Menu
I am writing this post because I need sincere advice on saving my career in the IT field. I feel like I work amdist incompetents, in a world where everyone is intimidated by my intelligence.
Okay, now that you might think this is some lame, whiney, cynical post about how annoying my workplace is, let me just address my point– I am a well-educated (albeit largely self-taught), experienced, and very intelligent and competent computer programmer and, for the first time in my life I cannot seem to find work and am (literally) faced with the prospect of looking for work in Home Depot because I simply CAN’T SEEM TO FIND A JOB! Something I have never considered to be a practical possibility for the past 15 years in this field, and I am seeking some sincere advice about how to address the issue or, perhaps things that I can do to make a more effective presentation.
I’m not an errogant person, and I don’t mean to sound condescending or cynical here, but I am getting to the point and being very matter of fact about the issues. I would appreciate any advice anyone can give me on building / growing a career and overcoming these obstacles.
At 33 years old, with 20 years of programming experience under my belt, it doesn’t take a mathematics major to figure out that I have been doing this stuff since a VERY young age. An age, in fact back before the mouse, GUI’s and the object-oriented point and click environment of Windows. You remember? The days when you actually had to know how the computer worked in order to program it, and computer science students had to learn to do long division with hexadecimals (my father was in college for computer science when I was 13– I found hex math kind of fascinating.)
Over the years I became quite an accomplished programmer, particularly in C / C++ and later in the visual environment (it took me a while to give up DOS for Windows, but by the time Windows98 SE rolled around, I started taking Windows seriously.) I developed skills in Visual C++, Visual Basic, and MFC. I am an “accomplished” programmer. That is, unlike many of the self-taught “hackers” of the trade, I have made it my point to learn all that is learnable about the technology and the languages, not just the bits and pieces of them that suit my immediate needs to play with the computer.
In the late 80’s / early 90’s, I found quite a nitche in devleoping special-needs applications for small businesses, back before vertical applications like Quicken and Peachtree could be bought off the shelf and customized to meet the needs of most businesses. In the mid 90’s with the emergence of the Internet and everyone’s rush to claim their piece of the Internet pie, again I found no trouble finding a steady supply of freelance development work cranking out HTML and, later JavaScript and Java applets to support the ever increasing technical demands of web-enabled applications. By 1999, some of that was starting to dry up for me, as larger companies began to offer free web hosting, and discount development programs, as well as (again) vertical applications that allowed users to throw together quick websites and deploy them easily without as much reliance on outside expertise. In 2000, sudden family needs uprooted me from my location in the midwest and put me here (in Jacksonville, Florida) where I felt confident that I would simply start anew and begin establishing a network of clients and contracts. Nearly three years later, and nearly bankrupt, nothing could be farther from the truth.
While the market for IT jobs for which I am qualified is not void, it does seem scarce, and for the ones out there for which I am qualified, I don’t seem to make the grade for one reason or another. I have had discussions with IT professionals in my area and, while many are competent professionals, many are not, and even of the ones who are, I honestly have to say that my understanding and knowledge of the technology and systems is, overall, superior to the vast majority of them. While I don’t expect to just walk into an $80,000 / year job in this present market, it seems utterly ridiculous that someone with my combined skills, experience, and an IQ of 200 (not that anyone cares about that fact, in particular) is working as a two-bit computer programming instructor in one of these piece-of-shit techical schools, trying to teach C++ to students, many of whom, after 18 months barely have a grasp of the fundamentals of writing algorithms, or the fundamentals of business processes, to say nothing of designing, authoring, or managing a complete information system. If I don’t find something soon, I may actually have to consider looking at unskilled manual labor jobs, for lack of anything else. Not that I mind a “hard day’s work”, except for the fact that to settle for such work, aside from its obvious financial implications, would be terribly demoralizing to my character, and a HUGE waste of my skill and potential, which I have spent a lifetime developing.
I work for a POS technical school. I am salaried, but they are on this “40 hours” kick right now, insisting that all instructors spend 40 hours per week “ON CAMPUS”, a notion which, if any of you remember your days of college, is utterly ridiculous. Again, not that I mind an honest week’s work, but to be loarded over in such a manner makes one feel like a clock-punching flunky, and serves no practical purpose, especially when you consider the conessions and schedule I am asked to keep. The irregular hours that might otherwise make it convenient to consult otuside of my teaching job have just enough interruptions that noone in his or her right mind would concded to hiring me under the conditions I would be forced to ask for (if I found a part-time consulting contract for example and wanted to keep my full-time teaching job.) You see, we have no midday classes, so all classes are at night and in the evening. Classes are only three days per week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday). So, in order to have a full load, I have to teach 8am – 1pm in the morning, then go home, and then come back five hours later and teach 6pm – 11pm… Wow, what a day. To add insult to injury though, they want me to come in on my off day / days for the additonal ten hours and sit on my hands. Heaven forbid the clericals in the front office do “more work” than any of the rest of us. Then there are the mandatory staff meetings, shceduled right smack in the middle of my “afternoon off”, 2:30 to 3:30, or something like that. So, forget going home on those days. Of course, being “exampt” I don’t get anything for that (other than the headache I get all the time when I go too many hours without eating.) When students do little things, like drink too much on the weekends or forget to show up for class one or two days in a week, we are expected to come in on our time and tutor. Heaven forbid they lose one of these incompetents you know, especially at $25,000 a pop. (That’s what an 18 month program costs at this place… Wow)
As if all of that stuff weren’t enough, now they are “demanding” that we take our vacation on the break weeks in between quarters (there are four of them.) The trouble is, you only accrue 28 hours per quarter of PTO, but you are forced now to take off 40 hours. Being salaried, we don’t get overtime or “comp time” or anything else for that matter for coming in on our own time, but now all out our PTO gets eaten up before the year is even up, so basically you end up off for two weeks at Christmas for free. What a wonderful time of the year to be broke, huh? Of course, don’t even think now about getting sick or needing a day off for anything… Because you obviously don’t have the time off.
Allright, enough complaining about the school and its policies. My point here is that I am working amidst some fine faculty people / professionals, but the leadership in this place is an absolute JOKE. The chair of the CIS department, in spite of the fact that she’s working on her Master’s (Oooh, I’m impressed), and from a (different) POS “fake” college no less, has not CLUE #1 about the IT industry as a whole, and certainly nothing about computer programming. She even runs her own “web business” like it’s a hobby or something. Why is this the BEST job I can get in a major US city???????
I often get the impression that perspective employers view me as being “too” qualified for positions, or perhaps they don’t beleive my skills when I claim experience with so many things. What can I say? I don’t (and won’t) apologize for the fact that, like it or not, computer science comes (and has always come) easily to me. Really none of the computer languages I have learned (Basic, ForTran, COBOL, RPG, C, C++, Pascal, Ada, Java, HTML… and the list goes on) has ever been particularly challenging to learn, although any of them admittedly takes time to master and become proficient with. I don’t know all there is to know about Unix, for example, but about ten minutes with it and I got the hang of it. Give me the manual and a brief command reference and I can figure the rest out as I go along. That’s how I learned DOS, and I was only ten years old back then.
SQL and database administration are shrowded in this dark cloud of mystery sometimes that makes the fields seem complex. Well, complex (and powerful) they are, but difficult to learn? I didn’t think so, although I know that many people do find them difficult challenges. I know that I am among the fortunate minority in this sense.
…It seems I have “out-talked” my limit for this post… Continued in the next post in this thread…