Any people who work in IT?

Since you have no prior IT work experience most likely your only option is to start off with help desk. If you like computers now you will hate them in 6 months and also the people who use them.

 

Agreed! LOL

Seriously.
Get your A+ and Network + as soon as possible
This will at least get your foot in the door.

IT seems more about CERTs than degrees
at least at the 'lower levels'
I think as you reach for management positions
they may start looking for degrees
but
then again you have one . . .
[i dunno that the major matters that much
like most management positions]

Rocket River

 

If you decide to start with a help desk job, corporate help desk would be far superior to commercial (outside) tech support. Customers will be more assho!es than fellow employees. There will be advantages to both small company support and large corporations. In a small company, you likely will be treated very nicely as people like to make friends with the tech guy for favors...as a limited resource, you will have the power to choose who you give the best support to. You also might be put into the positions of buying machines and coordinating outside contractors for stuff like server/switches/cabling installation and maintenance. Be very honest about what you can and can't do when hired. Do not give a false impression about network administration if you've never done it professionally.

The advantage of tech support at a big corporation is you can learn a lot. You have colleagues to learn from; you have various IT specializations to get exposure to; and they might even pay for training and certifications.

anyhoot, if you like it and it makes you feel good to solve computer problems for people who thank you, give it a try. Why not.

 

Also Corporate has clearer boundaries
Which you will find to be important.

Customers want you to do everything and then want to blame you for everything.
They are a bit .. . unrealistic and ungrateful
that can be frustrating and a definately cause of burn out
and job dissatisfaction

Rocket River

 

I was a college dropout with three years in psychology when I got into IT (I did go back and am about to finish with my BS in IT).

Volunteer at your local college for 10 hours a week for a few months. They'll put you to work formatting disks, imaging PCs and installing hardware. Work on your family and friend's PCs for free. Get your A+ to start.

A word on certs- don't over-reach. Get the simple stuff first. If you cram and brain dump and get a more complex certification like CCNA or MCSE, you won't understand it and won't be able to use it. It will essentially be a piece of paper.

Then move on to something hardware related. As others have said, big organizations are more forgiving than service companies that have many clients.

Help Desk can be wildly different things depending on the company. It can be something as mindless as resetting passwords and assigning tickets to technicians, or it can be remoting in and fixing everything you can before assigning it to a living person who has to make a site visit. So if you go that way, make sure to get an idea of what your job duties will be.

Remember, experience is king in IT. The more actual time you can put on your resume, the better it will look.

 

put some bull**** on your resume and go get yourself an IT job you worthless college graduate

 

My company has a few open entry level IT positions:

http://www.dyonyx.com/about-us/employment.aspx

I think typically people apply for the Service Desk Analyst - Level I position and work their way up to Network Engineer, Systems Analyst, Systems Engineer, and so forth. Depending on which route you want to go, you'd have to work on your certifications like Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and etc. A lot of IT employees I notice didn't actually major in it in college or go to college. Some people started out at ITT Tech or a call center and gained enough experience over time to negate education.

 

Couldn't have said it any better. I work in IT and hate it. Not all feel that way so it's best to try it out for yourself. As someone said before, the helpdesk position is usually where to start.

P.S
I hate ConnectWise.

 

Lulz. Just get a job, and you wont feel so bad. You've got to start some where. At least you have a degree. Most people would be willing to at least give you contract work with a degree, because if you don't pan out, they can just get rid of you without the hassle of cancelling benefits, etc.

 

I quit college a couple years in and started working in IT back in 1999. It's been good to me and I've been lucky in that I've been able to build up a lot of good experience. My first job in IT was putting asset tag stickers on computers, now I work for the biggest software company in the world. Just about everyone starts at the bottom, and experience is worth far more than a degree or certification. It's not an easy profession by any means, but if you enjoy figuring out complex problems and have good customer service, it can be a rewarding job. I don't regret my decision to leave school and go this route, but I would still like to finish my degree at some point.

 

getting your CCNA would be a good start if you don't want to get a degree. Employers respect those certifications as yobod said.

 

:grin:

 

Maybe a Business Analyst: get a CPM, SCRM Master or Agile Certification. I worked at a gas pipeline for nine years and did a boat load of end-user testing on project teams: the IT project managers usually weren't programmers themselves, they just learned the processes, did AFEs, budgeting and MS Project timelines.

 

Alot of what has been said in this tread is good solid info.

One thing I have not heard mentioned is Linux\Unix and Xen Server

If you know Linux well and can get a good handle on scripting you will be way ahead of the game.

