The best job I ever had was as a contract consultant. I made insane money and worked from home. I’d kill for another job like that. Working as IT staff in a large company is terrible.
So despite everything I said above I think there are still good places to work. I like where I am now and get a lot of job satisfaction out of it. It did take a few jobs to get there though. IT also lends itself to working from anywhere with a good internet connection so there can be a lot of flexibility there. My current one doesn't allow a lot of that (yet) but I think working from a beach or mountain trailhead might make certain positions easier to deal with
....My suggestion is to get a hobby outside of work - to the point where you no longer care what actually occurs during work....
I agree. Don't quit your job until you've found another. Don't abandon EE for IT. You'll find that in the long run EE will out pay IT. It just depends on where you want to work and what type of company you want to work for. There are a lot of guys at my work that are EE that do CS work. They took extra classes at night and learned Object Oriented programming. So keep your day job, go take a courses at your local univerisity, and choose a language that will run on an embedded system, like C++. Then you will stand out as knowing hardware with being familiar with writing software.If you're planning on going into IT to get away from pedants and egotists, you're doing it wrong.
Find a better job, don't abandon your career. Also, don't move back in with your parents.
You might want to read some of the horror stories from the /r/talesfromtechsupport and /r/sysadmin forums on Reddit before thinking about quitting your EE job and going into tech. Trust me... the shit you have to deal with in IT is probably worse than what you are dealing with now.
But, hey, don't just take my word for it. Take some classes, and try an IT consulting gig on the side once you know what you're doing. If anything, those skills will supplement your EE skillset. I recommend learning about AWS administration, Docker containerization, and VMWare VSphere. Those skills are hot right now.
I don't necessarily see IT/software as an endgame. I see it as a stepping point for getting into other fields.
Tech consulting
Management consulting
Analytics
Big Data
Artificial Intelligence
Fintech
Algorithmic Trading
Quantitative Finance (this is a longshot)
Etc. I don't want to stay in a hardcore IT/software role forever. I want to move to the business side of things (also getting an MBA is not an option for me).
So the thing is - entry level in IT sucks for almost any field. Most people end up spending time as a helpdesk monkey or call center smuck dealing with people who are shockingly bad with computers. Like, whatever the worst thing you can think of x1000 bad. So bad you won't be able to troubleshoot problems well because you aren't capable of imagining the actions leading up to the issue. Like using a hacksaw to make a different version of ram work with the motherboard. Like using a wet paper towel to clean a motherboard and then immediately turning it on. Time in these positions crawls along so 1 year feels like 5.
But you climb the ranks and have to deal with "Users" less and less. Finally one day you can sigh in relief as you should rarely have to deal with them again. Its this day you realize that other IT people are almost as bad. You visit the tier 2 person making $80k per year because the build system isn't working for them. And you find out the switch they are using isn't plugged into the wall jack. The DBA decides to run his python job locally on the database server and quickly consumes all 48GB of ram bringing it to its knees. Meanwhile he is also saving the results of his query to the C drive instead of the data drive or mapped network drives and proceeds to use up every last byte of free space. Now its an emergency issue YOU have to fix. Someone leaves and you get handed their code to fix\maintain and, not only is it atrocious but the ahole didn't comment anything anywhere
So you move up again and have to deal with supporting tech less. Now you can do more big picture things and tell people how things should be run. This is when you realize that your voice is often drowned out because you are the only IT person in "Stakeholder" meetings and no one else apparently knows anything about IT. So you give your expert opinion about how the project needs to be run but you get out voted because maybe they should require people enter their full SS#. They only really need the last 4 but this way they'll have it in case they need it later. No one else cares there is no good plan to curate access to this data. It'll be fine. Stop worrying. (It wasn't fine and a lot of people ended up with access they had no business having).
Or you go into a consulting meeting with the people who hired your firm and say "We've done this x number of times. If you do A you will have issues. B works flawlessly. Here are all the cases where we've been involved in both A and B so we know what we are talking about."
