IT Careers: Is The Boom Over?
Everyone’s heard the stories of the guys who work their tails off in college and get into the job market, only to find there’s nothing there for them with a four-year computer degree. Or the ones who got out there and worked for a few years, then found themselves out of a job when their dot-com went under or their company outsourced everything to India. If your goal is to get an IT career, it’s a scary world out there: business is being shifted rapidly to India, and the IT technicians over there are more than competent enough to handle the work. But the boom’s not over yet. In fact, it’s just beginning; but you may have to look elsewhere for your best IT career path. IT Careers: Software Development versus Hardware Maintenance The one subcategory of IT that’s being outsourced consistently is the dull, repetitious job, the one no one wants. For instance, when everyone was convinced all the computers were going to crash when the year 2000 rolled around on hardware and software clocks, someone had to go into the millions, perhaps billions of lines of code that included dates and add space for two digits on each one. This is a tedious and painstaking job, requiring attention to detail and skill with computers but no creativity. This was the first major IT task that was outsourced wholesale to India, and IT jobs since then are largely the same sort: tedious routine tasks (no pun, you computer folks!) that require technical skills and attentiveness but no creativity. IT careers requiring serious creativity are still out there: specking out large computer systems for companies, working with cutting-edge resources to find out just what they can really do, teaching others, creating and maintaining databases at large corporations. If the job requires you to create something new, or if the job will require you to stay onsite to maintain that creation, you are one of the lucky ones with a stable IT career. Service, too, is something you can’t outsource. The guys in India can write software for you and email it or ftp it over; but they can’t reach over 8000 miles to jiggle the doohickey on your motherboard that has somehow worked itself loose. Or upgrade your computer. Or get rid of the fifteen thousand pieces of shareware that somehow infected it when you let your teenage son use chat programs without really thinking of the consequences. (you know who you are!) We will always need people in IT careers to maintain our hardware and software onsite, and we will always need people to train – no matter