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Moving Away From the IT Field?
irving47 writes 'With the economy the way it is, it's a little iffy to even think about switching careers completely, but lately, I've gotten more and more fed up with trying to keep up with the technical demands of companies and customers that are financially and even verbally unappreciative. While I might be good at it, and the money is adequate, I'm curious to hear from Slashdotters who have gone cold-turkey from their IT/Networking careers to something once foreign to them. How did you deal with the income difference, if any? Do you find yourself dealing with people more, and if so, how did that work out?'
I'm an ex-Navy guy. My military career field was journalism and public affairs. When I got out of the service I went directly into IT.
The same factors that governed my career change would likely work in this, and any other similar situation:
1. Identify things that you LIKE to do.
2. Of the things that you LIKE to do, do you also possess marketable skills doing them?
3. Can you put those skills on a resume?
4. What can you do NOW to add credibility to your new career?
Work those things out and making the leap should be fine. Beware, leaving IT can often mean leaving a good paycheck. You'll want to get your finances and lifestyle in check before making the jump.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Seriously. You can start with one bag of seed and a few plastic buckets and sell to local businesses (especially organic businesses and asian stores since they sell larger quantities) and scale up from there. Inventory isn't a huge problem since it only takes 72 hours to grow the sprouts, and you can buy the seed by the 25kg bag.
Obviously, I'm simplifying things, but honestly it's a business that's incredibly easy to get into, resistant to non-local competition due to the perishability of the sprouts, and if you can 'get it right', you can definitely market on quality
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
other people's poop. So why not switch to nursing
IT jobs get absolutely no respect any more.
They get paid crap.
They have *ON CALL* work.
They have to read the minds of dolts who make more money (and work in a more sex balanced environment and who often get to go out drinking on the company dime).
I had to beg our manager to take the guys to lunch. And he wouldn't spring 15 bucks for an appetizer.
Meanwhile the other side of the building is meeting for drinks at the bar at night dropping easily 10 to 20 bucks per person.
At my friend's company, the IT folks get up at 6am, get left at work while everyone goes out drinking for extended lunches (because they are "sales and executives")-- entire company is smaller than my last team. Executives my ass.
Somehow, we let them do this to us. When I was getting into the field, we were priest kings in air-conditioned rooms with complete power. But with each passing year, we underbid each other and passed control over to people who worked us to death.
Leave the field.
If your in it, learn to fail gracefully.
Negotiate for more money and leave when they don't give it to you. Leave them in a lurch.
This all sounds like a troll but it's more bitterness seeing complete idiots making 6 and 7 figure salaries while the "intelligent" folks are working as slaves.
How did it come to this?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
- Skills [read buzzwords] change every few years - Check
- Buzzword compliance resume is more valuable than actual skills - Check
- Your job can be shipped off to India, China or the Next-Offshore-Location any single day - Check
- You make a lot less than what people think you do - and a lot of your staff hates you [esp for Administrators] - Check
Did I miss anything ? So what's there NOT to hate an IT Job ?
IT isn't about training, it's about being able to find answers and solve problems of a technical nature. Development requires training, although the best developers I know are almost entirely self-taught. The best in IT usually come from other backgrounds, and have an aptitude for technology. The "pure techies" don't go very far. Throw in an MBA, CGA or PMO certificate and you are moving up in IT.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out.
The problem is, you are an overpaid janitor, and if your union keeps forcing companies to give you 6 weeks vacation, $80/hour, and free blowjobs, they can and will drive those companies into extinction.
Then you can pat yourself on the back and bring your good old-fashioned union-label mentality to the soup kitchen.
At some point, "collective bargaining" becomes "killing the goose." Ask any GM stockholder.
Sure, people selling little baggies of things will prosper and grow. But it ain't going to be cheerios.
Honestly, I'm an Indian IT guy who looks like this and is a straight edge vegetarian. But despite all that, twice in Portland, people have stopped me and asked me for some weed.
