[Closed] Career advice for IT?

Developer - look at some of the code clan type boot camp places. I’ve worked with some great people that have come in on that route.

https://codeclan.com/

Or with a help desk background maybe business analysis or performance analyst type roles?

What's your background / what do you enjoy?

I worked in oil and gas for many years doing technical jobs offshore. MWD (one job I did) involved a lot of data handling, data processing, etc., plus the practical side of looking after a unit of surface equipment with several PCs and numerous sensors.

I recently did an MSc in building surveying but have no wish to work as a surveyor now. Not my cup of tea. This was to the ends of a career change away from oil and gas.

What’s your background / what do you enjoy?

Generally, I prefer technical jobs and problems rather than dealing with people if that helps? 😀

I think data analyst better than a developer role for you. Train up in Power BI or Tableau

Do a Cloud Guru AWS course - I think the "basic" but pretty in depth one is called solutions architect or something. Maybe do something AWS-ey that covers the data stuff too - data lake bits, Glue, Sagemaker etc. Also if you're data inclined, learn Python.

I think I'd probably look at something data analyst to start with.

But it probably wouldn't hurt to do a few intro/taster courses for a few different areas, and see if there's anything you particularly enjoy. IT can be a pretty miserable place if it's not something that resonates with you.

Fundamentally though, why IT? If you've opted out of surveying after doing an MSc, what are you hoping for?

IT Security

IT Security

Or maybe IT Security

Or if you want big money Data Protection Officer.

Oh, I'd definitely do some kind of fundamentals of programming course - helpful for most IT roles, and for the most part, don't worry about formal qualifications (unless you like that kinda thing).

help desk monkey

Nice attitude. You'll go far.

If you’ve opted out of surveying after doing an MSc, what are you hoping for?

Surveying is mostly minor project management which just isn't something I'm interested in. It's all networking and building relationships. Just not me. I'm more comfortable with technical work where I can work semi-independently to accomplish some goal.

Data Engineer?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/roles/data-engineer

IT Security

IT Security

Or maybe IT Security

It’s not a bad shout.

If OP is interested the OU, via their online offering called futurelern have got a fundamental cyber security course, it won’t be enough for you to get a job, but it’ll give you a taste to see if you like it.

Problem solving is a big part of it, and we’ll as for people. If IT people had interpersonal skills, they wouldn’t employ people like me (sales, soon hopefully to be IT security).

@P-Jay Thx, I'll take a look.

Security or even with some technical aptitude, flexibility and a desire to be away from a desk, presales - https://blog.goconsensus.com/sales/presales/understanding-the-difference-between-sales-and-pre-sales. It pays very well and can be pretty varied.

Sounds like you might have the aptitude to be a good software tester.

ISTQB course is the defacto course \ qualification. You don't always need it to get a job, but it will help.

My advice would be don't do it. Become an ooenreach engineer or similar. Good pay, technical, out and about. Career progression if you want it. Most of IT is pretty dead end

If you must, how about testing? Requires good IT skills, good mindset to think of how to break things.

IT Security is not a bad shout if you have the time to invest in learning it and the willingness to accept the time it will take. It can be, and frequently is, extremely frustrating and has a lot of responsibility attached to what you do, but can also be very rewarding. It’s also an area with a vast range of different skill sets.

If you are methodical and enjoy problem solving, maybe consider SOC or Incident Response work. As you learn more, there are lots of different areas even within that to specialise in. If you enjoy standards and how they relate to working environments and process, GdPR and information security is big too. Companies of all sizes need to be aware of how they relate to GDPR and other laws (SCHREMS2, etc) so it’s also a good area to look at. You could also read ISO27001 and make a career of advising on how that applies to businesses.

Career wise it would be best if you can get IT skills and add that to your existing knowledge from your past careers and studies. IT guys without relevant business knowledge (like myself) have disadvantage of being generalists in the beginning of most projects.

IT does offer a broad spectrum of roles so you might want to do some general training before getting into a specialist area. Cloud and Security are probably the major skills gap at the moment, so there are plenty of well paid roles there.

