Why I'd Still Say Yes

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:45:00 -0400

I keep reading about how difficult the landscape looks right now for people trying to build a career in information technology, and it leaves me sitting with two feelings at once: grateful for the path I got to walk, and a little heartsick for the people just starting theirs, because that path isn’t available anymore. It’s left me with a question: if someone stood at the very beginning of this journey, still deciding whether IT was worth pursuing, would I actually tell them to go for it?

Let’s start with how I got into this field, because that route barely exists anymore. I’ve had a computer in my life since 1981, when I was eleven, so by the time I needed a part-time job in high school I already had something real to show. I became an assistant to a continuing ed director at a small college near where I grew up, a job I got specifically because I could demonstrate technical skill. I started building databases and spreadsheets with the crude early tools available, creating reports, and actually helping the place run better. I loved it.

Then I went to college and quickly discovered that I wasn’t ready for it. I dropped out twice. By my early twenties I had a high school diploma and nothing else, and college clearly wasn’t the right move for me yet. (I did eventually go back and finish my undergraduate degree with a 4.0 GPA, so it worked out. It just wasn’t the right time.)

What carried me through those years in between was real, demonstrable experience, and this was early enough that degree programs often didn’t exist for the things I’d taught myself. I could get hired by showing what I could actually do. That’s how I broke in through the early ’90s, including helping a few businesses get online for the first time and running logistics for business-to-business trade shows across the country. Eventually that became a job as a network and database administrator at a small school, a role that, as it happened, also required teaching a class. I went for this position specifically because I’d decided I wanted to teach in whatever way I could find, so I used my IT skills and a bunch of volunteer work giving tech advice to nonprofits to get a foot in the door, and then used that foothold to go back and finish my own degree. I’ve been in education ever since, going on 24 years.

None of my jobs came from a help-wanted listing. Every one came through people I knew, or through telling everyone that I was looking. I never had to deal with an algorithmic gatekeeper deciding whether a human would ever see my resume. I didn’t need to clear some arbitrary (and often unknown) threshold. That’s a genuinely different obstacle than anything I faced, and I want to be honest: I don’t fully know what it’s like to be on the other side of that.

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed over the years, about passion versus security, though this part is anecdotal rather than data, so take it as an observation rather than a study. A lot of career advice has pitched IT as one of the most lucrative fields available, and I’ve met plenty of people in tech who don’t seem to actually love the work, but they do love the lifestyle it affords. I’ve also seen a lot of mediocre tech products over the years, and I don’t think mediocre work comes from people who are genuinely passionate and happy about what they’re doing.

I’ve also watched IT go through boom and bust before. During the dot-com years, demand for IT professionals was intense while businesses raced to get online. It became a bubble. When a lot of those businesses failed, there were suddenly more IT professionals than open jobs. I stayed employed through the whole thing, so I don’t have firsthand experience of being on the losing end of that correction, but I think the current moment rhymes with it.

So what’s actually happening right now? The layoffs are real. AI has been the most-cited reason for U.S. job cuts for four consecutive months running. But there’s a second, less flattering story underneath that headline: a lot of this traces back to the pandemic hiring bubble, when tech companies grew headcount 30 to 100 percent between 2020 and 2023. IBM’s CEO has been blunt about it: people gorged on employment, and now companies are correcting for it. Blaming AI is often more comfortable for a company than admitting it hired too many people.

For entry-level specifically, the picture is more mixed. Hiring for this year’s graduating class is actually up slightly year over year, even as most enterprises say they’re cutting entry-level hiring as they lean on AI, and junior postings increasingly ask for years of experience that junior candidates don’t have by definition. The market hasn’t disappeared. It’s moved, and it’s gotten more selective about who gets in.

I don’t know how long this particular glut lasts. My honest guess is not very long, because I don’t think it will take businesses long to figure out that AI can’t replace good people, it can only enhance them. That’s a guess, not a guarantee, and anyone telling a seventeen-year-old otherwise is selling something.

