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Has the Glory Gone Out of Working In IT?
An anonymous reader writes to wonder if the glory has gone out of IT. One blogger remembered his first impression upon entering a profession in IT that made it seem like the place to be, with a new shiny around every corner. What experiences have others had? Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?
Glory in IT? If that was the case I'd get more women I think. I think any glory you thought there use to be is simply delusions on your part. People don't work in IT for the glory. People rarely do anything for glory.
Yes, Geekdom has sold out.
The day we traded the guru individualist programmer doing arcane tweaks inspired by the architecture of the machine, for the team in India writing on spec using no memory or speed optimization whatsoever.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
To be honest, I don't even understand what question is being asked.
What does he/she mean by "glory"?
And a "new shiny" what? "around every corner"?
Since when was IT prestigious? It once used to be the hot new industry where people made lots of money, but it was never 'sexy'. Lucrative, not glorious. And now it's not even that, so much.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Just like the proud, self-made carpenter, who used to do everything himself by hand, has to install pre-fab kitchen's in a day these days (and never mind how it's done, just make sure that it's installed in a single day), yes, the 'glory' has gone out of IT for *most* (if not *all*) people in IT these days. It might still be a *fun* job, because you get to 'play' with computers all day, but most of the glory has been lost to 'professionalism'.
R&D and MIT media lab aside ( I wouldn't call that sort of thing IT even though there is some overlap)
When I hear IT I think of my corporate support staff.
As far as I am concerned there has never been any glory in that thankless job.
I mean how glorious can a job be where the only recognition you'll get is when you screw something up?
When you are good at your job in IT nobody notices you since the goal of most IT shops is to be transparent to the user....
The Glory of working in IT peaked with the release of the movie "Office Space."
Ken
The more you mix business and government with IT the less fun it will be. Perhaps technology being more widespread gives a similar effect. IT Geeks once were like modern day wizards wielding their craft across the land. We were unique, somewhat scary, and to most, unnecessary. Now IT is everywhere and IT Geeks are probably more like pharmacists. Everybody needs them but they are far from impressive and it is easy enough to find one who will do an adequate job.
When? I've been in IT, as a programmer, since 93. Never saw any Glory. Except down to the truck stop south of town, where she was working.
Best Slashdot Co
Maybe if you were a UNIVAC technician, that was pretty cool. But in my lifetime I can't recall IT ever being a "glorious" occupation. Sure, there are jobs in the broader tech industry that might have that mythologized element. In the 70s and 80s, you've got Woz in a garage as sort of the canonical example. But IT still wasn't glorious in that era. The IT people weren't Woz; they were mainly at places like IBM, servicing thousands of mainframes and minicomputers. There was not an aura of glory around that job, even if it paid well and may have been interesting.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I work as a net/server admin and we are kinda like the red-headed step child of the company. No one notices us when everything is working, but as soon as something goes down... Anyone else feel this way? And sorry if i offend any red-heads out there who also may or may not be a step child.
21 8E 7E DF 0F 86 C4 03 1D 30 74 55 0F 16 D0 1E
At least for me. But then, I spend most of my time under the desks of beautiful women that prefer to go commando and where short skirts, connecting peripherals they don't need. Oh, wait a minute, that's the job I had.
There was NEVER any glory working in IT. Ever.
It would be like saying Windows 7 took all the elegance out of the Windows franchise.
Dear Slashdot.
Has the glory gone out of being a Slave? When did the lashes go from pleasure to pain?
Life is not for the lazy.
Depending on what the submitter means by "IT", there is still fun to be had.
I've been doing linux kernel customization and support for the past ten years. There's still lots of shiny stuff going on, to the point where it's basically impossible to keep up with everything.
On the other hand, if by IT you mean basic infrastructure support for corporate operations, that may be a different story.
Hahahahaha yoUs funny amerkans dun like i.T. N E more cuz Carly iT goddess ship all yous job to Bangalore new Silcon valley! We do ALL hi tec job now an you monky plug wire into wall when IT expert from Bangalore call to make yous lazy do what yous told. Hahahahah rember I tole you long ago tis wood happen! Go scrub toilet at long wol-mort wit yous amerkin diplomo cuz it wortless! hahahahaha! Me an Ravi make mess in aisle six ten laff when stupit lazy amerkan ex i.T work go clean up! hahahahaha!
When I was new, everything seemed new and shiny.
Now that I'm old, everything seems old and dull.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Hang on...they're thinking it's bad that people no longer look at you funny when you ask them what browser they use? They're lamenting the good old days when people put the entire e-mail in the subject line? They miss the lucrative position of explaining to someone that no, they can't just have root access? Explaining that the backup isn't supposed to be the only copy?
This is a problem?
Too many laid off people. Most of which are replaced with H1-B workers at a lower rate. Who wants to bust ass through 4 years of engineering school to get paid what a bartender earns.
There is still glory in IT, you just have to be a lot better than before. Used to be if you could get the CEO's internet and email working you were considered super human by Sr. management. Now you have to develop and/or implement something that will improve the bottom line of the organization.
IT is more akin to a boring ubiquitous commodity than a gee-whiz technological marvel.
These days we're more like car mechanics and plumbers than 'gurus'.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
IT is a miserable hell-hole that makes the very task of getting out of bed in the AM a chore.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
I started programming and repairing computers in the 70s. There was a certain coolness to knowing things that other people didn't know, almost as if you possessed magical powers. Modems? BBSs? Networking? A printer? You can recover a file off my floppy disk? YOU ARE A GOD, SIR, and you just saved my ass.
No longer. Everybody knows this stuff, or at least they pretend to know it, enough to be dangerous. Or else it's been supplanted. E.g. nobody cares that I wired my house for gigabit Ethernet; they just want to know how to jump on my WiFi access point. 802.11b/g/n/w/t/f is really not important. Need to recover a file? Oh yeah, Norton came with my computer.
It's like the photography industry, which barely resembles the industry of 20 years ago because everyone has a fancy digital camera now and can take better pics than they could back then. Or you can hop on iStockPhoto.com or sxc.hu and get cheap/free stock photos that used to be really expensive. Or the graphic design industry: now every "hack with a Mac" (or a PC) can "do" graphic design, no special skills required.
The trick is to be so good at problem solving (or camera angles/lighting/composing, or graphic style) that people still recognize you as a wizard. I mean in the I.T. repair sense, not the 6d+3 sense. This requires creativity, and not everybody has that. If you don't, but you need that feeling of recognition, then you need to either play a lot more WoW or find a new field/niche.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Now that users can do almost anything (simple) on a computer or even their phone, they now expect that anything they can imagine (vaguely, inarticulately, even impossibly) should be easy to do.
Unless you're at one of the rare shops that's well funded and not directly dealing with users, you will likely be in a no-win position.
Deliver a flawless system and you go unnoticed. Instead, you get asked "can it do this ?"
Or worse and most likely, you step into a position with an existing product that you have to continue development of. It will be behind schedule, over budget, and a complete architectural disaster. What's more, it won't match what the users need because nobody bothered to dig deeply to find out what the users really needed (as opposed to what they initially said they wanted - there's a huge difference).
Am I bitter, yes. I'd rather be a lawyer. At least then I'd still be getting rich doing crap work.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Those arcane tweaks inspired by machine architecture are still here, as long as you're going OS kernel coding or low-level performance-oriented stuff.
People associate glory with things like winning a battle (in the old days) or winning a champion (nowadays).
People DON'T associate glory with things like having 2 routers able to ping each other or displaying some graphics on a computer screen.
Glory in IT? There was glory in IT? ????
The only way to bring glory into your daily job is to do it yourself. No work environment does bring the glory. If it should, it would attract such people, that any glory would be estinguished.... OOooops, that's what happend to the IT.
CU, Martin
It was fun until...
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
I'm not sure about the glory but the fun of working in IT is getting pretty rare. There are too darned many pointy hair bosses who think they've got high-powered technical chops because they read (and partially understood) a few articles in an in-flight magazine who then get back into the office and turn things upside down for no apparent reason.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Is someone feeling burned out? There is no glory in most jobs. It's just a job. As far as more pervasive technical culture - while more people can now troubleshoot the basics (drink holder not working, computer plugged in, etc.) there is still a need for your basic help desk type work. Joe Blow Sixpack won't be doing any advanced network administration, data recovery, web development, business process integration..... the list is long. Just because more people can now check email and browse the web and use basic software doesn't mean that out culture has advanced to the point where everyone is a geek. With the prevalence of Rockband, Guitar Hero...has the glory faded out of being a musician? I mean, I recall those early days when there seemed to be a groupie around every corner....
I don't really think any geek worth his salt got into IT for "glory". They got into it because they liked building things, working with computers, etc. - thats sure what got me into it. As a systems admin, I acknowledge and accept my role as what basically amounts to a computer mechanic, but my career choice satisfaction, and I'd even say pride, isn't derived from Jobsian sense of cutting edge oober eleetness. It comes from doing something I enjoy, using my brain to solve problems and challenges, and from being a productive person.
Being a mechanic, a carpenter, electrician isn't particularly sexy, but I'm sure the guys in those fields probably don't care either.
And that good will be that in companies where IT isn't the end product, the IT shops will finally realize they're there as SUPPORT staff. For example, in my company (primarily physics, chemistry, math PhDs) you could fire all the IT people and the company would still work. Oh, it wouldn't work as well. Some fuzzy-headed scientist would download a virus or something, and lose some time getting his PC working again, but it would bumble along. But it doesn't work in the reverse. You can't fire all the technical folks and have IT take over--not unless they're all hiding PhDs I don't know about.
IT supports me. I appreciate it, and I understand it's a hard job. But they need to remember they SUPPORT, and act like it. I'm sick of snooty IT folks who think the world revolves around them and whose first inclination to a request is to say "no."
I've been hard-working member of an IT staff for a while now, and I do sometime feel as though all the glory has been sucked out of a "glory hole" of some sort.
We really should have a staff meeting about it. Firm action is clearly needed.
Must be a slow day on Slashdot. The only thing glorious is when the check clears.
We make two to four times as much money as the average American. That's enough to ensure that IT remains a respected and desirable career.
The brief bubble period where we made millions in fake stock options was an anomaly. It was not "normal." Our careers were never really glorious, but they will remain prestigious, like those of scientists, engineers, and other skilled, well-paid professionals.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Give us some context regarding this "glory" that you perceive as having "gone out of IT". While I know that, prior to the dot-com bubble burst, everyone and his brother was going into IT, it's not as if (those silly Intel commercials notwithstanding) people were looking on IT folks with awe, or that most women were fighting to be with us or anything like that.
Or, given your mention of "new shiny[s]" - perhaps what you're missing are the days when a sysadmin had unquestioned control of his domain, ran it as he pleased and didn't have to answer to any higher-ups? Those days are long gone, and are not coming back (and, frankly, let me be the first to say "good riddance").
#DeleteChrome
was that working in IT sucks. The lead character found happiness by quitting the field entirely. The other characters stayed in the field because "it's a job." Office Space brought sympathy to the career field. Not glory.
The cult classic that actually glorified being a geek was "Hackers."
Work Safe Porn
... then you are in the wrong profession.
If you want glory, find something you like and be the best you can be at it, and hope that's better than almost all of your peers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sounds like something someone would say that only entered the IT field for the money or whatever dot-com-esque crap.
I do it for the love of it, not for anything or anyone else.
The glory is making something that people *want* to use, or it really honestly makes their life better, and they know it. I've done mostly back-end stuff throughout my career but I have seen email comments from users who have praised the system for making such-and-such job easier, or figuring out this big thing, or saving a lot of time, etc., and I can feel good that I had a hand in that, or I implemented that, etc.
My kids like playing with the apps on the iPhone, especially music making and drawing pictures. I can't say how many times I've been handed the phone with a picture and my daughter beaming and going "I made that!!", with obvious joy on her face. That made me happy, and I'd think the author of the program would be happy to know how much joy s/he brought.
That's glory right there. If you can make someone happy with what you do, honestly and truly, then it makes the TPS reports, status meetings, weekends and late night worth it.
