An awesome rant on the state of the IT industry by JoeWare
Joe is an Admin after my own heart! I read this cover letter for his resume and knew AtA readers would enjoy this as well. I found it from a link off of Phil’s MindCircus blog. Check it out:
Here is the home for my resume. I am not actively looking for work but I will always look at opportunities because I wouldn’t be where I am now if I didn’t keep my eyes and mind open to alternate possibilities. At the moment I am into working for the money, once I become independently wealthy I will work for fun and take up sympathy/charity cases for the challenge. As of right now my non-for profit and charity work is limited to my free tools and my responses in the community to various newsgroup and listserv questions.
Note that overall the computer industry in my opinion is in sad shape. You have a bunch of people working with computers who shouldn’t be and a bunch of companies trying to pay nothing for people with good knowledge. To the people lying on their resumes to get the "Good" jobs I say – "Stop it!". You are hurting yourself and the overall state of the industry, you will get yourself into something you can’t handle and look like an idiot. This also forces the companies to downgrade resumes when they see them and not believe what is written plus offer people who actually may be good crap salaries.
What is a crap salary you ask? A crap salary is a company posting for some expert with 5-10 years of experience in some field and several other fields and then saying the salary will be $20-30 an hour. If you have someone you are looking at that is a good thinker you better be starting at $50+ an hour with a ton of benefits and guarantees or looking at $100+ for straight hourly work. To put it another way, if someone offered me $30 an hour I would ask them why I shouldn’t just be a manager at a Best Buy or something like that. I made that much 10 years ago selling TV’s at Montgomery Wards and that was far less stress and pain than a full time tech job trying to make systems safe for the masses. And if you as a company offered someone that and they took it, you have to wonder… Are they that bad? Are they that desperate? Are they just biding their time until they go do something else and leave you cold.
Companies should start looking at tech talent like the sports teams look at athletic talent. Are you having tech issues in your company? Do you have tech superstars or do you have third stringers working to get into "safe" position or management and hide until retirement? I haven’t met many really good tech people who "wanted" to go to management or want to find a safe position, they want to accomplish things. There are exceptions to the management item… People who did tech because it was a way to get in the door to get to a management position and are bright enough to do pretty much anything. If you want a tech superstar, you will find that that is a person who has no desire to be in management and actually doesn’t need much management and doesn’t want to hang with management. Do yourself and your superstars a favor by not forcing them into management – read up on Peter’s Principal for more info.
At this point in time, most companies with computers actually need computer tech specialists. You are the least dependent on computers right now as you EVER will be. They will just get more and more important and if you intend to simply coast on whatever talent you get for some poor pay, you deserve everything that happens. I have no problem hearing that tech specialists make more than their managers. IMO, in many cases they should make considerably more. It is the tech specialists who keep your company’s tech running efficiently.
Clipped from JoeWare.net’s Resume Introduction found HERE.
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about 3 years ago
You have the wrong site hot-linked as “mind circus” The above link takes you to a domain parked by godaddy.
The correct one for the “mindcircus” blog is http://www.twistedethics.com/
about 3 years ago
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
about 3 years ago
Fixed! Thanks buddy!
about 3 years ago
Monkeys eat peanuts? :) I have seen high end sys admin jobs with a $50,000 package… Is this 1999?
The job market is grim to say the best.
about 3 years ago
Back in ’98, the dreaded Y2K was coming, and big companies opened up the corporate vault to pay old guard programmers whatever they wanted to protect the company. Around this same time frame, every small-medium sized company realized they had to have a website, and anybody who wanted to “get into” computers was being lured into web design, with ridiculously inflated salaries. This left industry with a generation where the old school guys had all been paid off and moved on to a happy retirement, while most of the new help had all focused in one area of expertise.
I think too many companies have gotten burned hiring IT help that got into the field for the shiny salaries once offered, but have been struggling to learn their craft ever since. You could be offering fusion in a bottle, but companies are just afraid they’re going to get another whiz-kid that can make cool flaming logo’s.
about 3 years ago
Guess that just comes back to bad management. They should have brought on a trust worthy technical director who could have brought on knowledgeable workers to get the job done instead of hiring every “Hot-Shot” that they “Heard” could do good things…
I remember learning flash in the late 90′s with dreams of grandure but still went for my MCSE in NT. As an admin I know the most important part of my career is keeping up with the times and learning new system and platforms BEFORE they go main stream. Until the economy picks up as technical execs lose their positions they are being replaced by MUCH cheaper people.
This is simply because people are desperate – and that doesn’t help the people looking to move up very much.
I hear Costa-Rica is looking for Network Engineers but they pay next to nothing (but hey you get room and board for free in paradise…)
about 3 years ago
He makes a great point about people lying on their resumes. He also makes a great point about paying the talent accordingly.
