Why I made this site

I have seen many adverts banded around in the media regarding the opportunities that exist in IT. They are peddling various courses to teach people IT. I find them at best naive, at worst, deliberately misleading. The average wage of an IT professional is £37,000 (~$61,100) according to one advert. The advert, I feel, tells the viewer that signing up for their short course will place them on easy street. What they don't tell you is that the vast majority of "IT workers" are support staff sat in call centres reading from a script. Now, I have no problem with anyone who works in these centres, in fact I admire their tenacity. I resent what I feel is outright dishonesty on the part of the advertisers. The pay on these front line positions is most certainly NOT £37,000. They also don't tell you that the employee turnover tends to be pretty high due to lower job satisfaction.

In my opinion these adverts are exploiting people's ignorance of the subject of IT. When people ask what I do and I tell them I'm a software developer they invariably respond "Oh, computers". That's ok, it's not like I feel some massive insecure need to correct them. It's how the human mind copes with areas we don't really care about. It sits on a dusty shelf in our mind with a post-it note on saying things like "computers", "space stuff" or "hippy crap". The advert takes such a gross generalisation, it's like saying a career in "cars". What does that mean? Design? Construction? Driving? Repair? Exactly, it's an insult to your intelligence to say "get a career in IT".

I decided to make this site to give you an insight into what I think is one of the most interesting areas. Software development is still sought after, even in this economic climate. There is an immediacy, a type of instant gratification to coding. You can write code, run it and see the effects quickly, I can't think of another line of work where you can change a design into tangible results so speedily. No other area where you can toy with ideas and make cutting edge prototypes with such ease.

My hope is that some use it to spark a new direction for themselves. So that, one day, when someone asks you what you do and says "Oh, computers." You can reply "No! Not just computers! I've made websites, programs and enterprise systems that handle collosal masses of data that you couldn't comprehend let alone understand. I have seen the 1's and 0's that control your life. The traffic lights, your payroll, your bank account and criminal record. I have reached out and touched the digital finger of god. You are a number! And insignificant speck of magnetic resonance on a disk. So no! Not just computers."

Ahem. Sorry.