Medicine - Doctors are slaves to the insurance industry. ;-)
Aviation - Pilots are slaves to the commercial pressures of cheap air flight.
Law - Was there ever a time when a Lawyer was respected?
IT - The run is over, we have reached the pinnacle of mediocrity. That is the way of the free market.
I never noticed the glory on a large scale - it usually comes as hurried "thank you"s after I have recovered someone's Word document they edited straight from an email attachment, then lost, or when I look up Excel help in front of the end user to answer their question. It never comes from building an enterprise level CMS that works perfectly for the end user for years at a time. Luckily(?), we still hire people who don't know how to log in when presented with a username/password box. My job isn't nearly the same as it used to be, but I definitely have job security while our education system is as poor as it is.
...if you love what you do. Depends like always on where you work and what you do. I work for a media/educational start-up and despite the fact that we are using somewhat older tech, there is something new and shiny around every corner maybe not with "new" technology but with solving real issues with the technology available.
New and shiny problem solving is always much more fun.
Let's see . . . First, you have to define glory. Then you have to define IT.
A well-formed question should include well-defined ideas of what you're asking about. Holy shit is it hard for me to believe that a grown person asked this question, and then another grown person actually put it on the frontpage of Slashdot.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
..the Soviet Union was still with us.
I think I have a mental image:
Soviet Tanks hauling large mainframes on parade down Red Square Moscow while a loud speaker bellows out "Our glorious IT staff have developed our first portable computers capable of 80 kilo meters per hour! Rivaling enough the mighty American library of congress! The capitalist will tremble at their might! For the glory of the motherland! Those who do not applause will be arrested!" A big "URRAAAAH!" from those watching as a soldier holding a AK-47 glares at them.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
FOR GREAT JUSTICE!
Ok, so I know slashdot isn't the snappiest of news sites but the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. There was a few years there that IT would revolutionize mankind, change everything there was to know about economics, society, nations and borders and we'd all go live in some new-age cyberspace era. That's the last time I heard anyone use the word glorious about the IT industry, which makes this article about 8 years late. New record?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've been involved with and working in IT for over almost 30 years (since my first Vic-20). This raises a lot of points on companies and the shiny - the answer is not as black-and-white. The answer is: it depends. My experience has shown there are three typical views of IT and how 'shiny' it is to the company. To find out, ask the question - Does your company treat IT in how much value they add to their organization?
:)
1. They view IT as a cost-centre. Run, don't walk away from companies that view their IT centres as something to be outsourced.
2. They view IT as a necessary evil and spend only as much as necessary to keep their employees from throwing their monitors out the window. These kinds of companies understand IT is a necessary, but they don't like spending money on it. They tend to upgrade software that are SEVERAL versions behind, and your typical office PC is 4-7 years old. No shiny here - IT is dull and so is working here in that role.
3. They view IT as a way to save money. Innovative and highly adaptable companies that change with their operating environment usually view IT as a way to improve on efficiencies, and use it to reduce costs and improve services internally and externally. These are good companies that view IT as shiny and always something to invest in. These companies also tend to be around a long time, or they always seem to make money even when times are bad. It takes money to invest in IT - badly managed companies don't have money to spend on it. These companies, from an IT and a learning perspective, are preferred. More often than nought, they also tend to dabble in Open Source - never a bad thing.
So, when doing an interview at a company, ask the following questions:
1. How old 'typically' are the computers in your office?
2. What version of Microsoft and Office are you using?
3. Does your organization view IT as a cost center or as value-added infrastructure?
Measure these against points 1-3 for their shiny score.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
"Bad PC sales staff exposed"
Dishonest and clueless (I avoid the more inflammatory "lying" and "terminally stupid" terms) individuals are as likely a reason as any. Just like snake-oil salesmen and pseudo-scientific charlatans give medicine and science a bad name, respectively, so do the "armchair techies" give a bad name to genuinely competent IT professionals. IT personnel at both retail stores and businesses should be held to a higher standard than "I know more techno-jargon than you do, so I must be smarter". One bad apple spoils the whole bunch, and one charlatan can do damage to the field as a whole. Be willing to hold people to a higher standard rather than giving them a pass and the profession will get as much respect as any other. I respect a competent bricklayer, plumber, electrician etc. much more than someone with unproven "tech savvy", since the latter can currently bluff their way to a high position in IT with little or no specific tech knowledge.
IT was never good. What you really want to do is work for a software company. That way you work for the central product of the company rather than being the company's expense!
Seriously since this is ask slashdot lets treat it is a request from a customer. Bounce it back to the helpdesk for not asking them to clarify and having no idea what is even being asked for. IT never has been glorious. In most places we are at best tolerated because no business/organization/whatever can survive without us. Upper management who think their monitor is their computer expect you to wave your magic wand and make whatever absurd idea they have work. And you have to bust your ass to make it happen. People get into this field for one of 2 reasons. 1. They think they'll make a lot of money - Typically they have no drive to learn the latest and greatest and get annoyed that you expect them to actually know something. These people are almost always destined for failure or management. 2. You actually like the work - Typically would be programming or playing with the latest OS or or hardware whether they had a job in the field or not. These people will either get lucky and be allowed to do the work they love or more likely have to wade through the muck created by management and deal with or work around those in the field for reason 1. Usually wise asses with twisted senses of humor. It helps keep us out of the psych wards!
Oh, hell yes. I remember the wiring closet that was adjacent to the women's room...
Oh, wait a minute. I thought you said Glory HOLES....
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Don't forget not being able to pay you student loans off.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Before 2001, firms would roll their own internal systems so there was plenty of software development around. They didn't trust the "solution" providers, like SAP, yet because they firmly believed that those firms charged too much and they didn't want to do business like the solutions providers told them to operate. And back then, a development team was basically, a few designers/coders, an architect, a business analyst, a DBA or two, and the network guys who were off on their own. So, we had about 8+ folks working on a project - not including the network guys. Also, there was plenty of work because of the impending doom of 1/1/2000, when planes were going to fall out of the air, dogs and cats sleeping together, and Western Civilization going back to the stone age. Life was good, Making six figures as a contractor wasn't unheard of and even the norm.
Then came the recession of 2001 - 2002, maybe even into 2003.
Companies found out that it was cheaper in the long run to buy software off the shelf. They realized that SAP, IBM, Oracle, Perot, Siebels, EDS, etc... maybe was better and cheaper than rolling their own from scratch. So, out with the development teams, and in with the programmer/DBA & programmer/network admin - this is for most business environments. There wasn't a need for so many programmers anymore and if they did need a programmer, well, you could offshore for a hell of a lot less. Sure, there is still a demand for programmers, but no where near as many that were needed as back in the 90s. The market has shrank dramatically. Many companies no longer have their in house development staff. They outsourced it off to specialists or even off-shored it. (There is still a demand for blacksmiths, but instead of a demand for a couple per town, there is maybe a demand for a couple per state - if that. The same goes for buggy whip makers. And even then, many of those do it as a hobby and have day jobs because there isn't enough business to make a living.)
So, basically, IT has become another white collar corporate cog type of job.
This is just my take.
Have to stop correcting because Slashdot's entry script is falking out on me...
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
mmm, may be bartenders?
H1B workers are a minor factor at best. By most counts, there are somewhere between 5 and 6 million U.S. high-tech jobs. The H1B visa quota ranges from 65,000 to 195,000 or so, or about 3% of that at most.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Have the self-righteous pricks who made such a mess of IT at the turn of the decade stopped thinking that their unchecked and non-methodical actions are "glorious"?
The premise that IT is for supporting a business (due to the business paying for it) is quite possibly a mistaken way of thinking about IT.
IT, Information Technology, should be all about informing people so that they can make smarter decisions or have richer lives. To some extent the Internet has achieved this, though one may imagine an Information Czar to put pressure on filling the deficiencies on the Net.
In the workplace, computers play a very managed role. A computer mistake can be a costly one, and the more channels of information, the more chances for something to go wrong. Furthermore, computer programming is actually very difficult work - making a computer do something actually smart is hard, let alone creating enough smart software to cover every variety of personnel. So the ideal of IT is not happening. The desire of IT being useful for helping people elevate their earning power conflicts with the cost of ensuring that computer projects are progressing and making sure the computers, which are really stupid, don't bring down the company. Instead, IT can devolve into a small technical job of making sure the pieces that break are fixed and when everything goes down a relatively cheap fix is at hand. IT for some is a drudging responsibility without opportunity for making a change.
Naturally, IT evolves though. Tools and machines are increasingly being endowed with computer powers, and once the path for using these capabilities for further productivity becomes clear, the machine becomes the man, that is, the decision making or control is gradually granted to the hardware.
The corollary is for people to keep trying to use technology to solve problems. Computers are going to take over much of the tried and trued production in every sector, and people will have to find their own way to earning a living, more than likely through the use of computers to work on challenging problems. Businesses that have been avoiding the risk of computer projects will find that staying the course will lead to thinner margins due to competition. Dullness in IT may be the calm before the storm.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
And it's only about remembered by geeks anymore who watch it for the admirable snark bait and drinking games. But it was a nice, if stupid, try.
I've been in IT for 10 years now and so far I've contemplated suicide twice. I've watched my lunch break go from 1 hour to eat while you work. Taking a break now is stopping what you are doing here and go over there to explain to our accountant's cousin why she can't use Magic Jack with AOL. Keeping up with the latest and greatest technologies is a joke to everyone that's around you. Even though it's your job to understand this equipment and if we need to upgrade. All the other IT people you've met have an ego the size of VY Canis Majoris. Their life is so much better than yours even though when you hang out with them they can't afford anywhere you want to eat. Also usually their talent is watered down and forget having a conversation about anything other than computers. Finding a new job is a joke. Most online "job sites" are just phishing for resumes that have your social security number and other personal information. Any legitimate jobs have a line forming at the door of applicants. Those jobs are usually a start up that will be around until the owners' loan money runs out. If you ask if there is any room for advancement they feed you a line like "You're already on the top in that position." Meaning you are stuck where you are at until they go belly up. Any ideas your boss or whoever is over you comes up with is usually stupid. Cost cutting and other business BS has left you to complete projects that aren't going to work by impossible deadlines. You only come to work because their internet is a little faster than what you got at home. Working most of the time has cause you to lose touch with friends and some family. You find yourself like a zombie getting up everyday to go to work. You can't wait until the weekend but it takes more than 2 days to recuperate. You read this article on Slashdot and find an avenue to vent. Only to have that temporary escape rudely broken by the question "Hey dude, can you see why my PC be glitchen up?"
The glory left when you prevented us from using the OS we wanted to use in favor of the OS you could support. Or, more precisely, the one you SAID you could support. Now you get all of the blame for its shortcomings, which we have no problem recounting to you when you show up to fix our new machines.
Suck on it.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Well, after 4 years of school you should be both a decent IT guy and a great bartender.
I've been coding for over 25 years now. Obviously things have changed. Long gone are the days you could accomplish something with some coding skills and a manual. Now everything is micromanaged ad nauseum by people who don't have a clue. No, it's not as much fun as it used to be, and that is a crying shame.
An anonymous reader writes to wonder if the glory has gone out of IT. One blogger remembered his first impression upon entering a profession in IT that made it seem like the place to be with a new shiny around every corner. What experiences have others had? Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?
Glory? In IT? Are you serious?
Since when was IT ever glorious?
I work in IT because it's what I know. I'm relatively good at it. I can get the job done. People pay me for it.
But glory?
Yeah.. Right.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
That 3% would take a huge cut out of the IT unemployment figures...
"The Glory" days, folks, were the days when IT flunkies like me got to jet around the world in Business Class, stay in 5* hotels and have decent sized expense accounts.
Now it's cattle class, 3* hotels and every spend questioned.
I'm seriously looking at another career...
yeah! Glory! Allelujah. Glory in IT today is having my non-techie boss telling me to run Ubuntu on xen coz his lead programmer thought it's a good idea. If I tell my boss Ubuntu doesn't support xen it's my neck, not the programmer's coz the programmer develops the shitware that makes the money!. Totally unlike the days of yore when if I told my non-techie boss to send his lead programmer to bugger off it would be my neck, not the programmer's......WAIT, I repeat myself......Glory? in IT? Hah!
