-1/2 hours a day of bitching on message boards with 1/2 an hour of actual work.
I wouldn't say that the educational system helps people expect anything more interesting or fun in IT. Especially if you get involved in the field directly or just do tech related stuff on your own first. I've been working in IT for six years now (four when I started college) and decided not to get my degree in anything CS-related because the classes were painfully boring...
That's funny. I live in the Albany area and I've never even heard of "the Masie Center". The top employer of tech-savvy folks in our area is RPI.
The CEOs are paid a lot because they know where the bodies are buried.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
I like my six figure salary very much, and I want it to keep up with inflation.
hmm lets see,..spend 4 years getting a comp sci degree,..then spend X number of years watching your skills wane as you spend all your productive time managing TPS reports for the 7 managers that you are "dotted-line" to. Then once you get savvy enough with said TPS reports and mindless meetings, the dept decides "to go a whole new direction" which basically means your job has been outsourced to India,..(usually timed right after you sign a mortgage and new car loan).
...but it sucks as a career because of all the life-sucking project manager parasites who leech money off the company by exploiting your talents.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I had the opportunity of 'driving' the Australia Telescope Array (five radiotelescopes that are linked).
I ran it one morning from 12AM 'till 6AM. We were specifically looking for signs of alcahol in interstellar space but the data was also just a standard observation run.
It consisted of calibrating the array, pointing at the target area, recalibrating the array, pointing at the target area..... ad nauseum.
I thought it was exhilarating but I could see if I did it for more than that one run, it would soon become boring.
I work in IT and although it is sometimes boring, development & support are more interesting that the many other jobs I have done.
Also, loved the idea of an accountant thinking IT is boring. Sooo Python!
Many projects are mundane, but I love doing creative personal projects. That's where the fun is.
For instance, my latest site has all kinds of crazy comparisons. A new one I'm working on now involves sneeze propulsion. In order to do it I need to figure out how much force is in a sneeze.
To figure that out I'm going to put a ping pong ball into a tube then videotape myself sneezing into the tube. Using the video I'll be able to figure out how fast the ball comes out and from there I'll calculate the force of the sneeze.
In order to make the site I get to dabble in all kinds of technologies.
Some people say that getting paid for doing a hobby will suck all the fun out of it. I don't think that's true. It may not be as fun at work as it is at home, but all that time at work results in refined abilities that can make home projects even more fun.
The key is to not let work limit what you do with your skills.
Cow Cube
Maintenance is technically challenging and sometimes fun. But it is really just maintenance. Architectural design at best. User support blows any way you slice it.
I hate being in IT, I only stay because I get to be a developer on occasion, it pays the bills, and I haven't finished school yet.
Give me a job where I don't have to use off the shelf equipment, can do some R&D, and have a very, very small chance of getting paged in the middle of the night by a dead server/switch/router/user.
f that in the a.
> Surely with so many (especially young) people being 'web first' with not
> just their buying habits, but now in terms of what they do in their spare
> time, we'd expect more of them to want to get a career in it?
No, I would expect the exact opposite. What is exiting about something so commonplace in your lifestyle as the Web?
With the McDonaldization/"process standardization" of software development, it IS boring. Every kid has seen Office Space, and the real joke is that the movie's pretty realistic.
That's not to say that there aren't exciting jobs out there in IT, but unfortunately they are the minority.
New grads shun work as "boring."
However, the study make the situation appear worse than it is as they selected all of the "non-computing" for the survey; all the people, who might be predisposed to thinking that computing is not boring, were removed from the sampling pool.
Given a random profession, outside of jobs that fall under the category of adolescent dream (e.g., astronaut, football player or treasure hunter), most day-jobs and careers shall seem boring.
Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 1:17 AM
My latest submission to slashdot.
No doubt it will be rejected.... LOL!
Slashdot Story Submissions
Preview Submission
SPENGLER'S SLACKERS. Are you one? Enlightenment
aqk writes -Young American slashdotter! Are you possibly one of Spengler's Slackers ?
This modern-day journalist descendant of Oswald Spengler has almost as much a dark vision of Western Society (i.e. the USA) as the philosopher.
