Has the Glory Gone Out of Working In IT? 623
An anonymous reader writes to wonder if the glory has gone out of IT. One blogger remembered his first impression upon entering a profession in IT that made it seem like the place to be, with a new shiny around every corner. What experiences have others had? Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?
Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
To be honest, I don't even understand what question is being asked.
What does he/she mean by "glory"?
And a "new shiny" what? "around every corner"?
Carpenter vs. pre-fab (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Glory in IT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Give us some context regarding this "glory" that you perceive as having "gone out of IT". While I know that, prior to the dot-com bubble burst, everyone and his brother was going into IT, it's not as if (those silly Intel commercials notwithstanding) people were looking on IT folks with awe, or that most women were fighting to be with us or anything like that.
Or, given your mention of "new shiny[s]" - perhaps what you're missing are the days when a sysadmin had unquestioned control of his domain, ran it as he pleased and didn't have to answer to any higher-ups? Those days are long gone, and are not coming back (and, frankly, let me be the first to say "good riddance").
Re:a long time ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe if you were a UNIVAC technician, that was pretty cool
UNIVAC is a year older than I am, and nerds were NEVER considered "cool" until normal people started using PCs.
It was the year 2001, that's when. (Score:2, Interesting)
Before 2001, firms would roll their own internal systems so there was plenty of software development around. They didn't trust the "solution" providers, like SAP, yet because they firmly believed that those firms charged too much and they didn't want to do business like the solutions providers told them to operate. And back then, a development team was basically, a few designers/coders, an architect, a business analyst, a DBA or two, and the network guys who were off on their own. So, we had about 8+ folks working on a project - not including the network guys. Also, there was plenty of work because of the impending doom of 1/1/2000, when planes were going to fall out of the air, dogs and cats sleeping together, and Western Civilization going back to the stone age. Life was good, Making six figures as a contractor wasn't unheard of and even the norm.
Then came the recession of 2001 - 2002, maybe even into 2003.
Companies found out that it was cheaper in the long run to buy software off the shelf. They realized that SAP, IBM, Oracle, Perot, Siebels, EDS, etc... maybe was better and cheaper than rolling their own from scratch. So, out with the development teams, and in with the programmer/DBA & programmer/network admin - this is for most business environments. There wasn't a need for so many programmers anymore and if they did need a programmer, well, you could offshore for a hell of a lot less. Sure, there is still a demand for programmers, but no where near as many that were needed as back in the 90s. The market has shrank dramatically. Many companies no longer have their in house development staff. They outsourced it off to specialists or even off-shored it. (There is still a demand for blacksmiths, but instead of a demand for a couple per town, there is maybe a demand for a couple per state - if that. The same goes for buggy whip makers. And even then, many of those do it as a hobby and have day jobs because there isn't enough business to make a living.)
So, basically, IT has become another white collar corporate cog type of job.
This is just my take.
Have to stop correcting because Slashdot's entry script is falking out on me...
Glory is in the eye of those at IT's mercy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you'd find something you like doing, you could end up having fun at your job, and kill 2 birds with one stone, maybe ? At least, that's what the IT field is for me!
Re:Carpenter vs. pre-fab (Score:3, Interesting)
I dunno. Around here, if you have money, you likely had your cabinetry done by Amish. Done by hand, great amount of pride in workmanship, yet somehow not too much more expensive than Home Depot.
Dumbest Slashdot story ever (Score:3, Interesting)
NUMBER ONE: If anything, the pace of "new shinies" has INCREASED over the past decade. When I started out in the dot-com era, there was primarily C/C++ or Java if you were doing backend work... and Java, Perl, or ASP's if you were doing web development. The basic concept of building a web app with an MVC design was a "new shiny". There was no Github or even Sourceforge yet. Today there's a new framework or language or awesome end-user app to play with every time you turn around.
When the anonymous blogger in the original post remembers I.T. as "the place to be", he no doubt means that in financial or marketing terms. That is, we all thought we were going to be stock-option millionaires... and with the exception of some Googlers, that delusion of the industry has been dead for almost a decade now. I.T. is not the insane gold rush that it was 10-20 years ago, but relatively speaking it's still the best paycheck you're likely to get while still being free to fuck off on Slashdot half the day.
