Answering Some Questions
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A student in CS and IT asked these questions of me and I figured it would be better to answer them here than in private communications:
1. Why did this type of work interest you, and how did you get started? I got started in 1979 when I was little and my father introduced me to programming (I just saw him do it, did not understand what he was doing.) I thought that it was the coolest thing ever. When I was 9 he taught me to program and at 13 (1989) I got my first internship with a Fortune 100 doing software engineering. This was incredibly instructional and really helped me think broadly about paths into the career rather than following formal paths into it.
I got hired at 18 by a university and my career just took of from there. I got to work in Fortran and C programming, computer aided manufacturing and in Solaris / UNIX administration. It was a great experience very early on in my career. I never worked in helpdesk or similar careers.
I moved from software engineer to IT around 2005 just because the opportunity came up. I'd done a mix from around 1998 - 2005, but had been primarily focused around DevOps and software engineering.
In 2006 I did an interview with a Wall St. firm as a favour to a large global consulting firm that had been having issues staffing a particular position and ended up getting the offer and really liking the team - so went to work on Wall St. for most of a decade.
More recently I left the world of big finance to pursue a more meaningful career in social change and spend more time with my family as my kids are little.
2. How did you get your job, and what job experiences led you to your present position? At this point I have been in IT or software engineering for twenty six years so there is a ton of background force propelling me towards wherever it is that I am going. My current position(s) were through a lot of searching and like many this far into their careers mostly they come through people that you know in the industry although my resume has gotten pretty extensive, finding good positions often means knowing people already at the place where you want to be.
3. Do you find your job exciting or boring and why? I've always found IT exciting. Thankfully I get to be in positions that allow me to do new things, spend time in intellectual pursuits, grow and gain experience. IT is always growing and expanding and changing and there is a lot of opportunity to do fun, exciting things. There is really never a time that I am not learning something new.
4. What sort of changes are occurring in your occupation? Surprisingly few. The field has begun to mature heavily and for those who have been "keeping up" there are always new things, but the fundamental career has not been changing in any significant way for some time. There are ongoing moves from one technology to another, more working from home, more working outside of the US, changes in techniques but the field is becoming relatively mature and stable, now.
5. From your perspective, what are the problems you see working in this field? Education and context. Education meaning not formal education but a lack of foundational knowledge or of standard foundational knowledge. Often professionals talking to each other will find huge gaps in knowledge sometimes of things the other would find very basic. Knowing even what should constitute basic knowledge is difficult. The field is very large and even people working in it for a very long time often have huge gaps of knowledge about the field itself, even defining the field can be a challenge. Sometimes not even knowing what core job descriptions refer too or common terms are misunderstood. There is no standard corpus of knowledge that everyone is expected to have in the field leaving two ten year professionals potentially with completely different ideas of the field.
Context meaning that IT is a role that serves businesses, but often people working in IT do not take the time to understand and/or empathize with the businesses that they support which leaves IT with little context. How does one know how to design or engineer something in IT without knowing how it will support the business in question? You can't, of course. But many IT people lack business training or understanding and often believe that IT can somehow be actioned in a vacuum, which it cannot. Which leads to many problems and misunderstandings.
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This kind of destroys the thread I saw on SW where everyone said you had to start in a Help Desk position to be able to learn anything.
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@johnhooks said:
This kind of destroys the thread I saw on SW where everyone said you had to start in a Help Desk position to be able to learn anything.
LOL. Yup, I've been fighting that misconception my whole career. @AndyW didn't start in helpdesk either and he's a well known consulting IT guy with a long career too (one of the NTG founders.)
I know very few people who hit six figures and started on helpdesk. Most of the people I work with that are in the higher income brackets in IT tended to start off in junior administration, engineering or development roles. You can obviously get there from helpdesk too, but it feels like a very uncommon path to me. Unless you are starting really young.
