To think that computing/IT is a poor career choice?

[iamarobot]

Hi,

In terms of earning potential and barrier to entry, is IT as a career path really a bad one in 2011? I see the news report that there is a shortage, and then there is a story about Indians being shipped in by foreign companies. It's a shame really, as I quite like computers. Maybe I should take a look at the green energy careers leaflet i have around here somewhere....:s

YABU

I work in technology consultancy. Starting salaries for new graduates are £30k. IT architect salaries for banks and consultancies are well into 6 figures. I know 25 year-olds at Google on 75k. Freelancers charge anything between £400 and £1,200 per day depending on their specialities.

Frankly, it's the best paid job there is outside of banking and the upper echelons of the law and medicine.

DH is in IT and earns a lot of money. He doesn't have any qualifications in it and is not a programmer or anything but he runs/builds large datacentres and is very much in demand by other companies. But to be honest it is his personality/drive and talents in other areas such as electrics that have gotten him this far. Ambition will get you pretty far in most jobs tbh, it is a very important commodity.

Malinois I read your post and have lengthened my 8 year olds allocated computer time forthwith!

aldi you would be better off lengthening her allocated maths time. The money is not in using computers but in programming/designing/architecting computer systems. And that means having a very strong mathematical background. Computer Science is basically applied maths.

You don't know what you're talking about.
My husband is in IT and earns a great wodge of cash.
His new employee (recent graduate from his PhD) is on over 40k already and is regularly being head hunted by the City on starting salary of 60k.
Fresh out of a PhD.
I would say IT (which is a very generic term by the way and doesn't mean an awful lot) can be very well paid indeed.

I agree with you Malinois
My SD is good at maths and I've told her to stick with it since a) she loves it and b) it will pay well

It is still so male dominated though. I've worked in the industry for 27 years and there are even less women in IT now than 20 years ago. I am one of 10 women in my department of around 80 and all of us are over 30. There just don't seem to be any younger women coming through at all. I have no idea how this compares to other professions.

Well I am certainly not complaining about my DH's salary - he is in IT, he is also self taught.

We have a lovely lifestyle, nice house, nice holidays, two cars...

.

YABU.

bestiswest Sad isn't it? We do get women applying for jobs, but none of them are British. I think CompSci/Physics/EE which are the degrees that normally go into tech firms simply aren't attractive to British girls. Plenty of Italian, French and Dutch women though. It was a real PITA for us because we needed a lot of security cleared staff which of course isn't possible for non-UK people so sometimes we had to turn down a better-qualified foreign woman for a UK man :(

Here's a joke for you

What did the Arts Graduate say to the Computer Science Graduate?

"Do you want fries with that?"

DS1 takes after his dad with the maths, he got paid very well for redesigning some of the school website. I am hoping he follows in his dad's footsteps.

PigletJohn: I'd laugh if my degree wasn't in media & film ;-)

I'm totally self-taught, but I was lucky enough to leave university during the dot.com boom and got a job as a junior developer really easily. All you needed to be able to do back then was say you knew a bit of HTML, and bingo - a junior job.

Nowadays I do the sort of work that my CompSci friends at uni would have killed for!

What makes you ask? Are you looking to choose a career at an early stage or to retrain or is it for DC?

Works for us! DH is a self-employed software developer. He is also a maths person - degree in Computational Sciences. You can get very very good money if you can get financial services-type experience. The contractoruk website lists current average contract rates to give you an idea of earnings.

30 years ago my HR-type person father tried to encourage me to consider IT as a career, on the grounds that it was a new sector and therefore should be "gender neutral" and provide more opportunities for women to progress well. Less institutional sexism, I guess.

Well Dad, you got that wrong! I know quite a few 40/50-something women who got out of IT years ago because they were sick of the male culture. My SIL is university Professor of Comp Sci (not in the UK) and is a VERY rare bird indeed. Terrible shame, but DH can count on the fingers of one hand the number of female colleagues he has worked alongside over the last 20 years.

It is sad Malinois. Maybe I've been lucky but I've found it a very family friendly profession. I think you are possibly right about not enough girls going into the right kind of degree courses and maybe IT is not well enough sold to women as a career. I have worked with some great developers with Arts degrees mind you.

Its still a very good profession, and its not going away anytime soon.

Competition from low wage countries will increase, but that's true of nearly any work these days.

I'm obviously doing something very wrong. I work in IT, have done for 11 years and earn nowhere near some of these salaries being talked about in this thread. I'm also pretty sure most of my friends and colleagues don't either, unless they are being extremely coy.

All i have to show for it is poor eyesight and a hunched back. YANBU!

We know from our own business experience that the quality of work done in many of the overseas countries to which work is being outsourced is frequently of poor quality. DH works for very large multinational companies with a presence in most countries, and the IT departments in some of them are a complete nightmare to deal with - usually cultural issues to do with a reluctance to take ownership of tasks or make decisions, and a general lack of urgency about deadlines.

People are getting wise to this. There is a trend towards outsourcing to UK-based companies again.

A career in IT is the best thing i ever did. Earning potential fantastic, of course you will work hard, hours not always sociable and a good idea to specialise in a particular area.

If you decide to change careers later in life like i did, again you have plenty of options as your skillset is very transferable into other areas and sectors including project management, business analysis, facilitation etc, its agood career, go or it.

cheryl I am with you there! But I am prepared to take a lower salary to be where I want to and to have the flexibility to work from home when I need to.

Hmm.

Welcome to MN, iamarobot!

my dad had a career as a SAP from the point where computers with things you wrote programmes for using punch-cards...

YANBU if like him, you feel some of the joy went out of it when computers no longer had valves...

to be fair IT like many professions can be ageist and he was made unwillingly redundant shortly before turning 60, and he got an Equitable Life pension. He would have done better if he's stuck with teaching.