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NippleFloss posted:What non-exclusive jobs would you consider to be better than working in technology from a pay and effort standpoint? Like, yeah, some people sit around and reinvent wheels all day long to cut costs by 10% for some useless business. But a lot of these jobs have actual stakes. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 08:39
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I started my ~*IT JOB~* on Monday. So far it's just been the standard HR/Benefits/'Working Here' info dump but my god, it's incredible. Industry owns. anthonypants posted:Because it's like 90% white middle-class libertarian suburbanites, the only truly oppressed class in America. My site has 1000 people with roughly 60% having graduated in the last few years and tons of diversity and it's freaking great!!
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Jun 15, 2016 08:58
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Vulture Culture posted:"Working in technology" isn't a job, and technology is only dubiously an industry in this context. You can't lump together helpdesk call center workers, bioinformaticists, quantitative traders, PACS administrators, computer/electrical engineers, and people writing simulation software for oil exploration like they're remotely the same thing just because they involve keyboards and sitting. This thread has a pretty narrow focus. We don't really get many bioinformaticists or quantitative analysts or embedded systems engineers or really much of anything beyond help desk, devops, sysadmins, and network admins. I think the thread could actually use more variety because the homogeneity can make the thread tend too much towards negativity and gallows humor, but it is what it is. Every job has stakes to the person that holds it. But it seems like most of the complaints about stress that get posted here aren't anything specific to the job, they are workplace complaints. The boss is an rear end in a top hat. I don't get raises. My customers are dumb. Those aren't problems that are unique to IT work. My main problem is that whenever a new person comes in and says they're thinking of getting into IT or someone says they just landed their first IT job, half of the responses are about turning into an alcoholic or questioning why you would do such a thing. It creates this impression that your default state should be one of world weary cynicism instead of helping someone get excited about the first steps in what can be an interesting and profitable career. It's a field where you can go from minimum wage to making more than the US median income in just a couple years with only moderate effort while sitting at an air conditioned desk. And you have a wealth of career paths ahead of you if you're just a little industrious and self directed. I mean, there are a LOT of lovely jobs out there so it just seems kind of crass when someone complains that they have to drink to survive a day of writing GPOs or creating SCCM packages for 50k a year (or more).
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Jun 15, 2016 09:54
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I actually stopped drinking because of my IT job!!
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Jun 15, 2016 09:58
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Having close friends in both fields, most skilled trades are a year or two of classes and on the job training. Anyone can pick up a service industry job in under two weeks. Computer janitors are much closer to skilled trades. There are definitely people in my division who are overpaid. "Application administrators" who are basically just empty nester moms who can type. Security starts at 100K for basically dictating common sense policy. The technical jobs in my area require many years of experience and are definitely not overpaid. Obviously it's nice to work inside instead of on a roof in 108 degree weather but that shouldn't be a requirement of a middle class lifestyle!
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Jun 15, 2016 12:12
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alg posted:Having close friends in both fields, most skilled trades are a year or two of classes and on the job training. Anyone can pick up a service industry job in under two weeks. Computer janitors are much closer to skilled trades. To be fair, computer/network Security is a field that needs to be high-paying just to look important to other departments. Who's a manager more likely to listen to; some guy making the same money as the people under him, or someone at his own pay grade?
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Jun 15, 2016 13:00
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I could understand the drinking sentiment depending on where you start in IT. My first IT job was a call center for a very large ISP. I've never dreaded waking up to go to work outside of my time there. The customers treat you like dirt, you need to worry about metrics in order to stay employed, and when you take it personally that you're honestly trying to help people and all they can do is put you down because there's a phone separating you, it'd tough not to be jaded. But outside of that experience, IT is an amazing place to be and we definitely are a bit cushy outside of tier 1. I have no degree and let my certs expire yet I pull in more money than anyone I know and have been for years. Yet I have a fiance who can't even do lab work because the state decides she spent 100k on the wrong science degree and must go get another and friends with Master degrees making $20 an hour and closing in on 30 years old.
