I’ve been in the technology industry for 20+ years. I’ve worked for the major companies that SELL into IT.
I agree that when you are in IT that when the s**t hits the fan then you are expected to work through the night and on weekends when your area is down: the network, the servers, the storage, the applications, the database engines, whatever. When one of those goes down they tend to bring everything else down with it. The hard part is bringing everything back up in the right sequence to a known point in time. Downtime is lost revenue.
What has worked for me is being the technical half of a sales team. As a technical pre-sale person you get to continue to challenge yourself and learn new technologies before they hit the commercial market. And, you also get to share in the commissions without taking the huge risk that the pure sales reps take – though they do get the bigger rewards.
My advice to someone starting new in the technology field is plain and simple: never stop learning.
Many of my colleaques are looking for jobs today because their skills and knowledge are not as fresh as they once were 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. Continue to learn new technologies.
Do whatever it takes to get the job done. Be driven. Be obsessed with your work.
