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

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I hadn't thought of that. I just LOVE to clean up poop. In fact, I'll sit there waiting, watching, anticipating, ready to catch it before it can fall onto the mattress. I'm perfect for that job, and I'll even do it for free.

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

[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'd never do it, but

[EQ]

To become an RN takes 4-5 years of school.

No, speaking as a soon-to--be former IT guy, going from BS/BA to BS-RN takes 2 years. Here in Colorado, several universities have an accelerated program, as long as you can hit the pre-reqs in science (mainly anat & phys, microbiology, pathophysiology) and math (dead simple stuff, not even close to engineering calculus). So no, not 4 years, maybe one year at night nailing down the biology courses, then 2 years full time learning the RN. There are even hospitals that will reimburse your tuition as long as you work 4000 hours (~2 years) for them upon graduation.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[TheLink]

That's very true.

But for a similar reason I find it stupid that "everyone" keeps promoting IT to people who would not normally consider it.

Plenty of other jobs, especially jobs that can't be outsourced to India or Vietnam or wherever on somebody's whim.

Hairstylists and plumbers aren't going away or going to be outsourced any time soon.

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

[Aggrajag]

I changed from IT to nursing and haven't regretted the switch. And yes,
the job does include poop cleaning (and really nasty stuff especially
if you specialize to become a paramedic) but you get used to anything.

Why would one become a nurse? If you like interacting with people and
are prepared to help them when they *really* need help then the job
might be what you are looking for.

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

[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'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

[WgT2]

Even if all you have is a high school diploma, you can get a two-year associate's degree, and yes, still become an RN.

That might not be the case in every state.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[RemoWilliams84]

Do you really think all of these unemployed people are going to the hospitals with no insurance?

I live in north Alabama (I know, ha ha) and we have one of highest unemployment rates in the nation. Hospitals are laying off nurses. The ones that aren't getting laid off are having hours cut back, vacations cut back, 401k dropped, pay cuts, no raises, etc.

My mother-in-law is an RN with 15+ years of experience and has seen all of these things(except being laid-off) happen to her. Many of her co-workers are being laid off also. It may not be happening in every state. But I imagine all of the states with high unemployment rates are seeing similar results.

Re:I'd never do it, but

[drsmithy]

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. :)

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

[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

[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

[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

[harmonise]

None of what you posted has anything to do with teaching English in a foreign country and therefore isn't relevant to the item you quoted.

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

[Grishnakh]

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.

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.

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.

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

[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. :)

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

[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!

Re:Look before you leap

[Hal_Porter]

I know several IT companies that will only hire Gitmo alumni as managers. Or at least that's the best explanation I can think of.

Re:Look before you leap

[DoofusOfDeath]

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. :)

Maybe you're the same guy! Have you checked?

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.

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

Re:Look before you leap

[Alpha830RulZ]

A huge percentage of the population today is stuck in jobs they do not like.

One thing to realize about this is what Marx wrote about 150 years ago about alienation of labor. He said, and I think it's true, that to work for anyone else inherently renders that work less satisfying. This means that the essential nature of -any- economy is that production is less satisfying than we would like. This is true whether it's a capitalist, socialist, or communist society. To work for The Man sucks, and always will.

Re:Look before you leap

[painandgreed]

Maybe you're the same guy! Have you checked?

Doubtful. Journalists stopped most of their fact checking decades ago.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

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 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.

[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.

[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 wish I had stayed down the docks.

[Xest]

"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

Re:I wish I had stayed down the docks.

[Rolgar]

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.

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.

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

Re:Bean Sprout Farming

[tomhudson]

While you're at it, why not sell raman noodle trees? With the economy the way it is there's bound to be people who would fall for that sort of scam on craigslist or feebay.

Or you can sell them baggies full of cheerios - just tell them they're donut seeds.

Forget software engineering.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually man, I make more money selling magazine subscriptions, than I ever did at Intertrode!

Only bad thing is I have to pretend I'm a recovering crackhead.

