Ever since the .com boom in the late 90's, more and more people have been lining up for jobs and to go to school to become computer programmers, network administrators, web developers, and systems engineers. Many of them have no clue, no passion, no interest, and no hope. They just see big dollar signs, and think it's the right way to go.

They're wrong.

You see, what we have in the IT industry is an over-saturation. It's a piece of why the bubble burst in the late 90's. If you have a true passion for computers and how they work, or learning how to write software, or being paged at 3am to learn how to reconstruct a RAID array, then by all means, go for it. If you think it's a great way to make easy money or "I talk on Messenger all day, so I might as well become a computer guy!", then go flip burgers at McDonald's.

Finding a job in the IT industry is damned near impossible. Companies put out single ads, and iliterally receive thousands of resumes. Those of us who are actually in the field because it's our passion and what we're good at are often looked over, because our resumes don't jump out at the potential employer's trained monkies like someone else
who's not qualified for the job might.

The over-saturation of people looking for these jobs also results in another large downfall: lower pay. When a company has so many people to choose from, it has the ability to pay less for the job, because if you won't do it, someone else who can do it will come along and do it for less money.

So please, in the name of whomever or whatever it is you believe in, if you don't have a true passion or a real yearning to get into another field, don't use IT as a 'fall-back' place to be. And stop listening to your 80 year old grand parents who say, "computers are where it's going." We still need people to fix cars, manage money, run businesses, deal with all the legal crap going on, write books, drive busses, and yes, clean the toilets.