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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."
I like pizza, but I don't want to be a cook at the local pizza joint.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Let's roll to determine your career path. Roll a d20!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Am I missing something, or is this roughly the equivalent of people saying "I want to be a fireman when I grow up!"?
Still, I suppose it's encouraging that software dev is seen as reasonably classy. Even just a few years ago it was all "but I'm not a sweaty nerd!"
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
How many said they wished to produce educational video games for mobile devices?
But when it comes to design jobs, you either got in because you have other skills, or because you already had a game design job. In a smallish commercial game team, we'll have 2-3 designer/producers, a dozen or so coders, and over a dozen artist types by the end. On an indie project the "designer" is likely also project lead, and any other "designers" are dual-role.
I love having a car to drive around, but I don't want to be an auto mechanic. (race car driver though... hmm....)
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.
Breakfast served all day!
Why go into the white collar equivalent?
I (sometimes) enjoy my work, but glamorous it ain't.
I'm entrenched in IT and I'd rather be doing anything else on certain days... :)
Study shows lots of people like pudding, few aspire to become Bill Cosby.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What tiny proportion of teens and young adults has ever even heard of it, much less played it?
People who love animals are the same way. The vast majority love them because they are tasty. An independent group love them because they're animals. Same kind of thing for technology.
If someone is sitting on the sofa playing hours of D&D and eating handfuls of Doritos I doubt they have ANY career ambitions, let alone IT. Personally I don't get the allure of computer games. If I'm going to spend hours doing anything it had better yield some results. And by results I don't mean blowing up the bad guy with a plasma ray.
i thoroughly enjoy crushing teenagers' dreams of being video game designers by showing them the reality of it. i show them some code and start talking about physics or shaders and their little souls just deflate. granted, ill occasionally get one that isnt scared off, but most of them just think that because they play of lot of video games, they could design them.
teen gamers like to play, not work.
Gee, real "news at 11" story there...
I'm also failing to find an overall point here. I drive a car every day, yet I'm not an auto mechanic. I brush my teeth every day, yet have never had a desire to be a dentist. Not quite sure when we started thinking that most of the objects or functions consumers interact with or do every day would somehow prove a professional correlation, especially when the cobbler wears no shoes.
From what I've seen, most of them think this means coming up with a few ideas and then finding someone else to do all the hard stuff. It's pathetic. Maybe 1% of that 50% will actually take it seriously, and even then a bunch of them may get 2-year technical school degrees that come printed on Charmin 2-ply. If they're lucky, they can get a job at EA getting paid peanuts while being chained up in the basement and eating hardtack and swill.
Past the obvious, "it's not because I like it that I want to produce it". There are more technology than IT. Engineering (as in building stuff) is all about technology, but it has nothing to do with computers. Chemical engineering is all about technology as well. But it is not IT.
Who was thinking about work when you were a teen? (Let alone IT work)
When you're a teen,.. playing Xbox 8 hours a day while getting paid for it would seem like a perfectly legitimate career path.
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.
These days anyone can buy a frozen pizza for a dollar and nuke it in the microwave.
Pizzas don't have a mechanism to keep people from adding their own toppings before putting it in a microwave or conventional oven. Console games, on the other hand, do have a cryptographic mechanism to keep end users from adding mods.
It'd be like people who watch television all wanting to go into theater
That or like people who watch YouTube making their own videos to post on YouTube. It's a bit harder to do that with a video game.
I'm not going to become a chef anytime soon though.
God spoke to me
On the other hand, help desk might be a good way to get one's foot in the door at some companies.
no love for hardware developers ? :(
How would a teen react to the description of a tester's job? "You will be playing Xbox for eight hours a day. The games you will be playing are horribly broken. You win if you can tell us how you broke them."
Well of course. If I go into management, I can play computer games all day. If I go into IT, I have to fix the managers computer when it won't play games
"If you think playing endless hours of Call of Duty will create a desire to get into the information technology, think again.
When you do something you love for a living, sometimes you don't love it anymore. Plus, unless you are a software engineer, a typical IT career can be for the birds. Infrastructure guys are generally worked to the bone and only noticed when something breaks or fails. Management rarely complements an infrastructure team when things go smoothly. Also, to management, IT is an anathema at best and at worst, seen as a liability (read that, necessary evil.) I don't know that I would encourage my son or daughter to go into a career in technology unless they wanted to become programmers. That said, if my children absolutely desired a career in IT infrastructure, I would steer them to the networking side versus the systems side.
