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New Grads Shun IT Jobs As "Boring"
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jun 24, 2008 11:17 AM
from the work-from-home-chicks-dig-it dept.
from the work-from-home-chicks-dig-it dept.
whencanistop writes "Despite good job prospects, graduates think that a job in IT would be boring. Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy? Surely with so many (especially young) people being 'web first' with not just their buying habits, but now in terms of what they do in their spare time, we'd expect more of them to want to get a career in it?"
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'boring'??? (Score:5, Interesting)
And good riddance! We don't need 'shiny object' people in this business.
Most jobs are boring (Score:5, Insightful)
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
Life requires labor. Civilized life requires even more labor. Most of that labor is unpleasant in some way. We face the grind anyway, day after day, because it keeps the ball rolling, and because it gives us the money we need to do the things we actually like doing.
If you manage to find a job that you actually like a lot, that's great. If not, hopefully you will be strong enough to accept the realities that most people face, get a boring job, be useful, and earn a decent living.
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Re:Most jobs are boring (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always found that it pays to like boring jobs ;-)
It's only rarely that we admins get to do heroics [blogspot.com].
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Re:Most jobs are boring (Score:5, Insightful)
Me too. But I haven't always valued money the same way.
Alone in your early twenties is a good time to chase after fun experiences and short term payoffs. Your money needs are relatively low, job security in a nice to have, and independence is new and exciting.
Wait eight years. Add a mortgage and a couple of kids. Get used to the independence. Suddenly a stable job that pays the bills sounds a lot better. You've done enough exciting jobs and short term payoffs, and now you need to think it terms of decades.
Most IT jobs aren't so complex that you have to start right out of college. You can do something else and change jobs.
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Re:Most jobs are boring (Score:5, Interesting)
True with a caveat or two, you will still start at close to the "just out of college" salary, and it jobs have to exist here in this country. If Americans find it too boring, then companies will have to find somewhere else that really wants the jobs. It happened with customer support, it now looks like it will happen with IT, when telepresence robotics takes off it will probably happen with garbage collection, taxi driving, and long haul trucking.
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Re:Most jobs are boring (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think that's true. I've always thought fortune 500 CEO would be really exciting and fulfilling, and yet you have to pay those guys a fortune to do the job. Maybe it sucks a lot more than I thought.
On the other side of things, it seems like 'janitor' or 'farm hand' would pretty much maximize boring/unfulfilling, and yet those guys get paid next to nothing.
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it's not compensation, it's booty (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:it's not compensation, it's booty (Score:5, Insightful)
If giving CEOs a bigger cut of the profits produces incentive for the CEO to increase earnings, it's just good business to give them a bigger cut.
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Re:'boring'??? (Score:5, Funny)
That's right! IT is boring. Stay away. Far away. You won't like it. More money for m....hey look! A shiny object!
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Five Years Into the Job (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Five Years Into the Job (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you dont find it boring to begin with you really need to ask yourself the question "where will I be in five/ten/twenty years?". For the majority going into software engineering or IT the answer is "prettymuch the same thing I was doing two weeks after I graduated college". You might be better at it and you might be leading a team of people, but you will still be doing about the same thing.
You see this at big companies too, its much more common to promote a software engineer to a "software engineer level 2" or something similar than it is for them to move on to something else. The career path is usually designed to keep you doing the same thing for a long period of time. For many other types of jobs (such as consulting) the entry level position is seen as stepping stone to bigger and better things.
Now I know that there are a lot of exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking 90% of people who start out in a company as an entry level software engineer or IT guy dont move on to anything else. Thats why people get bored with it imho.
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Re:Five Years Into the Job (Score:5, Funny)
Are you kidding? Working in IT is like going to Disneyland!
Except all the lines are short because all the rides suck.
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Re:Five Years Into the Job (Score:5, Insightful)
What's made it much, much worse is how much clerical work we have to do now due to regulations and general ignorance of people new to the industry. We have to document everything so that our job can be outsourced to someone less skilled and willing to work for less. We have to have reviews and justification only because the CIO wants to pretend he has some clue about what's going on. What should be a 10 minute fix turns into a two week red-tape fest. Then they have the nerve to ask why I'm not getting more done.
If ANYONE asks me if the IT field is a good choice for a career, I solidly reply "Hell, no. Run the other way and get a job *making* something that is useful or a job *helping* people."