-Steve

ex-DBA here

[Dexter Herbivore]

I was working as a DBA in the mining/exploration industry until a few years ago. I got sick of constant corporate takeovers and mergers that went with the industry at the time, it's not fun looking for a new job every 14 months because some other company bought out the exploration rights and had their own staff and systems. On top of that, after my last redundancy I travelled around Europe and swore to never again look at a drillhole data log. Now I work as a civil servant overseeing the Thoroughbred, Standardbred and Greyhound racing industry. It's taken me 5 years worth of work here to finally get back to the level of income that I had at age 23, but the job satisfaction now is immense. It did take a few years to adjust and slowly work my way up the food chain but I wouldn't go back to IT and ungrateful/idiotic/anti-technology positions again. Ultimately I found that job satisfaction and regular hours far outweighed the extra money I made in IT.

Re:switched.

[tomhudson]

i became an atorney (sic)

Spelling and morals are both still optional?

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

[Splab]

The bubble bursts and a lot of people realized that quite a lot of "professionel" IT had absolutely no idea what they where doing.

Look on the bright side though, currently bankers, real estate agent etc. are getting the same treatment.

Also, IT is hard to quantify, a "key account manager" is quite easy to quantify in terms of turnover, and IT is often socially inept people, they aren't good at fighting back.

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

[thynk]

How did it come to this?

We let them take away our over voltage cattle prods. Plain and simple.

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:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Billly Gates]

You can thank Clinton and Bush for making it so easy and profitable to outsource American labor. When consumer spending owns 70% of the economy because there is no manufacturing or business spending left in the U.S. it is a huge problem.

In past recessions business spending brings the economy up and then consumers follow. Now it does not make a difference as invested money just goes to China and India and not back to us. Consumers are working for less and working more hours cut back on spending until things improve.

We did not allow this. THe corrupt lobbiests and politicians did. We need to fight back and form a third party or get involved with other workers like auto and factory workers who can't compete and end free trade. Only then will we get our salaries and our jobs back. Yes in a recession like this one I am willing to cut throat and kiss b*tt not to go homeless and its hopeless trying to have us all agree to stand up when so much labor is available.

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

[hairyfish]

"There is no justification for a 7 or 8 figure salary for someone who didn't found the company." Of course there is. There are plenty of examples of gun CEOs turning $100M companies into $1B companies. If their leadership results in hundreds of millions in extra profit, they deserve a good slice of the pie. Where it goes wrong is how CEOs all now seem to command 8 figure salaries and bonuses regardless of performance. A lot of these monkeys sink the company, yet still walk away with 8 figures.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[hairyfish]

IT does generate a positive balance sheet of you manage it properly. You provide a service, and you charge the business for that service. The problem here is that most IT managers/CIOs are either Techies who don't understand politics, or political animals who don't understand tech. These guys invariably end up getting a raw deal from the business because they don't have the skills they need to do the job properly. When a Sales Manager asks for a new laptop, we buy a $1500 laptop for $1200 (through bulk purchasing/negotiatiing), then recharge the sales dept $1500 for it. We buy, build and support the user for a price the user couldn't better themselves. They win, we win. Apply similar margins to everything to do and suddenly your dept budget is fully funded. For some reason, IT developed this idea that the rules of the universe don't apply to them. That may have true for a brief decade or two in the 80's and 90's, but since the dotcom bust, we are back in the game. Play the game or fail.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Aladrin]

I agree with Rand's philosophy to a point, but it has -nothing- to do with why IT is like it is.

IT is staffed mainly by people who love doing the job. That means that when it comes to taking a little crap to keep your job, you take it because you love the actual job. More and more get piled on until it's the standard way to do things in the industry.

On the other hand, Atlas Shrugged was all about getting the respect and recompensation that you deserve for your hard work. It's pretty exactly the opposite of what is happening in the IT industry. If we were using that book as a guide, we'd all be quitting and finding a job elsewhere... You know, kind of like TFS is asking about.

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

[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

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

There are plenty of examples of gun CEOs turning $100M companies into $1B companies. If their leadership results in hundreds of millions in extra profit, they deserve a good slice of the pie.

I guarantee you that any CEO who turned a company around like that didn't give himself a slice anywhere near the size of the chunks gouged by some executives. The mentality and ethics of the efficient CEO are entirely at odds with the sponger CEO. One is good for the company, the other is not.

Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I wonder how many of us there are? I saw the light back around '02.

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 :-)

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.

Very timely...

