Exiting the IT Environment 4

[arthurliz]

Here is the premise...
All of us have done extremely well in IT world, but....
We never seem to have had the respect, possilby the power,and even the cash that comes from being the person in charge...and I don't mean in charge of IT.

Our question is this, can you exit the IT world into something else, for example finance and because you are extremly familiar with IT you become a top dog?

Here is a real life example. We know a pair of programmers who used to kill themselves writing software for securites traders. The programmers watched the traders make lots of money and toss a bone to the programmers. As we have heard it from the ex programmers, yes the bone was good and perhaps better than normal but hell if the traders made millions with the software, the programmers got thousands.
So the two guys completely quit IT pooled every nickel they had and then set up a own real live securites brokerage firm. Now they write software for themselves and make the bread based on successful trading strategies.

Anybody else quit IT and go dwon the road to fortune and perhaps eventually fame?

 

[Dimandja]

I write banking software from time to time. A few years ago, a colleague friend of mine shocked us all by joining one of the banks, and is now a top dog over there. He has a good understanding of IT and banking; a combination that used to be good for top programmers, except he makes a lot more money now.

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[johnherman]

I know a guy who quit IT and made moderate fame and fortune as a rock 'n' roller.

Another guy was a P/A, got his MBA, went into project management and is now a VP at a credit card issuer, overseeing marketing operations (includes business and IT assets).

Another friend was programming for a casino in Atlantic City and would play poker at lunchtime for recreation. He has since quit his job and is a professional gambler.

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The trouble with doing something right the first time is that noboby appreciates how difficult it was.
- Steven Wright

 

[chiph]

I have a friend who was an AS/400 programmer who left IT and started his own business selling CDs thru a website. He's doing really well. His life is pretty regular now (no insane hours) -- he takes orders, boxes them up, and takes them to the post office to be mailed twice a day. In between, he answers email, goes to the gym, & watches a lot of movies.

Chip H.


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[bytehd]

sounds nice
after writing code from age 15 to 40 and having
nothing to show for it, perhaps its my turn



George Walkey
Senior Geek in charge

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[langleymass]

I'm actually taking some acting lessons. I am doing it for the job interviews. But if someone offers me an acting job, I doubt I will say no.

 

[tekinme]

From my perspective , quiting probably is not a good idea. One could possibly gradually work towards the management position in the Vertical(Like Securaties ,S/w in generaly) they are programming and s/w the role eventually .
Or
The other thing ppl in IT do is , they try to do part-time MBA and depending on the their major ,try to s/w the field or atleast get into Management position on IT side .

I have been thinking on the similiar lines for quite some time , thinking of working on MBA and make some changes to my 7yrs of IT career in a way which would help me leverage my exisisitng experience n get in better challenging managing role ..Let c

BTW, i am glad tht i joined this forum , looks like lot of ppl on the same page as me .. i appreciate everyone's input here

 

[bytehd]

yea teacup

we are all broke

my mechanic makes more than me

George Walkey
Senior Geek in charge

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[BocaBurger]

House appraiser for mortgages: Each Appraisal is $300 to $450. 90%+ of it is boilerplate text. Takes 30 minutes on site and 20 min. of research on the net, then print and fax or mail. Do 4 to 6 per day Mon. - Fri and 2 - 3 on Sat.

Martial Arts or Yoga teacher: Student fee is $55 to $85 per month. Have 125 to 200 students total with classes during the day & evening and Sat. AM. Give seminars at $100 to $250 per person every few months with 25 to 40 participants.

Sell stuff on E-bay. I bought an item retail for $29.00, sold it used on e-bay for $35.00 auction! Made more money overcharging for shipping & handling.

Why the heck am I still in Support?



BocaBurger
<===========================||////////////////|0
The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword hurts more!

 

[bytehd]

All of us have done extremely well in IT world"
is a faulty premise.

I know more technically than most of my peers,
but does that help me pay the power bill?
Nope.



George Walkey
Senior Geek in charge

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[Onyxpurr]

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if this happened often. Apparently the burn out rate for programmers is 3 years, last I heard.

