In reply to SV reX :
In reply to SV reX :
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Of those top 5 factors keeping you out of IT industry, how many of them are about YOU?
Do you think all the reasons you can't get a job are someone else's fault?
Rethink that.
In reply to Steve_Jones :
I hear you. I'm talking to a wall. Yeah, I know.
GameboyRMH said:In reply to SV reX :
I wouldn't consider it, the only reason I haven't completely ruled out IT/software dev as a future career option is because I have so much experience in it and figure it may be worth making use of.
I don't think it's correct to say that the rule is that you need a degree. Lots of job ads state that they will consider work experience in lieu of a degree. The amount of leeway employers give over having a degree just varies over time, and demand for degrees right now is probably only 2nd to the Great Recession era. Not having a degree is probably not in the top 5 factors keeping me out of IT industry jobs right now.
As usual, you are using fringe sources and how YOU think things should be vs how they actually they are.
There is literally NOT A SINGLE PERSON I've worked with at my company that doesn't have a 4-year degree. Let me reiterate that, EVERY SINGLE PERSON I've worked with at my company has AT LEAST ONE 4 year degree, some multiple 4 year degrees, some have more than one Masters.
Very, very few companies offer "experience in lieu of schooling" and they aren't the companies with larger salaries, better benefits, and things like RSU's. I actually work for a huge tech company, for almost a decade. I'm telling you how things ACTUALLY are and you refuse to accept it.
In reply to SV reX :
I got 3/4 of a degree and didn't come out with any connections, I guess Schmoozing and "Networking" 101 is a 4th-year course? I don't even know what most of the people I went to school with ended up doing. I only know that a guy who I was in a lot of CompSci courses with ended up doing landscaping and tree removal as a small business.
The IT industry has already changed in ways that made me lose all personal interest in it and is rapidly getting worse, so I don't want to sink any more resources into it. Right now I'm most interested in jobs that require a mix of knowledge work and physical work and put value on customer interaction/relationships (that stuff isn't easy for me but apparently I'm decent at it) since that seems to be the most automation-proof right now. I've been especially looking closely at service advisor jobs at dealerships.
In reply to z31maniac :
Oh I believe you and I'm not arguing with any of that, but most IT jobs out there aren't at those big-name megacorps that have such high requirements. I've hardly ever seen those kind of job openings and wouldn't expect to be able to get one.
GameboyRMH said:In reply to z31maniac :
Oh I believe you and I'm not arguing with any of that, but most IT jobs out there aren't at those big-name megacorps that have such high requirements. I've hardly ever seen those kind of job openings and wouldn't expect to be able to get one.
Even small companies want a degree. If you have as much experience as you say you do, getting a degree should be easy.
My fiance finished her BA since we've been together and is about to finish her MBA while having a full-time job, taking care of the dogs, dealing with my recent health stuff, etc.
SV reX said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Of those top 5 factors keeping you out of IT industry, how many of them are about YOU?
Do you think all the reasons you can't get a job are someone else's fault?
Rethink that.
I'll try and list them:
1. The whole industry is still somewhere in its worst-ever downturn - definitely not my fault.
2. AI-mania, related to #1. I have approximately zero interest in today's AI tech. Partially my fault, one of those things I don't like that makes me lose interest in the work. Call it "creative differences." I could probably even teach myself to get into LLM development which has starting pay clean into the 6 digits, but it's not only boring but could contribute to what could be one of the most disastrous events in humanity's history, so I'd rather not.
3. I have no skills or experience with some proprietary hyper-expensive cloud computing platforms that I also have no interest in, you could say it's all my fault, but if I wanted to work with things that would put me to sleep I would've gone into accounting. Also why I haven't specialized any further in database administration to get into pure DB admin roles.
4. Local issues with employers distrusting/not valuing foreign work experience. Not my fault.
5. Ageism, partially my fault for not taking action to avoid it when it was a well-known issue (through either "bunkering up" in a very secure job in my 30s, entrepreneurialism, or changing careers), but it hit me about as early as possible, and changes to the industry made the entrepreneurialism option much less viable.
