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

I'd never do it, but

[Lord Kano]

you might want to think about nursing. My ex-wife was an RN and she made really good money right out of college.

You have to clean up poop sometimes, but it's decent money.

LK

Re:I'd never do it, but

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

A friend of mine went into trades - just picked up a mature aged apprenticeship and become a fantastically rich electrician. Seems like the geekiest trade to pick up. There's a demand for qualified electricians in Australia at the moment from what I can see, but I'm not sure if it's a worldwide trend.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[Lord Kano]

Where I live, we have a very big senior population. Hospitals are some of the biggest employers around here. Even when they need to close a hospital, all of the employees are needed at other locations.

LK

Re:I'd never do it, but

[wisty]

If you want to travel, ESL (English as a second language) teaching is great. 20 hours a week teaching (plus prep time), you see your work being used (as the students get better at English), interesting co-workers. If you know (or want to learn) a foreign language, it's a great opportunity.

The best thing is - minimal office politics. There's you, a class, and maybe a head teacher telling you what to do. Co-ordination meetings, blame games, and clueless managers are hard to find. You still have a boss (and work policies), but the soft crap is mostly between you and your students.

Income is much lower in China (where I am), but so are costs. Great news if you have savings and no debts. Other countries have higher pay.

I wouldn't advise it to anyone with a superiority complex (they make poor teachers), or anyone who hates the idea of living overseas, but otherwise, it's a blast.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[hrvatska]

In my area (central NY state) lots of nurses have two year degrees. My wife, an RN with over 30 years experience, is of the opinion that the local community college's nursing graduates come out of school better prepared than any of the area universities granting BS degrees in nursing. What really matters is whether a nurse has passed the board exam to become a Registered Nurse. At that point it doesn't matter whether a nurse has a two or four year degree, they're all RNs and they all get paid the same. Where the BS degree matters is if a person wants to go into the management side of nursing. Hospitals are increasingly requiring a masters degree to enter the management side of nursing. Since a BSN is generally required to get an MSN, if you think you are interested in management go the BSN route. And I don't know what it's like in the rest of the country, but around here a nurse with at least one year of experience has no problem getting a decent paying job. I suspect it's true in many other areas too, judging by the amount of nurse recruitment junk mail my wife regularly receives. Nursing is not for everyone, though. Aside from all the shit, vomit, blood and other bodily fluids, I would not do well at the people side of nursing. Lots and lots of people problems to deal with. I don't think I could put up with it.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[digitalchinky]

I have a few friends teaching English in Taiwan. The government does not provide working permits for 'English teachers', it's an illegal profession, good money though - expect to have to do a runner or hide out about every other month or so as the government sends out their surprise inspection teams. Sometimes more often, schools will routinely file reports on competing schools in their area.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[apmonte]

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.

I'd also suggest that you get out of IT unless you have a genuine passion for helping a company make the most of it's IT resources. And by that, I mean helping to make its user community make the most of its IT resources. (The user community IS the company) To many admins could care less about the end users (My brother calls them DFU's) and lock computers down to the point that it's very had to do our jobs. (And we hate you for it) When my IT department makes it harder to do my job, (blame it on company policy if it makes you feel better) I'm less inclined to do my job. Provide us with the tools (both hardware and software) to do our jobs more effectively and listen to feedback from the user community. Otherwise, please get out of the field.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting that you would differentiate between the IT operations of a business and the Business of that business. Both IT recruiters and IT hardware advertisers would have you believe IT is the business's business. I happen to agree with your move and am planning the same for myself.

Computers are the punchpresses of the 21st century. You'll need fewer and fewer IT people to do more and more. It's a dead end for most. Luckily, Open Source (I use FreeBSD at home) lets me get my "gotta-constantly-break-and-fix-and-improve-my-computer" addiction satisfied using almost the same environment I would at a large company, other than scale. I don't have to struggle with Tandem Non-Stops and then relax by editing CONFIG.SYS a hundred times. Congrats on your move and good luck.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[j-pimp]

And nurses aren't being laid off anywhere in the US. In fact, there is a significant shortage.

Very true. My girlfriend is a physical therapist from the Philippines. She came to the US on a H1 Visa. Several of her classmates came here on Hi visas. Two of her cousins are nurses. They both got instant green cards. One left for England.

If you want to be able to work anywhere in the world, become a nurse.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[Penguinisto]

The best thing is - minimal office politics. There's you, a class, and maybe a head teacher telling you what to do. Co-ordination meetings, blame games, and clueless managers are hard to find.

...wanna bet? I'm speaking as a former CompSci instructor who had to deal with school districts, the Utah Board of Regents, some uber-clueless collegiate administrators, and to top that off, a colleague with few technical skills, but one hell of a penchant for back-stabbing. Fortunately, the latter was easy enough to handle, but the former three were raging nightmares, and could make your life a living hell at the slightest whim.

