At one time anyone with real experience in this field was considered a golden goose by employers. Information Technology professionals were treated with respect as both individuals and for the knowledge they brought to the table, but fast forward ten years and many companies see you as just another body in a sea of bodies to fill a seat.
Statistically, the field is growing here in America, but realistically, it is shrinking. The main reason is because companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Hewlett Packard outsource most of their work to countries like India and the Phillipines, and as we all know from dealing with tech support in these countries, these people don't know shit about technology. It's cheap labor, and all of them (companies) are doing it, so they don't have to worry that a customer will go somewhere else for their products because in large part, there is no where else to go.
Another issue is automation. Microsoft is always opening up new data centers to handle it's Internet traffic, but they have become so good at it that a medium sized data center (by Microsoft's standards) employs approximately sixty people and over half that number are dedicated to building security (as in security guards, not I.T. security).
Yet another issue is that America has fallen behind in the technology sector due in large part to capitalism and America's unwillingness to demand more speed, more reliability, and better technical support for our products. Our Internet is down for several hours, and we simply sigh, accept it, and find something else to do in the mean time. We call Technical Support and get no help, so we either deal with the issue on our own or gripe about it on some forum that nobody from the companies we buy our products from reads or cares about.
President Obama, God Bless him, promised a major infusion of cash to bring broadband to everyone across the country. He promised us a billion dollars and thousands if not tens of thousands of new Information Technology jobs, and to date he has delivered on only a fraction of that (one to three million dollars, which is nothing, really).
Until we force these companies to stop outsourcing our jobs to other countries, and until we start investing heavily in our own infrastructure again; working as a Information Technology professional is not worth the time or the money we spend to gain the knowledge it takes to do the job.
If you want a decent living wage, job security, and good benefits, seek a career in the health care industry and force the government to stop giving out work visas to immigrants before that field is ruined for Americans as well.
Save your Information Technology cravings for diagnosing why your gaming rig has suddenly just crashed and you can't play World of Warcraft.
Note:
I rag on Apple and it's legion of ignorant end users all the time, but their technical support is quite good compared to Dell, Hewlett Packard, and the others. That's not to say it is great, because it's not. But it is better than what's being offered by most companies. The reason for this is because it has to be. Nobody in the field wants to waste their time paying for over priced machines, going through the hell of finding classes within an 8 hour driving distance, and paying the big bucks to become Mac Certified only to make pretty much what they already do because in the business world Mac's are in large part, unknown. Apple knows this and has compensated for it by investing heavily in it's own tech support infrastructure.
Case in point: My employer recently tried to get us Mac training, but they could not find a trainer within a day's drive and so gave up looking. (not that they looked very hard, because they really don't care if we are trained on Apple products.
Quick Buy Tip
if you can't afford a Solid State Disk drive to speed up notebook or netbook, try this alternative.
The best way to speed up performance on your computer is to install a Solid State Disk drive. The main bottleneck in our systems these days is that 30 year old technology called a Hard Disk Drive. They are slow, but they are cheap and reliable. The issue with SSD drives is that while they are super fast, they are also expensive and the technology is still a bit buggy.
Enter into the fray, the Seagate Momentus XT. A hybrid drive (and believe me this is not a new concept) that uses some NAND memory (about 4 gigabytes right now) and a standard mechanical drive to help speed up essential processes like booting the O.S. and opening your most used programs. You won't get the speed of an SSD, but you can purchase a 500 gigabyte drive for under $115.00 at the time of this writing and it comes with a 5 year warranty.
Seagate advertises as much as an 83% increase in speed over standard 7200 RPM drives, but real world tests show more along the lines of a 50% increase in O.S. boot times, and for other tasks such as copying files or ripping DVDs there is no speed increase at all. Still, if you can save a minute or two off of your boot times, isn't it worth it? I think so.
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