A friend suggested I get a job in IT. What exactly is IT “work”? What do they do all day? Is a degree required or just a general knowledge of computers?
It covers a wide variety of things. I do computer support – helping people with questions and password resets. I also administer our course management system (combining courses, adding instructors, etc.) and course evaluation system (this involves uploading data, and setting up the system). We install new computers and upgrade older ones as they get too old. If someone needs special software, we install that for them. And if anyone has a problem with their computer, we troubleshoot.
Others work on maintaining the network – upgrading and configuring servers and network switches. We also have programmers who work on our student information system and provide support for that.
Knowledge is more important than a degree, though the more specialized things (like programming) would require formal training. No one in the User Services department has a degree in computer science; most just have B.A.s or B.S.s (I have a Master’s, though it’s in English).
That’s kind of like asking “what is office work”? These days the generic term IT encompasses a huge range of highly specialized jobs. Everyone will pile in here to explain their specialties, I’m sure. I’m an old-timer (started my career in 1989), so am a rare IT generalist. When I started, it was called MIS (management information systems) and although I was a programmer, I also occasionally did operations (doing backups, printing and delivering reports, etc) and PC hardware repair, configuration and support. Later in my career, I delved into security, system admin, network design and managment, hardware installs and repairs and more programming and analysis.
There’s no place for a generalist like me in the IT “world” today. Now they want you to have years of experience with very specific tools and business domains. Saying things like “I learn quickly” will get you laughed out of the room if you’re more than one day out of college because everybody in this field learns quickly. It doesn’t matter, though. They don’t want people who can learn, because employers don’t train anymore. They want people who already know how to do the job. (I disagree with this stance.)
I still remember when I was in college, my mom told me that my computer science degree with get me a job anywhere. It was kind of true back then. But not any more. The field is so exquisitely sub-divided now that general skills don’t buy you anything.
IT work is pretty much anything to do with the operation of computers. It can be anything from configuring employee laptops, setting up huge server rooms, writing programs, etc. Almost always a degree is required, because you are competing for jobs with lots of college graduates.
One area of IT that doesn’t always need a degree is working a help center call desk. That’s where you answer user questions about how to use the company’s website or answer questions about how programs work.
What is going on in your life that you’re asking this question? Are you in college, or do you have already have a career and are looking for a change?
Sure there is. But the term now is “full stack developer”.
Or you work for a firm like Accenture or some other consultancy where they shoe-horn whoever is on the bench into the next available project.
“IT” work consists of anything from addressing user issues in a help desk call center, building and maintaining networks and other systems infrastructure, designing and building custom software and web applications, installing and configuring enterprise level software and systems, databases, data analytics, project management, business analysis, sales, marketing and strategy.
I started as a programmer / business analyst around 20 years ago for a small consulting firm. Now most of my work consults of a combination of project management and strategy (which is a fancy way of saying I help advise executives how and what technologies to implement in order to achieve their business goals).
What I “do” every day is like a cross between the Bobs from Office Space and Jared from Silicon Valley (both creations of Mike Judge). Mostly I spend my day on conference calls or answering emails making sure various people (developers, project managers, QA people, data scientists, SMEs, UX designers, whoever) are following the plan we laid out with our client. In between I sit around, surfing the web, reading up on latest industry trends, set meetings, write reports, create proposals and otherwise look for people to hire my firm to do the stuff I described above.
Very little of business doesn’t involve “IT” on some level.
Retrain as a project manager - generalist knowledge is quite useful in stitching together all the parts (and stakeholders) in a complex IT project.
Not that I’ve seen. People I know who call themselves that are still just software. I’m a generalist in that I’ve had my hands in software, hardware and … people… ware.
Ooh, I want a job like that.
Thought of that. But in my experience, PM’s have full responsibility but zero authority and they’re the first to get the blame when things go south. I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d like to get into the PMO side of things: chasing down people to do their project timecards and get project estimates, manage schedules, do analysis on how projects are doing, etc. More coordination and organizational skills, less pressure to be an SME.
I know that my brother called himself a systems analyst. Most of his work (free-lance, incidentally) involved programming. His biggest project was setting up a secure (for the 1990s–probably inadequate today) between a large NY bank and the Fed for money transfers.
And you don’t need a college degree to be a programmer. Most programmers are self-taught. What you do in college CS is write some one-off programs in Pascal, a language hardly ever used in the real world. According to my son (ex-Microsoftie) what you never learn is how to work in projects involving dozens if not hundreds of programmers that have to coordinate their activities over many months, if not years. He spent several years helping to build NT and it was totally different from what he studied in college.
