Is corporate America so bad?

[multi-vitamin]

Hi All,

I'm currently working a dead-end job, and needing to make a change.  I earn $45K a year at my current job -- no chance of getting a raise or a promotion, as I'm the the number 3 person in the organization, and the top two are not going anywhere.  Anyway, this job adds nothing to my resume, and I'm not increasing my skills, or learning anything.  I hate going to work now.  The boss is incompetent, and doesn't treat the staff with respect. 

  My work hours are nights and weekends, so I am taking classes at a state university to become an accountant/CPA.   Ultimately, this means I will enter the dreaded-corporate world!? 

What makes the corporate world so bad?
I have also been thinking about going to an 18 month program at a local community college to become an Information Technology professional.  Any thoughts or advice would be much appreciated. 

I guess I should mention that I am a single, 28 year old male with no dependents.

Thanks

[Eric]

Depends on what you mean.  Personally, when I think of the corporate world, at least the dreaded corporate world, I think of a huge company where I'd just be another cog in the machine and I could pass any number of bosses in the hall during the day and none of them would know my name. 

I'm not a CPA but do accounting work.  My current company is about 15 people.  The biggest company I've ever worked for was 125, but our accounting department had 3 people.  But of course, these companies are incorporated too, so that makes them the corporate world?  There's nothing wrong with big companies if you like a specialized role, or you can search out smaller companies if you like a more generalized role.  And of course there's accounting work in every city in America so you're free to move around if need be.  It can be boring, but like most jobs, your co-workers and boss matter a lot.

[firewalker]

In corporation jobs you have even less say in a matter than you do now. You have an idea or complaint?: It will go no higher than your immediate supervisor. Direction will come from several levels above who have no actual concept of what you do or how long it takes. You are subjected to repeated pointless meetings. You must report what you did, and then report that you reported. Then explain why you didnt do enough fast enough to someone who doesnt understand what you do but doesnt have to admit it. Thats a start. Anyone else?

[Dimitri]

Nothing is necessarily wrong with the corporate world.  Any job is what you make of it.  Looking back I would say the most joyful job I've ever held was for the late Prudential Securities.  At the time quite a large firm.  And an absolutely wonderful place to work.  Being a salaryman can be a very rewarding career.  Personally I would pursue the CPA if I was in your position.

[multi-vitamin]

@Cathy:  I have a few friends who are in the IT business, and they had to take very low paying jobs to get there foot in the door somewhere.  No one wanted to hire them unless they had experience -- An annoying catch 22.

@firewalker: my current situation entails a boss who doesn't want to hear opinions. It's like my coworkers and I are children to the boss, and we dare not speak unless spoken to.  So, I guess it can't get any worse!

The CPA career interests me, as if I ever get tired with corporate America, then I can go work part-time doing taxes 4 months a year -- after my stash has grown considerably of course.

[eil]

My sister got an accounting degree and was hired by the department of defense right out of college. Now she travels the world on the government's dime, implementing various programs and giving briefings to military generals. She's now stationed on the outskirts of a city in a beautiful European country.

Can you tell I'm a little jealous?

IT is a great field to get into because there's a lot of demand for it. But there's also a lot of people entering it right now, which means the salary isn't particularly stellar unless you either go to work for a large corporation with a business casual dress code or become a rockstar with a large social network and get to choose from multiple job offers at any given time.

As of this very moment the big money is in software engineering. But I predict (perhaps cynically) that over the next 4-8 years we'll see a glut of programmers in a saturated market thanks in large part to the "let's teach every citizen how to code" campaigns from politicians and educators recently. A similar thing happened to nursing in the 90's, and then the legal field in the 2000's. And let's not get into how easily programming can be outsourced to educated workers in developing countries...

Anyhow, the best advice I have regardless of field is that if you like your work but don't like your job, then just go somewhere else. Really. People love to stigmatize job-hoppers as disloyal or impulsive but that's only because they're either in management or are too afraid to do it themselves. I'm 35 and I've been at my current job for four years. This is the longest I've been at any job because I've finally found an employer that both pays well and treats me well. Unfortunately, it does mean that I'm getting a late start on my early retirement but that's just how things have shaken out.