Which brings me to the actual bet worth making, if you’re the one deciding right now. Start from a premise: if IT expertise is something society keeps needing over the long run, then what we’re going through right now is temporary. Right now, more experienced professionals are competing for, and winning, jobs that entry-level candidates might otherwise have filled. So will there be enough opportunity in the first few years to get a foothold and start building real experience? That’s a real calculation to make, and if IT isn’t a genuine passion for you, just one option among several for financial stability, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at that calculation and pick something else right now. You don’t need an IT degree to benefit from IT skills, either. Those skills strengthen almost any career path you choose.

But what if you actually love this stuff? Then the calculation above leaves out the part that’s kept me in this field despite choosing a job that doesn’t pay anywhere close to six figures.

There is real pleasure in the work itself. Once you get far enough into code to actually see how it works, there’s an elegance to it, a beauty in how efficiencies get found and how pieces connect to each other. It makes you think at a different level than you otherwise would. There’s an order to it that doesn’t exist in the chaos and entropy of the rest of the world, and building something well enough that the order holds is its own kind of satisfaction, separate from whatever it pays.

Part of what keeps pulling me back in is the puzzle of it, as well. Nothing stays the same for long, and no problem behaves quite like the last one, so there’s always a new shape to work out. Solving it usually means someone gets to do the thing they were trying to do, or something that was broken starts working again. I’ve lost count of the friendships that started because I helped someone with a computer problem they were stuck on. The puzzle-solving is fun for me, and it’s even better when it ends with helping somebody.

Point that same capability at something you actually care about, and the scale changes. I’ve spent a big chunk of this year building educational resources for the Khmer Magic Music Bus and Cambodian Living Arts, work that’s been genuinely hard and has taught me a great deal along the way. It didn’t exist before I built it. Now teachers anywhere in the world who want to bring Cambodian history and culture into a classroom have something to work with that wasn’t there before. That’s a different kind of compensation: the ability to make something exist, because you happened to have the skills to build it. A career in IT can be a calling in exactly the way teaching, medicine, or ministry can be.

What would I tell a young person who decides to stick with IT? Leverage what you can control. Get strategic. For example, reduce the cost of getting there: get an inexpensive, credit-transferrable two-year degree first to save you from starting your career buried in debt. Build something real, not just credentials, by volunteering your technical skills for a cause you actually care about. You help them, you build genuine connections, and you walk away with work you can point to and explain, rather than just a transcript. If networking fits your personality, do that directly: public speaking, showing up at events and organizations, building relationships. Get hands-on with AI, because I expect it to be around for a long time to come in some form or another, and the only way to know how it can actually help you is to use it, since everyone’s strengths and blind spots differ. What matters is producing work you can point to and explain: what you chose, why, and how it improved the outcome.

Whichever combination fits you, the underlying logic holds: entry-level jobs have to exist eventually, because the people currently holding these jobs will retire or move on. No industry can permanently freeze out its own next generation.

There’s one more thing that I think matters even more than any of the strategy above: let people see how much you love this field. I see the difference constantly. Some students want me to invest serious time working with them, and you can tell fairly quickly when they’re not really into it, whether it’s a parent pushing them or it just isn’t their thing. Then there are the students who can’t help themselves, who are pulled toward this whether or not anyone’s pushing them at all. I will bend over backwards for those students, because that was me, and still is. The people evaluating you for a job, internship, or a volunteer opportunity are sometimes people who share that same pull, and when they see it in you, they recognize it.

I can’t promise anyone a job. I want the world to work in a way where doing everything right guarantees things will work out, but I know that isn’t how the real world operates. Getting there might mean a bad job or two along the way, or some hard decisions you didn’t expect to have to make. I wish that weren’t true.

So would I tell someone standing at the start of this journey to go for it? If it’s genuinely what they want, yes. Find people to connect with, find ways to be useful before anyone’s paying you to, build something you can point to, and underneath all of it, keep the part that made you want it in the first place.

Tech Industry on tomgromak.com

Why I'd Still Say Yes