Originally Posted by hux309

Im not sorry for you im glad, i know full well what a dump that place was.

Friend of mine got fired for a stupid bs reason basically they wanted shot of him, anyway signed up to south west water and now spends his time reading meters and says it's the best job he's had with better pay!!

Damn im tempted now lol, anyway this could be the shove you needed.

As for me i'll be fine, the boning hall over here isn't too bad so long as you give the boners a wide berth.

Did they try to screw you all over the redundancy pay, bet you got a pretty penny.

Originally Posted by Trout

Get trained in Middleware and get a years experience in Message Broking and I will guarantee you work for years - well paid too.

Originally Posted by TurboKitty

I honestly wouldn't recommend IT to anyone at the moment, unless I really, really, really, disliked them.

The market has been rubbish for a few years and is the pits right now, along with everything else. A lot has been out-sourced and there are a lot of experienced people out there without work. It's generally not a nice environment in which to work either. It's high pressure with zero thanks and *everything* that goes wrong is your fault. When you're doing the job well and there are no problems, they wonder why they need you as nothing is going wrong , and when there are problems everyone is baying for blood. You're constantly expected to perform miracles with no resources. When you do, they expect more next time and when it doesn't work out, well, that's your fault too! Plus everyone thinks their problem is far more important than anyone else's. Nobody wants to learn anything about IT or take any responsibility for their own work or system because that's your job, (seriously, if they delete a file accidentally and it wasn't backed up because they'd saved it locally rather than to a network drive, that'll be your fault too).

Programming is a bit different and not something I've done, so I can't comment on that, but I'd honestly say avoid any type of support work or project work.

Unless IT is your dream job, playing with tech all day is your idea of heaven and you can ignore the (l)users and the fact you're treated like something they trod in, avoid.

Originally Posted by vindaloo

You didn't mention offshoring. IMO that's the biggest potential threat. IT is becoming a commodity that's essentially free to transport. Anywhere with a big enough bandwidth can support workers. Certain banking and defense/gov't contracts are the only safer havens.

Anyways, I'm currently on gardening leave, literally, as I've today finished spraying the garden fence. As of the end of October I'm also redundant.