Study Shows Teen Gamers Like Tech, But Don't All Crave IT Jobs

CIStud writes "If you think playing endless hours of Dungeons & Dragons will create a desire to get into the information technology, think again. A new study by CompTIA of teens and young adults shows that only 17% want to pursue a technology career despite the fact that 97% say they 'love' technology." This can't be any more surprising than that most concert-goers don't intend to be professional musicians, can it? 17% actually sounds like a pretty high figure to me. The article goes on to soften even that number, though: "[I]nterest levels jump when teens and young adults are presented with options for specific jobs. Nearly half of the respondents can see themselves potentially designing video games; 41 percent envision creating applications for mobile devices; 39 percent, designing web pages; and 34 percent, applying technology in fields such as healthcare or education."

Comments

Stupid article is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I like pizza, but I don't want to be a cook at the local pizza joint.

Re:Stupid article is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I like turtles, but I don't want to become one...

Re:Stupid article is stupid

[Gideon Wells]

This article would have made more sense realistically a while back. Current teen gamers are part of a console generation where one of the main three contenders, the Wii, is even doing well in Nursing homes. Gaming could be seen as having a stronger correlation back when gaming was more niche.

To use your analogy, anyone can make and eat pizza these days. At one point, in a steadily decreasing percentage of those alive, the only people who made/ate Pizzas were enthusiasts who either built their own oven, knew someone who did, or was a relative of an over owner/builder. If you are this involved, connected, etc. you might be more inclined to work at a pizzaria than anything else.

These days anyone can buy a frozen pizza for a dollar and nuke it in the microwave. Yet the TFA makes a big deal that these microwave pizza eaters aren't as dedicated or interested as the oven building pizza eaters. Go fig.

Re:Stupid article is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not exactly in "get off my lawn" territory, but when I was a kid, if you liked computers at all it just made sense to pursue a tech career. Then the 90's boom happened, the market flooded with people that weren't really that interested who wanted the pay day, etc. I've bounced around a bit over the years doing web and winforms development, sys/net/tel admin, etc., but you learn a few things about peoples' perceptions of what various careers mean.

Developing video games isn't sitting around playing retro video games all day and dreaming up awesome shit for an amazing new product. Not in a place that actually ships. It's work.

Being a sysadmin doesn't usually mean reading others email and goofing off on facebook all day, it means stress and deadlines and working on shit hardware you wish you could pitch in a lake, while someone who doesn't understand the job breathes down your neck.

Making websites isn't like playing with ideas on construction paper all day, it's about fighting with bizarre customer requirements, broken browsers, legibility, accessibility, viewer device support, etc. We're largely past the days of Frontpage (or god help us, MS Word) goofs knocking out awful, broken shit for huge sums of money.

Most other kinds of regular programming aren't Matrix-style uberhaxoring in a back alley club somewhere. They're people in polo shirts and khakis, in cubes, with a short stack of reference books, wondering how long that next awful meeting is going to last and if they're going to fall asleep in front of the boss.

For most, jobs are jobs. It's hard to get pumped about doing them unless you just really like what you do.

Re:Stupid article is stupid

[Theophany]

Possibly one of the best posts I've read on Slashdot. Real life is the place all those cool ideas you have as a kid come to die.

I'd have loved to work for Google or Apple 5 years ago. Sadly, along with the rest of the industry, they couldn't pay me anything like what I value my time as being worth.

users vs producers

[tverbeek]

This should be obvious that gamers would be mostly uninterested in tech careers. It'd be like people who watch television all wanting to go into theater, or people who like to drive going into automotive mechanics, or people who like to eat pursuing a career in culinary arts. Liking to use something is very different from wanting to be one of the people who make it work.

Re:users vs producers

[detritus.]

Exactly, the whole "video game programmer" craze that started years back from the various online colleges fell flat on its face.
All the gamers expected they could just walk in and land a job making up and designing games without any idea of what was really involved, or that they would actually have to learn a thing about development. The only best possible scenario for the 99th percentile was being doing grunt work for EA working long, stressful hours on someone else's project.

Notice how those degree programs are rarely advertised anymore.

Re:users vs producers

[Sir_Sri]

We offer a very successful game development specialization as part of computer science or software engineering. That works very well. It is our most popular stream and even kids who don't get the full specialization usually take at least one of the game development courses. It's still a comp sci degree, so they can go off and do anything any other computer scientist can do, they are specialized in game dev.

Easily half of our students are interested in games (and take some game dev courses), and are into technology because of games. But that's mostly the domestic ones. The ones from the middle east, india and china are much more academically oriented (which is why our grad programme is 85% foreign). But game development on average is a shitty career choice, long uncertain hours, low job security and dependence on government handouts for game companies isn't a great way to make a career. So even the ones who have fun making games in course work will go off and build boring databases and web sites or be business analysts etc. When someone offers you a job paying 50k with no benefits to make video games, and someone else offers you 70k with benefits and career advancement options it's tough to take the game dev gig.

