#Week 8. Being an IT professional 20/30 years ago

 I will talk about a typical IT professional in Spain and all the things around that has evolved alongside it.

First of all, and something remarkable that has not changed over the years is that most of the students and “professionals” are men. In contrast with other areas that have shifted from a predominant male workforce to female as for example medicine. IT remains a male stronghold for some reason even though it may be changing slightly.

I have to say that I have never had an insider vision of an IT guy since any of my close family or friends were attached to it, so I have actually had to look for references to know what it was like, 20 years ago. Something is sure, the range of possibilities was narrower than it is today.

As I said previously the range of things available to work with, was limited compared to nowadays. For instance, it was not evident that so many languages  will appear 20 or 30 years ago and the object oriented language didn’t exist at all. In the 90s many programmers usually worked without LAN, and developing programs in languages like Turbo or Cobol.

The internet was not so developed as well as the people interconnected to it. For example, work centres that counted with a LAN, they were using coaxial cable and BUS topology, which means that when a cable of a computer failed, the whole LAN will drop.

The type of professionals that existed in the 90s was pretty much programmers and system administrators and nowadays, the specialization, due to the complexity and wide range of technologies, is bigger, so you can find «back-end», «front-end», web, applications server-client, mobile apps,… programmers,  system administrator, virtualization technicians,…

According to the references that I have read, being a IT guy in the 90s or early 2000s was very well paid in Spain and there were many different options for you to move to a new company or growing up as a professional.

In the late 90s, early 20s I remember there were a bunch of formation centres for simple users, so there were some professionals that use this possibility to make some money, even though I think you didn’t need to be an IT actually to teach some basic windows functionalities. Today it is easier than back then, to find knowledge or answers by surfing the web, but it is also true that the complexity added is harder to follow.

In terms of cybersecurity, I think 20 years ago the virus were not only addressed to make or steal money but to create some disturbance in the OS or to spread an idea, therefore, the necessity of cybersecurity professionals was not so important.

Here below the references.

https://parceladigital.com/2017/06/19/trabajando-como-profesional-de-la-informatica-en-la-decada-de-los-anos-noventa

https://www.actionsdata.com/blog/las-tic-en-espana-una-historia-de-exito

https://www.elmundo.es/f5/campus/2017/10/18/59e643dde2704ec9438b45fa.html


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