Please think about it a little more carefully.

I'm getting a little tired of working around people who are "in it for the money". These people astound me. Without a love for the job, they're terrible at it and not paid well at all. I'm getting sick and tired of running into routing and switching guys who can't fix a simple PC problem. I'm getting sick and tired of running into desktop support guys who can't think past a troubleshooting flowchart. I'm getting sick and tired of people who only do the bare minimum required to avoid being fired. These people aren't affecting me negatively (I work with the cream of the crop), but I'm starting to feel really sorry for them.

If you are thinking of getting into computers because the money is good, think again. You're not the first guy who's had this thought. You're going to be competing against ALOT of people who picked up CS degrees because that's "where the money is". You're going to end up fighting others like you for shit jobs, and you're going to get smacked down by people who are REALLY good at what they do. You're going to head into an interview with your newly aquired CCNP or MCSE cert, and you're job is going to be taken by somebody who eats, sleeps and breathes technology every waking moment. As a matter of fact, he's awake more often than you are.

Here is who you will be competing against for that lucrative 80k/yr job you want so bad:

1. He's been a geek since he was 10. The only thing he's good at is information technology, and that's all he cares about.
2. You know those certifications you want to spend $9000 to get at a school? He has every one of them, he studied the books on his own (in his limited free time) and loved every minute of it. He picked up 3 of them while you were paying $9000 to have an instructor teach you.
3. He's comfortable with the idea of working 24 hours straight, and is proud of these marathons.
4. He will travel anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Family and friends can't hold him back.
5. He loves technology so much, that he does things other employees call "work" for fun. Even though he's a network engineer, he's learned three programming languages "just because". The Beowulf cluster in his basement makes his dick hard. "Well rounded" is an understatement.
6. He will always be better than you, and will always make more money than you. Get used to it.
7. There are hundereds of thousands of him.

Still want to get into it? What did you do this week? If the answer is anything other than "I learned <insert geeky topic here>" you're fucked. Have you ever made any of these statements?

1. I can't afford the classes.
2. I don't have enough time to sit in front of my computer or reading books learning shit for hours on end.
3. I can't afford to pay my bills on less than 30k a year for a few years.
4. Having my job outsourced would kill me.

Sound familiar? If you've said any of that, you are so screwed. There are people out there looking at those 4 statements saying "And?". If their job gets outsourced, they'll have another one next week. They don't need to take classes. A reasonable person would say they don't have enough time in the day to "play" with computers as much as they do, but they do it anyway (at the expense of everybody and everything around them). They will gladly take low paying jobs, because they get to do what they love. When the ecomomy picks back up, they'll be loaded again and they know it.

You know what the worst part is? These guys you're competing against for lucrative jobs don't consider it "work". They are amazed that they actually get paid to do things they would just as soon do for free. How about you?

All so very true.  These are the reasons I got out of IT about 4 months ago.

Quoted: These guys you're competing against for lucrative jobs don't consider it "work". They are amazed that they actually get paid to do things they would just as soon do for free. How about you?

big +1.

I sometimes get up early to debug/write some code, go to work to debug/write code for 8 hours, then come home and rebuild the whole thing for free  just because I figured out a better way to write it.

edit:the "in it for the money" guys just burn out too quickly.

Well there is money to be made if you are good, as you point out, but I agree that if you are only in it for 'the money' then you will fail.  To be fair, there is a big divide between the professional IT group and the mouse jockeys who answer phones all day and can't fix shit.

Quoted: I sometimes get up early to debug/write some code, go to work to debug/write code for 8 hours, then come home and rebuild the whole thing for free  just because I figured out a better way to write it.

Bingo.

My brother is a IT geek from 86'
He went to college for statistical analysis stuff and turned IT

i'm glad i switch my major from computer science to geology

Quoted: i'm glad i switch my major from computer science to geology

Reminds me of an out of work cartographer I know. Poor bastard.

I'm still undecided on what career to take, but I knew I wasn't gonna take CS everyone is doing that down here.

Quoted: Quoted: i'm glad i switch my major from computer science to geology Reminds me of an out of work cartographer I know. Poor bastard.

i know someone who's majoring in geography.  interesting major, but i have no idea what kind of job that translate into.