Please

[PCM2]

I think the percentage of "young adults" who actually have any idea what their future career is likely to be is less that 17 percent.

Sounds about right!

[Demoknight]

I'm entrenched in IT and I'd rather be doing anything else on certain days... :)

Smarter than they look

[girlintraining]

Normally teenagers are the gold standard for naive thinking, but they got it perfectly right on this one. I'm in IT. I've been here for a long time. I tell anyone considering a career in it to beat themselves soundly about the head and shoulders. How many ways is it bad? Ah, let us count the ways...

You'll rarely get any respect from your employer.
Most of us don't work for Google -- we work for MegaCorp(tm). MegaCorp's sole focus is on the end of quarter profit margin, and that means that everyone that isn't in sales is slowing us down. Cut those budgets! Trim those sales! Yarr, matey, we be bringin' in da gold this quarter! Nevermind that IT said it costs more and runs slower being powered by wind than a diesel engine. Your entire field is considered a bloated waste of money.

You will not be playing with the best technology, you will be helping others play with it.
Whatever is sitting on your desk is most likely a 3 coiled turd unless you are a programmer of some kind, or a manager. It's 3--5 years old, and so loaded down with antivirus, encryption, and at least 5 conflicting corporate 'big brother' programs to catalog your every keystroke that it runs slower than molasses uphill.

Your talents will be wasted.
Only the '20 year men' have a shot at getting something done and being recognized for it. And most likely they'll be looking for dumb kids like you to put in tons of overtime for a pat on the head.

Dungeons & Dragons?

[Sir Realist]

What tiny proportion of teens and young adults has ever even heard of it, much less played it?

Different world now, tech-wise

[ErichTheRed]

I think this is just natural considering what's happened with technology in the last 20 or so years. Tweeting, blogging or posting a status update to Facebook is not a difficult, cumbersome task. The user interface is intuitive, you don't have to do too much magic to get Internet access, and the results are immediate. Someone on the back end did all the magic to make this possible -- you're just a user.

Contrast that with being interested in PCs around the early to mid 1990s. The cohort who "loves technology" was limited because loving technology meant you loved to mess around with arcane, strange concepts that most of the population didn't understand. Today's "love technology" crowd actually loves using technology someone else built for the most part. Do you think your average Facebook using teenager would want to go back to, say, 1993 and spend hours fiddling with driver parameters to get a video card working in Windows, or OS/2, or DOS, or Linux? Or figuring out the magic incantations to get your 14.4 kbps modem to dial into an ISP?

Unlike a lot of people, I still actually enjoy my systems engineering/architect job. I get to solve interesting problems and come up with workarounds for strange situations all the time. I wouldn't want a traditional corporate job, or project management, or whatever, just because those jobs aren't intellectually stimulating IMO -- mindless paper shuffling. However, I have seen my share of people who tried to force themselves to love IT jobs, and they're disappointed. The fact remains that you have to have the "figure it out" mindset and the discipline to sit and work through a complex problem. I'm also one of those people who is interested in all the crazy stuff going on under the hood to deliver data around the world, so I guess I "love technology" too. That said, with things like ITIL and process-driven IT, there are a lot of IT jobs that are very boring now...the key is to get yourself one of the interesting ones. As far as software dev goes, sure, everyone thinks they'd love to program video games because playing them is fun. Doing boring, predictable, corporate software development is different -- just connect parts from different toolsets. I can't tell you how many CRUD web interface applications I've seen -- businesses need this stuff a lot more than they need video games. Someone has to do the unsexy work.

So, the group of people who "love building things with technology" is much smaller than the "love using technology to stay in contact with my social circle" group -- same as always.

Gaming led me into IT because...

[wynterwynd]

You used to have to learn everything about the computer just to get the damn games to run.

I literally started my IT career at age 13, hammering away at a shiny new 486SX/25 on a command line trying to get games to run properly. I learned very basic scripting/programming concepts working with batch files and optimizing autoruns so the sound would work in Wing Commander or Space Quest wouldn't crash. I learned hardware installing my first CD-ROM and sound card to play 7th Guest. I learned troubleshooting methodology trying to get Windows 3.1 to work just so I could play Myst.

Gamers today don't have to go through all that. Gaming is mainstream and a long way from the marginalized hobby for nerds that it used to be. Consoles took away all the need for know-how, now it's just insert disc and push buttons. When you don't have to understand the components to get the pretty-shinies to bleep-boop on the screen, you don't try to.

Having said all that, I do believe that PC gaming can lead to IT knowledge, if to a lesser extent than it used to. Hardware tweakers, framerate enthusiasts, and OCers will absolutely have the skills to jump into system building and optimization with both feet.

Re:And also

[snowraver1]

Sorry to hear you feel that way. I started my current job in one of (if not the) lowest salaried pay band. In the last 7 years I have change job titles at least twice, have more than doubled my pay, and am now at the lower end of the highest non-management pay band. IT pays better than most other areas of employment. Maybe you just need a new employer, or maybe you aren't cut out for IT.

I also enjoy the work.