Now, there's a market which expands during a recession.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
You've obviously never been treated by a nurse who was in the job for the wrong reasons. Please don't ever SUGGEST nursing to people, unless they demonstrate a genuine compassion, patience, and willingness to help others even on their worst days.
And what does the executive do that justifies his income?
That's something you can ask a GM stockholder too. Hurr.
Long, tedious and boring story cut short, one day I woke up and decided that I no longer enjoyed working in the IT sector.
(after about 20 years of putting up with the various levels of brain death involved in supporting both the machines and their (ab)users..), so jumped.
I'd gotten so sick of the whole game that after I quit my last full time IT job, swore I'd never do it again, and it was almost a year before I touched a computer of any sorts again, and about two before I went back online.
First couple of years readjusting to the (major) cut in salary were pretty nasty, saving grace was that I owned my house outright and had no outstanding debts, even so , financially were tight at times but things have sort of stabilised. Currently working for a charity as a sort of Über-handyman (plumbing,painting,electronics and hardware repair, NC machine programming etc etc - the etc etc including IT work...but for reasons explained below),
To make ends meet, I've been doing things like plumbing, woodwork (joinery mostly), painting and decorating etc, it sort of helped that I'd a family who were involved in these trades so I'd grown up knowing how to do most of it., and honestly, I've been as happy as a member of the genus sus in coprophilous materia..
A cautionary note though, once it is known that you actually know anything about IT in whatever field you jump to, be prepared for what usually happens next. I'm slowly getting dragged back into IT in my current job at the charity, mostly through the electronics related work I'm doing for them (my 'field' before I jumped to the computer/network admin side of things), but also through what I'm seeing as seriously screwed up Network/computer installations within the charity I work for (and others) which they're paying people good money to 'administer' on their behalf.
Even though you swear blind at the start that you'll never do any IT work again, it *will* find you..in my case, I don't mind as it's for a reasonable cause (and I really hate seeing people who've got Noddy MCxxxx and CCxxx bits of paper pretending to know what they're doing and taking the piss in this manner, especially with a charity).
So, be prepared for a drop in living standards based on monies etc, I can't tell you if you'll be any happier. I am, I actually sleep more than a couple of hours a night now (after years of 18-20 hour days, six days a week) and I no longer see reams of 'C' code in my bloody dreams (and I praise the flying spaghetti monster for that, as I do so hate 'C' ) but that's just me, YMMV.
One bit of advice that I can give you from my experiences jumping ship. I can't stress this enough, if you do go through with it, *plan* your exit, know what else you *can* do, and see if you could survive/make a living doing whatever you choose. Plan your exit, don't just jump ship the way I did before you have something else sorted out to go to first.. This lack of forward planning was my only mistake/regret, understandable at the time, as I was seriously pissed off and wasn't quite thinking straight, but this lack of planning probably caused me the most grief the first couple of years.
Like at least one other poster has said, in general it'll help if you have a degree of some sort as well.
and finally if you do jump, then good luck, and hope it works out for you.
I hear people complaining about their shitty IT conditions, and I really do sympathise.
I used to be in a similar situation, before I learned a bit more about Economics and applied it to job hunting.
Supply and Demand alone suggest jobs in places like the Games industry (to which most male gamers under the age of about 25 aspire) will be horrible. The massive supply of labour will be chewed up and spat out by the fickle industry, paid low money and treated like crap.
Likewise, many people in IT are on the cost side of the ledger, where a company is always going to be seeking for reductions in cost and increases in efficiency.
My suggestion? Find an industry which is old (and thus has well established work principles), deeply unsexy, and (if you can) look for jobs on the income side of the ledger. And then be the guy that steps up to take responsibility for safe-guarding that income, the guy that can step up and speak truth to power and be taken seriously because it's your job to make sure that $100m, or $1b, or $10b revenue stream never ever ever stops.
In my case, I discovered the logistics industry and found a programming job at the largest company in my country maintaining the codebase responsible for 80% of their sales (and climbing).