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Jun 15, 2016 13:23
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IT can only become cushy if you either land with the right place or are smart enough to not get stuck in Tier 1.
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Jun 15, 2016 13:45
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a cop posted:I actually stopped drinking because of my IT job!! I found the mole, guys!
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Jun 15, 2016 14:13
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NippleFloss posted:I'll never understand why people want to pretend that IT work is this special circle of hell when by and large it's overpaid, reasonably cushy, and low stakes outside of the same personal stake everyone has in their job. There's also the whipping boy / IT monkey servant stigma that has somehow befallen a lot of IT departments. When I was doing construction/landscaping/whatever bullshit 'service' industry job, customers had a reasonable understanding that I should be paid for my time and labor and materials cost money. In most of my IT jobs, that seems to be a concept that is completely lost on literally everyone outside the department. I'm in a good place now, but previous (lovely) IT jobs had me regularly working over 80 hours per week for pretty lovely pay. I'd get stupid "orders" at 5pm on a Friday saying that I needed to build an entire 150 person call center by Monday, in a wing of the building that was unfinished and didn't even have network connectivity, be given $0 to purchase the necessary equipment, and actually be expected to make it happen. When you try to explain the hurdles involved with such an inane request, you're greeted with blank stares or "that's what we pay you for." No, you don't pay me to go buy thousands of dollars of switches, and servers, and cable, and phones on my own dime, and then spend every minute of my sleepless weekend architect-ing you a free solution. (except that one time it actually happened) As for being overpaid  I don't fall into that category, and I've only ever talked to a couple people that make what I would consider a ridiculously large sum of money to do what they do. However, those people are also incredibly skilled, have a ridiculous amount of knowledge, and are probably fairly compensated considering the level of work they perform.I'm not underpaid by any means, but my wife (a nurse), makes about 150% my salary, the service writer at my local Ford dealership, certainly makes more than me. I'm pretty sure my friend, a Honda Parts Dept manager makes about the same as me. Is there some golden spring of IT monies and easy living I'm missing out on?
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Jun 15, 2016 14:53
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My previous jobs before I came to IT: 1) food factory where they would literally preach at you in company meetings and then tell you who to vote for. They would also fire women when they get pregnant and/or didn't sleep with their boss. It was basically The Jungle, except without all the socialism at the end. 2) Magnet wire company where 3 of the 4 people on my shift were violent felons and was so poorly maintained that one time a grate on the floor disintegrated underneath me dropping me into pit of cooling sludge, along with the 470F, 250lb die I was working on, which managed to just miss my head but did land on my arm so after I got done peeling crispy fried skin off my arm and talked to the plant supervisor about the massive safety issue, he just shrugged and basically said "Whoopsie!" It didn't hurt that bad and I did get a pretty awesome looking scar from it, so that's kind of cool. The floor grate still wasn't fixed a few weeks later when I quit. 3) Cable technician. Where I would spend most of my time in people's homes, which is the worst because it means getting yelled at for the sins of my employer and belly crawling through literal poo poo because most people live like loving animals. Once I actually had a crazy lady threaten me with a tomahawk. Plus, all the domestic violence I get to see firsthand, because again, people are loving animals. I could tell stories about this job forever but really I'm just trying to forget them. So, yeah, this job where I mostly just reset the same Problem User's passwords over and over again every day? In the air conditioned office for the company that, sure, is maybe somewhat evil and has a lot of similarities with Omni Consumer Products from Robocop, but they have great benefits and pay for a smartphone and a gym membership? I'll take it. Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit, but it's pretty insignificant compared to the bullshit I was shoveling earlier.
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Jun 15, 2016 14:55
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NippleFloss posted:embedded systems engineers I'm a embedded Linux systems engineer with a focus on infosec. I am also the network admin for the engineering department. I also focus on SIP/VOIP. Working in a small company (39 people!) can be awesome, but can also be incredibly stressful, especially when the owner doesn't want any debt, so money is tight even though we are exceeding sales by 20 - 30% per month.
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Jun 15, 2016 14:56
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A good plumber makes more than any of us in this thread. But then again, they have a pretty lovely job.
