Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Moving Away From the IT Field?

Posted by kdawson on from the life-on-the-other-side dept.

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?'

22 of 783 comments (clear)

  1. I'd never do it, but by Lord+Kano · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
    1. Re:I'd never do it, but by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:I'd never do it, but by apmonte · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:I'd never do it, but by harmonise · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
  2. Look before you leap by FPhlyer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm an ex-Navy guy. My military career field was journalism and public affairs. When I got out of the service I went directly into IT.
    The same factors that governed my career change would likely work in this, and any other similar situation:
    1. Identify things that you LIKE to do.
    2. Of the things that you LIKE to do, do you also possess marketable skills doing them?
    3. Can you put those skills on a resume?
    4. What can you do NOW to add credibility to your new career?

    Work those things out and making the leap should be fine. Beware, leaving IT can often mean leaving a good paycheck. You'll want to get your finances and lifestyle in check before making the jump.

    --
    Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
    1. Re:Look before you leap by TikiTDO · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Look before you leap by BillGod · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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!

      --
      MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
    3. Re:Look before you leap by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    4. Re:Look before you leap by painandgreed · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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

  3. I wish I had stayed down the docks. by joeyg1973 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Bean Sprout Farming by serps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously. You can start with one bag of seed and a few plastic buckets and sell to local businesses (especially organic businesses and asian stores since they sell larger quantities) and scale up from there. Inventory isn't a huge problem since it only takes 72 hours to grow the sprouts, and you can buy the seed by the 25kg bag.

    Obviously, I'm simplifying things, but honestly it's a business that's incredibly easy to get into, resistant to non-local competition due to the perishability of the sprouts, and if you can 'get it right', you can definitely market on quality

    --
    "Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
    1. Re:Bean Sprout Farming by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  5. Forget software engineering. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  6. Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IT jobs get absolutely no respect any more.
    They get paid crap.
    They have *ON CALL* work.
    They have to read the minds of dolts who make more money (and work in a more sex balanced environment and who often get to go out drinking on the company dime).

    I had to beg our manager to take the guys to lunch. And he wouldn't spring 15 bucks for an appetizer.

    Meanwhile the other side of the building is meeting for drinks at the bar at night dropping easily 10 to 20 bucks per person.

    At my friend's company, the IT folks get up at 6am, get left at work while everyone goes out drinking for extended lunches (because they are "sales and executives")-- entire company is smaller than my last team. Executives my ass.

    Somehow, we let them do this to us. When I was getting into the field, we were priest kings in air-conditioned rooms with complete power. But with each passing year, we underbid each other and passed control over to people who worked us to death.

    Leave the field.
    If your in it, learn to fail gracefully.
    Negotiate for more money and leave when they don't give it to you. Leave them in a lurch.

    This all sounds like a troll but it's more bitterness seeing complete idiots making 6 and 7 figure salaries while the "intelligent" folks are working as slaves.

    How did it come to this?

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    1. Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here by Money+for+Nothin' · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

      Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
    2. Re:Govt Security, Accounting, Jobs with boots Here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  7. Very timely... by Jon-ZA · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    -Zero Tolerance for Zero Intelligence-
  8. Oi by Turbo_Button · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll take your job!

  9. A Change is as Good as a Rest by grcumb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
  10. Applying economics to job hunting by adamkennedy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. Lose the boss by arielsom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".

  12. Re:Why not Farming itself? by Stupid+Crunt · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.