 

[bytehd]

then i did pretty good at 25yrs in
except that it no longer pays the bills
do its time to move on
too bad eh?

guess if you really like technology
its time to move to kabul and ride the next wave


George Walkey
Senior Geek in charge

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[lionelhill]

I'm just a lowly technical user, but I sympathise. What really makes me want to give up on IT and take a nice lo-tech job is how things have changed since I first started playing with computers (back when you worked all summer to save up for a machine with 2K ram, and sophisticated games had rectangular bats that went "bleep")

Just as an example, lets take "help".

Stage 1: the program only did what it said it did, so you didn't need any help.

Stage 2: the program did quite a few things, and the help came in a book. You could read the book while you used the program.

Stage 3: the help was "on line", which meant that you had to open a little window, read the content, try to remember it, and then click somewhere, and the help disappeared behind what you wanted to work on, which looked subtly different to what it said in the help file (Usually the button you're supposed to click on was missing).

Stage 4: the help went context sensitive. Now there wasn't an index. In the context where you needed help, there wasn't any. But if you asked for help on the button marked "Exit" a neat little window popped up telling you "click on this button to exit". There were similar windows for "Save.." "Load" etc.

Stage 5: the help moved into a pdf file. Now it was either too small and fuzzy to read, or the lines were too long to fit on the screen all at once. Nearly always the page numbers in the index were different to the page numbers in the acrobat reader.

Stage 6: the help moved onto the internet. Theoretically this means its never out of date. Practically it means there's always a nice "Connection denied" screen to look at when you get fed up of cursing the application. And when the error you're fighting is that you can't make your internet connection work....

Computer technology is a beautiful, wonderful tool. Why is it so often misapplied?

 

[BocaBurger]

I used to work for US Robotics. I was at HQ for a series of meetings. One was about our new improved online support & help system. About 1/2 way into the speaker's features list I raised my hand and said "But the biggest problems user have is that they can't connect in the first place". There was dead silence. Speaker tried to continue, but then just went silent, walked off the stage. Plan was never implemented.

Since the regular help line was so busy, SE's were given a special 800 number to call, since it got embarassing to sit for an hour at a customer's site waiting for the support line to be answered by a person.



BocaBurger
<===========================||////////////////|0
The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword hurts more!

 

[arthurliz]

OK
After reading what has been posted so far I'll change the premise.........."All of us have done extremely well in IT world, but...." to
..........at some point we thought we were doing extremely well in the IT world as we were hauling in lots of moola very easily, but after a short time, it just became a drudge job when technology shifted or the bill payers woke up and stopped throwing money at us.

How's that for encapsulating the fact that we all got in, had fun, got paid well for it, and guess what, it ain't no fun anymore and does not pay any more.

Or to put it even another way....We appear to spend as much time solving real business / systems / software problems via self education / continuing research / consultation with our peers as medical researchers or corproate lawyers, yet we don't get anywhere near the money or satisfaction.

 

[Onyxpurr]

Ah, so that's the crux of it, huh? Not getting paid enough money?

Anyone and everyone would love to be paid more. Quite frequently in this world, people ask, "why aren't I paid more?"

I'm not really sure why we're paid less now? Could it be that IT as a whole was overpaid to begin with? Just a question, not an assumption.

Anyway, regardless, I'm happy with what I'm being paid. Plus I have forgone better paying jobs because of the following:

1) I LOVE what I do.
2) Benefits are good
3) Boss is great
4) People are cool
5) close to work
6) did I mention I love what I do?

 

[bytehd]

give him a few years.......

George Walkey
Senior Geek in charge

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[kHz]

