FAO people in the IT Industry

im a more support manager, but im desperate to get away from support and get into consultation.

the problem is with IT at the moment is that the supply of jobs is small and the amount of people looking for jobs is huge. My advice for anyone right now is to try and hold your current job down the best you can for the time being, especially the next 12 months.
 
There do seem to be people on here who really don't like 'IT' - what might be interesting and more constructive is if they outlined what area they work in.

I'd suspect that support roles are often disliked after a short period of time and some techie/networking roles might not be for everyone. I guess being a DBA can be pretty mundane (albeit you can get reasonable $$$ in some areas).

The OP has asked the right question unfortunately some of the replies probably aren't useful to him as they've avoided his question - 'IT' is a large area - to advise against it without qualifying your response isn't really helping him.
 
scorza said:
Management. All the other decent jobs will be off-shore in the next decade or so.
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Sad but true and it makes me wonder what sort of future England has ahead of it. No more manfacturing jobs. The knowledge industries are now starting to go abraod.

Despite all the hostility towards bankers, it's only the City Of London and it being the world center for financial services that's keeping the UK afloat.
 
Like anything if you're reasonably competent at something, enjoy doing it, and aren't afraid to work hard and/or pick and choose who you work for, it can be extremely rewarding working in IT.

I've been working in various analysis/development roles in IT since 1996, and if I could do it all over again I would, it's been an amazing area to be in - and is only going to get more interesting as technology develops and drives businesses forwards.

For all those who voted to avoid IT (as has been mentioned) it would be helpful if you explained why. Was it not what you expected? Did you not work hard enough/smart enough to secure the promotions/projects you wanted?

I don't buy the market being saturated as a reason to avoid it. It's certainly saturated with mediocre candidates [the developer market], hiring at the moment is an utter nightmare, SO many useless candidates, that the really decent candidates can pick and choose where they want to go and work.
 
scorza said:
Just to add that I read that Comp Sci graduates have one of the highest rate of unemployment atm - about 12% or something. And yet still our wonderful government believes that there's a skills shortage and is encouraging IT companies to abuse the intra-company transfer scheme to get cheap workers from India over.
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Trouble is that mediocre candidates with out-of-date comp-sci degrees ARE less skilled and less able than mediocre offshore developers with a number of technical certificates.

Don't get me wrong, they're *equally* useless, but they are happy being paid what they are actually worth. When an average comp-sci IT graduate, who knows as much about delivery business systems as they do about the contents of a woman's bra, comes out with a 2:1 degree demanding the earth in wages.

It usually takes about 6-12 months to beat the bad practices out of grads and get them to a reasonable level of competence to handle simple user stories...even then it's all pair programming anyway. Having said that, it's easier to beat out the bad practices of grads, rather than people who have been in the industry for 20 years...
 
I'm a tech/media guy at a college and it's gettin boring now. What keeps me in the job is the people around me. I can sit in lessons, sit in staff rooms all day without gettin into trouble. The IT part is just a bonus and a pay at the end of the month.

I deal with IWB systems & everything to do with new technologies. I am however, pushing towards VLE systems/Education methods. If anyone is thinking about been an IT Technician as a life changing subject don't. Just make it a stepping stone towards something bigger. We are all classed as 'monkeys' or 'scivvies' or 'carpet lickers' where I work and we ain't valued. I do try my best to gain respect but no point as you just get treat bad again.

Mind you, did time and half on Sat just gone and come out with 130 quid just for few hours just for installing some printers in few rooms on Apple Mac workstations. So the pay ain't that bad.
 
Yes I would stick with IT if I did it all over again. Did a maths degree, started doing a few contracts as a cable monkey or putting computers on desks in the holidays. Finished uni in 2004, went straight into a 2nd line support role (turn it off and back on again :D) as a "temporary" job while I figured out what to do and ended up staying in the industry. Now I'm a Citrix/VMWare architect/consultant (so many pompous titles for the same job) with some project management thrown in.
 
Personally I want to go into something like image processing, biomedical informatics, signal processing or something of that ilk but I think those fields are different from 'IT' in the sense it's being used here.
 
Rotty said:
Even though I have done OK out of it, If I was starting out now I would avoid IT at all costs
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This, I hate being sat a screen all day. We have a 1st line tech who's meant to do all the toner swapping the checking it's switched on type jobs. I'm always nicking jobs of him just to get out of the bloody office. The sad truth is the end user isn't grateful for a lot of the stuff that goes on because they don't know it's even happening.

If I was doing it again, I'd love to do technical stuff for live music or in the theatre. I've never been able to do enough of it to get good but I've been doing I've been back stage for what seems like most of my life. The other day I came across one of my most precious possessions, a script from the primary school naivety play where I operated the curtains.
 
I've been in IT for years, and it's treat me pretty well - but I wouldn't recommend someone starting in the industry these days. Wages have been stagnant for years (i.e. depreciating), and if you don't have tons of experience then there's a hundred cheaper people in India that will do your job for less.

If I was doing things now, i'd do something like Aerodynamics, Geology or Economics and work really really hard on getting some excellent development skills. Then go and work for a defence company, an oil company or a hedge fund.

General IT, not so much.
 
I'd probably try and specialise in something niche and go contracting. I.e. make a short term killing like the Y2K gravy train and then move on to something else.
Obviously, the tricky part would be identifying what future niches there will be and positioning oneself to be viewed as an expert in the field.

As a general aside I probably should have researched the IT industry more when I was a student, I just had this vision of software development being a bunch of coders knocking something up, checking it works, putting it out there, and then fixing any issues with it, rather than the wide-range of roles (analysis, testing, project management, consultancy, support etc) that it actually encompasses. Back then I thought if you couldn't code you wouldn't get an IT job, so I didn't pursue it, and only fell into IT some 4-5 years after graduating.
 
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I'm currently doing Software Engineering at University aswell. I'm currently sitting in my final year. All that keeps going through my head now is 'You picked the wrong career path'.

Id blabber on about how I've come to feel over the last few years at uni but its boreing so I'll save you from it. Basically OOO something new and exciting was turned into something dull and boreing rather quickly. I love creating things but seeing how things have gone I just cant see myself doing it 9-5 every day I'd rather be in a position where I have a chance to do something different now and again.

Currently looking at going into the RAF, a Masters (but this is getting less and less the more I think of it), a different degree such as business management

I have also been looking at post grad schemes, however most of these seem to be bombarded by applicants and you must do something spectacular to stand out but I'm giving it a shot as it may be the thing i need to get back some enthusiasim into what seems a stagnant career path.
 
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