I've been trying to leave IT for the past 10 years, but where else will I find a job that pays so much for such little work?
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Different perspective (Score:5, Funny)
Then again, if most folks look at computers as an appliance, who wants to be an appliance repairman? Seriously - how many folks wanted to work for the phone company in the 60s and 70s?
Re:Different perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#1960s [wikipedia.org]
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If I had the power to do it all over again... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have gone into Economics.
Or maybe Forestry...
If I had only known the IT world would turn into what it is now, I'd do something else. Too much politics... To much hype...
Re:If I had the power to do it all over again... (Score:5, Funny)
I... I wanted to be! A lumberjack!
Leaping from tree to tree, as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia!
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Re:If I had the power to do it all over again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Economics is an extremely limited niche field? Have you heard of wall street? All those big investment banks and trading firms look first to economics grads when they go hiring. Wall Street grabs just as many economics grads as Silicon Valley does CS majors.
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Let's spice up IT (Score:5, Insightful)
The TFA goes on to quote someone as saying, "We need to show [young people] the variety of roles in IT and the importance that IT carries today. IT is at the heart of business these days and there are real opportunities now to have a career in IT which will ultimately lead to a position on the board."
A position on the board? That is supposed to be "not boring"?
It;'s All Relative (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm an accountant."
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Re:Let's spice up IT (Score:5, Funny)
This isn't a lot different than the general decline of math and science careers in general. It's just a small sign that we're moving away from skilled knowledge-based industries into crap-service based industries.
Would you like fries with that?
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Re:Let's spice up IT (Score:5, Funny)
My IT job is plenty spicy after I figured out how to make my desktop loop Destination Calabria [youtube.com].
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Well, many IT jobs ARE boring (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, many IT jobs ARE boring (Score:5, Insightful)
Hate to piddle in your soup, but most jobs in the world are "pretty fucking boring". Welcome to reality.
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Re:Well, many IT jobs ARE boring (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't help it, I'd rather be a university gaining new knowledge, than be on an overseas holiday. I rather spend all night configuring, adjusting and tweaking computer hardware and software than be getting drunk in some crap night club. I'd rather be /.ing than mindlessly myspaceing and so for me a career in computers just ain't boring even if a do find some elements somewhat tiresome like coding.
So the grads are just leaning the computers skills are more difficult than other grad choices and the big entry level salaries are gone eliminating blind greed as the only reason to choose a career in computers, so reduced numbers are to be expected and generally it is better for the whole industry, less drones sucking up space doing more harm than good and of course the actually computer geeks/nerds get to enjoy higher salaries and better conditions.
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Oh come on now... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Spair time?"
Seriously, this is ridiculous.
Spelling (Score:5, Funny)
"spair time"? Seriously, who edited or approved an article with that in the summary, not to mention the punctuation?
Maybe THAT's why IT jobs are boring - you're required to spell!
Re:Spelling (Score:5, Funny)
Which of course is what oh-so-many IT jobs are - a source of despair.
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Re:Spelling (Score:5, Funny)
If Slashdot can prove anything, it's that the IT industry has no grammar or spelling requirements.
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Irony? (Score:5, Funny)
What's IT? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd rather do software development, CS research, something along those lines. Heck, my dream job would be working on low cost communication infrastructure in the third world. While I'm sure that all technically falls under the realm of IT, to me that's always be something different. Maybe that's just me, but "IT" to me has always been the boring stuff.
Re:What's IT? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd rather do software development, CS research, something along those lines. Heck, my dream job would be working on low cost communication infrastructure in the third world. While I'm sure that all technically falls under the realm of IT, to me that's always be something different. Maybe that's just me, but "IT" to me has always been the boring stuff.
I got my bachelor's in computer science. I found programming boring as can be, so when I got out, I stayed on as a systems administrator building servers / networks, etc. It's a heck of a lot of fun because you never know what that next phone call will bring!
Maybe a pig will step on a laptop, or a printer is out of toner, you never know with the people I work for (ag research... yes there is a lot of IT in ag research).
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Re:What's IT? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why any software developer/engineer/designer will never describe their role as IT. And I think that's fair enough really.
Mentally, I think business IT - point and click Windows administration, network maintenance, exchange account setup, etc, as tasks that someone can be trained to do. You see adverts for IT training, and that's the type of stuff they're talking about.