I wish Information professionals would get over themselves. In the past the forces of supply and demand made life cushy for the majority of us, but that didn't change the fact that we are essentially mechanics and engineers. There are all manner of mechanics and engineers throughout our world and we aren't special in that regard. To be sure, there are a great deal of very intelligent Information professionals, but I tire of the delusional self image that 'geeks' as a whole have crafted for themselves. It is this ethos of self-delusion and self-indulgence that spawns questions similar to that of the original poster. Yes, I am generalizing and I know sound bitter, but I've lived in several different words (IT, academia, construction work, beach bum, etc.) and I've rarely seen a group that is more self-aggrandizing...well maybe artists.
There never was any glory!
IT was, is, and always will be all about sucking up to management and giving management whatever they want so they can fire real workers and pocket their pay.
The only reason we work in IT is because we are too scared or lazy to get a real job involving real physical labor.
I think that the "glory," the absence of which we bemoan in this thread, is best understood as a metaphor for the era when success in IT and its predecessor fields was mainly about being smart. If you were in what was called the data processing business in 1960, intellect was, by and large, what made you successful. That situation persisted until the mid-1980s or so (depending on where you worked), and it gradually became more important to have knowledge than intellect, and the non-technical skills (writing, teamwork, getting along with your boss, dealing with politics) became more important, too. The change was because of the drastic increases in complexity of the systems we worked with, and because the tools were so much more reliable.
In 1980, it was not an unreasonable objective to read every word of every document printed, and every line of source code, for Bell Labs UNIX. Something that could easily be done in a few months. It's not a reasonable goal, anymore, for any of the major desktop releases, and so you have to specialize, and rely on having things just work. And by and large, they do, and even people who don't specialize in technology can use computers and write Excel macros these days. They for the most part do quite well unassisted, and so the panache that came with restoring the boss's spreadsheet from a floppy disk with a bad sector isn't there anymore.
There are still good gigs out there, but they can be hard to find, and you have to make your tradeoffs among technical challenge, funding continuity, salary, management quality, coworker quality, and the extent to which the technology is strategic from a career perspective. And once in a while you still get to work around a compiler bug.
These days, I feel like a cabinet maker working in home depot. I have a bunch of skills that are not being utilized because the majority of the work happening (at least where I work anyways) has shifted from creating custom solutions to installing, maintaining, and supporting 3rd party applications. My job satisfaction is eroding. While I used to take pride in creating stable, elegant solutions to complicated problems, I now spend most of my time fighting with messy integrations.
While I never expected massive paychecks or bleeding edge technology, there was a time when it was at least valued similarly as other departments, that is gone. The dot com bubble brought in a ton of people students and carer changers who had nothing but dollar signs and free pac-man in their eyes. After the bust, sadly most of these folks were not driven out as well. So now we have far too many clueless IT workers/managers who work on fear and CYA alone and it drags the whole profession down.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
- People yell at me when ever any thing nearly related to a computer breaks
- They think I should fix their home computer for free because it is easy but they cant do it
- Always more work than time (Slashdot to maintain sanity)
If that is glory I should have joined the Army.
I think you misspelled "gory".
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
For me, it's been several events over several years.
The first was 1998. That was the first time I could confidently send a client to a big box store to purchase a computer that was appropriate for their needs, reasonably reliable, and a couple hundred cheaper than what I could build it for.
The second was 2000. I was writing up a browser related document about cookie management.... when I decided to look something up on the web by searching "cookie", I discovered Nieman Marcus had displaced all relevant technology discussions. For me it meant Joe six pack and the related marketing types had escaped the boundaries of AOL and taken over much of the Internet.
The third was 2004. While working on a new platform for one of the big 3 American wireless telecoms, the sponsors for the project made the decision that usability and reliability was less important than "entertainment potential". And yes, this stuff is located in the call path.
I.T. is the plumbing of the world... and no one calls a plumber until the toilet's overflowing.
Sometimes I have to say to hell with it and just eat my jellybeans.
You forgot #0
0. A company within or supporting the IT industry that treats their own IT department as a cost-center and/or as a necessary evil. An IT industry company with a clue knows the value of IT and how to leverage it efficiently to add value to the organization and/or bottom line. Those without a clue are going to miss a lot of good opportunities, suffocate themselves by knowing enough to be dangerous, or sabotage their own operations. Based on my anecdotal experience anyhow, but I think you have to be extremely lucky otherwise and over the long term luck tends to run out. The cause of this effect I think is upper management that does not really understand the market they are managing. This can be so insidious that you may not know when to run until it's too late so it's a good idea to pay attention if you see the signs.
NUMBER ONE: If anything, the pace of "new shinies" has INCREASED over the past decade. When I started out in the dot-com era, there was primarily C/C++ or Java if you were doing backend work... and Java, Perl, or ASP's if you were doing web development. The basic concept of building a web app with an MVC design was a "new shiny". There was no Github or even Sourceforge yet. Today there's a new framework or language or awesome end-user app to play with every time you turn around.
When the anonymous blogger in the original post remembers I.T. as "the place to be", he no doubt means that in financial or marketing terms. That is, we all thought we were going to be stock-option millionaires... and with the exception of some Googlers, that delusion of the industry has been dead for almost a decade now. I.T. is not the insane gold rush that it was 10-20 years ago, but relatively speaking it's still the best paycheck you're likely to get while still being free to fuck off on Slashdot half the day.
NUMBER TWO: There is NOT a "more pervasive technical culture" today. Having an Facebook account does not make you a web-developer, and having an iPhone doesn't make you a sysadmin. There is common perception among middle-aged and elderly people, that the younger generations are brighter or "more technical" because they carry lots of electronic gadgets and spend lots of time on social networking sites. The opposite is probably true... if anything they make people dumber. Regardless, while the number of consumer toys has grown exponentially... I would submit that percentage of society with any real technical interest or aptitude has remained constant.
Well not exactly dying out, but aging fast and not refreshing fast enough.
Me thinks this cannot be good for the future of Open Source, Linux or Ubuntu.
They rely on a lot of retirees or those who work with large corporations to donate their time to the cause.
Desktop Linux might even get a boost with all the tech workers from the 80's/90's boom when they all retire (2030 the year of the Linux?).
Maybe these workers will shift jobs that they all lost to 3rd world countries, lets fact it that these jobs are not ever returning and they will lowball you at every corner of the market.
Lets face it, these countries are not full of incompetent people and they can learn IT/computer programming just like anyone else. They are human, so don't understimate those who will take your job will produce crappy code.
Maybe for developers (although I think they are under appreciated) but definitely for not for Sys Admins, and Help Desk techs. These positions only ever get attention when something goes wrong, and often take the blame for many things outside their responsibility.
As an IT administrator in these tough times, you might as well give up on always having nice shiny toys to play with. You end up supporting legacy systems and trying to get more out of the old rust buckets that used to end up curbside years ago. As for glory, IT has always been the bastard child of every organization, all we do is spend money with very little ways to generate revenue for the organization. That's unlikely to change anytime soon. If your getting into a career in IT, be prepared to be under-appreciated by everyone around you. But don't let it get you down, you know that what you do is important, otherwise logic would have led you to another career.
You Guys have hit the nail on its head. But you do not know it. There has never been any glory in being a Microsoft drone. When was the last time your IT provider wrote a program that was not some visual basic junk.
The glory was making hardware actually compute things. Writing email programs, not installing them. The glory is long gone. Unless you are an open source provider where the glory has never left. Perhaps working for Google or Cygnus... Oh I read that Red Hat bought them. Did you read that article? Glyn Moody is one of the people in IT that has the glory.
So the glory generated depends on what your IT staff do. There is no glory in paying the computer tax to the man. One the other hand there is greatness in providing the good stuff.
The glory really depends on the area of business you work in and the team. If you're lucky enough to work for a true IT company with a great management staff I think the glory and fun are indeed still there. But for those working in backroom IT shops at financial institutions, hospitals, and smaller companies the days run log sitting boxed in a cubical and listening to the click/clack of keys from across the room along with the occasional whisper with people talking as if they're in a library. These are the jobs where there is no glory and often not much fun or excitement. But unfortunately I'd say 90% of the IT jobs fall into this realm from what I've seen.
In a world where downtime is not only acceptable, it's actually EXPECTED, and every idiot with a PC on his desk with a copy of MS Office and 16 hours at a junior tech college thinks he's the next genius programmer...yeah, whatever "glory" IT may have had vanished long ago.
When was there ever any glory?
Getting screamed at by some fake-and-bake guy because his laptop doesn't work all the while bitching and yelling that "I make the fucking money here cube monkey! Fix my shit!" or lecturing us on "If you people actually made some fucking money they might send you on a golf weekend once in a while. Wait do you computer geeks even know how to golf?" Gee thank you "will not be named marketing company once located in Plymouth MN" for that experience... No wonder you went under and have 3 of your executives in jail now...
How about the executive that needs you to scrub his PDA to make sure the wife can't figure out he's banging Stephanie in payroll all the while chatting how worthless the black hole of IT is. "Do you people do anything besides spend our money?" Gee thanks I loved spending 3 weeks with Faire Issac getting your data feeds set up so you can actually get mailer out to all your potential customers before first quarter. And you assholes still had the balls, after I worked 3 days straight sleeping in a server room, to gloat on how "if you could get your job done right you could have come golfing with us." We've been shit on as an industry from day one. What Glory? And does everyone in a suit fucking golf?
Then there was 3 years with Lady Macbeth out in Burnsville who was so brutal and wicked I can't evne put into print what he issues were... all the while complaining that a staff of 8 could only field 3200 calls a day... Simple math:
60 minutes in an hour. 8 hours = 480 total minutes
480 * 8 = 3840 total minutes.
3840 /3200 = 1.2 minutes a call...
NOT FAST ENOUGH! WTF? ARE YOU BRAIN DEAD WOMAN?! Asking someone their name takes at least 20 seconds... Whatever... not that I am bitter... people complain they can't get help but then you bitch that you aren't "helping them fast enough" ... ARRRrggg... Oh well not my problem, she was more then capable of driving a 40 million a year company into a 4 million a year company before the competition bought them out and threw her 6 figure fat ass out the door...
And after all that still having to put in the 60 hour a week grind in a server room, coding everything, administering everything, and being told by your boss that "You need to foot the bill for all these certifications, why should we pay you to help you keep your job?" MCSE, CCNA, CCIE, CNA, etc... I remember in 2000 I had to shell out $12,000 in a year of my money to "keep my job."
The sickest thing is, in all those years, because of the nature of our work, we IT people see all of the company. No insulation. The corruption at the top all the way to the bottom. If Jeff is surfing pr0n in the warehouse or Mr. Big is surfing kiddie p0rn in his masion, IT sees it all and suffer it all too. From the top AND the bottom. It makes you not like people in general. I have 0 faith in any human walking Earth now as a result.
I remember at one employer just running a simple
DIR /S *.MPG /S *.AVI
DIR
against the personal drives due to disk space running out.
The sheer volume of pr0n was staggering. The executives were furious. They wanted blood. I was in the conference room when they demanded to know who the top offenders were. They were going to make examples of them. I was fired on the spot when I named the top 5 offender... all sitting in the room.
Glory my ass. Never was any, never will be any.
Blissfully retired and anyone dumb enough to go into that field, good luck. If you want to see the worst in humanity, IT\MIS is the field to be in. I'd rather work with prison inmates then go back to that, I take honest evil over hypocritical evil any day... Glory? How about IT Shell Shock Syndrome...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
"'There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-that's all.'"
-Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There)
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
I'm completely getting out of IT. I've been doing Technical Support for well on 10 years now and when I was laid off from my last job I re-evaluated my life and came to the solid conclusion that fixing computers for a living was not bringing any joy whatsoever. Other than paying the bills, the job wasn't doing anything else for me. So I'm completely jaded and disenchanted with the IT industry as a whole so what am I doing now? Taking 6 months off, going traveling! When I first got into IT it was straight out of high school, I skipped University because I wasn't too academically inclined but I got a LOT of certifications for various things in IT so I'm well qualified enough to do quite a range of things but when I look at the industry I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth. Originally IT was super cool, I was the admin, I controlled everything, and even when there were restrictions I could get around them. That was in my younger more childish IT days but as I matured in IT I became very jaded with the continual politics that are played again and again so that leaves me at today not wanting to fix another damn computer even if my life depended on it. Instead what I'm going to do once I get back from my little trip is start a company and experience the highs and lows of running my own business! It's the only way!