Shit, don't tell me that! I'm finishing up a CS degree in a little over a year.

Quoted: Shit, don't tell me that! I'm finishing up a CS degree in a little over a year.

I just hope you love to code.  A lot of people go into CS because they want to go into some generic IT business area, when they should really be getting a BCIS degree.  CS degree can lead to things besides coding, but that's mostly what it's for.

Thank you, this makes it easier to NOT do an MIS degree.

Quoted: Quoted: Shit, don't tell me that! I'm finishing up a CS degree in a little over a year. I just hope you love to code.  A lot of people go into CS because they want to go into some generic IT business area, when they should really be getting a BCIS degree.  CS degree can lead to things besides coding, but that's mostly what it's for.

Well, I do love coding.

See too much of that crap too. I can remember the first few years of college seeing people flipping through the different majors offered at colleges and seeing different majors and asking 'how much will this pay?'

All I think is 'for you, nothing'

I have been telling the "in it for the money crowd" for years that unless they actually love the technology aspect, they will burn out in a few years. Of course, none of them listen, and they hate their job in no time. The truth is, if you have some good math skills and cognitive reasoning comes easy, there are jobs you can make money at in this industry...but you better be prepared for competition and you better actually enjoy long hours and middle-of-the-night maintenance windows....otherwise no money will justify what you have gotten yourself into.

Now I am getting older, so Im not the 20 something that would get on a plane with a few hours notice....one gets tired of that. But still, I continue to enjoy late night installs, overnight upgrades....I get jazzed when big systems go down...I still love the subject matter. I tell people I get paid to solve puzzles....and I love puzzles.

Newsflash for aging folks supporting families...you will never compete and win against a generation of kids raised on caffeine, single, no kids, and no desire to put their books down. I was once one of those kids....and I made a good deal of progress in the field in a short time....now I see the new crop coming up....they are better, faster, and more able than I ever was....and the only thing that keeps me ahead of them on the org chart is that the finance folks that approve the budgets are more comfortable working with seasoned, well spoken 40 somethings than they are giving millions of dollars to college kids with little experience in the real world.

Subnet.....I am with you on this 100% (well, maybe 99%.....im one of those router/switch guys....I have technicians to solve the windows stuff for me....comes with the position - if it has a Microsoft OS, I let one of the kids own it...I'm an IOS kinda guy)

Shit, I don't have any of that shit and I was better than 90% of the people I worked with who did.

all of that stuff describes me except the travelling. i hate to travel. would not take any amount of money to travel as part of my job.

other than that that is a pretty good decription of me. for instance. I went skiing in aspen last month. but made sure i had a place with high speed connection and did work when i wasn't skiing. programming is what i do to keep from being bored when im not doing anything else which means i may program at any time of day or any day of the week. and i taught myself every language, system, hardware config, network, network programmng, debugging, sniffers, routers, protocols, hardware configs, assembly of hardware, protocol analyzers on and on. and because i like good tools i built 2 work stations at my own expense in addition to the laptop the company gave me, and i have 3 internet connections which i pay for...

relentless, obsessed. when i program on a big new project i do so in 'binges'. program till i drop, get up and do it the next day. no nine to five, no 40 hours a week. its whatever it takes.

how i got to be where i am was by outlasting, outprogramming out supporting everyone i worked with.

i've worked with more than a few people who got into it because it was 'cool' only to find out it was just too obscure, boring, confusing and did as little as possible to just bet by.

bottom line is if it aint for you you aint gonna be happy..

Man, this is cool. My brethren are coming out of the woodwork.

Great post, but it's true for any job.
I became an electrician for the wrong reasons, now I'm trying to find something I can actually do for the rest of my life.
If you don't love it, you will never stick it out thru the rough times.

Quoted: Man, this is cool. My brethren are coming out of the woodwork.

I always liked your avatar and have just assumed that you were one of the good guys.
I mean, the rookies dont get a network with 4094 hosts on it....they start off with RFC1918 Class "C" crap You have to know a few things before you manage something of that scale.

Biggest thing I built to date was two fully populated class B networks....over 5000 routers, over 10,000 frame relay PVC's......very fun routing.....big fat BGP network for a National banking company. Cool stuff!

