Replies

My husband is a SAS programmer and I HATE the IT industry with a bloody passion. He has been laid off 5 times in 10 years. I wish he would get out of it. We lost everything in the last lay off. I don't want to go through that ever again. I thank God every single day that he still has a job.

He took a salary cut (about 40%) to take the job he has now. Beggars can't be choosers, so I just try to be careful with our money and hope for the best.

I used to be a SAS programmer, too - back in the early-to-mid 90's. I loved working with SAS, but once I moved away from a mainframe environment I switched to PERL, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Transact-SQL.

As I said, I've had a great run, so I don't really hate the "IT industry"...it's just that there really isn't an IT industry any more. Computing is being absorbed back into the disciplines that use it as just another one of the tools that professionals like accountants and investment analysts need to be successful. It's just that when you've spent 20 years doing something, it's awfully hard to go back and transform yourself into something else (and to get hired to do that something else when there are so many 24-year-olds willing to work cheap.)