The Grass Is Always Greener

You may hear disgruntled tech professionals complain about the decline of tech opportunities, and how it may be time to consider a new career. Perhaps they’re fed up with outsourcing, offshoring, H1Bs, etc., and may believe the difficulty in finding good tech jobs means that it’s time to look elsewhere.

But stop and think for a moment about that question. Presumably you’ve trained for a career in software development and have worked for most of your career in this field. What other type of work are you qualified for, which pays nearly as well?

Let’s alter the question a bit to ask what field a young person, presumably before college, should go into in this day and age. What would you recommend? The traditional answers are probably law, medicine, and business. They sound sensible at first, but things are rarely that simple.

Lawyers, despite the glamorous portrayals on TV and in the movies, generally do not make more than engineers, as a group. Sure, there are the superstar lawyers, the partners at private firms, or the chief counsels at large corporations, that make insane amounts of money. But they are a rare breed, probably as rare senior executives at top tech companies. In both professions there are countless people toiling away for moderate salaries – and the thing is, the ones working in law toil away much harder than the typical engineer. I don’t know of too many engineers, except perhaps at some startups, who regularly work 80 hour weeks like law associates often do.

Likewise, the medical field provides high salaries for top specialists, but with the rise of managed care and hard-bargaining insurance companies, a lot of doctors have to hustle to make barely six figures. Do you remember the last time you went to visit a doctor, how they had to constantly juggle several patients at once and spent only a few minutes with you? That’s what they have to do to survive on low insurance and Medicare reimbursement rates.

Then there’s the field of ‘Business’, which is quite a nebulous term. It could mean Wall Street, Corporate Finance, Banking, Sales, or any number of money-related careers. However, even in this field the number of superstars making big coin is naturally limited, and the hours can be long. And as we’ve seen with the credit crisis, this industry is also subject to major boom-and-bust cycles.

Perhaps the other route to big success is entrepreneurship. However, while the other professions above do not provide any guarantees of success, striking out on your own provides close to zero guarantees. And this is perhaps also the hardest road to take – harder than law, medicine, business, or tech. However, in some ways it can also be the most rewarding. Imagine not having a boss to report to – although effectively, your customers are now your bosses, so that’s effectively a wash.

So if we are to conclude anything from this little overview, my point is that there is no relatively easier path to success, and tech is just as good a path as any other, warts and all.