Right now, we are in an age characterized by what some people call “hyper-individualism,” where we consider the individual the most important unit of value (as opposed to the cause, the organization, or the company). You can see this emphasis in the products and services we buy: iPods are about your music, wherever you are; streaming media and Tivo are about what you want to watch, when you want to watch it; Twitter is about giving you your very own kind of paparazzi.

Blogger and social media guru Chris Brogan recently posted an article that really got me thinking about this trend. During these trying economic times, he recommends that you treat yourself as a personal brand, like a consultant, even if you’re in a full time working position, because companies are going to treat you like a temporary, as-needed resource. So what we get are hyper-individualistic companies, with “me, now” philosophies and employees who have to think in the same way to survive (and to grow). I count myself as one of these employees.

So we’re seeing this “me, now” philosophy show up in the economy, in business, and at the individual level with social media.

I hate to be a harbinger, but this worries me a bit.

Could the more-for-me, what-I-want, when-I-want-it consumerism/investment strategy that brought down the economy tell us something about the look-at-me, who-I-am-now, as-I-see-fit social media information “economy?”

Let’s make this analogy a bit more concrete and draw some stronger parallels (since we love analogies around here at Intermz).

The economy crashed because it was growing on value in the stock market, housing market, etc that simply wasn’t there–a bubble of perceived (vs. actual) value. That perceived value was created by lots of people wanting to get rich quickly, who invested in increasingly complicated and opaque things, and consumers who borrowed more and more money to buy more stuff they thought they could use their ever-more-valuable houses to pay for. (This economist predicted the 2008 crash a year earlier.) We all had to have more than yesterday, so to slake that thirst, we had to rely on false value; we told the goose to lay gold-looking eggs. Both investors and consumers, often the same people, were focused on more for me now, not some for all of us over time.

So here’s the tie-in: Could it be that social media and its unprecedented emphasis on creating personal value could turn into an unsustainable bubble of its own? And I’m not talking about value bubbles for social media companies like Twitter and Facebook who still haven’t figured out how to make real value (i.e., money). I’m talking about value for each of us, by of us.

If we focus so much on our individual selves, how great and wonderful we are, our “personal brands” as full-time consultants and “presidents of our own careers,” could we run the risk of trying to be perceived as valuable rather than actually valuable? The people who had to have more before the 2008 recession based their decisions on perceived value. A personal brand is but a “collection of symbols, experiences and associations” connected with a person, after all. Does that sound like a focus on real value to you?

I realize I sound really crass at the moment, but I’m worried that we might end up creating individual bubbles that will pop just like the economic bubble did in 2008 because we had to create faux personal value; as more people join the social media, personal-president movement, we might be compelled to find value where it doesn’t really exist–just to stay in the game.

You might retort that the Internet, the big information market, is efficient and will prevent those bubbles from forming, that the market will remove individuals lacking real value–but that’s what many people thought about our economy before 2008, too.

Maybe some, or a lot of us are creating our very own personal bubbles right now.

My advice? Keep your eye on the basics: invest in what you know. In this case, know thyself, and you will know you true, and your potential, value.

I have been a musician for over a decade and have found many similarities between IT and musicianship. This got me wondering if the skills that make us proficient at our technical work translate somehow to music - or visa versa.

Perhaps an attention to detail and structure make programmers natural musicians. Perhaps an affinity for problem solving transalates well into both music and performance tuning. Perhaps thinking in patterns and mathematically is the key (after all, so much of music is math, which explains why many mathematicians are also musicians). Or perhaps IT people simply turn to the creative, free-wheeling nature of music to escape from the exacting rigor of technical work.

Of course, it can’t hurt that the explosion of the home studio is powered by the personal computer.

Do my experiences strike a chord with you?

Are you a musician or composer? Perhaps you know a musician or three working in IT?

And what, if anything, ties the extreme technicality of IT to the artsy berth of music?

An article I recently read suggested that a reason employers are having a difficult time finding qualified IT employees might be the result of the narrow focus of the employer’s own requirements. This makes sense. As the number of different technologies and industries in which we specialize grows, it is more and more difficult for us workers to maintain a wide range of skills with requisite depth. If you check job descriptions these days, it’s not surprising to find something like: “Required skills: 5+ years of database administration on Sybase, in a data warehousing environment, with .NET experience, Web Sphere experience, in the pharmaceutical industry.” On top of that, you would typically see a long list of “experience with X a big plus.”