What you need is some aptitude for the subject and the ability to learn fast. Most of the programmers my son knew were self-taught in HS out of interest. He was, for one. He has written a book on the whole subject.
I do the highlighted things too. And update our website, replace content in those courses, work with a proprietary data base, host webinars, and record and edit lectures.
I understand your basic point and generally agree with it but it isn’t quite true. There is still a place for generalists. I know because I am one for a multi-billion dollar facility for a mega-corp that works directly for a prestigious consulting company. I am the only permanent IT person on site so I have to know how to do some of everything. My specialty is enterprise applications and databases but I have to do hardware, networking and everything else too. I am the end of the line expert on many things but I also operate like a Primary Care doctor as well. I can look at other problems outside of my area of expertise and figure out which of the loads of specialists I have contacts with needs to deal with it.
Those types of jobs are rare at the lower levels these days except in very small companies. I am lucky to have mine but they wanted an IT generalist with some specific specialties that happened to match mine. They wanted everything from development experience to regimented QA to hardware and that is what they got just because I have worked in on lots of different things for a long time. My only weak point is large scale networking but that isn’t a problem because all I have to do is describe the problem well enough for the vendors to fix it and I can easily do that much.
I agree though that IT is a huge field. It stands for “Information Technology” which could include just about anything from designing software for gas pumps to 3D animation to the newest version of the iPhone. A lot of people think it just means Deskside Support (fix my stupid mistake on my PC like the Geek Squad) but that isn’t it at all. There are lots of branches like infrastructure, hardware, networking, software development, QA, compliance and even legal that are included under the general umbrella. There are countless different specialties that fall under those as well.
Oddly enough, in my 20+ years of working in the field, I have never worked directly with someone in the field that has a Computer Science degree and only a few that have a degree in Information Science. I have worked with people that have degrees in Music, English, Political Science and everything else including no degree.
It is more about talent, self-learning and the ability to adapt than anything else. Technology changes too fast to be effectively taught with a textbook approach. You have to constantly read, experiment and teach yourself. Only some people can do that and that is why many IT jobs pay so much and have such good perks. Many of them require rare skills that have a high demand. However, those same skills that get you a job today may be almost worthless five years from now so you have to keep on top of the curve if you want to stay employed. Even though the pay can be fairly high, it is also a highly unstable market and you have to be prepared to be laid off or fired multiple times in your career because that happens to almost everyone in the field.
If no degree is required for most IT work, what is the hiring process like? How do you “prove” that you actually know about IT?
Applied, hands on experience in IT related work is always good.
Certification in one or more IT disciplines (security, networks, databases, Microsoft technologies, Linux, etc…) is a great way to get your foot in the door. Even non-high technical skills like business analysis, or technical writing, or web content management, or test and QA work can be helpful.
But why don’t we start with you telling us about what IT experience you currently have? It would be much easier to give you helpful advice if we had an idea where your current skill set and IT interests lie.
If there are no (or few) generalists any more, then what do you have at a medium-sized company that only has the budget to hire one “computer guy”? Because I would expect that to be the largest category of IT employment, because there are a lot of companies of about that size.
My 31 yo stepson, who is very handy with computers, tried to get an entry level position in a local hospital’s IT department and was turned down. I think they wanted to see some kind of certification in a field that is related to IT. His response was ‘Oh Well’. He has no intention of going to school and getting any kind of certification…
So does every MBA grad. The downside is that sometimes you have to travel 4 days a week for months at a time. And sometimes clients can be difficult. The firms themselves can also be extremely competitive, especially when times are slow and a lot of consultants are “on the bench” (not staffed on a client).
Yeah, being a PM sucks. PMO isn’t much better. Part of it is as you say the PM has no real power or authority over anything like staffing or resources. Often they are just contractors hired by some middle manager.
Maybe try being an “Agile coach”? They seem to get paid a shitload of money teaching PMs how to be Scrum masters and evangelizing Agile.
IME, if you need just one IT guy, typically he is going to be a network engineer with a lot of general IT knowledge. The rest of it can be outsourced to cloud-based services. And unless you are building apps in house all the time, you can always hire developers and other resources as needed.
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If no degree is required for most IT work, what is the hiring process like? How do you “prove” that you actually know about IT? [/qutote]
Typically they list all the projects they worked on and the technologies they worked with. Certifications too.
Depends on the company. Several of my clients had PMOs whose job was mainly “making sure the PMs can do their jobs”: providing tools, making sure the tools were being used, growling at the PMs who had asked for the tool if they weren’t using it, having those contacts which people know exist but not where to get… as the head of one of them put it “we’re like the mother of every other engineer in the company, minus the cooking”. And chasing people on timesheets was generally the job of the team leader.