I still remember when an exceptionally bright student I had, decided that he really liked taking narcotics (turns out that it's pretty common means for a kid to rebel against his/her strict Mormon family). He came in and spoke to me one day after he'd missed class. I made the (political) mistake of discreetly bringing a counselor in to get him some help, since this was something that was way over my head, and he needed the help. Less than an hour later, I was taking a drug test myself and getting hammered with questions by the superintendents because I was, and I quote: "too much of an influence" on my students. Later that year, a student decided that one of the lab servers was a great place to stash some ripped movies so he could share it with his friends at home (Kazaa was pretty new at the time). I spent three hours trying to explain to the superintendents that it was easily taken care of, the offending material was removed, and the MPAA take-down notice was satisfied as soon as the school received it (the files were up for less than 24 hours). I took two weeks' vacation to avoid being suspended, and the student got summarily thrown out for the rest of the semester.

I stuck it out about two years after that, and while the BS died down a lot over that time, eventually funding cuts wiped out seven teaching positions, mine included. The (IMPO) less- technically competent colleague was shifted to an administrative position, and the last CompSci instructor (who was within two years of retirement at the time) got to keep his.

Trust me - I prefer working out here in IT. At least it's the devil I know, and the salary more than makes up for it in most cases.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[COMON$]

Along these lines, Pharmacy is a great profession as well. The world needs more good analytical pharmacists, sure some are about as useful as a bean counter but pharmacists are getting more responsibilities every day. The program is 4-5 years (3 academic years, 1 year of rotations, 1 year residency which is optional right now). The breadth of the position is about as broad as MDs, and is better suited for the squeemish. You still have to deal with users, "I have to stick the pill where?". My wife switched professions to pharmacy, is a P3 right now and the pay is insane, my buddy made about 130K straight out of college and only worked 9 months that year.

Since you will be a non-traditional there are several programs that you can do over the net (recorded lectures and live sessions), that are just as good as sitting in a classroom and dont require you to relocate. Several of my wife's classmates are over 40 so it isnt too bad of a switch.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in... I'm an ISP Net Engineer, so not directly I.T. but i'm still immersed in routers, switches, servers, miles of cat5 and fiber etc... and we all love it here. We all get interesting projects that we get to see through to completion, we get to play with crazy expensive lasers and test equipment, our managers are pretty cool, and very appreciative. Lots of positive reinforcement when we get things done. Maybe all you disgruntled I.T. guys should beef up on routing and RF technology and come on over! Also due to the country moving more and more to broadband we are hiring pretty steadily.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[Voyager529]

Users *can* be a pain. Where I work though, there's an extremely small chance that a situation like this would happen.

Hey I tried to install windows 7 alpha but now my computer doesn't work?

Our company machines require a password to boot from anything but the hard drive. This user would be more likely to call me about getting it installed rather than asking for support after the fact. Even if he somehow managed to guess the password, the fact that he had to do so likely indicates that he's not going to be calling my helpdesk to get support for it, and the fact that he can't log into the domain to access his documents or e-mail means that his machine would be re-imaged by lunchtime.

I have a problem with my computer since I installed mega-zob-toolbar; please fix it.

We have a corporate antivirus to help reduce attacks like that, but if they fail, then this is part of my job. Most users, realizing that it takes significant amounts of time away from their productivity, tend to ask what they can do to avoid it in the future. The majority of virus attacks I get are based on ignorance, not malice.

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?

First, a quick google search shows that DOMiNO releases DVD rips of movies and isn't a software release group. That said, the majority of the users at work will call me if they need help editing the PDF file in the first place, not asking for help installing 5 DVDs and running a keygen. They know their coworkers can do it, and if they need Acrobat installed on their machines and don't have it, they know that all it takes is a phone call to my desk and I'm going to work on solving their problem.

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.

This one I could technically see happening, but AFAIK the only person here who uses ISO files is me. On a more generic note (i.e. sending stupidly large files via e-mail), our Exchange server has a 10MB limit; users who try to e-mail something larger than that will instantly get a failure message. If they do genuinely need to send that large file, I can arrange for that file to sit on an FTP server so that all the recipient has to do is click the download link. If they don't really need to send the file, then, well, they're not going to call.

Oh that? That's my home wifi router so I can work from the rec room.

Our building has encrypted wi-fi already. The people who need it access it, and if someone starts needing it, you guessed it, they know to call. Even if my building didn't have wireless, if they can see it so can I. We don't have live ethernet jacks anywhere they shouldn't be, so if it's underneath their desk, it's a trivial matter to track down a linksys router. From there, I'd present my case to my boss as to why we shouldn't have wireless access here (or why we should, but at least done properly), and let her decide what she wants me to do about it.

