OT:rediculous, IT people Options

[bd1308]

i'm sitting here at the school, and there are all of these techs running around (my age) reading papres on how to add printers. (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/WTF.gif) makes me wonder why I never get the good jobs.....

b

[Part Pricer]

QUOTE (Dr. Roger @ Mar 28 2006, 01:32 PM)

and that can be a tele-commute poistion.  :beer2:

And that, my friends, will end your career.

You have to ask yourself, does the job that you are going to do require your actual physical presence? If not, then it can be offshored.

The trouble is, in IT, all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cable through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs, etc. This is generally the lower paid end of the IT spectrum. There are exceptions, but the competition for those more highly-valued, highly-paid jobs increases with every position that is moved to Bangalore.

Every day, I see more and more project management, help desk, network admin, user admin and software development and support positions being moved to locations outside the US. The technology has evolved to a point where it is functional and cheap enough to implement for most organizations. As technologists, we shouldn't be surprised about this. It has been coming for a while.

In the company that I am working for, most of our CCIEs are no longer based in the US. This used to be a highly-valued and prized certification that clients desired. However, since there were so few of them for the longest time, the salaries of US-based CCIEs shot through the roof. They caused people to look elsewhere for a more cost-competitive solution. It turned out that college educated, knowledgeable, articulate, certified individals could be had outside the US for about 20% of the cost of domestic talent. Give them a high-speed line, VOIP and VPN access and you've provided the same service while contributing to the bottom line.

If you are going to go into the IT field, please realize that most of it will soon be treated as a commodity if it is not already.

My advice:
1. Find a job
2. Get some experience
3. Develop an exit strategy
4. Get out
5. Enjoy your second career