NUMBER TWO: There is NOT a "more pervasive technical culture" today. Having an Facebook account does not make you a web-developer, and having an iPhone doesn't make you a sysadmin. There is common perception among middle-aged and elderly people, that the younger generations are brighter or "more technical" because they carry lots of electronic gadgets and spend lots of time on social networking sites. The opposite is probably true... if anything they make people dumber. Regardless, while the number of consumer toys has grown exponentially... I would submit that percentage of society with any real technical interest or aptitude has remained constant.
Glory? (Score:3, Interesting)
When was there ever any glory?
Getting screamed at by some fake-and-bake guy because his laptop doesn't work all the while bitching and yelling that "I make the fucking money here cube monkey! Fix my shit!" or lecturing us on "If you people actually made some fucking money they might send you on a golf weekend once in a while. Wait do you computer geeks even know how to golf?" Gee thank you "will not be named marketing company once located in Plymouth MN" for that experience... No wonder you went under and have 3 of your executives in jail now...
How about the executive that needs you to scrub his PDA to make sure the wife can't figure out he's banging Stephanie in payroll all the while chatting how worthless the black hole of IT is. "Do you people do anything besides spend our money?" Gee thanks I loved spending 3 weeks with Faire Issac getting your data feeds set up so you can actually get mailer out to all your potential customers before first quarter. And you assholes still had the balls, after I worked 3 days straight sleeping in a server room, to gloat on how "if you could get your job done right you could have come golfing with us." We've been shit on as an industry from day one. What Glory? And does everyone in a suit fucking golf?
Then there was 3 years with Lady Macbeth out in Burnsville who was so brutal and wicked I can't evne put into print what he issues were... all the while complaining that a staff of 8 could only field 3200 calls a day... Simple math:
60 minutes in an hour. 8 hours = 480 total minutes
480 * 8 = 3840 total minutes.
3840 /3200 = 1.2 minutes a call...
NOT FAST ENOUGH! WTF? ARE YOU BRAIN DEAD WOMAN?! Asking someone their name takes at least 20 seconds... Whatever... not that I am bitter... people complain they can't get help but then you bitch that you aren't "helping them fast enough" ... ARRRrggg... Oh well not my problem, she was more then capable of driving a 40 million a year company into a 4 million a year company before the competition bought them out and threw her 6 figure fat ass out the door...
And after all that still having to put in the 60 hour a week grind in a server room, coding everything, administering everything, and being told by your boss that "You need to foot the bill for all these certifications, why should we pay you to help you keep your job?" MCSE, CCNA, CCIE, CNA, etc... I remember in 2000 I had to shell out $12,000 in a year of my money to "keep my job."
The sickest thing is, in all those years, because of the nature of our work, we IT people see all of the company. No insulation. The corruption at the top all the way to the bottom. If Jeff is surfing pr0n in the warehouse or Mr. Big is surfing kiddie p0rn in his masion, IT sees it all and suffer it all too. From the top AND the bottom. It makes you not like people in general. I have 0 faith in any human walking Earth now as a result.
I remember at one employer just running a simple
DIR /S *.MPG /S *.AVI
DIR
against the personal drives due to disk space running out.
The sheer volume of pr0n was staggering. The executives were furious. They wanted blood. I was in the conference room when they demanded to know who the top offenders were. They were going to make examples of them. I was fired on the spot when I named the top 5 offender... all sitting in the room.
Glory my ass. Never was any, never will be any.
Blissfully retired and anyone dumb enough to go into that field, good luck. If you want to see the worst in humanity, IT\MIS is the field to be in. I'd rather work with prison inmates then go back to that, I take honest evil over hypocritical evil any day... Glory? How about IT Shell Shock Syndrome...
Not glory (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know whether there was ever glory in working in the computer field--but there used to be joy, and it's a lot harder to come by these days, at least in my experience.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh don't get me wrong, it isn't like this is a drudge or anything, I like tinkering around with computers and such, I do it some in my free time, but, if I were independently wealthy, no, I'd NEVER work again. I'd do what interests me, it would surely involve some computer geek activities,but, honestly, I found out a year or so ago when I had 7 months off between contracts. My day generally involved, getting up, walking the dog...hitting the gym for a couple hours, then getting on my motorcycle, and riding around New Orleans all day, exploring and finding fun things to do. At the end of the day, I'd meet somewhere with friends getting off work for a few beers, wash, rinse repeat.