[Luck12]

My own personal situation is really good with low stress, high pay, general autonomy, short commute, but I think I'm one of the lucky ones.  For most, it's not nearly that good.  You basically have a bunch of higher ups telling you what to do and that they need it done by some unrealistic deadline.  Then, you might have asshole clients.  Further, many of your co-workers will be the dumbass Spendaholic types, but unfortunately you have to be somewhat fake lest you be though of as "not a team player".  Ditto for any corporate gatherings (if you don't go, it can look bad)  Of course, being a "team player" also means taking it up the you know what and never pushing back on unrealistic demands.     

[SnackDog]

It kind of depends on the corporation and the job.  Google is a corporation, but I understand the working conditions are fairly good aside from stress to turn cool ideas into revenue at some point.  Same goes for Whole Foods, although the great majority of the jobs there are fairly unskilled (but also very low stress).  I work at a Fortune 20 corporation with more than 50,000 employees that is pretty old-school, but democratically run.  I know the CEO and about half the executive staff. They answer emails from anyone and are pretty transparent about how the operation works.

I would second the thoughts above that IT can be a pretty dreary pursuit.  It is an increasingly outsourced corporate function with an emphasis on minimizing cost for basic service. Only a small fraction of the IT staff get to pursue cool new corporate solutions to business needs, many of which seem to revolve around clouds, data mining and mobile access.

Accounting is fun if you find it fun.  Attention to detail and an affinity for coma-inducing reams of figures is required.  Businesses run on finance, at the end of the day, so financial wizards can have fun and create a great deal of value.  Or just count beans.

[RyanAtTanagra]

I would second the thoughts above that IT can be a pretty dreary pursuit.

Agreed, don't go into IT unless you already live and breath it as a hobby, or you're going to hate it right out of the gate.

If you do go for it, I agree that certifications do not meaning anything.  I don't think I've ever considered certifications on an applicants resume.  They're too easy to get and tend to be flashed by those with no actual experience, so it kind of has the opposite effect of what you want.  A degree means something for entry level, but beyond that I don't even care about the degree.  I just interviewed a guy yesterday that had 15 years of good IT experience and no degree and I congratulated him and told him that was awesome.  He said I'm the first person to see it that way, though.

If you want to go to school and you want to get into IT, then go to school for IT.  Otherwise I'm not sure I'd distract myself.  My degree is in accounting but I worked my way through school in IT and by the time I graduated I would have had to take a step back in pay to use my degree, so other than one job I had at a smaller company where I did dual duties I haven't used my degree.  Whereas a buddy of mine that started in IT about the same time as me but didn't waste time going to school got ahead of me.  We do pretty much the exact same thing now, but I've never caught up to him in pay.

You can get into IT without education, like others have said, depending on what you're interested in.  Sys admin?  Get a spare computer, install windows server or linux, get a domain name and point it towards your home IP and build a website and start running your own mail server and dns.  After that's going build a database backend for the website.  Can be anything, wordpress, etc.  You now have the big 4 on your resume.  In Linux those being Apache, Postfix/Sendmail, MySQL and Bind.  MS has their equivalents.  Or for a bonus line item forget the spare computer and do it all on Amazon and you can add AWS to your resume.  You're not going to get a 6-figure job after that but you'll squeeze your foot into a door.

Want to be a coder?  I'm not one, but from what I've seen that's even easier to self-start, there are so many resources out there.  One of the junior devs we hired at work last year got the job because he had some decent self-driven projects.  He had no work experience, this is his first.

Yes you will probably have to start at the bottom but if you live and breath IT you will learn quickly and move up.  I started in tech support which is a common, albeit shitty, first step.  But you do have to really enjoy IT.

Accounting is fun if you find it fun.  Attention to detail and an affinity for coma-inducing reams of figures is required.  Businesses run on finance, at the end of the day, so financial wizards can have fun and create a great deal of value.  Or just count beans.

I'm one of those weird people that loves numbers and accounting.  If you want to do accounting because you enjoy it, then ignore IT and everything I said above.  Since you work nights and weekends you will have an easier time getting an internship during normal business hours.  Don't waste time in IT to the detriment of gaining accounting experience, like I did.