I've been A+ certified for 7 years now after finishing a 9 month PC course at tech school back in 99. I freelance in my free time. Networking is not my thing. I just do the basics. Simple hardware or software is what i like to fix the most. But I'm getting tired of questions like how to burn a cd or how to do this and that on AOL. It's getting harder to explain that I'm not AOL tech support or just tell them to read the manual. These people expect us to know every single thing in the computer world. Microsoft and PC hardware is all I do. Others, I tell them to read or contact support.

Oh yeah, preach on Subnetmask.

I am an electronics engineering technologist and I do a fair amount of hardware and softare development along with the typical tech duties. I use a lot of specialized CAD software and I write a lot of my own software for testing hardware.

Every year the IT Nazi's want everyone to give up there Administrator privlidges on there machines. The problem with this is our IT folks are slow as hell and complete morons. Now granted we have some exceptional folks, but they don't stay in the ranks of the people who handle desktop calls. The good guys get bumped up to better projects, good for them but it leaves us with a boat load of dumbass IT folks (mostly in it for the money).

These low level IT folks, mostly ITT grads and the like, can not fix anything. There blanket solution is to completely wipe out the machine and install a new drive image. They do this for every thing.  I had an install of Adobe Acrobat that was hanging up and taking up all of the system resources. So they reinstalled windows and all of there other BS. And it kept hanging up. I went to the Adobe website and found that there was an issue where some file would get corrupted with old data from the previous install.

After two times of the IT folks completely reinstalling windows and the other S/W I ended up with approval for Administrator privildges on my machine and I fixed it.

That sort of shit happens when you have IT folks who don't know what they are doing and are just in it for the money.

Then we have these goobers who adminstrate one of the servers that has technical data from all of the different groups in our project. So the server admin sees he is running out of disk space and just starts deleting peoples shit, luckily we have our own server which is backed up.

And the lady that runs the license server for the CAD systems knows nothing about any CAD system other than AutoCAD. We use OrCAD for electronic schematic capture and PADS PCB and BLAZE router for layout. She never keeps the license server daemon up to date and we have had trouble with the upgrades becasue they can't find the damn license because the server is not up to date.

So yeah if you don't really love IT and want to be the best at it find another damn job. IT is important and we don't need fuck ups blowing out servers, half ass reformatting folks desktops for every problem, and not knowing the systems you "administrate".

Quoted: Here is who you will be competing against for that lucrative 80k/yr job you want so bad: 1. He's been a geek since he was 10. The only thing he's good at is information technology, and that's all he cares about. 2. You know those certifications you want to spend $9000 to get at a school? He has every one of them, he studied the books on his own (in his limited free time) and loved every minute of it. He picked up 3 of them while you were paying $9000 to have an instructor teach you. 3. He's comfortable with the idea of working 24 hours straight, and is proud of these marathons. 4. He will travel anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Family and friends can't hold him back. 5. He loves technology so much, that he does things other employees call "work" for fun. Even though he's a network engineer, he's learned three programming languages "just because". The Beowulf cluster in his basement makes his dick hard. "Well rounded" is an understatement. 6. He will always be better than you, and will always make more money than you. Get used to it. 7. There are hundereds of thousands of him.

We have a prime specimen at work.

8. Although he works atleast 14 hours a day, 4 of them is spend at /.
9. He has hygiene worse than a homeless, and thats after the boss told him to start showering.
10. He is used to geek for himself, not to work with others. Although he works for two his boss have to adjust his tasks since he's barely capable of working with others.
11. His social intelligence is non-exsistant.
12. You can't send this guy out to customers due to 8,9,10 and 11.

I've been a unix admin since '90.  You didn't mention anything about having to deal with arrogant, dumbass, shithead, pencil neck, communist cock sucking engineers who use the computers you support.

Quoted: all of that stuff describes me except the travelling. i hate to travel. would not take any amount of money to travel as part of my job.

This is quite common. My company is DESPARATE for Voice Network Engineers (Cisco voice stuff), and people have turned down high paying jobs over the travel requirements. Somehow I never imagined that the travel requirements would be so much of a deal breaker.

