Anyone here work in the IT industry?

JTE83 said:

Do you work as a programmer, database guy, software engineer, or other stuff in IT? In general, how has the industry been lately in terms of pay and getting / finding / and keeping a job?

I'm an ex-software engineer. Got laid off in 2001. After a year of looking I decided to do something new. The work was fun--I was getting really good at reading reams of crappy code and fixing it without a debugger, but the environment kept getting worse. More specialization, more aversion to risk, and more mickey-mouse programming tests with every interview.

Most of the guys I know who are still in it are training their Indian and Chinese replacements.

I'm starting a new career as a teacher.

oldbobcat said:

I'm an ex-software engineer. Got laid off in 2001. After a year of looking I decided to do something new. The work was fun--I was getting really good at reading reams of crappy code and fixing it without a debugger, but the environment kept getting worse. More specialization, more aversion to risk, and more mickey-mouse programming tests with every interview.

Most of the guys I know who are still in it are training their Indian and Chinese replacements.

I'm starting a new career as a teacher.

Been in IT for years. Been a graphic designer for the past 6. Got laid off last October and haven't been able to find work since. I am dying for work. Wish I picked a different career path, but I love the work. Problem is, a design firm would rather give a kid credits for work than pay him/her. So they just get students to do everything for free.

Yes, more and more programming work is being farmed out to India, Ireland, etc. Programming is now kind of blue-collar work, if you can get it at all.

that is sad...

wish you guys the best!

regards,

My username gives it away.

IT work is good in Australia at the moment.

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[font=Comic Sans MS]My son completed 5 years of IT related industry studies, and ended up working at an internet caffee,all his colleagues had diplomas degrees etc, talk about being over qualified[/font][/font]

mikesbytes said:

My username gives it away.

IT work is good in Australia at the moment.

Depending of course what your specialization is. What do you do Mike?

--brett

sideshow_bob said:

Depending of course what your specialization is. What do you do Mike?

--brett

Cut my bread and butter as a data modeller. Nowdays I mainly do Business Intelligence and Customer Relationship Managment (the analytics bit)

What do you do Brett?

Well i'm a programmer but in the games industry, so thats quite different to what IT usually means.
Being an entertainment type industry it has it's own cycles, mainly driven by successive waves of console hardware.
It's been fine for me so far, but i've heard plenty of horror stories. I got in at just the right time for my own particular skillsets.

i am an electronics engineer but i also work as an e-commerce web developer.

the IT industry has crashed i feel, everyone decided to re-train in IT a few years ago and now the market is flooded with out-of-work programmers etc trying to get too few jobs.

someone hit on it earlier, a lot of development work is being out-sourced to India who do it for a fraction of the cost.

people are wiling to get any IT work they can and wages have dropped.

mikesbytes said:

Cut my bread and butter as a data modeller. Nowdays I mainly do Business Intelligence and Customer Relationship Managment (the analytics bit)

What do you do Brett?

Historically, whatever was required, datamining/SQL, PERL/PHP/Bash/C,C++, Unix/Linux plus a few other bits and pieces like systems architecture. Now it's just business management which isn't nearly as exciting. Having said that I'm moving more and more into customer/user service and support (by choice and interest).

--brett

Hence why i'm very glad i'm not a specialist, nor terribly interested in a skill that can be outsourced. I do capacity planning and forecasting, utilisation improvements, SOE development and solution design.

However I have the skillset across multiple disciplines; x86/x64 servers, commerical unix, mainframe, network, database, etc.

Todays employee is about being versatile and involved in value add service delivery. Increase the value in the product you are delivering and you keep your job. Be good at it, become invaluable and keep you get to keep your job.

Perhaps i'm thinking about it in an overly simplistic way, but it works for me perfectly.

Just talked with my brother today. He's an accounting consultant in Dallas, and he sees the business coming back. Seems that a lot of managers and clients are tired of slow turnaround and poor quality that goes with offshoring. He says a typical ABAP fix that should take a couple of days usually turns around in a month or two when working with India. Management is finally wising up to this.

supermarket admin (If you can call that IT - nothing special like software engineering) - a measly £5.20 a hour lol - but i guess i have a stable job and have very little risk of being made redundant.