Everyone else at the meeting: "We want to do A. We are smarter than everyone else that has tried it. We will succeed where they failed."
Hint: They don't succeed. It has been my experience that you need to get used to being ignored a lot and watch all the negative consequences you predicted come to light. Sometimes you can't even say "I told you so" because you are too busy proving they were warned. Lots of decision makers at the top like to think they are smarter than everyone else so if something fails it must be someone else's fault.
I would be cautious about the grass being greener on the IT side of the fence
So despite everything I said above I think there are still good places to work. I like where I am now and get a lot of job satisfaction out of it. It did take a few jobs to get there though. IT also lends itself to working from anywhere with a good internet connection so there can be a lot of flexibility there. My current one doesn't allow a lot of that (yet) but I think working from a beach or mountain trailhead might make certain positions easier to deal with
I think a lot of people don’t understand what I am looking for - maybe I phrased it incorrectly. Im not looking for an IT career. I want to get into tech. Two different things, I believe.
As for the suggestion about hobbies - I have had plenty of hobbies over the past five years. Does nothing to keep my mind off work.
I look at the next 25-30 years of my career and think, there’s no way I want to be an EE the rest of my life. Or even someone that’s purely technical.
I want to pursue different fields - big data, artificial intelligence, finance, tech, etc. i just see programming as a basis for all of that. I don’t have an end goal in mind for my career. I see work as an experience/opportunity to learn - the money is not a major concern because I think I would be comfortable past $90-100k which isnt that difficult these days with some experience.
IT is far from what I want - I can see how many of you think my expectations are ridiculous in that sense.
I was fortunate to have gotten into IT when IT was just getting going in the mid 80s. I am now an IT Director for a textile company. Money is great and all but getting to this point in 25+ years was hard. Lot of layoffs/hirings especially in the early 2000s really put a damper on my career. I am 51 and should think about retiring but having to go through so many jobs to land where I currently am was, IMO, not worth the hell. But, IT guys, even high level ones, have it so easy today. Installing 50 Netware 4 servers on Pentium!!! systems was a bitch back in the day. My specialty was global RADUIS systems using Shiva Access with worldwide implementation. Yeah, the struggle was real.
Maybe not easier, but definitely faster! Now I can whip out a server in hours instead of days!It depends. Things change. I remember how hard it was to manage a handful of sun boxes and a HP 3000. It thought it could only get easier. I now build custom CI/CD pipelines and solve multi-regional availability problems. It never got any easier for me lol.
Without a doubt. I can spin up entire environments in minutes. I've got a template for a customer that builds their entire production environment. Containers, databases, networking, etc. Takes about 22 minutes to run in completion.Maybe not easier, but definitely faster! Now I can whip out a server in hours instead of days!
Maybe not easier, but definitely faster! Now I can whip out a server in hours instead of days!
Yeah, I'm managing around 60 VMs by myself. I'm the only IT guy at the company. On top of that I have to manage all the NAS backups, the website, the SQL servers, the shipping system and all proprietary SW that we use. At least my days (and sometimes nights) go by quickly!Yeah... except now a single admin is expected to be able to manage 200 VM's or 500 containers instead of just 40 physical servers in the past.
If anything, the infrastructure is more complex than it was before. At least it's more automated, anyway.
Or would I be better off keeping my job (in Chicago) and trying to do the same thing in my spare time?
Yeah, I'm managing around 60 VMs by myself. I'm the only IT guy at the company. On top of that I have to manage all the NAS backups, the website, the SQL servers, the shipping system and all proprietary SW that we use. At least my days (and sometimes nights) go by quickly!
We are always hiring EE in the DC area, working alot of cool things..IT requires a security clearance, and I cant really talk much about it due to NDA's.
If you are dead set on staying in the midwest my suggestions wouldnt work.
Ask @purbeast0 he loves DMV LOL
I am actually aching to get out of the midwest. Been here my whole life. Ideally want to move to NYC