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Where I am, IT seems to be doing fairly well. I know people who aren't spectacularly bright, but technically interested, who are doing well in entry-level IT and moving up into engineering positions. The hard part is getting your foot in the door, but once you do, there are opportunities available. They aren't always glamorous but they're real.
That said, success among young men in general is extremely bimodal, in ways that aren't necessarily correlated to socioeconomic background. I'd say half the zoomer or millennial men I know are unemployed or significantly underemployed, in a way that tracks mental health/functioning/grit/economic necessity more than it does raw intelligence or capability. Several are bankrolled partially or fully by the women in their lives, who have normal but not glamorous white-collar jobs that are generally higher-status or pay than what the men have. The ones who don't have a girlfriend are... pretty damn depressed, in the "repeatedly dropped out of college and lost touch with all their friends because they sleep 13 hours a day" way.
Young women have a distribution of success too, of course, but it seems to map most directly onto SES than it does individual factors. So I have a female friend whose mother was bipolar and is struggling to launch, but most of the college-educated ones are white-collar workers making median+ salaries, and it's the non-college-educated ones who seem to be stuck in the service sector.
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
In some ways I'm in the winning column, in some I'm in the not-so-good one. I don't have a lot of optimism for the future and I do feel like many of my early academic dreams died due to overcompetition and the marginalization of people like me in elite or semi-elite spaces. I suppose I'm just trying to hold on to what success I do have, but I have very little buy in for the system as it exists -- I just don't feel homicidal and find it morally outrageous that people do. Our problems are far, far more diffuse and our evils are far, far more banal than anything that would justify killing people over.
For the record, this is in a flyover state most coastal folks probably think of as a shithole. We have our problems but it's home.
What sector of IT in particular is killing it? Over in infosec they’re doing terrible at the moment. The economy has left the industry to thin out the herd at the moment and jettison what it can. Balance sheets are suffering in a lot of places. Are the entry positions you’re finding localized to a particular type of entry work?
I wouldn’t say they’re killing it, just that there is a bit of opportunity. I don’t know how to compare.
To be clear, by IT I mean general office IT support/MSPs, I can’t tell you how programmers or infosec people are doing. This is not a very tech focused area, but there’s always a need for general IT services even in flyover country because every organization uses IT. Last I heard cybersecurity type positions were desperate to be filled, and the big issue was finding people actually qualified for those kinds of roles. But what I hear from cyber people around here is their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.
I'm essentially in that field. The lack of glamour is what makes it so overlooked. You have to be willing to work several "technological levels" behind the bleeding edge. Forget widespread AI integration, automation, orchestration and hyper-converged environnments, most of my clients are not yet ready to really commit to or against the cloud, and I'm not talking fancy PAAS solutions, but just bog standard IAAS or SAAS. They're making the kind of technological transitions you heard about the "bleeding edge" industry making 15 years ago, if not more. All that while supporting the actual business needs of a company for which IT is about as central as the janitorial services are.
And that's at the sysadmin level, I still think there's a lot demand for support yes. The difficulty is finding people with the right soft skills and the right amount of general troubleshooting knowhow. You need the right mix of making people feel reassured that their problem is gonna get fixed, friendly but professional, and not make people feel stupid. I got my real start in the industry doing Microsoft Office support for legal secretaries; because it turns out that combining IT troubleshooting skills and enough MS Office skills to support some of the best secretaries when it comes to that software is actually quite rare. And that would be might tip to someone looking for employment right now, you need to develop an uncommon combination of in-demand skills that makes you stand out. Forget what the bleeding edge industry says they need, everyone rushes for those positions. If you're the adaptable kind who doesn't mind if the job is not glamorous or a "dream career", obscure, unsexy, pedestrian and boring is the move.
No kid thinks "when I'm grown up I'll be a support specialist for a payroll software!", yet what does every company with employees need?
