Tech jobs are now white collar trades that need apprentices
Tech jobs are now white collar trades that need apprentices
With a generation of networking engineers set to retire, is this how to give their successors a faster start?
This is news? What are they doing, throwing juniors into server rooms and expect them to learn through looking at blinking lights?
Yes
Pretty much. If you can’t Google it you’re screwed in a lot of situations. Too many tenured IT folks have been through the forced self learning and insane hours figuring things out that they think training and documentation is not needed. I’ve definitely been there. In the late 90’s early 2000’s most orgs didn’t pay for IT shit so you just had to deal with it. It’s definitely better now but there are still people and companies that act like it’s 1999 still. I took over IT for an org a year ago that had their only IT employee die and they never recovered some of their data out of AWS because the dbag used personal accounts and didn’t document shit. This was a company with 500+ employees and that had 1 IT person. They also had a 2003 server that was implemented in 2005 that was never updated and was used in production until a month after I took the contract.
That is exactly what they're doing buddy
I love how the trend in tech seems to be to shift 100% of responsibility for professional development to the employee.
"Just get some certs on your own and build a homelab."
Yeah, I have 2 degrees and a bunch of certs, of which many require CEU or renewal costs. Everytime I ask for professional development it's "yeah there might be some budget for this one specific thing next quarter".
It's really cruel because no amount of education will prepare people for the inevitable first year it takes to actually learn all the ass backwards ways they have of doing things that only that specific workplace does and everyone does it differently.
Every important piece of tech has a borderline unworkable backend that is 20 years of hack jobs taped together that you can't change or improve or it all collapses.
But yeah they expect college to prepare you for that lmao.
This has always been the case, but in the US, basically no tech employers actually treat their junior employees as apprentices, they treat them as temporary contractors, and are thus unable to maintain any consistent kind of institutional knowledge, which then reinforces the loop of relying for contractors for everything a small level of hierarchical steps under C Suite.
They've basically brought over the broken ladder of the management track, over to the technical track of increased technical expertise (without necessarily increasing management/administrative responsibilities).
Currently, each generation of executives doesn't come from within the company. There's no simple path from mail room to executive anymore. Now, you have to leave the company to go get an MBA, then get hired by a consulting firm, then consult with that company as a client, before you're on track to make senior management at the company.
If the technical track is going this way, too, then these companies are going to become more brittle, and the current generation of entry level workers are going to hit a lot more career dead ends. It's bad for everyone.
Currently, each generation of executives doesn't come from within the company.
This in particular I find to be just the most astonishingly duplicitous, completely full of shit thing about American Tech Corps.
They are masters of lying to you and telling you that if you work hard, perform well, blah blah, you'll adcance through the ranks.
All outward oriented 'how to be a good employee' type media propaganda says you need to be loyal and stop job hopping.
All these motherfuckers job hop all the fucking time and they know they do!
EDIT: After a decade in the tech industry, I got assaulted and just give off of disability now, basically in poverty.
There is literally no amount of money you could pay me (lets be real, promise to pay me and then not actually pay me that much) to get back into the tech industry.
My QoL is 100,000x improved not having to deal with the constant deceptive office politics, utterly incompetent managers and useless projects.
You're 100% right about 'what even is a career path'.
They don't exist.
Barring super basic stuff like an A* or whatever to be a basic network techy, certs are required or desired certs are constantly changing, as are required skillsets and experience in general.
None of the HR people that write job descriptions have any clue what the words theyre using mean.
They kept inflating 'required years working with X program or language', and everyone just started lying on all their resumes.
The hiring process is a theatre of the absurd.
And unions
This. Unionise people. It's a benefit for all
This is already literally how it works in Germany. You can also get in with a college/university degree, especially for software dev jobs, but nowadays it's pretty unusual that people who enter the field just have no related education at all.
