After college I switched to a career in IT instead of what my degree was in.
The career has been very good to me for the last decade, but I see it maturing now in both good and bad ways.
The advantages of a career in IT are that you can work just about anywhere there are businesses, there is a wide range of specialities in IT and there is the possibility of changing to a different specialty if you get bored. The pay can be really good, and you get alot of industry standard training paid for by employers that is applicable no matter where you go.
You can always make yourself more valuable by getting into the more difficult fields in IT.
There are definitely disadvantages to IT.
In most organizations, IT is not their core business, therefore your job is an expense to the business, so you have to keep a perspective of where you fit into the organization. Alot of the infrastructure has already been built and so there is not alot of the “hey look, if we implement this neat system, it’ll make this dept. more efficient”, now it’s more like “we’re spending how much for this, how can we cut costs there”
IT is a 24/7 job. Depending on what you do, you can and will get called after hours and on the weekends. Very few IT people work 9-5. On the other hand, alot of things can be handled remotely. (oh, and my own saying is “If it can be done remotely, it can be done from India”)
Management. I know management is bad in alot of places (otherwise Dilbert wouldn’t be funny), but IT seems to attract alot of bad management at the top levels. Many of the top managers don’t have IT experience at the lower levels, so they are easily swayed by flashy sales brochures and demonstrations without realizing that there is a large gap between what the sales guy says and what the product actually does.
Entry into the field can be difficult. Unless you’re lucky, or in management (I’m bitter, I admit it), it can take years to get the knowledge base and experience to make a decent salary.
My take on your concerns about the safety of IT during a recession is that it is a valid concern. Right now things are pretty good, but if you look back at my first paragraph about the disadvantages of IT, you can see that IT is a big budget expense, so guess where they’ll cut when things are bad.