Really?? This Azureus software prevents other people from working? I can't see why.

I haven't had to deal with this one yet, either. About the worst issue I've had so far with regards to bandwidth is that half my office uses Pandora or something similar. Still, our internet speeds are acceptable, I take a peek at our gateway's traffic log to see if there's any high-volume traffic going through abnormal ports, and so far so good. Should this become an issue, I have a supervisor that makes the decision as to what should be done about it.

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.

A clear, simple explanation usually curbs this one. The majori

Re:I'd never do it, but

[BitZtream]

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.

You realize you just ruled out every single job in existence right?

Both Chinese and Mexicans are more than capable of doing EVERYTHING an American can do. Second generations immigrents born here generally speak better english than most Americans who have been here for several generations.

Whats best about it all is they have actually had hard lives most of the time so they don't have their head up their asses expecting to get paid a ridiculous amount of money for a trivial job.

If you want to prevent outsourcing or 'insourcing', drop the entitlement additude, stop demanding pay levels you don't deserve, and put in a fair days work.

When spoiled brats compete against people who have experienced true hardship, the brats will lose, EVERY TIME. As an American, in IT, I can say for a fact, we are completely spoiled brats.

By law, Americans must make more in one hour than many far harder working people in the rest of the world make in a month, how do you ever think you can compete against those people?

I despise illegal immigration. I say we start shooting illegal immigrants on site. I however have no problem with the legal immigrants who come to America and 'take American jobs'. Come to America, take my job because you are better and cheaper, then they aren't the problem, I am. I am not an immigrant, but one of my grandfathers was, and one of them was a native American. Makes it rather hard for me, as a sane minded person to have a problem with someone doing the same thing my grandfather did that put me where I am today.

Of course, being spoiled, you wouldn't understand that.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[taphu]

Anything else?

Yes. Actual Information Technology. It has been my experience that the projects that have been successfully outsourced are projects that involve zero new technology and have traditionally been implemented by considerably overpaid "engineers" who can't tell the difference between a Turing Machine and a vending machine.

In my opinion, 2/3'rds of the software engineers I have ever met deserve to loose their jobs for the simple reason that the resources they consume are more valuable than their net production, usually by a staggering margin. It is as simple as that.

Yes, my job title is "Sr. Software Engineer". No, I will not tow the union line.

I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[joeyg1973]

I used to work on the docks in NJ as a longshoreman during the summer and winter breaks from school in the early to mid 1990s. If I had stayed down there I would have close to 20 years in already, be getting paid close to the same amount I get now considering the hours that I put in plus the extended periods of no work each and every time the economy takes a down turn. I would have 6 weeks paid vacation every year, great medical, stable work, and no politics or being treated like an overpaid janitor. Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out. The books are now closed and probably won't be open again for 5 years so even though I still have a union card, I can't get a job down there till federal government determines that it needs more workers thanks to the NYSA, not the union. I am trying to get a job as a US Customs Agent now. Sure I ain't going to be making a lot of money, but the benefits, 40 hour work week, and stable steady work means that it actually comes out to about the same as I make now.

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[drsquare]

If six weeks vacation (not even two months) will drive a company into bankrupcy, maybe we need to rethink this whole capitalism thing.

I don't see the problem with a docker making $80 an hour. Would it be better if everyone made minimum wage? I thought the whole point of economic growth was that everyone got richer. But then I never bought into trickle-down economics.

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[georgemoot]

The teacher's union of Toledo, Ohio has for years had a "peer review" policy where they would meet annually to discuss & potentially dismiss teachers that have been deemed "incompetent". This isn't the school board firing teachers... it's the teacher's union itself.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91327130

This, I think, is an example of a union doing exactly what it should be doing: Protecting it's valued members and getting rid of the dead weight. With a system in place (which is largely supported by the union members) to keep a shared level of quality among members, I would think that their bargaining power when it comes to discussing benefits & pay could be largely deserved.

If more unions took it upon themselves to actively resist providing shelter to the incompetent, I think the general impression of unions wouldn't be nearly as negative.

Out of the frying pan, and into the fire

[siddesu]

I got out of IT after more than 10 years in the field (and CTO-ing for a public company in my last job) as I finally got fed up with it. After a longish sabbatical, I started a small bakery/coffee shop. I'd say it is as big a change as you can axe for, and I have been pretty happy so far. I still use some of my mad skillz, but since I went the hard way - designed and built my shop and equipment more or less from scratch - I had to learn (and I am still learning) a lot of stuff - from carpentry, construction work and machinery to advanced chemistry. ;)

At the beginning, the money wasn't that good and it was hard work and long hours, but eventually things picked up and now I am better off than I used to be. The biggest benefit outside of the pay is the free time -- now I have a lot of time for side projects. Half are somewhat related to extending the business, the other half are just things I like. I don't push it very hard though, because that was what I was running away from in the first place. Overall, I regret it I didn't run away from the field earlier. That said, I got into IT by accident, and I didn't like it that much.

