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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!
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 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
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.
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".
"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.
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.
It's not that, he just doesn't have any spair time.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
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.
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 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."
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.
> You will start by being the windows reinstaller, cable puller , desktop lugger, etc. ...ah, no.
If that's all that you can manage after getting out of school then you wasted your time.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
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...
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."
Spair - n. The air found within the spare tire in your trunk.
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.
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.
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
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....
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.
Making the NBA look tall.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
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.
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.
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.