That’s one thing I don’t see that much in IT. An IT Director or CFO with 20 years IT experience. I always see guys with that kind of experience still doing development work for the suits…man! Top management, if there is any, is either a sales guy, some ex Accenture or Booze Allen consultant.
You miss my point. Whether or not something is revenue generating is a matter of perspective. However, management most surely is not. That is why for govt. contractors, managment comes out of “overhead”. If you are MS or IBM, IT would seem to be revenue generating. When I moved into managment in my last job, I would discuss this with my boss. We managers were not contributing any more than the programmers. (We produced a software product.) It was just as hard, if not harder to replace the programmers as the managers. I was important in the sense that I brought money in, in the sense of a new contract, but nothing fell apart when I left. Someone else would have brought that contract in. The real reasons management makes more than other workers include: there are fewer managers than workers, so the aggregate cost is less, managers set the salaries and pay raises, managers tend to be older, and something has to motivate people to move into management. It has nothing to do with being revenue generating. I’d toss supply and demand in, but I haven’t seen much evidence of that. And the supply of IT workers can be influenced by mucking with visa restrictions, etc.
On a pro football team, the head coach makes something comparable to the lessor stars on the team. (Mike Tice only made $600K a few years back, so some coaches make not much more than the back ups.) The assistant coaches make a good deal less. I haven’t found an up to date site, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some asst. coaches make less than the NFL minimum. I’m confident that it gets more in favor of the players in baseball and basketball. The same could happen in corporate America. The biggest difference that I see is that the GM, and to some extent, supply and demand set players salaries and coaches salaries.
The most middle class, white IT guys can aspire to is middle management. I can’t think of any that make it up to regional VP, let alone higher.
Unless, you start your own company. Of course, most start ups fail. In any field.
We didn’t meet, but you must be about the first Doper I can claim to have almost met, although Biffy The Elephant Shrew and I must have known each other by sight since for a couple of years we were both at Revelle College, UCSD.
To address the OP, I think offshoring is a significant threat to the IT profession, but not as much as it has been made out to be. Certainly there are routine coding tasks that can be farmed out, but I can’t imagine a situation where designing a system that will be acceptable to the users can be done without having analysts and developers onsite, whether they are employees or local contractors. I would think also that the home office having to constantly collaborate with an IT shop halfway around the world, in the opposite or nearly opposite time zone, would tend to be increasingly burdensome as time went on. But that’s just my conjecture.
To think that 90% or 95% of IT jobs will go offshore, IMO, is similar to the notion that all the needed software must surely have been developed by now, so there’s no need for IT at all.
Or that all the decisions must have been made by this point, so we don’t need managers anymore! 
So you’re in my cohort, and you were at the orientation in August? Wild!
We just missed bumping into each other at Alpine Village a couple of years ago, too.
Are you coming to The Dopefest?
I’m really offended by this, you left out us short bald guys in this emumeration of IT geekdom.
I’m not sure if that’s true. Large organizations with lots of IT infrastructure have CIOs and Director of Informations Services and such.
Which does mean that if you have good interpersonal skills, a business background, understand management theory, and bathe - and become an IT business analyst, manager or the like - its really a breeze to stand out in the crowd. I know some really bright, business aware, socially adept IT management nowadays - its changing.
However, I still know a lot of Unix programmers who got lost in 1969, guys with their A+ certification who think “continuous improvement” are just two big words that are meaningless but want to know why they don’t have a career path, and guys that can program like the dickens, but can’t translate requirements without help because they don’t understand concepts like “audit” or “customer.”
Isn’t programming like engineering or any other technical field? Some people enjoy doing it and don’t want to move to management because they don’t want to spend most of their time in meetings and doing management tasks. At an airline, the boss of all the pilots undoubtedly makes more money than the other pilots, but I’m willing to bet he or she doesn’t get to fly much. A lot of programmers don’t want career paths.
Actually, I think a lot of programmers want career paths that leave them doing software actvities. From “program what your told” through “tell people what to program”.
msmith, note Dangerosa’s statement. The perception is definitely that managers should have business backgrounds. For some reason, it is perceived that it is easier to graft technical skills onto a business background, than the other way around. Partly, because there really are the types that Dangerosa mentions, and partly because there is a strong perception amongst those with business degrees that software types are geeks with no personal skills. My observations, as kind of an outsider to both groups, is that geekiness indeed runs stronger in the “hard” IT fields than other geek fields (like my beloved physics), but that over time skills gradually level out. Those with no personal skills eventually learn some, or are pigeon holed. Those with no technical skills eventually learn to talk like they have some, and either get promoted out of harms way or wander off into other areas.