It's kind of funny. Normally, when you think of the hiring process, you imagine a potential employee sitting at home waiting for that phone call: "You're hired!" In reality, the anxiety is at the other end. "Are we offering him enough money? Are the bonuses big enough? Will he like the benefits? Jesus, I hope he doesn't mind the travel..." And I shit you not, people turn down REALLY high paying jobs because they can't handle travel or relocating.

It's kind of nice as a voice guy, though. We're treated like kings!

Quoted: relentless, obsessed. when i program on a big new project i do so in 'binges'. program till i drop, get up and do it the next day. no nine to five, no 40 hours a week. its whatever it takes.

I have worked over on a friday afternoon writing code in LabVIEW, for free.

I have wrote code on the weekends and my afternoons for PIC microcontroller in assembly for free too.

Its about getting it perfect.

I've found that you can always discover the difference between a good IT candidate and a "wannabe" by what they've got set up at home.  If your company is looking to hire for an IT position and the candidate has a faster, more reliable, and more secure network at home than you do at work, you should probably consider hiring them.

I'm sure this applies to a lot of fields, but in IT, you must love what you do.  I'm a network security geek, and I would go absolutely nuts if I didn't love what I do.  I eat, breath, and sleep "network security."  If I'm not actively doing something, my brain is probably floating over whatever engineering problem is sitting on my desk at work, or whatever new vulnerability was announced on BugTraq, or how I'm going to roll out some new security app across the enterprise.

That's just how we function.  I couldn't imagine a worse job than IT for someone that didn't love it.  Everybody loves something, find it and bust your butt getting into your field.

-James

Quoted: Quoted: I sometimes get up early to debug/write some code, go to work to debug/write code for 8 hours, then come home and rebuild the whole thing for free  just because I figured out a better way to write it. Bingo.

I was up until 3 this morning fixing my L2TP problem, for no other reason than I wanted to.  Does that count?

Quoted: www.gaernin.net/gaerninserv3.jpg

IIRC, that's your web server at home, yes?

I have always learned stuff on my own. People always ask me "Where did you go to school to learn this?" What school teaches you how to setup and maintain an entire network of computers and servers running Linux or BSD and integrate them into a Winblows and MAC environment. Also install and maintain server apps such as Qmail, Sendmail, Postfix, Apache, BIND, Samba, MySQL, Perl, Python etc.  

Quoted: Quoted: www.gaernin.net/gaerninserv3.jpg IIRC, that's your web server at home, yes?

It's not actually mine, but between 3 friends of mine we sorta do random stuff with it.  It used to hang in The Pit of Doom, which was an old office of ours, but none of us work there anymore so they had us pull it out.  It's sitting in another friends dorm room right now.  We're actually in the process of adding another machine to it and starting up a cluster.  I'm picked up two GX100s that I plan on adding as well.

Quoted: Quoted: Shit, don't tell me that! I'm finishing up a CS degree in a little over a year. I just hope you love to code.  A lot of people go into CS because they want to go into some generic IT business area, when they should really be getting a BCIS degree.  CS degree can lead to things besides coding, but that's mostly what it's for.

Huge +1. You better love to code. For those that don't, a CS degree is crazy! It's extremely difficult to obtain (compared to most others) and isn't of much use to a non programmer. If you don't want to code, get a CIS degree. It's waaaaay easier (ask a CS student ).

Quoted: Thank you, this makes it easier to NOT do an MIS degree.

I do what I can.

Quoted: Quoted: These guys you're competing against for lucrative jobs don't consider it "work". They are amazed that they actually get paid to do things they would just as soon do for free. How about you? big +1. I sometimes get up early to debug/write some code, go to work to debug/write code for 8 hours, then come home and rebuild the whole thing for free  just because I figured out a better way to write it. edit:the "in it for the money" guys just burn out too quickly.

I'm the same way at my engineering job.  a BIG +1.

It's like I tell the assholes that only want to race my car for money, YO.

I'm in for the ride, not the cargo.  

Quoted: Quoted: all of that stuff describes me except the travelling. i hate to travel. would not take any amount of money to travel as part of my job. This is quite common. My company is DESPARATE for Voice Network Engineers (Cisco voice stuff), and people have turned down high paying jobs over the travel requirements. Somehow I never imagined that the travel requirements would be so much of a deal breaker.

