Work in IT industry Vs Others

Hi,

I would want to know if there are gun shot differences in the kind of work involved in IT industry Vs others. To me "IT" means a very dynamic stream where generally unless you are into a sort of maintenance projects for long term, you are always in look out of solutions to tasks which you dont 'exactly' know the solution, but try to build up solution based on some concepts that you..In the other industries, except those involving investigations and sort of, you generally 'know' what to do and 'exactly' how to do - you have either a set of standard instructions to perform a task or you know it by experience. In any case an average individual who has spent an year or half in a role would be comfortably knowing with precision what he has to do. In "IT" , lets say you have a task, you know in what platforms it can be done, but you would get the comfort of task only after you are done with some percentage of task. Until then it is an abstract idea that of trial and error for an average person that this can be done this way or other way..I dont know if I have expressed my self properly, but guys what is your take on this.

That is pretty far fetched from the truth. Every industry has its challenges.

The guys that drill through a mountain have great headaches with a tunnel boring machine.
Those that lay roads have to take into account landscaping / weather etc
The guys working at the LHC need to learn how to keep magnets from exploding

Those that work on electronics need to learn to trouble shoot circuits. A friend of mine managed to wire one incorrectly and literally melted an amplifier.
And so on

No one knows what they have to do. Unless they are working in an assembly line where they are targeted to do one job and one job only. With the IT industry people keep reinventing frameworks / concepts all the time. Viewed from one angle, its just too much to learn. Viewed from another, you keep learning enough to prevent getting bored ;)

Deepak Bala wrote:That is pretty far fetched from the truth.

And a bit insulting to the other industries too.

Heck, even a pilot, who flies the same route over and over again, is considered skilled. And will encounter stuff unexpectedly, that will need to be handled, and generally at the worst possible time. I wouldn't want to have a pilot that can only handle good weather -- even if the jet only flies in good weather.

Henry

The term "IT industry" is questionable. Companies typically have "IT" departments. The IT department should not be considered an "industry" however. Finance, entertainment, publishing are examples of industries. The companies that are part of these all have IT departments. What is being compared?

Well, no task irrespective of the field is easy. But a person eventually knows how to do it by experience and generally would be doing it by following set of laid down procedures. In case of pilots under expected circumstances, yes they need to think different and might not have a process to work out and more so in case of things like investigations and crime handling departments. My intention is not to know which is difficult, the point is which is more dynamic.In our regular software development, for an average individual if there is a task, he just starts with an abstract idea that this is how it might be done to work. while in other sectors except those which come under the above category, people always 'definitely' know 'how' a certain task can be achieved - either by pure experience or a set of standard instructions. In IT, even if we expertise in knowing 'definitely' well before how we do it by experience, we may not end up doing that same thing every day.. there would be new technologies to adapt and work out.

Software design and related development activities do indeed required deep thinking and problem solving. The nature of these aspects are based on "what" type of software is to be created and the requirements of that software, and as a result there are many unknown elements that eventually must be discovered.

Information Technology (IT) does include repetitive and repeatable tasks which are defined and prescribed, however.

Ram Korutla wrote:Well, no task irrespective of the field is easy. But a person eventually knows how to do it by experience and generally would be doing it by following set of laid down procedures. In case of pilots under expected circumstances, yes they need to think different and might not have a process to work out and more so in case of things like investigations and crime handling departments. My intention is not to know which is difficult, the point is which is more dynamic.In our regular software development, for an average individual if there is a task, he just starts with an abstract idea that this is how it might be done to work. while in other sectors except those which come under the above category, people always 'definitely' know 'how' a certain task can be achieved - either by pure experience or a set of standard instructions. In IT, even if we expertise in knowing 'definitely' well before how we do it by experience, we may not end up doing that same thing every day.. there would be new technologies to adapt and work out.

I think that in any field, espescially in diagnostic related fields (medicine, forensics, veterinary, research), you have a typical "status quo response" to things. Like in IT, when you have a bad hard drive or network switch, you replace it. But what of the things that, say doctors, deal with that are on the outskirts of what they deal with normally? Diseases that could mask themselves as other diseases -- treating ear infections, but they turn out to be polyps or whatnot.... thinking something is malignant and upon further examination it turns out to be benign.... that's along the same lines as what we do in IT as well. You think a problem is localized to one workstation and it ends up distributed across an entire AD environment, you think something is software/OS related and it ends up being a ram issue.... you think you find the localized area of a memory leak in your app, but then find out it's poor overall design or poorly written code.

Any field will have its days of doing "normal things" and days of "you'd never believe what happened and I didn't have the answer until....." .

I used to be a vet technician. Some days, I cleaned a lot of ears and trimmed a lot of nails. Other days I was on the internet trying to find answers to help the doctor treat the animals. Other days, I was using every skill I had experienced to keep animals alive, keep doctors on time, keep clients in check and keep the pets happy. Every day is different. I find similar situations in the IT field.