However, I disagree with his stance on IT guys going to management.
Where I work, I am on track to be the CIO/CTO in about 4-5 years. I should have one or more underlings at the time. I will however never take my hands off the wheels of the IT infrastructure, but I do strive for management and anyone who doesn’t want to climb the ladder, and achieve the payscale that comes with it is a fool.
The way I see it, the challenges of tech will always be there, but the challenge of becoming management and becoming an integral part of shaping how IT can influence and improve the company is best done by tech people who understand the business, its objectives and how technology can positively influence every aspect of how the company works.
Maybe I just work in Shangri-la. But this is how I see it.
I don’t know about you guys, but I get paid respectably. And I like playing with the toys like the rest of you all. Nothing is more fun than new technology that we get to play with and figure out how to use it to make our lives and by extension the company’s life easier/better. However, when you get to the CIO/CTO level and you now have a vested interest in corporate profits, it ups the ante and the dollar amount of your bank account.
So while Phil there will play with his toys, I’ll be paying for my daughter’s college and enjoying the multitude of challenges that come with moving up to IT management.
PS: I also have no issue with what he said about skilled tech staff making more than their supervisors. Nothing wrong with that if they provide value back to the organization to merit it.
about 3 years ago
Don’t get me wrong Sloth there are always exceptions to the rules – I can attest that i am in this field not only for my love of technology but for the DOUGH!
But I have seen people promoted to manager or director status that had no business being there. Some people are good at what they do and just that – these people CAN NOT oversee or manage others.
Then there are people like you and I that not only want it – but we KNOW we can do the job.
about 3 years ago
Interesting all around. I agree with him somewhat, but I think the root cause is ignorance. How many people reading this can say that their boss has anything resembling a clue as to what they do on a day to day basis? I can’t. Everyone in management at the company I am currently working for thinks that IT is “magic”, they want something and it just happens.
Worse is that when I try to explain my job to my boss, he says he doesn’t want to learn it, or he wouldn’t have hired me (he’s retiring shortly, so there is an explanation for that).
The other side of this coin seems to be the assumption that any trained monkey can do IT work. Sorry, that is just patently false. Not everyone has the mental facilities (I’m including the patience to not throttle ignorant people here as well) to work in IT. Just as not everyone can be a doctor.
An interesting side note on the Doctor side of things; I used to work for several doctors and on more than one occasion one of them would comment that he just couldn’t do what I do.
I eventually asked him why he thought that, and he responded that he only had to deal with one anatomy, and that if someone came in one day feeling ill and told him that they had just recently installed a horse heart, he would not be able to do anything other than stare.
Of course that got a good laugh out of me, but after thinking about it, there is a lot of truth to the underlying comparison he was drawing there.
As an IT professional I deal with no fewer than three “anatomies” (x86, x64, and SPARC). Add in the different OS’s (at minimum Win32 and *NIX), and then add in all the hundreds of thousands of software packages on top of that (not to mention the ways that they interact among each other), and it’s amazing that IT people can fix just about anything.
Further, Doctors will go through Medical School once, and continue their careers with minimal supplemental learning, where IT professionals have all the rules completely changed on us about every 5-7 years, requiring that we devote hundreds of hours of our own time (and usually money) to stay current with our professional knowledge.
The only logical conclusion I can draw from that is this; I should be making somewhere around $300/hour as an IT generalist, and around $1000/hour as a Security and Automation Specialist.
Unfortunately for me, it will take at minimum longer than I will live before IT people will be given the recognition that we deserve for what we do. Just as Doctors took a couple hundred years to get the recognition they deserve.
So apparently what I’ve been saying for years is actually true; “I don’t need medical school, I’ve got Google!”
about 3 years ago
i’ve been doing this for a long time and I have yet to get paid $30 an hour, I wish! I’m lucky to get $12 an hour and that’s the sad truth. I haven’t ever been offered more than $12 for my skills and I feel that I wasted my time going to college. Now I just try to hide and hope for retirement, because the job market hasn’t offered me ANY sort of escape.
about 3 years ago
You need to go out there and asert yourself sxj! What are your skills? Do you do consulting on the side? Don’t take what people offer! MAKE YOUR OWN FUTURE!
about 3 years ago
When I read this: “How many people reading this can say that their boss has anything resembling a clue as to what they do on a day to day basis? ”
I thought of my boss with pointy hair like Dilberts boss.
And if we all made what we were worth then there wouldn’t be any need to complain now would we? My low 6 figures isn’t as much of a direct representation of my abilities as my $150-$300 /hour for consulting is.