I was offered a job as a Manufacturing engineer for a Major electronics company.  My job wold have been to spend 1 month of 3 in china inspecting plants to ensure they make a quality product.  I was offered $120,000 to do this.

I turned it down because I didn't want to make two 18 hour flights every 2 months and live in China.

It's all about the personal impact on you.  I would accept a job traveling in North America.

Quoted: I have been telling the "in it for the money crowd" for years that unless they actually love the technology aspect, they will burn out in a few years. Of course, none of them listen, and they hate their job in no time. The truth is, if you have some good math skills and cognitive reasoning comes easy, there are jobs you can make money at in this industry...but you better be prepared for competition and you better actually enjoy long hours and middle-of-the-night maintenance windows....otherwise no money will justify what you have gotten yourself into.

You know it. I'm a voice guy, so ALOT of my work is done on weekends and after hours. Taking down a server is one thing, taking down the phones is quite another. Cutovers are always done on weekends or late friday night. The customer's needs come before my own.

Now I am getting older, so Im not the 20 something that would get on a plane with a few hours notice....one gets tired of that. But still, I continue to enjoy late night installs, overnight upgrades....I get jazzed when big systems go down...I still love the subject matter. I tell people I get paid to solve puzzles....and I love puzzles.

Boy, you nailed it. Travel gets old (I'm 26), but I take it in stride. I'd say I'm away from home about 1/3 of the time, but it comes in spurts. In other words, I might not see my house for a month, but I get to work from home for a few weeks. It all works out in the end. I'm truly blessed that I have a wife who understands (and knew what she was signing up for when we got married!).

Newsflash for aging folks supporting families...you will never compete and win against a generation of kids raised on caffeine, single, no kids, and no desire to put their books down. I was once one of those kids....and I made a good deal of progress in the field in a short time....now I see the new crop coming up....they are better, faster, and more able than I ever was....and the only thing that keeps me ahead of them on the org chart is that the finance folks that approve the budgets are more comfortable working with seasoned, well spoken 40 somethings than they are giving millions of dollars to college kids with little experience in the real world.

Bingo. Honestly, I don't fit the profile of the "eat, sleep and breathe" guy I used as an example, as much as I used to. Now that I've been at this a while, my experience kind of speaks for itself. One guy might say "I have my CCNP, CCVP, MCSE, CNE, blah blah". I can say "Ya, well I routinely generate $300,000 a year in bilable labor, have done most everything under the sun in varying capacities, and I have a proven ability to juggle several large projects concurrently. In fact, I've done it for years. Here's my employer's phone number. Call him. He loves me, and wishes I didn't have to leave."

Subnet.....I am with you on this 100% (well, maybe 99%.....im one of those router/switch guys....I have technicians to solve the windows stuff for me....comes with the position - if it has a Microsoft OS, I let one of the kids own it...I'm an IOS kinda guy)

LOL. Well...I don't do desktop support anymore either. I leave that to the help desk monkeys.

The skills I picked up are EXTREMELY helpful though. As a voice guy (contact centers in particular), I do alot if CTI integration. All those years of figuring out desktop quirks have proven extremely helpful. It gives me an edge. For some reason, I get irritated when a network engineer can't fix a simple desktop problem on his own damn PC. "Damn, the agent desktop didn't uninstall all the way. I guess I better call TAC".

Quoted: We have a prime specimen at work. 8. Although he works atleast 14 hours a day, 4 of them is spend at /. 9. He has hygiene worse than a homeless, and thats after the boss told him to start showering. 10. He is used to geek for himself, not to work with others. Although he works for two his boss have to adjust his tasks since he's barely capable of working with others. 11. His social intelligence is non-exsistant. 12. You can't send this guy out to customers due to 8,9,10 and 11.

Guys like that will never be succesfull. "Well rounded"describes technical AND professional traits. If he's a technical god AND manages to fix the items yoy listed, he'd be unstoppable.

A guy that can't be sent to customer sites over what you described is worthless. As a matter of fact, somebody who is less knowledgeable technically, but is a true professional in every other aspect would likely do better.

