I'm damn tired of all this IT jealousy.

The BBQ Pit
1

I am so fucking tired of all the smug Schadenfreude about IT people being out of work. I have been out of work for a while now, and all I hear is barely veiled versions of ‘that’s what you get for being a greedy bastard’. For the record I, (and most of us unemployed IT) wern’t being greedy. I was being responsible. See like most people I had various dreams of being a musician, or author and a million others.
But as I was making my life decisions around the end of high school I decided that it was most responsible to ‘get something to depend on’ then working my way towards my dreams. I was good at computers, and liked doing it more than any other ‘responsible job’. Plus Every economy guy on TV and magazine survey said Computers were about the only job that looked likely to continue strongly for the next couple decades.So around '90 I was on my way to becoming a computer science guy. Around '93 the Internet was turning the corner from geeky pastime into major phenomenom. Around 95 I decided to move on to Grad school to get a masters. That didn’t work out so well so I entered the IT job market in 97. I was making good money compaired to all my freinds, but I was working 65-70 hours a week so all I hadn’t hit the Jackpot as so many people think all IT guys had, or expected. I worked various jobs at several companies, doing whatever they needed at the time. I was trying to be a responsible company man(god was that a mistake) and ended up with no area with more than 9 months experience, which with this IT market makes me essentially unemployable. I am in the shitty position of being underqualified for an IT position. I am over-qualified for an unskilled position(the guy at McDonalds nearly had a heart attack laughing when He read my application and resume).

I’m not looking for sympathy, I know many people are worse off, and I will survive, But the next unclefucker who says 'It’s about time you greedy computer guys got what you deserved ’ Is going to be giving some more business to the high altitude window repair and cleaning-blood-off-the street industries.

(Well apparently even than damn server is against me, trying again)

2

General IT work = Skilled labour. Plumbers, mechanics, electricians, etc all make good coin, and so do we.

Now if you will excuse me, I’m going to start my first day of unemployment by running my signed dismissal agreement to the office. Oddly enough, the plumbers and electricians will still be at work today.

3

Wolfman, sorry about your situation. I went into IT for the same reasons as you did. Ironically, I started my college career in psychology, but didn’t have the funds (and perhaps the patience) to spend for all the extra schooling that would have required. Now had I gone that route I could be counseling all the unemployed IT folks.

I’m still employed until the end of the week. I don’t know that the IT field will ever truly turn around in the United States (if that’s where you are). I’d recommend to be creative in exploring your other alternatives. Focus on work that’s more difficult to ship overseas. Good luck.

4

wolfman, there are a lot of us who have taken a very similar career path to yours. I have a bachelor’s in psychology and a master’s in advertising, but have spent almost my entire career as a programmer. I got into it simply because it was a practical thing to do. I’ve never had any real love for the job, but I’ve used it simply as a way that I could aford my many other outside interests. I have never, ever worked a 60 hour week. Of course I’ve been out of work for about a year now, so maybe I should have put in those extra hours.

I have known a lot of folks in IT in my life and not one of them has ever found themselves rolling in money. For the most part we all made very comfortable livings. The parking lots where I worked were full of Hondas and Toyotas, not BMWs and Mercedes. Most of the people who became instant millinaires from their company’s stock options are now back to where they started.

On the other hand, even though I’ve been out of work for a while, I don’t hear any of this contempt and glee regarding my plight that you seem to be getting. Maybe you need a new set of friends.

5

I’m gonna tell you all this one time only. Get your butts to Denver and apply for a Fincial rep job with TMobile. My husband is working 50-60 hours a week and I’m getting tired of it!!! He’s working so many hours because 1 hes a hard worker that loves his job 2 the company is about 200 people short at my husbands site ALONE and 3 he’s saving up money for our belated honeymoon. GET OUT HERE AND HELP!!!
please?

6

I have a T-Mobile phone, will that help? Seriously, what does a Financial Rep for T-Mobile do?

7

I feel your pain. I graduated with a MS in IT in July 2000. This was just before the bottom fell out of the market. That would have been a good thing, but I was also about 6 months pregnant at the time (and oddly enough, people don’t want to hire obviously pregnant women). By the time the baby came, the market was headed for trouble.

I have an okay job, but it has nothing to do with my BA or MS. My husband finished the same MS program in 2001 and finally got a job using his degree in January 2003. Unfortunately, that company went bankrupt 1.5 months later.

