Same here. I was unaffected, making $45K a year, putting into a 401K, getting decent health benefits while doing tech work for a bank (of all places) until I was laid off. We're now in mid-foreclosure. I'm getting a paid sh!t wage doing warranty repair work about 10 hours a week and it's the only work I've been able to find since I was laid off last May. I've got no health benefits, I cashed out my 401K and what was left kept us in this house long enough to learn that the bank wasn't going to work with us at all... and a year ago I was telling my laid off friends how rock solid my job was. Things went down hill fast. NotQuiteReal, you're making yourself sound like an ignorant, arrogant ass.

I have two children, 12 and 7 years old. Over the years they've successfully destroyed many of our CDs and DVDs however, thanks to the ability to back them all up, we haven't actually lost any of them and we can still watch them on the PC we have connected to our LCD TV. Aside from that, what happens when the next big thing comes along and DVD's go the way of the 8-track, the cassette and VHS? I have LOTS of movies on VHS that I was forced to buy again on DVD, as well as music on cassette that I had to repurchase on CD. Now that I have all of those DVDs stored digitally, I won't have to repurchase them when the technology changes again. I wonder how much of the entertainment industry's money has come from people having to repurchase the same content everytime the technology changes?

I worked as a LAN support tech in the banking industry for just over seven years. For the first couple of years it was great. The pay was good, the work was satisfying, lots of travel and the company took care of me. Then came the inevitable reorganizations, one a year it seemed like. The new people in charge had no comprehension of what IT people do. As far as they were concerned we're just the people that fix broken stuff. They had no idea of all the things we do in the back ground that never get noticed because it was all working exactly as it was supposed to. They only noticed when things went wrong and in the corporate world you're only as good as your last mistake. They kept moving our offices around to smaller and smaller spaces until it was down to just me tucked away in the far corner of the basement (ala "Office Space", seriously).

First, like someone else said, I had to justify every purchase I made, every drive across town to check out a problem that couldn't be looked at remotely, hell every box of pens I bought. Then for the last few years it became a fight every year to justify my position at all. They finally laid me off this last May. I've spent the summer using what was left of my cashed out 401K to supplement my wife's income to take care of our family and now that is nearly depleted. I've done lots of temp work and interviewed for plenty of IT positions at less than half the pay that I was getting. In fact I just interviewed this last Monday morning with one of my former employer's competitors, doing the same job for a whopping $11.75 an hour. Apparently that's all my degree, certifications and 7 years of experience commands any more. If they offer me the job I'll have no choice but to take it and do my best not to have a chip on my shoulder about it.

I really feel like IT is a dead end industry now. I've also been asked many times if IT is the way to go for a career and I always say no. Very emphatically NO. A janitor gets more appreciation and better pay than a tech here. Maybe that'll be my next career move. Cleaning up after snot nosed 10 year olds at an elementary school. Somehow it doesn't seem all that different than doing tech work for a large corporation.

The IT industry is shrinking and this is by it's very nature. Sure the dot com bust plays a part but that's only a small part now. The very idea behind computers is to make things work faster and more efficiently. People think this is only on the user end but that's not true, it's also working the same way for those of us that build, repair and maintain computers and networks. The fact is that it's taking less and less techs to do more and more work. It was slim pickings eight years ago when I got my job in IT and I had to beat out nearly 100 other applicants for it. That was when the economy was in great shape.

We'd like to blame it on the economy and say that IT will bounce back when the economy does but the fact is that it won't. One network administrator can now do the work that, ten years ago, would have taken five people to do. It's the same with PC techs, since it's no longer cost effective to actually fix anything any more. Parts are so cheap that they're simply thrown out and replaced or warranty returned to the manufacturer where they're thrown out and replaced. A company of two thousand employees that spans three states, such as the one I was recently laid off from, no longer needs fifteen PC techs to keep up with all those users. Instead, most work is done over the phone now by about six guys. If it can't be fixed via remote desktop or netop, they simply ship a ghosted machine to the user that any drunk monkey can plug in, which is then configured remotely if any configuration is required at all. Put the old one in the box the new one came in and ship it back. Installing a new printer? Insert tab A into slot B and call the help desk to do the software install. Fifteen minutes on the phone and it's ready to go. When the economy does finally recover, these companies MIGHT hire one or two more people, MAYBE, but don't bet your future on it.