Quoted: I've found that you can always discover the difference between a good IT candidate and a "wannabe" by what they've got set up at home.  If your company is looking to hire for an IT position and the candidate has a faster, more reliable, and more secure network at home than you do at work, you should probably consider hiring them. I'm sure this applies to a lot of fields, but in IT, you must love what you do.  I'm a network security geek, and I would go absolutely nuts if I didn't love what I do.  I eat, breath, and sleep "network security."  If I'm not actively doing something, my brain is probably floating over whatever engineering problem is sitting on my desk at work, or whatever new vulnerability was announced on BugTraq, or how I'm going to roll out some new security app across the enterprise. That's just how we function.  I couldn't imagine a worse job than IT for someone that didn't love it.  Everybody loves something, find it and bust your butt getting into your field. -James

That's the stuff I do as well.  Great niche.

Quoted: Quoted: I've found that you can always discover the difference between a good IT candidate and a "wannabe" by what they've got set up at home.  If your company is looking to hire for an IT position and the candidate has a faster, more reliable, and more secure network at home than you do at work, you should probably consider hiring them. I'm sure this applies to a lot of fields, but in IT, you must love what you do.  I'm a network security geek, and I would go absolutely nuts if I didn't love what I do.  I eat, breath, and sleep "network security."  If I'm not actively doing something, my brain is probably floating over whatever engineering problem is sitting on my desk at work, or whatever new vulnerability was announced on BugTraq, or how I'm going to roll out some new security app across the enterprise. That's just how we function.  I couldn't imagine a worse job than IT for someone that didn't love it.  Everybody loves something, find it and bust your butt getting into your field. -James That's the stuff I do as well.  Great niche.

Security. Blech. You fuckers are always wanting to check out my laptop before you'll let me on your network. Bastards.

Quoted: Security. Blech. You fuckers are always wanting to check out my laptop before you'll let me on your network. Bastards.

Aye.  My network.

Quoted: I'm getting a little tired of working around people who are "in it for the money".

I have been in IT since I got out of the mil.  I am not doing this shit for free!  I am doing it because it pays the bills and I am damn good at it.

Here is who you will be competing against for that lucrative 80k/yr job you want so bad:

I would hate to have to compete for a salary decrease.

1. He's been a geek since he was 10. The only thing he's good at is information technology, and that's all he cares about.

And he has poor social skills, cannot interact with customers, doesn't bathe and has non-existant public speaking skills.

2. You know those certifications you want to spend $9000 to get at a school? He has every one of them, he studied the books on his own (in his limited free time) and loved every minute of it. He picked up 3 of them while you were paying $9000 to have an instructor teach you.

And while he was working in a sterile lab environment, plenty of folks with experience were busy fixing trading floors, hospitals and designing production networks.

3. He's comfortable with the idea of working 24 hours straight, and is proud of these marathons.

And burn out after a few years of doing that will negatively impact his product quality.

4. He will travel anywhere, at any time, for any reason. He has no family or friends to hold him back.

Fixed.

5. He loves technology so much, that he does things other employees call "work" for fun. Even though he's a network engineer, he's learned three programming languages "just because". The Beowulf cluster in his basement makes his dick hard. "Well rounded" is an understatement.

Well rounded?  He is technology focused without understanding the business impact of technology.  Can he discuss the security issues surrounding unfettered access to information and various legislation with the CIO, legal, HR, security?  You also contradicted yourself.  I quote, "The only thing he's good at is information technology,"

6. He will always be better than you, and will always make more money than you. Get used to it.

No bloody likely.

7. There are hundereds of thousands of him.

Sure, I ran into a bunch of them before the bubble burst.  They held a myopic view and were too "technology" focused to be an asset when the .bomb hit.  More than once, I have seen these self proclaimed geeks working retail.  They "play" with technology for the sake of playing with it.

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Shit, don't tell me that! I'm finishing up a CS degree in a little over a year. I just hope you love to code.  A lot of people go into CS because they want to go into some generic IT business area, when they should really be getting a BCIS degree.  CS degree can lead to things besides coding, but that's mostly what it's for. Huge +1. You better love to code. For those that don't, a CS degree is crazy! It's extremely difficult to obtain (compared to most others) and isn't of much use to a non programmer. If you don't want to code, get a CIS degree. It's waaaaay easier (ask a CS student ).

The problem with me is, I'm not near as smart as some of the other CS guys (I'm smarter than a few) but I'm miles ahead of any of the CIS guys.  So I'm sorta in a middle ground.  I already have a line on a consulting job when I graduate.