Either acloud.guru or whizlabs can guide you through the cloud certification path, and starting with the AWS cloud practitioner gives you a basic grounding before going onto the AWS CSA Associate. There's equivalent certification in Azure too, which is the next most popular cloud provider.

Personally, I'd also recommend reading The Phoenix Project and/or The Unicorn Project to get an understanding of devops and agile principles. These two books are fictional scenarios rather than textbooks, making them fairly light reading. But having an understanding of these concepts and the terminology could make a big difference in an interview and help you when you get started.

Mobile app developer.

Lots of resources to get you started.

(I'm an android developer, and dabbled with Flutter)

If you are looking at starting in a year or so, I suggest Flutter / Dart.
It's a development platform that works for both ios and Android (and web and desktop)- it's becoming very popular and you wont be behind people with 5 years experience as it's pretty new.

Get a Macbook for development.

My advice would be don’t do it. Become an ooenreach engineer or similar. Good pay, technical, out and about. Career progression if you want it. Most of IT is pretty dead end

I've working in 'IT' for nearly 40 years, and TBH I wouldn't particularly advise it as a career change job based on what you've said about yourself - but the above is a good shout.

Generally, I prefer technical jobs and problems rather than dealing with people if that helps? 😀

I've just retired after 35 years in IT, mostly software projects. There is an increasing realisation that many of IT's problems are a result of the failure to take the people aspects seriously. This leads to dysfunctional teams, building the wrong things for the wrong reasons. There are very few IT jobs that actually require no interaction with people.

mostly minor project management which just isn’t something I’m interested in.

Welcome to IT, you are either managing your own or a teams work, or working with incomptetant micro managers doing the same to you </sweeping_generalisation>

Often the hardest part of any job is the people you work with, IT is no different. DevOps, IT Sec, QA (although manual test will hopefully die out in favour of automation one day, I can dream).

@toby1 basically nails it. I work IT-security and (with the exception of my incident response work) pretty much all of what I do is trying to get other people to do things for me or with me.

I appear to constantly "joke" about our next hire being a behavioural psychologist as so much of our job is trying to convince people to do things in specific ways. I'm not joking. If I knew of someone with that skillset, I would hire them.

Anyway, there's a huge element of being able to manage things in IT, be it time, people, projects. If you find a job you like and are good at with just one of those, you'll probably end up being exposed to the others too.

IT Security

To do IT security effectively you need one or both of an understanding of the business you're doing security for and a wide understanding of IT, so from your description of where you are I suspect you would find this endlessly frustrating, as would people you worked with. On the other hand if people are suggesting this to you it perhaps helps me understand why I used to have so much trouble finding good candidates!

To do IT security effectively you need one or both of an understanding of the business you’re doing security for and a wide understanding of IT

Yeah - I was surprised by the IT security suggestions, that's a very specialist subject that takes way more than a year to get up to scratch in, imo.

It is because "cyber" is short-staffed and there is near constant pressure to get more people into the field to do things. The same sort of thing exists around development, with people being bombarded by news articles about teaching kids to code to drive the knowledge-based economy forward in years to come.

I am trying to be positive about how I recommend IT-related careers; I want the market sector to have good people, but I also want people to understand that to be good takes time, experience and skill. With ITSäk, you need one or more specialist kills and, generally, a good lot of experience to make a positive contribution and those take time to gain, often in areas that have a lot of pressure or pay badly (like SOC L1). Or, they take people putting in a lot of effort in their own time and trying to sell that equivalence to a company or a recruiter as to why they should get a job as a cloud security architect when their previous experience is all working at a swimming pool since university.

I have 25 yers in IT, with the first 10 in software testing and the last 15 in ITSäk. I am still "only" a Senior Specialist. I still learn every day. I still get frustrated every day. Such is life.

@Mackem

Get a Macbook for development.

Any reason for that?

I was think ing speciifically about mobile app development. To develop for ios you have to use an Apple - whereas for Android you can use PC or Mac - there are ways around it, but they are pain.