Bonus: Outside of IT there was also the unforeseen problem of my IT experience actually being a massive hindrance to changing careers because employers in other industries don't know what's happening in IT and think that if they hire me, I'll just leave for a job at Google within a few weeks. This might even be the reason I lost my motorsports job, that they saw me as an inherent "flight risk" because of my skills.
So they're not all other people's fault, but of the things that are my fault, I largely don't care to correct them to get back into an industry I find increasingly uninteresting, miserable, and risky. The money in ordinary IT jobs isn't that special and similar money can be made in other industries that don't require anywhere near as much knowledge.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
So, you DON'T want a job in IT, but you just want to come here to complain about hiring in the IT industry?
Strange.
I didn't realize this whole time you didn't have a degree. I bet you are getting filtered out of at least 95% of all jobs you apply for simply on those grounds.
While it is possible to succeed in software and engineering without a degree, the odds are stacked against those without. I've met exactly one mechanical engineer in my 10 year career without a degree. He was extremely lucky to get his first CAD job through a personal friend connection and his options are very limited on where he can go. He has not worked at a company larger than a few hundred employees total and likely never can unless he goes back to school.
maschinenbau said:He has not worked at a company larger than a few hundred employees total and likely never can unless he goes back to school.
TBH if you are over 40 and decently put together and can talk the talk I would just lie about having a degree and hope no one checks unless its for some job where you need a PE stamp or something. Worst case they check and you don't get the job which you were not gonna get anyway. Its not like they throw you in the pokey for lieing on a resume.
I also do not have a degree, but I've entered my fourth decade of my professional career. For a while, I would list my 5 years of college but I was always careful to make sure that there was no degree listed. Just "Smalltown College, 1992-1997" and then something like "pursued coursework in Management Information Systems" or something like that. If they assumed I gained a degree that was on them, but I wouldn't claim to have done so. My most recent background check asked for transcripts and/or diploma for my high school, so I assume if I had said I had a degree they would have followed up on that as well. When I started back to college, I eliminated the first attempt from my resume and replaced it with a "Mediumtown University, 2023-2028" line with a note that I hold a 4.0 GPA in Information Systems.
That said, I just started a job at a multi-national conglomerate at a management level, sans degree. The only person to mention anything about it was my boss's boss who, in the interview, asked if the 2028 was a typo or if I was going back to school. We had a conversation about it wherein he told me that he, also, did not have a degree.
That said, I'll never know how many opportunities I may have been passed over because they saw I didn't have a degree and just hit the "we've decided to pursue other candidates whose qualifications are more aligned with our needs" button. This opportunity came my way based nearly 100% on personal recommendations and connections, so I didn't get put into the general filtering process.
93gsxturbo said:maschinenbau said:He has not worked at a company larger than a few hundred employees total and likely never can unless he goes back to school.
TBH if you are over 40 and decently put together and can talk the talk I would just lie about having a degree and hope no one checks unless its for some job where you need a PE stamp or something. Worst case they check and you don't get the job which you were not gonna get anyway. Its not like they throw you in the pokey for lieing on a resume.
My fiance had a job offer rescinded because of a bankruptcy filing due to her ex-husband running up a bunch of debt in her name.
Sorry, lying about your background is not how you get ahead.
EDIT: Just to clarify, most companies don't run a background check until they have offered you the job, or they are positive they are going to offer you the job.
GameboyRMH said:SV reX said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Of those top 5 factors keeping you out of IT industry, how many of them are about YOU?
Do you think all the reasons you can't get a job are someone else's fault?
Rethink that.
I'll try and list them:
1. The whole industry is still somewhere in its worst-ever downturn - definitely not my fault.
2. AI-mania, related to #1. I have approximately zero interest in today's AI tech. Partially my fault, one of those things I don't like that makes me lose interest in the work. Call it "creative differences." I could probably even teach myself to get into LLM development which has starting pay clean into the 6 digits, but it's not only boring but could contribute to what could be one of the most disastrous events in humanity's history, so I'd rather not.