Good money, normal 9-5 hours, prohibited from doing overtime, a proper infra team to manage the hardware, a proper ops team to deploy and run our software, and a reasonable ability to requisition just about anything we need, because The Spice Must Flow.
I would imagine that similar jobs to mine exist in all kinds of places that sound really boring, places like power companies and garbage recycling and anywhere else that needs a lot of IT but will never be mentioned on the front page of slashdot.
I was in the IT industry for more than 6 years from when I left high school. I also became sick of the crap involved with the customers within that field of work so I decided to go back to uni to become a teacher. While I was at uni I also trained to become a bus driver (this only took 2 weeks) and was employed straight away as a city bus driver part time. During my 4 years at uni I spent 3 years as a bus driver, but in my last year of uni I had to spend much more time on my course work, so I left bus driving and retrained over my uni break to become a carer of disabled people. This job lasted the whole year I was at uni and I was promoted from a carer to an activities co-ordinator in that time over people who had been carers for 15+ years. I think IT peoples reasoning and logic skills plus the fact that on average we are smarter than the average worker enables us to move very easily in to 'lower' jobs. I found that bus driving and my work with the disabled was extremely enjoyable, and the pay while a bit less than working in IT was very easy to live off, even though I was only a part time worker. Now I am a teacher I have spent 1 year teaching primary school in Australia, and now I have moved to South Korea, home of the stupidly fast internet speeds that I could only ever dream about, and I'm teaching English here. I'll be going back to Australia at the end of this year and continuing to teach in a government primary school. The kids in Australia and Korea love me because I will play computer games with them, also I am teaching them the logic and reasoning skills that most of us IT people (or ex IT people) take for granted so my kids often get test scores noticeably higher than other classes. I really think that moving to the three other jobs, 1 un-skilled, 1 semi-skilled, and finally the last one skilled, has been the greatest thing I have ever done in my life and I would recommend any IT person who is thinking of getting out to just do it! As I said, IT people bring a unique set of skills to any job and no matter what the job I think you will find your self getting promoted much quicker than the average person. 6 years ago if you had of told me I was going to drive buses, look after disabled people, and then become a teacher, I would have thought you where crazy! Today my life is much richer for the interesting people (and not angry smegg heads who just want me to fix their stupid computer NOW) I have met and the new skills that I never thought I could possibly learn.
I joined the US Army as an Infantryman. Can't get much farther away from IT than that. I wasn't trying to move away from IT, it was response to my country at war and the subsequent loss of a friend to insurgent action in Iraq that made my decision for me.
I obviously work with people in an entirely different way than I did in IT. For the record, I was a software engineer with IBM in Pittsburgh on the Websphere Competency Center team. I loved my job and still can't imagine a better group of co-workers and business partners to work with. Maybe I'll get back to tech after my time in the Army, maybe I won't.
In the Army I'm currently a 240B medium machine gun team leader. My age (29 when I joined the Army) and experience (good civilian job, college) earned me a little more flexibility in promotions, but no more respect with my peers. The average age in my company is approximately 21. It's been an uphill battle to compete physically, but it's a challenge I've found fascinating.
As for the money, better make sure you're in a good position before making a move like this. Thanks to my 7 years at IBM, I was, but it would be a nightmare to try to live off lower enlisted salary when you're used to much more.
My previous experience did land me one unfortunate headache, the CO/1SG found out that I was "good with computers" and stuck me in company operations for 10 months. Try to avoid talking about your previous IT experience if you go this route.
You hit upon something here. There are a lot of IT related fields. One can be a sysadmin, a DBA, an admin watching over developer projects, an architect who designs infrastructure, the network admin who sets up the core/edge structure, the implementers who implement, the security auditor, the corporate compliance people, etc.
I wonder if people might be better off changing their IT field, rather than leaving the industry completely and starting from ground zero. For example, changing from a sysadmin specialty to a DBA would require a lot less retooling than changing completely out of IT and not having any common skills.
"Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out."