Good luck.

Re:Look before you leap

[bagboy]

Off Topic but... "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." This is also me - 9.5 years Navy Journalist (NMC and AFRTS - Diego Garcia, Adak,AK, Naval Base Seattle Public Affairs, Gitmo) and now 10 years network engineer.... Small world isn't it. :)

From what I've seen...

[benjamindees]

Teaching and working in industrial engineering are popular sideways career moves for IT people. There is still a market in the US for large-scale industrial engineering (heavy machinery, chemical processing, construction). It is typically a similar environment, lots of technical savvy required, not too much customer interaction, but with reasonable hours and less stress than the typical IT position. Teaching is an obvious move, since it is government subsidized, benefits from the recession, has a history of rising prices, and there are still lots of people out there willing to go into debt for the opportunity to learn about the magic of computing. Also, less stressful and typically lower paying than IT.

A Change is as Good as a Rest

[grcumb]

I hit the same point about 2002. The Dot Com thing had soured and I was just tired of the whole game. I did a two year volunteering gig in the South Pacific... and never left.

It's fascinating, because a lot of the stuff I was doing when I first arrived here was the same I'd been doing 10 years before (I mean literally the same technology). Since then I've moved along and now I'm pretty much current with the kind of things I'd likely be doing back in Canada (technical manager for a local university institution). Just this week I submitted patches to a wireless network driver for the latest version of Ubuntu. So what's changed for me? Just this:

IT work in development has taken me to cities, towns and villages in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, East Timor and Vanuatu (where I now live). I'll be off to South Africa in a little over a month.

I have faced crazy demands in the past (Windows activation from a place with no networks and no telephones? Keeping the minutes for a week-long meeting in a town with no power?) I've had malaria and been hospitalised with kidney stones from dehydration. I've shared the room with rats, roaches, fire ants and geckoes. I've slept on cement and eaten more cold rice than I ever thought possible.

But I've also had breakfast in the clouds, been to the brink of volcanoes, rambled in rain forest and snorkeled in coral reefs so often that it's run-of-the-mill, dined with Ministers of state... and helped make people's lives a little more liveable.

The work is engaging, challenging and stretches one's creativity to the limit, trying to figure out how to mesh Internet technologies with cultures largely unchanged in the last 3000 years. It pays a tiny fraction of what I used to make, but the rewards are infinitely greater.

Family?

[corychristison]

Do you have a family? If so, will you be able to continue to support them?

I am expecting my first child any time now (5 days over due date). I am currently self employed and make great money doing it. Especially this time of year, as opposed to the 8 week 'vacation' I have every summer because business dies and income dries right up. Although that is easily manageable with some basic savings and balancing of numbers.

I've been hmming and hauing the thought of finding something more stable and doesn't require me to be on my toes 24/7. There are some openings at [a very large local employer] that I've been considering applying to in the spring.

You always have to weigh the pro's and cons. For me I am actually quite torn but I suppose we'll see what happens when my child is born.

My Pros of current job:
- Flexible. I work when I want and don't when I don't want (it's great when the wife is in and out of false labor all week)
- Good money for the amount of work involved.

My Cons of current job:
- Can be long days if they work out that way.
- No stability in the long run
- Keeping my own accounting for taxes, etc. (trivial, really)

The new job would be a 30% pay decrease, but would be stable all year 'round.
My days would most likely be shorter than what I am pushing myself to do right now.
I would have most benefits and coverage for dental, drugs, etc... which would be handy although i've been fine without it so far! (might change with the baby)

My biggest worry with jumping into a new job would be that I would probably have to ask the wife to go back to work. Which turns into paying for day care, etc. etc..... just a bunch of crap I'd rather not deal with.

So, to the point. If you have family and you are making ends meet no problem right now, stick to it.
If you don't have family and could take a potential pay cut, go for it. Your happiness is worth a lot.

SciOps

[Shag]

I spent about 15 years in IT (programmer, sysadmin, webmaster, web dev, consultant). 5.5 years ago consulting was slow (if you knew my town, you'd know why) so I was looking for a full-time sysadmin gig. Just so happens the biggest local UNIX shops are observatories - the kind with telescopes.