As to your question about corporate jobs, I prefer small companies as they tend to have less red tape and more varied days, but in every job I've ever had by far the #1 most important thing is coworkers and my supervisor, and those can be good or bad at any size company, so that's not at top of the list of things I care about in a job, personally.  But like others have said, just because you're a CPA doesn't mean you have to go work for the Big 3 (is it still 3?).

[Sibley]

CPA here. If you're going to go the accounting route, there's a fairly clear path at the beginning.

Bachelor's degree (eligible for CPA exam) - split between public and private accounting. Public = audit, tax, the Big 4, etc. Private = everything else, including internal audit. CPA firm experience will help you get a job at companies.

Accounting education, but not eligible for CPA exam - probably only private accounting, though if you're smart you might be able to get around that.

FYI, if you don't like accounting, you can be seriously miserable.

Once you've got some experience, you can go pretty much any direction. Its really flexible, and I know older accountants who have ended up in some crazy places career wise.

I'm currently in my first corporate job. I do not want to be management at my current company - I don't want to deal with the politics. 25k people total.

[darkadams00]

IT vs Accounting--Two different areas entirely, each with its own areas of heaven and hell. It sounds like you need to do more self-examination to determine what would make you want to go to work. Simple IT certifications are rarely worth their paper unless explicitly expected by an employer you're already working for and they pay for any classes you need to learn something new for a future lateral or upward move. An  accounting degree will do nothing to further the career of the typical IT/computer science-related employee. The exception would be folks who plan to start their own IT consulting, sales, or repair shop. Such people need both technical and financial acumen, and the usual split between these skills means that the accounting/financial piece of the business is the one that is outsourced.

IT can range from simple account setups, help desk, and tech support tasks to more involved installation, maintenance, and support of hardware, networks, software, and hosting environments and on to system architecture design and software development. If none of those roles (or similar ones you could find on an IT blog) resonate with you, then IT would become your daily dose of hell.

Similarly, accounting ranges from regimented tasks in a large corporate accounting department, tax preparation at all levels, consulting/accounting in an accounting firm, managing the finances of a small to medium size business to hanging your own shingle for small business accounting. If you aren't ready for a corporate accounting department, then you need to be ready to work with clients. The corporate world lends itself to politics. The client world lends lets you meet a fair mix of business leaders and idiots.

At the end of the day, choose what you want to do on the basis of your personality, strengths, and interests. Your current job will pay your bills. An IT job will pay your bills. An accounting job will pay your bills. But if you hate the significant portion of your waking hours, then a simple slide up or down the income scale will mean very little after the first year or two.

I work in a company with more than 10,000 employees around the world. I just happened to get a job in a start-up division of fewer than 50 that has since grown to over 500. My group in that division began with 6 employees, and now we have about 90. So I get a bit of both worlds--intellectual freedom, project flexibility, eccentric personalities, office politics, frustrating clients, too many meetings, occasional travel, easy weeks bookended by brutal deadline periods. But I love every week--not every day and certainly not every minute. By Friday, I usually look back and enjoy a bit of accomplishment. Why? I love my job. It pays less than some and more than others on this forum. I don't care. Hopefully you'll find that place as well.

[GetItRight]

I'll add another vote for avoiding training classes or college for IT. Having been in hiring positions for IT jobs I look for experience (either professional or hobby/side gigs) and clear logical thinking and problem solving skills. I consider degrees and certifications a mark against any candidates with little or no experience. If you have no experience and a mile long list of certifications I want nothing to do with you. I've been to college and know the drill, dumbest common denominator and all, braindump a few tests and try to fast talk your way into a job where you do little and sap all the time of the rest of the team with hand holding. I've seen so many people in this field who just want to be handed the answers and not have to think, but on paper they appear well qualified to the untrained eye.

If you have 10 years of experience (doing more than entry level jobs) and have a degree and maybe a few certs or have done some training on specific products to keep current that is fine. If you have a bit of experience either entry level or your own hobbies, no credentials, and show logical thinking I see potential that I can train and advance. Don't get into IT unless you have had an interest in computers, technology, software, networks, etc. for a while and have taught yourself. You need to be able to teach yourself and work through problems you've never seen before.

[2527]

I have trouble imaging a reasonably skillful accountant with reasonable social skills, work skills, and expectations having a bad time. 