3. I have no skills or experience with some proprietary hyper-expensive cloud computing platforms that I also have no interest in, you could say it's all my fault, but if I wanted to work with things that would put me to sleep I would've gone into accounting. Also why I haven't specialized any further in database administration to get into pure DB admin roles.
4. Local issues with employers distrusting/not valuing foreign work experience. Not my fault.
5. Ageism, partially my fault for not taking action to avoid it when it was a well-known issue (through either "bunkering up" in a very secure job in my 30s, entrepreneurialism, or changing careers), but it hit me about as early as possible, and changes to the industry made the entrepreneurialism option much less viable.
Bonus: Outside of IT there was also the unforeseen problem of my IT experience actually being a massive hindrance to changing careers because employers in other industries don't know what's happening in IT and think that if they hire me, I'll just leave for a job at Google within a few weeks. This might even be the reason I lost my motorsports job, that they saw me as an inherent "flight risk" because of my skills.
So they're not all other people's fault, but of the things that are my fault, I largely don't care to correct them to get back into an industry I find increasingly uninteresting, miserable, and risky. The money in ordinary IT jobs isn't that special and similar money can be made in other industries that don't require anywhere near as much knowledge.
1. I have shown you time and time again, this is patently false. You find fringe sources to fit your ideas, not reality.
2. "I have no desire to learn skills employers want." That's just beyond berkeleying stupid. Sorry, there is no nice way to say it.
3. How much did I know about NetSuite or ERP systems before I was hired? Absolutely nothing. I had to look up what the acronym stood for and what an Enterprise Resource Planning platform is and does. What did I know about electrical distribution systems on Naval ships before I worked at L3 Communications? What did I know about winches, and Rated Capacity Indicator systems for cranes before I started at Tulsa Winch Group/Greer Electronic (I didn't know how to setup a rig and calibrate CAN-based string potentiometers for outriggers)? What did I know about 130 step processes to back up autoclave machines that make carbon fiber parts for airlines?
The Answer? Nothing. But I know how to write and figure things out.
Do you think the Developers that work at NetSuite, SAP, Shopify, Fusion, etc, were experts in a platform they had never used before they started? NO THEY WEREN'T. But they have education and proven experience, with work samples, etc, to show they were capable of learning them.
4. Is this something you looked in to before you moved? I just read an article about an American couple who left Barcelona after a year because quote, "It was hard for us because we never bothered to learn Spanish or Catalan and learn local customs."
5. How old are you? I'm 43 with 17 years of experience and I still get constantly recruited. And there are FAR LESS Technical Writing jobs in the US vs Software Developement and Software QA.
BONUS: More patently false information. No one who is in charge of hiring besides a local burger joint thinks this. Google, AWS, Microsoft, etc are insanely difficult to get in at even with years of experience AND a formal education. Having IT knowledge is not a hindrance outside of IT professions.
If a company sees you as a "flight risk," it means they know they are underpaying you and there are other options. Since it seems there were no other options, I doubt this was the case either. You even admitted earlier a few reasons why you would have been "put on the E36 M3 list" in a short time from the place you were just let go.
Sorry for hitting you with both barrels. But especially #2 is beyond my comprehension. You admit you don't want to learn new skills that employers, and you think you could just "teach yourself to be an LLM developer" when it's something multiple companies are spending hundreds of billions on and "AI Hallucinations" is still a HUGE problem.
Difficult, boring jobs pay well for a reason. You seem to want to gain no new skills and expect a Database Architect salary with IT Desk Help Level 1 responsibility.
What employer isn't looking for someone who tells them what they're doing wrong on day 3?
GameboyRMH said:This matches up with my experience:
This is a really dumb opinion piece for many reasons, the largest of which is right in the title.