I was applying for sysadmin jobs when a part-time gig operating a small telescope came along. I didn't know a whole lot of astronomy (okay, I knew woefully little, and had never had a single class in it) but the telescope was controlled by UNIX and Linux boxes, and I sure as heck knew those. I had to learn about "right ascension" and "declination." I picked up some other part-time jobs, so my worst year (2005?) ended up only being 80% less than my best dot-com year (2002).

About a year later, I started doing sporadic laser-safety stuff at a couple other observatories. Not in terms of actually working on the lasers, but in terms of making sure they didn't, um, hit any airplanes. :)

A couple years in, some folks who were using the telescope a lot decided that since I was a techie, curious, and actually talked to them (they used an AIM chatroom for communication between collaborators on a couple continents, and all my fellow operators were thoroughly non-instant-messaging sorts), they'd train me to use their data-taking setup (xterms and some custom GUI apps, running in VNCs over an SSH tunnel). So before long I had entries in ADSABS and a .gov email address and life was getting weird.

Last year, after 4 years of being a computer geek surrounded by astronomers, I signed up for an online graduate certificate program in astronomy, in hopes of learning what all those strange words meant. This spring, being in a graduate program weighed in my favor and I got a full-time job as an operator-in-training at a (much larger) telescope, which basically pays enough to live on, here (and has a lot of upside potential).

So... pros and cons of going from IT operations to technical work in science operations...

Cons:
You'll never hear anyone talking about crazy dot-edu or dot-org pay. ;)
The survival of your job depends in part on survival of their funding.
If you're a lone wolf or primadonna, operations is not the place for you.
Work ethic may be different; no foosball table.

Pros:
Science abhors a vacuum between people's ears, so everyone you work with will be smart in some way or another.
Scientists actually recognize and appreciate the fact that You Make Things Work. (egad!)
Hiring authorities often equally happy with a degree in their science, some other science, technology, or engineering.
Stress level can be significantly lower in some cases (like mine).

Oh, and FWIW, science-y places also need electronics engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, programmers, sysadmins, builders of instrumentation - all kinds of techies.

Just sayin'.

Re:Look before you leap

[BillGod]

I was laid off from my IT position.. I live in Ohio.. everyone is laid off. All I know is computers. In a past life I was a paramedic but figured I didn't have the compassion needed for that job. I understand computers and love to do it. Thats why I chose IT. About 6 months ago I took a leap and opened my own computer repair shop. Only cost me about 2k to get the doors open. No stock of parts except the boxes of crap I had around my house. I am now making profit after 6 months. I love it. I have no one to answer to but myself. The customers are very thankful that there is some place they can go that will actually fix there issues. I even have some older retired guys who just come in to hang out. I have no experience what so ever in running a business. Learning curve is not all that hard. Luckily my neighbor is an accountant and helped me in that area. The first 2 months were kind of scary not having anything to do. Played a lot of pocket tanks with my friends. Now I have an office that I don't even go into because I have so much to do. If your an honest person that truly knows how to fix computers. I am sure you would be a welcome asset to your community. Oh yeah and the 2 mile drive to work is SWEET!

From IT Tech to Slot Tech

[J-Rod_Brown]

I went from IT to working on slot machines... The switch wasn't that difficult as far as troubleshooting, deployment, and repair but its a different world. Instead of cube farms, you get to work on a small army of money making machines. One of the most interesting facets of the job is the customers. They are so varied and odd ball that its a riot. Especially when people think they can scam you out of some money saying a game cheated them on this or that. Its not a huge career move but I love the environment I work in. It is much less stress and you get to walk around a lot and meet many interesting people with many interesting stories. Good luck with the economy in some states, though. Most of the Indian casinos are holding up alright while other Class III facilities (especially Vegas/Lake Tahoe) are struggling (it all has to do with the customer base...).

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Billly Gates]

You can't justify ROI with intangible assets. Thats accounting 101. For the non business majors reading this it means if something is not physically there with a recept and a precise unit output it therefore can't have a cost/benefit anaylsis.

Marketing people use intangible assets like brand image and advertising and accountants are cool with it and understand but no not I.T. its a cost!

Your accountants need to know this and use cause and effect relationships in determining the cost of failure or a benefit and not look at outputed units of revenue. Its just not going to happen and end up costing more.

I agree with what you are saying with salary. I get upset reading about talent bonuses for the wonderful jobs of BofA and AIG executives and just because someone thinks they have a nice office that they are now important. If I make a company lose only a few thousand dollars my butt is out the door. If its a few billion they get a bonus because they ahve a nice office and their employers want to kiss up so they can become like them some day. Founders need these but most good CEO's make less money than bad ones. I think slashdot ran a story on this.

It just comes to show that you need to hire passionate people about who they work for and what they do and not their egos or wallets. Its pretty obvious who the latter is loyal to at the end of the day.

