Yeah, you gotta at least understand what people are telling you. Otherwise, “Ah, sorry boss! Those widgets aren’t compatible with the thingamajig so we need, like, three wee- er, months, to solve this!”
You must have enough industry experience to parse the bullshit and sort the details.
But I came in to chime along with those who said, “Call center jobs are NOT LOW STRESS.” Jeebus with jelly on a cracker, if you want to check out your brain and coast in a job, that’s not the way to go.
Thank you for that detailed response. No, I do not want to be a programmer. I was looking at Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert, but I find that has now been retired. There is something equivelent in Azure. And on one website, it said that Health Care was a big industry for that. Now in practice, I don’t know if the fact that I was a PM in health care for the past 3 years would make any difference doing that job, but it would not hurt on my resume.
I worked in a call center for a bank for a year. You ever had someone call you up from a restaurant screaming at you because their card has been declined? I have, at least once a day in that job. It is ALWAYS the bank’s fault, except 99% of the time it is not. It is only stressfull if you let them get to you.
I could tell stories about some of the idiots I had to deal with. Maybe I will, in another thread
Fair enough, if you know what you’re getting into. But for a lot of humans, being yelled at (even when it’s not your fault) takes a toll.
Beware, nowadays, the metrics at call center jobs are what’ll sink morale. Doing the absolute bare minimum takes too long; now you’re on a PIP and about to lose your job. Do the absolute bare minimum faster! Crappier! There ya go, good boy/girl.
“Thank you for calling __ Bank. How may I provide you with excellent customer service today?”
I said that over 15,000 times in a year. 80 calls a day, 400 a week etc.
This is not going to be my job for the rest of my life. I hope, anyway. I have a friend who says, “You can do any job for a year.”
Anyway, I will create a new thread about this.
You’ll get to type of calls for IT support. First kind is the stupidest people on earth trying to use computers. Then you’ll get the kind that are irate because the product isn’t working right, and they’re right it isn’t, and you have to feed them some bullshit line from management about a fix that will be available soon but it won’t be, you know it, they know it, and management knows it.
Even the companies with quality product and services that don’t generate a lot of the second kind of calls will have plenty of the first kind.
Why not apply for a Census job? They’re still hiring, and the pay is pretty good for a temp job.
Amen to that!
There’s no doubt that this type of knowledge and experience is helpful. I was an engineer for 15 years before becoming a Project/Program Manager and it has made me very valuable in my role as a technical PgM.
But not all PM/PgM roles require it. We have dedicated Scrum Masters that don’t have engineering experience and they are able to perform their duties very well without. They do pick up some detailed knowledge along the way, but it wasn’t there when they started. But Agile skills are difficult to master in just coursework. It really helps to get practical experience in existing projects before taking on that role.
Nearing an early retirement, worried if I’ll get bored.
I’ve read of these 8 week IT boot camps. Some are kinda scams, like Devry type places, but apparently some are supported by the IT industry and give you basic IT skills to work at a help-desk or something. You are not gonna be making 6 figures working AI for google or anything.
Well, I don’t know about no stress, but sure, it shouldn’t be an issue to get such a job, though your timing is perhaps not the best with the current situation. We aren’t hiring any IT people in my organization right now because it’s difficult to train and integrate such people into our system with a good percentage of our staff still working from home and only a few physically in at any given time. I imagine a lot of organizations are having similar issues, though perhaps they have better ways of dealing with it.
Most call center jobs are a lot less than that, unfortunately…usually entry level is more like $15 an hour, tops and the benefits generally suck too. As for certs, it would depend on what you want to focus on. Usually, entry level call center you just need basic skills (something like Comp TIA A+ or Net+), but if you want something a bit more I’d look into online/remote training in something like MCSE or ACA (if you want to go systems), or maybe CCDA/CCNA/CCNP (for network), maybe CEH/CySA+ or the like (if you want to go security…this would be my recommendation, as I think cyber security is the big thing these days and there are tons of jobs if you have the aptitude). What you could do is take an entry level call center position to get some experience (and they will train you as well), while taking something else, and in a year or so you could jump to a much better and more fulfilling position in one of the branches of IT that appeal to you. For at least 6 of those 8 years you’d be doing something fun, at least IMHO, as opposed to the grind of a call center. Neither will be exactly stress free though…IT is pretty stressful at all levels, at least IMHO, though it can be a different kind of stress dealing with users as well as non-IT personnel who wants what they wants, and wants it for next to no money and yesterday.
There are IT jobs that are accessible if you’re 58, but I’d temper my expectations.
When most adults with jobs ask me “can I become a programmer?” my answer is usually “no”. The internet has tons of freely available information on how to become a programmer. There’s a ton of information online; a good candidate would have already looked at it and tried some stuff. If you’re waiting for someone else to tell you if you can do it, you probably won’t get far.
Programming and programmers, IMHO, take a very special mindset. It’s definitely not for everyone. I think IT is also that way, though to a lesser degree. The OP was talking about call center employee, and I think that could be for most people…most people who can deal with the grind and the crap they will get on low pay and benefits anyway. Generally, call centers in my experience have really high turn over for this exact reason…it sucks. Only if one progresses to management does it get even marginally better and you see a drop off in turn over. Hell, even tier 3 engineers on a call center don’t last long before moving on to something better.
This is my US-centric view, btw. MMV in other countries and I don’t have a lot of experience with those call centers or help desks.
I have to say - if you haven’t programmed in 30 years, you might find it harder than you expect. Object oriented programming has become the way to write programs, and it’s got a number of concepts that are tricky.