With Internet Connection speeds going up and cost going down more and more companies are starting to move toward collocating there data into data centers or utilizing cloud technology.

The Back bone of those new technologies is Unix\linux and other hyper-visor platforms.

Know those well and you will be sitting pretty.

 

I'm a QA consultant without a CS related degree

I got an environmental sciences BS and bummed around for a few years before getting a real job. Come to think of it, I've probably spent more time on clutchfans than I did studying in my 5 years at college. Thanks dad for the tuition... Thanks Clutch for hosting an awesome place to hang out, and I mean it genuinely.

And by real job, I mean working at a video game company where my brother in law worked at. I had to start at the very bottom by testing the website and making 10/hr. It was similar pay to a more manual hardware QC jobs at Linksys I took on/off during summer.

You will see a lot of people who are in your situation at this level. Some are contractors who bounce around to use the money for rent and weed but get jaded at the mindnumbing repetition of doing tasks they normally did for fun. And the web side was stuffier than the game side. I joined because I wanted to know how to make a website.

I'd consider myself computer and internet savvy, so I was the workhorse after 3 or 4 months. Not because I knew any programming (I hated the AP C++ class I took in HS and transferred out), but rather all the hours I wasted surfing around, pranking people on AOL with proggies (yep), or looking for passwords and mp3s. Odd eh? My brother helped me out a lot in design, infrastructure, and CS knowledge. But I did my part by asking for more and more information. Why did this bug do this? What could've been different/better? Not your typical deal of reporting, firing, and forgetting. It helped that I thought I was gonna make a website.

So I started in the summer of 08, and fast forward 5 months and everybody gettin laid off in here. The web QA staff was reduced from 4 testers and 1 automation engineer to 2 testers. The game side was even more brutal, from 30 contractors to 5 contract-to-hire. It was a sore time as the company was still growing (not as expected though) and we eventually had 3 million registered users by the end of the year.

In those 3 years, there were highs and lows, and that job was not as easy as it looked. You have to be anal and process oriented. To really succeed you need to be curious and loud. Pick the devs brain even if the culture is you vs. them. Try to get a mentor like the lead. If you're bored, you're doing your job. If you're bored and not tired, then you're not doing your job. If you're still around after six months, then you might have the hunger and a degree of patience to do something more. Or you're just a moron who doesn't know any better or too afraid to take risks.

I didn't know which I was at the time.

6 months is the average burnout time for an entry level QA. Either you get sick of the app, tired of being underpaid/overworked/unappreciated, and/or you decide you can do something much better. I thought I was gonna get promoted after the year ended. I did by being a company hire. 10/hr w/ benefits, woo! It didn't help that I did more and likely knew more than the auto engineer that left. After all, I didn't know enough programming to justify the raise even if I was automating parts of the site. Needless to say, I was disgruntled as hell for a little bit, and when the lead left, she was replaced with some deadbeat who had a Senior QA title, which threw more gas on the fire. I was the unofficial "Lead", even after he got fired and even until I left.

I wanted to quit, but I didn't feel like working from the ground up again. I knew vital skills for my company's web app but without that degree or programming fluency, I had no secure leverage. I could bluff my way into a promotion, but it'd be stressful as hell and feeling might've been hurt at the end. But a year later, I got promoted to Associate QA Engineer. I took it as them taking a risk for me. I didn't even look for a different job. The coworkers were great, but don't let the envt. and aura fool you from the outside, game company management is ruthless.

At the time, I didn't think the salary was as high for what I did. I was pretty much the web QA department along with a coworker who got the $11 shaft. He was good, but I had to be better. I learned a lot of hats in that time, and I discovered I didn't really invest in programming as much as I anticipated. It's weird, I did so much, wrote scripts for automation suites, formed test plans and harnesses, certified weekly to biweekly releases for things like a co-sourced and subsequently, an entirely independent payment processor, different incremental features like promotion codes, throttling mechanisms, webservice APIs, flash, ajax, sql, server clustering, etc.

The position was great for learning. Cutting edge Web x.0 stuff, but the pay was crap. And I wasn't motivated enough to learn more programming either out of laziness or because I was drained at the end of the day. The job is a bunch of peaks and valleys. Crazy overtime for release day. Some recovery either the next or the emergency patch after. I had like a 100 releases in a two year time span. Sounds impressive, but if I once did 3 in a week, maybe it's not quality over quantity. If they were so butthurt about my performance, then they should've hired more people for a website that counted 10 million members. And they weren't on the surface.