I’m in similar position looking to get away from the oil industry. Had a wee look at the trainee openreach engineer positions, and they sound quite attractive. I have found some shocking reviews of the position and the company to work for and wondering if anyone has any direct experience to share?
Cheers

working with incomptetant micro managers

This x100. I've worked in 'IT' for a while in a few different industries and it always, always comes down to this. If you don't have one yet, you will do soon! It seems as every company grows and its IT team with it, these people get in all the nooks.

This x100. I’ve worked in ‘IT’ for a while in a few different industries and it always, always comes down to this. If you don’t have one yet, you will do soon! It seems as every company grows and its IT team with it, these people get in all the nooks.

And all of them adamantly insisting that "I used to be a developer too! I understand!"

As others have said,

Security is a boom* sector and screaming out for good people.

(*in more than one meaning)

You're looking at 5yrs experience + CISSP to get decent money in IT security. If you're looking at long term career switch well worth it. It's not an easy ride despite the demand.

Quickest £££ money for low - med upfront learning investment has got to be SAP or Salesforce admin / consultant.

If on the other hand you want an easy way to get into tech you can pick up in a matter of months, while making semi decent money try:

Shopify, Wordpress, Big Commerce or Webflow setups / maintenance. Pick one and focus. You will be able to do your learning for free at The University of Youtube. Probably enough business from this forum alone to keep you running. Plenty of people happy to pay for someone that simply picks up the phone while running on UK hours.

Surveying is mostly minor project management which just isn’t something I’m interested in. It’s all networking and building relationships. Just not me. I’m more comfortable with technical work where I can work semi-independently to accomplish some goal.

There's not much of IT, whether development, testing, infrastructure, analytics etc that doesn't invoice minor project management, building relationships with people, etc except at the very junior levels where you turn up and get told what to do.

Cyber security - Loads of companies are behind the curve, especially public sector/NHS who have been increasingly targeted since Covid. It’s a pressurised job and you need technical skills plus governance/policy knowledge. Also heavily linked to cloud migration below and the increased need for assurance.

M365/Teams/ - going to continue to grow as orgs work out what a sustainable model of flexible/home/mobile working looks like. Orgs learning on the job how they migrate accounts to 365 and role out these new evergreen services

Cloud/azure/aws migration - trend is for suppliers to offer their products as cloud first/cloud only. Plenty of orgs creating their own private tenancies as a result so on premise services will increasingly need to migrate across.

Mobility services - phones now need corporately built & managed with products such as in tune (so you get native MS apps) and Apple DEP. MDM/MAM policies need applied and managed and app deployment controlled.

Very simply explanation but if you have any of those I guarantee that proactive heads of IT will be after you.

OP, looking at your contribution to the GB News thread, and assuming that you aren't just trolling there, I would suggest IT is not an appropriate path for you. In almost any IT role, there is a need to communicate with non-technical people in a comprehensible way, and your refusal to do that on that thread suggests that you are either unable or unwilling to do that. If you do still want to go down the IT route, some training in effective communication would be as important as the technical training.

In almost any IT role, there is a need to communicate with non-technical people in a comprehensible way

yeah, good one....

I would suggest IT is not an appropriate path for you. In almost any IT role, there is a need to communicate with non-technical people in a comprehensible way, and your refusal to do that on that thread suggests that you are either unable or unwilling to do that. If you do still want to go down the IT route, some training in effective communication would be as important as the technical training.

I'm sorry if what I wrote sounded impenetrable but my understanding of something was questioned by someone who implied that they knew a lot about it. Discussing that something in its own terms seemed appropriate.

more interesting than being a help desk monkey?

I am an IT Director. My SD team are not "monkeys" maybe you need to rethink

Not going to lie, gonna be a tough ask with no formal qualification or experience to get into anything IT apart from lowest level stuff, and even then you're fighting the grads and yooths for that (who will be paid less). Its a slight peev of mine that people just say they fancy working on IT as they've got an aptitude for it (from experience interviewing people, 16 hours a day on Call of Duty doesn't count as IT experience). Ironically it's your other skills you probably have that'll be what you could sell.

