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How Will Recent Financial Downturns Affect IT Jobs?
An anonymous reader writes "So, with the financial crisis and loss of jobs everywhere, what are the chances of getting a good IT job? I'm going to graduate this year with a BS in Software Engineering majoring in Network Security. I'll be looking for a job as a penetration tester eventually, but I hear that is hard to get right out of college so I'll be looking for a job as a Junior Network Admin or similar type of job to start off in. Is there a lack of jobs in this field? I figure computers always need fixing so they have to have some sort of IT personnel on staff to maintain the core of their business. Anyone have a good insight on this issue?"
Hey, don't worry too much. I just graduated in December from Michigan Technological University with a 3.1, packed up a U-Haul, and moved out to NYC without a job offer. No one's heard of MTU out here, but within a week I had two really good offers, and got my salary up pretty high by having the two companies fight for me. I had two summer internships, I was the GM of a student group, and I had a student job at the sys admin place on campus. Anyway, it's not so bad. I highly recommend you pick a place that you want to live (and that has a decent local economy), move there, and start pounding the pavement. I spent 3 months applying for jobs in NYC from Michigan, and it was essentially useless. Once you're local, you're golden. Good luck!
I hope you aren't relying on this hire to manage your backups or do anything else that you deem critical. If his attention to detail is that lax on something that is presumably important to him, imagine how lax it'll be on something that's important to you.
Grades only matter if you want to work in academia (be a real scientist). Otherwise grades are only spice on top of your education. Not the other way around.
Academia jobs, I believe, prefer people without experience because they aren't yet spoiled by the real world, just as corporations and such prefer people with as much experience as possible because they've "forgotten the useless crap from school".
So really, depends on what you want to do, but working in the real world both pays better and is, to me, more gratifying since you see your creations put to work instead of just being peer-reviewed and if you're lucky at one point adopted by a real-world guy.
They will call and all that will be said is that yes you worked there. Short of getting fired and charged with a crime a previous employer will say very little during a reference check.
Believe it! This is policy where I work. The issue is the organization could be liable for causing an applicant to not get the position they were seeking. In other words, we would probably get sued for saying Bob* was a shitty dev. We will only verify past employment.
* My apologies to anyone named Bob or Robert.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
I prefer to think of myself as an optimistic pessimist. I see failure modes in systems and procedures. Part of my present role is to document and train in possible solutions.
With that being said, one problem I've faced in the past was never being seen as taking problems seriously. $WIDGET is down, everyone else is shouting, don't you appreciate the problem. Gee, I understand the problem, wrote the chapter on how to resolve it, and can give you a planning estimate (which is always longer than my internal estimate). I'm not freaking out because I don't feel the need to put on a show.
Oh by the way, when $SYSTEM was planned out, the stakeholders decided redundancy was too expensive. Would you like to review that decision? Learning to say that politely is still something that I have to approach carefully.