My own job is as a subcontracted minion, I’d work a couple levels under someone like msmith537. Getting asked to “explain more detail” in my CV always makes my eyes try to roll: FFS, I do pretty much the same things in every project!
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ask the people I’m working for how do they do things. This is called “taking requirements”.
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ask to see the master data they currently have. Master data is data that defines the things you use every day: materials, machines, specifications… and my job tends to involve mountains of it, so we have a lot of cleaning to do and the sooner we start the better.
I once had a project where management didn’t understand how much data I had until I said “ok, let’s take a look at one of my files… say, specifications… oh look! Over a quarter million lines!” -
if project management has no previous experience with my modules (Production, Quality, Maintenance), explain that yes, I need to start on the master data NOW. Actually, we should have started a month ago, and yes I know I wasn’t here a month ago.
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compare it with the stuff SAP (or, the SAP their company already has) can do as-is. This generates the list of “gaps”, that is, of things that will need some work.
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come up with descriptions of how they’re going to do things once everything is ready. The resulting document is called the Business Blueprint (BBP). Often you have to write it in triplicate: in most companies, there is a group of people who like things explained in words (Sales tends to fall here), one who likes their tables and those better be in black and white (hi, Finance and Costing!) and one who loves their colored flowcharts (hellooooo Engineers).
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prepare “functional designs” of any programs we need. In theory, these should be understandable by the people who will use them. They also need to be understandable to the technical analyst, whose job is to translate them into something understandable to programmers. Sometimes I’m expected to wear both hats, sometimes not. A common complaint re. personnel is that often the people doing the hiring don’t understand that no, “technical analyst” isn’t just fancyspeak for “programmer”; lots of programmers can’t analyze their way out of a paper bag in a deluge, lots of functional analysts no speakee programmer, we need a translator.
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check everything with the users. Sell things to the users. Sell things to the mothership. Indicate to the mothership that this thing the users have requested and which according to the mothership “is not done” is in fact already being done in thiswholelist of other factories in the company. Refrain from looking smug. Refrain from cracking skulls. Scream only where nobody can hear.
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help the users clean their master data, mainly by cross-referencing lots of stuff and giving the lists of mismatches to the users so they can decide what to do.
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prepare the programs to load that data.
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verify that the programs and forms and so forth match specs; if not, return to programers with a “tsk tsk”. Find those parts of the specs nobody had thought of; return to programers with an “oops me bad”.
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load the data (several trial runs and the real load). Check every load as if I hated it.
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write all previously mentioned documents. Write training manuals.
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train whomever will do the actual training.
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hold the users’ hands during their first month of being in the system.
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start looking for the next job and hope they’re on the relatively sane side.
Certainly that can happen, but it’s an indication of a place that has no idea how to run projects (or often, what constitutes a ‘successful’ project*) - and places like that are to be avoided. Project managers should be responsible for the proper administration of the project. Stakeholders are responsible and accountable for the project outcomes.
- For example: A project board may decide things like cost and timescale tolerances in advance, and may stipulate what should happen if those boundaries are traversed; for this reason, a project that goes over budget, and is halted by the PM, and where the project board resolves that it is no longer viable, and project activity is closed down, is a successfully-managed project.
Except in practice the project manager often bears the responsibility for the project going over budget, regardless of whether it was his fault or not.
The last firm I worked at (a poorly run tech consulting firm), projects were typically undersold by a team of douchey salesmen and then tossed over the wall to “delivery” (PMO). Typically the first act of the PM is to issue change requests to rescope the project or budget to something more realistic (which the clients always appreciated).
Then during the course of the project, staff would be pulled on and off project at the whim of the firm’s management and scope would inevitably be changed during side meetings between sales and the client (typically over drinks).
In one particular case, management shut down an entire offshore development center without telling any of the PMs who had projects running out of them. Always fun to dial into your morning standup call to get an “out of service” signal.
When the projects went over time or budget, inevitably the PM is thrown under the bus.
Or, alternately, the PM is just an administrative “schedule keeper”, and some steering committee is the actual management authority.
Although I agree with his comment that you can do the work without a degree, in practice a CS or IT degree is required simply as an HR checkbox item. (They need to check it off their list of “requirements”.)
Whether you have a degree or not, most interviewers will test your knowledge by making you diagram or write solutions to some trivial problem on a whiteboard. There are pros and cons to this: lots of hiring managers have discovered that the claims of expertise on people’s resumes are hugely inflated (i.e. the candidate didn’t know what he claimed that he knew), but lots of developers have also commented that having to write code on a whiteboard is not the way they usually program computers, so that throws them off and makes them look bad.