Knowing how to code isn't going to prevent you from getting a job. A face tattoo might.
I'll admit to being a bit confused here also. You are soured on the IT industry and don't want to invest resources in it, yet a lot of your commentary is about how difficult it is to find employment in that industry. Do you want a job in that space, or are you looking to transition to something else. If so, what?
RE: Degree stuff... Its a box you will likely need to check for a technical degree. It might not be a flat out requirement, but it will make your chances of not getting filtered out so much better. If its possible to pick up where you left off with your degree, I'd do that in a heartbeat. No matter what industry you are headed 4, just having that "piece of paper" with a 4 yr degree on it will be helpful.
Also, as much as the "AI Mania" bothers me also, you know damn well there are LLM applications wayyyy outside "general AI" (Chat GPT-ish) that may still be of interest to you.
In reply to z31maniac :
1. I don't know where this denialism of the recent tech downturn comes from. Your last argument that it wasn't happening was a *projection* of likely future growth that hasn't happened yet. Here are some measurements of what's actually been happening over the last few years:
https://technical.ly/professional-development/tech-job-market-trends-downturn/
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Tech-sector-layoffs-explained-What-you-need-to-know
All the growth (edit: in jobs) that happened from the depths of the initial pandemic slump to the heights of the mid-pandemic was undone by some point in 2024, let that sink in. By mid-2024, there were less software developers employed than in 2018:
https://www.adpresearch.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-software-developer/
And the layoffs haven't stopped since, they don't seem to have even slowed down.
2. That would be correct if my intention was to stay in tech at any cost regardless of how the industry changes, but that's not my intention. Employers want all kinds of things and tech is only one industry I've been applying to with the hope of getting a little more value out of it on the way out if I'm given the opportunity.
3. When employers and their application management systems are looking for X years of experience in Y, I don't know how you'd even trick the system into letting a human see that you have some ability to learn before a glorified grep script eliminates you for not having the experience they want. None of the software that filters resumes can enumerate or appreciate an ability to learn, and the humans who decided to list X years of experience in Y as a hard requirement tend not to be very flexible about it either.
4. Not exactly, there were signs that local employers undervalued immigrant workers but I was only able to narrow the problem down to an issue with foreign work experience in particular by experiencing the same thing myself. It's not like there's a language barrier or cultural difference. At my last job a lot of people were surprised to hear that I'd ever lived anywhere else.
5: Late 30s, I've only twice in my life ever had anything resembling a recruitment attempt, but I'm not on LinkedIn, which probably helped me gain a couple of jobs that valued secrecy...although in retrospect that may have been in large part because they wanted to keep their own sketchy behavior a secret. In any case, I really don't want to use LinkedIn.
You'll have to tell me what reasons I admitted for being put on a E36 M3 list because that sounds totally alien to me, I wouldn't think of myself as having been E36 M3listed at any job I've had.
I used to want to gain new skills in IT back when the things you learned in IT could be useful to a person and had some variety to them. Then as the work shifted to doing less varied things that could only be useful to a large business (centralizing everything into companies that do increasingly specific things "at scale") what businesses wanted shifted away from my interests to the point that my remaining interest is now just as a hobbyist. I've never been after any pay that doesn't match the position either (putting aside the issue that most jobs have been denied any share of half a century of productivity improvements by now).
Now that I've reached the point of being indifferent at best about staying in the industry, it can be frustrating when an application to the odd old-school IT job that I'm well-qualified for goes unanswered, but I'm not going to put much effort into making myself generally more desirable to today's tech industry and I can accept what that means for my future job prospects in it.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I'm in my 60's. You are in your 30's. I completely under your frustrations and strong resistance to doing things that are anathema to you because I was once in my 30's, and felt that way too.
Try to soften up your perspective. I think you will live to regret some of these choices.
I struggle with a thirty-something complaining about "ageism"...
GameboyRMH said:I'm not going to put much effort into making myself generally more desirable to today's tech industry and I can accept what that means for my future job prospects in it.