-Zero Tolerance for Zero Intelligence-
I'm still really enjoying IT. Sure there are good days and bad days, but it's far better than any other type of job I've had (Steel Mill Melt Shop, Coffe Shop Barista, Movie Theater Usher, Administrative Assistant, etc.). Trust me, the one thing that all of the crummy jobs I've had had in common were the PHBs hired for any reason other than skill.
I think we need to return to the question of what happens as we automate more and more of society. Do we really need everyone having a menial job? Couldn't we just have something like welfare, so people who want to work can do so and be productive, and we can keep the majority of people out of work, comfortably at home playing video games all day? Isn't much of PHB syndrome caused by people trying to justify their paycheck?
IT was great when we were developing solutions.
Now we just triage Twitter worms. Even the virus writers have gotten lazy. Register a service and make a tray icon? Seriously? Where did the elegant polymorphic exe appenders that *actually required a special tool to clean* go?
"Business-in-a-box," "more indians" and "I read this in a magazine" now dominated our CIOs. I'm not sure the last time I met a CIO that even knew what PHP was, or what ASP stood for. Now all they know is Agile this, Twitter that, Facebook customer conversion this. "Dell says they made millions on twitter! Why can't we?" BECAUSE your a dentist. People don't impulse buy root canals for christsakes.
The software problem? Buy more software. That software doesn't work with MS. So what do we do? Buy more software. This magazine has an article about a project available on Codeplex that we need to buy to fix the software we bought.
Forget elegantly converting old databases. We just buy more software. Stick that software on top of the old database and have someone from the callcenter cut and paste it. What do we need those IT snobs for?
Redhat Linux? We don't need that shit. No one uses it. We get MS Windows for a discount. ....any idiot with google can now build their own Enterprise business package. Security? Screw that, we're compliant. Our Auditors say so. Not having a password policy makes security more transparent!
Redhat is too expensive because we need IT gurus to make it go.
Reporting breaches?
What do we have to report if we do no logging, auditing or security account management?!
It sounds like in another 2 days, you'll be in a clock tower with a high-powered rifle!
Clearly you've got some very specific frustrations at your current job, and are so obsessed by those feelings that they actually seem on-topic to you here. Still, do me a favor. Print out the comment above. Put in a drawer somewhere. Then take a deep breath, go get laid... and try to get some perspective on the fact that it takes more than a couple of years to rise to the top of the heap, and that there will always be people in every job with less passion yet more clout.
Then in a couple years, pull this printout from the drawer and read it again. It will be quite a shock!
I don't want to put you all to sleep w/the usual old fart stuff about steam powered computers and blinky lights, etc.
Back in the day, it was cool, fun, had some prestige and even attracted women on occasion.
The PC was the first step to commodity status and the internet absolutely sealed our fate.
I would never recommend a career in IT to anybody I actually liked.
My unofficial title for years now.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Is there a profession that offers it's practitioners 'Glory'? The Knight Errant of old or a Dragoon who survived the "Charge of the Light Brigade" might have achieved glory - but these days it seems to be in short supply.
> Has the Glory Gone Out of Working In IT?
As a highly educated programmer and software engineer, I hate to say it, but this is like asking "Has the Glory Gone Out of Being a Nurse?"
Actually, risking downmod even more, it's more like, "Has the Glory Gone out of Being A Candystriper?"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I've been doing everything in the PC field for about 12 years now.. Some programming, some networking, and more than anything, on-site troubleshooting and repair (both hardware and software). I think the 'glory' comes from the customer when they are overjoyed that you just saved their machine and or data from certain death as they seem to think. If you take the time to explain somewhat to them what was wrong and what you will do to fix it, and they understand you, more often than not the customer will glorify your existance to all of their peers. Word of mouth is my only form of advertising. My reputation is what brings in the business simply put. Oh do mostly after hours calls so that makes all the difference!
I like it. I get to play with computers I could never afford (and if i could, I'd have a better car). Who cares about glory? The paycheck is where its at! I'm hoping after my 5 years intro are up ill be making living wages to goto meetings. Mainly, with glory comes celebrity, and I hate it when people say "oh? you're in IT? FIX MY COMPUTER!" I am in IT solely for the thrill of putting together whiz bang fast networks with Ferrari servers (and the paycheck isnt too bad either), not because some idiot messed up their nameserver.
I don't know whether there was ever glory in working in the computer field--but there used to be joy, and it's a lot harder to come by these days, at least in my experience.
How about when the big corps (MS, IBM etc.) started telling us every couple years that we had to start over because the frameworks we'd been using were no longer being supported because they now had the "real solution".
I understand what you're saying, but I've always had sympathy for IT people in a technical company. I'm glad that you appreciate them, but I think you underestimate their contribution and knowledge. Yes, your PhDs are probably smarter than your IT folks but that doesn't mean they know how to keep computers and networks running smoothly.
Ok people - QUIT THE DAM WHINING. You are not wrong in what you say, you are totally correct but complaining won't help.
If you don't like your job work out what you would be happy doing and how to do it. There is no reason for you to stay in a position you don't want to be in. Train, study, and apply! You may fail but surely it's better to try and fail than not try and fail by default.
So far at my sysadmin/general it job i have:
- drilled holes in reinforced concrete
- installed the electrical system in a house complete with assembling the light fixtures
- unmounted a kitchen sink and fixed some heat radiators to the wall
- smacked iron rods protruding from the concrete floor to get them out
- delivered documents and merchandise as a courier
So your analogy isn't that far off , that being said choose your workplace properly , if there's no proper workplace in your country emigrate. (I'm currently looking for any civilized country still accepting immigrants)
You are always in the background of any project. It's assumed you can do whatever it is they want you to do, even if it has never been done before. They will want it 6 weeks earlier than you can deliver it and 50% cheaper than you can buy it for. You are supposed to be invisible. No one thinks about how much work you have to put in to something in order to keep it up and running in a production environment. If the service fails at 3 am on a Sunday, every minute of your time will be tracked until the service is restored and you will be told how efficient you aren't and what you should try to do better next time. When the kudos are given at the next company meeting and everyone talks about all of the great things they have accomplished this year, your name is never mentioned unless you count the "Oh, and thanks to IT who.. does what they do!" mention from the CEO.
You're the plumber. You're the TV Repair man. You're the phone guy. They only know your name when something has gone wrong and they think you can fix it. They only think you can fix it because they are fairly sure you, or someone like you, broke it to begin with.
Welcome to I.T.
I missed the glory?
The IT industry is shrinking and this is by it's very nature. Sure the dot com bust plays a part but that's only a small part now. The very idea behind computers is to make things work faster and more efficiently. People think this is only on the user end but that's not true, it's also working the same way for those of us that build, repair and maintain computers and networks. The fact is that it's taking less and less techs to do more and more work. It was slim pickings eight years ago when I got my job in IT and I had to beat out nearly 100 other applicants for it. That was when the economy was in great shape.
We'd like to blame it on the economy and say that IT will bounce back when the economy does but the fact is that it won't. One network administrator can now do the work that, ten years ago, would have taken five people to do. It's the same with PC techs, since it's no longer cost effective to actually fix anything any more. Parts are so cheap that they're simply thrown out and replaced or warranty returned to the manufacturer where they're thrown out and replaced. A company of two thousand employees that spans three states, such as the one I was recently laid off from, no longer needs fifteen PC techs to keep up with all those users. Instead, most work is done over the phone now by about six guys. If it can't be fixed via remote desktop or netop, they simply ship a ghosted machine to the user that any drunk monkey can plug in, which is then configured remotely if any configuration is required at all. Put the old one in the box the new one came in and ship it back. Installing a new printer? Insert tab A into slot B and call the help desk to do the software install. Fifteen minutes on the phone and it's ready to go. When the economy does finally recover, these companies MIGHT hire one or two more people, MAYBE, but don't bet your future on it.
Glory? The only thing that I think could possibly be construed as glory is this idea that non tech people have that since everything is computerized now that there will always be high demand for IT people. The fact is that a CS degree, A+ certification and nearly a decade of experience is fast becoming a worthless skill set. Myself and most other unemployed professional geeks will be going back to school, retraining in some other field all together.
The other side of that coin, one that applies to IT people still employed, is that you're only as good as your last mistake. When you're doing your job well, no one knows that you're doing any thing at all. They don't even know you exist until something breaks down and then suddenly you're completely incompetent regardless of how quickly the issue was resolved or even if it wasn't your fault. It might have been the phone company's fault but those stuffy executives in their $3000 suits that can barely operate their blackberries, all they know is that it's a computer problem and you're the computer guy. Get on your knees and pucker up.
I wouldn't recommend the IT industry to any one. You'll get that BA in computer science and whatever certifications they tell you will help and then you'll go to work in some call center doing PC support for $12 an hour, and that's being optimistic since most of that work is outsourced to India where they're paid $5 an hour to do the same thing and happy to get it.
Here's how it works:
1. Stupid people with money decide to do something to make even more money.
2. The stupid people hire smarter people to develop their idea and make it a reality.
3. The stupid people use the fruits of the smarter people's work to make millions or billions.
4. The stupid people squander the millions on cars, planes, boats, houses, fine dining, whores, and cocaine.
5. The smart people get laid off or fired and are left to go suck up to the next group of dumb people with money in order to support their families.
6. The stupid people repeat the cycle using their friend's money because they now have a track record of "generating millions/billions in income".
So who's really dumb and who's really smart? Is it the prostitute or the patron?
Our desktop support guys are treated lower than dog dirt, people clap, whistle, and shout at them all day long to get their attention. They truly do have a thankless glory-free job. Working in network security is a little more glorious, especially when you explain to people that you keep the network safe from "hackers." Unfortunately it isn't enough to convince girls to have sex with me but it carries a little more weight than say an accounts payable specialist I suppose.
If you went into IT for the reason of glory, you were mistaken, as it never existed. There was a sense of power as you knew more than most people which and achievement when you solved something no one else could solve. People congratulated you for those efforts, but it was not glory, it was momentary achievements.
I wish I could remember the author here on slashdot (probably 10 years ago I remember these comments), but he said the following:
IT is not a field for Glory, if you want glory go and get an MBA. IT is not a field for big pay, if you want huge salaries, go get your MBA. IT is not a glamor field where you get the ladies, go pick any other field on the planet if you want that. If you want to go into IT, you will be asked to work long hours, get little respect from the company, and have your priorities shift faster than unpicked lotto ping pong balls. However, if you love computers, love being able to problem solve, love working with emerging technology, and don't mind any of the previous statements, then IT might be the field for you.
Face it, most IT people are glorified electron plumbers. We make sure stuff goes from point A to point B without leaking all over the place. People only call us when they want something fixed, and are usually pissed at us for something that was their own damn fault.
Dude, you misunderstand:
You wanted the "Department of Inadvisably Applied Shiny Shit."
This is the "Department of Keeping Crap Moving."
If you wanted Shiny Shit, you are in the wrong department - cause this is a crappy job.
When teenagers got the internet. Seriously. Back in the 70's and even 80's there was a certain prestige with working with these very expensive high tech pieces of equipment. You were a bit of a wizard.
Now computing is a commodity. You can buy it by the hour at a cafe...and your 12 year old relatives can write things to one another that make your eyeballs want to melt: this isn't the utopia anyone was promised.
