Feeling stuck...(IT work)

[dtmt]



Well you could always do your work on external HDD owned by you. Company laptop is then nothing more than a tool just like pencil would be. 

Uh oh, indignant lecture from Captain ROI coming in 3.... 2...

 

[papa kot]

I was in the same position as you were. I turned things around by realizing that there was absolutely no point in keeping doing what I did. I had to make a change and suffer the pain short-term in order to obtain long-term benefits.

First of all, niche in IT is really great if you're a researcher with a bunch of patents and an advanced degree from a reputable school or if you happen to be a genius who quit a top level college in order to start his own gig. Unfortunately for you, your niche is in a dying field. You're not special. You're lucky because most people won't like screwing around with mainframes, as there notion of mainframes is not really hot today.

Your pure IT options are pretty limited for an immediate transfer, i.e. no additional schooling, experience. Choose to do some back office job, e.g. reset people's passwords, or try to get into development and compete with everybody in the world for the same crappy entry-to-mid level development positions.

I think your best bet is to mix is up, as it was mentioned earlier in the thread. Suggestions:

• Pre-sales - tech advisory to sales folks. Pays okay, sales reps will take most of the glory and you'll take the blame while traveling a lot. Good pre-sales positions will pay more than $100,000 and you can work from anywhere as long as you're near a major airport. Potential to get into sales and make decent $ for a long run in any industry.
• Consultancy. Similar to pre-sales, but less glory.
• Project management. If you're good at getting things done -- execution -- perhaps this is for you. Basically, you have to make other people make things happen.
• Product management. Make products that address the needs of the market. Enjoy enormous amounts of stress while being everybody's scape goat. However, if you poop out the next iPod you won't have to look for a job for the rest of your well paid life.

My major point -- do it now. If it is not easy to switch today, it won't be easier tomorrow.

 

[username79]



First of all, niche in IT is really great if you're a researcher with a bunch of patents and an advanced degree from a reputable school or if you happen to be a genius who quit a top level college in order to start his own gig. Unfortunately for you, your niche is in a dying field. You're not special. You're lucky because most people won't like screwing around with mainframes, as there notion of mainframes is not really hot today.

Your pure IT options are pretty limited for an immediate transfer, i.e. no additional schooling, experience.  Choose to do some back office job, e.g. reset people's passwords, or try to get into development and compete with everybody in the world for the same crappy entry-to-mid level development positions.

This is bad advice.

OP has a solid amount of experience on mainframes at this point. Mainframes are in use at many of the world's most important organizations and due to risk they will likely not be replaced for the foreseeable future (who gives a **** about them being "hot")-- people that have skills on mainframes and are still able and willing to travel are very rare.

OP should round out his skills, quit his dead end job, and become an independent contractor. He can make an easy $150+/hr at multiple clients and have all the work he can handle, plus the competitive challenge and reward of having to prove his worth at new clients.

**** a 100K/yr sales or development position -- or god forbid project management.

 

[papa kot]

This is bad advice.
OP has a solid amount of experience on mainframes at this point. Mainframes are in use at many of the world's most important organizations and due to risk they will likely not be replaced for the foreseeable future (who gives a **** about them being "hot")-- people that have skills on mainframes and are still able and willing to travel are very rare.
OP should round out his skills, quit his dead end job, and become an independent contractor. He can make an easy $150+/hr at multiple clients and have all the work he can handle, plus the competitive challenge and reward of having to prove his worth at new clients.
**** a 100K/yr sales or development position -- or god forbid project management.

What get you here, won't get you there. I will leave this up to the OP to decide what he wants to do, but as somebody who has tried both paths, I'll stick to providing feedback about what worked for me.

Actually, I have done exactly what you've described. I had an extensive set of skills in a certain area and just like mainframes, my area of expertise started to slowly wind down. Many folks moved on or quit, whereas I did consulting for great hourly rates. Things were peaches and cream because due to many reasons there were only a few companies who could compete. You can say things went well until many of our customers started switching to other technologies in order to reduce development/support costs and start using new, hotter technologies.

In the end, I replaced all my tech books with business-related reading material. I still got a job in IT, but now I use computers for things other than code. And if things get tough, I can look for a job in any industry anywhere in the United States, as my skills are transferable. If you ask me, this beats profiting in the near term while knowing that your skills will be absolutely outdated.