8

A financial rep is the person TMobile customers call when they want to pay their bill, bitch about said bill, whine because they can’t pay their 2000 dollar phone bill that their 12 year old ran up calling his internet girlfriend on the other side of the country… you know… the person that gets paid to get bitched at when they try to help people lol.

9

Hi guys, can I join your club?

I am a former IT/Tech support/customer support employee. I was laid off in March of 01 and didn’t get a fair fucking shake until March of '03.

Now I’m a Legal Assistant and in a Paralegal program… Maybe things happen for a reason :smiley:

Sam

10

Does it pay more than McDonald’s?

11

Hi! I just graduated from C.S. - anyone have a lead on a job? :smiley:
Myself, I’m in the field because I’ve always enjoyed it (my unfortunate date of graduation not withstanding). Given the large percentage of people in this thread who have abandoned the field altogether, should I be more concerned than I already am?

(I can’t believe you’re getting heat for being in I.T. - OTOH, there’s plenty of lawyer, secretary, and trucker gags around, so throw some back. ;))

12

Wolfman I hear ya buddy. I entered IT in a similar roundabout way. It started as hobby in H.S. and turned into a profession while in college - IT was the best paying job I could get as a student, and built far better skills than waiting tables or bartending - when I finished with a BBA in Management in '01 I had planned on leaving IT behind and looking for work more directly related to my degree. However, I got an offer (they recruited me, based on a recomendation from a colleauge) from a local ISP to take over as their Unix Admin and they offered me a much better salary than I could get in an entry level job as a “business man” somewhere. In '01 the IT market in Alaska was still pretty good being fairly insulated from the chaos in Silly Valley and the place hiring me looked solid: they’d been in business for ten years, had a stable customer base and some very lucrative contracts with the State to provide 'net access and support to rural Alaskan schools. Plus they were a OSS friendly shop running everything on BSD and Linux servers. Seemed like a good place to settle in for a few years, make decent money and get some really good experience.

By April 2002 they’d lost the school contracts and a few other large private ones, due mainly to gross mismanagement on the part of the owner. As a result I went from having a minimum of 30hrs of system maintinance work to down to 15-20hrs. I’d managed to keep myself employed by waving my BBA around when we landed a huge contract as part of a federal building rennovation, claiming that I was the most qualified person in the office to do PM work, which was true I did an outstanding job at running things. By Oct 2002 the contract was starting to dry up and the company was running short of money. They handed me my walking papers on Halloween, with no notice and no severance, nor did they buy back my vacation time. Which, btw, I’d already scheduled to take A WEEK LATER!

Seven months and a move to Houston later I’ve finally found another job. In the four months I’ve been down here I didn’t even bother to apply for IT work, knowing that the half dozen or so jobs posted in the paper would be swamped by candidates far more qualified than me. Trying to fall back on my degree proved frustrating since the economic malaise as spread to every other sector of the economy by now and those entry-level “business man” jobs are now requiring 3-5 years directly related job exp, which I don’t have. I got very lucky - a friend reccomended me to his boss when their IT guy started making noise for someone who could build/admin an SQL database and write a web interface for it. Fortunately running MySQL servers and doing web dev work on them in PHP had been an offical part of my job for the past three years so I was hired (yay me!) at my old salary no less. Yes I realize how lucky I am.

The point of this story? Just another IT guy speaking up about not being a greedy dot com bastard who deserves unemployment. Like 90% of out work IT guys I entered the feild because I had an aptitude for the work and expected it to be a growing sector, with plenty of steady, honest work for the foreseeable future.

13

What are you defining as ‘I.T’? To me, ‘I.T’ means database support, network guys, tech support, server maintenance, etc. MCSE grad type stuff.

Programming, on the other hand, is something different, although it may get classed as ‘I.T.’. Especially database programming, VB programming for internal use in a ccompany etc.

In my experience, there is no glut in the programming field, defined as people who write software for a living (as opposed to doing the occasional VB app as part of their tech support job or something). If you can write in C++, and can write good, solid, elegant code, you can find work.

The root problem is that the tech bubble in the 90’s caused many companies to heavily overspend on IT, and this in turn caused a huge boom in IT educations, typically things like 6-month database admin programs or MCSE’s. Now that the boom is over, there’s a big glut of such people, and many of them will probably never find work in the industry again.