[Iron Mike Sharpe]

In corporation jobs you have even less say in a matter than you do now. You have an idea or complaint?: It will go no higher than your immediate supervisor. Direction will come from several levels above who have no actual concept of what you do or how long it takes. You are subjected to repeated pointless meetings. You must report what you did, and then report that you reported. Then explain why you didnt do enough fast enough to someone who doesnt understand what you do but doesnt have to admit it. Thats a start. Anyone else?

THIS ^^

Plus, annual reviews seems to be completely arbitrary.  I've found my output matters less and less and just being a positive "yes man" gets me better reviews.  I can pretty much just slack off all year, but as long as I praise the company's direction in meetings and around supervisors, I will get good marks.

Also, management changes happen about 24 months.  I don't even bother to pay attention to who the people are two levels above me anymore.  They'll be gone in 2 years or less.  Why learn their names?

I hate all of the corporate talk, and all of the acronyms and naming projects with code names that are just misspelled versions of other words.

[GuitarStv]

Ahhh   . . . . the corporate world.  I have a story that encapsulates what it's like working in a big corporation:

My division is typically a cash cow for our company.  Year after year we post reasonable returns and continue to sign contracts to ensure future work.  We've never lead the company in revenue, but we've never been in the red (or even close to it).  About four years ago we had a guy come in who decided to really shake up our division to make us the most efficient area of the oppressive corporate conglomerate.  He decreed 15% budget cuts across the board and called this a fancy buzzword.  So, every one of the dozens of projects that we're working on was estimated as usual, then given a 15% budget cut and a hiring freeze across our division.  It looked great the first year, and the guy in charge got a lot of accolades and (I can only assume) a huge bonus.  The next year he left the company.

Now, our projects typically take 3-5 years to complete.  By the third year after the budget cuts, we started to have major problems delivering on time.  Long time clients were getting pissed off at our unresponsiveness.  All departments in our company were reporting that they were over budget, and were badly understaffed.  We had to do a division wide hiring frenzy that year because people were short staffed and leaving due to stress.  Most shockingly to management, it seems that we finally ended up about 15% overbudget on every project we worked on during that period.  If only there were some way to have predicted this outcome . . .




As far as annual raises . . . here's a breakdown of our corporate raise/bonus structure:

30 - How well you personally do your job
40 - How well the team of two hundred people on your project meet contract and release dates
30 - How well the company as a whole (with like 20 divisions in 30 countries and thousands upon thousands of people working for it) does

This is the most demotivating rewards scheme I've ever seen at a job.  I could defecate in my cubicle and throw the feces at coworkers and get 70% incentive pay.  I could work 100 hour weeks for a year and give my soul to the company and get 30% incentive pay.  :P

[Guesl982374]

In a word: Politics.

Cons: As others have said, what makes it so bad is that it is a dictatorship. Those in power "decree" something (spending cuts, hiring freeze, change in strategic direction, higher work load, etc.) and it has all sorts of effects on those in the organization. Other negatives include, but not limited to: the mindless ass kissing, favorites getting promoted/raises regardless of performance, pet projects, forced/fixed hours, "professional" unpaid overtime, unnecessary stress, manufactured emergencies & deadlines, beige cubes/walls/carpet, seeing people who are already dead inside, etc.

Pros: Usually more money and benefits, extremely safe environment as compared to physical industrial jobs (both current and historical),

[jmusic]

Ahhh   . . . . the corporate world.  I have a story that encapsulates what it's like working in a big corporation:

My division is typically a cash cow for our company.  Year after year we post reasonable returns and continue to sign contracts to ensure future work.  We've never lead the company in revenue, but we've never been in the red (or even close to it).  About four years ago we had a guy come in who decided to really shake up our division to make us the most efficient area of the oppressive corporate conglomerate.  He decreed 15% budget cuts across the board and called this a fancy buzzword.  So, every one of the dozens of projects that we're working on was estimated as usual, then given a 15% budget cut and a hiring freeze across our division.  It looked great the first year, and the guy in charge got a lot of accolades and (I can only assume) a huge bonus.  The next year he left the company.

