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 [flagged] Pushing People into IT
14 points by trabant00 on Nov 26, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments
This comment was inspired by a submission that has been flagged. While the context of the article was about women, this is a generalized problem. Boys are just as much the victims of parent ambition as girls are. That said, here is my original comment:

One thing I do not understand regarding regarding college diplomas overproduction is the push for more women in IT. We all know over here that IT is not the sunshine and flowers industry it sometimes looks like from outside. There's plenty of psychical and mental health hazards.

For the first time in 20 years I now have more women colleagues than man. Of course we should accept anybody who is passionate about IT into the field, but pushing people into it? In my team right now there's an junior engineer girl who is absolutely WOW, I have only seen one more junior so bright and passionate in my career. But there's also two junior engineer girls, the project owner and scrum master - both women - who are just miserable! They have no love for technology, quite the contrary: their phones, laptops, home wi-fi, are a source of stress for them. Which is especially bad now with work from home, no IT help desk. The 2 girls have been pushed into the industry by their parents who have a rosy distorted image of IT. The 2 women by the need for more money. This is not empowerment or equality or anything like that. Their lives are passing them by while they toil away at something they hate.

For my part I always try to also present the bad parts to parents who ask me about IT for their children. Having people who hate their work doesn't do anybody any good.

This is a request for comments and also an attempt to make you aware when you will have the chance to have career discussions with parents and children.



> "Their lives are passing them by while they toil away at something they hate."

This is probably true for a large percentage of society - very few people actually get to work at their "dream jobs". But people need to work to support themselves and their families, and IT work, even if you're not passionate about it, still pays better and is less physically demanding than working in a factory or a restaurant. You can get satisfaction from other things in your life - it doesn't all have to come from your job.

I've worked in software development for many years, and I used to be passionate about it. But after seeing enough disillusioning things about it, it's become just a job that pays the bills until I can retire, and that's OK with me.


I disagree with nothing you said. But you started with passion and that makes me think you chose freely. I am talking about being forced/pushed into it.


I think you are presenting a rose colored view of "choosing freely" the vast majority of people go along with signals they get along the way and those signals are always(?) inaccurate and arbitrary biases from older people considering past generations in largely irrelevant environments, etc.

I think quite a few people get pushed around by arbitrary sentiments until they find what they like and quite a few people don't really find anything because no one pushed them in any direction so they never really had the opportunity to learn to critique anything and develop their own opinions.


To expand on this comment, as humans we only have the illusion of choice. All choices and behaviors are the result of cellular information processing that happens (mostly) in the neuronal networks of the brain. These mechanics are deterministic.


The problem is that the IT sector eats up a very big cut of the economy. Since it is the nervous system of the economy it has the power to extract rents from all other sectors and that has led to enormous wage inequalities, which is what drives people to push their kids to IT. This won't be solved by creating more "no code" tools so that people who hate IT can still work in it, it will be solved by stopping this relentless value extraction that tech does against against any other activity. IT is the new finance, except it's worse because , unlike finance, they can behaviorally manipulate people with more than just carrots and sticks. All those people who create free content for google and FB deserve to be compensated for their work (it is work after all because it creates value). And all those workers, drivers, and services who are now commodities thanks to software eating the world, deserve pay rates that are suitable for a fair , sustainable society, not rates that are meant to maximize quarterly revenue growth of already-huge behemoths.


Having worked a wide variety of manual labor before landing my career jobs - I'd rather sit in a heated cubicle / office / open landscape and hate my work, than to be outside (or in factory) hating work.

For the past years I've seen so many people romanticize trade jobs, but truth be told, many of those jobs absolutely suck compared to "normal" white-collar jobs. The tasks are extremely repetitive, working conditions are worse, working hours can be worse, your body wears out.

My mother emigrated in her early 20's, and worked for around 10 years in a fish factory, filleting fish. She had to quit after injuring her arms - like many of her co-workers did. They'd fillet fish for 8 hours a day, in damp and cold conditions.