Glory? The only thing that I think could possibly be construed as glory is this idea that non tech people have that since everything is computerized now that there will always be high demand for IT people. The fact is that a CS degree, A+ certification and nearly a decade of experience is fast becoming a worthless skill set. Myself and most other unemployed professional geeks will be going back to school, retraining in some other field all together.

The other side of that coin, one that applies to IT people still employed, is that you're only as good as your last mistake. When you're doing your job well, no one knows that you're doing any thing at all. They don't even know you exist until something breaks down and then suddenly you're completely incompetent regardless of how quickly the issue was resolved or even if it wasn't your fault. It might have been the phone company's fault but those stuffy executives in their $3000 suits that can barely operate their blackberries, all they know is that it's a computer problem and you're the computer guy. Get on your knees and pucker up.

I wouldn't recommend the IT industry to any one. You'll get that BA in computer science and whatever certifications they tell you will help and then you'll go to work in some call center doing PC support for $12 an hour, and that's being optimistic since most of that work is outsourced to India where they're paid $5 an hour to do the same thing and happy to get it.

Christ. Here in Montana nearly 30% of my income goes to taxes, health care is sh!t, sick pay doesn't exist, i only get 14 days paid vacation and women get no paid birth leave at all. I make about $40K a year.

God bless America right?

Seriously, if you want a social life, you have to be social. The Internet is alright for making that initial contact but that's about it. To develop any kind of meaningful friendship you're going to have to actually, physically meet people. I live in a relatively small town in one of the most technologically backwards states in the US (Montana) and have virtually nothing in common with 90% of the population here. One of the things that really sucks about it here is that there are no real geek type social activities. No decent computer gaming clubs (or gaming clubs of any kind beyond the gobbs of casinos), no geeky conventions aside from the one sci-fi type convention that occurs here every year, it's not all that big and most of the attendees seem to disappear for the rest of the year. There are very, very, VERY few opportunities to meet like minded individuals here. If you're anything like the typical geek you don't give a crap about hunting, sports, trucks, fast cars or any of that usual macho BS. You use your mind much more than you use your muscles and that prevents you from having much in common with a great deal of the population. And meeting women... well something that will help tremendously is having more guy friends and hanging out with them in social settings. For many of us geeks, particularly in an area like mine, it means spending a lot of time going to places and doing things that we don't find terribly interesting. People will give you all kinds of trite advice like go where the women are, the library, trivia night at your local bar, sports events, church, whatever... but you'll find all on your own that this doesn't really help much if you don't know any body and you'll get bored quickly. You need to make more guy friends first, expand your network of friends and the opportunities to socialize out in public will expand with it and then so will your chances of meeting women. This means making some concessions and getting to know people with which you only have one or two minor things in common with. It's frustrating. Of course one, not so easy to do alternative is to move somewhere with a bigger geek community. Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Denver... get online, look for techy, sci-fi, computer gaming, geeky conventions and see where they take place. Chances are that if it's a city of reasonable size there are others like it there. There's your geek community. Forget the Internet as a means of making friends and meeting women, 99% of the time it will get you no where and you'll end up posting on slashdot, asking how to make friends and meet women.

At this point they've sucked dry and destroyed every other movie I came to love growing up, what difference will one more make? Really, what is one more giant, steaming turd on the pile?

When KDE4 was first officially released with Ubuntu I found it so buggy it was nearly unusable. I could have investigated fixes and little tweaks I could have made on my own to make it more usable but if I'm spending more time fixing it then using it than what is the point? I went back to 3.5. When 4.1 came out I gave it a try and I've been very happy with it. I've never liked Gnome, it reminds me too much of the Mac OS in terms of it's looks and usability. Not that it's a bad desktop, it just looks and feels a little too bland for me. Not my taste.

I set up squid on my sons' PC and only allow them to see specific sites, blocking everything else. If they want access to another site they have to sit down with me and show it to me and I'll add it to the list. Not as great as net nanny but it does the job. There are probably better ways to go about it.