Re:OK how do you get jobs like this?

[FPhlyer]

My IT Training came from on-the-job. The Navy was still all dumb terminals and MSDOS. My job, as a journalist, eventually required the command provide me with a system for desktop publishing. That meant either Windows 3.1 or MacOS 7. Fearing Mac, they gave me Windows and Aldus PageMaker. When the command began rolling out Windows to the rest of our personnel, I was the only person on-hand who had any knowledge. I became Tech Support. When they began networking the machines together in a workgroup, I assisted with that as well. Not to mention that cabling a ship for closed circuit television is only a few steps removed from cabling 10Base2 ThinNet.
When my ship pulled into Hawaii, I spent my liberty installing Slackware on my personal laptop. By the time I got out of the Navy, I had plenty of experience with Windows, Unix (Linux), and networking. I got a low-level, low-paying job at a financial corporation and quickly worked my way up by proving my ability and obtaining requisite certs, etc.

Lose the boss

[arielsom]

I think there are a lot of things being mixed up here. My job in IT sucked. So I left and am now a freelancer doing web related stuff, and working as a teacher, also on IT related subjects. My point: it's having a boss that sucks, not the actual IT. When I come in from the outside and I'm being paid big bucks for it, I get respect that I wouldn't if I were a wage slave. The reason they treat salespeople better is that they know how to market themselves, whereas there is this persistent image of IT people as Rainman types who you can kick around. Unions would help, but just leaving works too. In France we call this "voting with your feet".

Leave of absence?

[sandysnowbeard]

I'm 25. After two years in the industry (and about four years of college), I became really disillusioned with computer science. I attempted to quit my job and go hike around Japan. Ultimately, my company gave me a quite generous leave of absence (which I'm still on). I'm still in Japan, now teaching at an elementary school. It's tiring work, but I feel loved and appreciated. My salary is roughly half of what it was before, but my rent has also been halved, I have no car or car insurance, etc., so I live well. As the guy above spoke, you can probably arrange with your company to take a leave of absence. It takes courage, but you can leap blindly and still land on your feet.

Re:Other Industries

[Z00L00K]

True - and since I have been brought up on a farm I know that weather is an important problem to worry about.

If you really want to see the scope of troubles in different jobs I suggest that you can watch Mike Rowe in the show "Dirty Jobs".

In reality - either you have a job filled with problems or you have a dull job where you are never challenged intellectually and you become stagnant.

Re:Look before you leap

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a sales manager, managing a team of sales reps selling services.

Then I switched to video server pre-sales, traveling to customers around Europe. I spend my days in Linux, networks, mpeg encoders and decoders.
Now I'm doing what I really like, and what i can really do better than others.

Plus the paycheck is 50% higher than before ...

Ok, it took me some time to find the job and do the transition, but I'm so glad I did it!

There are nice jobs out of IT, I don't consider myself as doing IT, plus I make more money than the average IT guy.

You need to find what it is that you like doing, what you do better than others, then choose the job that would use this and make you succesful and happy. It can take a few month to really discover this.

Good luck

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[vlm]

imagine if "Accounting Rules 1995, 1998, 2000" was the norm- accounting rules became obsolete every 3 years and you had to retrain or lose your job

I am not sure if you were going for a "funny" mod, but tax accounting is, if anything, worse than your description of IT, because unlike IT, you can't use anything but memorization, certainly no logic is used, and it literally does change, a little bit, every year, and there are about a zillion independent taxing authorities in the USA (city, county, state, federal), but only one microsoft.

On the other hand, my great grandfather was 100% employed thru Great Depression One doing that. Takes just as long and costs just as much to file taxes on 100% of revenue as it does on 10% of revenue, at least to a first order of magnitude. I wonder if I'll be employed 100% of the time during Great Depression Two...

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to prove your blanket-stereotype wrong, I am an anarchist who has worked in IT for over 12 years (primarily database programming/administration) and have never even asked for a raise. I am probably the lowest-paid office personnel in this company, even lower than some production workers. I know a lot of people who make more than me -- even people who don't particularly hold a specialized skill -- but I have never even once questioned it, even to myself. It's none of my business. I'm not jealous, and I'm not selfish.

But here's the catch. I don't believe in government, just as an athiest doesn't believe in god. I believe that centralized power is the largest and most successful scam in human history, as well as evidence that despite our technological accomplishments, human beings are still quite primitive in certain aspects. Particularly the instinct to blindly follow rather than think; to choose sides and fight against others, even when there is no need.

Yet I'm not at all the selfish, money-hungry, materialistic chump you make me out to be. In fact, most of the selfish materialistic types I come across in life are very pro-government, not at all the libertarian/anarchist types. They are easy to spot; you will find them making demands on others, rather than on themselves.