Now, our projects typically take 3-5 years to complete.  By the third year after the budget cuts, we started to have major problems delivering on time.  Long time clients were getting pissed off at our unresponsiveness.  All departments in our company were reporting that they were over budget, and were badly understaffed.  We had to do a division wide hiring frenzy that year because people were short staffed and leaving due to stress.  Most shockingly to management, it seems that we finally ended up about 15% overbudget on every project we worked on during that period.  If only there were some way to have predicted this outcome . . .




As far as annual raises . . . here's a breakdown of our corporate raise/bonus structure:

30 - How well you personally do your job
40 - How well the team of two hundred people on your project meet contract and release dates
30 - How well the company as a whole (with like 20 divisions in 30 countries and thousands upon thousands of people working for it) does

This is the most demotivating rewards scheme I've ever seen at a job.  I could defecate in my cubicle and throw the feces at coworkers and get 70% incentive pay.  I could work 100 hour weeks for a year and give my soul to the company and get 30% incentive pay.  :P

I'm sure said manager got another job making 50% more somewhere else with the resulting buzzwords on his resume:  "Ruthless efficiency champion:  Spearheaded process improvements resulting in 15% cost reductions and improving overall corporate profitability..."

[2lazy2retire]

First of all, you probably don't want an "IT" job. In tech, "information technology" typically refers to a subset of relatively low status and low paying jobs.

Secondly, you can get experience without a job. There's no catch-22 at all. Nothing stops you from creating your own projects, publishing them on the internet, contributing to other open source projects, and so forth. If you get lucky, your side project might save you from ever having to get a job (such as the case of my former friend who earns ~$150,000/year+ in passive income from a project that he started and which I helped monetise). In the worst case, though, it's material for your résumé and can get you a job elsewhere.

I'm IT and earn more than your friend, so easy with the advice. The best piece of advice I could give is that it's not what you do but who you do it for - i.e get as close to the money as you can - banking/funds etc

[2lazy2retire]

I would second the thoughts above that IT can be a pretty dreary pursuit.

Agreed, don't go into IT unless you already live and breath it as a hobby, or you're going to hate it right out of the gate.

If you do go for it, I agree that certifications do not meaning anything.  I don't think I've ever considered certifications on an applicants resume.  They're too easy to get and tend to be flashed by those with no actual experience, so it kind of has the opposite effect of what you want.  A degree means something for entry level, but beyond that I don't even care about the degree.  I just interviewed a guy yesterday that had 15 years of good IT experience and no degree and I congratulated him and told him that was awesome.  He said I'm the first person to see it that way, though.

If you want to go to school and you want to get into IT, then go to school for IT.  Otherwise I'm not sure I'd distract myself.  My degree is in accounting but I worked my way through school in IT and by the time I graduated I would have had to take a step back in pay to use my degree, so other than one job I had at a smaller company where I did dual duties I haven't used my degree.  Whereas a buddy of mine that started in IT about the same time as me but didn't waste time going to school got ahead of me.  We do pretty much the exact same thing now, but I've never caught up to him in pay.

You can get into IT without education, like others have said, depending on what you're interested in.  Sys admin?  Get a spare computer, install windows server or linux, get a domain name and point it towards your home IP and build a website and start running your own mail server and dns.  After that's going build a database backend for the website.  Can be anything, wordpress, etc.  You now have the big 4 on your resume.  In Linux those being Apache, Postfix/Sendmail, MySQL and Bind.  MS has their equivalents.  Or for a bonus line item forget the spare computer and do it all on Amazon and you can add AWS to your resume.  You're not going to get a 6-figure job after that but you'll squeeze your foot into a door.

Want to be a coder?  I'm not one, but from what I've seen that's even easier to self-start, there are so many resources out there.  One of the junior devs we hired at work last year got the job because he had some decent self-driven projects.  He had no work experience, this is his first.

Yes you will probably have to start at the bottom but if you live and breath IT you will learn quickly and move up.  I started in tech support which is a common, albeit shitty, first step.  But you do have to really enjoy IT.

Accounting is fun if you find it fun.  Attention to detail and an affinity for coma-inducing reams of figures is required.  Businesses run on finance, at the end of the day, so financial wizards can have fun and create a great deal of value.  Or just count beans.

