Last job killed my love of IT, management beat it out of me. Wonderful company, demotivated by my manager from the first week. Couldn't be a nicer guy, smartest tech I've ever met, Peter Principled his was into management.
Never been paid that much, took about every Friday off on PTO, total WFH, can't say what my benefits cost but it wasn't $100/mo. in total. My last job was half the pay and benefits, was so much happier. I think of that every time I read a comment about why companies need to pay more to satisfy us. Everyone should have a look at this. Had ALL that at my penultimate job, NONE at the most recent.
I feel so weird, especially at this time of life with a solid resume, interviewing for PT work at Lowe's. Thinking I'll be happier than a pig in shit spending 4 hours a day, just walking around helping people, doing what ever bullshit I'm asked to do. Looking to see how it goes, see if there are ways to work myself up to FT, better schedule, supervisor, whatever.
Thought about "retiring" to work in a hardware store to keep busy and fit, but not for a decade+. Excepting my credit card bills, and what my wife sends home to the Philippines, she makes enough to cover everything. Won't take much to take the edge off.
I love hardware and tools and plants, about everything they sell. Hoping to learn a lot as well. Helping people is really satisfying to me, and I'm excellent at handling customers. LOL, I'm best with the angry ones, sometimes get them apologizing. :)
Need a sanity check, am I losing it!? Been through the worst depression of my life the past few years, hoping this will break me back into a normal state of mind.
EDIT: Got the job! Holy shit, the assistant manager is just like me! Dropped out of tech to take a minimum wage job at Lowe's 8 years ago, now he's at $90K. We've even done much of the same work in the IT space. "I did DSL for Bellsouth when it was new!" "Yep, did my time as a cable internet guy."
Seems to be a lot of space and opportunity to move up. I'm going to knock this out the fucking park!
BONUS: Clerk at the shady gas station overhead me telling my neighbor about quitting IT and getting hired today. Guy ask me what I did in IT, gave him a run down. "Yeah. I was a web dev for 20-years, couldn't take staring at a screen any more."
Dude, if you're happy and can survive, you made the right move.
Working in IT has me questioning my entire existence. In many ways, I envy you.
As someone who just got his A+ certification and is looking for his first job in IT, why do/did you feel this way?
I am doing a career switch from marketing/SEO which was…! Manipulating everything for people to sell shit and my job is beholden to whatever the FUCK Google wants to do today? No thanks!
It depends A LOT what kind of IT career you do. If you are a sysadmin with a shitty manager/company you'll hate it. If you do helpdesk you'll hate the whole human race.
But you can become devops, SRE, cloud engineer, architect, so you get all the fun at tinkering without the bullshit (most of the time, no job is perfect).
Well, I’ll have to start out in help desk but I’ve done CS as a temp job before and it was kind of fun. I don’t want to do help desk forever though, and I understand just how DUMB some people can be. Like, wow… 🤣
I dunno, I’m excited to get started in it and I don’t know what I want to specialize in yet.
If you enjoy tech, keep going for it. There's nothing inherently shitty about the work, at any level, and it pays. As with any career, we sometimes burn out.
Thank you! I think it’s a career right up my alley and I’m excited to land my first gig - hopefully in the next couple of months.
I worked in email marketing for JP Morgan for a few years. Most miserable job I ever had. All work from home and super short hours but I couldn't live with all the information manipulation that was going on. It's ridiculous how much personal info people give up online without even realizing it and that was 10 years ago. I can only imagine how bad it is now.
Yeah, I’m sure on the email side it’s ridiculous!
My experience is that ITs role is to manage organizational liability, not helping people. Perhaps i am naive, but i wanted a job in tech so that i could help support other people in doing amazing work. You do get to do that, but it needs to be constantly framed from that point of organizational liability in order to effect any change. Different orgs have different risk appetites and cultures that make that change easier or harder.
tbh i would still start a carrer in tech, i do not want to dissuade you from such. For me i was better able to navigate the day to day bullshit after i learned what they are actually paying me for vs the dream i had in my head.
That depends on what you do.
My job is mainly to keep things rolling and improve them, but also support to a certain degree.
Our support team's job is obviously to help people.
Not much of what we do is motivated by liability. But I work in the public(ish) sector.
Thank you for that info. I’ll keep it in mind. I’ve worked for various corporations for over 20 years, so I know they all are about self preservation.
Well at least now you can work in a hands-on environment and hopefully use your marketing skills to manipulate your management chain into doing what's right for you or the company.
That’s what I’m excited to do is hands-on stuff. I’ve built my own PC and have sort of torn my wife’s Mac apart when troubleshooting a heating issue. Doing things with the CLI or remoting in will be cool too!