| Topic Name: |
Considering a career in IT Part 1 |
| Message Name: |
Considering a career in IT Part 1 |
| Date Posted: |
01/26/2002 |
| Message: |
Hi,
I'm a senior in high school and I'm trying to decide what to do after college.
My first choice career is to be a programmer but after doing all the research I could,
it's starting to sound a lousy career. What follows is my observations about the industry and I was hoping
some people here could tell me if there correct or not:
My plan was to be some sort of contracting programmer. From doing research on the web, it seemed like this would be a great career as there were lots of Java contractors who were earning in excess of $90 an hour. Further research revealed that these contractors do well in good times but did a lot worse than salaried programmers in bad economic times. (I remember reading on some message board about a guy who was a contracting programmer earning $200,000 a year and spent a lot of his earnings. The market for his skill set dried up in his area and he didn't find work for 11 months and was looking for work as a waiter or something.)
It seems contractors usually aren't able to work all year and when you take into account the lack of benefits, they aren't making much more than salaried employees. The fact that contract rates can fluctuate drastically makes me think twice about that kind of career. I figured I would just pick up several skills that could each pull over $70 an hour to make sure I was always employed, but now I don't see how that would work as it would mean I would be acquiring experience in each skill very slowly if I devoted equal time to using each one professionally so I wouldn't be able to command high rates for each skill in the first place. Then theres the question of what I would do after I hit 40 or so and was no longer an appealing candidate for programming work.
I figured I would just try and become a consultant at that point. But my research seems to suggest that all consultants spend all their time travelling all over the place and working insane hours forever which doesn't appeal to me. So, my new plan is to consider being a contractor as a sun certified enterprise java architect. As far as I can tell this is the ultimate Java cert. (though I could be wrong on this) Problem is I can't find any data on the earning prospects for an SCEJA. It would require a great deal of work on my part to get my skill set to the point where I could pass the trio of exams to get the cert so I would want to be sure its worth the effort. So, what kinds of contract rates could I probably get today if I had several years experience as an SCEJA? How about as a salaried employee? And what kind of hours would I probably have to put in if I held that sort of position?
Like contracting, being a salaried programmer sounded nice at first too. However, it seems that in order to be one, you have to spend much of your free time - for your whole career- learning a ridiculous amount of never ending programming languages and what not, for only slightly above average pay for a professional career. Throw in the fact that quite a few programmers work between 50-60 hours a week for no overtime pay and that if they don't work for a company where they can land a management position by the time there 40 or so they can't find any IT work and it doesn't look like much of a life. (continued in part 2)
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