If you want coding experience, I'd always suggest going for the widest used stuff, so web side - JavaScript/HTML/CSS/JS frameworks, maybe Python - as people say there's loads of online help out there.

Once you start doing things like app development you're specialising quite a lot and with the limited skills/background you can bring I'd say that'd be a tough one to blag.

If you can live with the talking to other people stuff, maybe Scrum Master roles are feasible. Definitely worth starting to read up on Scrum/agile methodolgies as a way of working anyway regardless.

I'd be open about what role you go for - at a junior level it might be a case of taking whatever role/technology the employer sees fit rather than hanging your flag on being, say, a web developer, or an IT Security specialist. Your home training/aptitude will get you into the frame, I'm not 100% it'll give you much power to demand a specific role.

In almost any IT role, there is a need to communicate with non-technical people in a comprehensible way

yeah, good one….

Best laugh I've had all month.

Can't offer any advice myself, but what breatheasy just posted looks very sensible based on my experience of working closely with a dev team.

And perhaps the scrum master/project management side is a better way in for people with significant experience in other industries?

On a positive note, I think the barrier to entry has never been lower. When I started in IT I managed to scrounge some outdated CCNA material from a friend and studied that. Nowadays you can pick a subject to learn and between YouTube, Udemy, Pluralsight, ACloudGuru etc the learning resources are so easy to get to.

I do a fair bit of interviewing and one thing I've noticed is attention spans are dwindling and a lot of the younger folks struggle to maintain focus and learn in depth concepts. I would have no issues hiring an older candidate if that person brought a load of life/work experience and showed proof (portfolio, demo etc) that they were able to learn. It would be refreshing and make you stand out in a sea of grads.

In almost any IT role, there is a need to communicate with non-technical people in a comprehensible way,

absolute bobbins and also a bit weird and stalkerish that you bring up OPs contribution in another thread.

Yes communication skills are increasingly important in the appropriate role, so you can communicate effectively, enable change adoption and engage in process/service improvement, articulate strategic direction etc. But they are usually senior management or PM role where you need to be able to understand a wider range of technical concepts and articulate them as appropriate.

Not so true for SME technical roles where you aren't required to have those skills. Some of the very best, most valued staff I work with have zero communication skills, and do not have the ability or willingness to develop them.

Only place it really lets them down is at interview.

Oh and regarding being a help desk "monkey", I started in IT doing that for a bank and look back on it with fond memories. Learnt a lot and was a great foot in the door for moving upwards when the time came. If you have any large bank scale head offices etc near you, I wouldn't discount it.

Not so true for SME technical roles where you aren’t required to have those skills. Some of the very best, most valued staff I work with have zero communication skills, and do not have the ability or willingness to develop them.

I think it's a "it depends" in this case on the company size. Small companies I have worked at you chat to the owners and getting on with them helps! Bigger company with layers, different maybe.

On help desks:

My first IT job was telephone-based tech support. "Monkey" isn't that unfair a description, at the place I was at at least.

On the one hand, the learning curve is near vertical, you will learn a lot and fast. The people you work with, the ones who aren't there because "any job = money" at least, are mostly good people who took a support role because they wanted to fix problems and help people. I have friends today that I made there like 25-30 years ago.

On the other, you will likely be treated like pond life, from the management to the customers. The trick is to get in, take as much from it as you can as quickly as you can, and get out before it sends you barmy. It's a bit like living in London. (-: Where I was at, the average length of service in Tech was six months. I managed four years but that was was largely because I wangled my way off the phones as fast as humanly possible.

sorry, I meant Subject Matter Expert rather than Small to Medium Enterprise. But your analogy is probably accurate nonetheless

Not so true for SME technical roles where you aren’t required to have those skills. Some of the very best, most valued staff I work with have zero communication skills, and do not have the ability or willingness to develop them.