So yeah, there's a superiority complex if you actually studied CS, program for a living, know the insides and outsides of Unix and several languages, etc. Of course, you're still creating some internal business application for the most part ... Of course it helps if you actually get excited (mildly) by designing things properly, be they databases, program architectures, and so on.
Outside people find it hard to see the difference, it's computers, innit.
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Of course IT is boring! (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's not because it's nerdy (as the summary opines). It's simply because its about maintenance of poorly-designed shit. You might as well call it glorified janitorial work.
In contrast, creating new stuff, as actual programmers and engineers do -- that's interesting!
Re:Of course IT is boring! (Score:5, Funny)
And it's not because it's nerdy (as the summary opines). It's simply because its about maintenance of poorly-designed shit. You might as well call it glorified janitorial work.
In contrast, creating new stuff, as actual programmers and engineers do -- that's interesting!
So to sum up, maintaining poorly-designed shit is glorified janitorial work, but making new poorly-designed shit is interesting?
Roger.
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Re:Of course IT is boring! (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's not because it's nerdy (as the summary opines).
Yeah, my favorite part was, "Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy?" Really? Bill Gates made it look nerdy? Like if not for Gates, the whole industry would be filled with badass cowboys and hot chicks or something?
Yeah, even the fact that "badass cowboys and hot chicks" popped into my head as the opposite of "nerdy" is probably an indication that I'm an IT nerd.
But yeah, I've found that at least the IT work that falls on the support/maintenance side (as opposed to the development side) is kind of boring crap-work. It's fixing problems that some other moron broke, and cleaning up problems caused by poor design. It's 2008, and we still don't even have decent backup/archive methods. Every product out there has huge problems and gaping holes in their functionality that should have been fixed 15 years ago, but instead everyone has been working on things like database-driven filesystems that never make it to market.
That's right, I'm looking at you, Microsoft.
InfoTech work isn't all science-fictiony and cool. Oddly, it's more like being a Fonzie in training. It's like all this technology amounts to a broken jukebox that has to be smacked in just the right way to get it going, and you're just hoping to learn how to do that so you can stand around looking cool until someone needs you.
Except that this Fonzie never ends up looking cool and everyone treats him like a trained monkey. "Slap the machine and play me a song!" they all yell.
Oh, yeah, I know I've jumped the tracks and gone into nonsense. Whatever. I work in IT. Making up random crap on Slashdot is the most interesting part of my day.
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Is this news? Is this bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA:
Non-IT graduates think a job in IT would be "boring,"
despite its good career prospects.
IOW:
People don't enter fields that they aren't interested in.
Film at 11.
As opposed to... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shit, I wish my job was boring. When something breaks it gets so exciting I worry that I'm going to keel over dead.
Anyway, the damn snowflakes need to suck it up. What entry level job isn't boring? You put in your crappy dues, so that you get a better job down the road. I've worked all kinds of jobs, and they're pretty much all boring, even things you wouldn't think would be boring. I did a stint doing wildlife tagging, where I got to roam around on a four wheeler shooting things with a tranq gun, and that was astoundingly boring...99% of the time you just sat and waited and let the mosquitos gorge themselves on your blood.
Thank goodness (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the late 90's/early 2000's WAY too many people were jumping into IT because it was the new field du jour which was supposed to make those starry eyed high school kids (some even drop outs) rich with no real effort. Them oversaturating the industry with underqualified and uninterested workers half-killed IT over here. It almost felt unfair working on my Computer Science degree with people who flat out hated computers and always wanted to copy each other's programming projects to pass classes, simply because they though that was the way to go for a good job. The industry could use a bit of thinning out if it means that we're left with actual bright and enthusiastic people who really do like doing this type of work.
Re:Thank goodness (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I was one of those people, sort of. I went to college for computers because I was good at them, and I liked the "magic". After a decade spent working on computers, I half-wish I was done. I make decent money being a sysadmin, and I think I may be able to retire a little bit early, but as for my day-to-day existence, I no longer love computers, or even like them. Aside from my work laptop, I don't even have one at home. Don't want one. I'd rather read, or cook, or learn something non-computer-related. I guess I'm just burned out.
I still do my job, and I have a lot of interest in learning new things I can use at work, but it's not from any sense of personal fulfillment. It's more from a desire to build a stable system that won't wake me up at 3am. I haven't worked on a project for myself forever (unless you count my blog, and even that is blogger.com). I just don't have the fire anymore.
