Computer Careers Book
Monday, November 17, 2003
How to Become a Rich Computer Programmer
Hi,
Over the weekend a high school senior asked me about the future job prospects for computer science graduates, and I answered with a raving rant they probably didn't expect or appreciate. Because, fact is, we can't predict the future
and telling young people to go into computer science, or teaching, or whatever because the employment prospects
look good based on some government study is misleading them.
So here's what I wrote that poor high school senior who asked what she probably thought was a reasonable question:
"Because although I'm still very young, I've now lived now long enough and seen and heard enough of the world to tell you that all this prediction stuff is BUNK!!!
I don't have a crystal ball and neither do your teachers and neither do all the government or industry experts who get paid big $$$ to pontificate.
The truth is, the future will be too extremely complicated and just too extreme for me to sit here and tell you, yes, the prospect for computer careers is going up 4% per year etc etc etc. Blah blah blah.
The truth is, you should pick as your profession something you enjoy doing and which has some reasonable value to society. You just cannot tell what will happen. Many thousands of entertainers die broke but
many make huge fortunes.
Forty years ago the odds of making decent money as a "performance artist" were extremely slim. Yet in mid-60s an ugly woman from Japan put on an exhibit requring people to climb up a ladder to read a small piece of paper and thereby captured the imagination and fame and fortune of the top rock star of the time -- John Lennon -- who could have had millions of beautiful women around the world from ages 12 to 112.
Now any number of people cover their bodies with disgusting stuff and call it art and I think it's ridiculous but if I were wealthy I'd probably pay $50 to see them just for the sheer novelty and entertainment! So they do provide some value to a target market in our society.
The computer field that will do best in the next 20 years is one you and I have not yet heard of.
Those who are now entering the computer science field will see ups and downs in the next 20 years. If I could tell
you the precise dates of those ups and downs and the ups and downs of various IT-related technologies, I wouldn't --
because with psychic ability that powerful I'd already be rich and retired to a tropical paradise!
There are computer programmers who currently deliver pizza and one computer programmer is the richest man in the world.
By the way, when Gates started Microsoft in 1975 software was considered a mere insignificant necessity that just came along with the big mainframe computers companies bought from the likes of IBM. NOBODY foresaw that by the new millenium their significance would be reversed!
Neither could anybody have foreseen that IBM would not make contact with the owner of the most popular PC operating system of 1979 and so would return to Seattle and Gates and thereby give him the opening to lease DOS from its creator (across the street from MS) for $75,000.
What did the experts tell Mr. Gates in 1975 when he dropped out of Harvard? IF you could travel back in time to 1975 and tell the then experts that a tiny software company in Seattle run by young geeks (in a 1979 photograph I've seen, Gates still looks like he belongs in my junior high yearbook) would one day be bigger than IBM, they'd have laughed themselves sick!
When I was your age, the surest profession to make a lot of money in, all employment experts agreed, was to be a doctor. Now, most doctors are being ripped to shreds by HMOs and the cost of malpractice insurance. I've seen doctors who want to change to a computer career!
Yet my mother just had two knees replaced by a doctor who has no intention of changing his career. He probably also pays a fortune in malpractice insurance but he's got a fortune left over because he invented the knee replacement and the hip replacement and is also highly paid to travel the world and teach other doctors how to perform those surgeries. He loves his work and adds great value to it, so the trends the experts rely on do not apply to him.
Not too long ago, nursing and teaching had lousy prospects. So only a few new people entered those professions and now demand is going up as baby boomers in both groups are starting to retire. But teaching especially is going to undergo tremendous changes over the next 50 years.
So, my advice to you is, do what you love. Earn to learn. Figure out what you can add to your field -- how can you go beyond the routine 9 to 5 employee mentality? Be prepared for great changes - they are coming to every field. They can't be predicted - screw the experts who claim they can. But the more you learn and the more you learn skills in your profession, in how to network and search for jobs, and in how to work for yourself in marketing your ideas and innovations or in your willingness to do work on the side, the better you will prosper in this new millenium.
Vast changes are coming, bringing vast opportunity. Those who refuse to change their old-fashioned, "employee" way of thinking will fall behind. Those prepared to think, learn, use their imaginations and solve problems to help other people, will prosper greatly.
Actually, that last is the real key to success. The more you help other people, or help businesses help other people, the more money you'll make."
One way for those of you who already have IT skills to get more experience, more contacts and more money, is to work on a contractual, freelance basis. You can do it nights and weekends if you have a regular job. Check out these two sites for freelancers:
Freelancers site
eLance
hope that helps,
Rick Stooker
Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career -- a computer careers book
http://www.inforingpress.com
