Lots of good info here. I'm a 20+ year veteran of IT, initially getting BA in Comp Sci (programming) and studying hardware (electronics, music, and radio were hobbies of mine, too). I have purposefully not risen to the status of CIO because, frankly, I'm not "asshole" enough for that position in most companies.
I started my own PC and network consulting company with my soon-to-be wife back in the early 80's in Maine. Not that there was a lot of work, but I kept busy by doing just about anything that came my way. That broadened my experience a great deal.
Since then I have been with small to extremely large businesses, mostly either by moving from one company to another as my career advanced, or through acquisitions. I have been on both sides of acquisitions, too. In the last 6 years, I have been unemployed due to lay-off or other job-related problems 3 times, for a total of over 14 months total (so far - I'm still unemployed at the moment).
In recent years, and with the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx) and other "responsibility" legislation, IT has become a serious stress producing, fun-sucking job. Pressures at most organizations are to reduce costs in IT to the single digits percentages of revenue, which makes for extremely lean running (and just what E's been saying about not having tools to do the required jobs). Most larger companies have done or are doing outsourcing to overseas service solutions for anything that can be done over the wire - meaning Help Desk, remote admin, network management, etc. Couple that with the pace at which IT changes, and you have a nuclear warhead being hit by a 6-year-old with a hammer.
I have found that certifications get you in the door, largely due to the HR types using them as gatekeepers. You don't have to have a degree or any certs if you have good experience and you know the hiring manager, but to get through the typical job search via HR and headhunters, you've got to have the passkey, and those are certs.
I don't have my certs, having moved into management years ago, but I always kept up with technology so that I could at least apply it properly to my business solutions. The problem I see now that I'm unemployed, is that middle management is being laid off and positions are being eliminated due to outsourcing. If I apply for an admin position, I'm competing with people who are all out of work due to the outsourcing and they have their certs. If I apply for Sr Management, I'm comnpeting for very few openings.
Even though I've been lauded as one of the best IT people ever seen by most of my colleagues, they don't have a place for me at their organizaton because I threaten their jobs.
IT is no longer fun. The business community has for too long ignored and underfunded true IT responsibilities and the pace at which IT changes is now under fire because companies can't afford to replace 1000 desktop OS eveyr year, let alone server apps and OS. Because financials were being tweaked within the systems and no real accountability paths were established within the computer systems and software at many companies, we ran into Enrons, WorldCOM's, etc. The execs actually exploited the fast pace at which IT changes, to make it possible for them to screw with the accounting and produce the results they wanted.
This has led to Congress passing laws to obstenisibly "protect" the consumer from public companies cooking their books. However, the real loser here is IT. For years business has said they have to move faster to keep up with competition, but it has been a ruse - when businesses move too quickly, they make mistakes, produce and execute poor plans, and alienate both their employees and customers. The excuse has been that IT moves so quickly and enables the company to move more quickly, we can now turn on a dime. But SOx, for example, will slow down this trend, and force companies to do more planning and record-keeping in the automated areas that previously were "black boxes".
And much of this was driven by the leader's (Microsoft) marketing strategy. Rather than produce good code and then refine it, they kept releasing new versions that cost more money, and the pace was quickened over the years. Only recently, with the attempt by MS to force businesses to move to XP and 2003 by sunsetting all OS support other than those, has the business community rebelled and aid, no, we will not, cannot change OS every two years across our 1000's of systems. In fact, MS was forced to continue support for Windows 2000 licensing because of this last year.
Ok, so why am I telling you my opinions about all this? Because IT (in general) is no longer what it was in the 80's and 90's. The pendulum is swinging back to a time where IT is part of the financial arm of an organization. Yes, there are still pockets of areas where IT is a product or a means to getting a solution, but in larger companies, the issue is that IT is the communications and operational backbone of the company, and execs have for far too long ignored the true value of IT in their organization and what it means to the business. Since they did this over years and years without bringing IT to the proper executive and upper planning levels within the organization, and because of the Enron's and WorldCOM's, laws have been passed to make the contributions of IT a much more valueable and therefore risky asset in business, and to make those businesses finally recognize that by forcing them to deal with it in black and white, put-it-on-paper terms.
So, companies are pressured to spend less, legislation requires more documentation and proof and traceability, and CFO's and CIO's are held accountable for the results of their organizaitons - both people and systems. And yet again, businesses under-funded their SOx implementations, believing it to be an IT issue, when in fact it is a business and processes issue.
Tighten the reins! Here come the handcuffs! The design of basic IT systems is in fact, a significant problem from a security and evidentiary (proof) angle. Great steps must be taken and enforced at policy and procedure levels to insure things are traceable and provable. How would you feel if your personal integrity and job were on the line because a software program you bought might glitch and make a mistake in your accounting numbers, and the company making that software has a no-liability clause in their license??
That's where we are today. That's the reason I'm looking to get out of IT. My prediction for IT types like me is that the jobs in the US will become more of an auditing and/or vendor management position, making sure the systems and contractors are doing things they were designed to do, and most admin and other jobs will be done over the wire. The larger companies in the IT sector now will start (they already have) buying or using smaller concerns for the local installs, and turn the operation over to overseas or world-wide companies that can cut those costs by leveraging low-cost employee markets like India, China, etc.
Well, that's my take on IT right now. I don't know what I'm going to do, personally. But I'm not going to be an auditor.