I have worked in IT my entire career.
Like any career/job it has its good points and its bad point. It has a lot of drama and tantrums so do not think you will be getting away from that, again something that I think if people are being honest is also a given in any job. I started out looking to be a programmer and after doing some work as an intern for about 9 months determined there was no way I could do that for decades of my life, I am too much of a people person. You can certainly find niches where you can be a developer and still interface with stakeholders and if you have both skill sets that will make you valuable to those firms, but in the end as a developer or database admin your focus is interacting with a machine to get it to do things. I currently manage a team of developers as part of my staff.
So guidance is to figure out the fastest way you can to determine if you really like the work. I think you are still in that fascination stage where it looks cool because it is different and challenging and it engages your intellect, but like any job, it has to touch you beyond that to not become a slog after years of doing it day in and day out. Also be aware that developers needs to learn almost entirely new tool sets at least every five years to really stay current and relevant. Sure there are still COBOL programmers out there, but it is not the norm. Over my short 25 years in the industry I have seen databases progress from Btrieve to dBase to FoxPro to SQL and now to web based versions of NoSQL. I recall a guy I worked with when I was fresh out of school who was just over 50 and he worked on our help desk. He did not want to get promoted and just wanted to do that job until he retired. His reason? He was sick of having to learn new stuff every few years and had lost the passion to do that. I thought he was nuts and unambitious. Now as I approach that age, I get his viewpoint a lot more. It is hard, hard work. The nice thing with something like grant writing or being an accountant is that things in other fields may change but likely not as much. Math and debits and credits and filling out forms are pretty timeless. New programming languages are being developed all the time. I am in the tail end of a nearly two year implementation of an ERP system for our company. We'll be running in the cloud, something I've done with other software at other places, but not to this scale, it was usually a side app like payroll or CRM. My entire staff is having to learn new skills to support this and remain relevant to the business. I have one guy who is 63 who just resigned early this week because his work has shifted so much and he does not want to retool so he's looking for something that can use the skills he has and coast. Think about all this and more.
It is also a field with a lot of bodies in it, but very few solid programmers. I'd day less than 5% of the people I've with I would classify as above average. There is a lot of mediocrity in the field in large part because the barrier to entry is so low. You can pick up a book or learn stuff of the internet and start applying to jobs. Getting those first few might be tough, but then you will likely find jobs if you can interview well. The challenge is keeping them by keeping up with demands. This is a tough one. I have been having the same conversation with business stakeholders for decades. They want to know why something they can do in Excel in 5 minutes takes a programmer days, weeks or months to design, build and test. Programmers are never fast enough, the estimates are always too long, and they are never happy with what they get. Please do not go into this field thinking it is anywhere near easy. It is not. You need to enjoy it, or it will be miserable, so I go back to what I started with. Figure out if you really like the job as fast as you can. Not what students in a school do as projects. Those are not real-world problems. I still find any college programming is useless in the projects I need my team to do. When I hire entry level people I hire them for aptitude not anything they did. Do I see logical thinking and problem solving? Can they solve some of the logic problems I give them in a solid way? The programming languages I learned in college I ever used outside the classroom as they were dead before I graduated. I had to learn something new right away. Java and others have a bit more staying power right now but on-the-job is what makes a programmer valuable not book learning. You need to solve real problems, which usually are very, very mundane. In business most of your work will be around reports or data manipulation. You will not create full systems unless you work for a tech firm that sells software, you will be integrating one system to another, doing ETL (extract, transform and load) work until you are blue in the face, and spending weeks trading e-mails with the CFO on getting one report to work exactly as they want for all the bad data that is in the system.
I'm trying to give you a real picture. It's a job. And it's hard. For those that like it it can be fun, but there are many more days of drudgery and projects that are really great. Unless you go to work for yourself you will be programming what someone else needs and not what you want. Give it a go and see if it resonates with you. If it does you will likely be employable forever as I only see the need increasing as it has for decades.
ETA: Saw sokoloff posted before I was done. Of seven developers on staff only one makes more than $100K and he has over 15 years experience in X++ a programming language for Microsoft ERP system, so nothing you will learn in a college. My web team who is likely using technologies you would learn is between $60K-80K, and that included a guy with 25+ years of experience. He was not a good developer and is no longer here. Lots of those guys bouncing around getting code built but not well. The big tech firms in town will pay as sokoloff indicates, but they expect results. My guys accept the lower pay with way, way less stress. We line up well with market salary surveys but do struggle to find people because everyone feels they can make the coin right out of school. If they can't handle that treadmill we get those who want some work/life balance. We offer exceptional benefits which also helps offset the slightly lower salary. I think expecting to settle in to $80-$120K after 5 years of experience would be a realistic target. You'll need to be a rock star or get into some crazy environments to make more than that in my experience.