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What I have found to be more common is that people who go to college to start their careers often then leave college and start in helpdesk, but those that skip college often start in other career areas. College is the most common path into IT from the inside, helpdesk is the most common entry point from the inside. So those two seem to line up as the "following the commonly accepted path" course of action. And it seems that people who feel that college is the only way to get a job and those that feel that all IT starts with helpdesk are very often the same people, so there might be a connection. Or I might just imagine that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
This kind of destroys the thread I saw on SW where everyone said you had to start in a Help Desk position to be able to learn anything.
LOL. Yup, I've been fighting that misconception my whole career. @AndyW didn't start in helpdesk either and he's a well known consulting IT guy with a long career too (one of the NTG founders.)
I know very few people who hit six figures and started on helpdesk. Most of the people I work with that are in the higher income brackets in IT tended to start off in junior administration, engineering or development roles. You can obviously get there from helpdesk too, but it feels like a very uncommon path to me. Unless you are starting really young.
I've never worked in a Help Desk (thankfully) but from what I have seen/heard, it seems like it's almost impossible to get out. And it looks like it rarely challenges people enough to make them want to be there.
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I worked in Helpdesk for 11 years. Now I don't
oh wait yeah I do when someone around here is sick or doesn't "show" up I get to still. -
@scottalanmiller said:
What I have found to be more common is that people who go to college to start their careers often then leave college and start in helpdesk, but those that skip college often start in other career areas. College is the most common path into IT from the inside, helpdesk is the most common entry point from the inside. So those two seem to line up as the "following the commonly accepted path" course of action. And it seems that people who feel that college is the only way to get a job and those that feel that all IT starts with helpdesk are very often the same people, so there might be a connection. Or I might just imagine that.
It's kind of crazy. You get a degree in whatever field it is (CS, CIS, etc) and then start in an entry level position where someone who never went to college could start and do fine.
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@Minion-Queen said:
I worked in Helpdesk for 11 years. Now I don't
oh wait yeah I do when someone around here is sick or doesn't "show" up I get to still.I guess that's probably true of all of us to an extent
Esp at home ha -
@Mike-Ralston is a great example of this (as in happening as we speak). All his buddies are headed off to college in the next week or so. He is starting his full time job in IT. He has interned here for almost 3 years and is handling a good portion of our PBX Engineering, with oversight of course as he is junior but still full time. At a higher pay scale than I would hire someone coming out of college.
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@johnhooks said:
I've never worked in a Help Desk (thankfully) but from what I have seen/heard, it seems like it's almost impossible to get out. And it looks like it rarely challenges people enough to make them want to be there.
People often assume that helpdesk is like a gateway to other IT careers, but it is not. You don't put in two years on helpdesk and magically have skilled or experience to be a DBA or something like that. Helpdesk is its own career inside of IT, it's not a stepping stone to different careers. The idea that you do helpdesk as a means to something else is completely weird and illogical. Companies hiring a path like that are nuts.
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@johnhooks said:
It's kind of crazy. You get a degree in whatever field it is (CS, CIS, etc) and then start in an entry level position where someone who never went to college could start and do fine.
The only thing is that people waste years going to college to learn nothing useful and do so learning from people who often couldn't get the job you wanted anyway. What qualifies them to teach? Often nothing more than being otherwise unemployable, or wanting to take it easy. Sometimes you get lucky and get good professors, but not very often.
If someone goes to college and has the same skill set as someone who didn't go to college I'd take the "didn't go to college" one every time because it shows that they have more ambition, make better decisions and need less handholding to do the same things.
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@Minion-Queen said:
At a higher pay scale than I would hire someone coming out of college.
Three years of experience versus zero experience. Lots of ambition versus took four years to chill out and drink a lot of beer.
Of course he makes more than a recent college grad, he has tons more to show!!
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@scottalanmiller said:
People often assume that helpdesk is like a gateway to other IT careers, but it is not.
But as you just said,
@scottalanmiller said:
helpdesk is the most common entry point from the inside
This is where the perception came from. Simple assumption really. Most people DO start on a helpdesk and then find a new job because they now have the magic "Degree + Experience" thing that get past the HR filters.