But with the economy where it is right now take away either my 9 to 5 (err 8 to 4) or my on the side consulting and I am gonna be hurting!
Anyone have a get rich quick scheme… I mean the next big idea? Anyone?
Bueller?
about 3 years ago
I’ve been in a similar boat as sxj until the job I’m currently at, where although I’m still not even at 30 an hour yet, I’m at 25 which is ALOT better than I was making in the air force, and ALOT better than my last few jobs.
Although I think I’m a seriously underpaid network admin, but since they just laid off our IT Director to save money, I don’t really wanna rock the boat too much right now…
about 3 years ago
I also failed to mention that one thing I’ve realized over the last few years since I’ve been out of the AF is that I tend to undervalue myself I think. Its hard for some of us to ask for the money we deserve, cause it’s always just been what we do, so it feels weird to ask for so much money to do it even though we do deserve better compensation.
about 3 years ago
Better to ask and not get it then let them think your a chump! Where are you from Mike?
You need to over value yourself! Do you do side consulting or are you just a 9 to 5′er?
Now with the Director laid off who assumes his responsibilities? Sounds like a great time to take over some of his duties and make a name for yourself!
about 3 years ago
I’m in Las Vegas, a salaried 9 to 5′er, our IT Director was in Florida. We only had 4 IT guys total for our side of the company, now down to 3. No one really took over for him when he was laid off, we just kind of got everything thrown on us.
Our company is family owned and split into seperate divisions, retail and residential. We’re residential side, but when our Director left we got “shifted” to retail for oversight/HR purposes, but we never hear from our “IT Director” on the retail side. We just keep doing what we’ve been doing, trying to pick up the pieces best we can.
I did just implement an actual helpdesk system though using a Jumpbox and OTRS, and it’s proving to be a big help keeping things organized.
What I’m hoping to get out of my current position is just more experience as an Admin, then I can use the years as part of leverage to make up for my lack of college in applying for future positions.
about 3 years ago
Lack of college is not something to be overly concerned about – if you see yourself going somewhere in the company you are at keep good detailed notes of your accomplishments and present them during review (if you have them).
Keep reading the want ad’s, craigslist and other job sites and apply apply apply. Keep you skills and certifications up and with a solid career track you can get a better position. Sell yourself. Don’t Sell Yourself Short!
What is a starting admin postion paying out in Sin City?
about 3 years ago
I can see where Mike B is coming from since I am in a similar boat as he is. My company is small and places live value in the IT Dept. Everyone in the dept is well underpaid except our Boss who is WAY WAY over paid. Being a small staff we all wear many hats and get some great experience, which is what keeps us here for a short period of time. There is a high degree of rollover here and the department suffers due to it. I have gain a ton of experience here that I would not get other places. However, now I think it is time to venture out and see what I am truly worth.
about 3 years ago
Sadly that is the case in most small shops. But get what you can out of it and keep looking for new leads. Network make friends and do favors for people – it will come back around!
Where are you from Rever?
about 3 years ago
I had a similar job as my first “real” IT job, WAY underpaid, but there was SO MUCH experience gained, I took it as a trade off. Looking back, the experience was worth the job, but the job was not worth the pay.
One of the things I always do when working with a new client is to tell them my rates up front, and then negotiate from there. To remind them of the value I bring, I always invoice them for the full rate and list discounts given on the invoice.
I’ve only ever had one person tell me that they thought I charge too much, and to that I responded “go ahead and hire someone else, and when you’ve had a few bad experiences with other people in this area, you’ll understand that you get what you pay for.”
Long story short, I got a call from that client about six months later with a string of horror stories about spending more than five times what I would have charged to get everything fixed and working right, and when he called me it was still not working correctly! As a favor I fixed everything for him at about 1/3 of my normal rate, and have had a good working relationship with him ever since.
Really if you want to make what you are worth you are going to have to stick you neck out and do probably ten times the work you’d do at a 9-5, but if you can handle the hours the pay off is SO worth it.
about 3 years ago
I live in Rhode Island (you know that little dot on the map.), but the company is in Massachusetts. Like Mike we too are family owned and ran. I really like the Company itself but definitely feel undervalued. I have been here for over 5yrs and converted the entire company from multi NT Domain to a single 2003 Active Directory with 4 sites. I also have started an initiative to bring in FOSS, Linux Servers and Virtualization to help bring down cost and increase utilization and productivity. I have my MCSE, MCSA, A+ certs along with specific test for Cisco and NetApp Appliances. Man it would be nice to be sitting at $30 an hour.
about 3 years ago
Have you spoken to any technical recruiters?
about 3 years ago
Yup! And never cut your hourly rate. You are better giving them a free hour than taken a cut… Think about the future! And don’t undervalue yourself.