Only place it really lets them down is at interview

Partly true - I have extraordinarily bad people skills and hate dealing with end users for that reason (not because I consider them beneath me :p ). In my current role something's gone badly wrong if I am talking to end users but I do have to communicate clearly in internal meetings (at all levels) and produce design documentation etc. The stereotype of the IT expert that treats everyone with disdain and does his own thing the way he wants to is either non-existent or very rare these days.

As for routes in to IT - depends a bit on which side you want to get involved with (infrastructure/admin vs dev, although the lines blur a bit with crap like Infrastructure as Code :p ). I'm very much on the infrastructure side and service desk is still the most obvious route in if you've got no formal experience (even with decent qualifications like an MCSE you'd struggle to get a role as an engineer etc. with no experience).

My route in was a VAX/VMS operator then focused more on the Windows Server then VMware side of things (and ended up as a tech architect), I don't think pure operator roles really exist any more (apart from in some niche areas). If I was starting out now I'd be looking at a service desk role in a big IT services company - not only will you get to work with a lot of technologies there's also likely to be training available and career progression paths laid out so you can progress from service desk to junior engineer well within a year. With smaller companies I imagine it's harder to progress that fast without jumping ship.

If your main interest is on the infrastructure side but you're adept at coding you should be able to progress very quickly as automation etc. is here to stay but the industry is still lacking in skills (thankfully I progressed beyond a fully hands-on technical role before my crappy coding ability became an issue...).

Cyber security is also a good area to aim at, even the junior roles where I work require coding skills though (and multi-OS experience), service desk or junior dev role would be a good starting point for that but you probably need to keep pushing back from being pigeon-holed as a dev or infrastructure admin and get into the cyber security side as quickly as you can. You're also more likely to need security clearances (everyone on-shore where I work has SC but some roles on government contracts need DV which is expensive and time-consuming to go through so no chance someone is going to put a new hire with no experience through it). Once you have it though you'll have much better job security (it's not really a "jump ship and write your own pay-check" thing though as they're usually government agency specific and don't transfer easily).

The stereotype of the IT expert that treats everyone with disdain and does his own thing the way he wants to is either non-existent or very rare these days.

This is an uncanny description of the last two lead devs for the product I was working on.

And yes, it was a management/hiring problem really. The company didn't know how to handle a dev team and wasn't able to recruit anyone more suitable for the role.

Underlying related issue: Experienced devs are in such high demand that companies will tolerate far weaker soft skills than they might for most other roles. In my experience anyway.

a bit weird and stalkerish that you bring up OPs contribution in another thread

I don't think so. The OP asked for advice. His behaviour in the other thread was so striking that it influenced the advice that I gave.

Although I am just a random bloke on the internet, this is my area of expertise - I have 35 years in IT, mostly in technical roles but including managing a group of up to 220 analysts, testers and developers. I've been responsible for both development methods and for recruitment at various times. This isn't an appeal to authority, I can still be wrong, I'm just stating that I have some relevant experience from which to draw some conclusions.

The stereotype of the IT expert that treats everyone with disdain and does his own thing the way he wants to is either non-existent or very rare these days.

It's not as rare as it will be, but it's certainly not something that a forward looking organisation would be looking for. Quite a few people have mentioned agile methods, and the first value in the Agile Manifesto is 'Individuals and interactions over processes and tools'. This is a recognition that IT projects are fundamentally a communication problem at every level. People who struggle to communicate effectively will struggle in a modern project environment. They will be uncomfortable, their teammates will be unhappy, results will probably be poor. So I would not advise someone who says "I prefer technical jobs and problems rather than dealing with people if that helps?" and then displays some interesting communication behaviours to take up IT as a career. It is unlikely to work out for them.

and then displays some interesting communication behaviours

Nah u have just found a way to attack me like some wierdo. Take your gas-lighting elsewhere.

Nah u have just found a way to attack me like some wierdo. Take your gas-lighting elsewhere.

🤣

Best of luck with your job search.

Best of luck with your job search.

Good luck being a manager. You sound covertly toxic.

