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?

 

[chiph]

that a technical education, complete with the typical IT style consultative process is probably a pretty good foundation for accomplishment outside of IT

Any rigorous education prepares you for success in the real world. It's why some of the best CEOs come from an engineering background.

Chip H.


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[specialist]

reguardless of what you do, how many of you actually wake up in the morning and look forward to going to work? If not, can you envision yourself waking up each morning and going to a job (any job) you sincerely enjoy?

Thats the key right there. Doing what you enjoy. If you no longer enjoy it, find something you do like. I just happen to like doing web development and design. I did in the 90's and still enjoy it to this day. I feel blessed to be where I am even if I make very little $$. Living in seemingly the most expensive area in the US, it is tough when you cannot afford $ 400,000 for a 1 bedroom condo. But thats life. At least I'm here, and I'm happy. It could ALWAYS be much worse.

Count your blessings
-Mike

--"Playing Golf" is not a job... I checked already

 

[BocaBurger]

Well, since I work in support, and no one ever calls and says: "Everything is fine, I just wanted to call & say thank you." I have to be ready to take everything from mild disgruntlement to outright abuse.
If I can make a living teaching martial arts and Qigong, I am out of here. I am even trying some e-bay sales to suppliment my income. Anyone interested in a t-shirt with original, one of a kind Chinese calligraphy by a Shanghainese master?



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

 

[specialist]

BocaBurger-

Everything is fine, I just wanted to call & say thank you




-Mike

 

[kHz]

You have to balance what you like with being able to earn a living. You may like being a fine artist and creating Jackson Pollock-type paintings, but your chances of starving are very high. Therefore I work in IT.

I would love to be a comic book illustrator or just an illustrator drawing in pencil. I have drawn ever since I could hold a pencil, but the chances of eating ramen noodles for 3 squares a day is very high with that career path. I was an art major for a time in college, but didn't think there was a good chance of employment so I changed to business. Therefore I work in IT.

There is a possibility that I could do web design since I have an art background, but a lot of people do web design and I like to draw freehand which is not in demand even in web design. Therefore I work in IT.

 

[BocaBurger]

Mike,

But you don't use my company's product :-(



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

 

[chiph]

There is a possibility that I could do web design since I have an art background, but a lot of people do web design and I like to draw freehand which is not in demand even in web design. Therefore I work in IT.

kHz -
You could buy a graphics tablet:

http://www.wacom.com/tabletwizard/index.cfm

Chip H.


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[crystalized]

If you want more reading on this topic I wrote a paper for a class I was taking and in the process found an interesting book

Jill Fraser, White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (New York:W.W. Norton and Co., 2001)

In particular there was portion of the book that mentioned that Employees entering the industry are burning out at a high rate, for example over 5, 15 and 20 years the number of programmers remaining in the profession drops from 60% to 34% to 19% respectively -- she compared that against engineers and while I don't remember the numbers exactly the drop out rate was significantly worse for programmers.

I thought this was interesting and think I am a very good example. I have been a programmer and an IT trainer over the last 5 years and discovered I loved the training element. I also love what I am studying right now - completely non-IT related - so my goal is to become a university professor some day.

So I will definitely be in the 5 year category!

Crystal
--------------------------------------------------

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

-Oscar Wilde

 

[happymc100]

All I can say ppl, is that with so many disatisfied IT pro's out there, means there is more chance of that good position for myself.

Take it from me, compared to the general public IT is a hell of a well paid career. If people chose to over extend themselves financially, then whatever job they do will never be enough money.

Call me a bright eyed newcommer to this field, but look at what we have access to compared to say. someone on £12-14000. I know where I prefer to be.

Tc and keep the faith.

 

[crystalized]

I know for me it is not dissatisfaction - I do not mind the work at all and I have been lucky to have been in mostly good environments. I just simply can not see myself doing this for the rest of my career. But there is no doubt in my mind that the technical skills I have developed will serve me extremely well in my next career(s).

How many other people leave IT not because of dissatisfaction but because they want something new and different?

Crystal
--------------------------------------------------

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

-Oscar Wilde

 

[arthurliz]

Crystalized, the programmer actually makes a great point...."How many other people leave IT not because of dissatisfaction but because they want something new and different?"

I reply to it because once upon a time, I had a technical staff of roughly 100, and finally to deal with the typical IT employee rant of "I want more training, I want top projects, I want to run bigger projects, how come xxx gets all the bleeding edge projects, etc." I went to a book store and bought 100 copies of a do it youself aptitude test (out of my own pocket) and had each IT person self administer so they could try to start to figure themselves out.