[Jon-ZA]

I'm completely jaded with the IT industry after having spent the past 10 years installing toner cartridges and mapping network drives for people that show very little gratitude. I tried my best to move up the corporate ladder, so to speak. I started out at the bottom and slowly worked my way up passed junior admin, helpdesk, and into senior technical support. Then I hit a vertical limit at one company, with no choice for further career progression. I looked around and evaluated my skills, but everything pointed to a horizontal move. With my desire to have a stable, decent paying job, I had inadvertently boxed myself into a position which was going to be almost impossible to get out of. My skills were clearly tailored around supporting users, with some network admin and even lecturing experience. Then, a miracle happened, I got laid off from that job and that's when life started. Suddenly a thousand possibilities entered my head. And that's where I'm at right now. I'm taking 6 months off, I put my condo up for rent and I'm going traveling to Africa! I'm hoping to accomplish quite a few things when I get there, re-focus my efforts and rejuvenate my enthusiasm, when I get back I want to start my own company, I'm tired of working for people. I want to experience owning a company firsthand and seeing my efforts pay off, literally. I'm tired of making shareholders richer and richer with each passing month. So if you skipped all of that here's the sum up. If you don't enjoy what you do, take some time off to figure out what it is that you want to do with yourself. Emphasis on 'time off'. They say that people change careers 5 times in their lives. This change, for me, will be change number 1 and I'm looking forward to it like you cannot believe.

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.

Oi

[Turbo_Button]

I'll take your job!

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.

Re:A Change is as Good as a Rest

[swb311]

Halliburton

Re:A Change is as Good as a Rest

[grcumb]

What is the name of the organization you work for ?

I currently work for the University of the South Pacific (no link, slashdot would kill it).

Most of the ICT4D stuff I did was through VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). They tend to prefer people with solid industry experience and who have some exposure to cultures other than their own. They recruit throughout Europe, North America and in Kenya, Uganda, India and the Phillippines. In Canada, they recently amalgamated with CUSO. They work in dozens of countries the world over.

There are a ton of organisations seeking talented professionals to do this kind of work. It takes a little time to find the right combination, and some volunteering work is almost always required before you can start contracting your services professionally.

A few good places to start looking:

• The Grameen Foundation - Founded by Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus, this micro-finance group does fascinating IT-based work throughout the developing world. Very high standards.
• VSO - One of the best volunteering organisations, in my opinion. They require strong professional skills and experience, and typically provide good in-country support (YMMV from country to country).
• GeekCorps - Founded by Dot Com millionaire Ethan Zuckerman, this group is focused on answering the question of what comes after we've established the basics (e.g. roads, power and water). Interesting work and interesting people.

You give up a lot to do this kind of work, and you need to remember that it's never about you - it's about the people you're working with. But once you stop worrying about career and how to pay for your next Xbox, you'll find the rewards are tremendous.

For my part, just seeing the look in people's eyes when I show them what the Internet can do is enough. Watching them take your work in directions you could never have foreseen is enlightening and humbling. I wouldn't trade this life for the world.

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.

How'd I handle the income change after leaving IT?

[hyades1]

I just started lighting Altadis Behike cigars with $1,000 bills. As long as I smoked at least a couple a week, my income stayed about the same.

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:Baggies, yes ... but cheerios?

[tomhudson]

It's the hair. No matter how straight-edged you are, you're going to look half-baked :-)

Maybe they wanted it for muffins?

Re:Baggies, yes ... but cheerios?

[Rantastic]

But despite all that, twice in Portland, people have stopped me and asked me for some weed.

Might be because you live in Portland and look, at least superficially, like a marijuana enthusiast.

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'.

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:Getting old in IT is the kiss of death.

[Talisman]

Though I've heard of this phenomenon, and am sure it is true in certain niches of the IT world (such as game coders), I've never seen it in person.

Personally, I *love* seeing the old guy come on the job site, because he'll probably know every little quirk there is to know about the system he's working on, since he's been at it for the last 25 years.

We had to deal with an Alcatel IP phone build-out on a site, and it was new technology at the time, and our saving grace was Bob. Overweight to the point where the impolite would call him fat, gray bearded, thick glasses, unfailingly calm, and was the only person we could find on the planet who knew how to make this system work, and the rest of us weren't IT slouches. Or Sande, the 60-something tech who saved one of our hotels from a complete phone outage, twice, as he was the only person in the city who knew how to work on a Hitachi HCX-5000.

The idea that old guys are of limited value in the IT industry is patently false. You can have the college grads, I'll take the grampas.

I jumped ship about six years ago..

[lz2pt]

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.

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.

IT - bus drving - School teacher

[zedsonata]

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.

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.