I was talking last night about a guy who spent 20 years servicing printers. As these things went from $3,000 to $120 for your typical office printer...he's gone from actually servicing machines to driving 30 minutes to replace an ink cartridge.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
maybe the problem lies in branding yourselves as "nerds" - maybe that was not a good long term strategy, fools.
contribute at wikademia
Without going into an endless dissertation of how technology developments 1.) happen, 2.) have their sweet spot (golden years) then 3.) become pedestrian in nature, yes. The IT party's been long over. If you've got a solid rep, been in the business for a while and stay ahead of the curves (which implies you still enjoy the challenges to some degree) you'll likely be able to see a current IT career out to your "retirement". If you're just starting or under the age of thirty run quickly another way. I mean Road Runner clouds! There's nothing more to be had here. The carcass has been picked dry. On the consumer side it's all become applianced (like toasters... it breaks? Cheaper to get a new one.) On the enterprise side it's dominated by thankless bullshit monkey work that embraces mediocrity or less (ya' hearin' this Google?). The only great gigs left are jobs that allow one to bring true leadership to a position. And those are very rare (and at mid-career now, the only one's I'm interested in.) As an eleven year veteran consultant with a solid success trail behind me I still love this stuff but say "no" to gigs more than I say "yes" to anymore.
I still believe the IT industry should have unionized somewhere around 1995-ish. But that's a whole other magilla thread no longer worth discussing.
I started my first IT job in 1978. Managed a DEC PDP 11/70 and a slew of large impact printers. I can recall MANY times where I was a "hero", which actually got me better jobs more than once.
My last stint, and my longest in one place at 13 years, was to build a global WAN for a household name company. My team did an AMAZING job; good, fast, and definitely NOT cheap. We did our jobs so well in fact, the entire team got laid off by new ownership earlier this year. Two of us (out of 11) have found employment close to our old wage. The rest of us are doing something other than IT or have retired altogether.
For myself, I got several offers, most of which were for less money and involved moving to the East or West Coast. People looked at my excellent resume and string of successes and in every case asked one question: "would you be willing to work for less money?" Nothing about challenging work, interesting people, big projects, or how my decades of experience and 200 I.Q. would be an asset. Simply $$$.
In the end, I decided I'm done with IT. Had planned to teach college and actually lined up a gig at a major university, but passed on that as well.
Now, I play poker for a living and do quite well. No, I haven't been on TV yet, but it's a matter of time. I also play bass in 2 bands and just bought a little farm on 5 acres. These days, my RTFM is the John Deere tractor maintenance guide.
Do I miss it? Saving the world, even when they don't understand that's what happened? No, I don't. IT, at least for me, is no longer fun or "glorious" or even interesting.
I am my own gestalt.
IT != Computer Science && IT != Computer Engineering
You want the glory of being Linus Torvalds? I'm pretty sure that ain't IT at all kids. That's Computer Science/Engineering/Programming and that's not in the IT department.
[signature]
Yes, any infrastructure service, be it power or roads or IT, is intentionally uninteresting. "Interesting" means noticeable or memorable, and it's pretty much only the problems that people notice and remember.
I know few people who cry out "Wow, this is really smooth blacktop!" or "OMG, I picked up the phone and it always seems to have a dial-tone!" or "My email server isn't down!" (well okay we have said the last one a few times at IBM, but mostly to make fun of the Domino server guys).
In those rare times where something has broken (and isn't your fault) and you're able to do something really ingenious to fix it, almost nobody else would really understand what you did. If they're nice, they make a big deal about you fixing it, but they wouldn't recognize the difference between using your highly-advanced knowledge to perform a feat of brilliance and simply rebooting a broken system.
There's a lot of jobs this way, it's not a unique problem to IT, but it's fundamentally not a "glory" profession, and I'm not sure why anyone would think it is in the first place...
I left as I saw the writing on the wall that I would become too "mature" and be laid off/ fired, unless I was lucky or started my own gig (done that too. much work) and the end product of my labor was going to put others out of jobs. Yes I have read about how this is really a good thing, but the problem is our system does not retool those people as it is cheaper to hire younger workers.
So now I work in medicine and I work even harder but I enjoy my work more and I feel far better about what I am doing. I maybe starting over on the wage ladder, but I will be able to work as long as I am willing/able and my skills will not be obsolete in 10 years (maybe in 300 years).
There was a real change when once techs were treated as golden but not anymore.
It still has all the glory of plumbing, just like it always did.
Tag: "ajedineedsnotthesethings"
I remember when "Systems Administrator" was the thing to be. You were the guy that everyone went to for a solution to their problem. Taking pride in an elegant environment where everything just clicked.
Nowadays getting audited for things like SOX, PCI and HIPAA compliancy is just not fun. I was doing more IT paperwork than IT. That's why I got out of the private sector and I haven't looked back. IMHO legislators have taken the fun out of IT.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Today I came into work and I went to log into a solaris box. I was greeted with a message that my password was expired. I got to pick 8 meaningless characters, type them twice and forget the 8 I had become so comfortable with. I sort of was hoping for more when I got my degree.
I think there are several parts to this issue. One is the culture in which all of us techs built, we made it necessary that our equipment be used and people used to appreciate all the tools we gave them minus the learning curve. There was a dark side as well, most of the officers in business that i have worked for looked at IT in the beginning as a money dump. The employees loved it the CFO hated us, it was give and take but always in our advantage. We created the standard, and we created our own jail and now the business is always at an advantage over IT which isn't a horrible thing or else the companies would be replacing PC's and servers every 2 to 4 years which could by itself run a company in to the ground.
I think most of us back 20 or more years ago just loved to tinker and learned how things worked, researched, implemented then took our time to get it right. These days you have paper admins walking out of colleges all over that have no real world knowledge no real passion except for a pay check and no real ability to process the information handed to them, although most do like to talk big and share with you " well in college we did this" and "why do we do it this way in college this would be laughed at". Rarely if ever anymore am i sitting next to a person competent enough to troubleshoot more less touch anything.
This leads me to my next point, The quality of all this new generation of IT although highly trained will work cheaper and in most cases turn out lower quality work not always their fault do to projects and training. Now i know most would disagree with me but if you get one new guy in your department that has no idea what he is doing, it can drag down the impression (even if you have a spotless reputation) of your whole department the more and more people interact with your department next thing you know you have some micro manager crawling up your ass because they wanted to hire someone cheap without knowing anything technical themselves just to fill a hole and now have employees talking garbage about how useless and incompetent the IT department is. In my opinion the places I have worked, IT has been turned in to a a grind. It's not a place of development and increasing capabilities of workers, just keeping a standard going.
We now have individuals coming out of college and going to work that are trained for computers, before people were happy to get 386 computers, email excel, qbasic and that fancy new fandangled fax on demand from the desktop. now i hear garbage like "what you mean this only has a dual core with 2 GB of ram omg as soon as i load up outlook my applications are going to be soooo slow" and this is before they log in for their first run. It just feels thankless now. The Glory of a new frontier is gone, and until something new comes along that nobody understands and colleges have 0 infrastructure to train people on it, then we may be the tinkering hero's we once were.
As I look back on my brief career in IT, I realize that things have changed. I started earning a paycheck working in MIS in 1996. At that point in time, very few people had computers at home. Those who did have computers at home very rarely had internet access. If they did have access, it was through services like CompuServe, or AOL or Prodigy. At that point in time, IT had an aura of newness. It was on the cutting edge. The perception was that if you had a job in IT, you were ahead of the game and definitely a cut above the rest of the staff. There was still an aura of mystery and guru-ness to being in IT. Google wasn't around and there weren't readily available resources to solve issues with. You actually had to know what you were doing and understand how the systems worked. There simply weren't blogs and other resources where you could tap into the knowledge of your peers. Your best bet was Usenet or a mailing list.
In this day and age anyone with a little bit of computer competence can handle most IT problems by tapping into the collective knowledge. Colleges and trade schools are filled with the courses and information that a person needs to get up to speed. In the eyes of corporate America, IT workers have gone from the cutting edge, to just another support function like building engineers and janitors.
I've got your glory days. I worked for a smaller telco in the mid to late 90s. We in IT were treated like the wizards, the gurus, the kings of the company. Not only did every manager on staff know they wanted to keep us happy, they knew why. Keep your IT guys happy or your computer might stop running. When it stops running, you'll be on the bottom of our fixit list. These were the days of the TCP/IP code error so we could simply BSOD anyone that made us mad. Now we weren't jerks about it, and we demanded nothing, but for those managers that treated us bad we simply returned the favor. The joke around the office was that us "IT guys" could smell food on any floor of the building. The truth was, their manager always told us if and when they were bringing in food. Now I work for a large retail chain and IT is so isolated that we're often not invited to whole facility meetings.
A CS professor years ago used to tell us as students, "When you graduate, you'll spend the first year of your career trying to get Root, and the rest of it trying to get rid of it."
How true. My first year at a small but growing media company was exciting with colocations, T1s to set up, phone systems, strutting around with key-code cards, etc. I was important!
The novelty quickly wears off after, for example, a server doesn't come up after a scheduled night time reboot. Driving in the middle of the night to the co-location center just to see "Keyboard error, press F1 to continue" because the last person there borrowed the keyboard for another server and forgot to plug it back in.
Like many other posters have mentioned, when things go smooth, you get taken for granted ("what do you do here, again?"). And when things blow up, you've suddenly lost credibility because you 'forgot' to keep an extra spare of that proprietary power supply on hand. Or, get razzed for not better preparing for when a bathroom in an apartment upstairs over the server room has flooded and is making it 'rain' in the server room. (Yes, it happened!)
when did that happen?
ROFL!
"Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?"
Whoever wrote that obviously doesn't work in IT. The pervasive technical culture, as you say, has only served up more and more idiots as users and as wannabes in the IT world. All the IT nubs entering this industry know how to do now is Google their error messages for to see what some other nubs did to fix it. Real IT people know how to troubleshoot. We are irreplaceable!
Kids heading out of a degree mill to join the coal face should be under no illusions about glamour. You'll end up in a important job, but it will be far from glamourous. John Carmack can drive Ferraris and run his diy space program, Mark Zuckerburg can create a social networking site and screw groupies in the bathrooms. But these guys are not outright IT nerds, their Entrepreneurs first and foremost, they're made from different stuff and taken a different path right from early on.
I had always had a interest in shiny new things with blinkin lights, IT was an attractive career, however I had my bubble burst on day one. It seems the 9/10ths of anything is crap applied.
Getting to work with the latest and greatest, riding the bleeding edge of innovation... is not what 90% of IT jobs are about.
You will like not be working in a organisation of distinguished academics, with years of training in an academic institution. You will be working with 90% IT cowboys, who, like you learned 90% of everything they know in a self-taught DIY fashion, then went to do some 90-minute multichoice exams to have some certificates for their resume. The IT equivelent of a backyard mechanic.
You'll learn that everybody is an expert, according to them.
The blinking lights you learn to curse, well when they go off and leave a flashing red one at least.
The reality when you hit the ground in IT is that everything is somewhat old, no longer shiny, and being nursed along until the next upgrade cycle. Everything is out of date already when it's installed, everything is constantly broken or underperforming, therefore justifying an ecosystem of support and then eventual upgrade. Projects will always be late and overbudget.
In all likelyhood the coolest stuff you will be in your own time, your own projects.
The reality of IT is that most of the jobs are the IT equivelent of a plumber, when all the glory is had by the civil engineers who design and build the bridges and pipes, who get to feature in the news articles. Your job will be essiential, but not glamorous.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Actually, I love my job.
What I do not like is the people here that hate their job.
Sure, it is /., so people will be cynical, but anybody that hates what they do or thinks IT is not all it is cracked up to be should find another job.
I am not directing what I said to people at my job (unless you secretly know my username and are actually working where I work busting me posting on ./)
I hate when people, even on ./, will say how much this job sucks. It really doesn't.
I can tell you did not read everything, because I never once said that I hate what I do. I love being a programmer. It is the best job I have ever had.
What I do not like are the old farts that are squatting on the job only for pay. My point is that they are only working for the pay and not the passion. There are lots of programmers that are very passionate about what we do, and have to deal with some random old guy with an attitude that thinks they are better than everybody else. That same old person hates their job and is squatting until they retire.
I know this from experience because I see them in my department all the time. They do not do what I do, they are just in the same department.
Obviously with your comment and vague response, you are not really in the industry, but more of an outsider (and the fact that you quoted me saying how long I have been doing this as if that was the focal point of everything I said).
