When I was deciding on a career, I tried to understand where I’d be able to add the most value. I think increasingly being involved in IT is going to have increasing returns to scale, given the rise of LLMs, Generative AI, Cloud Products, and more.
It seems just about every company nowadays is an analytics company, and it makes sense why. It’s a lot less expensive to collect data, and that data can often lead to actionable insights. So, given the costs are low, the IRR doesn’t need to be significantly high in an era of low interest rates, and labor/judgement is becoming more expensive, all things being equal, we’ll see a lot more of information technology going forward.
There’s a couple different categories of IT worker. There’s a UI/UX coder type of role, a backend dev, system administrator, security person, and more. As gen-AI becomes a lot better, the value-add to coding becomes a lot less. Aside from understanding the basic algorithms, the return on learning SQL is a lot lower. Interestingly, the return on curiosity and strong reasoning skills is higher, because knowing how to learn can sometimes be hindered by immediate access to information in all forms.
IT managers seem to be a lot more applied, as they often are solving or translating the functional problems into solutions that make sense. The rise of Chief Information/Informatics Officers suggests that it’s becoming more valuable to learn how to interpret this data, especially because in a lot of ways, analytics’ promise is that it pays for itself.
However, although IT managers will become more valuable, it’ll be harder to start off a prosperous career. My first job was somewhat easy to get, in large part because of very high test scores, grades, and extracurricular activities. My second job, with under two years experience, not so much. After that, I’ve been getting bombarded by recruiters, almost daily. I think there’s a similar trend with any professional field that requires some base experience that is usually implied by a certain tenure, and/or speed of promotion/growth.
IT doesn’t have the same structured career path that Mckinsey, Deloitte, or partnering at a big law firm does. In some ways this is good, because credentialists don’t seep in as much. People who are true aficionados are better, and you don’t need to be nearly as competitive since there’s not as clear a path. This also undermines the challenge of harder working people from coming at you directly. It’s not as if working tons of hours will lead to a path that’s seen, established, and makes sense.
I hope that IT project management, architecture, and leadership stays relatively off-the beaten path, because it means that it’s easier to make a lot more money.
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