That getting a job in IT around here is like winning the lottery, you've got to be in it to win it as they say.... I am seeing lots of jobs posted for "post graduate" type people.... or basically people fresh out of University who have no experience and are willing to work for a pittance to pay off their student loan... on the flip side this means that employers simply aren't willing to pay more for experienced IT professionals... probably because of the recent economic down turn, but you get what you pay for I guess and that's all they are willing to pay for, so there isn't a lot that can be done about that.....I've worked with quite a few post graduate students who got their degree in computer science or a similar discipline and to be quite honest in most cases their qualification wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Probably the most shocking example of this was a freshly graduated student who didn't know what DHCP was or how TCP/IP worked.... not a clue. He knew what it was but just didn't know how it worked, "it didn't go into that kind of detail on my course" .... he said, he didn't even know that every network adapter had a unique MAC address.....
But the funniest was when he was asked if he had ever configured anything SCSI and he said "Yeah I once had to repair a laptop which had sticky coffee spilt in it" ... which I guess is only funny if you know how SCSI is pronounced in geek speak......which begs the question what exactly are they teaching students at University ???
I'm honestly beginning to believe that I am rapidly becoming one of the silver technicians, the ones who were there at the very beginning of the computer boom back in the early 1980's, the ones who can remember when computers had black or green screens and you communicated with it either via a Unix dollar prompt or the good old C:\> (if you were lucky enough to have a hard disk instead of floppy drives).... or further back still with the CPM prompt .....anybody remember PIP ?????
In other words the days when it was cost effective to have your hard disk controller repaired because a new one would cost roughly what you pay for a new computer these days....and the ONLY way to format the hard disk was to enter the Debug command in DOS and then G=C800:C to execute the bios code which ran the format .......but better than that you could ACTUALLY repair it with a soldering iron and a replacement integrated circuit...
And when you had pixel drop out on the the screen it was because you had a failing RAM chip on your graphics card and by noting where the pixel drop out was on the screen you could work out which RAM chip it was that was failing.... and you confirmed it by spraying the chip with Freon to freeze it and make it work temporarily.... You know the days when the IBM AT(X) computer would set you back at least £5,000 (for one).... Furthermore if you wanted to add number crunching to your personal computer you had to add a Math Co-processor called a 80387 or 80287 which you could fry an egg on when running at full tilt.......
I actually cut my digital teeth at Control Data Institute on a 38 week course shortly after leaving the Royal Corps of Signals......the climax of which was building a digital traffic light controller from scratch.... just a circuit diagram and a circuit board which I had to etch and drill myself.... after which it was programmed via switches using machine code by hand directly into the Z80A CPU not a high level GUI programming language and a compiler... each and every bit had to be set perfectly with over 17,500 separate instructions to get the traffic lights to sequence correctly....one mistake and you had to start all over again..... I passed the course and it grounded me in digital and analogue electronics....although I did find the course fairly easy because I did have a head start in electronics because I had been repairing TV's in my bedroom from the age of about 12 years old.
I could run rings around all of the current and new wave of IT professionals, and probably other IT professionals of my age would say the same......I actually understand what is going on under the bonnet of a computer.... the new blood flooding the market and driving the wages down are simply a gaggle of button pushing Microsoft Certified swap out monkeys.... Bitter me ? Nah .... Just twisted.....
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