AZ: Working in IT

[Raging Deadstar]

Imperator Fyron said:
Don't ever get into tech support...

Seconded. Although I enjoy working with computers and learned most of it "from the trenches" (And sometimes it is like the trenches, the explosions, the smoke, the sight of charred components )

I do Tech Support for several charities on a voluntary basis, sometimes it's good and everything works out but a lot of the time it's a job I've found leaves you cursing most of the day and isn't too fulfilling. Round these parts "Dell" has become a curseword.

[Suicide Junkie]

Be thankful if you have never seen or smelled a poorly-wired cubicle-block clusterbomb.

[Slynky]

Before you decide, you should look into all the IT jobs that are off-shored to India (et al). IT jobs aren't so safe these days.

[dogscoff]

Doing tech support for friends and family is just as good an experience for this, I think.

Seconded. In fact I got my job (and previous job) in tech support purely on the strength of self-taught practical geekery. I actually went to uni to study modern languages, I have very little formal qualification in IT at all.

I support a range of (thankfully, very robust) software products, which mostly amounts to sitting here waiting for the phone to ring. I'm in a laid-bakc, small office, which is good. I'd hate to be doing tech support in a big high-pressure phone-farm somewhere. This way I get to write, play nethack, read shrapnel etc between calls=-) I'm pretty lucky really, but it can get very boring and I often go home feeling completely empty. I'd like to be doing something else, really.

Money's not too bad though- if I translated into USD and posted it here you all might think I was rich, but the cost of living here is VERY high. I'm certainly not rich, but I live pretty comfortably.

[geoschmo]

Suicide Junkie said:
Just remember, despite how it works with friends and family, you can't smack a client upside the head when he does something boneheaded.

Probably not, but if you work at a call center you can mute the phone and cuss them out pretty good. It's quite theraputic if your office mates aren't overly sensitive to that sort of talk.

I've been in phone support for 9 years now, and did a year of field support before that. It's not been bad and support is good experience. When you start designing systems the hardest part is understanding the user requirements, and a solid grounding in support really helps you to understand how the customer looks at things. I am getting a bit burnt out on it by now though. I'm looking to get into the development side at my company.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Slynky said:
Before you decide, you should look into all the IT jobs that are off-shored to India (et al). IT jobs aren't so safe these days.

Actually, while off-shoring certainly sucks if it's your job moving, it's not really affecting that large of a percentage of the industry. There are still a lot of jobs out there. If it's something you are interested in and enjoy, I wouldn't let the fear of offshoring scare you away from it.

[RonGianti]

I started in a small firm working on an NT 4 / Novell network with 15 PC's. Took a Microsoft 9 month part time course after I was able to take a PC apart and put it back together on my own.

I read lots of books for a couple years, rode the tech wave of the late 1990's and double my yearly salary twice in 5 years (it wasn't much to begin with, say $9 / hour).

I was willing to learn something new and read on my own time, ended up at a company that supports 800 PC's on an international network Canada to US to Mexico.

Took a Cisco PIX (firewall) class in 2005, just took a VMWare class and rolled out 6 ESX (VMWare) servers attached to an EMC storage device. Most of the time our company will hire a specialist for some new piece of equipment, let them set it up, document it and then we learn it in and out ourselves and no longer need to pay $300/hour to a vendor. Because we save the company money this way, they are more than happy to pay for our classes and take them on company time too.

I'd say if someone wanted to get into the field on the hardware side, you could take a 10 month part time PC / Microsoft course then start in tech support, with the goal of getting some exposure and moving up. Its still a great career in the US if you concider that you don't need a 4 year degree to get into it.

[Renegade 13]

Imperator Fyron said:
Doing tech support for friends and family is just as good an experience for this, I think.

Heh, I've been the resident hard and software guy for my family (and somewhat for my extended family) since '97 when we first got a computer (I was 10 at the time ). You learn a whole lot in that amount of time, more in the software end though. Personally I like the hardware side of things a little more, and took the time to figure out on my own how everything works. Don't have to have any formalized training to be able to take apart and put back together a computer, but it's a useful skill.

I'm actually thinking of getting into a field with something to do with supporting computers as well, though I'm not sure where and what exactly. I think I have enough basic knowledge to build on and learn what I need to know, though that's yet to be seen

[Will]

Re: not working in tech support. It would be good to realize that there are many different levels of tech support, some that are intolerable, some that are actually quite nice. If you're doing support for the general public, it is terrible, and your job will consist of asking a bunch of questions to irate customers, straight out of a three ring binder of problems; you will not think, and be bored to death, and will get no reward from it. Internal IT is better, since you are given more leeway in solving issues that come up. And if you manage to snag a higher-level position, the work *can* be more rewarding. It might also be complete hell. So it's really hit or miss, but I don't think it is a bad thing to experience, personally. I did it two summers ago, at a corporate HQ, as an intern, and made $12/hour (this is about par for internships; full time employees would be salaried at around $35k-45k, plus benefits).

My current work is as a software developer, which could still be considered in IT, maybe. I'm still at an internship level, so I get $18/hour, but my employers are very flexible with how I work those hours. The only real requirement is I can put down a maximum of 8 hours/day, 40 hours/week on the timesheet. If I choose to come in on a weekend and just have a marathon coding session and end up working for 40 hours, I can stay home all week, I just have to fill in 8 hours for each of those weekdays. Most places will NOT be like this, however. But they do exist if that's what you're looking for.

My education is overkill for most work that is considered IT (as opposed to industrial software dev). I am a semester away from completing a Master of Science degree in Computer Science, and I finished by Bachelor last winter. If you want to get into IT, probably the quickest route that would still allow you to go for better opportunities later is to get an Associate degree, and look at grabbing a few certs in a specific field (e.g. network infrastructure). From there, you can get a Bachelor from a lot of different good schools long-distance, a few classes at a time. The difference between Associate and Bachelor degrees in payscale is very worthwhile. But the one thing to remember throughout all of it is, you HAVE to love what you're studying. Otherwise, it will not work out. If you find something that you can love, you are set, but I have seen far too many people who are just in it for the cash, and they drop out fairly quickly.

[Parasite]

I have been working in IT at this company for 13+ years. We are not currently hiring graduates for anything but tech support. As said before, this is a way to get your foot in the door and transfer to a better position. Right now we are hiring people, but only those that have very specific experience (or at least say they do). We went through a phase of hiring .Net people, and now are on the phase of "Portals" or "SAP Portals". It is whatever is the latest and greatest thing whenever you graduate.

We are shipping most of our real work of programming and development off to India. There is not much need for them here. The thing to get into is in the writing of application specs and being clear about what is needed in that application. My Masters in "Software Engineering" points to this but has helped me little in this job from the BS degree I needed to get it in the first place.

When I first started I was making almost 30K, slowly rising, and recently even slower than inflation, to about double that. A computer degree is not really needed here, just a degree. We have had PollySci, Language, and even my own Physics graduates get hired.

Advice I would give would be to yes, get a degree. Shoot for something that is just beginning or looks like it might get hot and head there. medical, biomed, and nano tech look like good bets. They use computers too.