In view of my place of residence in the sunny city of Los Angeles, I decided to find out if there are people in my beloved city who, for one reason or another, have left (
I looked through my album with business cards (yes, imagine, this is still in fashion with us), I quickly found the contacts of Mr. Aijimen, a Cisco engineer who developed the circuit and installed the smart home and alarm system in my hut. It turned out that the IT turnover is a more serious problem than I imagined. During the conversation, Mr. Aijimen suggested introducing me to his “guru,” who helped him open the gate to the world of the IT industry, but which, by coincidence, is no longer working in this area.
So get acquainted: RJ , the man who gave 13 years of IT and his story of divorce from his favorite business ...
For those who got to kat, first of all, thank you, and secondly, it turns out that there are not so many of you (sorry, I could not resist). In order to omit the long and sometimes boring history (of
RJ met IT in grade 5, and at the age of 16 he married her. They had a bright love. These are localization tests with SypeX Dumper, as well as long love with her (yes, he is such an ancient person). And with all his tourism, his beloved “Secure”, and VolVox (like Bitrix), and xRotor (his
RJ, what has changed and why did you decide to abandon IT?
Firstly, no one refused anything, and IT is still part of me. Sometimes it’s my shield, sometimes it’s my weapon. The only thing I refused was participation in projects and work for someone; it’s like, later insight, if you want. For a very long time I developed someone’s dream, was one of the millions of those workers, yes, you heard right - those workers.
At some point, in pursuit of mirages, I forgot that first of all I am an engineer, I am an artist, I am an artist in the end.
Was there any signal or event that served as your departure from IT?
Everything happened on June 10, 2017, I visited the JPL (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), on the very day when I was standing at the copy of the Curiosity rover, I remembered why I wanted to become an engineer. I understand that this probably seems childish to you, exchanging a career in IT for something not yet tangible, for some kind of crazy in your head, but this is exactly the moment when I decided that it was time to change something in my life.
Can you say that “IT did not live up to your expectations”
Oh my god, of course not! You still look one-sided. You understand, the wrong employer or project is not a reason to say that someone’s path is wrong and it needs to be changed urgently. I may sound like a hackneyed record of Chaliapin in my grandmother’s gramophone (PRICE), but I believe that in one form or another, each individual must be or at least have some kind of IT literacy, in the aspect in which you have it (IT literacy) consider, namely, to be able to program.
What can you say about the lack of calling in IT
Twenty five again! Please, let's figure out what IT is, otherwise we will have a deadlock all the time. IT today is not a solid mathematics and programming ability, as it was in the 60s or, say, in the 90s. You know that the most difficult IT job today is “Ability to work with people!”, And do you know what the most important skill is in sales? That's right - "Ability to work with people!", From here a simple conclusion, IT today (and indeed always) is not only programming.
The average salary in this area across the country (approx. The United States means) is $ 5,500 in the internal states and $ 8,000 in IT triangles, the average salary in the country, say the driver UBER $ 6,000, from here is another simple conclusion - IT today is no longer something super prestigious or highly paid, and IT as a whole is a huge machine or millstone if you want in which there is less and less space for creativity in the middle link or, say, among software developers. So, a vocation is a fiction, as well as the fact that talent is a guarantee of success!
Is it possible to say that you “burnt out” as a specialist?
No, definitely not! Did I burn out as an employee - perhaps as a specialist - in no case. I will not talk about other areas within IT, but I will say specifically about software developers, because it is this moment that interests you the most, programmers and networkers leave because of disagreements and pressure within a particular project. Often, programmers are seen as half-robots who write code, but in fact, most of them are very creative, whose artistic people are driven into frames that interfere more than help in the work. And for artistic people, as you know, melancholy sets in and in order to discharge oneself from the negative and recharge oneself positively they go “for a while” to other professions, but unfortunately getting back later is getting harder and harder.
So you want it back?
Specifically, I - no, but a couple of my friends would not mind. Even if I do not work in the IT sector, I try to make up for the loss of “myself” for the industry by perfusion of new blood. By analogy, he cut down an old tree, plant 10 new ones.
Is it possible to say that competition is killing IT-employees?
Absurd. This is how to say that antimonopoly destroys monopoly. In fact, competition is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. It is thanks to her that we today know about Straustup or Burns LI, about Zuckerberg or Durov in the end to the end. I don’t argue, competition reduces the likelihood of a good RFP (which, incidentally, is increasingly becoming the reason for leaving IT), but in itself is not a killer of personnel in this or any other field. In fact, disastrous is the fact that IT is very dynamic and today a person who has only completed 3 months of training at some bootcamp (sorry for Englishism) can receive more than a person with 10 years of experience in IT, only because he has the skill relevant at the moment. And if you are not engaged in self-education, then literally in three months, your knowledge will be considered obsolete in the programming world, and you can find yourself on the labor exchange.