The stereotype of the IT expert that treats everyone with disdain and does his own thing the way he wants to is either non-existent or very rare these days.

I don't know, pretty much sums up all the IT experts I've met in the last 30+ years....

Good luck being a manager. You sound covertly toxic.

Unfortunately, there's a fairly high proportion of toxic managers in IT.

I fully agree with onewheelgood's points about IT being made difficult by people/communication issues!

Good luck being a manager. You sound covertly toxic.

I think your ability to both argue with and read the personalities of strangers on the internet would look great on your CV.

I did exactly this because it’s always what I wanted to do, mine definitely won’t have been the fastest way but I studied my A+ so I got the fundamentals nailed down then got a job on an IT service desk in a big city, started from the basics, learnt how the most important thing is asking questions, then couldn’t progress there any further and had developed enough for a 2nd line role, now I’m in a 2/3rd line role but the way to make the money is maybe start in support then briefly 2nd line then if you’ve got the skills, look at the AZ100 for Azure or 365 specialist etc...

People who struggle to communicate effectively will struggle in a modern project environment.

Aside from the OP just committing harakiri and proving your point,

I'd agree with everything you said except that a technical manager needs to understand that technical roles attract people who are a bit... odd. And really they need to recognise that this can be a superpower.

I'm in a fledgling security team, 2-3 years old, I'm lead to believe that the reason I'm here at all is because the conversation went:
"I want Alan on the team."
"Why?"
"Cos his brain is ****ed."

Communication can be critical but it's entirely role-dependant. One of the best engineers I ever knew was a lad named Tom. He was a genius and an honest-to-goodness polymath. There was nothing he didn't know at least something about, we had some amazing conversations. He was bored one afternoon so for no other reason than he thought it might be interesting, he learned Russian.

But by christ you could never send him to site, we'd have had legal claims, he was a borderline psychopath, he'd have stabbed the office cat on the way in or something.

What do you do with someone like that? We binned him off in the end (because it also turned out that he was a battling alcoholic and would pop out to his car of a lunchtime to drop a half-bottle of Smirnoff and then pass out) but for a few years we shoved him in a corner with a big pile of hardware and a couple of impressionable apprentices and he was brilliant.

A tech being able to talk to 'normal' people is great, it's a valuable (and probably undervalued) skill. But it's not a showstopper if they can't, we'll find them a desk and a command line.

On the contrary, that thread was closed which shows it isn't allowed to be a toxic and nasty place. I suggest you reread what you've just written, i_scoff_cake, you still have time to edit.

I think one of the issues is people want to get into what is actually an extremely technical role not because they have aptitude but because they think it pays well. I see people with formal training and they just don't think in the right way and never will. I also see the converse a couple of contractors I know have no formal quals but are amongst the best developers I know. So first I would make sure you fall into the second category.

At this point short of if I was looking to fill a role other than a modern apprenticeship or something similar I would look at you and have no way of assessing your aptitude for a role that was not based on training you.

So....

If you know someone who is happy to give you a shot in anything even remotely close then take it. Accept that initially you will be a drain on time and not a contributor and understand you will be paid accordingly.

or

Develop something in your own time, something you can point link too on your CV. If you get an interview you can use it as an example of your work too. It will also let you know if you have any aptitude for it or if you are wasting your time. Also if at an interview you bring samples it will tell the person who interviews you if you have aptitude or not 🙂

Another thing to consider is domain knowledge is pretty useful developing a product in an industry you know about is a real advantage. Especially if you are working for a small company where you might not have a large base of industry experts to guide the project.

For instance if I was recruiting for a job in water and you knew what a PRV and DMA were you would have an advantage.

I have been an embedded C, C++ developer for 25 years, but I work very closely with teams that develop web apps and have dabbled, but its not really where my skill set adds the most value these days.

It does appear to be a young mans game in web app dev, as apposed to the embedded stuff that seems to be full of old duffers like me 🙂

It does appear to be a young mans game in web app dev, as apposed to the embedded stuff that seems to be full of old duffers like me

Hi five! not embedded at the moment but big C++ project with some very low level stuff. I'd second the web stuff being a young mans game. Seems like a constant battle with new frameworks etc and takes a real passion for (to me) learning the same thing but slightly different again and again to stay relevant.