The world is how you make it
I worked in IT for the money. Then I realized that no amount of money could give me back all the time for the frustration and near nightly emergencies of an online retail company. I had been in IT many, many years before this company and like the work, but this company did me in.
So I took my life back and changed careers, and now work as a freelancer.
But I wasn't good enough at it.
I can fix computing problems on my sleep.
It was a pretty straightforward decision.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Twenty years ago I knew people who had been pushed into the role of sysadmin because their boss thought they'd be good at it... based on the fact that they seemed to be better at operating the xerox machine than anyone else. The only glory in that was that the file server was the newest office play-toy and they got the "privilege" of operating it.
In 1997 I had a new colleague who had managed to switch from plain-old administration to network administration. He was so happy about it: "I don't have to worry about my job now, because I'm in IT." Of course, he was deluding himself. He didn't have any real responsibility anyway, but that was a time when consulting agencies were hiring (and were able to rent out) just about anyone willing to say they felt comfortable behind a keyboard.
Now, after having dealt with a few more managers and clients, I don't see how there was ever any glory in it. Today there's nothing new about file servers, or computer networks, or Internet connections -- every office has one. It's only miserable when critical parts break down.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that it's nothing new, IT remains a frustratingly abstract and unfathomable subject to almost everyone else, so they rarely follow through with your advice and it's never their fault when things break down. Years later they may finally see the light, take your advice and then marvel at the results, but it takes luck and patience to ever get that far. The legions of incompetent M$ sysadmins don't help the overall image of this profession either.
The bottom line is that I started to feel misunderstood and unappreciated years ago. As an independent consultant I don't earn very much these days because I'm picky about who I do business with, but at least this way I don't have to put up with the kind of people who would otherwise make my life more miserable than anything else. Peace of mind, or at least freedom from avoidable stress: that's definitely worth something as well.
:) (ironically not on slashdot, since it doesn't accept empty bodies, I guess)
I was a IT Coordinator for a large auto company for 8 years and left to be with my fiance up north. I work for a company that has no IT in house. I offered and they put their noses up in the air and hired an ex Nerd's onsite guy who freelances. And corrupts the network every 2 weeks.
Companies think that they are saving coin, but I dragged in to save the day when Nerd is 100 miles away serving others.
Depends on how you define glory, and I don't know if you're asking because you're considering entering, re-entering, or quitting the field....
If having career where there is a wide variety of different sorts of job opportunities available (if you have skills) appeals to you, then IT is good. If you can work well with others and can make technical concepts easy to understand for others who aren't as technical, then you have even more options...Like any other field, it all depends on the job.
It's a field where you can start your own business and be successful.
I guess my point is that "The IT Field" is HUGE. There are so many different types of jobs, so many different levels within the field...Most of them pay well, some of them pay ridiculous amounts if you're good. However, in most cases you have to pay your dues and get some experience before you get that great job; and it changes. You have to be able to adapt. There are some shit IT jobs too, but generally if you have the skills and experience you wont be stuck in one.
For most people in IT, maybe the type of glory they get is feeling good when they come up with a solution, or the type of glory you get when you bring a server that has gone down back online and people can work again and are thanking you for fixing it....but. then again, you could end up with a job somewhere really cool, with innovative work conditions and become part of a team that creates something useful that the whole world uses..I am sure some of people on various teams at Google probably feel that way - look at things like gmail or googlemaps.
Maybe you'll invent something new....I run the IT dept for a medical technology developer..We make a device that can detect serious chronic diseases before there are any symptoms, ...I feel good about that at times, but I wouldn't call it glory.
I would suggest that there are more practical considerations than glory. I always thought that people who wanted glory in their work environment more than anything else became cops or firemen or surgeons...but what do I know?
One thing I love about the field is that, so far it has provided me with a career, and the knowledge that I can go anywhere where there are computers and servers and make a living, even if it's freelancing until something better comes along. It's provided me the ability to make enough money to live very comfortably, and I like it. I like computers, I like tech and have played with computers and technology since getting an Apple ][ at age 8 (1980). I have worked in IT professionally since 1996 , and never have been unemployed since (unless I wanted to be for a brief period).
As far as obsolescence, I know why people think that...and while some positions may change or phase out over time due to things becoming more "end user friendly" - there will always be things that cannot be handled by the non-technical or amateurs, so no..I don't see obsolescence...only change - and if you stay on your toes, you can adapt.
I think the fun was taken out it by service management types. Report churning extension of sales.
John, I'm Only Dancing!
I think not.
I rest my case.
What made IT fun was all the things that were fast and loose.
Back when....
As long as you answered your pager it didn't matter where you worked from.
SOX was something you wanted on Anima chicks
It was UNIX vs Windows (now it's Linux vs Linux, Apple vs Windows, Unix vs Unix, and Vmware laughing at everyone)
The entire Netapp OS fit on a floppy
No one regulated free gifts (man I HATE paying for iPods now)
Oh the parties, the trips.....EMC trips to boston that no one can remember.....
Budget? What's a budget?
Charge-back, Payback? As in that user is going to get "payback" for being such a noobie?
No logging, public ips to everyone desk, banks of modems, bbs, telnet accounts at best.net
Who had ever heard of an SLA?
WTF is "change control" (anyone who thinks they can control change needs to cut back on the medical marijuana)
Point is that every new industry is fun at it's early stage because you get away with just about anything. The ends justify almost any means.
Today it's all about Risk management, accountability, regulation, change control etc. Now IT SUCKS!
But it happens to every cool job eventually. All jobs eventually get regulated, documented, easily replicated, easily taught. And then they are no fun anymore.
And why I am no longer in IT =)
More like a Glory Hole.
Umm... the reason I asked you to hang on to this post in order to look back on it down the road is because your inexperience WAS the focal point of everything you said.
I'm not sure if this makes me an "old fart" by your standards, but I'm in my mid-30's and have been doing this for a little over a dozen years. Your two years don't give you anywhere near as much perspective as you believe. How many different companies and environments have you actually programmed in during that short time? In some places, the contractors and younger guys do all the work while the established senior people are burned-out and lazily ride the paycheck. In other places, the senior people are the only ones with a clue and spend all their time cleaning up after substandard contractors or rookies. Some places are too rigid and inflexible, other places fly by the seat of their pants too much. Etc, etc, etc... every place is different, and that's why I asked you to hang on to this comment. Because several years down the line, when you've had a broader set of experiences, you'll read it again and chuckle.
People that used to work in IT 15 years ago are 15 years older now and have a more realistic view of the world and their place in it. Quite a bit of information regarding pluses and minuses of a particular occupation can be retrieved from the Internet, like SE getting into accidents much more frequently than everybody else. The danger of being "out of this world" is there, the money isn't.
Here is a simple question: Would you like to see your children choose IT as a career? I will go first: Hell no.
Perhaps IT as it was during the bubble years is mostly dead, or at least the bells and wistles that it came with for a while are. But that was only a commercial layer of "shadows and dust" the corporate world added to it. It's time to remember how it all began and what was the purpose of CS and IT in the first place. Time to rethink everything. Computers are machines that are programmed by people to do things that people are able to do very slowly, thus inefficiently. Like, guide rockets in space and traffic on Earth; find hidden meaning in large amounts of data; control other machines; help people learn and have fun; simulate virtual worlds. Forget the bold business plans and the $400K salaries. A computer is an extension of the human brain and software is an extension of the human mind. IT people will continue be valued insofar as they come to the IT world with knowledge in another field, as long as they also specialize in a non-IT-related field where they can use their IT knowledge as a sharp tool.
I've been it "IT" for 20 years, and have experienced the "glory" at least twice.
Once, while twiddling with some workstation upgrades at a client site I had a cute young secretary ask if I could do something about all the static on her phone. I checked some lines at the key system in the closet, and noticed the power cord had been neatly wrapped and bundled in with the phone lines. I cut it loose and shifted it a bit, and the noise went away. The secretary was so elated she offered "to have my children". Being the socially dysfunctional dork that I am, I backed away slowly while wondering if my recent marriage may have been my best move.
The second event, much more recently, occurred while I was at a cool old-time whiskey bar near Reno enjoying a beer with some friends. When the bar maid started complaining that their Internet connection was down (again!), preventing them from running credit cards, one of my (rather inebriated) buddies piped up that I was some kind of computer genius, while I kept my head down and tried to look inconspicuous. They ended up talking me into 'looking into it' with free scotch and cigars. It turned out that the boss had installed a new wifi video surveillance system that was interfering with the crappy USB wifi dongle on their crappy, ancient windows 98 box. I guessed the router password on the first attempt (I'm no Bruce Schneier - it was just that bad a password - I wonder if scotch helps with password guessing?) and changed the wifi channel, and it started working. I got a kiss and lots more scotch out of it. Every time my buddies retell it (they know nothing about IT - they really believe I'm a genius) the story just gets better.
At this rate, I'll have TWO more glorious IT experiences before I retire!
Except that the actual "IT" (not developers) work being performed by H1-Bs is often trivial (not that they do it well, but it's often trivial), and I'd wager most of the self-identified "IT" workers who are unemployed either 1) have an overinflated sense of how much they are worth in the current market and/or, 2) aren't much better than the H1-Bs.
Also, that number is not necessarily all for IT. Other areas (e.g. Chemical Engineering, Accounting, Finance, Management) also hire H1Bs.
Let's face the truth. It is recognized in two ways.... One we are ignored...Two we are yelled at when it does not work even though it does work. The TV series the IT Crowd had an episode called Aunt Erma. The intro to this episode shows it the best. (YouTube has it out there)
which makes this article about 8 years late. New record?
Sorry, no. The same kind of thing was said when time-sharing systems came out at MIT in the early sixties, when Englebart invented the mouse in the late sixties/Xerox PARC did the personal workstation thing in the early seventies, and when the PC came out in the mid-eighties. So it's more like fifty years late. The computer biz goes through boom and bust just like every other industry. And it seems to come in about ten year cycles. Web 2.0 didn't catch the wave because everyone with money was buying houses on Baltic Avenue and then the crash came. So call back in about five-to-seven when whatever's shiny in computers at that time takes hold and provides growth opportunity.
That is all.
You should go into a career that gets you a little more respect, like birthday clown or vacuum cleaner salesman.
After reading that I understood why IT applications are so far behind while hardware improves fast.
The short answer is, Yes! It's a cattle call any more. An example is a rumor in our large company that the CEO and CTO both have stock in the Indian outsourcing company we use. They have the right of first refusal to place someone in all IT positions in our company now. Our CTO said he didn't want any more American workers hired for IT jobs. Not sure if owning stock in that other company is illegal or not (considering they are pushing all hiring through that company) but it's sure as hell unethical.
Get out now. Start your own janitorial company. Both IT and janitors are knee deep in shit, but at least you will always have a job with your own janitorial company.
Sure I saved the first company I worked for's ass when I realized the programmer was offloading all the sourcecode onto a 9-track tape, and while it was copying I backed it all up into my account, and then watched him delete the original stuff, take the tape, and walk out the back door. Mr. Big (who usually was out of town, visiting one of his 12 girlfriends), laughed and slapped me on the shoulder, and said something about "I can't wait to see his face when he tries to demand money for the code" (which was probably due him). And that was about it. No thanks. No "Jesus, I'm glad you caught that!". No raise, bonus, or other meaningful gesture of appreciation. Then, a couple of years later, when I had taken over all the code maint (and was still doing ops), and the VP had left disgusted with Mr. Big, and Betty Boop the DE girl had left in disgust with Mr. Big, he told me he was selling our database and that I was out of a job after working overtime for half pay, and he still owed me $3000, but I'd never see it. Thanks for the glory, asshole.
But I still like telling the story, so, there's your glory :)
Not often I see a signature so related to the post...
IT (irritated technician): I agree with most of the prior Posts; IT is who is blamed when something doesn't work. No one has ever came to me and said, "Man, the Active Directory Accounts and roaming profiles work great, keep it up," rather, "Why the F*CK can't I access my homedrive and backups?" or "I typed the worng password 12 times, why is my account locked?" If IT works, then no one cares... if IT doesn't work, it's your fault for changing things. People just love the "Click (100 times) and see approach" and I'll be paid to wipe their @sses until they automate my job, or send it to India.
