Almost 40 and Fed Up of IT :(

Hi everyone, maybe you can help a lost soul with some advice?

I've done around 14 years professionally in IT (and more before that on a personal level).

I've lost a lot of love for IT now. And it's not just about becoming cynical of people due to dealing with users!

I've never specialized because I have no desire to. I like variety and I'm a natural born generalist. Used to be more relevant in life but in the modern world if you don't specialize you'll be punished monetarily, and maybe more so the older you get.

I'm no socialist but I despise the modern management structure. The people at the bottom suffer a lot. My current company is especially bad in this way, many people have left due to being burned out.

IT Support you are always 'blamed' by the rest of the company and the people at the bottom carry the burden of huge amounts of responsibility for ever more difficult to control IT. Management

Add to that the modern tech is so complicated. I long for the days of DOS and Windows NT! haha

I do still love IT of course, but not so much as a career.

Most people my age don't like their jobs either, regardless of career, they just do it to pay the bills.

I actually want to take a huge risk and start my own business, making a B2B application, I've read a lot on micro startups etc. and I'm very enthusiastic. I used to run a business before too and I really enjoyed working for myself. Only thing is, I have to risk a lot of money just to pay my bills while I do it.

I'm pretty sure I am going to go ahead with it soon. But still, I sometimes wonder if I should give IT another shot. Not in Infra but maybe learn Dev Ops or something. Although at my age, junior jobs aren't open to me, nor are they attractive due to having to reduce my salary to start at the bottom again.

Has anyone ever faced these life/career issues like me? Or can relate or offer any advice?

Thank you for listening!

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Comments

scaredoftests

It all depends on what part of IT you are in. I have been in many facets of IT (I am 58. Where I am now a systems admin working in a development, pre-test/test environment Learning a lot). Each place I have been at, I have learned so much. Start a new path.

Develop a test bed at home and practice!

TechGuru80

It’s a little unclear but are you saying you have been in IT Support for 14 years? If so, that’s probably your first issue. I would practice programming ALOT before you jump ship to make your own app.

NetworkNewb

europop wrote: »

Most people my age don't like their jobs either, regardless of career, they just do it to pay the bills.

Come on... No one really wants to go to work. It's not just your age. The catch is to find something you don't mind doing and that pays well enough so we can do the things we really enjoy.

Also, you're not even 40 and don't think you can transition into something else, that is even within IT, already? I have no idea what you currently do, but if someone wants to work on other things my best suggestion would be to try to incorporate those things into your current job as much as you can. That way you don't have to switch jobs and start at the bottom. You'll already have that "experience" the more advanced positions are looking for.

Starting your own business sounds interesting as well. Other people would have better insight into than I would though.

Best of luck!

Dojiscalper

I can talk a little about starting your own business. I recently moved to a much cheaper area of the country, however there isn't much of an IT market here. My wife has a pretty good job so I thought while I'm looking for a good job for myself I'll also start out on my own with an IT services company. I've been in field service in various roles for over 20 years so I know the industry well. I've been in business about 3 months and I'm finding ways to make money. I'm still trying to figure out how to get my own clients, but I'm doing contractor work to fill my billable time. I'm getting to the point where I might actually be able to pay all my bills and in another few months I may actually be able to invest back into my business try to advertise or buy more services to provide better service to my clients. Its great being able to have a lot of free time, but its hard and scary not knowing how much income your going to get.

daviddws

hmmm. Well it sounds like maybe you are burned out on IT and ready for a change. I'm a little over 40, but the difference for me I think is that I am constantly learning and updating my skills. I recently just passed the CSA+ for example. IT is everything to me and age isn't going to stop that.

mikey88

It's a good idea to get a business going on the side, but have a plan to fall back on if it fails. Don't quit your day job as they say. If you've been doing IT Support for 14yrs sure you'll get burned out/fed up with it.

Work on getting yourself financially independent and working because you want to not because you have to.

devilbones

I would get out if I were you. I don't think that it would be worth it to stick around. When I started in IT about 15 years ago the people that were at the point you are now at really brought the rest of the team down and created a pretty toxic environment. It was pretty easy too see that they had dropped their packs and things worked out better for everyone once they decided to move on. Good luck in your next adventure.

mzx380

I think that you could benefit from reading a post I put up on this site a few years ago. It could help you plan your next move

http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/123500-my-whirwind-year-things-i-learned-2016-a.html

LordQarlyn

I got my start in IT at 40, well professionally anyway, always been a PC hobbyist. I don't think your age is a factor.
But, you do sound like you are getting burnt out by the field. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, just means you should consider a different field. I've known several former IT professionals who switched to other fields, successfully, and at least from outside appearances appear much happier. One went back to law school, at 46 I should mention, and she became a reasonably successful corporate attorney. Another decided civil engineering was more appealing to him and is doing well there, I think he was early 30s.
Do some soul searching. Decide what you want to do with your life. You are never too old to change fields, but it will be harder at 40 and you will have to work harder at it, make sure it is something you are passionate for.

