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Despite the positive aspects of life in IT, circumstances may conspire to nudge you towards the exit, says Jack Wallen. So what are the factors that might push you over the edge and out of IT?
1. Stress
Anyone who describes IT as an easy career is deeply misguided. In fact, IT jobs that don't involve stress are rare. Remember, IT is disaster management. When a client or user calls you, it's almost always because of an emergency that must be dealt with immediately. And when you are working on those tasks, you have to get everything right, since failure could cost you a contract or a job. What's worse is that the stress rarely lets up.
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Talkback
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Jack. Many jobs and professions are frustrating, stressful, disappointing and unsatisfying these days days. Perhaps the angle is a bit different. Public perception of many 'professions' is very low these days, bankers, lawyers, politicians, police and etc. I was a Civil Engineer, before I retired prematurely and got involved with IT. Over the years the nature of the work changed and the 'fun' went out the job. Civil Engineers never had any status, even though their contribution pervades all aspects of everyone's lives
Thanks for your brief and accurate summing up regarding the 'Cloud' and standards - one short paragraph says it all. As for respect these days, I find that in general it is conspicuous by its absence in all walks of life.
Point 5 struck a chord. Micro-management by bosses who, basically, haven't a clue.
I would agree with this, but if you swap 'Industrial Electronics' for 'IT' you get exactly the same result :(
6 redundancies in 14 years... Towel thrown in?, not quite... I'm enjoying some downtime (no 16 hour days, all nighters, resurrecting and/or babysitting the dead and dying, oh and no 'not technical' boss (or any boss!))...
I know one thing - I'm not interested in working for someone else...
The points about People, Technology, Respect and so on ring true. I believe the "consumerisation" of technology is a prime force behind people and their lack of respect. In the early 90's if you could get a friend/family onto the Internet at home, you were viewed as a Guru. Similar awe was received at work for (nowadays) trivial help and troubleshooting. Technology is becoming ubiquitous in households with families getting themselves onto the Net, including wireless access. Children configuring the PlayStation, XBox, Nintendo and iPhone. People run a lot of technology at home nowadays, all configured all by themselves, leaving them to wonder what we actually do at work that is so difficult and stressful.
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This is a very good article and is very down to earth. These are common reasons and events that we see in the real world. Personally I think the hours is the one that does the most damage. Working late hours or extended hours on a regular basis can lead to stress and cause sickness and other issues. Not to mention working late hours fixing problems and issues which can be frustrating, etc.
IT jobs are not your regular 9-5 job where you show up to work, do your job, and go home leaving the work at the office. With IT, the work goes with you in most cases. It's 9-5, plus nights and weekends for off-hours upgrades, fixes, etc.
Good article. Point 5 is well made. Management fail to understand that off the shelf solutions are not always the right solution. They bring with them extra baggage in the form of integration and often a significant point of failure.
It is no wonder that the number of graduates heading for the IT sector is falling.
All excellent points. Another aspect (to expand on point 7) would be that technology is changing so rapidly that the IT worker not only has to retain his knowledge for antiquated systems and equipment while learning all of the new equipment/technologies. New products/technologies are coming out at a fierce rate that continues to accelerate every year. I still see companies expecting to find a guru willing to Engineer networks, systems, databases and SAN while willing to be oncall for all these systems for under six figures. Provided they could even find this guru; the person could not possibly keep their arms around all these technologies very long without vaporizing from oncall duties.
The major issue I find is that most users are now "IT specialists". Everyone, pretty much, has a PC / Mac / smartphone so they instantly "know more than you". They can install anything they like at home, use whatever browser etc so expect to be able to do that in a corporate environment where it's completely different.
Wow! What a burned out bitter old man who must be tired of having to convince people that they are always right!! lol It is a young mans game (I am not one), but it can keep you young and energized as well if you find the right environment. The challenge to make yourself better to continually learn and re-invent can be stimulating as well. Perhaps a career change is in order, Jack:)
How interesting - I was in law enforcement for 24 years and IT now for 7+. It is true, both careers are in for their share of scorn. My experience has been that the public's perception of law enforcment officers is way better. The public doesn't like the law, but they will act like they respect officers until the 'dangerous moment'. In IT, your own user base will treat you like a plumber with his buttcrack showing every time!!!
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I worked as a software engineer for 12 years at a very large IT company. Prior to that, I worked for a large Japanese video game company. I then moved on to technical support at a large medical devices company. Eventually, I was extremely burnt out by the uber-fast changing nature of the web services specifications (some of the original specs were well over a thousand pages); the shifting paradigms in J2EE; the numerous, competing frameworks for various tasks such as ORM frameworks, GUI frameworks, or pattern frameworks; the various different competing platforms that narrow your universe of jobs to a niche; IBM's incessant need to chase down every potentially big software technology. And then I had to become a jack-of-all-trades sort of guy. I was doing everything from performance testing and tuning, to coding proof of concepts on architectures I knew nothing about. It was also extremely stressful to work as a consultant in Silicon Valley--the elite of all the IT world. I was dealing with very smart, very capable people. I majored in mathematics and chemistry, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and was at the top of my class, and I was still very impressed with people I met and worked with in Silicon Valley. I interviewed with guys who were Putnam Fellows; I worked with many people who had Ph.D.'s in the hard sciences and engineering from the very best schools; I worked with a lot of true geniuses. You can't bullshit around people like this. They can smell your ignorance a mile away, and this often made me feel stressed out. Also, I noticed a lot of the older guys in IT just plain out sucked. They couldn't do ANYTHING past their small areas of expertise. They were just flat out useless--I would secretly hope they would get let go so we could hire younger, more agile guys like me to boost productivity and make my job easier. Not only that, but some of these guys were very smart when they were young. A few had Ph.D's in engineering from CalTech! A couple others were Phi Beta Kappas in math and engineering! However, they all never grew to become a really top notch engineer. I mean, it was so bad that, as an example, one of the guys, a 60-something year old Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cal Tech, would have troubles understanding basic, fundamental ideas in databases such as distributed locks or synchronization. That's when I realized that IT is a young person's game.
After all these years, I'm leaving the profession to go back to graduate school in mathematics. I'm also taking classes in biology to possibly pursue a health care career.
People refuse to admit to enforcing Closed Standards with bureaucratic forces invading peoples homes and enforcing ordered equipment to be enforced into a state of defectiveness.