Was working for a large DOT COM up until 2002. I was in the Atlanta area when they decided to drop the division I was in and close the Atlanta office. At that time there were at least 400 applicants for each job I applied for. I gave up and started a small web design/development shop. It was a very slow start and after 3+ years of struggle was finally put on a lengthy contract with my largest client. It's full-time/part-time so I have approx 20 hours a week to work on other projects.

-Milt

Been into software development since I got out of college in '83. What a long, strange trip it's been...

First job I could find (12% unemployment in 83) was developing document management and typesetting applications on a multiuser CP/M system. (any other dinosaurs out there) Replaced that creaky setup with an AS/400.

Got laid off in 91, got to watch the first gulf war start to finish, and then found a job working on a 3D CAD application in C/Win16, converted to C++/Win32. Now, that was interesting.

Left that for a cozy corporate job in the restaurant industry, where I've worked largely on field systems, from C++/Win32 to C/C++ Linux, to the latest - C#/Win32. I'm not really a political animal, so I didn't move up, but the pay is good and the work steady, so I'm not complaining. Decided to ride out the dot com boom in the late 90's, how could something with a P/E ratio that bad keep on? Glad I did, and work with a terrific gang these days.

Here's a tip for those of you seeing your jobs being outsourced overseas - we just closed down a disasterous outsourcing project. Job was to convert a large legacy SCO app to Linux. The results were a mess - translation problems, term emulation problems, problem problems, we were spending as much time auditing their work (code looked like the devil) as we would have doing it ourselves, and for once, management did something sensible.

The outsourcing thing is a fad. Companies will eventually learn why that doesn't work well, and bring it back in house, after they lose enough money. Those things tend to run in cycles, and the cycle is about to swing the other direction.

JohnO said:

. . . and for once, management did something sensible.

Sounds like the story of my career.

I started in automated typesetting, too, in 1981. We were a book and magazine typesetter running PentaWare on a DG Nova. We used an an Eclipse (the early 16-bit version) to produce custom apps like calendars, signature verification books, and Brandon's Shipper and Forwarder, a weekly directory of ships entering and leaving US ports. We used an Autokon scanner that cost tens of thousands of dollars to digitize the advertising at something like 40 DPI. Camera-ready pages came out of the Mergenthaler 606 (which usually [censored] the bed just before an important run), and were FAXed for proofreading to our client in the World Trade Center and FedExed to the printer in New Hampshire. First time I'd ever seen a FAX machine.

After I quit, they used the page-layout program and batch paginator I wrote to produce a drug compendium and regional cable TV guides. Not their original intended us, but you use what you have. I never had so much fun doing something I was getting paid for.

JohnO said:

...

Here's a tip for those of you seeing your jobs being outsourced overseas - we just closed down a disasterous outsourcing project. Job was to convert a large legacy SCO app to Linux. The results were a mess - translation problems, term emulation problems, problem problems, we were spending as much time auditing their work (code looked like the devil) as we would have doing it ourselves, and for once, management did something sensible.

The outsourcing thing is a fad. Companies will eventually learn why that doesn't work well, and bring it back in house, after they lose enough money. Those things tend to run in cycles, and the cycle is about to swing the other direction.

I pray you are right, however, much damage has already been done. There are a lot of really good people who are now so turned off to the whole IT thing (self included) that it would take an act of God to bring their morale back. The corporate world needs to understand that you can't just dump a bunch of highly educated people and expect everything to be rosy when they change their minds and need them back.

Apart from having to continually keep yourself up to date with the technology I really hate friends, or other people I meet, asking help with some PC related problem on the weekends. I also dislike people thinking that just because you're in the IT industry you're expected to know everything there is about computers and how users/clients think just because we have such technology everything is possible at the push of a button.