TheFORCE

What age are we talking about?

the_Grinch

To me, your environment is probably 51% of your problem. The rest is a mesh of "longing for the days of DOS" and not trying to move out of being a generalist. I'd consider myself, for the most part, a generalist. Primarily at my job I do Mobile Forensics. Call comes in for a phone I drop whatever I'm working on and deal with the phone(s). That said at this moment I do two to four phones a month and thus have to do stuff the rest of the time. Thus all the other work I partake in because technology is everywhere and having someone who understands it can be used anywhere. As an example, yesterday I fixed a broken alarm system and finished up some grant paperwork. Today I am running a powershell script to look for folder corruption and then duplicating 10 drives. I have a speciality, but it isn't a daily part of my duties (though I make sure to stay on top of the latest developments as they come). It helps that I'm in law enforcement and low manpower means I get to do a lot of stuff.

As for starting your own business, which is something I did several months ago, I say go for it, but don't quit your job yet. As Dave Ramsey said, when your business makes 50% of your salary while you are doing it part time you can then quit and pursue it fulltime. Until then, lessen your risk. Besides you can learn to code and write your app without leaving your job.

yoba222

Sounds to me like those 14 years have only been at large companies. It's not like that everywhere.

EnderWiggin

If you miss DOS, maybe you should take up *nix. It's almost entirely command line, and pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it.

daviddws

EnderWiggin wrote: »

If you miss DOS, maybe you should take up *nix. It's almost entirely command line, and pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it.

This is why we have PowerShell. He needs to attrib himself off of legacy dos and get into this. I spend ALOT of my time scripting now to automate which saves countless hours as a SysAdmin. Dos is so antiquated and honestly I wish it would go away.

SpetsRepair

I've been there and am still actually in that phase where you sometimes wonder why you did it all

Than I remember I love the field, I'm just not very personable with other depts and this is my issue. What do PM, management teams and others do? They give you demands with no actual understand of how something should work, than they pile on the work and expect you to figure it out and make sure everything works. Than you have other people in your own depts, who are usually busy with something else so good luck getting an answer and figuring out things when you're new in this company and the top brass (engineers with over 10 years experience who don't want to hand down knowledge, or if they do they leave out info so you have to keep coming back to them)

LeBroke

SpetsRepair wrote: »

Than I remember I love the field, I'm just not very personable with other depts and this is my issue.

The rest of your problems most likely stem from this...

IT is honestly 50% social skills, way more so than, for example, development or accounting. Only marginally less social skills than project management.

Nutsy

europop,

The whole "specialist" is a bit misleading. Even the highest level architects are generalists. Case in point, while working on my own cert goals, I met a guy who is a double CCIE. We became friends, keep in touch, and study together. While doing a group study session we needed to do something with MS AD. I watched is guy segway from doing infrastructure work, to working on MS stuff, to working on some VMware, and a few other things in between. Bottom line: he is one heck of an architect but has worked on multiple specialties.

What most people advocate in specializing is really saying, "go find a way to demonstrate technical excellence in one category of technology." Thus, because this is TE, the posters here tend to go for the highest technical cert of their choosing. Then, they branch out, and master others. Along the way, you may lightly touch a couple things. Thus, if you like (for the sake of argument) doing the Cisco bit, once you get a CCIE in a track, you don't fold your arms and say, "I move packets period." You complete that goal, look at what your employer requires of you, what is in demand in the market place, and interests you, and move forward.

Thus, the aforementioned philosophy is called the technical "T." Go deep on one, then move out wide to others. When you find something interesting go back deep on the next. Any given cert/technology is merely another bump on the road of your career, not a destination.

HTH

echo_time_cat

I, like others, think the problem is definitely 14 years in support (if that's true for the entire 14 years).

Being in support, regardless of your personal feelings about the platform/OS/Software you are supporting, sucks. You get pressure from all sides, internal and external. I find it's the internal pressure and attitudes that usually make things much more difficult compared to managing the customer. This is amplified a few times if your Manager "isn't technical."

UnixGuy

This happens when the focus is 100% career

Doing something else OUTSIDE work that you're passionate about can change your outlook. Take up a hobby or an activity that you're passionate, and suddenly your focus isn't 100% on the small annoyances at work

bjpeter

Have you considered programming? At work, I do not deal with people for the most part. Well, I deal with project managers and sysadmins, but only when I need them or vice versa. Most of the time, I work solo, and no one bothers me.

DigitalZeroOne

I won't say that I have had the same feelings, but my work did start to get a little stale at one point. Wow, now it's been probably 20 years that I've been in IT, and 2 things reinvigorated me. The first was VMware, I really enjoy virtualization technology. The second was PowerShell. PowerShell was probably the biggest one, it has made me want to do all kinds of things. If there is some product that my company is even hinting at, I immediately see if there are PowerShell cmdlets for it.

Because of PowerShell I'm now getting into HTML/CSS to try and style my PowerShell reports with much more...well, style. I am excited to work with PowerShell, and I'm still amazed at the time that I save. If you're even remotely interested, I would check out these videos from Don Jones:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D474E721138865A

I actually spent $400 almost 8 years ago to buy the series on DVD, because there was really nothing good online. Now that same series is free on youtube. I don't regret the money spent, it was worth it. I hope PowerShell can spark the interest back.

Cyberscum

I say give security a try and see how bad life can really get lmao. You'll wish you just were working at help desk!

Help desk: accidentally deleted the bosses PC from the domain grrrrr! I got written up.

Security: the company website went down from a DDOS and 10k customer accounts were breached. We're going to jail ****!!!

No but seriously, try another job. As long as you can pay bills what's the problem with trying something you might be more interested in. In the end we only have one life....

Be happy and good luck!