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Re:Thank goodness (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the reality is that "doing it for a living" is a good way to drain the fun out of almost anything. I enjoy building things out of wood. For about a year or so, I made custom furniture for people, and that's how I got the money I needed to eat. I did not enjoy woodworking all that much for that year. Now that I've been working in a different field for a few years, I've spent a good portion of my disposable income on building up a decent woodshop, and it's once again a hobby I enjoy. *shrug*
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Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
"But over 60% of non-computing students do not wish to enter the sector because they think it will be boring."
Who cares what non-computing students think? I can think of dozens of other job sectors that I suspect would bore me stupid, that's why I had the sense not to study for qualifications in them.
I suspect that these graduates all have a nasty shock coming to them anyway, courtesy of real life. Most jobs are "boring" in some way. That's why you get paid to do them rather than doing them for fun.
Ummmmm.... (Score:5, Funny)
Good money for creative work in decent conditions (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly many IT jobs are boring, consisting of pressing F5 repeatedly on various websites throughout the day.
Some jobs within IT are very interesting, because they are creative and require actual brain utility. Programming is the obvious example. Hell, even coming up with good configurations for sysadmin can be interesting. Point-and-clicking windows admin stuff must be dire though, and is probably where this negative image is coming from.
In much the same way as I find car mechanics boring, I can see why some people would find programming boring, because they don't appreciate the creative aspect. However being paid a reasonably good wage in an in-demand industry to sit inside at a computer is pretty damned good, even if you don't get to ride a road crusher or steamroller, or fly fighter jets (which I imagine is pretty boring for the 95% of the time you are on the ground actually).
Oh, and memo to students: Work is that boring thing we'd rather not do that allows us to pay the bills, buy that exciting car, buy that house to do up, eat that thrilling meal with friends and have a great time, etc. Get over it, but if you do stay away, demand will surely mean higher wages for us already in the industry.
yes it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
For the first 20 years, being a developer was cool. You were a hero, you worked during emergencies, you had a bit of freedom as a result, the pay was decent- never superior unless you became a contractor. And there is/was a problem with constantly becoming obsolete and having to retrain a lot more than other professions.
I finally left to be project leader and then a team leader. I see my developers suffering from the boredom.
It's mostly SOX. It's also a view of developers as generic by management. Executives do NOT WANT heroes. They want grey reliable processes that consistently take 3 times as long (and are not random between 1/10th as long and 10 times as long without anyway to predict it).
Programming in business is just not fun like it used to be. It's okay- but you code about 1/10th as much as you used to because of all the paperwork overhead. And you are a LOT more accountable. this is a good thing for slackers but it stifles the good people.
I did! (Score:5, Interesting)
I figured, push comes to shove, IT was something I could pick up without a 4 year degree, if I needed something to fall back on, but aerospace engineering you really needed that piece of paper (and then a masters, and probably a PhD if you want to do the cool stuff). Plus, as an engineer, a lot of times you get to write or maintain code if you are in the design world, so you can incorporate elements of IT into your job as needed.
I have never experienced an ounce of regret.
fine by me! (Score:5, Interesting)
Every now and then I get a twinge of "oh god, I'm really still working at the computer lab in college but with bigger machines and 10x the pay." Then I think about other jobs.
Lawyer.. HELL NO. Unless you end up doing fancy litigation it has to be one of the worst jobs in the universe.
Medical.. bleh. Boring? Is performing the same knee surgery over and over and over again not a bit rote? If you end up in primary care you at least get to help people 1-on-1. Help them take drugs to counter their lack of exercise, smoking, etc. Med school. ick. I think it's 40% of doctors say they wouldn't recommend the career to their children. That's one hell of an endorsement.
MBA? Interesting idea, would probably shortcut a lot of time in getting into the upper echelons but I can't stand posturing, game playing, and management speak so would probably not do well there. I'm an engineer.. in a self-taught sort of way. I look down my nose at MBAs.
Oh yes... wicked hours and professional attire for all of the above.
About the only thing I think would tempt me would be some form of design/electrical engineering. So I've picked up a couple books on the same and will start tinkering that direction. If need be, I'll go to grad school.
