How to Lose Your Tech Job
That's all right, United States! We weren't using our economy anyway. We'll just shut down the global marketplace and go fishing or something until your lot gets it sorted out.
But in the meantime, the IT jobs sector has been awakening each morning in wide-eyed horror. We get up, tiptoe into the office, and check our desks, only heaving a sigh of relief upon seeing that there is no pink slip there. We're not fired (laid off, downsized, right-sized, career-challenged, interview-enabled) yet. If you, too, work in a technology career and want to keep it that way throughout the global financial crisis, don't do any of these false moves:
Go to college for a decade.
That seems counter-intuitive, doesn't it? You'd think with lots of schooling, if you do well you should have job offers coming to you. But really, experience counts more than schooling in IT. This was debated in a recent Slashdot article, if you'll notice the comments on the story. You can have degrees rolling out your ears, but all human resources departments know is "must have eight years experience in server administration" and some such. Without a degree, as long as you have some certificates and experience, you actually have a good shot at a job.
Degrees don't hurt, though. This just says that if you spend years and years studying information technology, everything you know will be outdated by the time you get out. For most IT careers, having a CS degree for them is like having training in classical ballet and ending up being a nightclub stripper.
Cling to one language or platform.
Sorry, Fred Flintstone, but you're just going to have to put down that club and learn this bow and arrow. Obsolete. That is your watch-word. That is the word that will chase you down the corridors of all your career nightmares. Do not become obsolete.
Ignore sales and legal departments.
"I don't have a head for that legal stuff, and I wasn't hired for my people skills. I just want to program!" Yes, we can sympathize. It would be a nice world if we could all stay in our boxes and never worry about all this boring stuff. But you put yourself at a disadvantage compared to the designers and developers who keep an eye on the whole company's goals. Have in mind a customer and what that customer wants when you design a product. Go ahead, stay late to finish that demo for the sales department. And when your software combines one or more licenses, actually read them, OK?
Let tech support burn you out.
If you read this list of "10 things your IT guy wants you to know", you'll recognize a lot of the complaints. The thing to realize is, users do not abuse IT staff out of ignorance. In exception to Hanlon's razor, users really do hate IT staff, and deliberately do these things. This is because users are undereducated about technology. It frustrates them, and they take that frustration out on the IT staff person i.e. you. Don't take it personally. And whatever you do, don't sit a help desk for too long - you'll go barking mad.
Get out-consulted.
Oh, you're the network analyst? We outsource that, now. Programmer? Please, we get all that from India. Basically, our whole company is sales now! Isn't that funny? Everything else gets outsourced to whichever country does the same work for cheaper, thanks to the miracle of the Internet. Too bad for that career you were hoping would last 40 years.
Be all user and no designer.
If you're involved in the creative end of IT, like with design and development, you've had it drummed into your head for the past two decades about the sacred user and how you must always keep them in your mind. "Design for Joe Sixpack." Well, you've been lied to. Replace it with your new mantra, which shall be: "Build It For Yourself!"
To see how much sense this makes, look at all the companies which innovate, and what the designers of the products intended. Yahoo was started as a directory for their own use. Facebook was started by college chums who wanted to keep in touch. Twitter was originally used internally by the employees of the company who designed it. The Python language was started by a frustrated programmer who said, "That's it! I'm sick of C! I will use something else if I have to build it myself!"
Build it for your own happiness. If you only build things for others, you end up in the position of being the condescending information architect, who knows better themselves but designs broken toys for stupid users. Build for yourself, because you are a smart user. Then other smart users will want your useful tool as well.
Leave the details to others.
You've made a great program? Good! How are your users going to know how to use it? You're going to need documentation for it. Sure, that's "somebody else's job", but your input will help the writers understand the program better. And artwork - sure, the art department will draw up the buttons and menus and icons for your social network plug-in, but with your input they will be able to make the artwork express the personality of the application a little better. And you're building a database back-end? OK, but take a meeting with the company's online store and interview the sales department, and you'll better understand what important jobs the database has to do.
Follow your idols blindly.
Of course, we in the IT field have our giants, the voices which direct and shape our thinking. There's Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Steve Yegge, and Michael Arrington. Visionaries, all. Of course you should read them if you work in the tech field. But you don't have to bet yourself into poverty gambling on every word they say. Certainly, if you found a tech start-up, you're on your own. Maybe they'll angel-invest, and maybe they won't. Maybe they're right about the Next Big Thing, and maybe they aren't. They've all been wrong before, you know!
Filed Under: Jobs in Technology
