Anyone here work in the IT industry?

Do you work as a programmer, database guy, software engineer, or other stuff in IT? In general, how has the industry been lately in terms of pay and getting / finding / and keeping a job?

IT was once so red hot in the before Y2K era, then it just bombed. Anyone have stories of friends / coworkers / neighborhors having a hard time at it now? I bet that there are a lot of IT career drop outs now.

I once thought of switching my career to software programming but now forget that! Too much to know, and you have to keep updating to new technologies.

 

A couple of years ago, I had a hard time finding a job, but the last year and this year, I've had quite a few headhunters start calling again, and it does seem that the IT industry is starting to heat up again.

I don't know if my hard time finding a job a few years ago was due to my limited experience or the industry in general. But I think at the intermediate/senior level IT jobs right now, there is still a good market for good people.

ps. I do Development (programming and DB), System Analysis, Business Intelligence and anything else that comes around like server admin, web maintenance blah blah blah...

 

not me....

 

Programming is still very much in demand. I know for a fact that programming is a big problem in GE, specifically in the GE Industrial business. Im not sure about the other businesses.

Having said this, i avoided programming and im focusing on Electrical. It's much more flexible IMO.

 

Hey Inspired,

Yeah man i'm a programmer, it all depends where you want to get a job. Some countries are gagging for more IT people others are way, way, way over populated with them. Here in Australia thier after IT people with good experience and a university degree, if you've got experience and a degree don't expect to be getting paid any less than $70,000, if you don't then expect about 30 to 40 grand. But big word of warning man, IT is crap. As a programmer you'll get nothing but grief, trust me the money barely makes it worth it, there are much easier jobs in the world that pay a hell of a lot more. I'm just doing this til i get my degree then its a change for me. Do yourself a favour do something else

 

Also networking guys get all the glory, if you do want to go IT go networking, its a crap load easier (i've done it before too, trust me if you know how to set everything up right the first time, its a sweet ride)

 

Programmer. Part-time, as I'm still studying. Doesn't seem to be a problem with getting/keeping a job, and pay is good.

No, it fell to a realistic level.

Not really, no. The people who drop out are the ones who realize they'd rather do something else.

 

I'm a Systems Engineer at a tech sales company. I basically support their infrastructure all around, from servers down to the desktops. How is the industry? Still pretty good. I think in the last few years, the wanna-bes and paper cert people have been weeded out. The pay is good...I'm certainly living fairly well.

The real money is made in programming. Why? Because no one wants to do it and it's in demand. My fiance makes close to 6 figures in just over 5 years in that biz. But you have to have the grit to do it, thats for sure.

 

I wanted to do Visual C++ MFC programming of application software. But I ran into a "brick wall" of how to do things that were undocumented. Microsoft doesn't publish or tell everything of how to do Windows programming - e.g., the European Union has sued MS for not giving enough information on programming for European developers to make software.

Anyone entry level in any industry usually has a hard time starting out.

I'm a mechanical engineer / technical writer. I once had a CS friend who did contract C++ programming for Harris Bank at $150 / hr.

 

How well did you look?

Try this link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vcmfc98/html/mfchm.asp

MFC and all the "everyday" API's are perfectly well documented. What they were sued for is a bunch of other server/communication-related API's. Stuff that application programmers don't ever need.

That said, I have two comments.
1) MFC is horrible, evil, ugly and, uh, evil. Avoid it if at all possible.
2) MFC is pretty much deprecated and replaced by .NET. The underlying Win32 API is still used because it's sufficiently low-level to do things .NET can't easily do, but MFC is just an early, clumsy attempt at doing what .NET does much better.

So avoid MFC.
It's nasty to work with, and it's pretty much useless these days.