Well, requirements like that really limit the number of qualified candidates available.

The good news for us is that, if we are qualified, we can command a good wage/rate - standard supply and demand curve economics. The bad news is that, in order to become qualified, you need to spend a lot of time within a very particular constellation of areas, which can make you a lot less able to move around.

My personal experience has reflected this. The more experience I get, the better the positions I can find, but the fewer of those positions there seem to be. Thus, when I want to change locations/companies for any number of reasons, my flexibility has become more diminished over time.

Obviously, some career paths and specializations are more flexible than others, and some of us may never encounter much difficulty moving around. If all things were equal, the specific requirements by employers, and the focused skill sets of employees, generally work well together. But not all things are equal. The number of technologies various industries have to choose from grows daily. However, the capacity for employees to add on those new technologies to their skill set, to a usable degree, is finite, for all intents and purposes.

For one particular position, I was the only one interviewing. They had many applicants apply, only two qualified candidates, and only one willing to relocate. The employer commented that this was a serious problem for them.

This situation applies across all industries, and not just IT. But few industries experience the same kind of change, quarter over quarter, that we do. The sheer array of technologies a person could, and might need to, specialize in today is humbling.

As either an employer or employee, have you seen or experienced the same? What, if anything, can we do about it?

One day, a student moseyed into the TA office and, after a few words about the upcoming lecture, suddenly became very quiet, as if he was unsure whether or not to ask what was on his mind. I encouraged him to go for it and he asked abashedly: “Can you tell me why I should choose this career?”

We had a long talk about that. Afterward, I began to realize how many of our students were, in one way or another, asking the same question.

First of all, I’d like to distill what an IT career tends to entail. Whether you’re working for a buttoned-up large corporation, a small local company, or a paradigm-shifting outfit like Google, IT people are basically divided into two basic roles: designers and builders.

Designers, like architects, decide what elements are needed, where they should go, and how they should work together. They produce blueprints.

Builders (better known as developers), like construction workers, translate blueprints into functioning technology systems. They produce code, computer hardware, and networks.

Often, designers are builders, and vice-versa.

So, why choose IT as your career? Well, the first thing most people want to know is how much they can get paid. Information technology people are some of the highest paid groups, on average, in any organization. For non-management positions, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) indicates that IT workers, on average, earn 77% more per year than any other occupational category [1].

Obviously, specific professional occupations, like doctors and lawyers, can outrank IT by a good margin. However, when compared in terms of the BLS occupational categories, only Legal Occupations outrank IT - and only by $13,000 per year.

Why? Information Technology people are responsible for building and maintaining the computer systems that keep modern companies running and competitive; without those systems, some would lose literally millions of dollars a day, while some would simply go out of business. Imagine what would happen if your bank stopped functioning because a natural disaster damaged its networks, resulting in interrupted deposits and withdrawals. People might overdraw their accounts, miss payments, etc. It would wreak havoc for the bank, its customers, and all the other businesses that depend on those same customers. Hence, IT people are paid well to provide their critical, behind-the-scenes service.

Now that we have the compensation piece out of the way, are there other reasons to choose IT as a career?

There are many (albeit subjective) reasons to enter the IT industry.

The biggest one is that IT is a great place for people who like problem solving. Both designers and developers in IT are confronted with many variagated puzzles almost daily. They are tasked with creating fixes for very tricky problems, like how to balance a website’s user-friendliness with the number of features it has, or whether it’s better to make a program faster or crash less.

One of my favorite things about IT is that you are always building things. Whether it’s a database, a piece of software, or a network, the feeling of accomplishment you get from knowing what you built actually works, and works well, is a feeling like no other. If you ever made paper airplanes as a child, and were constantly tweaking a plane to make it fly further, faster, or higher, and you  succeeded, you know how it feels.

On a more pragmatic note: the time and cost for learning IT skills is very low. This means that you can learn well-paying skills very quickly. In fact, many highly-skilled IT people are mostly self-taught. Additionally, computers are cheap and give you access to endless amounts of information via the Internet that are like launch pads for developing whatever skills interest you - website design, programming, database design, security, and even building computers. Through the course of my career, I have acquired enough skills to have been paid for three of those five types of jobs and have allowed me travel the world on someone else’s tab - and all at relatively very young ages.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about an IT career is that you are building skills that you can use to join an exciting startup or start your own business (both of which I have done continue to do). Because IT skills are, I believe, very easy to pick up, and because the cost of creating a new website, piece of software, or other “next greatest thing” is just the cost of a computer, some cheap (often free) software, and your time, you really will have a shot at becoming the next Google or Facebook.

