New Grads Shun IT Jobs As "Boring" 752
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?"
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.
Anecdote (Score:3, Informative)
I started college as a journalism major. In my second quarter, we were each assigned a classmate to interview. Mine was a girl who had entered college as a CS major (a path which I would tread backwards on less than two years later).
Her reason for switching: "I didn't realize it was just programming all day".
I don't remember whether I asked her what she expected or what she said. I suppose that has something to do with why I didn't stay in J-school.
Re:If I had the power to do it all over again... (Score:3, Informative)
And strategy consulting.
A lot of folks that I work with are econ majors - they do such things as market and channel distribution strategy, trending, demographic and geographic estimation for consumer sales, building economies of scale models for new markets, market penetration analysis and so on.
The opportunities are endless.
If you have an econ degree from a good school (Harvard, UChicago etc) and if you have a quantitative mind to boot, there are so many fun things you could do.
Re:yes it is. (Score:3, Informative)
I also still extremely enjoy software development... maybe why I always go for the senior dev position instead of project management or IT director-like positions
Re:Most jobs are boring (Score:4, Informative)
I don't get how being tied down makes a person more independent.
It doesn't - I wasn't clear enough.
When you're just out of college, the fact that you live on your own without any supervision is new and exciting. You want to stretch it to the limits and see what you can do. Eight years later, it's something you're used to. Nothing to get excited about, just like the ability to see or read the internet isn't something you get excited about.
Re:fine by me! (Score:2, Informative)
As a litigator who is leaving law after 5 years to teach high school math, I 100% agree. Litigation sucks unless you have a ruthless edge (not necessarily a bad thing) and get off on squashing others (again, not always a bad thing). Even when the underlying facts of a matter are interesting and I get to go to court, 99.99999% of the work is horribly boring. Email made that infinitely worse for young lawyers (think hundreds of thousands of pages of e-discovery for even relatively minor matters). Lucky for me I'm about to go bore a bunch of teenagers, instead of being bored myself with a bunch of document review!