15 Jun
2013
15 Jun
'13
7:01 p.m.
On 16 June 2013 00:32, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
Umm.
I'm sorry you're going through that. I wish you better luck in the
future. (seriously)
You could come here, but you might value freedom and privacy, which we
don't really "do" anymore.
It's been the case since the beginning of the credit crunch. Almost
all the IT journos I know personally are out of work; a few hang on
doing forum moderation or writing for ?10/article.
As for techies, well, things are slightly better than they were 2-3Y
ago. Around 2009-2010, pretty much everyone I knew was out of work
except the actual genius-level guys or the handful who hang on in the
City (UK-speak for "Wall St.") Now, I guess only about half to
two-thirds of the IT people I know are out of work; basically, only
the young, the very keen, the very talented, or those who are still in
positions that are >5Y old, indeed, 10+Y old, are still employed.
/Good/ Linux & FOSS techies are OK. Windows people are fungible and
disposable now. Sadly, I am mainly a Windows guy, with sidelines in
Mac and Linux, but I'm not a specialist. I don't know Perl or any
other scripting language, I don't do regular expressions, I'm not a
programmer or a devop -- primarily, I was a desktop support guy. I'm
good at that, but that business is more or less a minimum-wage
helldesk job now, staffed mainly from remote places, via call queues,
under immense pressure. I've done a bit of it; it's /horrid./ I was a
2nd/3rd level desktop support guy, but you can't get into those roles
now without multiple MSCEs etc., which I don't have and can't afford
to do.
Anyway, I'm tired of "reskilling". I've been doing it for 25Y. I
started on VAX-VMS and CP/M and have switched to new OSes & new sets
of apps about 15 times now. I'm sick of it. Problems that were sorted
and had gone away are re-appearing, together with vast realms of new
complexity, coupled with an attitude of "if it works, leave it", "if
it doesn't work, reimage it or deploy a new VM and hope for the best".
There's little real deep troubleshooting any more and nobody has the
breadth of coverage I used to do. It's all nuke and reload from orbit.
If that doesn't work, give it more RAM or wait for a new version.
Enough. Screw IT. Bored now, as "Bad Willow" said.
I'm currently waiting to hear about a technical-writer position in
Berlin in Germany and if that fails I've applied for English-teaching
positions in both England and Japan.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884