Before we move on to the main question, where do they all leave IT, I want to find out if a lack of communication can be a reason for leaving IT
Unfortunately, this is another stereotype. In fact, in a healthy team, there is at least one mitap (morning / evening meeting), debriefing, pair programming and work with trainees (yes, yes, and that too) and, in general, a bazaar inside the office as the teams work at a round table or in an open type office. So there’s practically no opportunity to retire if you haven’t been given an office - which is not practiced for “ordinary” IT employees. In general, people associated with IT are mainly social butterflies in the asocial world of framework and prejudice. In order to understand how sociable we are, come to the next comic in San Diego, I'm not afraid to say that at least% 70 of this audience will be connected with IT. Yes, within the framework of this world we are possibly “strange” or people with oddities, but believe me, lack of communication is not about us!
So, the main question: “Where have you left the IT world?”
Remember, I visited JPL, there I met Ria (a girl from KalTech, a former IT specialist), PhD. So (
So she said: “Programming is like golden bracelets on my hands, at the right time they are my jewelry, at other times, my protection, they do not burden me and are not my shackles.”
In the evening of the same day, I called Ali and said that I had met his female avatar (laughs). Of course, I began to reflect on this and remembered that my close friend Vadim, also a former IT-specialist, an expert in streaming systems in the entertainment industry, but who works in a field that is far from both the entertainment industry and IT in general. Having talked with him about the acute problem of ventilation and cryogenics in the world of space, he suggested introducing me to his friend Nikita, an engineer of cryogenic systems, since he has more knowledge in this matter and could help me become more than that.
“So where did you go from the IT world?” I blurted out impatiently
I became a NATE (North American Technician Excellence) technician, engaged in the development, installation and, if possible, innovation in the field of HVACR (Air Conditioning, Heating & Refrigeration), as you understand, the IT knowledge here helps me in modeling and calculating systems.
If it’s no secret how much do you earn?
So, I won’t tell you the amount, but at the moment I earn three times as much as I did when I worked as a DevOps engineer at Universal Studios. I work mainly from 8 to 4, sometimes until 7, I have two days off and a lot of free time that I spend on books, Autodesk Fusion or in the xCode development environment working on my projects that interest me.
And the last question, where else do you think are leaving IT?
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Let's be clean, if a person leaves because of money (basically this is a category with a salary of up to 5000), then wherever they pay the same or more for less labor. This is both the sales and real estate, it is the repair of household appliances, and even become UBER or Lyft drivers.
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If a person leaves solely because of stress, then basically they take a break to return, and often start their startups or in the words of Jim Ron, find something that brings them less stress, for example, they go to teach or become university assistants (I I know a lot) - If a person is doing well in terms of salary (we are talking about a category above $ 6,000), but he doesn’t have time with self-education, then they often become drivers of heavy vehicles (truck driver), but I understand it sounds absurd, because half of the drivers dream of becoming IT-people, but often fleeing the hustle and bustle, people wanting to maintain their income level go exactly to the drivers of heavy trucks, because there they often earn from $ 8,000 and above.
- Now, it has also become very fashionable to build your online stores on Amazon and other platforms, and as you know, IT employees are not the last people in this sometimes very profitable business.
This list goes on and on, and understanding that your readers are mostly highly educated people with higher than average intelligence, I want to note that IT is now the same field as thousands of others. Innovations in this sector are slowing down (in my humble opinion) in inverse proportion to Moore's law. Of course, I understand that it will offend someone, it will even offend someone, but the respected community, you can no longer live by programming alone, you need to develop and develop in other areas. You need to get skills in any other business, if only because it will broaden your horizons and only help you find innovative solutions in your daily work of developers, networkers, team leads, etc. Good luck to all of you in all your good undertakings, peace be with you and your home.
Thank you RJ for a very informative conversation and a rather unusual look at the IT industry. Now, I would like to hear from a respected habrosociety, whether there are any “former” IT-employees among you and whom you have retrained to. I understand that this can cause holivar, well, damn it, aren't we here for this? Are we not here to discuss our victories and defeats? I sincerely wish all of our guys who, for one reason or another, decided to expand their arsenal of skills other than IT with all the very best and I hope that you leave your mark in the comments under this article (
On this note, I say goodbye to you and hope for shots in the heart and head in the comments, slight wounds to the knee and dump of phages and curses due to freezes of your central processors. Good luck.
UPD:
Many thanks to everyone who read this creation, pointed out errors in the text (which, it turns out, I am an illiterate person), gave me new ideas, well, I just covered it with obscenities (this is also criticism). Love you!