So if you’re in that position, you might consider either changing fields outside of IT entirely, or at least learning where the demand is within I.T., and getting some additional training to qualify yourself for that. I’ve noticed quite a few open jobs in my area for Java and .Net programmers, for example.

14

I use IT to refer to any Computer job. I originally got a Degree in Math Science from Michigan(Was trying to double in CS and math, but couldn’t afford any more tuition to get both, and had neither, But the classes I had taken, qualified me for Math science) So I it not a matter of throwing in 6 months and expecting the world to be handed to me. I was a damn good programmer, good enough to TA for C++ and algorythims in my first failed attempt at grad school. But it is completly irrelevant how good of a programmer you are, Unless you have a resume that says 3+ years in field X. Every job that gets posted recieves hundreds of resumes, and if you can only put 9 months experience in X then you don’t even get considered. I have nine months as an Oracle DBA, 6 months as a C++ programmer, 6 months programming in a propreitary GIS language, 6 months as a systems analyst plus other month long assignments in various crap. Nothing that will get me past a screening in any job.

Not to get off the subject and turn this into a whinefest though. I will figure out something, But I am so fucking tired of the greedy asshole is now unemployed joy that seems so common in the world and on the board.

15

I haven’t seen anyone call IT guys ‘greedy assholes’.

I did see some annoyance back in the day when IT guys were Gods. It can be annoying to go to university for six years to get a Masters in Engineering, only to see some 19 year old kid with a Microsoft diploma make twice your salary. So I imagine some of those people are getting in their licks now. But damned few.

A more common attitude is, “Hey, we all knew it was too good to last. Now it’s over, so stop whining about wanting to have a job in the field forever and go get some real training like the rest of us had to.”

I’m not saying this is fair, and I’m not saying that all IT guys are poorly educated. I personally know two with Masters degrees themselves.

All I’m saying is that people who are seduced by the lure of easy riches should not really be all that surprised when it turns out that there’s a catch. And more specifically - no matter what your field is, no one owes you a job. If you can’t find work in IT, perhaps it’s time to look at another field.

MY attitude is simply, “well, I’m sorry you’re out of work. But no one promised you a lifelong career. If you can find a job, terrific. If you can’t, do something else”. It’s that simple. I save my real scorn for the IT guys that want laws passed to ensure jobs for them - like lobbying to prevent outsourcing of IT work to other countries.

16

And I can offer another example. My bachelor’s is in German Lit. and my master’s is in Library Science. I knew what Schadenfreude meant, straight away let me tell you.

(and if I hadn’t, I would have known where to look it up!) :smiley:

17

amen, wolfman, amen!! – pretty much echo’s my sentiments and experiences exactly! Although I got into the field much earlier and have twelve+ solid years of experience - I was still out of a job a little more than a year and half ago. I started my own company and did computer consulting to get more cash (using my business contacts). Still it took me some time to find a solid gig. Then I hired on permanently with a company just five months ago and put my company on hold for the time being (some personal things were prompting that move). But , oh boy have I experienced the out right “glee” from a lot of people that I was out of work! Unfortunately, a good deal of which came from my own family! I never really understood that. Here I got into the field very early - excelled both in college and in the industry - distinguishing myself very well in many fortune 100 companies. I outclassed many others in companies both within my field and throughout other departments within companies – so, of course, I was damn upset to be out of a job!! In spite of this - people would be like “he’s finally experienced a setback” type attitude (at the least a “relief” attitude). I really don’t understand the attitude that some people take that life must be full of dissapointment, conflict, and let downs. Sure it exists, but why dwell on it? Anyways, I degress…my best advice would be do what was already mentioned in that you need to find the “sweet spot” within the field in order to continue in it and expoit it. That could not only be programming, but a specific type. Then build from there. Let me tell you though - even the ones that do have IT jos right now - It really kinda sucks at the moment. You definitely don’t have the luxury to pursue all of your interests in the field until you “pay the bills” first.