For the moment, however, I'm wearing shorts and flipflops, am decently paid, left alone, showed up at work at 10, and have a little web stack I can call my own. I have, admittedly, a bunch of mind-numbing, syntactically sensitive technical problems to work on but with each passing week I add a lump of knowledge and maybe a tool or two to solve future problems.
If everyone wants to stay away.. fine by me! I'll just be in demand all the more.
Y'know, I think I've written myself into a better mood.
IT has changed. Life was better then. (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first got into computers it was exciting and new. The first computer at my work place was mine, an Apple ][. What could it do? Anything! Look at this Visicalc thing! Then I stuck a CP/M card in and got dBase II. That allowed us to build a complete accounts payable and payroll system (once we got to dBase III). More computers followed. I thought it would be very cool to get a computer on everyone's desk! People were interested and amazed at what you could do with one of these small desktop boxes. More people got involved. Then came Ethernet! Yes! We're networked! And what about gophers and email? And what was this www thing? It ws an exciting time when hobbyists and enthusiasts drove innovation and spearheaded the drive to compute the world. They were seen as intelligent, innovative saviors. To open up a box with a new computer and smell those polymers wafting in the air still gives a sense of progress! The future has arrived (it's just unevenly distributed--William Gibson) but we were evening the distribution! We were changing the world, increasing productivity.
Well.....Mission accomplished.
Now there IS a computer on every desk. Now there are more servers than you originally had computers. Now without a flashy web site you are hopelessly behind. Now everyone wants in on the action to tell you what to do. Now if you're down for a second it's all your fault and heads will roll. Now IT is a subservient class with deadlines and 'management.' The corporations, big and small finally got over their wide-eyed enthusiasm and ignorance of the field and yoked it in--hard. It has turned from an art to a science, from innovative to expected, from bleeding edge to basement cubicles.
The same thing happened with electricity. The same thing happened with radio. And now it's happened with IT. It has gone fom a hobbyist paradise to a mundane backwater. Too bad. Life was better then.
Boring ... and engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
Engineering in all its facets (from civil engineering to mechanical engineering to chemical engineering) is sometimes considered "boring" too.
From what I understand this is because you need a lot of background knowledge, and unless you're extremely good you won't find much scope for technical innovation. You'll primarily be applying knowledge, not inventing it.
E.g. in the case of structural engineering using standard components, standard materials, and standard constructions. It's only when you work for a specialised engineering design company that you get to do state-of-the-art finite element calculations on brand-new structures. Other companies just use standard design rules to dimension standard components in standard structures, the trick being to satisfy all requirements in the cheapest possible way in the least possible time. Day in day out.
So you'll generally have to find expression for your creativity by getting things done on time and within budget instead pushing the envelope, and as soon as you're doing that you'll tend to shy away from wild innovation.
With software development there simply is a lot of (to me elegant and beautiful, to others dead and boring) scientific background knowledge you should have (algorithms, data-structures, compiler design, finite automata, complexity theory, concurrency theory, discrete mathematics, and numerical mathematics) supplemented by more applied knowledge like the principles of software engineering, in-depth knowledge of at least three programming languages (C, C++, Java), some experience with the object hierarchy underlying modern GUIs, and probably a lot I forgot.
And when you've done all that and appear for your first job, you may find you'll be on some project team and entrusted with responsibility for building component X of subsystem Y according to specifications someone will give you. You write your code, construct your test-cases, and verify correctness, document your functions, check in your code, and rush off to the next specification you'll implement because you've got to meet productivity standards or you're out.
This might seem a little pessimistic, and I'm sure that in many companies who use a seat-of-the-pants approach to software engineering things are more exciting. Like being given a huge poorly documented codebase to maintain. But generally speaking I don't think it is. There is (thankfully) an awful lot of this engineering-type work in software production, and only those who excel will, in time, become the lead programmers, designers, and system architects who actually dream up and shape end products.
Some people, and especially those who dream of designing a new supercool system to fly aircraft do indeed find the prospect of maintaining payslip applications on mainframes, automatic teller machine software, book-ordering software and inventory management systems, and crufty little custom data-entry packages boring. And perhaps they're right.
As I see it, most software engineering tends to be a bit unspectacular when done right, and excitement mostly enters the equation if you make serious mistakes. Of course there will be exceptions, like the Mars landers. But not everyone can be a programmer at NASA.
Re:Oh come on! (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot really needs a "+1 Bitter" moderation. :-)
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