The problem isn't a lack of wanting to find good people that know linux that will work for them, it's finding good people that know linux that are willing to work for the peanuts that they pay their techs. It's pathetic what call centers pay and no self respecting tech is going to work for those wages unless they're in dire need of employment.
On the other hand, there are plenty of guys working in the electronics section at walmart for $7 an hour that would be happy to take the one week class the call center has that "certifies" them and become a help desk tech. Hence, the frustration many of us experience when we call for tech support.

I'll join the movement. Let's start a website.

All I have to say is, amen brother. With as much time as I spend holding people's hands through any kind of change on their PC, I don't think it would be any more painful for them to learn a new OS, even Ubuntu.

I think I heard it on an episode of Futurama: "When you're doing your job right, no one will be sure you did anything at all." That's pretty much how IT works and it's why most of my users, some of which are my superiors, really have no idea what I do there. Trying to explain it to them would just bore and confuse them. Unfortunately I think it's just the nature of the job.

Ah yes, the standard Christian, backed-into-a-corner-due-to-complete-lack-of-proof response. I've heard it many times. Ok then, even though I think this is an utterly ridiculous and absurd point, I'll bite.
Really then, what we're dealing with here is levels of faith is it not? It takes a minuscule amount of faith to believe in one's own senses. At least in my case being that I'm healthy, not currently taking any medications, using any drugs or consuming any kind of mind altering chemical. I haven't even had a cup of coffee in nearly a decade because of the way it affects my senses.
I can reproduce the same results from my senses every time, without fail. At the age of 32 I have enough trial and error experience using my senses that I feel they are trust worthy. The minute that my senses produce some result completely at odds with the results they have produced in the years prior to that point, I'll try several more times to reproduce the conditions and verify that oddity. If it can be verified, I'll go see a doctor or a psychiatrist and get their opinion. This is a scientific methodology, no?
I have used these senses to form my morality, my idea of right and wrong. For example, I have proven that having children and raising a family, without marrying their mother, is not harmful to myself, their mother, our children or society around me. I know this because using my senses I have deduced that my six and eleven year old children are happy, healthy, well-adjusted children that are doing well in school and in life in general. I have like-wise deduced that their mother, who has been my best friend and companion for twelve years, is also happy, well adjusted and successful in her career and her life. And of course myself, I am also happy, healthy and successful in my life and my career. No harm has come to my family or any one who has come into contact with us as a result of the non-traditional life style we lead, what ever that means.
However, Christians (and followers of other religions) have told us many times that our life-style is immoral and somehow harmful to us, society and the world. They have formed this opinion not due to any kind of proof, because there is none, but because God (a magical, vengeful, jealous, irrational and completely unreasonable man in the sky) tells them that this is so. The existence of this deity and all of his fantastical, magical abilities have never been proven. They have been corroborated by men thousands of years ago, whose existence also cannot be proven and who also claim to have either seen or performed similar supernatural feats, none of which can be reproduced, and one of whom claims to have been the son of this deity by way of immaculate conception, and whom also was said to possess the same or even more fantastic supernatural abilities as this deity and his followers.
Needless to say, belief in this system of morality requires no small amount of faith. And really it's completely irrelevant because if this all could be proven and I had seen this deity with my own eyes, I would not follow him. His rules are not not based off of what is harmful and not harmful to yourself or others. Indeed, many of his followers are and have been extremely harmful, beyond measure, to millions of people all over the world. His rules are to be followed because he says so, period. Such a god is not worthy of my worship.
And George Washington? Well aside from the staggering amount of rational and easily believable evidence available to substantiate his existence, I have never heard it said that he walked on water, turned water into wine or healed the deathly ill with the touch of his hand or the sound of his voice. So again, it takes a very small amount of faith to believe he really existed.
Then there is your argument, which in itself is not only quite extreme, as religious people and their arguments tend to be, but it is ignorant to a staggering degree. You're trying to sway me and everyone else not with proof, but with a complete and total lack of proof. You're trying to establish your lack of proof, as your proof are you not?
I've got an idea. Let's conduct an experiment shall we? Let's change our entire legal system in this country so that it is not proof that is required to win a case, but the total lack of it, and let's see just how well our society functions under that system. Get started on that and let me know how it turns out. I'll be hiding out in a bunker until it's over.