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OK. So every day, I hear and experience more and more about the computer professional gravy train. IT Architect, DBA, Computer Programmer, Software Engineer, Network Engineer.
You can enter the field with any degree if you need one at all.
Apparently, you can make 70K mid career with only a high school degree or two year DeVry type degree.
Apparently, if you have a Computer Science degree, you can be rolling in the six figures mid career.
If you have a CS/IT degree and MBA, forget it, you've got a license to print $.
There's thousands upon thousands of jobs everywhere.
So, can someone clear this up for me? Is it really that great of a career? I mean, from everything I'm reading, computer professionals mid career who may have a related degree or not are outearning JDs.
Because from what I'm hearing, it sounds like a gravy train.
Its kind of saying that actors and athletes make millions. While that is true, its not the "norm". Is it possible to make six figures with just a HS diploma? Sure - I know a number of people that are making that. But then again, I also know a number of people in other industries that are making six figures with just a HS diploma. So IT isn't a factor.
What is a factor is that those that are making that are typically not IT 'generalists'. They have a specific skill (network engineers, Firewall architects, DB architect etc.) that they've worked at. The barrier of entry isn't the issue (you don't really need any qualifications) like some other professions where you need formal education, license, certification etc. However, the challenge is that to get to that mid-career point you're talking about, you need a proven skill set/experience that businesses need.
As someone mentioned, one of the factors to getting to that point is the effort/resources spent in continuous education. Many of the skills sought after today didn't even exist 5-10 years ago. And some skills that were considered "expert" level are common these days; or at least technology has advanced enough that the expertise is no longer needed. I know a number of CCIEs, and their basements resemble a small business with racks of equipment. Some get them from work, but some also purchased them off of craigslist and ebay. So I wouldn't say working in IT is all gravy.
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Originally Posted by jobaba
I just realized after I posted this that my mom does computer programming.
She's worked at home and from time to time, when I'm there, I see her staring at source code on the computer.
Personally, I think computer professionals are overpaid.
I think the ones who write useful software should be paid well.
But the people who set up network passwords, install software licenses, and set up the big screen projector at workplaces and colleges should not be making 80K a year for 8 years of experience.
My opinion...
Define 'computer professional'... that's almost like saying "people in sales" are overpaid..... Aren't both of your examples computer professionals? I don't know anyone that makes 80k and all they do are those three functions. I'm sure they exist, but again, it's more of an exception.
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Originally Posted by jobaba
How would you break into the industry with a Political Science degree from say University of Maryland?
Funny you mention that ... I have a BA from UMD. Got started building PCs (minimum wage)... then went into networking, then security, then in IT management. I busted my ass early on working in startups, as well as setting up networks and installing OSs when I'm at home. But the timing was also right - I graduated college right before the .com boom. So you were pretty much guaranteed 60K if you could spell MCSE. However, times have changed as the industry has matured and the talent pool is overflowing in many areas. One constant is that I see a lot of people with certifications and long resumes... but less with actual talent and skills that can back them up.
The key is to start low (or wherever you can) and really work at it (which is sort of the formula for every industry no?). I think there's a misconception that you can just go out and get yourself a XYZ cert and some magic door will open where you get to pick your litter of 80K IT jobs. Again, I'm sure that's possible - Just as a talent agent may 'discover' me as I'm buying a pack of gum at CVS. Not sure I'd rely on that method to pay the bills though.
I don't have a degree, and I am now making real good money as a programmer. I didn't just jump into it, though.
.....................
I see so many threads on here about how to make the big bucks and I just don't understand why anybody, degree or not, thinks they can just start out making a bunch of money without working your way up to it.
Absolutely! Even with degree in Computer Science it took both my husband and I (we are both programmers, although I do everything from programming to administration (to a degree) to partial project management) to reach 80-90-100K.
My first salary was 32K, I was a graduate student in CS, with Bachelors in CS, working first as an intern, and then as full time ASP programmer at cheap skate insurance company in 2001. Now I'm approaching 6 figures, not quite there yet, but close. (Actually, if you take my employer's retirement match into consideration, I'm just barely above 100K ) It took changing 4 jobs; changing fields; 12 years of learning various technologies, programming languages etc. and working my butt off; and moving to higher COL area.
