Firstly, IT workers != computer programmers. In there are support staff, data entry people, helpdesk, admins and so on. For some of those, the writing is without doubt on the wall and your pay/conditions per work unit is going to carry on dropping. For others, the annual pay rises may have slowed but the trend is accelerating. What else would you expect from a still infant industry heading into its teenage years?

If I were a betting man, I would say that anything which isn't tied to locality and is not specialist/niche in nature is doomed to become as crappy as any normal job. Locality is real important because boilerplate services which are not niche such as auto maintenance are highly localised to the customer, and hence a mechanic or plumber in a rich neighbourhood will tend to earn loads for identical work done elsewhere. Compare auto maintenance costs between Berlin and Addis Ababa for example.

As my daddy said to me many, many years ago, the secret to high earnings and excellent work conditions in the free market is to be perceived by those with money as being able to do something valuable which is perceived as hard to find elsewhere. I know a guy who fits spiral staircases - he's good at it, but his talents are hardly unique. Yet Elton John had him fit a spiral staircase in one of his houses a few years ago, then the other celebs saw it and suddenly he's putting in spiral staircases all over the world and charging six or seven times the normal cost. In the end, it is cheaper to pay seven times the odds and avoiding finding your own worker when your opportunity cost per hour is like US$500!

The second thing my daddy said to me is to leave the free market when you start thinking of having children. The free market will throw you away if you get sick or you lose your reputation which someone influential can easily cause. He suggested a highly unionised public sector job where if you feel a bit peaky you can just go on sick leave for twenty years. Personally, I wish there were some middle ground between excellence being rewarded and the dead but safe hand of guarantee, but we as a society are still too torn between the old Babylon myth even after all these millenia later :(

I would also say that from my personal perspective as a specialist IT consultant, work is still paying US$750-1000/day upwards but the recession means that there is simply a lot less of such work, so much so that you have to find other sources of income which are usually totally unrelated to IT as so to prevent reputation damage. However in my subjective opinion there is certainly no pressure to reduce payments for high quality specialist work, if anything in some fields the rate is actually rising as more skilled professionals quit permie jobs for their own IT consultancy business. At the top end things keep on getting better, and at the bottom they keep on getting worse. Just like the wage gap in all Western countries since the 1980s!

Cheers,
Niall

A friend of mine at college was very similar to you in that he somehow made do with three to four hours of sleep a night - me personally I prefer ten with nine as a minimum, though annoyingly on a 26 hour day. We discovered many years later that he had something wrong with his pituatary gland and moreover, it was something serious such that it was becoming increasingly unstable over time.

Poor bastard's body is fairly screwed now thanks to all the wrong doses of hormone he keeps receiving. In his case he couldn't have done much had he been diagnosed sooner, but in your case if you have health insurance/live anywhere other than the US then it's probably worth pushing yourself at your medical system.

HTH,
Niall

I also come from an embedded background and I didn't find a C++ platform abstraction library to my liking (i.e. fun to use and giving the programmer maximum power and control), so I went off and wrote my own: http://www.nedprod.com/TnFOX/ (docs are at http://tnfox.sourceforge.net/TnFOX-svn/html/). You can build a noGUI version which leaves out all the GUI stuff which should provide what you want: it also has a type reflecting metaprogramming database adapter with a copy of SQLite3 thrown in for good measure, and it is very seriously fast and efficient unlike most GUI toolkits e.g. all the bottlenecks use assembler or intrinsics and there is ample stream computing support which uses metaprogramming to assemble vector instructions. One major difference from libraries such as ACE is that I deliberately made TnFOX as fun to program in as possible - I have made zero attempt to make it academically "proper" or "pure".
Hence it does come with an unusual programming paradigm - I make heavy use of C++ metaprogramming constructs and C++ exception handling and pervasive multithreading. And almost no one else uses it which I take it to mean that its learning curve simply isn't worth it for most people which is fair enough. In the end, if you ever want someone else to be able to work on your project then you need to use a well established toolkit which has a significant programmer pool attached to it. And ease of finding programmers is vastly more important than a "right" or "proper" or even "good" programming paradigm - as the designers of Plan 9, BeOS and NeXT found out.
If your project is something recreational, do give TnFOX a look. If it's for something ever destined for outside your personal fun time, go with Qt or wxWindows or any big free portability library.
HTH,
Niall

One of the biggest roles I ever worked was as head of development for the control software of the fuel and hydraulic test benches of the EuroFighter defence aircraft. The entire EuroFighter project was probably one of the biggest IT flops of the last twenty years - with at least a 25 BILLION euro overrun as well as five years late and the project still doesn't work (and likely never will). And it wasn't the engineering that went wrong, it was actually the software stuff - few realised at the outset that most of that airplane was actually software and not hardware, and they misallocated the resources accordingly from the start. For example, I was appointed as head of software development despite being just *twenty* *three* years old at the time because no one thought software was the hard part. It typically meant that the big salaries went to the hardware guys and they just got anyone they could for the software - though in fairness, they rapidly ramped up our salaries when they twigged our importance.

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Yet because of the name recognition and the seniority of the role, it is without doubt the biggest asset on my CV (despite having also worked for ARM and having a long line of open source contributions). Companies really like names they know, and a big engineering project is perceived as being "even better" by managers and HR than a pure software project.

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However that's today in 2009, and it wasn't always so. In 2003 I couldn't get an interview for love nor money and I think that was because there was more negative EuroFighter news in the press at the time, and I was indeed black balled for it at that time. In hindsight, with the passage of some time (and I'm sure it helps that now I'm older too), people tend to forget the bad and remember only the good.

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Therefore my advice to you is this: even if you are working on the biggest flop of the next decade which will be talked about by everyone for years to come, remember that the pain of association only lasts a few years. It is still better for your CV in *the* *long* *run* to have worked on a really famous disaster (and to show you have worked on anything e.g. open source competently since) than to have worked a serious of non-descript successes.

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I guess that's celebrity culture for you, but maybe also a touch of the prodigal son. Interviews and job hiring as just as fraught with insecurity and anxiety for the managers (indeed probably more so) than for the prospective employee. I certainly always found during the hiring process that I worried about how person X would fit into my team, whether their colourful private life might be a boon or a problem, whether and how much they are telling lies or leaving things out etc. Someone who is slightly famous and/or has evidence of having publicly gone through the wringer is probably a safer bet than someone whose background could be entirely faked - after all, I as a manager don't have the time to extensively fact check an interviewee's CV for truth.

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Hope that helps and good luck in the future. By the way, in the long run forming your own business is definitely the way - it's much more of a challenge, you reap what you sow directly, and best of all you get to mostly work on what you want when you want with whom you want.

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Cheers,

Niall