I would have no problem doing that for the rest of my life, while, of course, taking vacations off to travel somewhere caribbean to a beach on occasion.
No, I learned there, that I could easily occupy myself with travelling, having fun in NOLA, doing things with friends and chasing women the rest of my days, and NEVER miss a day of work again if I were to get such an opportunity.
I didn't know that IT was glorious. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are always in the background of any project. It's assumed you can do whatever it is they want you to do, even if it has never been done before. They will want it 6 weeks earlier than you can deliver it and 50% cheaper than you can buy it for. You are supposed to be invisible. No one thinks about how much work you have to put in to something in order to keep it up and running in a production environment. If the service fails at 3 am on a Sunday, every minute of your time will be tracked until the service is restored and you will be told how efficient you aren't and what you should try to do better next time. When the kudos are given at the next company meeting and everyone talks about all of the great things they have accomplished this year, your name is never mentioned unless you count the "Oh, and thanks to IT who.. does what they do!" mention from the CEO.
You're the plumber. You're the TV Repair man. You're the phone guy. They only know your name when something has gone wrong and they think you can fix it. They only think you can fix it because they are fairly sure you, or someone like you, broke it to begin with.
Welcome to I.T.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
actually the "nerdy" look has become something of a in-fashion thing for some girls
Nerdy looking girls turn me on.
a watch with no LCD's [sic] inside
A watch? How quaint! Why would you need a watch when you have a cell phone?
slacks, and a button up shirt
Odd, the women I know have convinced me to ditch the slacks and button up shirt, they say it makes me look like Mr. Rogers with a goatee. The only women who seem attracted to me when I dress like that are hookers. [slashdot.org]
Re:The Glory went out of IT (Score:1, Interesting)
There's an article up on Computerworld lamenting this trend, but there's an even better commentary on it, which puts it into historical perspective, here: A modern window into the historical dislike of bosses against expertise. [dbzer0.com]
In a nutshell, capitalists have always tried to reduce the skill required to perform a job, so that their employees will not be able to demand any kind of respect, better wages, or workplace equality. They prefer increasing control over employees, even if it harms their profitability in the long run. It's happened over and over again, and IT is just the latest case.
On a related note, one of the downsides of setting up shop in India is that they apparently don't take shit lying down. Man, I wonder if this guy was as much of a dick as the guy I worked for ten years ago. I often contemplated doing him grievous bodily injury. HR manager beaten to death by angry workers [dollarsandsense.org]
It's funny though, five people committed the crime, but they've arrested nine people, and the police "are expected to arrest more."
I guess the idea is that "they were all in on it!" I don't know, if these HR workers really did sit down and plan on killing their boss, they sure as hell didn't plan very hard!
"Okay, guys, when he puts down his mug and says 'yeeeeeah, we're gonna need you to move your offices into the alley out back. You'll probably want a cot, too, since that's where you'll be living now.' we all beat him to death, right there in his office! It's the perfect crime!"
That totally sounds realistic to me.
Admittedly being short on details, it still reminds me of the McKinley assassination, when authorites tried to argue that Czolgosz was instructed to kill the president, (because Anarchist leaders are known for handing down marching orders to their subservient lackeys, heh!) despite it being obviously a lone, emotionally troubled man's act -- it was merely a convenient excuse to round up "troublemakers" and deport them.
Re:huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think that is the case at all, take mercenaries for example... sure they might love killing people... but I imagine that they do it for the money, and happen to be very good at it too.
Re:Where would I find glory? (Score:3, Interesting)
These days, people's health seems to be considered more important than anything, so glory = saving lives?
glory job = Surgeon? paramedic?
Re:The Glory went out of IT (Score:3, Interesting)
Because it works today. It'll even work tomorrow.
Your "standard easy-to-manage way" will quickly grow into a bloated behemoth. It will barely work even today. By tomorrow, it will have collapsed under its own bloatedness, the "standard" will have been replaced with the new "standard" and no one will want to work on the unmanageable mess built on the old standard.
Famous last words. Parkinson's law applies to computer time as well -- workload expands to fill all available memory, disk, and CPU time.