#2 Addding new skills is something that pretty much employee ought to do but I would estimate only 5% of employers actually encourage this. It is flat out easier for management to run their business in some sort of "steady state" than actually promote true growth / change in their staff.
Heh. I have picked up a LOT of new skills by the tried and true method of:
Doug set this up, but he left six months ago.
Now it's broken, and we never realized how important it was.
You know something that resembles it a little bit, so go fix it. Did we say it was important?
It pays well, sometimes without a degree, but you work your butt off. You are basically on call 24 hours a day. And everyone you know will treat you like their own personal Geek Squad.
Some days are a breeze, but deadlines can be hell.
Let's do a little math. 40 hr at $1000/hr for a single month equates to $1,600,000. It is extremely unlikely that any firm could sustain this level of spending for any length of time...
I have seen many "voodoo magicians" claim they could do the work of ten lesser workers but in every case these charlatans ended up being "all hat and no horse" -- they talked a good enough game to get a desperate and clueless higher up to ok some kind of initial contract but ultimately their promise to be a "silver bullet" for some technical issue where disproven by employees that had a whole lot more at stake.
Of course it is a world a difference to make $1000/ hr and even $200/hr. -- folks with specialized knowledge very well may be justified if the system they support generates direct revenues many orders of magnitude greater than what some hired gun demands. The firms that end up with such a fragile environment are doomed to either reengineering to a more stable system or live with these lampreys until a wiser competitor can operate with less overhead...
Couple extra zeroes there. Your hypothetical job billing $1K/Hr is paying 160K/mo, not 1.6 mil.
Couple extra zeroes there. Your hypothetical job billing $1K/Hr is paying 160K/mo, not 1.6 mil.
And as I said, it is not that there are no such situations, it that the number of such situations is so vanishingly small as to be not really worth considering. It is not quite like winning PowerBall but maybe hitting a trifecta at the race track...
It really does not matter if you work for some famous Internet company, or some kind of financial powerhouse, or some household name in software -- NONE of these places are setup to compensate the frontline staff ( or contractors ) with packages better than top tier managment. If it does happen for some brief period count your lucky stars.
It really does not matter if you work for some famous Internet company, or some kind of financial powerhouse, or some household name in software -- NONE of these places are setup to compensate the frontline staff ( or contractors ) with packages better than top tier managment. If it does happen for some brief period count your lucky stars.
At my company the top tier is paid only a nominal salary, so EVERYONE makes more than them
The only places I've heard of with insanely high rates for contractors are financial firms, and in that case you need to be a specialist who can and does save their butt when their production systems are down and they're hemorrhaging money as a result. You have to have a reputation in the business to get a gig like that.
It's not a gravy train. A DeVry degree and a few certs is going to earn you a trip to the unemployment line, more likely than not. You're competing with a lot of visa workers, all of whom will have masters degrees and who will magically have exactly the qualifications the employers desire. On the IT side, you have to constantly keep up with various vendors new products and versions. And those jobs which pay 6 figures? They tend to be in places like Silicon Valley or NYC where costs of living are sky high too.
That said, the field is still a very good one to be in, if you have any aptitude for it. If you're a US citizen, especially in the D.C. area, you have the advantage that you can try for jobs requiring a clearance, which aren't the highest paying but at least get the visa workers out of the running. Then you can be the guy running the NSA surveillance.
#1 I am 100% sure there are still a whole bunch of people doing minimum wage data entry. The odds of any of them "working their way up" gets harder and harder as more people get the training / education to do the more lucrative programming in more formal settings. The more mature any field becomes the more structured the path to success is...
You would think the competition is high, but there really aren't a bunch of people that like IT or have the skill for it. While talking to other co-workers, they actively avoid it. A co-worker writing SQL said he did not want to be pigeon holed into IT and that he wanted to stay in the business side. I went from a file clerk making $11-12/hr to $50k/yr superuser in Access to a $80k+ SQL reports guy.
Management encourages it, as long as you have the numbers to back it up. When I combined industry knowledge with a few queries, I was able to get $100k+ in money from vendors in a month for $5k paycheck that month. I am more of a superuser that uses SQL to create risk controls, eliminate process issues, or identify refunds from vendors. While I have met many technical people with higher level technical skills, the number of guys that have an understanding of both are harder to find. I consistently identify gaps in data and automation over the last 5 years.
