Pushing People into IT
One thing I do not understand regarding regarding college diplomas overproduction is the push for more women in IT. We all know over here that IT is not the sunshine and flowers industry it sometimes looks like from outside. There's plenty of psychical and mental health hazards.
For the first time in 20 years I now have more women colleagues than man. Of course we should accept anybody who is passionate about IT into the field, but pushing people into it? In my team right now there's an junior engineer girl who is absolutely WOW, I have only seen one more junior so bright and passionate in my career. But there's also two junior engineer girls, the project owner and scrum master - both women - who are just miserable! They have no love for technology, quite the contrary: their phones, laptops, home wi-fi, are a source of stress for them. Which is especially bad now with work from home, no IT help desk. The 2 girls have been pushed into the industry by their parents who have a rosy distorted image of IT. The 2 women by the need for more money. This is not empowerment or equality or anything like that. Their lives are passing them by while they toil away at something they hate.
For my part I always try to also present the bad parts to parents who ask me about IT for their children. Having people who hate their work doesn't do anybody any good.
This is a request for comments and also an attempt to make you aware when you will have the chance to have career discussions with parents and children.
40 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 77.8 ms ] threadThis is probably true for a large percentage of society - very few people actually get to work at their "dream jobs". But people need to work to support themselves and their families, and IT work, even if you're not passionate about it, still pays better and is less physically demanding than working in a factory or a restaurant. You can get satisfaction from other things in your life - it doesn't all have to come from your job.
I've worked in software development for many years, and I used to be passionate about it. But after seeing enough disillusioning things about it, it's become just a job that pays the bills until I can retire, and that's OK with me.
I think quite a few people get pushed around by arbitrary sentiments until they find what they like and quite a few people don't really find anything because no one pushed them in any direction so they never really had the opportunity to learn to critique anything and develop their own opinions.
And we must not forget that pushing young people in one direction might come at the expense of another that maybe they would have chosen themselves and where they could excel.
My perspective: my parents wanted to force me to quit IT, at the time it payed peanuts in my country compared to civil engineering - what they wanted. I struggled with money for about 10 years, but now I'm making more than my former civil engineering university friends, have a lot less responsibility and I hate my job a lot less. How I explain it to myself is that my passion made me excel at my job while they do see it as "just a job".
For the past years I've seen so many people romanticize trade jobs, but truth be told, many of those jobs absolutely suck compared to "normal" white-collar jobs. The tasks are extremely repetitive, working conditions are worse, working hours can be worse, your body wears out.
My mother emigrated in her early 20's, and worked for around 10 years in a fish factory, filleting fish. She had to quit after injuring her arms - like many of her co-workers did. They'd fillet fish for 8 hours a day, in damp and cold conditions.
She then went to college, and got her degree in preschool teaching - which she loved. She loved working with children, and it's easy to get work. But after 15 years in that, once and she got injured - turns out working with preschoolers is also a pretty physical job. She's not even 60, but has multiple chronic injuries from her previous employments.
But even then, sometimes it's just very hard to get around certain tasks. I used to work as an electrician for a year (apprenticeship), which is regarded as a pretty lucrative and interesting profession - but I quickly discovered that the work was quite taxing on my shoulders, neck, and arms. After all, some days you'd be standing on a folding ladder for hours, doing work on things mounted to the ceiling.
Other professions have their own unique injuries, that you'll see time and time again.
Best of both worlds would be to work as an engineer, supervisor, or similar in those professions. Half of you work involves office work, the other half being out in the field...but without having to do all the dirty work. Half of the guys I worked with as an apprentice, ended up pursing college in their 30's, aiming to become Engineers.
On one hand
in which other industry you can:
Learn everything in your free time and all you need is e.g 300-400$ PC? (8gb ram, some cpu, nvme m2 disk)
Optional remote work with possibility to relocate to other countries
Huge salaries
Huge demand
On the other hand...
In which other job you gotta put this much effort in your free time?
I kinda mean this [If doctors were interviewed like software developers] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_aDz-AcCmY
Being a doctor. My sister is one and she has to study ~10 hours per week in her free time so she can keep up with new treatments / methods.
Ummmm, We do.
Please stop being offended on another's behalf. Outrage culture isn't healthy.
Such a temperament would be unacceptable in our or any workplace.
But being a mediocre IT person is far better than being a mediocre welder. So if your kid has no passion for anything, let them at least get a job they hate that pays better. But if they aspire to be a top 1% novelist, let them.
Does that mean they'll be happy? Hell no. The HN community consists of people who are great at their jobs but hate them. We complain about too many JS frameworks but the mediocre programmer out there hasn't figured out how to not store passwords in plaintext.
Someone out there who can be a best selling novelist will probably still hate her job, but again, she's getting paid well, and probably happier than being a starving mediocre programmer.
I personally love computer science and have since a young age, but the career as a whole often isn't particularly meaningful or profitable. I'll do it anyway, because I love it. Objectively, there's much better things I could be doing. Previous generations had the same obsession with their children being lawyers and bankers (although I believe they probable are at least quite lucrative). Hopefully one day we'll learn and let our children be what they want to be. I'd hate to think we might be disuading some aspiring surgeons for example, with the promise of being wealthy "rock star programmers", only for them to end up in an unfulfilling job in data entry.
IT is high demand and generally high-paying. Per supply and demand, if you increase the size of the labor pool, you get higher competition, which drives down employment costs. It's not surprising that some of the loudest get-women-in-IT shills are IT employers and some NGO's and state entities who are in these companies' pockets.
I mean, this just sounds like working in general.