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Definitely getting in the field it was interesting to see how not-bleeding-edge a lot of corporate IT is, but also slightly comforting -- I often describe my own personality as the direct opposite of silicon valley: "move slowly and fix things." That's definitely the sort of thing I would put on a sticker.
The messy reality of maintenance/operations and the need to actually test things cautiously is a huge element of how I view computers; I've always related to them in an operations kind of a way and even in my youth I was only moderately interested in programming. It didn't seize me the way it often does other people. I'm not sure anyone dreams of being level 1 support, but I did dream a bit as a kid about being a sysadmin, especially once I got heavily into Linux which I've used on my desktop for about 10 years now.
That said, I do love automation, orchestration, and I suppose hyper-convergence, and I do use them extensively in my homelab. It's definitely a goal of mine to use those at some point in my career, and I know of some shops who use them. Perhaps time will bring them more into the mainstream of general IT, because IaC is awesome (and is genuinely something that use of AI makes significantly easier to learn).
I love teaching, and I've been told by people that I'm good at sitting down with someone and explaining things in a way they can understand. So the opportunity to share knowledge and help people learn/get people back to work/find a workaround or a fix that helps people move on with their day is very satisfying to me. I hate computers getting in my way as much as anyone, and it's great to get them out of people's way.
The lack of significance on the balance sheet is definitely the greatest area of trepidation for me as I look forward in my career, in the sense that I do have concern about layoffs/being unable to do the job properly because of limited buy-in from management.
Yes, it's a good idea to play with the bleeding edge stuff in your homelab, because when you start having to make recommendations for clients, you need to understand what is "forward" for them and every cycle try to bring them closer to that. You're not usually going to be given the time, budget, staff, and freedom to disrupt money-generating activities necessary to turn a company that does remote work by RDPing onto machines accessible from the internet into a modern network in one step. But you can make a list of the biggest, fastest steps you can make right now to move them closer, your "quick wins". You can get them to put their RDP behind a modern, updated firewall and VPN. Once that's done, you can start segmenting their network, putting internal boundaries with firewall policies, setting VLANs... You can later leverage the work into getting to separate who should be able to access what to migrate them to ZTNA... Sometimes though, the way forward is also simply blocked by other considerations. One that I often encounter is line-of-buisness applications having specific requirements that just aren't meant to work in a bleeding edge environment. Infrastructure as Code and orchestration are great ideas, and I totally agree that the ideal is that your servers are cattle, not pets. That if you login to a server to do installs and configs directly you're not being efficient. But all line-of-business apps I interact with require manual installation and configuration. Pretty much all LOB software sold to small/medium businesses is designed for pets, and so is a large portion of the software developed internally for these companies. So you get that company better prepared, you try to mitigate the inconvenience of pets by making the pets as easily replaceable as possible, but you'll hit a point where you just have to wait on the software to catch up. In the meantime, you prepare by learning how to take the next step in your lab.
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Makes sense. IT / administrative work will always dominate corporate office settings.
In the case of infosec, a number of years ago there was an analysis that found a 0% unemployment rate; but there’s also a lot of candidates that can’t find work. It’s a strange industry on the labor side if you don’t understand what’s going on.
Right now there’s an over saturation of analyst positions. Qualified people are looking to get in on the ground level but many of them are unable to get their foot in. What’s very high in demand is the meat for the industry. Threat detection engineers, incident responders, etc. A lot of the veteran, very high pressure roles. These are greatly understaffed at the moment.
A lot of them probably work as L1’s or as juniors. It’s a good position to get into if you can manage the burnout and pressure (especially in an MSSP setting, they’re notorious for that). IAM is also increasingly becoming the frontline for threat actors looking to exploit systems. There’s problems on both the technical side as well as the business. The latter has to constantly prove its value to the executives because they often don’t understand what value you bring to the organization. Depending on who your employer is, your position may also be at risk of being permanently unstable; so it’s a worry people have.
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