18

Amen to all the above posters. Many good wishes to all. I too came to IT in a roundabout way as a Russian Studies major who ended up in business adminstration, and finally figured out that the stuff I had the most fun with was networking. I went to a classic dot com (issued a nerf gun when I signed on), left to do project management at a company building fiber optic networks to businesses, and then poof. 11 months unemployed. Now I’m working at a non profit dealing with telecommuting policy and program administration. Expand your horizons is my advice. You sound like a very skilled (much more so than I) generalist. Someone’s going to appreciate that. Keep the resumes flowing and something will turn your way. And to those who may gloat, the hell with them. You’re working in a field you like. Setbacks happen to good talented people. This too shall pass. And you will have the last laugh.

19

I think Y2K did a lot to expose the man behind the curtain. There was a time when an MIS professional was tantamount to a God. They did things no mortal could. Ahhh, the good old days. I am just hanging around now, keeping a low profile and doing what is asked. I’m practically a dinosaur, I’m a mainframe programmer. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and I know I am one lucky SOB. It doesn’t make you rich, but I live very comfortably. It has its annoyances, I was called at 4:30 this am because some file transfer job couldn’t connect (there wasn’t anything I could do about it, I just think the operators were lonely). Anyway, there are ads in the paper every Sunday for IT folks. Where I work ,we are hiring:

CSS Coordinator (Telecom)

One to three years experience in the telecommunications field as well as retail specific knowledge or experience for coordinating store installs.
Broadbased knowledge of telecommunications hardware, wiring and services
Knowledge of processes for removal of telephone equipment for remodeling, relocations and closings
Prior experience coordinating inventory and refurbishment of equipment for re-installation with vendor
Prior experience coordinating Telecommunications Billing and consolidation for all store telecommunications services
Prior experience coordinating repair service and maintenance on telecommunications equipment
Strong organizational skills
Strong communication skills
Strong interpersonal skills
Bachelor’s degree from accredited four-year university or college or equivalent combination of coursework and experience
CSS Supervisor (Night)

 Available to work a 4pm to 1am shift with flexibility for possible future shift changes
 Minimum of three years supervisory experience in a retail specific customer support environment utilizing technology to troubleshoot and resolve store system issues.
 Demonstrated knowledge in Point of Sale and Back Office Applications. IBM and NCR platforms experience required.
 Thorough knowledge of store support procedures and policies
 Strong leadership and motivational skills needed to establish and implement such processes to support company business applications
 Proven organizational and planning skills and demonstrated ability to communicate effectively in oral and written form is essential
 Project management skills needed to manage special projects as assigned
 Access to confidential files requires impeccable background of ethical behavior.
 Successful completion of an appropriate course of study or graduation from an accredited college or trade school or equivalent experience in related industry.
 Experience with a process methodololgy such as six sigma is a plus
 Experience with ITIL a plus
HRMS Testing Manager

 Proficient in Microsoft Office products as well as MS Project
 PeopleSoft HCM 8.x experience
 Mix of functional/technical experience preferred
 Retail knowledge a plus
 Involvement in multiple PS implementation in the testing/cutover capacity utilizing a formal testing methodology
 Planned and executed testing for PS Payroll with a minimum of 25,000 associates.
 Experience with testing ESS/MSS, EPM (data warehouse), Workflow, Portal, T&L a plus
 Four year degree in Information Systems or equivalent.
 5+ years of experience in Information Technology Management.
 Excellent communication and presentation skills.
PeopleSoft Web Portal Developer

 Bachelor’s degree or equivalent job experience
 Five-plus years of information systems development experience; minimum two years of project design activities
 Five to seven years of system analysis and programming experience
 Two to three years proven experience in PeopleCode, SQR, App Engine, PeopleTools 8.18
 Java and C ++ programming experience
 Strong communication skills

Senior Programmer/Analyst

 Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of coursework and experience;
 Working knowledge of PCs including software and hardware
 Two to three years development experience with Client Side Technologies which include Java, HTML, Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)and XML. Server Side Technologies including Java Server Pages(JSP) Java (Beans & Applets)and experience with SQL and Oracle databases.
 Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), Internet Information Server (IIS), Visual Interdev (Active Server Pages), Component Object Module (COM), Janus and Cold Fusion experience preferred.
 Working knowledge of PCs including software and hardware
 Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Teradata Database Administrator
 Bachelor’s degree from accredited four-year university or college or comparable business experience
 Requires 3 to 5 years of Teradata and Informix or DB2 database experience and technical certification
 In-depth understanding of database technologies
 Experience working on Unix and Mainframe operating systems preferred