Jocks play games.
Water is Wet.
Fire is usually hot.
The sky is often blue.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
The newer generation didn't grow up with the opportunities the understand what simple coding could do. In the 4th grade (1991), I had "computer class" once a week where we were taught BASIC and the concept of step-by-step logic coding via turtle (Logo). I was able to grow up tinkering with throw-away 286s and 386s, screwing them up and then reinstalling DOS.
Today, kids have beautiful UIs and systems that want to minimize their interactions. They don't have computers... they have "apps", "the internet", and all these other environments, but are rarely presented with the opportunity to understand how Action A leads to Result B.
They love what technology can do, but they have no clue how it works. They're not tech-savvy. They're tech-dependent.
I like good looking women.
But that doesn't mean I want to be in Pr0n.
I remember an old Sensai wo said he loved his martial art but his turning it into a career teaching kids killed his love of it.
When I was your age we didn't have music file sharing utilities. We had to go out to a store and shoplift the CD.
What's the link between technology and D&D? Roleplaying (which involves real-life social interaction) in a medieval setting (which has no technology) is pretty far from IT or software development.
It is true that software engineers often fancy board and role playing games. But it's not because of technology, it's because of their mindset.
Those man-years are only lost if you are the one paying for them, otherwise it is known as a steady paycheck.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
True that.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
half designing video games; 41 percent mobile device apps; 39 percent, web pages; 34 percent, healthcare or education i dont think i read that right.
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.
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> Every system today required protection against malicious code and attacks. Wake up hippy, disco is over.
The best protection against malicious code is to learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them.
Your proud ignorance is the best way to ensure that all of those past mistakes will be repeated over and over and over again.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's no girls and it's all full of fat guys with social disabilities, it fucking sucks.
How does enjoying playing a computer game cross over in to that kind of environment?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
to most of those putting frozen pizzas in microwaves a kitchen knife or can opener are almost as alien as the toppings in their non-prepared form
Alien? Yes. Banned? No, unlike Sony v. Hotz and before that the team effort of Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony to shut down Lik Sang.
""If you think playing endless hours of Dungeons & Dragons will create a desire to get into the information technology, "
Who the fuck ever thought that?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Part of the reason is that they have friends, such as myself, in the IT industry. Friends who say, "Yeah, working in IT is fantastic, I love getting phone calls at 2am when I'm trying to sleep because some client decided to change their API without telling us first. And of course, it has to be fixed RIGHT NOW, because Grandma can't get to her webmail interface to read the latest chain letter."
Love sees no species.
"This can't be any more surprising than that most concert-goers don't intend to be professional musicians,"
The slight difference is that anyone with half a brain can work in technology one way or another, while very few people can become professional musicians.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you arey an IT professional, why would you care about having extra work to do because of Microsoft?
That would be like a lawyer complaining that people broke the law.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It is how I got interested, and I work in IT. I think I started a bit earlier, in that it was a 286 that got me started. Sure I had earlier computers than that, but I was younger, and they were not as game friendly (TRS80, VIC20, never had a C64, had a friend that had one).
But yeah I remember fiddling with batch files, boot disks, memmanger, EMS, XMS memory and the like and all sorts of hacks to get a game to work. Back in the day it was a rare thing to simply install a game and have it work, you had to really fiddle to get things to run (or maybe I was always on the edge of compatibility perhaps). Everything was new, and not everything worked all that well together. Heck I remember upgrading from 5 1/4 to 3.5 to CD-ROM. Bought a copy of MS Flight Sim 4.0 just before CD-ROM came out. It came on like 40 3.5 disks! I remember having to mess with Pools or Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds to get them to run, and then when running to get them not to crash.
