Hiring Disparity
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I also don't see many other careers where people change jobs as often as IT either.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm really struggling to see what is so special about the IT industry compared with other careers.
What is alike with other fields? What other field has no upward mobility in a single company or region? IT is extremely unique in that it is huge, broad, ubiquitous but the needs of the job vary so heavily between positions, companies and regions. There is no field that I know of remotely like it.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Captives?
Yes. In most regions outside of major metro areas (NYC, London, Houston, The Bay, Zurich, etc.) the IT ladder exists only partially. In smaller regions this means that the IT person at company X might have literally zero other employment options without relocating. Their employer, if they know that the employee is unwilling to relocate, knows that they have a monopoly on the IT positions that they can accept and can therefore dictate their salary. The employee has no bargaining power as both parties know that they cannot leave without simply being unemployed and unemployable.
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@Dashrender said:
I also don't see many other careers where people change jobs as often as IT either.
Because of the ladder effect. Most careers you have the ability to move up within a single company. But IT can't do that. Only the very largest companies can have an entire IT ladder internally and nearly all of those still require multiple regions in order to make it up that ladder. So even if you work for IBM, JP Morgan, Barclays, Microsoft, etc. if you are unwilling to relocate you become trapped at a step on the ladder.
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Upward mobility - I'm not sure how many jobs have that either.
To go back to the first post:
doctor, lawyer, accountant, receptionist, salesperson, teacher, factory worker, manager, etc
A doctor and lawyer are kind of at the top of their field already - short of going to work either for themselves or a larger firm, there isn't going to be much change.
A receptionist and factory worker are kinda the same, unless they don't want to be those things anymore, they don't ever really change, there's not much of upward mobility there.
Now a salesperson - they are their own thing
Teachers, unless they get more schooling (i.e. masters, PhD) assuming they want to stay in the classroom, again no changed needed or really available.
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Usually a Doctor or a Lawyer are trying to physically move when they apply for another Job. Not many stay in the same geographic area.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Usually a Doctor or a Lawyer are trying to physically move when they apply for another Job. Not many stay in the same geographic area.
I would ask why they are moving though? Is it for promotion, or for geography reasons?
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From what I have seen it's more geographical than anything else.
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I'm not sure what you mean by ladder effect?
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@Dashrender said:
Upward mobility - I'm not sure how many jobs have that either.
To go back to the first post:
doctor, lawyer, accountant, receptionist, salesperson, teacher, factory worker, manager, etc
A doctor and lawyer are kind of at the top of their field already - short of going to work either for themselves or a larger firm, there isn't going to be much change.
A receptionist and factory worker are kinda the same, unless they don't want to be those things anymore, they don't ever really change, there's not much of upward mobility there.
Now a salesperson - they are their own thing
Teachers, unless they get more schooling (i.e. masters, PhD) assuming they want to stay in the classroom, again no changed needed or really available.
That's my point, they have short ladders and those ladders usually exist, in their entirety, in every region that employees anyone in those fields. Doctors and Lawyers can start their own practices anywhere, doctors can move to a hospital nearly anywhere, etc.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Usually a Doctor or a Lawyer are trying to physically move when they apply for another Job. Not many stay in the same geographic area.
But they don't have to move. They might want to, but their careers can be made in nearly any region. It's only to get more customers that they would move to a bigger region. Not to do more senior work.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm not sure what you mean by ladder effect?
To go from entry level IT ($10/hr) to senior non-management IT ($500K / year) there are a huge number of career steps. Huge number. In system administration alone (not an entry point career path) you have juniors, mid levels, seniors, leads, subject matter experts, etc. Few companies short of the Fortune 100 have all of those positions. If you want to get through those ranks you are either limited to a very few multi-national companies (not likely located where you live) or you have to bounce around a lot as you gain experience.
If you want to laterally move, normally needed for reaching high level positions, say between Windows and Linux you need a company large enough to not only use both and employee people for both but also to have the right ladder steps for you in both positions.
The career ladder for IT is immense, larger than any field that I know. If you want to go from a medical intern to a neurosurgeon, you have steps, but relatively few. If you want to go from L0 helpdesk to senior architect you have many - a great many steps.
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To make things harder, we should stop talking about helpdesk or Windows jobs. Those exist, more or less, everywhere (although literally none exist where I grew up so even that is an overstatement.) But lets look at Sybase DBA or SAP positions. There are whole swaths of the country where these jobs do not exist. No matter how good you are, you can't get hired. You could be work a quarter million a year in Chicago and be the absolute best, most experienced person available but if you live in the wrong location there might not be a single company able to hire either of those positions, junior or otherwise, for hundreds of miles or more.
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So the more you specialise, the more you can earn but the fewer jobs that are available and thus you may have to relocate. I'm not sure this is much different from say nursing, where the highest paid nurses are specialists who may only get jobs at certain hospitals that provide what they're offering.
My cousin is a top teacher earning a fortune, but has to move around a lot as there are very few positions at his level.
I'm sure this is true for lots of other professions as well. Top mechanics might earn $500k, but they won't earn that in my town.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm sure this is true for lots of other professions as well. Top mechanics might earn $500k, but they won't earn that in my town.
Outside of working for a racing team, do any mechanics actually make anything like that? Do even ones working for top racing teams?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
So the more you specialise, the more you can earn but the fewer jobs that are available and thus you may have to relocate. I'm not sure this is much different from say nursing, where the highest paid nurses are specialists who may only get jobs at certain hospitals that provide what they're offering.
It exists to some degree in every field. But nursing along with many nursing levels and specializations is available in every populated market in the developed world and in most of the undeveloped world. Even basic IT, a mid level Windows admin for example, will have whole markets with no job opportunities.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Outside of working for a racing team, do any mechanics actually make anything like that? Do even ones working for top racing teams?
Dunno. I don't know anyone earning $500k in IT either though.
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It was mentioned earlier but I feel that job titles are to blame (at least in part)
Look on the job boards, in my area you will see crap like this:
Senior Network Administrator - duties: fixing computers and working on our software issues
Helpdesk Technician - duties: managing a domain across 5 sites with replication, encryption
Windows computer administrator - duties: manage our network switches, setup blah blahHow can we help fix this?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Dunno. I don't know anyone earning $500k in IT either though.
I know many, although mostly who moved to management. But getting into the $500K range is certainly something that mainline IT can do.
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@MattSpeller said:
It was mentioned earlier but I feel that job titles are to blame (at least in part)
Look on the job boards, in my area you will see crap like this:
Senior Network Administrator - duties: fixing computers and working on our software issues
Helpdesk Technician - duties: managing a domain across 5 sites with replication, encryption
Windows computer administrator - duties: manage our network switches, setup blah blahHow can we help fix this?
That's a huge question that I don't know the answer to but I think that it is key to solving this problem. Maybe an IT Industry Association is needed to not be a union per se but to act as a non-profit to oversee this kind of stuff and set standards.