But, if all that risk is not your style, you can always get a good gig with a big corporation. In Michigan, the unemployment rate for IT workers is around 2%. The unemployment rate for all sectors is over 7%.

Good luck and happy building!

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The first person, let’s call her Helen, was a graduate student studying ecology. We talked about animal population characteristics for a few minutes. Then I told her I worked in IT for a large mortgage bank. Shockingly, she asked for more detail. So I explained a little bit about what I did in the most introductory way I could: I build computer systems that handle mortgage fraud and risk. With the mortgage crisis dominating the news, I figured framing my job that way might elicit a strong response. Instead, she smiled a very genuine “Ah, cool” combination and we proceeded onto the next topic.

Second shot. Another graduate student, Dan. He studies mathematical models that describe how plants propagate. (Related to emergence theory.) A highly technical person, Dan would certainly be interested in the cooler aspects of IT. I spent a good 10 minutes (significant at a party) probing him about his work, which he was more than willing to talk about. I made sure I did the Covey’esque-thing of making deposits into his emotional bank account so that when it was my turn to talk, he would oblige me with the same attention. He finished his rundown with some admittedly interesting anecdotes about plant propagation patterns, then inquired about what I was doing.

I hit him with the best story I had (even though it wasn’t exactly what I did).

“Do you know what the number one item that men, aged between 30 and 35, buy on Thursdays after work with a bag of diapers?”

“No, what?”

“A six pack of beer. So, grocery stores put diapers and beer on opposite sides of the store so you have to walk past all the other stuff. The work I do on mortgages is similar to that.”

“Oh, wow.”

At this point I expected him to ask how IT systems figure that stuff out. But he didn’t. He made eye contact with some other friends and politely moved on.

Was it something I said?

I’m not sure if it was a failure or just a lack of success, but what I got out of it was that my big guns didn’t work on a technically savvy person who, theoretically, should have been receptive to my work. So either my big gun wasn’t big enough, or something else was awry.

Do you think I could have done something differently? Got any tips for next time?

(Wine picture from oodora.com.)

Since three of my closest companions all believe it’s possible, I’ve begun a quest to see if they are right - and will begin a blog series about my experiences. I hope they are right. Then when I say, “I work in IT,” I don’t get the usual “Ah. Sorry, I think my friends are calling me.”

Here is some background.

My wife is a doctor.  She has all manner of stories about her field. Funny ones, sad ones, astounding ones, you name it. When people find out she is a doctor, subsequent conversation often leads to her either relating an interesting story or others sharing their medical-related stories with my wife and the group. Another friend of ours is a lawyer and is full of tales of misfortune and misfits, while others are involved in robotics and genetic research, very contemporary and applicable topics for the times.

During one of these conversations, I noticed that, while my field of work and study (IT) was also pertinent and perhaps even more pervasive, IT is virtually never becomes a topic of conversation in groups - even groups of IT professionals. Interestingly, when I recently brought up using the Pythagorean theorem to figure out the height of a TV, the topic was pounced on.

I started wondering why there is such a difference and, with some help, came up with a few possible reasons:

1. Society views IT as tools and are only interested in their output - not their construction.
2. IT is, by its very nature, highly artificial and removed from anything human. (By contrast, robotics, while artificial, still has a large human element.)
3. The basic concepts and vocabulary needed to converse about IT are not within the social fabric; when doctors talk about headaches or heart failure, we immediately have a basic understanding of what those are. We don’t have a basic understanding of what programs are or why they crash.
4. IT people believe that their field is so esoteric or nerdy that it is uninteresting to the masses.
5. The masses believe that the IT field is so esoteric or nerdy that they don’t bother finding out more about it.
6. Because IT lacks an inherent human element, making IT stories dramatic and appealing to peoples’ emotions is difficult.

The question is: Can IT be framed or delivered differently so that it becomes a more interesting, more relevant topic of conversation?

What do you think?

Check back for more installments of in this series, or subscribe to my RSS feed!

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