I also got very heavily into modems soon after. I was a daily users of a host of BBS's so much so that my folks were forced to buy a second phone line (even then there were pickups followed by the mod/demod screeching sound, followed by a 14 year old screeching sound). I even tried briefly to host my own BBS. I even did my co-op placement in highschool in a university IT dept (which really should have showed me what I was in for, too idealistic I guess). Later I got into building, OC, and moding computers for fun. Heck getting "multiplayer" (which was really 2 player) to work over a modem was an experience, but awesome as well. I remember setting up Warcraft (original) and Doom2 over 2400 baud modems in my 1st years residence. The year after that it was all about Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Warcraft 2 all, modem good times... I think one of the things that made Starcraft 2 very popular (other than it was a great game) was the fact that it was one of the first games where you actually didn't individually connect to another PC, but to the Internet (Battlenet) and let it do the connection for you. Anyone remember TEN (The Entertainment Network I think it stood for), that was all it was for, to help players connect.
So when I went to university I naturally went into Computer Science (1995), and everyone and their dog seemed to be getting rich making web development or software. Then I graduated in 2000, all ready to make my mark on the world, and the tech bubble burst.
I have however worked in my field for 12 years, and while some of it has been rewarding, much of it hasn't exactly been what I expected when I started all of this so long ago. Then again I never worked for a start up or a small company, I work government, which can be very restrictive, cumbersome, and frustrating at times, but it does have a good pension and benefits and is pretty stable, so the good with the bad I suppose.
But given the history of IT jobs, I don't think it is all that surprising that people are not getting into it in droves. When I did, it was sexy, and the potential to make a very good living, now you are much more likely to be an abused corporate drone with little respect, overwork, and little chance for advancement. Yadda yadda yadda, you want to make real money, go into management. I think the youth see not just all the folks that got rich off the tech bubble, but all of those that missed it, and the result it had on everyone (pretty negative). While in a totally capitalistic sense, everyone in the last 10 years should have been going in to finance, so they can be one of those guys on Wall Street cleaning up.
If I had to do it all over again, I think I would still go into CS, as it is still despite everything a passion and an interest. However I might have looked at doing a joint major in Economics, and then getting the appropriate certification, leveraging my CS into the finance world.
D&D is a tabletop game played with dice, miniatures, pencil, paper, and imagination. Why in the world would that imply a career in IT?
I.T. jobs are one of the most-easy to outsource to India. I would advise my son against taking any job that fits this category. Perhaps one may begin in domestic I.T. but it's also likely that some time in one's career, it'd be necessary to train their Indian counterpart to perform their job, only to have it transferred to the country at 1/3 to 1/2 one's salary. Having spent an engineering career at one of America's "big computer companies", I've personally seen this happen on many occasions. I walk through our campus and observe large empty parking lots with weeds popping up through the asphalt, looking at the empty buildings they surround. I tell my son "these lots used to be full of cars and those buildings used to be full of working people." They've all lost their jobs mostly to India and China. It's sad.
but it' still a job and I'd rather be doing something else than tweaking worthless web pages for the college drop outs in marketing..
Like what? Filling out piles of paper work as a lawyer? Dealing with mindless hospital bureaucratic administrations as a doctor? Working 80 hour weeks as your typical MBA manager? All of which cost 50k-100k to get through the degree-door and pretty much have the same pay scale as a software developer. Sure, maybe if you are stuck as a geek squad/tech support person for 7 years, but software development at least is pretty damn cushy. Play your cards right and you can work remotely in a lot of cases and do it all from the beach. It can get stressful, but only if you let it. Manage expectations, don't get involved in office politics, and give estimates with normal working hours in mind; it will all work out.
Really? My experience has been quite the opposite. I got a C=64 as a kid and when I learned I could control it through writing programs, I was hooked. When I got older, the fascination never wore off. To this day, I find it just as entertaining. I'm a programmer both by hobby and profession. Some days I wonder how it is I can live in a world where I can be well paid for doing something I'd be doing at home anyway.
Granted, I don't expect everyone's situation to be the same, but if one truly does enjoy the work, I can't see it getting old at all. Repetitive? Sure... Frustrating? Definitely... Maybe I'm just weird, though. (Well, I'm definitely weird for sure, but whatever...)
I want my time to be productive. Maybe you could work at a job where you spend all day installing Microsoft updates but I can't. I get my jollies from designing systems that work well on the factory floor 24 hours a day, six days a week without crashing.
If you think the last 37 years have been great because of what Bill Gates and Microsoft did, think of how great they could have been if Bill Gates and Microsoft had done things right (using the quality standards in place in the mid '70s).
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
You are a rare exception my friend. Having said that, I also enjoy my work, but I'm not naive or clueless enough to think it's particularly common to do so, so I don't boast about it.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.