In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
Yes. When you do work for a large government client, and they yell at you because the server you installed DON'T WORK!! when in actuality they type in their password wrong 5 times and get locked out, it makes you wonder where the glory went. The only glorified field of IT nowadays seems to be in research and development. Working with a team to actually MAKE something. It is this whole IT as a paid service thing that makes people feel horrible when the day is over. Businesses don't think that IT is worth the money, their outdated equipment breaks, then they blame it on you and make you feel like shit. I've invested quite a bit of time and money in to making my job easier. By means of learning new technology and using PSA with MSP type products to manage large amounts of clients. Still, it just keeps on sucking. Not trying to sound depressed or anything, but for christ's sake. I rather be coding, not fixing people's Outlook, MSN, MyWebSearch, AOL, WinAntiVirus2009 problems. Yes it does make you feel good because there are some people out there that truly appreciate the work you do for them. But 95% of your day can be filled with awesome clients and pats on the back. It only takes that 5% of people to ruin your day. Bring the glory back. Code more.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I don't know about glory, but for me IT for the last 18 years has involved getting paid lots of money for stuff I'd mostly do for free if I could. Sure, there's been the odd banal job or two, but I've tended to move on from those quite quickly - even if some of them were very well paid.
I find it hard to imagine what else I'd do.
Great Windows SFTP Server!
The glory has gone from IT long time in the company I work for (20,000+ staff). There is now too much incompetence. People that are lost..need to be re-educated, that live in the past unaware of today. IT has become sth unflexible, unreliable, unable to deliver. Sometimes I get the impression that IT almost keeps data from our company hostage. Keeps information hidden. What I've seen in other companies, wasn't much better. Too much data stored in proprietary formats, ready to create problems. I predict some rather painfull changes in the near future for a.o. the average IT department.
Hi, IT here. You and I have been getting along pretty good at first, but now things have changed. You used to get excited about working with me. You used to stay late and do things with me because you wanted to. Sometimes you'd even take me home and play with me a bit there too.
Now you just see me 40 hours a week, and sometimes less. You don't touch me the same way; you're just going through the motions. You work with me just enough to get the job done.
Well I'm sick of it. There are a lot of developers out there that still find me exciting. A lot of developers still see the glory of working with me. Hey, let's face it, I'm pretty fucking awesome.
So, anonymous reader, it's over. I'm leaving you. It's not me, it's you. You're the reason you don't find me attractive anymore. I'm just as awesome as ever.
Yeah, I work for money, and IT work pays more. Frankly, I can't do anything else that pays that much, so I put up with this. Of course now I just got offshored and laid off, so now I am lazing around and occasionally knocking off $4 microbrew. I try to avoid telling people I know anything about computers so I don't have to fix them. If I lived on the Big Rock Candy Mountain that would be better, but no sane person would pay us to do nothing.
When the hell has there ever been glory in IT?
Seriously, go look the word up in a dictionary.
-Make something revolutionary and brag about it and you will have a 15 minutes of fame at work
-Make something revolutionary and don't brag about it and someone else will take the credits for you (the person who will take the credits will not be a programmer)
-If it runs perfect and you don't brag about it, people think you are not doing anything
-If it runs perfect and you brag about it, people will have little to no reaction
-If you debug everyone at work and brag about it, people think you are the one making the bugs in the first place
-If you debug everyone at work and don't brag about it, at least your boss will know that you are doing something and are important to the organization(enough to keep your job)
Of course, it's not every week and every year that you can make something revolutionary, that was years ago for me.
These days, it's more like do your job, tell your boss what you have done, take your pay check and don't except anything because you never get anything else than a pay check.
IT is an expense. A necessary one, and if done well the cost will be under control and things won't break down too much or otherwise get in the way of whatever business we have. As with most professions, there's elements of engineering and craftsmanship, and we should rightly take pride in doing it well.
But glory? Never saw any of that.
There was a time, back in the 1970's, when there was definitely GLORY in working in IT. Especially if you were the technical guru in a mostly business-oriented company.
People didn't have the FOGGIEST idea how computers worked. Maybe one in ten people even had access to a computer TERMINAL, and PCs weren't even a glimmer in IBM's eye.
Users viewed us as the High Priests of the cult of the Mainframe. We were the privileged ones, that knew the arcane languages of COBOL and Fortran. Those of us who were really gifted could compose incantations in Job Control Language (JCL) that would actually cause the all-wise all-knowing IBM 360 to DO OUR BIDDING -bwahahahahahahahah!
We produced reports that were used to control every company decision, from inventory supplies to maintenance of equipment. It was GIGO - garbage in, gospel out.
Users came crawling to us as supplicants, begging for the favor of having their requirements coded. Turn-around times for creating a new report were measured in MONTHS.
And there was little or no accountability. No one understood what we did. Errors could be blamed on mysterious "glitches" or "bugs", and it was acceptable to take WEEKS to fix them.
Then the PCs came. And the Microsoft shrink-wrap software. Oh the agony!
Everything became a commodity. Everyone had a computer, and they could control it by clicking a mouse. The art of writing and debugging software became a niche skill like horse-back riding.
Now we have been completely debased. We are reduced from the priesthood of the glorious Mainframes to janitors cleaning out the clogs in the Microsoft plumbing. Kids out of highschool get certifications out of bubblegum machines and want to be put in charge of the IT department.
Users only notice us when something breaks, and all we hear is nagging and complaints.
IT sucks now, and it's all the fault of the evil Microsoft empire.
But someday, there will come a new resurgence of technology. Something that will replace PCs, and make Windows obsolete.
And then we former priests of the Mainframe cult will laugh at all the upstart MSCE's as they realize that their hard-earned skills have become as worthless as our knowledge of VSAM or JCL.
Laugh until our teeth fall into our oatmeal!
this is so funny that the mods were afraid to mod you up
"There are no hero's in IT, only people who fail."
Those of use that feel at the top are the game must be content with driving projects and (forgive me), 'solutions' that work and perform when the environment turns harsh. The rest, make us look bad.
I spent over 15 years as an IT professional (systems admin, network admin, support tech, customer service tech, programmer, database developer, web developer, etc.). I burned out, hard. That, coupled with some personal setbacks in my life, caused a short period (about 6 years!) of realignment. Now, I'm back in college doing what I've wanted to do since I was 16 years old. In other words, I was distracted, and now I'm back on track.
To my parents, IT was prestigious. When my dad grounded me as a kid, he never took away my computer. Well, he did once; he returned it immediately, but I remained grounded. He had the idea that I was learning more by programming my C64 than the grounding would teach me. In hindsight, I think he was wrong, but that's what happened.
Many years ago, I said, "Just watch. In a decade or two, IT professionals will be just like auto mechanics, and the IT industry will be just as screwed up as the auto industry." I think it's there now, or at least very close to it.
Adventure, excitement. A Jedi craves not these things.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
When I had my own business, I put in a ton of work too. You've got to do it.
However, when you are a paid or salaried worker and routinely work more than 40 a week, something is wrong with you, not your employer.
Yeah, I pooped my pants.
The IT industry has changed a lot in the last ten years or so, largely for the better. No people aren't as amazed as they used to be by your technical prowess, but companies are starting to actually understand what it is we do. To a certain extent this means that they're no longer throwing money at us willy nilly, but that's not really a long term success plan anyway, and there's plenty of consulting work left if your dream is spreading FUD until someone pays you to solve a problem which doesn't exist.
Personally, I'm glad of the change in IT. Every person who works in the field and loves what they do has suffered because of the thousands of idiots who thought that IT was the easy road to glory and riches. It's not. It's a job. Even worse, it's a job in the service industry. You're not going to get rich quick, you're not going to get the girl, they're not going to give you a medal and praise you every time you walk down the hall. If that's what you want and you hate working in IT, then GTFO and leave the jobs for people who actually enjoy the work. Generally speaking they're better at it than you.
Or the comp-u-janitor... Or the guy who simultaneously is expected to perform miracles and yet every year is criticized on his performance appraisal for failing to meet goals and deadlines never communicated or defined. I am expected to see far into the future and make sure nothing ever fails, especially when due to idiot user interference. (Hey, when you f*** with the printer and it breaks, how the f*** am I supposed to magically know this? And do you think I can't tell when I come to look at it? Why do you lie?)
It's frustrating. The pay is l-o-w. The respect is in the basement. I am expected to be available in person at a moment's notice, or by phone, or by email, or SMS immediately. I am not supposed to take vacations except when it's convenient for everyone else. But of course, that time never happens.
My mistake was in raising everyone's expectations. Now I have to live in that house. :-\
is 24x7 security guardpost......
nth more than that........XD
unknown and will not be known
The fact is IT was a coveted career choice that unfortunately flooded the market with a lot of 6 week wonders. The days of every shmoe on the street thinking he'll get a certification and get a job paying $50K a year are over. And, trust me I know because I AM one of those shmoes who lucked up and ended up with a company that outlived the Dot Com Bubble; and long enough for me to get competent at what I do.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Dude,
what the hell have you been smoking..... and more importantly..... Can I have some?
This reminds me of something a surgeon in his mid-50's told me, after I had a bad experience with younger, just-out-of-surgical-residency surgeons: "I remember when I was young and foolish, wanting to operate on everything I first saw."
You're 26. You still have the fire in the belly, the desire to change the world. Kudos, and hope you keep it for a long time. But you also have the inexperience to understand what those of us who have been in this industry longer than you've been alive, and were once the hotshot young 3x-employee-of-the-quarter ourselves, are saying.
For many of us, things aren't the same in the technology world. Everything has become mission-critical. Uptime requirements have become permanent availability. Stress levels have increased substantially, as management has moved from commander's intent (this is what I want, make it happen), to micromanagement. It's not so much a loss of glory; it's a loss of fun, of research, of designing solutions to complex problems.
For me, the two biggest flags of things not being right has been the elimination of lunch, and the resignation people have over their conditions. Up until about 2002, heading out to lunch with colleagues wasn't an issue; now, it's like pulling teeth. They're all busy and either skip lunch entirely, or eat while working.
Add to that, you would not believe the number of people I hear as a contractor bemoan their current position. When I point out they could always go somewhere else, they say the same thing: "yeah, but where else can you go?" The two things these people have in common are experience with different companies, and none of them are over 33-34.
So yeah, enjoy yourself, but do print this out. You'll want something to remind you of your glory days when you're old and remembering the good ol' days--say when you turn 32-33.
I think it matters where you work. For example lots of my friends and I work at "cool" IT places (but we're called engineers and we run the worlds largest sites)
We still all get laid for this, girls think its hot when you work for Facebook or YouTube or Zynga (just say you run Mob Wars!!!!!) or Slide
caveat - this only works in the bay area.
That's 65,000 NEW H1-Bs approved per year with NO CAP on renewed H1-Bs except the maximum time limit. You are an ID10T!
IT Admins: The idiots that sit around doing nothing when everything is running well, the idiots that fucked things up when something is broken.
I've been working in MIS/IS/IT for twenty+ years and I don't ever remember any glory. Paper cuts from punch card and fan fold green bar printouts sure, glory no.
You might get a little recognition now and then, but the person stocking the frig with the free soda got more respect.
And to the person who thinks that people are more technically savvy and need less IT these days, I say, "Idiot!" Just because you can twitter and logon to Pandora does not make you an IT person. Write me a report pulling data from multiple DBs (MSSQL, MySQL, and Oracle) and then display it with charts/graphs and pivot tables. Oh and make sure all 800 nodes in the compute cluster are all working on the same data set, and that they all submit their required daily status, and swap to the new data set within the weekly 5 minute maintenance window. Crap, appointments and meetings are only being scheduled on 1/3 of the 2000+ employees' calendars. Now drop everything because Enterprise CRM is not sending notifications to the 5000+ global call centers staff! Or my personal favorite, figure out why the five thousand servers purchased by the National Telephone company of a small Central American country refuse accept any voice mail passwords from their 200,000 customers...
None of that was glorious, but did get me some good bonus checks.