FYI, the moral of Atlas Shrugged is that coercion is wrong, not that dog-eat-dog capitalism is right.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[mauddib~]

Then you didn't really understand the morals, or maybe only part of the morals were given to you.

An important moral is to not have greed, you just showed greed.

Yesterday I saw a movie about farming in the 1920's in the Netherlands. People farmed because it was a necessity. Nobody had greed because greed meant others would not work for you the next year. I'm not a jock, but I have a beautiful life with ups and downs, a beautiful girlfriend and the opportunity to learn every day.

If money is not the thing you can get, then let it be knowledge, the passion to perceive something new every day. Why this focus on the negative?

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Anonymous Coward]

I left IT (Mainframe development when I left) for Accounting. I had a B.S. in Computer Science and 10+ years of experience in the field. My minor was in Russian Literature. I had exactly 0 experience with accounting. However I had worked as a DBA for back-end mainframe work for a few years, and I knew all the ins and outs of the software. That was how I got the job, I knew how to do everything in the software.

Now I have worked in accounting for 3 years. The initial pay cut was awful (I took a 55% pay-cut), but I was able to cut back on expenses (less eating out, since I had normal working hours and no on-call), and I was willing to work all of the "overtime" in the department. I use the term loosely, because they wanted people to come in for 5-10 hours over the weekend. Coming from a background of working 60+ hours weeks, this was a welcome change, and they paid me for the time. I also spend less money on "fun" things (My computer is a P4 3.0 GHz with a 6800GT, it works for my games). My wife also works.

I know how to use Macros in Excel and write good scripts. That made me the most productive person they had in the department. I moved up the ladder very quickly. Now I manage a few people, I make a decent amount of money (not as much as I made in IT, but enough for my lifestyle), I have time to spend with my kids, I have a weekend, and a great quality of life. I still work about 50 hours a week, which other people see as a "hard worker" and I get respect.

As for working with people, accounting is a department most people tend to avoid. Anyone can come in after payday if there is a problem with their paycheck. My underlings I leave to do their work (Data entry people, as long as the data is entered, they can screw around a little as long as it's not obvious). The only people that bother me are the higher-ups when they want reports, most of the time it's through e-mail. I actually deal with people less now that I'm in accounting (I dealt with more Indian programmers, multi-boss situations and Brazillion operators in IT).

Guess what I got out of working in IT? One time I received an unframed certificate of thanks for coming in over Christmas to help with an emergency data center IPL (that went wrong). That wasn't the only time I came in over a holiday weekend, but I did receive something that time.

The point is, if you know that back-end of Oracle or SAP, you should be able to get into the field (especially if you have a B.S. degree, companies like those).

Now, I'm going to run some scripts to get the reports, format them with some macros then sit back and play nethack for half the day, and get paid for it while the bosses think I'm hard at work. Your mileage may vary.

From IT to Psych

[DeafScribe]

I did web development from '96 to early 2001. Started as a freelancer in Florida, then temp and perm work in Washington, D.C. Money was good, respect was widespread, temping gave me plenty of time to travel. Good times.

Then the dot.com crash hit. I spent the following year applying to 500 different jobs. Got a few nibbles, a few interviews, but no bites. I threw in the towel and went to work as, basically, an orderly at a psychiatric care center.

We were chronically short-staffed at the outset, so there was all the overtime we could handle and then some. The pay wasn't anywhere near what I made in webdev, but I was too busy to fret about it.

By and by, I move up a notch in position, then become a weekend manager, then help run a new program. It's been nearly eight years now.

I work two full-time jobs, the second one somewhat related to the psychiatric work. 90 hours a week, and earning less than I did doing webdev. I'm not bitter - if anything, I'm thankful that I've got all the work I can handle while some folks are really suffering. My job security is pretty good, because working with psychiatric patients is a specialized skill that requires a certain temperament to do well.

I also write on the side, hence the user name.

Would I go back to webdev? It would require a lot of schooling - much has changed since I left the field - and if I did, I'd do it freelance. A previous poster was right - the problem is not IT, it's the boss.

But working with people definitely has its rewards, or I wouldn't have continued to do it so long. And this field has provided some fascinating insights into human nature, in ways that most folks are never exposed to. It's been an interesting journey all around.

Re:Look before you leap

[dasunt]

Yeah because you won't need that car to make any service calls, and hauling around computers and tools is trivial on a bike

Distance may be a problem, or time constraints.

But hauling around computers and tools is trivial with the right bicycle setup. :p

Commercial Property or Community Management?

[walterbyrd]

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.

I know a woman, in Denver, who works as property manager for an office building. Basically the job is hiring contractors, collecting rent, paying the bills. The job pays $90K a year, with perks up the wahzoo. She does not know anything about plumbing, electronics, hvac, or anything like that.