She then went to college, and got her degree in preschool teaching - which she loved. She loved working with children, and it's easy to get work. But after 15 years in that, once and she got injured - turns out working with preschoolers is also a pretty physical job. She's not even 60, but has multiple chronic injuries from her previous employments.


One thing I’ve always admired with physical jobs is the natural level of physical exercise and human interaction that can come with them. It’s very easy to become schlubby and introverted from sedentary office work. Your job will change you.


It should be mentioned that IF you work for a great employer, they will try to make the workplace more safe for their workers - buying equipment which reduced injuries related to stress and repetitive work.

But even then, sometimes it's just very hard to get around certain tasks. I used to work as an electrician for a year (apprenticeship), which is regarded as a pretty lucrative and interesting profession - but I quickly discovered that the work was quite taxing on my shoulders, neck, and arms. After all, some days you'd be standing on a folding ladder for hours, doing work on things mounted to the ceiling.

Other professions have their own unique injuries, that you'll see time and time again.

Best of both worlds would be to work as an engineer, supervisor, or similar in those professions. Half of you work involves office work, the other half being out in the field...but without having to do all the dirty work. Half of the guys I worked with as an apprentice, ended up pursing college in their 30's, aiming to become Engineers.


At least for human interaction, your job is what you make of it. Granted, it's much easier when you're in the same office as your co-workers rather than remote.


This. People underestimate how hard physical labour is. I'd rather do anything computer related than manual work.


Is manual labor the only other option to IT?


In terms of access to poor people...maybe. In the UK trades jobs can be picked up and pay well if you work hard and have an aptitude. Factory work paid very well for skilled / semi-skilled workers AND had good benefits. Anyone can access programming as a career, but not so easy to access accountancy/finance/law etc.


>We all know over here that IT is not the sunshine and flowers industry it sometimes looks like from outside. There's plenty of psychical and mental health hazards.

On one hand

in which other industry you can:

Learn everything in your free time and all you need is e.g 300-400$ PC? (8gb ram, some cpu, nvme m2 disk)

Optional remote work with possibility to relocate to other countries

Huge salaries

Huge demand

On the other hand...

In which other job you gotta put this much effort in your free time?

I kinda mean this [If doctors were interviewed like software developers] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_aDz-AcCmY


In which other job you gotta put this much effort in your free time?

Being a doctor. My sister is one and she has to study ~10 hours per week in her free time so she can keep up with new treatments / methods.


I (man, 26) always wanted to do a manual job, but my parents pushed me into the IT. Now 2 years after graduation I am sitting on my ass and dealing with databases. I hate it so much, but guess what. I make 60k per year. I see the point of my parents. My schoolmates earn less than 20k and struggle a lot. The good paid job gives me an access to the "higher class". Besides that, compared to my schoolmates from the good old days I see options that only IT can give you. Already starting a new project, so guess what. I will probably do the same to my kids.


Interesting perspective. Well, if you like the choice now than it was a good choice after all for your case.

My perspective: my parents wanted to force me to quit IT, at the time it payed peanuts in my country compared to civil engineering - what they wanted. I struggled with money for about 10 years, but now I'm making more than my former civil engineering university friends, have a lot less responsibility and I hate my job a lot less. How I explain it to myself is that my passion made me excel at my job while they do see it as "just a job".


Most people see their job as "just a job" and for many people that's absolutely fine. They have a stable income and can do things they're passionate about in their free time. Those women you think were pushed and hate it? They sound like adults who can make their own decisions and change industries if they decide they'd rather do something they're more passionate about. I would rather have parents who support their children in whatever they want to do, but in the end tech is hardly a bad career choice to be encouraged to explore.


It is just a job... this is a crucial point. My aunt used to be a passionate dancer and the passion turned into her job. The story looks like a dream come true from the outside and the reason I spoke to her is the reason why I am ok with where I am right now. She has been living this "dream" for about 10 years by now and recently she confessed that she lost the passion only 2 years after she turned i into a job. This is a natural cycle I believe. People change, hobbies and passions change. Now I am passionate about football and my new project (the one I am secretly doing while being paid at work) is about football. I am passionate about it, but already know this is just a period of my life.


