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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?
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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)
"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?
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
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.
Hate to piddle in your soup, but most jobs in the world are "pretty fucking boring". Welcome to reality.
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
to each their own cup of tea...I got my bachelor's in computer science. I found programming boring as can be, so when I got out, I stayed on as a systems administrator building servers / networks, etc. It's a heck of a lot of fun because you never know what that next phone call will bring!
Maybe a pig will step on a laptop, or a printer is out of toner, you never know with the people I work for (ag research... yes there is a lot of IT in ag research).
This isn't a lot different than the general decline of math and science careers in general. It's just a small sign that we're moving away from skilled knowledge-based industries into crap-service based industries.
Would you like fries with that?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
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"
I can't help it, I'd rather be a university gaining new knowledge, than be on an overseas holiday. I rather spend all night configuring, adjusting and tweaking computer hardware and software than be getting drunk in some crap night club. I'd rather be /.ing than mindlessly myspaceing and so for me a career in computers just ain't boring even if a do find some elements somewhat tiresome like coding.
So the grads are just leaning the computers skills are more difficult than other grad choices and the big entry level salaries are gone eliminating blind greed as the only reason to choose a career in computers, so reduced numbers are to be expected and generally it is better for the whole industry, less drones sucking up space doing more harm than good and of course the actually computer geeks/nerds get to enjoy higher salaries and better conditions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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."
I think the reality is that "doing it for a living" is a good way to drain the fun out of almost anything. I enjoy building things out of wood. For about a year or so, I made custom furniture for people, and that's how I got the money I needed to eat. I did not enjoy woodworking all that much for that year. Now that I've been working in a different field for a few years, I've spent a good portion of my disposable income on building up a decent woodshop, and it's once again a hobby I enjoy. *shrug*
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.