IT's identity crisis
By Paul Desmond
唐Dargel一直在工作,因为他是一个teenager, and now, at age 37, he wants out so badly he's willing to join the National Guard to get extra money so he can go back to college. And yes, he's aware there's a war on.
Dargel works for a large outsourcing company that provides IT services to a medical research facility. The Intel systems administrator says he's lucky to have the job he does. He was laid off in 2001 and again in 2004. At one point the only work he could get in his hometown of Rockford, Ill., was installing point-of-sale terminals in restaurants.
"It was pretty embarrassing, installing touchscreen terminals in burger joints," Dargel says. He eventually landed a better, higher-paying job that required him to relocate, but he's still suffering from a bad case of IT identity crisis.
He looks back wistfully to the days when elite "command prompt commandos" ruled the IT universe, using skills that he says have been rendered largely obsolete by graphical interfaces and automation. "Now I'm a monkey just responding to lights," Dargel says.
His career crisis certainly isn't unique. A recent Network World story on the predicted shortage of IT workers touched a nerve among readers, many of whom shared their frustrations over the directions their careers have taken of late.
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