--Magus
IT is, and always has been, the high-tech equivalent of the maintenance guys who keep the lights on and the toilets flowing. We are under appreciated when everything works, blamed for every failing, and hailed like gods for fifteen seconds after we do the impossible.
Face it. We are a well paid trade, and most of the time don't have to get our hands as dirty.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Want to know where all the glory went in computing? Out the door with the SGI workstations and other "expensive" things in IT. Every time one of you linux fanboi's replace a real enterprise system with some desktop computer and your weenie little OS your killing hundreds of vendor paid for lunches and training classes where you have to travel and other "perks" of working in the IT industry. Stop your bitching. Your the idiots that brought it all on yourselves! Enjoy the drudgery of what "cheap" gets you. While you can that is. Until your all replaced by your own freetard operating system running in "the cloud".
The glory of IT is not in IT, but in software engineering. IT is the dark, smelly, hairy underbelly of computing technology. Software engineering is the light, bright, wonderful topside, basking in sunshine and wonder.
IT personnel are responsible for keeping crappy, obsolete, virus-laden servers working without enough money to get anything better. Any money spent on IT is considered an expense. "Good" IT consists of finding the cheapest off-the-shelf software to sorta do the job.
Software engineers are given the challenge of a problem to solve, and the money and time to do it in. Good software engineering consists of designing the most elegant technical architecture to solve the problem.
IT personnel are regularly yelled at as if they were barely more valuable than a "click next to install package" monkey because that's often what they are. Even when personally far more capable, the job only requires you to "click next" when installing somebody else's software, perform backups, and set passwords. IT personnel are relegated to the back store room and not allowed to see anybody, except accidentally on the bus on the way to the local Carl's Jr.
Software engineers regularly meet with executives in fancy boardrooms with glass tables. They are there to design quality solutions that will be used by thousands or millions. They are treated with accord, respect, and often, mild deference. Lunch is often provided by hired caterers at design meetings.
No matter how "senior" you are in IT, you are easily replaceable by anybody with the requisite MCSE certificate.
There are never enough qualified software engineers - they are pretty much always in high demand and paid to match. When software engineers work in a field, they quickly acquire domain expertise that's almost impossible to replace.
People who confuse IT and Software Engineering often wind up working in the wrong field. Put in the time to become a software engineer, and you won't ever regret it. Cram through your MCSE or CCNA, and become one of the faceless droids. (Yay! I know what an MSI file is! I can calculate a subnet!)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's like Florida for ex-IT workers.
I have it on good authority that retirement is glorious.
But it goes a (nasty) step further:
Microsoft's money has always dwarfed others in order to make people believe they are the only solution available.
That tactic includes controlling what is published by the media in order to make sure that the masses will never know what could be detrimental to Microsoft reputation.
You can also see it the other way around: in a single word, that's blatant CENSORSHIP.
How many among you have seen any streamline media talking about a (3-month old) super-fast web server with ANSI C scripts that beats (in user-mode) IIS 7.0 (in the kernel) (5x faster than ASP.Net C#)?
Why immensely inferior project receive exposure and not the best?
That's why there is no more glory in I.T.: the incumbents are just censoring it because it would hurt their sales.
When I started in IT, and I suspect most modern IT professionals, it was the heyday. Late 90's, Dot-com bubble hadn't yet burst. Companies were throwing all sorts of money at IT because they were convinced they needed it even if they didn't know why. The bubble changed all that. Over the past decade IT as an industry has started to mature. Its not the place you're likely to find a smart mouth kid with pink hair and piercings all over the place. Those days are gone for the most part. Replaced is that smug attitude and outward appearance with a more professional candor. IT is growing up. Lots of professions go through these life cycles. If you consider IT in the 90's relative to IT in the late 70's and early 80's, IT is cyclical. So I think while the glory days of our fond 1990's have passed there is more glory as technology will advance. When it does most of us will be old farts and there will be a new round of young punk kids to hire in droves where there is such a shortage companies will hire then at any cost.
As I point out occasionally, information technology is like stationary engineering, but a century later. Stationary engineering was the field to be in around 1870 or so, when factories were starting to get advanced technology like electric motors, and really big steam engines were coming into use. Young boys saw that big engine at the Centennial Exhibition in 1874 and wanted to be stationary engineers. It impressed people at the time that the big engine needed only one guy running it, and he was usually sitting on the platform reading a newspaper.
By 1910 or so, you just ordered motors and panelboards from General Electric, hooked the gear up according to the directions, and bought power from the local Edison company. It was a routine job, but still a growth area. There was plenty of work and the pay was good, but it wasn't cutting edge any more.
Today, there are still stationary engineers and electricians, and it's an union job. Stop by the boiler room and say hi.
IT is taking the same path, a century later.
I think we need to return to the question of what happens as we automate more and more of society. Do we really need everyone having a menial job? Couldn't we just have something like welfare, so people who want to work can do so and be productive, and we can keep the majority of people out of work, comfortably at home playing video games all day? Isn't much of PHB syndrome caused by people trying to justify their paycheck?
Wasn't that the plot basis of the distopic Matrix movies?
the PC became the Business Computer. Since the late 90's, corporations have more or less raped the entire industry, wrecking the Internet at the same time with ads fucking everywhere. Both Linux and Microsoft are both now about how to improve corporate efficiency. Apple's existence 10 years ago was about having Gates on the podium promising a new version of Office on the Mac. It's about having the latest Microsoft Office, implant a blackberry to it's staff so that the CEO's can go about golfing. Computers are obsolete before they even leave the factory. Seriously, did we go through 40 years of computing just so that grandpa could get an account on Facebook? And people wonder why IT recruitment is at an all time low? (at least over at this end of the pond)
An influx of people who don't know anything or are not actually interested in computing has led to it's downfall in the workplace - simple as that. The micro-management factor comes in and pretty soon you have a meeting of 15 people where 1 or 2 people in that meeting only know what they're talking about!
Middle managers and project analyst's running around asking YOU how to do their job :-) And you telling them how to do their job, what questions to ask etc ontop of having to fix the damn issue.
On one project where I had to setup on my own frontend Apache servers with a JBOSS application, CISCO load balancer, replication to DR etc I had 4 people telling me what needed to be done, the most problematic thing they had to worry about was undeleting an email!
This is why IT for those who actually DO IT - sucks right now.
Yah, there was glory for all of you till one of you got all of you exposed as the red-necks you probably are. Everyone knows your just doing this to keep from fixing fences.
Now quit your lingering and get back to work on the firewalls.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Thank you man, you made my day. :-)
I'm an IT monkey (Isn't most of /.?) I don't get the glory, I get a paycheck. It may not be a fat one, but it isn't thin either.
I'm just trying to survive this recession with my skin intact (and my house and car still in my possession). That means no glory, 45 hour work weeks and all sorts of bad stuff. The good thing is, I enjoy most of it.
1) That's a guess on your part unsupported by any citations
2) People unemployed generally *WILL* take a cut in what they were USED to making when the alternative is making either zero or unemployment which generally pays less then they would make working.
1) Your argument is -- well. Silly.
2) How can it be better bringing in "not much better" outside labor when the labor pool does exist here already?
3) You need to review how H1-Bs are SUPPOSED to work.
Speaking from my personal experience, and having slowly (too slowly) working up the corporate ladder glory is what you make it. If you love what you do, and cherish the battles there's plenty of glory to be had. The issue is that everyone is different from both a support and end user perspective. My problems can be summed up fairly readily though, and some were already clarified above. IT Managers are usually from external sources so do not know how the business runs, as all businesses operate differently even if the same field (ie. one bank will utilize different systems from another). IT hardware/software decisions seem to be made on the golf course with no input from staff. Cutting costs is put priority one over everything else, even if it does not make sound business sense. For example, our business recommends a global IT staff/end user ratio of around 300 to 1. I work in our head office building and actually had to fight my boss to be allowed to stay here when they farmed out IT to a cheaper location. End users, for the most part, do not want to deal with remote fixes. They want people to come to them and fix problems. I support around 300+ physically in one building and it's too much sometimes. Especially when companies are notorious for making you work as much as possible for the least amount of money. My job title does not include VCC support. It does not include IP Telephony support. It does not include Network support. It does not include Server build support. I do it all though, because if I didn't the business would be affected. I know it's a lot of rambling, but it's the state of IT and it's hard to get it all together. The only hope is that the next generation of people getting into this field realize it's as much about the smarts as it is about the people.
I'm just going to repeat what most on here have already said; IT is a job there isn't any sort of "Glory" thing about it. If you seek Glory and recognition chose a different career path.
Right on. I can respect that.
If you couldn't tell, I work for one of the companies where I am doing everything.
It is nice that I am getting so much recognition for it though. It could be true that 5-10 years down the road it will be different, but right now, it is nice.
The world is how you make it
Good grief man, you can't be serious! Hahaha... A twenty-six year old rockstar in computer programming, 2 years experience... Oh wait, you are serious, let me laugh even harder! HAHAHA! Whew, that's better :)
;)
You need to learn a bit of humility. I've been programming for as long as you've been alive, and I'm only 38. Yes, I even got paid work in computer programming before most kids are able to get a job at McDonalds, which fueled my desire to learn and work even more. By the time I was 26, I was already running my own consulting business, and still am to this day. I may know a thing or two, and occasionally pat myself on the back for being clever, but I certainly know that there's more out there that I don't know.
Maybe I'm a bit above average as a programmer, but whether I am or not comes secondary to the way I handle myself and my treat clients, and people in general. You can't go around acting like you're smarter and better than everyone else. Eventually it's going to come back to haunt you.
Good luck with your job working for the man as a "rockstar"... If you're genuinely talented maybe I'll hire you someday
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
I thought Edsger Dijkstra is glorious. Dennis Ritchie, Andrew Tanenbaum, Linus Torvalds etc.
Probably anyone working at any job could get glorious if he does something exceptional. Therefore it's no surprise there's more "room" for glory in emerging fields simply because there's more to discover and less competition though it's also more difficult. IT has matured thus leaving less glory treasures.
Of course that's MY idea of glory. Yours may be, the attention of the girls. We get even more fundamental here, the choice of leaving a genetic heritage or a memetic one.
IT: Getting recognition from clueless idiots: YOU. ARE. DOING. IT. WRONG.
When brilliant and innovative engineers lost control of the computer and IP industries, when control was assumed by lawyers and businessmen, the beauty of new ideas and innovation disappeared under the weight of corporate overhead.
We all hope that someday soon that a new American industry will be invented, a technology as exciting as aviation or microcomputers or the internet, an innovation that engineers and other techies can enjoy prior to its being noticed by our culture's parasites and co-opted by their greed.
s/ Cautious Nerd
Noobs? Sock Puppets? Jerks? I think that some great efforts are being made to correct this problem. I, for one, focus on positive mods, and just try to pick extra-worthy comments to push to the top. I've always read at -1, occasionally to my regret. For a while, I've been getting 15 points at a crack, then last week, I kept getting more, 90 points in all. Also modded my first Troll, used up 5 points on a guy using foul language and ad-hominem attacks. I didn't get any more points after that, figured I'd run afoul of a filter, but then a few days later got some more, and am up to 30 this week. Just tryin' to help, as IRL.
65,000 - 195,000 per year, for the last 20 years or so... I would estimate between 25-50% of those 5-6 million tech jobs are people that are or once were on an H1B.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Everyone knows that |IT> = ((1/SQRT(2))|attractive> - (1/SQRT(2))|unattractive>)
That is, those who work in IT are incompatible with attractiveness. You cannot be simultaneously employed in IT and attractive to women.
Contrary to what other posters have been saying, there's definitely glory in IT. Glory is when you save a company millions of bucks, or when everyone loves you because you make their jobs easier, save them time, or when people come to you with problems and go away with solutions. Usually this sort of scenario takes place at small to mid-sized companies, not at mega-corporations.
I was once told by a nurse that IT people were a dime a dozen; she then went on to ask how to BCC an e-mail and the look on my face must have said it all, so she looked at me and asked if I could "read a CT scan." I politically declined and instructed her what a BCC was in an e-mail and how to do it.
I never knew that sending an e-mail in some minds were as complicated as reading a CT scan...