IT Worker Disillusionment

January 12th, 2008 · No Comments

I saw an interesting article posted on /. (well, linked to from there anyway). The Slashdot summary is located here.

If you read through the comments which is what I find to be the most interesting part, you will see several from myself. I have some pretty strong opinions of my own about some of the issues, and being a young IT worker can relate to some of the problems that were discussed by many in the comments.

Most of the readers on Slashdot are generally working in the IT or programming fields and have technical backgrounds, so it is interesting to see the kind of responses you get. One thing that really hit me is that i’m not the only one who graduated from College and went into a starting salary that was 35-40% less than what I was promised by all of those silly salary studies or advisors. The studies claim that Computer Science graduates doing programming work or IT-related things start at around $53,000 / yr. This is a total crock! I’d say a better estimated starting salary for 2008 for an entry-level position in the IT or programming field is around $35,000.

As many pointed out in the comments, part of the issue is probably due to the fact that a College education has become the de facto standard now, and the Masters degree is the new bachelors. I started working on a Masters last spring but gave it up late last fall due to the stress and time requirements of the program that were starting to interfere with my work. It is extremely hard for some people (myself included) to further our educations while working full time, but it is also really hard to go back to school and quit your job to do it full-time. Being stuck with a bachelor’s degree and a few years of experience plus some certifications is where i’m at now, and you can’t go very far with that working for a State system.

The only way to move up at this point will be to move outside of the State system to the corporate world but that is fraught with its own problems such as lack of job security and stress related to focusing on realizing profits for the shareholders of the company.

I guess in the end the old cliche that “the grass is always greener on the other side” holds true in every field of work, not just in Information Technology - but I don’t work in those other fields so I can’t make informed commentary about them.