To wit: "America might be the first country in recorded history whose culture celebrates not only indolence but also the sheer absence of ability. Byronic loafing is the birthright of genius, but slacking has become the entitlement of every young American.
Huh. You're comfortably ensconced in your parents' basement, penning arguments on your Ubuntu system to slashdot, on why "XP is sooo much better than Vista".
Maybe you're the beer-swilling undergrad in his fully-paid-for dorm using your Macintosh to rant about how you'll replace all those Windows systems, when (and if) you join the business world?
Nevertheless, Spengler ( a scribe for The Asia Times â" yes, another offshore corporation) may have given you some kind of wake-up call. Perhaps you should take note. Do you agree with the above SLACKER article? Indeed: where is the USA going?
.
- aqk
F U
As Tool sings:
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
What a shame...
Using the web is very different from developing a web app.
The industry is nerdy because it must be. This is an industry with its fundamental technical roots in math, physics, and logic. Its less-nerdy side is still considerably nerdier than average. Project management, for example, involves explaining nerdy concepts to (potentially) non-nerds, and using nerdy subjects like economics to try to keep projects on-track and/or invent jargon to make CxOs feel like they're part of the "in" crowd.
Non-nerds need not apply; non-nerds have political "science", journalism, sociology, business, and other such areas to occupy.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Who the hell wants to be in IT anyway? When I think of IT, I often think of the guy that played a lot of video games when he was younger, so he liked computers, but didn't quite get the push into programming/engineering. So he spent his teens reconfiguring the computer and the modem for a few hours and now he's made a career out of it as sysadmin. On the other hand, you've got the guys that spent their teens soldering BJTs or writing open source code into project that span months. Those guys go on to be engineers.
The engineers make more money and have more fun. It's a rare company where the guy making the product is getting paid less or doing less interesting work than the guy supporting him. The closer you are to being the guy that generates revenue, the more respect that you'll command. And respect in the industry lets you demand a more interesting job.
Can you imagine a demonstration of a payslip program on a website? Do you think the com[any you made it for would think it a good idea? Would it allocate resources to it? Would it allow you to hook up a live version of this program (even on a dummy dataset) to a website in your spare time? I don't. And I'm afraid the same holds for all administrative software. Or inventory management software. Or any other custom software.
The only type of software I can imagine being showcased in this manner is scientific software, or screen-shots of software your company wants to showcase for some reason (potential sales, PR).
But perhaps I'm too pessimistic. Some companies allow part of their in-house software to be open-sourced. Then they will actually want people to know about it, and you have a lot more freedom to show it off.
When outsourcing killed my consulting company, we lost the house, tech bubble took the retirement, wife committed suicide and left me with mega debt and bankruptcy. Physical disability occurred and now I am over 50, unemployed possibly unemployable. I hate Microsoft and the Windows operating system and Windows software development, the Windows API, MFC, OLE, Active X, Internet Explorer, and Visual Studio. The corporate interests are busy trying to put the modern information worker back into a box so they can be put back into the factory and not represented by a union. What once looked like a real profession has turned into a dismal, boring, unsatisfying melange of CERT notifications and struggle between corporate America that doesn't want to pay for engineering and the young people who don't want to pay for anything, music, software or dues. Just what does the IT worker have to look foreward to in these days of accelerated computer reality where you cannot get enough education to keep up with the latest technologies because those in charge want teams to do the works, not stars. No more stars. Just underpaid teams of unimaginative drones manufacturing software and reconfiguring web servers over and over and over. Tuning firewalls against the same old and every day's new boring new/old Internet attacks. Just what is there in life that makes it worthwhile to do what it takes to master all this chaos for the small reward that they have planned for people in this line of work. Bah humbug.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
Life requires labor. Civilized life requires even more labor. Most of that labor is unpleasant in some way. We face the grind anyway, day after day, because it keeps the ball rolling, and because it gives us the money we need to do the things we actually like doing.
