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?'

Comments

Look before you leap

[FPhlyer]

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.

Re:Look before you leap

[TikiTDO]

I am with you, pick what you like, and move in that direction.

It is so refreshing to see someone really follow their passion. A huge percentage of the population today is stuck in jobs they do not like. This leads to resentment, anger, and eventually very negative release of these emotions. What's worse, the smartest of these make it to the top of the food chain, then take out all of this amassed anger on society. Had they not been pushed into fields that did not suit them, they would have most likely contributed a lot more to society, and left the positions they now occupy to those that could fill such roles while living a happier life, and contributing much more to the world.

The way I see it, the purpose of life is to do what you want, enjoy doing it, and enjoy helping others do the same. It is very unfortunate that this does not happen.

Re:Look before you leap

[netpixie]

>The way I see it, the purpose of life is to do what you want, enjoy doing it, and enjoy helping others do the same. It is very unfortunate that this does not happen.

I enjoy seeing my children have food to eat and clothes to wear. I enjoy being able to take them out to exciting places. I enjoy being able to send them to school. I enjoy keeping them safe in a reasonable house. My wife enjoys being able to stay at home and look after them.

All of these things are possible because of the cash I earn at a job I don't enjoy.

So, while universal joy is a good aim, in the real world it doesn't usually work like that. You have to choose which bits of your life you are going to enjoy and which bits you are going to endure.

Bean Sprout Farming

[serps]

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

Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Maxo-Texas]

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?

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Money for Nothin']

Simple: there are too many in IT who actually believe in the philosophy of "Atlas Shrugged" - a race-to-the-bottom, out-compete-each-other-for-the-good-of-mankind philosophy.

Ayn Rand and the army of philosophical libertarians in the U.S. whose intellect (required to understand the philosophy and economics behind it) naturally puts them in positions of influence and power via which these ideas are implemented (example: Alan Greenspan, a deep fan of Rand), along with the army of free-market economists who use their own work as faux-empirical justification for libertarian economic policies, NEVER talk about the humanitarian downsides of a hyper-competitive feedback loop/death-spiral... except to mock them in "Atlas Shrugged" (America's second most-influential book after the Bible, according to one survey conducted in the early 1990s).

I say this as a slowly-recovering right-libertarian (and developer) myself, turned moderate left-libertarian.

We in IT have cut our own personal income profit margins and raised our hours in an attempt to out-compete each other; we've raised the bar year after year on ourselves. We have, in short, cut our own throats. We now, and increasingly-moreso, live in the cutthroat environment we (and admittedly, I) have so often advocated.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[jandersen]

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?

I don't know, mate, but I do know the feeling.

I hit the low point some 4 years ago. , when it suddenly dawned on me that I tended to wake up in the morning thinking how much easier it would be just to give up; take an overdose of something pleasant and say goodbye. Except that you can't, really, when you have children adn a wife that love you - sometimes hope really is the worst thing.

Instead I started thinking about what it was that I hated about my job and my life, and what role I played in maintaining the status quo. Why didn't I have any friends at work? Well, to be honest, I was a grumpy git that never tried to fit in - I had all the right reasons, like I can't stand idiotic smalltalk about nothing, but the truth is that I was simply intolerant and fairly obnoxious. And why didn't I get any of the interesting projects with career potential? It's easy to see now, of course, that nobody wants to work with a contrary idiot, who seems to begrudge the very existence of his colleagues, but back then I didn't have the courage to admit it.

I didn't turn all that around in an instant, but I found that I could start out small, by standing up for myself on a few points. The thing is - I realised that a lot of the reason why I was that way was that I didn't have confidence in my own value. And how can others respect you if you don't respect yourself? Standing up for myself in small ways built up my self-confidence, which made me work to a better standard and it also helped others believe in me. I found the energy to be a little bit of an "idiot" like the rest and be more tolerant; now I am The Almighty UNIX Manager - in a small way - and the bosses actually talk to me with respect. It's not all wonderful, far from it, but I think I can see the light at the other end of the tunnel sometimes.

Of course this is just my story, but I think the morale is that it doesn't all have to be bad; if you find you are knee-deep in shit, bag it and sell manure.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Anonymous Coward]

How did it come to this?

What do you mean, come to? Didn't high school teach you that jocks run the world?

Working hard and being useful just means someone else is working less hard, being less useful, and making more money. That's life.

I blame my parents for raising me with morals.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[CaptSlaq]

If "a race-to-the-bottom, out-compete-each-other-for-the-good-of-mankind philosophy" is all you got from Rand, you missed the point.

"I swear, by my life and love of it, I will never live for the sake of another person, nor ask another person to live for the sake of me."

I'm not seeing what you say in that sentence, which was the money quote for the ENTIRE BOOK of Atlas Shrugged. If you feel that you're "living for the sake of another", you need to be job shopping *now*, because one of two things is happening:

1. You are undervalued where you are, and need to go to somewhere else that will value your skills properly.

2. You *think* you are undervalued, and need a dose of reality to let you know where you really are on the chain.

Either one of these will be fixed by doing some interviews and getting some feedback outside of your existing "pond".

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[4D6963]

That's utter bullshit. "Jocks" don't run the world, real jocks end up working at an auto plant and become alcoholics by the time they're 35. Hustlers run the world. If you want the world you can't be a sheep. You can't follow the other sheeps and wonder why you're not getting anywhere special.

Look at John D. Rockefeller, that guy was the perfect example of the successful aggressive hustler. From co-owning one refinery he pulled every possible trick to become more competitive than anyone else, eat the competition to get even bigger until he had a complete monopoly and became the richest son of a bitch in the world. No one told him what to do, no one showed him what to do, no one made it easy for him, he didn't follow anyone or complain like a big loser.

At the other end of the spectrum you've got people complaining in this topic that their quasi-janitorial job isn't getting them anywhere. I mean shit, the type of jobs we're talking about here partially consists in making sure people don't have CAPS LOCK turned on when they login in the morning. What the hell did you expect?! No one gets anywhere special by following the safe, pre-designed path that you've borrowed. What you do isn't special, you're probably spending most of your work day typing in some MySQL when you're not typing rants on Slashdot with your Cheetos-scented fingers.

I was just watching the Colbert Report and there was this thing about the university degrees the world's billionaires had. And guess what, a lot of them had none. Steve Jobs had none. Bill Gates had none. John D. Rockefeller had none. And you know what else these guys have in common? They're hustlers, and they got rich as hell. They didn't work for 20 years for some large company waiting to realise their career is shit, they took the bull by the horns, created their own damn company and strived to make it successful.

You don't want to create your own company? You don't have any sort of entrepreneurial spirit? You don't want to quit your day job? Well too bad for you. In life you can only choose two of the following three things : have it easy, do something you like, become rich and respected. You chose the first two, don't complain you'll never see the third.

Allow me to summarize

[shashark]

- 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 ?

Re:OK how do you get jobs like this?

[neoevans]

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.

Baggies, yes ... but cheerios?

[Gopal.V]

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.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[CarpetShark]

you might want to think about nursing.

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.

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[Anonymous Coward]

And what does the executive do that justifies his income?

That's something you can ask a GM stockholder too. Hurr.

Applying economics to job hunting

[adamkennedy]

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.

Re:Is it IT that's bad...

[mlts]

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.

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[Xest]

"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!

Re:I'd never do it, but

[vlm]

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?

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[Xest]

"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.

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[intheshelter]

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. . . .

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Both of you are right. Quite the paradox, no?

Re:I'd never do it, but

[mrboyd]

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.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[SQLGuru]

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.