Frankly, this episode makes this forum look like a nasty and toxic place.

I've no idea what incident you're referring to, but if that's your conclusion from your description then that speaks more about you than your arch-nemesisisis. a) you're judging the site on the back of what sounds like a fairly minor spat with one single other user and b) you're choosing to still be here and expecting free advice. For a "nasty and toxic place" you appear to be doing alright from it yourself so far.

As for you mocking my ability to read strangers, what did you think Onewheel has done? He declared that I’m a poor communicator, in general, based upon his own misunderstanding on one thread?

He's not the only one who reads your posts - you do rather give the impression of being able to regurgitate strings of text without giving much of an impression that you understand what they mean. I'm not saying I do, BTW, but you do write in a dense and impenetrable style.

You also seem quite happy to put other peoples' noses out of joint and also fairly consistently determined to present a contrary point of view. Now, that's fine - debate's a good thing, right ? - but you can come across as incredibly condescending at times. I'm not saying it's right, but you ARE going to annoy people - I wouldn't be posting on this thread if I wasn't one of them.

I probably should just let this one lie but I spent today pulling ragwort on a nature reserve and it's been bugging me all day. So, @i_scoff_cake, this is for you.

My first point is a general one. If you ask for advice on an internet forum and people respond in good faith, it's not a great look to launch ad hominem attacks just because you don't like the advice. It's just rude. As was your 'help desk monkey' jibe.

Now I'll address some specifics.

Nah u have just found a way to attack me like some wierdo. Take your gas-lighting elsewhere.

I have never attacked you. I stated that I had observed some behaviour from you that was counter to what I had previously stated to be desirable in an IT context. If you think that is an attack then again, that would be an undesirable attitude in a team. Yet this is where you start the ad hominems.

Good luck being a manager. You sound covertly toxic.

If you'd bothered reading what I wrote before you'd know that I'm retired these days. I have no idea what covertly toxic means - surely if the toxicity was covert then no one else would know about it, so it wouldn't really be a problem?

Onewheelgood’s nose was put out of joint on another thread because he discovered that he didn’t know anything about the intellectual milieu of CRT and Critical Social Justice despite probably considering himself quite ‘right on’ on the topic of anti-racism.

You've just made this up. My nose was not put out of joint at all on that thread. I was struck by your style, and I thought 'Isn't that the guy asking about an IT career?'. Other people asked you to try and write in a way that might be understood by more people. If you had been interested in actual communication, you would have done that. But you didn't. It seemed to me that there were two possibilities at that point - either you are interested in communication, but you struggle to do it effectively, or you don't care about communication but have some other objective. Since I had already stressed the importance of communication on this thread I came back to make that point again. I'm sorry you didn't like hearing that, but it's actually something I feel quite passionate about. So many IT disasters have been caused by a lack of respect for the human factors.

Now in a covertly toxic and stalkerish way, Onewheel crossed-threads and found a way to get back at me under cover of ‘positive’ career advice. In other words, a form of gaslighting.

I still don't know what 'covertly toxic' means, but I don't see what is stalkerish - this is a public forum, on which you publicly asked for advice. There isn't anything stalkerish about using someone's behaviour to make advice more relevant. And why would I want to 'get back at you'? You hadn't done anything to me (well, not until you came back to this thread and started with the insults). As for gaslighting, I'm not sure you know what that means.

Frankly, this episode makes this forum look like a nasty and toxic place.

Projection much?

And I still haven't attacked you. I haven't insulted you or called you any names despite being sorely provoked. I think you've been very impolite, and I do struggle to understand why you see things the way you seem to. But that brings me back to my fundamental point - unless people can communicate and collaborate effectively, any complex endeavour is going to be difficult. If we can't even manage a forum discussion properly, what hope is there for a global software roll-out, or the next version of Windows/IOS/Android?