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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
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
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?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#1960s
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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.
I've always found that it pays to like boring jobs ;-)
It's only rarely that we admins get to do heroics.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I don't think that's true. I've always thought fortune 500 CEO would be really exciting and fulfilling, and yet you have to pay those guys a fortune to do the job. Maybe it sucks a lot more than I thought.
On the other side of things, it seems like 'janitor' or 'farm hand' would pretty much maximize boring/unfulfilling, and yet those guys get paid next to nothing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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"
You know, I was one of those people, sort of. I went to college for computers because I was good at them, and I liked the "magic". After a decade spent working on computers, I half-wish I was done. I make decent money being a sysadmin, and I think I may be able to retire a little bit early, but as for my day-to-day existence, I no longer love computers, or even like them. Aside from my work laptop, I don't even have one at home. Don't want one. I'd rather read, or cook, or learn something non-computer-related. I guess I'm just burned out.
I still do my job, and I have a lot of interest in learning new things I can use at work, but it's not from any sense of personal fulfillment. It's more from a desire to build a stable system that won't wake me up at 3am. I haven't worked on a project for myself forever (unless you count my blog, and even that is blogger.com). I just don't have the fire anymore.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Most IT jobs aren't so complex that you have to start right out of college. You can do something else and change jobs.
True with a caveat or two, you will still start at close to the "just out of college" salary, and it jobs have to exist here in this country. If Americans find it too boring, then companies will have to find somewhere else that really wants the jobs. It happened with customer support, it now looks like it will happen with IT, when telepresence robotics takes off it will probably happen with garbage collection, taxi driving, and long haul trucking.
We are all just people.
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.
Yeah, some IT outsourcing is happening, but after a while I think it'll slack back off. I've talked to several people about IT--courtesy those assumptions that "computer scientist" = "IT specialist"--who say IT outsourcing is frustrating and ultimately inefficient for their companies. One woman in particular complained that their main corporate office was in NYC, but all of their tech support was at the time (sometime in 2003 or 04) based somewhere in India. Evidently, they weren't making the IT guys work a schedule compatible with any of the American offices, and also didn't check for a sufficient command of English, so it was next to impossible to get any useful help in a timely manner.
You're confusing "IT" with the function that most (most especially those actually in IT) refer to insultingly as the "Help Desk". The guys working the Help Desk are generally there because they either a) are too stupid to do anything else, b) are totally devoid of experience and have to put in their 2 years or so of Help Desk work just to get something on the resumé, or c) happen to be in an oversaturated area where there simply are no other jobs available.
To me, the core of "real" IT work is moreso in the background. Administration of servers, planning of backups, designing of corporate networks, securing said networks, and development of in-house programs. Those things DO take skill (trust me I worked in construction for side money every summer from my junior year in high school till I graduated college - my current IT job takes a lot more skill), but nobody realizes that they're back in their offices making everything work. That is, unless it breaks. Ironically though, the best IT people of that sort are the kind that nobody ever thinks about, because their systems keep humming along unnoticed. The only experience the users then have is with the help desk staff when something breaks on their local machine ;).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Lord yes, I used to love boring when I was in the Navy. When there is 300 feet of ocean between you and fresh air, and excitement means an anti-radiation suit or breathing apparatus or hoping to hell a seawater pump actual works at its rated capacity... you learn to appreciate boring like it was a fine wine.
He's worked himself up (or got born into) the top of the food chain and that's his privilege: he can fire you, you can't fire him.
He can demand ridiculous salaries, you can not. He can sink your company but still get the golden parachute, you can't.
And who can fire the CEO of a public company? Who decides what their salary is, and what kind of "golden parachute" they get?
The Board of Directors.
And what is the most common other career for a member of the Board?
CEO (or other executive position) for another public company.
I mean, the CEO of my company is on the Board of Directors for two other companies, and hell he's even the Chairman of the Board for his own company. And this is utterly common.
You think he, or any other Board member, is going to start a trend of reducing CEO's compensation? No, in fact the exact opposite! It's in their interest to drive up executive compensation, because then at their own company where they are CEO, they can ask to have their salaries raised "in accordance with industry norms" to sell it to the shareholders and employees. And of course the Board is going to say yes, thinking about their own CEO gigs.
It's a racket. It's a huge incestuous web of people colluding for their own mutual benefit. The alleged "risk" of the position that is supposed to justify the compensation doesn't exist, because they've done everything they can to eliminate the risk. Forget even the ludicrous "golden parachute". What about the most simple of "risks" -- that if you screw up your job too badly, you won't be able to get a job in the same field again? Once again, that rarely happens, about the only way to 'ruin' your career in upper management is basically to get indicted. Otherwise, it's never in the interest of the Board to hold their CEOs to too high of standards, because they don't want they themselves to ever have to worry about finding a job.
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