I started a part time job in 2009 out of high school and made minimum wage working IT for the school system. That lasted for 3 months after the stimulus money ran out. Then I came back a short time later and worked another 3 months unpaid for college credit.
After that program ended I then moved on to my first full time job where I worked 10 months in a temporary position. The person I was "temporarily" replacing didn't come back for medical reasons but the CEO decided to sell out to China and the in-house IT department was eliminated.
I then went a full year and a half unemployed, doing regular interviews in hopes of getting someone to hire a guy with good work ethic, ability to learn, a bachelor's degree in computer science, and a little over a year of experience in multiple IT roles.
After getting turned down by over a dozen employers I then moved on to finally get a job locally at a small shop IT contactor. I worked there for 2.5 years until the owner went completely AWOL and destroyed his business. We all left.
So THEN, I finally had enough experience to move immediately into a new role with better pay. I stayed at this other IT contractor for about 3 years then that failed on me by the owners selling the company, and the new owners taking the family aspect out and treating our department like a call center.
After that, I am now in my current position as an internal IT support engineer. Largely for me, the employment system failed multiple times. Yes I always got new opportunities and pay increases as expected as my experience grew. But employers just don't value people like they did 40 or 50 years ago. During my time at all these places, many fly by night employees came and went and when someone was terminated due to poor performance, they kept me because I was valuable to the team, at least at the time. My intent is to stick with whoever I am working for as long as possible, to try and make a stable lifetime career out of it and get some proper tenure as my forefathers did.