As someone who has worked public sector, was a union member, and even striked with the union I can say that this is not entirely the case, unions are dangerous and I would rather see them severely weakened in the UK.
Unions are okay if their power is kept small, but in the UK they go out of control- Unison, one of the UK's biggest unions claims over 2 million members, and despite the fact half the working population are taking paycuts right now, Unison is still pushing for pay rises, even though basic IT technicians are still getting paid £29k in some local authorities where their true market worth in private sector for the low levels of ability would be around £16k to £18k. Governments are powerless to say no though, because they simply can't deal with the damage caused by a union that can put a good portion of it's 2 million members on strike. The story is the same with teachers whereby you have teachers strikes because secondary school teachers are underpaid whilst the same union covers primary school teachers who hence get the same rises and who are hence now heavily overpaid for their job, but what can the government do? risk having an entire generation of kids education disrupted setting them back for life?
Similarly, unions have a habit of protecting people at work regardless of the merit of that. This makes it impossible to get rid of dead weight, because you can't afford the associated costs with doing so - it's cheaper to keep those useless people in the job, providing a shit service than it is to get rid of them.
We also have them acting as a strongly political tool, they mail out regularly to their 2 million members telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for, in my opinion this type of political lobbying is far beyond the remit of a union, particularly one with 2 million members who have distinctly varied political views.
I agree a country entirely without unions really would kind of suck for workers, but on the same note, as someone who lives in a country with unions that are simply far too powerful, and as someone who now, looking back wishes they had not given any support whatsoever to such unions I disagree that you want unions to become more popular or more powerful. They can bring countries to a standstill even when their argument has no merit- you only have to look at the current UK postal strikes for evidence of that and note also that the Royal Mail is having to pay £20m a year to provide premises and time off work for it's staff to perform union activities. That's a hell of a burden on a company when the only result is for the company to get screwed over for that £20m it has had to spend. It's hard to tell what the Royal Mail strikes are even about as the official line seems to be changing daily from the union involved- originally they admitted job cuts were needed and that that was not the issue but now they are saying it is about jobs. The Royal Mail has lost a £25m Amazon contract because of this, you simply can't have a union holding a company to ransom like that at the expense of the company, particularly when the union doesn't even seem to be able to remain consistent in what it's actual demands are!
Hairstylists and plumbers aren't going away or going to be outsourced any time soon.
"Insourced" Habla espanol. The key is to find a position where the job can't be sent to China or the worker can't be imported from Mexico. Mostly, this seems to revolve around sales, management, some medical (not all), some education (certainly not all), organized crime/politics and marketing. Anything else?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That might not be the case in every state.
"More power to them! In fact you could argue Unison is keeping the pay of private sector technicians from falling further."
No, the fundamental issue is that the type of technicians we're talking about are technicians whose ability doesn't reach much past being able to stick a Windows CD in the drive, boot off it and install it then maybe install a few apps- I would add network drives to the list, but one particular person I used to work with couldn't even do that. He spent 4 hours trying to figure out why he couldn't get a drive to map from another PC, the reason? He hadn't shared it on the other machine. How can we justify paying these people £29k? So what if private sector only pays them £16k - it's all they're worth. Skilled IT workers still get a decent wage in private sector, but the fundamental issue is that many IT workers simply are not skilled despite them believing otherwise because they built their last PC all by themselves. The person to which I refer was by no way unique either, at least 90% of IT workers on that wage level in the council were of similar low levels of ability to him.
Unions aren't part of the market because they require a lot of legal backing to support their effectively artificial existence. In a free market Royal Mail would not have to pay £20million a year to support a union that does not benefit it as a company. If people went on strike in a truly free market they would simply be sacked and replaced - especially in this climate where you have 70,000 Royal Mail workers whining that they don't know their companies future business plan, whilst 2.5million are sat jobless only able to dream of having the job, the pay and the benefits those workers have in the Royal Mail right now.