I don't think you can equate the typical IT worker's daily activities to a medical researcher. If you were talking about a computer science researcher, say, at IBM, then these are some of the areas they are working on:
* Hippocratic Database (HDB) technology, which respects the privacy of data it manages. HDB is application and database agnostic technology that allows current business operations to proceed with minimal or no changes to existing systems, while ensuring that disclosure concerns (i.e. privacy policy, security policy, legislation, etc.) are not an issue. The technology is applicable to any industry with disclosure management concerns (e.g. Healthcare, Finance, Government, etc.). Currently, the technology set includes:
o Active Enforcement - automates cell-level, policy-based disclosure management such that databases only return data that is consistent with company policies, applicable legislation, and customer preferences
o Compliance Auditing - records all queries and changes to the database and uses this information to construct detailed audit trails that specify the user, recipient, purpose, time, and exact (cell-level) information disclosed for any particular database query
o Sovereign Information Integration (formerly Secure Information Sharing and Sovereign Information Sharing) - allows two parties to share information about intersections between data sets without compromising the privacy or security of the remaining data
o Privacy-preserving data mining - preserves privacy at the individual level, while still allowing accurate data mining models at the aggregate level.
o Database Watermarking - allows one to deter data theft and assert ownership rights over pirated copies.
o Order Preserving Encryption - enabling database systems to execute queries over encrypted data without incurring significant performance hit or unnecessary cryptographic calls and still being able ot utilize the existing database functionality
o BA k-anonymity - enabling optimized data de-identification resistant to data linkage attacks
* P3P implementation and preference language
* Compression
* Connected Home
* Content Assurance
* Distributed Systems Management
* OptimalGrid: An Autonomic Grid Infrastructure
* OSGI: Open Systems Gateway Initiative
* DBCache
* Hippocratic Databases
* SMART: Self Managing and Resource Tuning Databases
* SOAP
* XML Databases
* Xperanto
(many others. And this is just IBM. Look at all the universities doing comp sci research, as well as other corporations)

These people are probably as well compensated as a "medical researcher or corporate lawyer." But what they are doing is so far beyond a typical day-to-day IT worker. Sure, there are some day-to-day workers, say, a software engineer who is designing a new satellite for a government intelligence agency or some new software for the military for advanced weapons, but again, these people are going to be well-compensated, and their pay is going to be above the typical worker.

What task have you done in the last month that isn't a commodity?

 

[arthurliz]

Actually I do agree with kHz, and very little of what I do is a commodity.

The reason for starting this thread is that I keep running into IT professionals that took their skills and left IT and because they had the IT background.....did very well when they applied that IT background in another field such as trading equities, derivatives and futures, or working as an attorney, (took law courses in a night school) or a ceramic composite materials designer / inventor or even as a cancer researcher, yes the guy really exists..at a major university medical school.

In each and every place they are doing exactly what they did before (example wrtiing applications or database design), and entirely from a technical point of view, but becasue they are on "the other side" and add that "other side" to the IT somehow they become more immensely valuable to their employers and the very positive outcome for the former IT person is seen in measures of job satisfaction, money, and power plus position, etc.

In a very real way, what I'm trying to dig out is what I once saw from the vantage point of running a IT project I managed for one of the top North American Architecutre schools.. that a technical education, complete with the typical IT style consultative process is probably a pretty good foundation for accomplishment outside of IT, just like that architecture school found in its alumni pool roughly 20 years after they graduated and roughly 5 years after they left architecture.

But notice one thing, architecture schools are pretty technically and multidiciplinary (design, engineering, materials, writing, drawing, etc, places. For many IT professionals, they seem to stop learning or end up very narrowly learning a specific craft (example writing only in C++ or network design) and perhaps the difference is that you can get into IT without much formal education, especially when compared to architecture.

Thus it is possible that the professional that leaves IT for something else and "really makes it", is indeed a rarity.

 

[mmorancbt]

This is a personal soapbox and a great discussion. I have maintained that building an IT based career does not have to occur in the IT department.

I am working for a client right now where I work in the financial reporting department. One of their "Financial Analyst" actually does a variety of programming tasks on PCs and AS400s but is not in IT!...

He is extremely valuable to the department and is included in virtually all high-level meetings with management when new projects come up. They need his technical input and his understanding of the financial reporting needs of the departments.

Were he in a strict IT role, the chances are his exposure to the variety and high-profile projects would be limited.

Look at my blog titled, "Career Transitions & The Entry Level Dilemma"

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/pm/career/archives/001209.asp

It covers this idea a bit. In 2001 I published an article titled, IT Doesn't Just Occur in IT - on the same premise.

Pure IT talent (technical) is a commodity of diminishing value. The best compensated technologists (financial) are those that combine their technology talents with in-depth knowledge of the businesses they serve and then provide tools that greatly increase the ability for that business to operate.

Matthew Moran

http://www.cbtoolkit.com