Which IT Careers Are Hot and Which are Not?

necromante asks: "I've been working on different IT positions through my career: support; some networking; DBA; web development; project management; even working on the client side for a little while. However, I don't feel like I am really a specialist on any of those subjects and I feel I need to focus on a particular field. So, I decided to ask for some feedback before making my decision. I understand that this depends everyones tastes, likes and dislikes. However, I would like to have a better idea of which are the available options, and I hope the results of this discussion can benefit other readers. Is there any IT career that I should consider more than the others? Which are the emerging fields? Is there any industry I should focus on in particular? Which careers on IT are actually more in demand and which ones not? Is it a better path to focus on moving into management?"

Comments

hot or not?

[raffe]

Well if you want to check if you are hot or not you can always go to hotornot and.....ohh THATS what you mean.....never mind

The ones where

[Timesprout]

you have to go undercover as an exotic dancer at a strip club as part of the requirements gathering phase.

Re:emerging fields:

[BadERA]

The point is, editing means editing of grammar as well as spelling. Spellcheck doesn't check grammar. "on IT" is not proper grammar. Next.

Quant Programming

[DCFC]

There is a subset of s/w dev in banks doing trading stuff. Very highly paid, and although the hours are a bit long they are shorter than I see in some sectors like video games. You need good maths, and be very good at programming. In my experience as someone who pimps these people into banks, almost no CS grads can program, indeed I've screened a number who were so ignorant I could not devise a question they could answer. One bank came to me after they'd interviewed 37 "chimps" (their ter)m and not one could demonstrate a grasp of programming that would betray them as different from an French literature graduate who would at least make the office look prettier.

Things that confuse CS grads:
Order N Square is not a Tom Clancy Novel about a Russian Mole.
Shannon's limit is not a village by a pretty river in Ireland
Stack Frame is not a wrestler.
You can't get high at a hash table
Design Patterns is not a boutique, and threads are not what they sell.
Iterators aren't the little evil robots in Stargate SG1, nor indeed are Heisenbugs.
Not not is is the same as no not. Yes, really I've had to explan AND to some...
The brighter ones manage to look amazed at the !! term in the C++ I write, the dim ones , well I don't know what goes on in their minds.
Also a CS grad knows lisp. It does a little banking but not much. However if you can't do Lisp your not a computer scientist you
are merely someone who like Star Trek : Enterprise who never got a data at college.

Also I have no bloody idea how you can call yourself a CS grad if you haven't taken apart an operating system and broken/hacked it.
Hint for CS grads:operating systems aren't written in HTML, I checked, and Aristotle wasn't Belgian.

They are mostly in C & C++ (not Java, a quiche langage, and if you don't recognise the term quiche you need to do some reading)

As it happens C++ is the language of high end banking, as in people straight out of college what earn three what you do after a 3 years experience.
But they're not CS grads. Maybe there are some smart ones, if so, they apply this intelligence in hiding from me as a headhunter.

Re:Avoid "hot" careers

[radtea]

According to m-w.com, frigging is a word, coming from the Middle English word fryggen (to wiggle).

In that case, I'll see your m-w.com and raise you the Wiktionary (which presumably the GP would claim is also not a word.)

My point is that non-standard, rare, odd, and simply weird neologisms should all be treated by the same standard. "Virii" and "frigging" are outliers for different reasons, but it seems to me both churlish and inconsistent to condemn one of them to nonwordhood while keeping the other.