IT crushes dreams

IT crushes dreams, grinds it to bits, burns it to dust and then takes a dump on it. It's not surprising to see IT's regarded as one of the most stressful careers in North America. Every years thousands of Americans waste best years of their lives learning the trade, all in hope of a stable and safe career. They spend endless hours behind computers, tweaking settings and trial'n erroring random tricks just to make it work. After all the router juggling and RAM installing, when a hire-able level of ITness is reached, they move from college labs to company cubicles. Here begins an exciting journey of more sitting, tweaking, installing, juggling and trial'n erroring. However this time around their work is no longer like the assignments they got in school. It no longer consist of company x wanting to set up an extensive network of computers, servers, printer, scanner and other office worthy gadgets. But instead it's endless hours of sitting around waiting for the dumb secretary up front to forget her password or the old fart up in management wanting to go over why he shouldn't download “The Cool Aquarium Screen Saver” he got in his email... for the 500th time. The complexity and challenge of IT work diminishes as days go by. Dumb secretaries finally learn how to remember a password and the old fart management guys give up on their computers all together. What you're left with is your life withering away in front of a computer. Arguing why IT budgets should not be cut becomes your only ever improving skill. You can no longer carry a conversation with a woman cause it's a fact that IT workers never get ass and have to resort to Japanese anime for any form of female interaction (maybe not even that). You also can never get over the fact that being in IT does not have the “panty-dropping” feel that comes with being a software engineers. Something you could have been, and probably would have been great at it too.

Which brings me to my other point. If your company is blessed by an engineering division you're worse off. Although the idea that working with engineers results in less argument and headache might seem natural the opposite becomes your reality. These self righteous group of tinker-heads tend to look down upon anyone who didn't spend half a semester in college designing hammers. They refuse to accept that they're mortals and prone to mistakes and god forbids if someone knows something that they don't. They sit behind computers thinking “I'm an engineer, I can do no wrong , check out this email I'm going to send, I'll make sure I'll send it to everyone on the network, I will load it up with pictures of my friends wedding, 114 megabytes? That doesn't sound like a lot. Send.” Then you see your Friday night change from going out with friends to sitting in your cubical and cleaning mess up. One thing engineers are great at is standing behind you and breathing down your neck while you try and remove the virus they unleashed on their computers. Huffin, puffin, and making snarky comments like “well the virus scan YOU installed on the computers should have detected it.” or “ we spend so much on IT every year, how can YOU guys let something like this happen?” Life is great.

Then it hits you, somewhere between the time you're banging your head against a wall or grinding your teeth, that you should have listened to your wise and brilliant friend. He warned you of the black hole that is IT. He told you “ Armen, IT work crushes dreams, stay way”. Now he owns a multi-million dollar software development company and you're stuck installing RAM. He spends nights with his many girlfriends on his 11 million dollar yacht, looping around the Caribbeans while you spend your nights rebooting servers and mopping the floor. IT work crushes dreams, stay away.

-Reza Shirazian