Then why do you feel the regular need to come here and bitch about it?
SV reX said:I struggle with a thirty-something complaining about "ageism"...
The companies want them young and inexperienced so they don't realize how hard the company is going to berkeley them, and because the inexperienced still think if you work hard all day every day you'll get ahead instead of just more responsibility for the same pay until you burn out.
By 30, in tech, you've probably been bought out before and/or seen PE firms come in and gut a place, or the VC money dry up at at least one start up. You can see the writing on the wall and might warn the other peons to abandon ship, lowering the sale value and affecting the bonus structure.
Do you live with your family and get some kind of allowance? No value judgement intended - I'm just baffled at how you managed to stay housed and fed and even spend some money on your car. I hope you can take care of yourself somehow.
In reply to RevRico :
The first thing that's wrong about that is that if they could get a bunch of people to just leave on their own like that, it would actually be a good thing for a PE firm. They want to whack staff to make the numbers look better, but in order to do so they typically have to pay people to leave through severance packages. If they could get folks to just up and leave on their own, it would make things much easier and cheaper for them.
The bigger problem, though, is that there's no company that could execute on a strategy like that, anyway. From what I've experienced, the ageism problem has more to do with money and perceived attitude. There is certainly a part of it that relies on the younger employee having less experience and not realizing that statements like "we work hard and we play hard" or "fast-paced environment" really mean that the company understaffs and expects that you will take up the slack. But I don't think that's so much of a conscious decision to hire someone younger because they'll fall for the trick; it's more that there is a bias towards older workers that they won't be as energetic or have the same "go-getter" attitude. That is to say, I think the hiring team at that sort of company is getting high on their own farts and really thinks that their company culture is just that they have high-energy people that like to get things done.
In technology, there is also a perception that an older employee is going to be less familiar with the current state of the art and be too outdated. If you're 45, then you might have great skills managing on-prem Exchange or ESX, but they have a CIO that is committed to being 100% in the cloud, so they want Azure or M365 experience. And it doesn't make sense to bring in an older worker who is going to have a higher OTE demand and then train them when they can grab a younger candidate who just learned the newest tech but doesn't have 3 decades of merit raises inflating their paycheck.
Something else that I have seen is that companies will eliminate positions for people that have been around for a while so that they can change the job description slightly and hire a new worker for a lower OTE. My previous employer did that to me this year. In fact, they laid off another guy along with me, combined our roles into a single role, and then posted it at a rate that was about 20% less than what my comp was. That job is still posted. Flip side, though, apparently the position that I was just hired into was created because my new employer did something similar to the last guy that was in my chair. He hadn't been around very long, but he had a bigger title and, I surmise, a bigger OTE number than I have now.
I've not really read any studies or anything, but I do know from being boots-on-the-ground in this, that the IT hiring landscape is definitely harder to navigate now than it was a few years ago. I suspect that one of the fundamentals is that IT needs experienced a pretty major expansion from around 1995-2015 and it was a field where you could pretty much write your own ticket if you were reasonably intelligent and could understand your specific part of technology. There was a big need for people to fill those jobs and not a bunch of folks to do so and that resulted in a sellers' market. In that time, though, a bunch of people took the "learn to code" advice and rushed into the market. At the same time those folks were getting educated and skilled up, employers started buying into solutions that meant that they didn't need the people they couldn't hire. Before the hyperscalers came onto the market, you would have to hire at least one pretty decent tech guy to operate your email, file, and print services at a minimum and if you had more complicated application needs, you'd probably need a couple people. AWS, GCP, and Azure will all now sell a business like that on being able to spin up whatever they need in the cloud with everything managed by them, so you don't need that small team in your small company anymore. Instead of a couple dozen people being employed in that role, now you've got one FTE who works for the hyperscaler. And, btw, they probably live and work in India or some other low-wage place. But at the same time now, you have a couple generations of people that grew their professional lives around all these lucrative tech jobs being everywhere. Which means we've built a giant talent pool that is swinging it towards more of a buyers' market while at the same time many of the buyers have figured out how to go without.