Among the things I found from reviewing the aptitude test results was that The very outgoing types could just have easily been stock brokers, industrial salesman, etc. A good term would be consultative selling in just about any complex profession, even the law.
The very technical types could function, or had the behavior set or aptittude for mastering complex technical tasks such as the law, engineering, and yes IT, but usuallly had minimal sales skills.
The great technical writers could have just as easily been academic reseachers in history or english.

What I found in the end, from five years of running that group was the the technical types tended to stay behind and get very frustrated as they hit the top of their value / pay range for straight technical skills, the outgoing types moved on sometimes in IT but sometimes into techncial sales and the writers, well they were a mixed lot, some left and some did not, the only possilbe difference was that the more outgoing were the ones who left.

In a very real sense this experience mirrored the long ago written managment science books (1950's) about the role and eveloution of a "middle manager" meaning that in the beginning a middle manager in something remote from IT, like marketing, first joins a company in a very technical role, such as managing the finance and accounting of a soap company's ad budget, then over a decade or so evolves into a mixed role of that techncial skill and interacting with staff and clients. Then by that person's early 40's they evolved into a manager of a division and sometimes high level client interaction, or they were out.

I've lived long enough to have seen that with law firms and large corporations, so my suspicion, is that successful IT people go though the same evolution, but they maks it via job hops. If they don't successfully evolve, they eventually quit IT

Or, thye decide to leave and take the best of IT with them, but if you looked at their aptitude test results you would find that they could have done a number of consultative careers from industrail sales man to broker to etc.

 

[langleymass]

Matthew Moran--I have bought your book.

I have said quite a few times that "I would leave if I felt like I could." I am frustrated because I believe that my abilities and talents have been wasted. I am not even close to reaching my potential. It is easy to get "burned out" when you aren't getting out of it what you put into it. My dues are OVERPAID.

For the past three weeks, I have been taking an acting class. It has been great and will go on for seven more. I am paying $270 for ten weeks of instruction--3 to 3.5 hours each, 30-35 hours total. I have a great instructor who has worked with the Coen Brothers. He even told us that agents will be coming in.

It's not my ambition to be an actor. I just decided to take the class because I thought it might help me get my next job. I figure if I make it as an actor, I will have to live in either LA or NY (I don't want to). I also feel like success in showbiz is a lottery ticket.

Back in 1998, I took an A+ class. Instruction was terrible. I paid about $1500 for about 40 hours. There was no help in finding a job, and this was during the so-called "tech boom."

Two months ago, I never dreamed I would actually be thinking about acting as a career. Now I am. I am getting more nurturing and encouragement in this class than I have gotten in IT since the middle of 1999. I have more respect for the instructor in this class than for any IT supervisor I've had .

As I write this, I am also thinking about the Super Bowl and Corey Dillon. He was called a "malcontent" because he was always complaining about having to play for the Bengals. He didn't want to play for an organization that didn't care about winning and thought that he deserved better. Before the season, he got traded to the New England Patriots. The "bad attitude" disappeared. Now he has his Super Bowl ring and helped his team get that ring.

I've certainly played for plenty of teams like the Bengals. I wonder how many other IT pros feel the same way.

 

[lionelhill]

Reading a lot of this, it seems to me that a major source of discontent is hitting the pay ceiling. And it's all the worse because of the way careers are structured.

Most places expect to promote people and increase their pay dramatically over the first few years. It's a good way to keep new employees happy, and tempt people to enter your business (at lower rates of pay than most of the people who are already there...). It's also fair, because at first the employee presumably doesn't know so much.

But obviously the faster you promote people at first, the sooner they're going to hit the point where you can't afford to promote them any more.

And anyway, is it fair that we should expect promotion and pay-rises throughout our careers? Surely most of us will have reached a point by the time we're 30 where any additional changes in our skill-set aren't expansions as such, just movements to keep us in line with current needs.

The grim truth is that in any career, most people are not going to progress upwards for ever. Suggesting otherwise is merely preparing discontent for the future. In IT the promises were (are?) bigger, so the disappointment's bigger too.

 

[kHz]

I have complete disdain for my place of employment, not so much for the organization, but for the lack of management skills my manager possesses. Along with his "pet" (my coworker).

We moved from AIX to Sun a while ago, and last summer before the migration, I brought up numerous areas that needed to be taken care of, which were ignored or forgotten or whatever. (I should have taken a clue when I was hired, because in my first week I sent a number of suggestions and things that needed to be done to improve the then-current environment - like a disaster recovery method. Then one day I heard my new manager and two new coworkers - across the hall - say, "did you see all those things he wants to do?" "I'm not doing any of that." That was one of my coworkers saying that to her and my boss, and he chuckles and says, "yeah.") Now most of the things I mentioned months ago are coming back as problems because they weren't done!?! (imagine that).