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Jun 15, 2016 15:24
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anthonypants posted:I guess I forgot to mention massively inflated self-importance in that post earlier. IT is safely within the realm of the service industry. It is laughable to call IT a skilled trade and it diminishes the work that actual skilled laborers perform in literally the same way that people plaster the title Engineer onto every minor position. lol sorry if you personally do not have any skills to consider a skilled trade. Go on speaking for all of us. This is cute.
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Jun 15, 2016 15:26
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:Is there some golden spring of IT monies and easy living I'm missing out on? The median household income in the US is 54k a year. I'd wager that most people in this thread will eclipse that (or have eclipsed that) by the time they've got 4 years in the industry. I can't think of a single other career path with such a low barrier to entry, quick ramp up, and high relative earning potential. Maybe a skilled trade like plumbing, if you don't mind dealing with literal poo poo for a living. I don't really think that most IT workers are overpaid, because almost no one in the US is paid the true value of their labor, but relative to other professions I think the wage scale for IT work is hosed up. None of your complaints about IT work are actually about IT work, they are about the people you've had to work with while doing IT work. But really, if you find it so objectionable why do it?
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Jun 15, 2016 15:31
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Bills aint gonna pay themselves.
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Jun 15, 2016 15:32
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DigitalMocking posted:A good plumber makes more than any of us in this thread. Maybe if they own their own business, but then that's not really an apples to apples comparison.
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Jun 15, 2016 15:33
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Speaking of IT stuff: Are there any good Ethernet cables designed to seal a ethernet jack for use outdoors?
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Jun 15, 2016 15:37
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I don't see how anyone can think that at least administrators aren't skilled tradesmen. A master electrician doing HVAC controls hooks up the VAV boxes to the controller and programs it by setting jumpers. A network administrator hooks up the PCs to the switch and programs it through a CLI. I do agree construction in general is underpaid for the damage it does to a body.
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Jun 15, 2016 15:38
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I don't see how anyone can think that at least administrators aren't skilled tradesmen. A master electrician doing HVAC controls hooks up the VAV boxes to the controller and programs it by setting jumpers. A network administrator hooks up the PCs to the switch and programs it through a CLI. I make ~75k, and honestly have to spend about an hour a day doing real work. The rest of my time is spent on the internet reading about stuff, or playing in my lab to keep my skills sharp/become familiar with new things. E: On a different note, I'm looking to move to a new job with more responsibility, and it doesn't sound like this shop has a proper dev/staging/prod set up. They are in the middle of a major rebuild of their systems, so now would be the time to push for all that. How big should dev and staging be compared to prod? The company provides a SaaS service, so they shouldn't need to be nearly as prod, correct(prod is just a scaled up version of staging)? RFC2324 fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 15:46
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:Is there some golden spring of IT monies and easy living I'm missing out on? Work in a NOC. We get maybe a handful of tickets in a month that aren't planned works (and even then it's generally something minor or a power outage) and I'm lucky enough to have a boss that gets that we might not always be available to pick up an extra shift at the drop of a hat. The only big outages we get are from force majeur.
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Jun 15, 2016 15:52
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NippleFloss posted:Maybe if they own their own business, but then that's not really an apples to apples comparison. I don't think you understand how much plumbers make. Friend of mine just started his apprenticeship at 44k/year with benefits as good as mine. That's basically tier 1 helpdesk level in the IT world. How many tier 1 guys do you know making 44k/year?
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Jun 15, 2016 15:56
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:Is there some golden spring of IT monies and easy living I'm missing out on? InfoSec. You get to tell people their information isn't secure; their practices are dumpster fire garbage, and their network is horrible. They will then pay you a lot of money, ignore your recommendations to fix anything, and repeat the same song/dance in 6 months to a year. FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 15:58
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RFC2324 posted:I make ~75k, and honestly have to spend about an hour a day doing real work. The rest of my time is spent on the internet reading about stuff, or playing in my lab to keep my skills sharp/become familiar with new things. Dev is in the control of the devlopers and there's no controls on it. It can be loving anywhere. You're missing an environment, and that's QA. Production cycle is dev (wild wild west) -> QA (mirrors prod in functional level) -> staging (same as QA) -> prod (with all the bells and whistles, redundancy etc).