We have systems like the minimum wage, equality laws, and the industrial tribunal system to ensure workers aren't totally abused so the loss of unions altogether wouldn't be the end of the world, but as I say I don't totally detest the idea of unions. I just wish they stuck to their remit, and were capable of accepting when things are good rather than insisting on continuing to fight battles which really don't make sense to fight- again the CWU won a battle against the Royal Mail a year or two ago, and what's the result of that? It moves onto something else which is so loosely defined it shows they're just trying to justify their existence and it is to the detriment of society- we can't for example justify having a two tier system where the private sector employee getting paid what he's worth at £18k a year is paying taxes so the equally low skilled worker in public sector is getting paid £29k a year, all because the union will play havoc with society if anyone dares try to fix it.
Please don't ever SUGGEST nursing to people, unless they demonstrate a genuine compassion, patience, and willingness to help others even on their worst days.That is to say, unless they're pretty much the antithesis of the average Slashdotter. :)
The executive is slightly different than the union worker. The union worker probably does not have a university education and so makes less than the executive, while taking shit for 40 years. The executive has a university eductation which taught him/her to blow the right persons while climbing the corporate ladder. The executive took shit for maybe 10-20 years and now makes a much larger income because they had to sell their soul to the company to get where they are.
Okay, maybe I'm slightly bitter. . . .
Both of you are right. Quite the paradox, no?
"You're twenty years too late, Thatcher already destroyed the unions. This is why we have the longest working hours and most inequality in Europe. Maybe if we'd kept the unions around we wouldn't be scrapping for minimum wage agency work whilst the bankers and executives walk off with all the cash."
No, Thatcher destroyed private sector unions, hence why the British economy recovered from it's low point post-Labour in the 70s, 80s and 90s. You cannot blame her for Britain's long working hours because it is Labour that has pushed the opt-out of the EU working hour limit. Also, Labour is equally to blame for bankers running rampant, I know it's fashinable for pro-union people to blame the countries ills on Thatcher, but the longer ago Thatcher was in power, and the more our country descends into economic tragedy under Labour the less sense that argument makes.
"So workers who would otherwise make fuck-all, now get an income which may well help them pay a mortgage and raise a family. No doubt if these same workers were making £16k, you'd be whining about having to pay taxes for the services which they can no longer afford themselves."
People don't have a right to make a decent wage if they're not willing to put effort into working hard and learning skills. I would agree there is an issue when skilled, intelligent, hard working people are underpaid for sure, but in the case I'm referring to we have lazy, unskilled people getting overpaid due to union support.
"On the other hand, we have newspapers regularly telling millions of people who to vote for. Considering your anti-union views, I'd imagine the Times is the paper which tells you how to think."
Yes, that's right. Wait what? Sorry, I didn't realise I read newspapers? Nice assumption- obviously everyone whose anti-union is a Conservative that reads the Times of course. No, you see, my anti-union views stem from being a member of Unison and seeing how utterly stupid the decisions it made were, seeing how it pushed the mindless agenda and how it protected and tried to seek rewards for incompetence. My political leaning is towards the Liberal Democrats, I would vote neither Tory nor Labour.
"Britain has the weakest and smallest unions in Europe, according to right-wing dogma this should make us extremely prosperous. Instead, we're actually worse off, still in recession when everyone else is recovering."
What? You do know the only country with a stronger economy than Britain in Europe is Germany and France right? I didn't realise length in recession was the only possible measure of a countries economic strength. You do realise Germany fell further into recession than us right? and that France is only ahead of us because our reliance on the banking sector which is not good in the current economic climate yes? You do realise France could be way ahead of us if it weren't for the heavy subsidies it had to pay industries like agriculture because of it's strong farmers unions threatening to bring the entire nation to a standstill each time right? Britain still has a stronger economy than every other single country in Europe bar these two by quite a margin. It's almost certain that Britain will in a few years move ahead of France again, and for a while we were even almost ahead of Germany. I agree our reliance on finance is a bad thing, but to suggest unions have any relation to our countries imagined lack of prosperity when we're still one of the top world economies is laughable. The only country that comes close is Italy, after that it's Russia followed by Spain, whose economies are almost half the size of ours.
