Jobs
My job isn't the sexiest job in the world. I'm not a private detective FBI agent circus performer who noonlights as rock porn star with a license to kill. I work on computers and help to fix and develop functional system that help people learn. I like it because it affords me the following:
1. I am good at it, so it is relatively non-stressful unless the people around me become not good at it and then I have to be doubly good.
2. It affords me the ability to work with smart people, doing smart things, and hopefully becoming a much smarter person one day who develops something really smart and makes smart person money.
3. We get to work with high profile clients like the Army, Navy, DoD, big banks, telecommunication etc... So if you screw up you get hell but when you do well you feel good.
Now I would like to expand on point 3 and try to somehow give guidance to anyone desiring a career change. I have a customer, a public agency; we'll call them Yee Haw Human Resources. This company runs the entire state's (a southern one) human resource facility. Working with them I have to have access to their systems, work closely with their IT people, even be on site to their facility if necessary. I also need them to be competent or at the least, alert. What I have found is that Yee Haw Company isn't equipped to open most doors much less operate a multi-100 tiered environment.
Yee Haw Company is so hilarious that many times I will call other peers over to listen to their DBA's or Admins talk about technology. They are so unbelievably uneducated that I have my doubts on how they operate a car or prepare food. It is shocking that entities today, that depend so heavily on technology, simply hand over the keys to complicated temperamental infrastructures to any dullard that manages to keep his desk clean.
In the past few months I have come to work with them and every day I can't help but think about how people possibly keep their jobs. The level of incompetence that is so stark throughout the IT industry is ghastly. And the amount of money that some of us veterans are paid is also astronomical to the point that we are rarely questioned about what we do. The gap between IT's results and the powers that be have become so stratified that the "Wizard of Oz curtain" that separates them is almost never pulled back to reveal the IT guy with his feet up on his desk taking a nap.
Sidenote: Now, if you just started out of college (and like all new college grads you won't make shit for 4 years - unless you're a lawyer I guess) you won't make anything but you will be depended upon and what I have found is that level of readiness for any college graduate entering the IT field is frightening. It is frighteningly awful.
Even more awful that this are the geographical areas of America and the world that are so under skilled that on a daily basis it becomes nerve-racking to think about how fragile the IT infrastructure of the world is. I don't know if this is considered stereotyping, well I'm sure it is, but I have worked with enough people and in enough places to honestly say that the level of competency in some regions (the southern states of America, England, any dutch-like union) is just horrific. And then in comparison to the America North East, Texas and California some countries annihilate our level of average proficiency (Japan, Russia, India). While we may develop some of the world's best thing in the technology arena, we certainly don't have enough quality people to install, mend, and expound upon such inventions as those stellar regions above do.
So, here's my point. While IT or comp sci may not be the most exciting business in the world I can assure you it isn't going anywhere. The infrastructures currently built have reached such a critical mass that any sort of fear of a "depression" will be swept away by the amassing need to simply keep going. Brick and mortar has been overtly replaced by lights and beeps. And the opportunity for some of our youth to take their abilities and make them viable on a professional scale, while it may seem bland, has never really been more needed. Unfortunately, you didn't get into the game in 95'.