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Jun 15, 2016 15:58
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There's a scene in that "Search for General Tso" documentary where an owner of a restaurant says there is this expectation that Chinese food be extremely cheap. If Chinese food isn't cheap it's thought that you are being ripped off. Why is it that some food like French cuisine has to be expensive to show quality but the opposite for Chinese? My boss is finding this exact scenario in trying to sell MSP services to businesses. Why do people think that IT services are cheap or have to be in order to be a good deal and worthwhile?
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Jun 15, 2016 16:01
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DigitalMocking posted:I don't think you understand how much plumbers make. Friend of mine just started his apprenticeship at 44k/year with benefits as good as mine. That's basically tier 1 helpdesk level in the IT world. How many tier 1 guys do you know making 44k/year? quote:The median annual wage for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters was $50,620 in May 2015. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $29,680, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $89,720. I think I'll stick to IT. In all seriousness, IT is a relatively cushy profession like most corporate office jobs are. Anyone working engineering, law, IT, finance, HR, etc is generally getting well above average pay and decent personal freedom. But IT doesn't have the same specific barriers to entry (like the certifications for law or engineering or accounting), and it's growing significantly compared to things like finance or marketing where the job market tends to be more saturated with applicants. There really aren't a lot of professions that can match IT for the opportunity it provides at the moment. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 16:15
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If an MSP isn't a good deal than why would someone hire them instead of in house? Economies of scale, right?
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Jun 15, 2016 16:15
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SaltLick posted:There's a scene in that "Search for General Tso" documentary where an owner of a restaurant says there is this expectation that Chinese food be extremely cheap. If Chinese food isn't cheap it's thought that you are being ripped off. Why is it that some food like French cuisine has to be expensive to show quality but the opposite for Chinese? My boss is finding this exact scenario in trying to sell MSP services to businesses. Why do people think that IT services are cheap or have to be in order to be a good deal and worthwhile? The people he's trying to sell to are cheap.
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Jun 15, 2016 16:19
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We have a watering can.
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Jun 15, 2016 16:25
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DigitalMocking posted:I don't think you understand how much plumbers make. Friend of mine just started his apprenticeship at 44k/year with benefits as good as mine. That's basically tier 1 helpdesk level in the IT world. How many tier 1 guys do you know making 44k/year? An apprenticeship isn't analogous Tier 1 and there are time and licensing requirements to move up to the journeyman and master plumber, things which are not necessary to move out of help desk. This is also not relevant to discussions of pay at the upper end.
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Jun 15, 2016 16:28
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Working in embedded Linux product development: Horizontal Ethernet jacks in our products wouldn't allow for enough room to bend a Ethernet cable and maintain spec, we have decided on vertical and a silicon plug for the two remaining jacks for outdoor use. Also I am almost done making the initial HAL kernel module for the product. This will allow us to just modify the drivers for future boards instead of having to rewrite the software. My plan is a single build for all of our future products for the next 5 to 10 years; and thanks to the HAL layer I am implementing + dtb files I believe this will be possible. edit* CEO is trying to tell us that we MUST use horizontal Ethernet jacks. I might have to have a discussion with him about how this is not possible and that physics prevents us from doing these things. Granted; he's a CCIE and a hardware/Linux guy, and he likes to push boundaries, but this time he won't win because POE takes up more space due to the magnetics needed. 
FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 16:45
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Methanar posted:We have a watering can. It goes with the server farm! 
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Jun 15, 2016 16:51
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go3 posted:The people he's trying to sell to are cheap. Oh yea definitely. There was a potential client who is opening his 6th body shop, drives super expensive cars, bought some $20,000 chandelier and $10,000 coffee machine for his lobby but can't understand why a server and setting up infrastructure should cost a few thousand. It's mind boggling sometimes.