"The Royal Mail staff might not be on strike if the management hadn't reneged on the deal. But as your only information on the strike comes from right-wing sources, it's no wonder you're so ill-informed. They can't be struggling that much for cash if they can afford to pay Crozier several million a year."
Obviously you're dead right about my sources, because after all the BBC and The Guardian are so utterly rig
It seems to me that that's a problem between the shareholders (employer) and the executive (employee). If the shareholders don't guarantee that they're getting their money's worth out of their executives, I don't see how that justifies making sure everybody below him also should be overpaid. Owners of stock in retirement plans (all of us with 401k and IRA, education funds, and other stock ownership programs) need to create voter blocks that vote out overpaid executives and offer the job to people at rates we consider more reasonable.
Does the fact that they get away with it justify the unions keeping other people out of work to justify higher wages for the employees who got in based on who they know or are related to? We have a Goodyear plant in my town, and I heard a long time ago that to get a job, you need to be related to somebody in the union. Too bad for all those people that could have a job if the company could have reasonable hiring policies.
Probably because a lot of "pure techies" (NOT ALL, settle down) don't really have such great people skills. Sure, most can get by without making people want to strangle them, but they're notoriously bad at office politics and 'soft' skills which the world has deemed vital to success.
In a meritocracy, based purely on skill and ability, the IT departments would run most companies. We don't live in a meritocracy (probably fortunately in this case), we live in an idiocracy. Mike Judge had it right. Besides, most tech types are far too vital in their roles for management to even CONSIDER promoting them. (That's the management that has a clue. Management that doesn't have a clue figures that since they don't understand what the IT guys do, and all they hear from them is 'No' most of the time ("No, you can't install Crysis on a company computer. No, you can't avoid having to type in your password. No, you can't write down your password on a sticky note and put it on your monitor. etc etc") then what they do isn't meaningful or useful, therefore they don't deserve advancement.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Hey I tried to install windows 7 alpha but now my computer doesn't work? I have a problem with my computer since I installed mega-zob-toolbar; please fix it. My kid gave me Adobe CS12 Mega Ultra Designer Pack-DOMINO-REPACK-XXXX to edit that PDF can I have admin right to install it? Hey, I've been trying to send that DVD by email for the last three days but it doesn't work and by the way the email server is very slow. Oh that? That's my home wifi router so I can work from the rec room. Really?? This Azureus software prevents other people from working? I can't see why. Hey IT guy why do you pretend it's my statistical report that i made myself in access that slows the database? I'm not even using the database; only access. Why won't you let us send .exe file by email!!!! THIS IS A BUSINESS REQUIREMENT!!!! You're working AGAINST the business!!!
Granted some admins go overboard. But users are a pain in the ass.
Both Chinese and Mexicans are more than capable of doing EVERYTHING an American can do.
Wrong. A Chinese person can't fix your car, for instance, because that would require shipping the car to China for repair. That would cost far more than just having an American fix it. A Chinese person can't tend to patients in an American hospital (we don't have robotics that advanced yet). A Chinese person certainly can't teach English to kids at an American school.
Second generations immigrents [sic] born here generally speak better english than most Americans who have been here for several generations.
Anyone who's "second generation" isn't Chinese or Mexican, they're American. And they can probably spell better than you too.
Most important thing I learned from my dad......do something you love because you have to work for around 40 years and that's a long time to hate your job. My dad started at a paper mill when he was 18 and retired at 60. He hated it but had the obligation of providing for a family (and by the time he could change, it was really too late to bother changing). He was always miserable. I program because I love it (don't tell my boss, but I'd do it for less money). When I'm not at work, I'm programming on the side or for fun or taking programming classes (game programming, I work in business apps) or just generally being involved in computers. My worst day as a programmer is still better than the best day doing something I hate.
It's ok to change fields, but don't be miserable doing it.