I'm one of those weird people that loves numbers and accounting.  If you want to do accounting because you enjoy it, then ignore IT and everything I said above.  Since you work nights and weekends you will have an easier time getting an internship during normal business hours.  Don't waste time in IT to the detriment of gaining accounting experience, like I did.

As to your question about corporate jobs, I prefer small companies as they tend to have less red tape and more varied days, but in every job I've ever had by far the #1 most important thing is coworkers and my supervisor, and those can be good or bad at any size company, so that's not at top of the list of things I care about in a job, personally.  But like others have said, just because you're a CPA doesn't mean you have to go work for the Big 3 (is it still 3?).

" don't go into IT unless you already live and breath it as a hobby"

FFS would you ever get over yourself. 25 years ago I had no idea what I wanted to do so I went on an IT training course
for 6 months - various intro stuff with COBOL. I had no interest in IT prior to this ( let alone "live and breath it as a hobby" ) and the only reason I went for it was that I figured with IT you can get quickly to a level where you can make decent money, also the last people that layoff generally affect are the sys admins.
Years later and i'm close to FIRE, I still do not get overly excited by IT, its just a job like any other and if your objective is to reach FI then a high paying in demand job is what you want.

[sol]

As far as annual raises . . . here's a breakdown of our corporate raise/bonus structure:

30 - How well you personally do your job
40 - How well the team of two hundred people on your project meet contract and release dates
30 - How well the company as a whole (with like 20 divisions in 30 countries and thousands upon thousands of people working for it) does

This is the most demotivating rewards scheme I've ever seen at a job.

I can top that.  I work for the federal government.  Not only do we totally lack incentive pay, here's the breakdown of how my annual raise is determined:

0% how well I do my job.
0% how well my team/office does its job.
0% how well my agency does it's job.
100% how dysfunctional Congress is this year.

In the universe of demotivational reward schemes, I think I win.  I mean lose.  I mean cry a lot.

[dunhamjr]

i have hard hard time saying its bad.

a lot of the problem is staying at places that dont fit you in some fashion.  culture, your own ambition, politics... they can all have a negative impact.

[Gone Fishing]

I have had ebbs and flows of corporate job satisfaction.  The good times never seem to last long enough, but the bad times were not usually that bad.  I use the term "busy boredom" to define most of corporate career.  Plenty to do, but not very stimulating work.  The slow erosion of your life energy is probably the worst part.  I am not a superstar employee, but have managed to get regular promotions and pay raises that coincidenly didn't seem to align with my work output leading up to said promotions.  May not work for you, but my personal approach is to get the work done,  not screw things up too badly, and be patient.

Sure we hear a lot of the corporate horror stories, but working for the government or a privately held company can be just as bad or worse.  A friend's father was just fired after 26 years with a small company.  The owner hired a young relative to manage his division.  From what I hear, the new manager came in with a chip on his shoulder and didn't want to listen to any of the old timers.  A couple of arguments later and friend's dad got the boot.  I wasn't there and can't say if he deserved it or not, but you have to wonder.

Here are my thoughts:

Pick a profession with decent earnings potential
Pick a profession in line with your talents/interests
Don't mortgage your future to pay for your education
Pick a company with a good reputation
If you have to settle for a lesser company, get 18-24 months of experience then look elsewhere. As an employee, your feet are your most valuble asset, and often times your only negotiating tool.
Stick to your FIRE plan so you can get out when you can't take it anymore.
You might just luck out (or figure it out) and find yourself in a great job that will satisfy you for a long time, but like most, you will probably end up just sucking it up long enough to make your goal.  Such is life, might as well get paid well in the process. 

 
 

[2lazy2retire]

First of all, you probably don't want an "IT" job. In tech, "information technology" typically refers to a subset of relatively low status and low paying jobs.

Secondly, you can get experience without a job. There's no catch-22 at all. Nothing stops you from creating your own projects, publishing them on the internet, contributing to other open source projects, and so forth. If you get lucky, your side project might save you from ever having to get a job (such as the case of my former friend who earns ~$150,000/year+ in passive income from a project that he started and which I helped monetise). In the worst case, though, it's material for your résumé and can get you a job elsewhere.

