Ask HN: Is it still worth it to try to get a job in IT
I am fascinated by systems but it seems hard to find how to make money. There are currently systems running COBOL. In another 50 years the stuff we currently use will still be around. Things don't change as quickly as you might be led to believe. Will it be a good career choice? Maybe so many people will be put off that there will be less competition. Nobody knows. If you want to make money, IT is still one of the best fields out there for people without much of a connection. It is also one of the fields that does have very complex systems. OS kernels, distributed database engines, AAA game engines, you name it. It is just in USA and some other few nations. In most of the rest of the world a sw dev is paid just a bit more than a standard office job And sometimes that's enough for a good and fulfilling life. If you're genuinely fascinated by systems, yes is the answer. The point to understand is that the surface-level coding is what's getting cheaper, the systems work isn't. Yes, But with the surging supply you have to come in at least top 20% of the developers to earn Good. Top 5% imo. There's a large bottom 50-60% these days who are overseas talent and boot camp graduates who are competing. Of course, I mean yeah the coding agents are good but they are far from being perfect. Every time I use them I endup spending more time debugging the code and getting everything right and working according to my expectations. I doubt they will ever fully replace the good developers completely. I think OP is from USA and there IT = sysadmin, while programming is Software Development / Engineering (to my crude understanding from browsing the interwebs). So what OP is asking if it's worth getting into IT to work on servers and such I am from usa but i was using IT as general handle for the sector informarion technolgy inclusive of software engineering, administrationn, networking and hardware. If you love it, do it. It is not that easy to find a job as before, but if you are good and pro-active, and with passion, money will come... no matter what you actually do. IT is a broad field. narrow it down. I firmly believe there are many opportunities in IT today. Again, that term "IT" is many factors broader in meaning today than it meant when I started over 35 years ago as an independent consultant in a very rural area of the midwest (US). When I started "tinkering" around, the term "Computer Science" started to emerge from "Electrical Engineering". I originally studied embedded systems and coded at what was considered then, the hardware level. Over the years, from my point of view, new terms were born. Terms such as "Information Systems" and "Computer Information Systems" (CIS). Over the years we land at "Information Technology", the currently very broad "IT". My explanation is not linear, but if I were drawing a graph you would see a crazy looking tree with many branches. "IT" would arguably be the entire tree at this point, depending on your point of view. My point is there are now potentially hundreds if not thousands of new branches of "IT". Pick a branch or a new leaflet that interests you and see how you might contribute to it in an economically gainful way. You'll go far. IT is very broad, and making money is always hard. Maybe if you want to be a manger.