If you own the business, community (HOA) management, can be even more lucrative. Seems like it would hard to get started, but if you could get started, you have a very stable income.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[jandersen]

It would be great if I could take some time off to 'find myself' but the steady paycheque I need to keep food in the fridge for the family kinda puts a damper on that idea.

Think of it as a long-term project. There are many hobbies that could have the potential to become a new career if one is committed. For me it is growing orchids - it isn't too challenging and very interesting (well, to me at least). Superficially it could look as if a few, big producers have cornered the market and are the only ones that sell anything; but this is because you think of it in terms of producing a million plants at a time and selling through a supermarket chain. There are other ways and other markets. So, perhaps this is something I will do one day; and in the meantime I simply enjoy it.

Wouldn't it be nice one day, when the kids are grown, to sell the house and move far away from it all, to live a simple, undemanding life? There are many lovely places in the world: Outer Hebrides, Yunnan, The Alps, and possibly a few more :-)

Slinky Plan B).

[Goraek]

pft.. I swapped from Physics and IT consulting to medicine..
actually, kinda fell into it.. ~plenty~ of scholarships and funding if you know where to look.
you can do it in 4yrs post-grad. It requires a whole new level of "knowledge density", though the average IT guy has the endurance to put the hours in.

tie in a ~little~ maths, ability to program and medicine... SOOOOO MANY offers for research...
seriously, the offers out there are... astounding. I've only got a Diploma in Electronic Eng, and get offers

In .au you can work 2 half days a week (assisting in surgery, locum, whatever) earn enough to cover living and hobbies..
three mates did that to fund a biotech startup.

plan B). hotties at med conferences. She's a doctor = kept man. she's even keen for me to stay in uni to do a PhD :D

I can't emphasise how exciting and fun med is to study. it's hard work, but just comes down to hours of the day :)

been there, done that, stopped looking back

[drteknikal]

I spent two decades as a network/pc tech and a systems administrator. When the time came to look around again, I was depressed by the thought of going through the job search, rolling the dice, settling in, performing triage and rebuilding, and then waiting to see how much management would allow to be done right in the long run. In my mind, it was the prospect of going somewhere else, doing the same things again, and spinning my wheels for a few years while I discovered which ways I'd be thwarted this time.

For background, I started off in the military (US Navy) and then transitioned to military/defense contractor (NAVSEA), then to civilian government contractor (USAID/STATE), and then I went corporate. I worked for a law firm, mistook the frying pan for the fire and jumped into the fire, went to work in a drug lab (a pre-clinical drug-development facility), was treated worse than the lab animals, found a K Street (Washington, DC) law firm with a casual dress code, and went back to working for lawyers. After about 5 years, I realized it was time to leave, and I no longer had much interest. Absent a carte-blanche startup opportunity, I walked away. Not the American Beauty deal, but I got 18 months of COBRA paid for, and continuing retirement plan contributions for the same term.

I bought the farm. Mortgaged my house, bought a 10-acre farm in West Virginia, and renovated. When complete, I sold the old house and decamped. Now, I grow peppers and make hot sauce. I keep bees and pack honey. I do what I want, when I want, and I answer to me. The farm's paid for, living expenses are minimal, and my retirement funds are intact. I'm a packrat, and I have a lifetime of collected stuff that's easily sold on eBay as needed. Even with medical expenses, I still have a positive cash flow.

There are many ways to do it. One of the easiest is to flee the big city for the middle of nowhere. My new place cost 1/4 of the old one, the new house is 20% bigger, and I have 80x more land. The trick may be funding the transition. I was lucky, my old house was paid for and I could borrow against it so the new place wouldn't have a mortgage.

Re:Hate this career...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a full time photographer (with degrees and everything!) and I can't tell you how awful it is trying to make money in this business. Absolutely every jackhole with a camera is now a photographer. Stock has been destroyed by Getty. Newspaper and magazine photographers are basically gone...they're all shooting weddings for $1000/pop to try to make ends meet. And weddings are worth crap, anyway, because every 24 year old girl (who naturally has a husband with a real job) has suddenly discovered her "passion for photography" since the digital cameras are so easy to use these days. So, yes, you would be broke, but still miserable, because you would be trying to actually make a living at photography (like I am) where your competition just has to not lose too much. It is an awful, awful, awful career.

Now I sell Shaved Ice..

[TombGuard]

I used to be in IT field.. most of my job dealt with problems. So I quit and opened a Shaved Ice stand 6 years ago.. best move ever. First few years were tough as I worked every day. Now I'm off on weekends and half day Fridays! People are always happy to see me and the hours are set. (IT field can have you working at night and weekends)