You are 100% correct that Helpdesk is not a skill path to an IT career other than Helpdesk.
You are incorrect that helpdesk is not a gateway to other IT careers. It is a gateway because many people use time on a Helpdesk to gain experience time. Yes it is Helpdesk experience and not server or network or PBX, etc. But, it is still valid IT experience.
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@JaredBusch said:
You are incorrect that helpdesk is not a gateway to other IT careers. It is a gateway because many people use time on a Helpdesk to gain experience time. Yes it is Helpdesk experience and not server or network or PBX, etc. But, it is still valid IT experience.
I'm not saying that it is not experience, did not mean to suggest that. I'm a big believer in that helpdesk is completely valid professional experience the same as anything else in IT. In no way do I mean to belittle helpdesk, in fact I think that I respect it far more than most people in the field do.
Working on helpdesk for a decade is a full decade of IT experience, no ifs ands or buts in my mind there. What I mean, though, is that it is experience that only directly leads to higher helpdesk positions (from junior, to mid to senior to lead, etc.) Even a century of helpdesk experience, though, is only experience on the helpdesk, with enough years of helpdesk you don't become a systems admin, a network engineer or a PBX designer.
Now, helpdesk experience + taking time to learn a new skill area might be a great way to move latterally to another IT area. And that, in theory, is how people intend to use it. Put in three years on a helpdesk while teaching yourself a different skill are (MS SQL Server DBA, for example) and prove to the company that you are loyal, responsible, etc. Put those things together and you might be a good candidate for a DBA slot. Although I wonder how often people actually manage to move around in those ways.
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@JaredBusch said:
This is where the perception came from. Simple assumption really. Most people DO start on a helpdesk and then find a new job because they now have the magic "Degree + Experience" thing that get past the HR filters.
Nearly everyone that I see doing that, though, appears to still be working in helpdesk
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@scottalanmiller said:
Nearly everyone that I see doing that, though, appears to still be working in helpdesk
Only because Helpdesk is the largest sector of the IT career fields. SO of course most would still be in Helpdesk.
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@JaredBusch said:
Only because Helpdesk is the largest sector of the IT career fields. SO of course most would still be in Helpdesk.
Maybe, but that the majority of people claiming that helpdesk gets you into other areas of IT are only ones who do not appear to have done so.
Is helpdesk really the largest? It probably is, but it's always a small segment anywhere that I've seen. Is there any stats on that somewhere? I've heard it stated a lot but have no idea if that is just what we all think or if there is something solid behind it.
Defining helpdesk is a little tough too. Are server admins helpdesk? In some ways, because they aren't the engineers and their field the helpdesk functions but normally to developers rather than desktop users.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Is helpdesk really the largest? It probably is, but it's always a small segment anywhere that I've seen. Is there any stats on that somewhere? I've heard it stated a lot but have no idea if that is just what we all think or if there is something solid behind it.
Is it really? Probably not. Probably the largest is the one man IT Dept.
Helpdesk though is in the 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands. For example, AT&T alone has thousands of Helpdesk workers in the US. I was one of them once upon a time. Note, this was not how I got started in IT, but it was something I did to move out of one field and into another. Using the time I was doing that to pickup other skills.
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@JaredBusch said:
Helpdesk though is in the 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands. For example, AT&T alone has thousands of Helpdesk workers in the US. I was one of them once upon a time. Note, this was not how I got started in IT, but it was something I did to move out of one field and into another. Using the time I was doing that to pickup other skills.
That's a lot of helpdesk. Although at Citi we had in the thousands of system admins. When you get that big, all the departments start to get really large
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's a lot of helpdesk. Although at Citi we had in the thousands of system admins. When you get that big, all the departments start to get really large
The office I worked in had ~500 supporting DSL. It was still SBC at the time. PacBell had 2 helpdesk centers and Ameritech had 1 or two. All with similar staffing levels. Then they merged in with BellSouth. By that time a couple of the other centers had shifted, but still in the thousands, just for that one job duty.
All US based. This is not counting the outsourced Tier 1 stuff.