One of my coworkers (the non-evil one) and I were talking about taxes and social security, etc., one day, and the evil coworker goes to the boss and says we were talking about our salaries, and he in turn goes to his boss, who then takes us into his office to ask us about talking about our salaries. She wasn't in the conversation, and doesn't know what is being said, yet being evil says that because she knows he likes her. Yet, gee, one day on a friday afternoon a few months ago, she comes into my cube and says, "so are you going to get laid this weekend?" Excuse me! What concern is that of hers? I never went to HR, which would have got her into deep trouble, yet she tells lies about us.

The boss calls me one afternoon wanting to know why a prod server was down. I explained to him, after looking, that it was rebooted. He asked me why. I explained it wasn't me and it could only be one of three others. Him (he said he didn't) my other coworker (who was out that day), or the evil coworker (who it was). Suddenly it was okay. Everything was alright. It didn't matter because the pet did it.

She is a manipulative, deceitful, two-faced, backstabbing, lying evil person. Yet the boss loves her. She can do whatever she wants. It is ironic that she says mean things about our boss behind his back. They think they are best buds, but I know it is only a possibly one-way street.

The nice coworker applied for a job as a lead on another team, but didn't say anything to the boss because if it didn't work out he didn't want him to know. So evil coworker tells nice coworker that the boss is mad and is going to make his life miserable. Apparently the boss told her this, and she just wanted to let him know (for his own good). Whether that happened, I have no idea. But he does talk to her about things he should not be discussing because he can get in trouble. But hey, they are best buds.

She is evil. He is incapable and ineffective.

This place is slowly killing me.

 

[langleymass]

kHz,

You aren't the first person to deal with an "evil" co-worker. All you can do is get out and then tell them why at the exit interview. Nothing will be done.

 

[MasterRacker]

I think I've worked with those people. Your boss wouldn't happen to be bald with a pointy fringe of hair would he?

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[kHz]

And part of what is so ironic(?) is that she is and idiot. The other day she said all the servers had to come down to change the password on (solaris) OBP. My reply was "we don't have a password set on OBP." She argued, "yes we do." I replied, "no, we have a password on LOM." So she challenges me and says, "we do have an OBP password set on the system controller." Again I say "the sc is the lom." Her: "oh. well the password command doesn't work. I tried." Me: "did you use password?" Her: "yes. I typed passwd." Me: "no. it's the word password." Her: "that's what I typed. passwd." Me: "no. spell the word out. P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D." Her: "oh."

That and some of the suggestions I made in the past she hijacks and brings them up as her ideas that the {so-called) boss thinks is so great. She has done that numerous times. One time I found and corrected the problem with Oracle on Solaris when we first migrated, only to have the "boss" send an email to everyone claiming evil person figured it out and gave her the acknowledgement of fixing it. This email went to a federal government agency we work for, and they were told that she did it. My other coworker heard the conversation the boss had and saw the email too, giving her credit.

She also claims to be getting email notifications from SMC which I cannot find her getting any emails from SMC at all. She makes false claims all the time. Yesterday she told the nice coworker that she was using a certain script to do a task. He tried it and it didn't work. He had tried to modify the script and couldn't get it to work so asked me (which I then fixed it.) He said "she claims to use it all the time but it doesn't work."

She is a real piece of work.

 

[langleymass]

kHz,

With regard to her question about you "getting laid," I recommend that you keep some type of tape recorder around. You could sue HER for sexual harassment. It might get her out of the company. But suing her would give you some satisfaction--would it not?

 

[kHz]

Does anyone know the answer to this:

The boss has a calendar posted outside his door and if somebody is late (even though there is flex time he tries to enforce factory line hours) he writes it on there for that day that so-and-so was late. If employee X has a dentist appt. or doctor's appt. he writes it on the calendar. If someone is sick he writes they were sick on the calendar. He does the same for vacations. Vacation doesn't bother me but the sick/appt's seems intrusive. (plus he doesn't write anything down for the pet though, she seems exempt from this.)

Somehow this strikes me as not completely legal, but I am not a labor attorney.

PS: I would need something recorded because she has said things before and when someone asks her she claims she never said such-and-such. That happened with the pager rotation time period. She wanted it set for X weeks and later she wanted it N weeks. When the boss, coworker and me said that she originally said X weeks, she claimed she never said that, even though all three of us said she did. She finally said, "ok, if you said I did. Though I know I didn't.

 

[SQLSister]

kHz, this has all the symptoms of a person who is sleeping with the boss. Be very careful around her and document everything. You may need it in a court case later.

Check with HR on the diplaying your sick time on a calendar in public. As a manager he has an obligation to the company to track it, but I don't believe he should be displaying the information for others to see. Also point out that one employee seems to be exempt from this if you want to be evil about it. Make sure to ask for confidentiality on the issue with the HR person before you ask them about it.

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