US Army

[MindTree]

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.

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".

Re:OK how do you get jobs like this?

[mikael_j]

isn't "...moving up in IT." a bit of an oxymoron? From what I've seen "moving up" from a regular IT position generally involves going into management and essentially becoming a non-techie, and if I'll be completely honest I don't consider that being "The best in IT", I consider that being management (just because someone manages geeks doesn't mean this person is a geek him-/herself).

/Mikael

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.

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:Why not Farming itself?

[Stupid Crunt]

It's hard work. I spent two weeks working on a sheep farm. 12 hour days, very physical work. Not to mention living in a state of constant sexual exhaustion.

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:OK how do you get jobs like this?

[lastchance_000]

When my ship pulled into Hawaii, I spent my liberty installing Slackware on my personal laptop.

You must be great fun at parties.

Re:Why not Farming itself?

[intheshelter]

Sexual exhaustion? . . . . Were you pitching or catching?

Performance Testing

[pnuema]

I think I really have managed to find the sweetest spot in IT. I make as much as a developer, my work is technically interesting, and best of all, I have absolutely nothing to do with production. Good performance testers are hard to find (mainly due to the high signal to noise ratio from the resume mills over seas), so when you are hired and recognized as such, you have some job security. Best of all, almost no one really understands what you are doing, but everyone understands when the website goes down, we lose $REALLY_BIG_MONEY every hour. If I prevent a single 2 hour production outage on our flagship product, I've paid my salary for the next 20 years. So we don't get shit on like QA testers, but no one is calling me at 3 in the morning either.

Re:OK how do you get jobs like this?

[BVis]

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.

Re:half the jobs in IT are cleaning up

[bigman2003]

Not quite the same, but...

I work for part of a University that has a name that sounds like a telemarketing firm.

Frequently, one of my high level clients will call me in a panic and leave a message. I call back, but 50% of the time I get screened by a receptionist who just assumes I am trying to sell something.

If the client is a jerk, I don't even bother to explain. I'll wait until they call back and then tell them I got screened.

This happened to one client 5 or 6 times. Finally I explained to the secretary who I was, so the call would go through. The secretary said, "Oh, I know who you are...but she gave me a list of words to use to screen calls with. And your unit has two of those words in the name. Besides, it's fun to watch her get mad when she doesn't get the call."

I don't blame the secretary at all. But then again, you could only get away with that in the public sector.

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.

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:Two sides to every story

[Grishnakh]

You should just let them revoke admin access. Then you'll run into a wall before long, and won't be able to work any more, and you can just surf all day. Your manager can then point out that your group did nothing for a whole month and it's all IT's fault. During that month of surfing, you can look online for a job at a company that has a clue.

This is all stuff your manager is supposed to be dealing with, not individual engineers. If he's trying, but he's still not getting anywhere because of dumb company policy or whatever, it's time to look for a new job because your department is probably going to be cut pretty soon for not meeting revenue goals. There's simply no way to get around a company having piss-poor upper management; I learned that at my last job, a company in that was in freefall and made every dumb decision possible which resulted in simply giving up on the product our department worked on (and was the industry leader in at first, before management bungled that lead away by laying off the RTL design team to save money before finding out there were bugs in the chip) and finally laying off our department, leaving our customers in a lurch.

Sales Engineering

[Corporate T00l]

In HS and college, I loved participating in programming competitions. Sales engineering is the first time that I've really duplicated that kind of experience, and gotten paid big bucks for it. The work inherently involves working with people. You are introduced to a constant stream of new businesses and problems to solve. And as far as verbal appreciation goes, sales reps can totally dish that out. If you're able to hack it and your deals are closing, your deeds will be widely acclaimed. There is a downside that if you're deals aren't closing, you'll be out of a job.

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)

Tech Writing is a Great Opportunity

[wvh]

I already had an undergrad degree in writing before I got my CS degree, and enjoyed IT/sysadmin/sys-programmer work for years. However, I truly "found myself" by combining my CS/IT knowledge with writing about it. Most software companies "need" a writer (whether they know it or not), and being a techie is an asset across the board. Documenting software for end-users is often viewed as a non-critical effort, but customers seem to like it ;-) I've also ended up doing product management work for various companies due to my user/product focus - it's a great space to be in. Similarly, I've also written a bunch of nerd books on various topics as a sideline. Feel free to contact me oofline for more verbose info, and some xrefs.