When I finally bit the bullet to look for a job, I got extremely lucky landing my current employer. It took me 3-4 months with various interviews while I was working. I'd get replies, but I'd get rejected on the face to face for being green or not having that magical CS degree. When I found the company on Indeed.com of all places (googled "QA Austin jmeter selenium" the last two were test tools I knew), it took me a month during that job search to go through their process. Consulting is crazy. I've never worked so much in my life, but I actually love the experience and people.



To wrap it up (not really), experience is a golden ticket, but you really have to enjoy or find enjoyment in computing, geek ****, IT, etc... . If you feel entitled because you went through college, it's gonna hinder you more than help. I was always pissed for months on performance eval day. I felt like it was a betrayal from my company, then at my manager, who was a freaking director, who either didn't think I was useful enough or maybe didn't bother to brag about me to the people who held the money. None of the last two were even true, but appreciation with words meant jack when you're making by for 20k/year, company margins were great, and you're doing work that some companies sell for 80/year (me disgruntled and bitter? noooo). I wanted to them to make an exception for me for what I did when instead, I shouldn't have vested my pride and emotions in business. Part of it was because I felt like I had nothing else since I didn't earn as much as what I thought I could. Another was that the disappointment was compounded with the next big idea marketing pulls out of their ass and wants by the end of yesterday. The resentment was personal and it was also a cycle partly driven by our materialistic culture.

You can't be those OWS hipsters b****ing about their BA degrees but won't lift a finger for proactive civic involvement. If you can endure climbing from the bottom, it almost always builds faith and empowerment in yourself with the right attitude (it's really everything). I didn't think I was worth that much my 2nd year, but the learning opportunity was great, so I treated it like a piggy bank. I also knew that bouncing around jobs would've hindered a real career path than getting that quick 15/hr raise. The easy out is the temptation you have to beat.

And maybe you can accelerate the process by taking programming/cert classes. Certs are nice for padding HR quotas, but experience will lead you to jobs you think you'll enjoy. And to break that catch-22, you have to overperform to the point where they get more than their money's worth for you. It's not always about working hard (though giving the appearance doesn't hurt).

Just to brag a little more in this bible of a post, when I left, they hired two people and pulled in another to replace me.

 

Make sure you really like IT because you have to keep on learning new technologies to keep up. And if you don't like it, it's going to be a real chore.
Start at the Help Desk level. Everyone does it and there is really not many ways around that unless you get lucky. At some point you'll have to choose systems or networking or some such. Choose networking if you want to make more money. lol

 

I graduated computer science in 1999. During the dot com boom there were thousands of job opportunities for me. I started out as a junior programmer making 47k per year (which I thought was a lot of money, lol). I worked that job for 3 years, topped out at 52k, then transitioned into a new position doing application support for a specialized off the shelf software. I got certified, became an expert on this niche software and I was making about 90k for 5 years.

I can tell you this, sitting in a cubicle all day around other computer dorks and daily office space references, I was ready to commit suicide. The thing that sucks is that you have to support people who don't know much about software or computers so you get help desk tickets, phone calls, long winded emails all throughout the day. Another ****ty thing is that you depend on so many other people. Data base analysts, network security guys, change control managers, programmers, etc... each has their own role and they have passwords that you don't have. You need them to do your job. Approaching these people, working with them, and trying to socialize with these drones is painful - if you are a normal human. And middle managers who want status reports of what you did that week every Friday. Ew.

I eventually left this world in 2008 and started doing my own thing with internet marketing and selling digital products. I made a pretty decent salary but not quite what I was making in the corporate cubicle IT world and I didn't have any benefits - but I was much happier. Then in 2009, I got a call from someone who needed my specialized niche application support skill and I told them that I didn't want to go back to the corporate world - they then offered me $75 per hour and full benefits ($75 per hour comes out to almost $160k per year at 40 hrs per week). This job was also in san francisco (my fav city) and I caved in and chased the money.

Holy **** I was back in corporate hell, working with the same IT drones, too many star trek comments, red stapler remarks, change control meetings and dilbert hell. I did it for about 6 months strictly for the money, but I eventually freaked out and left and I went back to my internet marketing and working for myself (which took off). I told my family and friends that I'd rather be homeless than to work in IT cubicle hell and there was no amount of money I would accept to go back to that world. It wasn't for me bro and I wasted a lot of my life doing it, if it is for you and you really love it, go for it, but that's my story.

 

lol, im sure most people would kill to get a "call" like that.