I'm IT and earn more than your friend, so easy with the advice. The best piece of advice I could give is that it's not what you do but who you do it for - i.e get as close to the money as you can - banking/funds etc

Uh… I’m not sure if you understood my post.

I said my former friend was earning $150,000 in passive income, i.e. he is financially independent and will never have to work at a normal job in his life, as of age 22. I would be FI as well, if I hadn’t made some errors in the legal structure of my engagement in the business. (There is a reason he is a former friend.)

My point was that if you do side projects, they can save you from ever having to get a job -- as I said explicitly.

$150k is basically an entry-level total compensation package for a software engineer at a top tech company. However, that's not passive income -- you have to work for it.

This what I was referring to ""information technology" typically refers to a subset of relatively low status and low paying jobs"

[RyanAtTanagra]

" don't go into IT unless you already live and breath it as a hobby"

FFS would you ever get over yourself. 25 years ago I had no idea what I wanted to do so I went on an IT training course
for 6 months - various intro stuff with COBOL. I had no interest in IT prior to this ( let alone "live and breath it as a hobby" ) and the only reason I went for it was that I figured with IT you can get quickly to a level where you can make decent money, also the last people that layoff generally affect are the sys admins.
Years later and i'm close to FIRE, I still do not get overly excited by IT, its just a job like any other and if your objective is to reach FI then a high paying in demand job is what you want.

Damn, not sure why my post elicited that response.  I've never known anyone to get into IT and enjoy it that hadn't already had a personal interest in it.  If you did and still enjoy it, congrats.  I imagine 25 years ago it was harder to have a hobby interest in IT.  Few people had access to computers, and even less access to information to learn about them.  Nowadays if someone doesn't already play with computers, they're probably not that interested, and as such I would still posit that that they would be unlikely to enjoy it as a career.  But as always, YMMV.

[Sid Hoffman]

This what I was referring to ""information technology" typically refers to a subset of relatively low status and low paying jobs"

I've been working in what I have always heard referred to as IT for the last 18 years.  Pay has been $40-120k for me and I know the top individual contributors (people who just "work" and not manage) earn around $150k.  This is what I have seen among the 5 different companies I've dealt with in a medium COL area.  I know in certain tech pockets like NYC, Bellevue, Silicon Valley you can easily double those figures.  I don't know what else you would call technology jobs if you are too snobby to call good paying ones IT.  I literally don't know and have never seen any other term used in all my years working in the industry.

[Davids]

It really depends on the company you work for and how you fit in.

[2lazy2retire]

The full impugned sentence from my post was "In tech, 'information technology' typically refers to a subset of relatively low status and low paying jobs." (#).

The first two words were important ("in tech"). Outside of tech companies, "IT" refers to all tech jobs. However, within the tech industry, "IT" typically (another word from my post) refers to jobs concerned with administering the internal corporate network, whereas the higher status jobs are concerned with building the product ("engineering") or deploying it to the production machines ("devops" or other terms). IT is seen as something that costs the business money, a necessary operating cost; whereas engineering is a source of profit. You can imagine how that leads to a difference in status and pay.

I was not suggesting that those IT jobs are not respectful jobs or anything like that, but as a factual matter, they are typically (i) relatively low status within the company, and (ii) relatively low paying compared to engineering. (The "relatively" was a word I inserted intentionally into the sentence.)

However, I think the sentence has been overly picked apart in any case -- the point conveyed was that if you want to enter the tech field, engineering is currently more lucrative than the jobs that I know as "IT".

No - i'm one of those whose job is to be "concerned with administering the internal corporate network" and like it or not most companies will not run without us, and incomes can reach into the top 1%. It depends on who you work for, engineering is not for everyone, but a lot of  people can acquire the skills to survive in one of those "low status" jobs you refer to enabling one to live and retire quite nicely.