It’s not the object-oriented programming that’s really tough, but the millikns of ways in which programming has changed.
When I started in the early 1980’s, you built software on your machine, and it executed on your machine. By the end of the 1990’s we were using sourcesafe for version control, but programming still did the same things - you wrote code that ran in a process on a computer. The ‘infrastructure’ you needed to learn was a simple build process where you checked in code and it was compiled with others’ code on a local build machine.
Now, we live in a world of distributed computing, with containerized virtual build machines, code that executes in the cloud, package managers, frameworks, lots of remote procedures and external interfaces for authentication and authorization, etc. There is a hell of a lot to learn today that didn’t exist 20 years ago.
Also, back then coding was very algorithmic. You wrote your own sorts, transforms, etc. Efficient coding was critical, as was a good knowledge of math. Now, most programmers simply glue together various already-existing libraries.
Age discriminatiin is a big thing. Our office was shut down and everyone was laid off. Those of us 55 and older were offered early retirement, and the HR people told us we’d have a hard time if we wanted to keep working as programmers.
Programming shops tend to like young people who have endless energy and few committments. Feed them free cheetos and Red Bull, and they’ll work all night for you and will work month-long 12-hour per day death marches. Also, their skills with all the new infrastructure are fresh, and if you find a good programmer you might have a candidate for management later. A 58 year old programmer is unlikely to be around long enough to become a serious permanent asset to the company.
There’s another reason, too: Employers are increasingly looking not just at you, but at your networks. They want employees with lots of linked-in connections of the right kind, they’ll look at your social media, etc. Some want your facebook, Twitter and even email passwords so they can check you out. Older people tend not be so heavily invested in all this, and therefore often don’t even pass the first level of scrutiny. One of our HR people told us we should have 25 linked-in connections, all from people relevant to the job and willing to vouch for you. At the time, I had exactly one connection other than my wife, and it was the editor of a magazine I once wrote for. It just never occurred to me to care.
I am enjoying my semi-retirement, though.
Ageism i one thing, but it’s quite another to be 6 years away from retirement and have no experience in your chosen industry (IT).
I would suggest focusing on Project Management. Get a PMP certification if you don’t already have it. Maybe an Agile certification as well. If you just want to build your knowledge base, go to a site like Udemy or even YouTube and take some course so you are familiar with modern IT concepts.
In addition to object oriented programming, there are a lot of other concepts in IT like databases (relational and noSQL), big data, Machine Learning / AI, predictive analytics, business intelligence (Tableau, Looker, etc), ERP systems (SAP, Netsuite), cloud (AWS, Azure, Google), cybersecurity, and probably a bunch of shit I don’t even know about.
Most corporate IT services are outsourced to companies like Cognizant or Wipro and most of their technical staff are based out of India. Or they are managed “in the cloud” by service providers like Salesforce or Microsoft.
Sam_Stone is talking nonsense about companies wanting your social media passwords. No reputable company does that. But they do look at you on LinkedIn. And 25 connections is nothing. Industry standard is you should have “more than 500”. Which is not unreasonable for someone in a “people-facing” role like project manager.
He is correct about the changes. When I started my career in the mid 90s, I was able to quickly become a “full stack” developer by learning PowerBuilder, VB, C+, Oracle/PL-SQL, SQL Server and later some java and HTML. Personally I don’t want to program so I went the business / PM route. My last job working at an enterprise cloud / AI software company, honestly I barely knew how any of that shit worked - Hive, HBase, Nifi, Spark, Scala, Pig, Flink, Impala, Sloop. Bunch of Apache Hadoop gibberish. My job was mostly just making sure the clients were happy with the work the engineers and architects were doing and finding opportunities for the salespeople to misrepresent it!
The point is I don’t think there are a lot of opportunities at most companies for an “IT guy” who knows a smattering of technologies in this day and age. 30 years ago, sure. A company might hire you to build some little apps in Access, VB, Lotus Notes. There might even be some companies where that “garbage IT” hasn’t been phased out yet. But it’s not the future.
[quote=“msmith537, post:37, topic:917129”]
Sam_Stone is talking nonsense about companies wanting your social media passwords. No reputable company does that. [/quote]
No large company maybe, but I know a couple of guys who were told they’d have to either provide their passwords or else log in and let the employer browse around their accounts. That was two years ago, and they were both small programming shops. People are terrified of employees who beak off on social media and get their employers in trouble, or cause conflicts with other employees because of what they say online. HR thought it was common enough to warn us about the practice and tell us we didn’t have to comply - hut good luck getting the job.
Not if you’ve spent your career in a shop with only 30 pther developers. For salesmen and field engineers, maybe you get those connections. For your average programmer, Inreally doubt it. For a 50-something who never paid attention to linked-in until everyone was laid off and scattered to the winds, impossible.
Then I don’t get the job.
LinkedIn has been around for over 15 years. I think it’s super-weird that you work in a place where IT people are indifferent to social media and your HR people demand access to that social media.
Aside from the people in your company, do you have classmates from school? Vendors, partners, customers, etc and other industry professionals you work with? Do you go to industry events, trade shows, etc?
Maybe you don’t need 500+, but not having any social media presence is apparently a big red flag to recruiters. Particularly in the tech industry.
I’ve worked for big multinationals and startups and quite a few in between. If anyone asked for my passwords I’d be out the door ASAP. I can believe some places would ask, but that’s not very common and since getting a new job isn’t all that difficult around here it’s going to guarantee that they don’t get the best employees.