May 12, 2016 at 2:35 pm
Eric M Russell (5/12/2016)
Sean Lange (5/12/2016)
I am clearly in the minority here. For me the IT world IS my second career. I spent a decade as a chef prior to going back to school for a new direction. I did a little dabbling in high school with development...if you can call it that...on an Apple II. That class did somewhat light my passion for computers and development.I wrote a school English paper on an old "portable" IBM XT in Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS . I preferred that because I could control the formatting better than wordstar. My teacher promptly failed my paper because "obviously the computer wrote it for me". My parents had to take that one all the way to the principal to convince her that the computer did not in fact write papers for students. I tried to convince her I was doing her a favor by not writing it by hand which would make it much easier to read than my handwriting. My how times have changed since those days.
Wouldn't that have been awesome! Image a high school kid back in 1985 programming their PC to write term papers.
No kidding. And I would imagine anybody that could write software to write decent term papers should deserve an A+ since they would be able to write passable papers on any topic. That require exceptional development prowess AND exceptional writing ability.
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May 12, 2016 at 4:40 pm
Japie Botma (5/10/2016)
Congratulations Howard. And I thought I am an old man in IT. 🙂 Officially retired 6 weeks ago and landed my first DBA Consulting job 3 weeks ago (part time). I am enjoying it so much, that real retirement is unthinkable.
Congrats
May 12, 2016 at 4:45 pm
m_swetz (5/10/2016)
I don't see myself doing this long term unfortunately. I enjoy database work and development, but IT in general has put me off. Money is good relatively speaking, but work/life balance is poor as the expectation is that I can be reached at all times, can work weekends, etc. Furthermore, in many organizations IT is a cost center and isn't treated as an integral component of the business.My promotion experiences have also been interesting. It's usually something along the lines of "you're our best developer so we'll have you manage people and do less development."
Maybe going the consultant route would be better, but that's a big leap that I don't think I'm in a position to take at the moment.
Perhaps. I have had quite a few jobs, and I think most were good ones. I enjoyed them and learned to balance life and work.
I will say that I have friends in law, accounting, medicine, construction, and many of them have had some long, long hours as well. I'm not sure that we get pressed to work more than some other occupations.
May 13, 2016 at 10:05 pm
Grant Fritchey (4/27/2012)
Retire? What's that word mean?
It means that you work for things that need you and you want to help, instead of for things that pay you.
I'll be a geek til the day I die. If I'm lucky, I'll get paid for it most of the way.
I wish I could get paid for it - I could put more money into the charities I support if I did. But of course that wouldn'work, would it? But despite being retired I'm better off (i.e. have more discretionary spending capacity, although less than half the gross income) than ever before.
Tom
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