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ExamForce :: Article Archive :: Newsletter Article
 The Cert Times: IT Edition Article Archive
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| Here's Your Diploma: Here's Your Sawhorse Pillow (B1N@RY N@T10N (A.J. Axline)) |
Graduates of the class of 2008, family members, faculty, friends, the hot girl in the front row, those of you coming back for another semester to improve your math grades, and honored guests... welcome, and welcome.
When I look at this capped-and-robed sea of youthful exuberance and idealism, I can't help but reflect back on my own graduation, and remember how excited I was to move on to the next phase of my life, oblivious to how woefully unprepared I was for the hobnailed jackboots of adulthood that would tread on my back and kick my kidneys until my urine flowed red like a plague of Egypt. It is my hope that the faculty and administration of this institution have managed your expectations so that they are at an appropriately low level.
You may have heard that when life hands you lemons, you should make lemonade. Well, when life hands you a sawhorse, you should try to get a pillow under your tummy, because you are about to get bent over. I believe that the Greek playwright Aeschylus said that just before an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head, killing him. True story, by the way.
I know that some of you are likely considering a career in the field of information technology. You may have heard about the opportunities to be found in computer science, software development, network engineering, and so on. I tell you now, before you set out on a road of heartbreak, that information technology is not a career choice; it is a form of self-abuse so heinous and explicit that it makes masturbation look like a handshake... which technically it is, but let's move away from that simile before it gets sticky.
I understand your confusion at my words. After all, haven't you heard time and again over the last ten years from politicians and businesses that there is a terrible shortage of IT workers? Indeed, this is a lie. What politicians and businesses (two fairly interchangeable terms truth be told, which it seldom is by either) hope to achieve by spreading this lie, is for a massive glut of IT workers to enter the job market in order to drive down salaries and benefits for these positions. In truth, by selecting an IT career path, you are actually acting as an instrument of your own vocational destruction. There will be no demand for you when you emerge from your academic cocoon.
One exception to the previous claim: if you are female or disabled, you may benefit from the hiring quotas that the government and certain high-profile corporations maintain in order to appear progressive and non-discriminatory, ignoring the fact that any sort of hiring quota is discriminatory. In this instance, you may be able to nab a decent, dead-end position under a glass ceiling somewhere. Dare to dream, young people. Dare to dream.
However, the rest of you IT hopefuls are thoroughly doomed, and not in a good first-person shooter kind of way. You are doomed to ever-decreasing wages, ever-worsening work environments, and constant reductions in workforce that will leave you with a resume that looks like you are stricken with vocational ADD.
Your evenings and weekends will be spent on-call, chained to the office by a shiny gadget that is meant to make you feel empowered. You will take all of the blame when things don't work; you will receive none of the credit when they do. You will be viewed by senior management as a barely necessary evil, pure overhead, right up there with utilities, staples and air conditioning.
You may have been led to believe that techies are respected in the business world. They are not. At best, you may earn some grudging respect for your skills, which you will end up keeping current and relevant by paying out of pocket as professional development budgets are axed like Lizzie Borden's parents. Most of the time, you will be beat up for your lunch money on a regular basis. In business-speak, "beat up" means "downsized" and "lunch money" means "pension", but you get the general idea.
Your only hope is if you are willing to combine your technology acumen with something that the morally vacant corporations that own every significant thing in this country consider to be valuable. For example, combine technology and law, and you can join the rest of the swine at the technology patent trough, filing thousands of patent applications every year in the hopes that some poor sap will step into one of your intellectual property snares, so that your company can sue the hell out of them. Corporations love employees who can bring in more money through litigation than innovation.
Here's another smart IT career hybrid: use your technological savvy to figure out new ways to strip away the last vestiges of privacy from John and Jane Doe, so that governments can track them and corporations can market to them. This has the benefit of offering you the opportunity to say, when you are asked by someone at a cocktail party or backyard barbecue what it is you do for a living, "I'm in the private sector, stripping privacy from private citizens." Now, this isn't a growth industry per se, because most of our privacy is already gone. But, there are still some career dollars to be carved off of this Big Brother cash cow.
You can always compliment your IT degree with an MBA, and become a Chief Information Officer. As long as you're willing to take a blood oath to your owners, and ensure that all of your supply contracts are filled by the vendor owned by the CEO's brother-in-law, you can ride the CIO hell steed all the way to the company's next restructuring.
Class of '08, you should know that it is better to be a sanitation engineer than a network engineer. This country will always need garbage men. We will always need people to take away the trash that's piling up in our cities faster than we can bury it or flush it into the ocean. If you can drive a garbage truck, you can get and keep a job when the techies are designing their online resumes and missing their mortgage payments.
But, I know that in spite of everything I have told you today, some of you will still pursue careers in information technology. You'll do it because you love technology, and you want to work with it every day. You want to use technology to help people run businesses, to help companies create goods and offer services. You'll do it because you want to explore the potential of technology, to see what it can do to improve things for a person, or a group of people, or a city, a nation, or even the world.
I'll tell you this: one percent of you may get to actualize your ambition and achieve your goals. The rest of you will struggle to achieve the most lopsided compromise possible; you will exist in an abusive relationship where knowledge, talent, and integrity play seventy-second fiddle to stock price fluctuations and the politics of corporate nihilism.
You will be bounced like a bad check between managers, departments, and companies. You will have to move yourselves and your families from city to city in search of work, like a 21st Century version of the Joads.
And, every year you will become less desirable as the next class of techies comes online... a newer, hungrier group of workers perfectly willing to accept less money and fewer benefits to do your job.
My friends, in my heart of hearts, where the imps caper with glee and the compelling need to eat red meat originates from, I really hope that some of you techies consider the garbage man thing. Or bartender school. Booze always does well no matter what the economy is doing. So, as you step forward into the abyss, I strongly recommend that you consider garbage or booze. Or, consider combining the two, and run for Congress.
A.J. Axline posts new content every Sunday at www.chaos-jester.ca. He likes cold Pop Tarts when the weather is hot.
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Posted by
nam on 30/07/2008 10:22 |
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