What sucks about IT is the long hours, the overnights, the 'my-shit-is-the-only-important-shit' lusers, the vendors, the telcoms, the budgets, the PHBs. Oh, and Java. Can't believe I forgot that the first time. Write once, suck anywhere.

The cool shit rocks.

The people who want technology for the sake of technology only work at places with boatloads of dough to throw at shit. Tech that doesn't work well or is too hard for your users is worthless. Most of the .bombs were like this - money out the ass, but no planning, forethought, vision or anything else.

Heh - I wish we had a /20 on the internet side; well maybe not - having to secure that amount of shit sucks. We've got a /23 from Sprintlink now and only use a small portion of it.

Course, inside is a /12...

TR

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Shit, don't tell me that! I'm finishing up a CS degree in a little over a year. I just hope you love to code.  A lot of people go into CS because they want to go into some generic IT business area, when they should really be getting a BCIS degree.  CS degree can lead to things besides coding, but that's mostly what it's for. Huge +1. You better love to code. For those that don't, a CS degree is crazy! It's extremely difficult to obtain (compared to most others) and isn't of much use to a non programmer. If you don't want to code, get a CIS degree. It's waaaaay easier (ask a CS student ). The problem with me is, I'm not near as smart as some of the other CS guys (I'm smarter than a few) but I'm miles ahead of any of the CIS guys.  So I'm sorta in a middle ground.  I already have a line on a consulting job when I graduate.

Best job to have is to consult IT managers. You tell them what to do or fix their fuckups for them and make them look bad and charge their company out the ass for it.

Quoted: I have worked over on a friday afternoon writing code in LabVIEW, for free.

LabView put food on the table and money in my pocket during grad school. It's amazing how much PI's with grant money will pay for a customized data acquisition system.


So what's with all this tech-talk? I thought all of us gun owners were dumb hicks...

Quoted: I've found that you can always discover the difference between a good IT candidate and a "wannabe" by what they've got set up at home.   -James

I built this im not the IT guy I just code on the side. My wife is a business analyst with 3 degrees
When she gets Home. She wont even look at a computer


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Quoted: Quoted: all of that stuff describes me except the travelling. i hate to travel. would not take any amount of money to travel as part of my job. This is quite common. My company is DESPARATE for Voice Network Engineers (Cisco voice stuff), and people have turned down high paying jobs over the travel requirements. Somehow I never imagined that the travel requirements would be so much of a deal breaker. It's kind of funny. Normally, when you think of the hiring process, you imagine a potential employee sitting at home waiting for that phone call: "You're hired!" In reality, the anxiety is at the other end. "Are we offering him enough money? Are the bonuses big enough? Will he like the benefits? Jesus, I hope he doesn't mind the travel..." And I shit you not, people turn down REALLY high paying jobs because they can't handle travel or relocating. It's kind of nice as a voice guy, though. We're treated like kings!

Voice, eh, What are you paying??  Jeff

Been a C/Unix code monkey since '87.  I don't put the marathon hours in anymore coding, but when some app in productions dumps core, more often than not it is me they want to fire-up the debugger and track it down.  I don't think too many of the programmers coming over from India even know C or Unix.  They all seem to be Java heads.  There are niches in IT that can be very lucrative.

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: all of that stuff describes me except the travelling. i hate to travel. would not take any amount of money to travel as part of my job. This is quite common. My company is DESPARATE for Voice Network Engineers (Cisco voice stuff), and people have turned down high paying jobs over the travel requirements. Somehow I never imagined that the travel requirements would be so much of a deal breaker. It's kind of funny. Normally, when you think of the hiring process, you imagine a potential employee sitting at home waiting for that phone call: "You're hired!" In reality, the anxiety is at the other end. "Are we offering him enough money? Are the bonuses big enough? Will he like the benefits? Jesus, I hope he doesn't mind the travel..." And I shit you not, people turn down REALLY high paying jobs because they can't handle travel or relocating. It's kind of nice as a voice guy, though. We're treated like kings! Voice, eh, What are you paying??  Jeff

Low end (i.e. we trained you), maybe 50k. High end (CCIE Voice, lots of experience) probably 120k, plus bonuses.