No, but they want jobs. And the ones that can only program EXACTLY what is laid out for them are far cheaper in India. If we are hiring here, we are hiring here because that way we get someone with communication skills who can talk to the customer (or at least the business analyst)
I agree with you that the trend seems to be away from that type of position. I can’t think of anyone in my company whose job really fits that mold, and a lot of former developers have been moved into the operations and support side of the IT department, where their technical knowledge combined with company knowledge is an asset.
At NG, we did the same. They mostly had programming degrees, btw, none had business degrees. Of course, our customers were pilots, we are a different breed from either programmers or suits, so we hired a lot of ex-pilots.
No place I’ve been hired those with business IT degrees, because we needed people who could actually write code. To get software built, we needed programmers, or math majors and the like. Those who could write usable requirements, perform useful system engineering, generally had some coding ability. So being a competent programmer was step one in getting an IT, software job. Step two, was fitting in - meaning you had the appropriate personal skills. Even if not all programmers need to be able to talk to customers - and I suspect you can do quite well at MS without ever seeing a customer on a professional basis - you must be able to play nice in the sandbox. To progress as a programmer, you had to learn to lead programmers and design, etc. If you can only program what you are told, you never got to this level. (Very few people can code, but only do what they’re told.) However, to further your career beyond one or two layers of management, you need some kind of respectible business background. MBAs are a popular means to this end. I can’t speak to their effectiveness, as I’ve found a nice niche outside of management.
Let me say right up front that these threads scare the living crap out of me. I am a network admin, have been for the last 6 years working for the same company. If I lose this job I am toast…burnt, crispy toast. I see more and more topics like this that make me think that I need to get into another field with more security…but what? This is the only skill I have.
Get a security clearance.
I was a network admin. Moved into consulting, process analysis, now project management and strategy. I’m also working on an accounting degree. I figure at the end of this, I have one hell of a resume for audit - though its unlikely I’ll ever do that.
Not for the company you’re doing the IT for, it isn’t. You’re stating the case from the perspective of a contracted supplier, but from the perspective of the customer, the IT being provided is still a cost centre. IT’s a cost centre.
Programming in a software company is not “IT.” Programming in a software company is operations.
There’s a much simpler answer: Managers have more and/or rarer skills than programmers.
Managing’s always easy when you’re not the manager.
I’m late to the thread, but I can third that!
I would like to add that what’s happening with IT and outsourcing is no different than anything else. It’s the Business Model. You come up with a product/technology, perfect it, make it a repeatable process, then ship the grunt work overseas for cheap. The key is to be an innovator, a process expert, or a grunt work shipper, if you want to continue to prosper. Otherwise, you’re just another buggy whip maker.
Having said that, management, while a necessary thing, is highly overrated. The cult of Type A management ubermensch still has a stranglehold on the Business Model and we haven’t found a way around it. Yet.
Interesting contradiction is’nt it. If you educate yourself to get a high paying occupation you will not get a job .If it can be done cheaper elsewhere it will. We are told future security is dependent on education. Yet the high paying jobs are the ones that will be offshored.If someone in India will do it for 1/3 price it is gone. We keep a skeleton crew here to fix the screwups . It is cheaper that way.
Engineering ,machine tool build and development …gone. Once you get the education and skills to demand high wages ,you become expendable.
We are sending our automotive industry to China. We will train and set up our replacements.
Pizza store managers will be safe.
I believe the OP is about the IT industry, not IT departments.
Having been both a successful manager and a successful programmer, I’ve got say I agree with Arky way more than you. One reason I didn’t bring up is that managers will bring in programmers from India, or outsource to Brazil, and lobby to change green card limits and such, but they never do the same for managers. Pretty much everyone can become, and does become, a manager at some level. You stay with an organization long enough, and you become a manager - even the least skilled. (In fact, the Dilbert principle often applies. Yes, I have been involved in decisions like “Well, we can’t make Jane move Jane into that PM slot, even if she is the most qualified, because no one can replace her on X, and we really need X. But, Bob’s not doing anything important right now.”) The only exceptions I can think of are those who made deliberate, proactive moves not to become managers.
Stay on the ball and you can have a career within the IT industry as well as within anything else. And, if you want to, eventually you become a manager which has a certain security: “A good manager can manage anything”. So, you can manage at FedEx or UPS, if your particular gravy train disappears.