 

[byau]

Consider consulting... the big guys like Accenture, IBM, etc. are always hiring.

 

[mkarim]



Consider consulting... the big guys like Accenture, IBM, etc. are always hiring.

Those are good to get some experience and have their names on your resume. But they don't actually pay well. It's actually afterwards that you can use their names to bump up your rate.

 

[GQgeek]

Not to derail, but what sort of salaries do IT consultants make at some of the bigger firms? Assume fairly well-credentialed, all up to date on tech/certs(ms/vmware/cisco), good experience and lot's of successful projects under their belt (as opposed to someone that's just done maintenance), etc.

 

[Blog Marley]

Probably doesn't help much since I'm fresh out of school but here's what I know.

PwC offered me 63 + signing bonus
Deloitte offered an "experienced" class mate of mine 70
Cognizant offered an inexperienced classmate of mine 70 as well.

Glassdoor.com would probably be a better resource.

 

[Sir Humphrey Appleby]

Does anybody who works with Linux know how good this course is/how good its reputation is? Not looking for a career in IT directly but a lot of the jobs I'm looking at moving into in the next few years say they want a knowledge of Linux amongst other things. http://www.lpi.org

 

[deadly7]



Does anybody who works with Linux know how good this course is/how good its reputation is? Not looking for a career in IT directly but a lot of the jobs I'm looking at moving into in the next few years say they want a knowledge of Linux amongst other things. http://www.lpi.org

Useless. Find an old computer nobody's using, download any flavor of linux (Ubuntu is more user-friendly but won't teach you the ins and outs of Linux; Gentoo is the "purest" form of linux in that you compile everything yourself and have a fully customized OS/software; I use slackware, which is in the middle). Install, tinker. Avoid the GUI as much as possible and try to do everything from CLI. There are literally millions of "how-to-linux" tutorials on the internet, what skills do you need specifically?

 

[brokencycle]



Useless. Find an old computer nobody's using, download any flavor of linux (Ubuntu is more user-friendly but won't teach you the ins and outs of Linux; Gentoo is the "purest" form of linux in that you compile everything yourself and have a fully customized OS/software; I use slackware, which is in the middle). Install, tinker. Avoid the GUI as much as possible and try to do everything from CLI. There are literally millions of "how-to-linux" tutorials on the internet, what skills do you need specifically?

I'd throw OpenSUSE on that list. We used it a lot because we have mostly SLES where I work.

 

[GQgeek]



Probably doesn't help much since I'm fresh out of school but here's what I know.
PwC offered me 63 + signing bonus
Deloitte offered an "experienced" class mate of mine 70
Cognizant offered an inexperienced classmate of mine 70 as well.
Glassdoor.com would probably be a better resource.

Ya those salaries pretty much suck, but if they're for kids straight out of school I'm not sure what kind of experience you could really have, in which case they're pretty damned good because what you learn in school doesn't translate to industry at all in IT.

 

[GQgeek]



Does anybody who works with Linux know how good this course is/how good its reputation is? Not looking for a career in IT directly but a lot of the jobs I'm looking at moving into in the next few years say they want a knowledge of Linux amongst other things. http://www.lpi.org

run Linux in VMware, but if you really need to get comfortable fast, make it your primary machine so that you're forced to use it every day. More enterprises that are on Linux use redhat, so go with centos, which is exactly the same. but if it's not for an admin role, just use a more desktopy variant of Linux like Ubuntu or opensuse.

If you really want to get your hands dirty you could go with this, which will teach you to build the os from source, how different parts of the os interact, etc: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

 

[Sir Humphrey Appleby]

^ Cheers, will give it a go tonight

 

[Blog Marley]



run Linux in VMware, but if you really need to get comfortable fast, make it your primary machine so that you're forced to use it every day. More enterprises that are on Linux use redhat, so go with centos, which is exactly the same. but if it's not for an admin role, just use a more desktopy variant of Linux like Ubuntu or opensuse.
If you really want to get your hands dirty you could go with this, which will teach you to build the os from source, how different parts of the os interact, etc: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

The above is very true. As part of my interview for the company I work for I had to build a CentOS VM and STIG it (since we're in the DoD space), as we're moving into our new space we're also moving away from using VMware in house and are working on deploying Red Hat's virtualization software as it's significantly cheaper.