Re:What glory days? (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, not all businesses have a network, in fact the vast majority of businesses still don't have a network. Many are just 1 to 20 person companies, I agree, but they form the bulk of the working population. They don't have networks because either the business doesn't justify it (which is often hard to believe) or they can't afford to get someone in to do it for them. Ma & Pa are not calling in IBM. They need John & Jane. They need the personal touch. These little companies often have to buy inappropriate package software. It's in these areas that the Glory quietly continues. Building computers & building software for the little folk. Because the little folk are in fact doing the interesting stuff, and them doing interesting stuff means we as the IT players are helping that interesting stuff get done better. Which is glorious!
Re:Unnoticed by design (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, any infrastructure service, be it power or roads or IT, is intentionally uninteresting. "Interesting" means noticeable or memorable, and it's pretty much only the problems that people notice and remember.
Indeed. There never was glory in IT, in any case, only the illusion of it back in the 90s when everybody was talking about the internet taking off and suddenly being the guy "who knows about computers" made you awe-worthy.
Now everybody sees IT services like they see the plumbing. They expect it to work and they should. You don't see people stopping a plumber to congratulate him because the sinks drain nicely (and if you think comparing you to a plumber is derogatory, you have a too high opinion of yourself and deserve your toilet to back up while you are still sitting on it).
Re:huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
you might find this interesting:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html [ted.com]
Re:You have to be a very insane programmer for tha (Score:1, Interesting)
This reminds me of something a surgeon in his mid-50's told me, after I had a bad experience with younger, just-out-of-surgical-residency surgeons: "I remember when I was young and foolish, wanting to operate on everything I first saw."
You're 26. You still have the fire in the belly, the desire to change the world. Kudos, and hope you keep it for a long time. But you also have the inexperience to understand what those of us who have been in this industry longer than you've been alive, and were once the hotshot young 3x-employee-of-the-quarter ourselves, are saying.
For many of us, things aren't the same in the technology world. Everything has become mission-critical. Uptime requirements have become permanent availability. Stress levels have increased substantially, as management has moved from commander's intent (this is what I want, make it happen), to micromanagement. It's not so much a loss of glory; it's a loss of fun, of research, of designing solutions to complex problems.
For me, the two biggest flags of things not being right has been the elimination of lunch, and the resignation people have over their conditions. Up until about 2002, heading out to lunch with colleagues wasn't an issue; now, it's like pulling teeth. They're all busy and either skip lunch entirely, or eat while working.
Add to that, you would not believe the number of people I hear as a contractor bemoan their current position. When I point out they could always go somewhere else, they say the same thing: "yeah, but where else can you go?" The two things these people have in common are experience with different companies, and none of them are over 33-34.
So yeah, enjoy yourself, but do print this out. You'll want something to remind you of your glory days when you're old and remembering the good ol' days--say when you turn 32-33.
Confusing IT (Score:4, Interesting)
The glory of IT is not in IT, but in software engineering. IT is the dark, smelly, hairy underbelly of computing technology. Software engineering is the light, bright, wonderful topside, basking in sunshine and wonder.
IT personnel are responsible for keeping crappy, obsolete, virus-laden servers working without enough money to get anything better. Any money spent on IT is considered an expense. "Good" IT consists of finding the cheapest off-the-shelf software to sorta do the job.
Software engineers are given the challenge of a problem to solve, and the money and time to do it in. Good software engineering consists of designing the most elegant technical architecture to solve the problem.
IT personnel are regularly yelled at as if they were barely more valuable than a "click next to install package" monkey because that's often what they are. Even when personally far more capable, the job only requires you to "click next" when installing somebody else's software, perform backups, and set passwords. IT personnel are relegated to the back store room and not allowed to see anybody, except accidentally on the bus on the way to the local Carl's Jr.
Software engineers regularly meet with executives in fancy boardrooms with glass tables. They are there to design quality solutions that will be used by thousands or millions. They are treated with accord, respect, and often, mild deference. Lunch is often provided by hired caterers at design meetings.
No matter how "senior" you are in IT, you are easily replaceable by anybody with the requisite MCSE certificate.
There are never enough qualified software engineers - they are pretty much always in high demand and paid to match. When software engineers work in a field, they quickly acquire domain expertise that's almost impossible to replace.
People who confuse IT and Software Engineering often wind up working in the wrong field. Put in the time to become a software engineer, and you won't ever regret it. Cram through your MCSE or CCNA, and become one of the faceless droids. (Yay! I know what an MSI file is! I can calculate a subnet!)