[PatStab]

My husband has worked for one of those big companies for 25 years. He worked in the states with them until 2001, they closed his division and figured he was off to look for a job.  But they kept him and offered him the opportunity to work overseas and he has ever since.  It's a huge engineering and construction company has over 84,000 employees.  He has only a high school education but a ton of valuable experience, and worked his way up.  I think one of the reasons he has done well is he gets along well with people, especially with people overseas.  I can guarantee you he does not kiss up.  He doesn't complain but if he tells them something is wrong you can take it to the bank and then they do listen.  One of the VP's went with another company and got him to go but he didn't like it, was going to stay because he is a loyal person, but I told him they would dump him in a heartbeat if they wanted to, so he went back with the original company.  I told him I wouldn't complain about him working away again and I haven't.  He didn't think he would ever like working for a big company as he was stanch union, but I guess he had good managers.  He is 69 and still there and they are getting him a visa for next year.  He was going to retire at year end but I wonder.  I was having a lot of problems with DD and he was going to quit at year end.  I will talk to him about it then, I know he likes what he does. Maybe if he gets on this segment I won't insist he quit though I want him home.  But I also like him to be happy.

I can travel and stuff just need to change a few things for winter, like get a truck and blade or blade for the tractor or something for this snow.

He makes a ton of money, has a lot of good benefits, and enjoys the jobs too.  I miss him but I think we both will miss the paychecks too so we shall see.  But I'm afraid we will wait to late.  So does he quit to make me happy or stay and enjoy what he does, he is so worried about being bored.

[GetItRight]

GuitarStv and LibertyStache said it well. The bigger the company the worse it is.

Fresh blood upper management tend to do slash and burn. Cut budgets, cut staff, etc. It'll increase profit, for a while. So they look like a hero for a bit, get the big bonuses, big entry and exit packages, etc. But they exit with their golden parachute before the repurcussions hit or unsustainability of their changes are realized. Whole departments of one person and business grinds to a halt because someone is sick, has a personal emergency, or quits and nobody else knows what to do. Then skilled people who knew the business inside and out are replaced with interns and H1Bs and your job just got even harder than working alone. Meanwhile everyone farther down the totem pole saw it all coming, but since there's any input fomr mere peons is ignored it's a surprise to upper management when it hits. The bigger the company the worse this is. Not a hard rule, but a general observation.

[Sid Hoffman]

GuitarStv and LibertyStache said it well. The bigger the company the worse it is.

This paints with way too wide of a brush and shows a willingness to openly discriminate based on arbitrary characteristics.  For the record, the places I've worked have been anywhere from 8000 employees to 280,000 employees.  In taking an honest look at it, I found no correlation between company size and whether it was a good place to work or not.  I'd had both good and bad experiences within a single company, and with different size companies and known others in the business who can say the same.

What I have seen most consistently is how it goes based on how profitable the company is.  That is something I have absolutely seen correlation with.  The more profitable a company is, the easier it is to enjoy my work and get ahead there.  The less profitable it was, the worse it was to work there, with the worst one being a company in the death spiral, alternating between offering outsourcing, selling off divisions of the company, voluntary retirements, and involuntary layoffs.  That place was the pits.

That's not to say that every highly profitable company is going to be great to work at and I suppose it's possible to find a great job at a company that's in bad financial shape and going out of business soon... but in general I see much more grounds to apply profitability as an indicator of good places to work than I do size alone.  You can try websites like Glassdoor.com to see how people rank their employers, but my biggest problem with that website is they only let you specify a company & location.  In my experience, your line of work within the company plays a huge role, for example working in IT for a healthcare provider (as I did) is totally different from being a hospital orderly with that company.  No comparison, but Glassdoor doesn't make the distinction between those at all.  You have to look at individual reviews to start to get a feel for what's going on.

[2lazy2retire]

GuitarStv and LibertyStache said it well. The bigger the company the worse it is.

Fresh blood upper management tend to do slash and burn. Cut budgets, cut staff, etc. It'll increase profit, for a while. So they look like a hero for a bit, get the big bonuses, big entry and exit packages, etc. But they exit with their golden parachute before the repurcussions hit or unsustainability of their changes are realized. Whole departments of one person and business grinds to a halt because someone is sick, has a personal emergency, or quits and nobody else knows what to do. Then skilled people who knew the business inside and out are replaced with interns and H1Bs and your job just got even harder than working alone. Meanwhile everyone farther down the totem pole saw it all coming, but since there's any input fomr mere peons is ignored it's a surprise to upper management when it hits. The bigger the company the worse this is. Not a hard rule, but a general observation.

I came here on a H1B , sorry for making everyone's job harder