The CIO said 'Why do we need a wiring closet, we're a cloud first company'."
you have to laugh, because otherwise you'd cry
That's why CTO and VP of IT exist. CIO concerns themselves with information, while the CTO or VP of IT handles the technology behind the information as well as the information. CIO is a generally useless position IMO; a title with little expertise in anything relevant.
Not surprising where the only way to get tech jobs is to have 5 years experience or work service desk and hope someone whos job you want gets hit by a bus.
I just had this argument with my HR team. I want to hire some people straight out of college and train them. They want to spend 15k more and get someone with experience.
But where do those people magically come from?
I'm amazed people want "experienced" workers. Like trying to untrained an "incorrectly" trained worker is a pain in the ass. Like fresh out of college at least you have a base standard, once they have experience in the field you never know what you are going to get.
Surprised they actually want to pay them 15k more and not what they would pay a recent graduate if I am honest.
They believe experience = better. In some cases that can be correct like sales.
You guys are getting helpdesk jobs?
They now want five years of experience for service desk now.
What you mean with things that advance continually but also every business uses a different solution you can’t expect someone who have a perfect understanding of 6976 different possible solutions used coming out of college? What are we even teaching these kids if not every possible current and legacy software of any possible IT application and the differences between each version of each. Geez.
Token ring networks is what they spent quite a bit of time teaching us about, in 2016. Perhaps fair enough to mention it as a thing that existed but they taught this stuff to us like it was current.
That’s the biggest problem with learning tech from a college: developing, vetting, publishing, and adopting curriculum all take a good chunk of time. More time than it takes for new tech to arise.
It’s not hard to see going to trainings/expos/etc. on new/current/upcoming tech while working at a business is going to be a lot more useful than learning 5-20 year old tech in college.
Now, I’m mostly just assuming things as I did not go to college for tech, but I work in education so I know how things typically go.
This is sort of how I got my start as a network engineer in the US, a dozen or so years ago.
There was a large skills gap in the area (still is, IMO)...so the company started hiring people that had no training but had a good technical aptitude with the intent to train them directly.
I know a lot of really great engineers that got their start through that program.
The company has since been bought, and bought again. We've all mostly scattered to the wind. But I still run into some of them every now and then as vendors for my current employer...our current VoIP consultant came from that program, and honestly I don't know anybody who knows IP Telephony better than him.
Over 15 years ago I proposed to a number of universities what could best be described as an apprentice program. Our clients were interested but because there was no defined income stream to the university (they wanted us to pay them to allow us to teach their soon to be graduates) nobody bit. We have been sounding the alarm about Gen-X retiring for years, but nobody wants to hear it. Now a lot of my colleagues are starting to leave the sector or move out of the US to and scale down their hours. Covering their roles is going to be a struggle.
A shitload of people are being fired from the government, I imagine plenty of them would be worthwhile replacements. It's just that training takes time. I was working as the employee for a contractor in IT/infrastructure to a global giant up until a month ago.
My former co-workers talk to me regularly, they are getting screwed without me. Yet the company won't call me up because pride. They wanted me to come back as an independent contractor at a lower wage. I won't because pride. It's fun. I gotta get a job soon though.
Right now they are paying two people a bit more than half what I was getting and they are fucking shit up because there's no real training, let alone apprenticeship. Sink or swim.
I read a mini rant from someone here recently about how software shops all fired their elder mentor employees because they didn’t close enough tickets, and spent all their time growing others’ skills. Similar theme.
But there is one problem here. When people possess a rare skill, they often don’t want to pass it on to anyone else. Keeping the skill rare is how you keep it valuable. And young employees who acquire a skill somewhere will immediately put it on the open market to maximize their pay. So employers are reluctant to invest big in their training.
Is it the right thing for the world to have apprenticeships? Sure. Is it the right thing for employers to invest in them? Yes, but they don’t because they are short sighted but also because they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty. Is it the right thing for veterans with a certain skill to pass it on? Dubious, unless they have some guarantee that the apprentice will support them somehow in exchange.
