Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.