And what is your project about?


Being obsessed with football and knowing how to deal with big data, it is a challenge to put those 2 worlds together. Predicting the football results means working with big data and the results is https://rowdie.co.uk


Manual work seems more promising than this. But i guess i do not know everything


This is so true. There's a lot of hype surrounding "programming" jobs and a frankly bizzare push to get everyone into one. I think it's incredibly damaging to effectively tell children they haven't "made it" unless they can code. From my personal experience, there's very few truly interesting or particularly profitable jobs in computer science and they take a huge investment to get there - maybe 5% of people with CS PhDs get to actually do something interesting. No, that 1 week scam coding bootcamp isn't going to get you anywhere anymore than you can learn a programming language from one of those 24hr books. Everyone else is doing mind numbing repetitive tasks that often don't even involve writing code after training (testing/data entry etc.).

I personally love computer science and have since a young age, but the career as a whole often isn't particularly meaningful or profitable. I'll do it anyway, because I love it. Objectively, there's much better things I could be doing. Previous generations had the same obsession with their children being lawyers and bankers (although I believe they probable are at least quite lucrative). Hopefully one day we'll learn and let our children be what they want to be. I'd hate to think we might be disuading some aspiring surgeons for example, with the promise of being wealthy "rock star programmers", only for them to end up in an unfulfilling job in data entry.


I'm currently in high school and the school-backed push towards programming careers has sort of created a predefined perspective on what programming is to "the world", and that programmers change "the world" so you should too. This isn't helped by the internet sensationalizing software development successes. I went to a virtual coding competition last year with around 100 contestants and it had this hivemind feeling. Now, I know it would have been different in person since it diverged into a shouting match of tabs vs spaces and other crap, but everyone I've met in school who is interested in computers for the past 3 years has a lot of the same ideas about things and haven't done much actual work. I think it's great that people are getting into software development but there's a certain level of badness in why programmers I know are programming that's hard to explain.


At the end of the day, it's all about money.

IT is high demand and generally high-paying. Per supply and demand, if you increase the size of the labor pool, you get higher competition, which drives down employment costs. It's not surprising that some of the loudest get-women-in-IT shills are IT employers and some NGO's and state entities who are in these companies' pockets.


Median salaries are actually quite bad. It's not worth joining most careers unless you can reasonably hit top 1% or be around top 10% within a few years.

But being a mediocre IT person is far better than being a mediocre welder. So if your kid has no passion for anything, let them at least get a job they hate that pays better. But if they aspire to be a top 1% novelist, let them.

Does that mean they'll be happy? Hell no. The HN community consists of people who are great at their jobs but hate them. We complain about too many JS frameworks but the mediocre programmer out there hasn't figured out how to not store passwords in plaintext.

Someone out there who can be a best selling novelist will probably still hate her job, but again, she's getting paid well, and probably happier than being a starving mediocre programmer.


Here is a tip. Don't call your female colleagues "girls". Because you would never call your male colleagues "boys".


> you would never call your male colleagues "boys"

Ummmm, We do.

Please stop being offended on another's behalf. Outrage culture isn't healthy.


If you called me a "boy engineer" or anything like that I'd ask you to stop. If you wouldn't, I'd punch you in the face.


> If you wouldn't, I'd punch you in the face.

Such a temperament would be unacceptable in our or any workplace.


you don't?


I sure as hell don’t infantilize my coworkers


In all honestly, I think we'd be more concerned if a coworker was so quick to take offence. I suggest we are a little more relaxed here in the UK.


At the end of the day it is just a job, they don’t need to be passionate about it.


It requires a disproportionate amount more work to succeed in than other careers. The payscale has a long tail and low median (everyone quotes a high mean but it's not normally distributed) which means it's really not worth it unless you are. There's better careers to be unenthusiastic about if you're just there for the money.


Maybe not, but you should at least consider not hating it.

And we must not forget that pushing young people in one direction might come at the expense of another that maybe they would have chosen themselves and where they could excel.


> Their lives are passing them by while they toil away at something they hate.

I mean, this just sounds like working in general.




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