Basically everyone acts in their self interest against the interests of the whole. And it’s not just employers doing so. It’s us too.
Co-ops and collectives can help bridge the gap between management interest and worker interest.
they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty.
In fairness, this is also down to companies having no loyalty to their employees. I would be more than happy to never have to go job hunting again, if career jobs, with appropriate incentives, were still a thing that actually exists. I am substantially less enthusiastic about the prospect of spending my entire working life dedicated to a single company that will not give me annual raises that beat inflation or any sort of pension as a reward for my loyalty, while my working conditions and benefits will likely deteriorate over time at the whims of a rotating group of petty tyrants in management, and the prospect of getting laid off because some dipshit in the C-suite implemented a terrible idea that anyone with the least amount of experience doing the actual work could have told them was doomed from the start and saved everyone suffering the consequences of their dumbass vanity project to pad their resume for when they pull the cord on their golden parachute and jump ship to sink another business.
I suspect a lot of people would be quite content at having the stability of such a position, if only the trade-offs weren't so terrible for them in pretty much every other way. The vague possibility of a farewell party at the end of 40+ years of work doesn't cut it.
One annoying thing I've noticed about certifications is that you have to get them for certain jobs but only use 20-30% of the subject matter you have to study in order to obtain them for the actual job...
Certifications are there to assure the employer that A) you know something B) you are able to be trained. The reason you use 20-30% is because few jobs on the planet require you to know everything. The certification assures that you are at least well read on whatever 20-30% is thrown your way.
Literally the only thing i really used on a regular basis from Sec+, is extremely basic PKI (private/public keys). I got it to meet 8570 requirements.
I learned far more useful skills on the job.
As a hiring manager, I don’t give a shit about certs. AWS certs, for example, serve primarily as marketing material and free money. Soft skill certs like agile methodology (of which I have several) are equally bullshit in that everything is a pattern not a prescription yet many people miss that and shoot their teams in the foot. There are some security certs I do value, such as CISSP, because they can be required for certain industries and actually do carry some gravitas. Even those, though, aren’t necessarily valuable for the things I actually need my security folks to do.
I’d say the market is maybe 30/70 split with folks like me and ATS or idiot hiring managers thinking your ability to memorize the specific GCP settings no one uses will actually make you understand why prod blew up. I refuse to get any; I actively support my team getting them as long as they know what they’re getting into.
I'm mildly horrified that Alexis Bertholf is viewed as the voice of tech on this issue
💯. Maximize your visibility not your capability.
Maybe young people will abandon internet like we are slowly abandoning newspapers, radio and television. It's just a matter of time when new generation will say they don't want to use tech and want to spend their time elsewhere and nobody will force them not to do it.
All of internet concept is based on belief that without using internet you are missing something. People are hypnotised on missing of the information or message. But does it really matter ? Can you really hypnotize young people that they will die without using internet ? That they will be stupid without using AI ? What if some generation during evolution process will develop anti internet gene. We are living organisms not robots.
100 years ago nobody would believe that you will earn a living by sitting in front of tv with a typewriter yet here we are.
This is an interesting idea, but the world is moving toward having everything digital. I imagine it being nearly impossible to live a life nearly entirely analog, and the youths only engage in what is strictly necessary, but can't abandon fully
All of internet concept is based on belief that without using internet you are missing something. People are hypnotised on missing of the information or message.
What?!
Can you really hypnotize young people that they will die without using internet ?
wat
Just wat
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I'm currently working with a team of a few seniors and the rest mid-levels. I've helped get a few juniors hired but they've buckled under the pressure after 6 months.
They studied development at school and did great with their classwork but perhaps they thought they knew a lot and ended up realizing that they barely scratched the surface.
Though not required to learn deeper aspects of development, having a team, partner or mentor goes a heck of a long way. It's like learning the piano. You can hit all the right notes but it doesn't mean you have musicality.
I'm also looking forward to working a couple of days a week, training and coaching young developers.