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Jun 15, 2016 16:52
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ratbert90 posted:Working in embedded Linux product development: What sort of products are these?
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Jun 15, 2016 16:58
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NippleFloss posted:What sort of products are these? My company mainly makes emergency phones, but our IP offering is pure-strain RTOS dumpster-fire garbage, so I was brought in to move everything to Linux and make it not terrible (which I think I am doing!). Funny enough, my old boss is doing the board layout, and my best friend is helping me with programming (not that I can't do it, just that it would take way to long for me to do everything I do AND what I am having him do.) Nepotism is awesome when you know good people! Because I set the project deadline for 10 months, we have enough padding in our schedule to make the build system, firmware, and software ultra-flexible. This means that if we want to venture into other IP phone markets, we will be able to do so with little modification to the software. It's also one of the only embedded Linux devices (other than newer Android phones) that uses SELinux and IPtables by default. The entire project is focused on being ultra-secure. There's even going to be a OTP key in the CPU die that our software will have to authenticate with to run. FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jun 15, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 17:04
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DigitalMocking posted:Dev is in the control of the devlopers and there's no controls on it. It can be loving anywhere. You're missing an environment, and that's QA. Every place I have worked has combined QA and staging. Essentially the logic is both are environments for seeing if things break while in use, so why do it twice? So in this kind of environment, size would run prod > dev > QA = staging, c/d? Trying to put it together in my head in case I need to put together a pricing estimate. I've always just dealt with what was there/what I was directed to build so far.
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Jun 15, 2016 17:08
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Staging should not only mirror prod infrastructure but load as well. I've seen services buckle under pressure in prod when everything was fine in staging.
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Jun 15, 2016 17:20
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We name ours a bit differently but ours go local > staging (internal only) > QA (client/public facing) > Prod and everything in Staging/QA/Prod are all setup / configured the same way so we shouldn't see any differences in load/etc
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Jun 15, 2016 17:28
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I know I am a little late to the discussion, but a couple of points: IT is an unskilled trade: this is so absurd it is essentially trolling. Yes, like others have said, there is a wide breadth of positions in the field. Some are script monkeys that don't require much skill. However, when you get to mid level administrator and higher up to a senior engineer / architect, if you don't have a wealth of skills and knowledge, you and your employer are in a world of hurt at some point in the future. The biggest problem I see with entry to mid level IT people is a lack of respect and knowledge for the complexity of modern technology. I like to call this the "can't we just" syndrome, which is mostly used by technically inept or out of touch managers and executives who don't understand how hard it can be to make components and systems work together. I am upfront about my knowledge limits, and I think any good senior level engineer should be. Trying to bullshit you way through career will fail eventually because someone will find you out. Real life story: I worked for a school within a Research 1 university with a fairly large technology footprint. The senior engineer I learned from decided to move on, and I was being groomed to be his replacement. Since we were too small to really have two full time sysadmins, this position required you know your poo poo and be resourceful because there was no other help to be had within the org, and to a lesser extent, the university because we had some unique systems and deployments. I filled in for about 4 months after my mentor had left, doing his job and mine, and when the time came to officially fill the role, I was not chosen. The guy who got the job over me worked for the central university IT organization on a team of other engineers, which in the hiring committee's view, granted him more 'experience'. As it became apparent that my six years there were never going to be rewarded because the only career opportunity available was not given to me, I stared planning an exit because the new guy didn't know what the gently caress he was doing and was in over his head. Not two weeks after i left, he hosed up the virtual environment and took the school offline for over a day and lost irreplaceable research data because the backups he was supposedly maintaining didn't work either. In the time that my mentor and I were there, we NEVER lost data or had that kind of downtime. He is still there 3 years later because they literally can't get someone better, and I'm in a much better position, so it worked out for me in the long run.
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Jun 15, 2016 17:28
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mayodreams posted:Trying to bullshit you way through career will fail eventually because someone will find you out. This is true, but beware of impostor syndrome and remember to reach when you look for new jobs.
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Jun 15, 2016 17:35
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