Very true. And if graduates are choosing jobs other than in IT, despite their expertise, then presumably it is because industry isn't paying enough. Double the salaries offered and see how many of those graduates you attract. Eventually, if the pay is good enough, people will condescend to doing those "boring" jobs.
As things stand, IT is woefully underpaid in comparison to those MBA and middle-management hacks who bring a lot less value to the enterprise and earn a great deal more. Perhaps today's graduates recognize this, and figure if they're going to be underpaid, why not be underpaid to do something you find fulfilling instead?
Seems like they're arguably smarter than we were when we received our BS and MS degrees.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Boring means it is running, it means everything is in place the correct way. Monitoring is working, everything is running smoothly and you just wait for the sms or green light to turn red. Gives you free time to work on interesting/fun things :-)
Exciting IT is supporting an environment that is an absolute mess! It's rebuilding zones in production, because someone didn't create the zfs mounts/quotas, it's creating a server list because your department doesn't have one and no clue on how many or what it supports, it's installing sudo on 156 servers, building ldap, it's going crazy over the RH7.2 box that has open public key access to over 40 production servers... AHHHH! ... boring is good in IT.
Awesome!
Work is boring. That is why it's called 'work'.
Unless you have someone supporting you or are independently wealthy you will need an income.
IT provides good opportunities for employment with much better then average income potential in a safe environment.
When you need a little perspective, spend a week or two digging ditches or carrying sacks of cement in all kinds of weather for a lot less money.
If you truly believe farming is better, what are you doing in system maintenance? Farming jobs are still out there. They are difficult and require a lot of manual labor, but a lot less than they used to.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I guess you and I have different definitions of "fulfilling". I find raising my kids fulfilling, yet they don't provide me with any food or lodging.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
If boring means that no one tells you what to do, then I'm all for it. I love being my own boss as an IT admin. No one watching me, no BS assignments, I decide what happens on my network and all the people using it are my n00bs. It's like a game, defend your network and take care of your army. People that get bored easily are n00bs at life. Everything is mystifying and magnificent if you look at it a certain way, you just need to have that open mind and a positive outlook and TADA, life is great.
However, it is my work away from the office that is rewarding. I've been a volunteer fireman for 17 years (now a Captain), an EMT for 14 years, I'm a Little League manager and a board member, a midget-league football coach, a father of two young sons, and I have a Harley for those in-between times. I could write a book about what all those things mean to me, about the kids I've mentored, the lives and property I've saved, and the good/bad times I've had. I'm 37 years old and none of those things are going to end anytime soon.
Today's young people want (no, they expect) immediate rewards for their work, no matter what it is. That can be in the form of money or in kudos, but they want the feedback. Is that the result of parenting, or the result of technology. Do you remember the days of having to do research in a library with physical pieces of paper in real books? Now days, you just go to Google and find all you need. Immediate rewards to your needs, right?
Why can't today's kids find their satisfaction outside the workplace? It's because they don't look.
It 12:30 am. I just spent 5.5 hours in a 95 degree closet upgrading a phone system that should have taken 1 hour to do. I was working with 1 guy remotely in Atlanta, who was also working with the phone company to troubleshoot the T1 line. I was there onsite to reseat the CSU/DSU card and dial phone numbers. Boring ? Yes. But it pays well. I'm glad people are getting out of I.T. I remember when there weren't a lot of people in I.T. and it was more fun then, and more profitable. Every swingin d*ck in the world is in I.T. these days. It's time to separate the wheat from the chaff.. or whatever the saying goes. If you are going to be in I.T. , you better like being paid O.K. money to be treated like shit and you better be damn good at what you do or you will be replaced. It's freakin brutal. What I did tonight was actually cake work. I didn't even have to use my brain. I'd do it 10 hours a day if I could but it ain't that easy to come by.
I don't. IT has come to mean computer network administration and operation...glorified backup tape switchers for lack of a better description.
But then again I worked for medium sized businesses long enough that I got my fill of keeping networks running (had an IT hat). Boring, tedious and easy. RTFM, work, cash check, repeat.
I'm proud to work with computers. I wouldn't want to be grouped with most of the 'IT' people I've known.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'