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#2 Addding new skills is something that pretty much employee ought to do but I would estimate only 5% of employers actually encourage this. It is flat out easier for management to run their business in some sort of "steady state" than actually promote true growth / change in their staff. Of course the 5% or so of firms that actually do run their business with a realization that if they're not growing / changing are the ones that are on the "best places to work" list and often have superior financial performance. In some ways that makes it harder to get hired in these places but the payoff is that working there is more beneficial to one's total career.
It's more likely that many people have no desire to go into IT. In off-hand discussions, most of them do not want to spend all day typing code on a screen. They had other career goals. Some have opted for positions in management, based on their years of experience and knowledge. They didn't want to learn about a new area. They definitely had no interest in learning anything IT related or moving in that direction.
At my company the top tier is paid only a nominal salary, so EVERYONE makes more than them
The only places I've heard of with insanely high rates for contractors are financial firms, and in that case you need to be a specialist who can and does save their butt when their production systems are down and they're hemorrhaging money as a result. You have to have a reputation in the business to get a gig like that.
It's not a gravy train. A DeVry degree and a few certs is going to earn you a trip to the unemployment line, more likely than not. You're competing with a lot of visa workers, all of whom will have masters degrees and who will magically have exactly the qualifications the employers desire. On the IT side, you have to constantly keep up with various vendors new products and versions. And those jobs which pay 6 figures? They tend to be in places like Silicon Valley or NYC where costs of living are sky high too.
That said, the field is still a very good one to be in, if you have any aptitude for it. If you're a US citizen, especially in the D.C. area, you have the advantage that you can try for jobs requiring a clearance, which aren't the highest paying but at least get the visa workers out of the running. Then you can be the guy running the NSA surveillance.
Thank you nibbler. You too, move4ward. I was going to write a comment for chet that the reason he hasn't learned much about it is because not many making above 150k will have time to post on CD so his general idea is 'skewed'. I bet he hasn't heard about the bonus for admin assitants at Goldman is over 100K. For everyone else that makes a difference its going to be bigger. So what if we all move to GS? JPM, BoA, Citi, Shell, Chevron, Exxon, Conagra and every IB and hedge fund, every gas & power company, manufacturing even farmer bob's coop will have to raise the rates to the roof to get some of the talent. Then theres the consulting firms and vendors who would need some talent/reputation as well. There's also the 'feds' who need the same talent to be the watchdogs.
hemorrhaging money yes in some cases but any form of downtime/latency, behind on trends/products or just behind on a regulatory reports costs money due to opportunity loss. Remember the finance folks do not think in cash. Time is money as they say
The job is not that hard, probably easy at times. I personally do not study or get certificates, that's for hardware people. I just pick new things every now and then. I wrote my first java code not too long ago, now i'm back to normal stuff. I don't think I have to prove that i'm not really smart academically. I got kicked out of my first university because I spent too much time with my punk band, working on cars and track varsity trying to avoid mandatory military training. There are lots of smart people at work but not many can code well. I have my moments. My reputation with problem solving makes up for my engineering degree that I've forgotten already, lack of finance knowledge, personable/language skills and my amateur racing hobby.
I'm not a rare case either, theres a lot of people in finance IT and been in it for years. How do you measure a CTO? how do they make sure its going to be hard to replace them? The real answer is how big is their operation in dollars, then its going to be hard to find someone who managed a bigger operation. They have to ask for a budget around September and they HAVE to spend it or else they'll look really stupid
IB is not in Silicon Valley. NYC and Houston is the primary, Boston and Chicago secondary. Then theres the other players all over. You name it, we probably play with them. I worked in NYC for 12 years and its not expensive for me since I lived on the NJ side most of the time I was there
Last edited by GTRdad; 07-31-2013 at 11:11 PM..
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) It took changing 4 jobs; changing fields; 12 years of learning various technologies, programming languages etc. and working my butt off; and moving to higher COL area.
Yep, my bad...
) with packages better than top tier managment. If it does happen for some brief period count your lucky stars.