In addition to that, you've also got a lot of weirdness in the market thanks to Covid. There are a ton of remote roles for which you now have people from all over the place applying instead of just within your own locale. That means that the recruiters have an avalanche of resumes to dig through. Which means they have to use these ATS tools to sort through it all. It was already a problem before Covid, of course, but remote work has made things far worse in that regard. As far as I can tell, the best way to get past the ATS screening process is to have someone that can contact the recruiter directly and encourage them to go looking for your particular needle and extract it from the haystack.
There is, also, a bit of uneasiness in the market that is affecting things. I know that locally, there have been a not-insignificant number of tech sector layoffs in the last few months. And there's probably more than what gets reported in the news since some companies work like my former employer and just bleed off a few at a time which means they don't have to publish a WARN Act notice. I think there was a little bit of over-hiring and over-paying during Covid and some employers are looking to trim back from that a bit. Despite the "are we there yet" questions that legitimately surround AI, there's also a lot of pressure to "leverage AI" which means "spend a million on an AI solution and recoup that with $2m in labor cost". And then when you throw in some of the general economic uncertainty that is shuffling about, you have budgets getting frozen and projects getting delayed while everyone starts to hunker down and take a wait and see approach.
But there's some light at the end of the tunnel, I think. I've been around long enough to know that every time there's a giant shift in IT, things tend to get rolled back a little. Cloud, for example, is proving to be more expensive than on-prem in a lot of cases and brings with it some challenges that range from security to performance. I don't think we're ever going to do another on-prem Exchange deployment, but I do see a not-insignficant amount of application repatriation and edge computing. AI really isn't yet, and while we're still in the early stages, I think that there will be a certain amount of rollback of the application of that technology, at least for a while. Or at least, I think the "AI all the things!" attitude may slow up a little. Not that I would be encouraging my kids to "learn to code" at this point, but we might get a softer landing than I first thought.
To tie it all back in, though, I still stand by the advice that I was given as a young child: The best jobs are never posted and it's all about relationships and connections.
One reason I always been jealous of IT/software/developers/web/etc is that (my perception is)you can do personal projects on your own with little to no monetary investment. Are there any projects in this realm that could A) demonstrate your skills or B)make you money?
If I knew how to code or make an app I have a backlog of many ideas I would go make in a heartbeat if I had the spare time to do so.
By comparison mechanical engineering is a lot harder to execute personal projects. 3d printing has improved and so has hobby level CAD software but it's still far from free and can be extremely expensive depending on your goal. Additionally it can consume lots of real physical space.
RevRico said:SV reX said:I struggle with a thirty-something complaining about "ageism"...
The companies want them young and inexperienced so they don't realize how hard the company is going to berkeley them, and because the inexperienced still think if you work hard all day every day you'll get ahead instead of just more responsibility for the same pay until you burn out.
By 30, in tech, you've probably been bought out before and/or seen PE firms come in and gut a place, or the VC money dry up at at least one start up. You can see the writing on the wall and might warn the other peons to abandon ship, lowering the sale value and affecting the bonus structure.
I don't think that it's much in the way of news to a lot of people in tech that there is ageism in certain places and it can be pretty bad. Note that I said "in some places" because I've also worked in or with quite a few teams where my simple presence didn't immediately double the average age.
There's a whole bunch of employers out there who like to hire "fresh" (ie, young & cheap) talent on the assumption that they know the current technology best and don't have to train them, rather than training people they already have who actually know their business. Oddly enough, the Venn diagram between those employers and employers who believe that their developers are going to move on anyway in 18 months' time is very close to a circle.
I'm a lot closer to an assumption of retirement than I am to the start of my career, and I did notice that I don't get contacted by potential employers that much anymore. OTOH I have a pretty decent job with a very decent employer, and frankly I'd probably just go self employed again instead of trying to get another job.
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