If you are looking for a job, I want to talk to you.  Right here, on this blog.

In an article at The Atlantic, Don Peck makes the statistics-laden observation:

It seems strange to me to consider the economy as a "thing that produces jobs".  Curiously, it should be the other way around, shouldn't it?  As a consequence of having a useful skill, we engage in activities known as "employment" that benefit ourselves and others.  This collective "employment" is what makes up the economy.  If the confusion could be dispelled by an aphorism, then I'd nominate, "Ask not what job the economy can produce for you, but what job you can produce for the economy."

I feel very lucky to have an income right now, and to be employed at a company that is doing well enough that I don't need to worry about job loss in the foreseeable future.  I have a privileged view of the world because of this (temporary) stability, and because of my background in computer science.  I'd like to take a moment to write about the future as I see it, given my perspective in technology.  I hope that if you are considering career possibilities right now, then reading this will give you some insight into why you should get as much education as possible in order to pursue a career in an information technology field.

You should become an expert in computer science and apply your skills to the areas of bioinformatics, physics, robotics, or any number of fields that have problems to solve.  From my viewpoint, all jobs are becoming information technology jobs and everything else is going to eventually disappear except in developing economies.  Consider the following job categories that are on the verge of disappearing or have disappeared altogether: translation services, middle-men like publishers, music retail stores and book stores, newspaper editors, newspaper classifieds, answering services, travel maps, phone directories such as yellow pages, travel agencies, commodity colleges and universities, the entire industrial sector, etc., etc.

The truth is that although people invest a great deal of time and effort becoming experts in specific areas, most fields of study include the seeds of their own destruction.  They do not teach you how to make yourself obsolete.  And by lacking this information, they lock you into a career that will, eventually, become obsolete.

Computer science, on the other hand, is the study of solving abstract problems.  Once a problem has been solved, it is packaged up and reused to solve bigger problems.  For example, once computer scientists learned how to compress information in the zip file format, compression become popular all over the place.  Hard drive space was saved, and the time it takes to send files over the wire was reduced.  But consider this: there were no "zip file factory workers" who lost their jobs when zip files were created.  That's because computer scientists are constantly leveraging their own work to solve harder and harder problems.  That's why they will never lose their jobs, en masse.  They are positioned to become the gatekeepers of all human knowledge--and not out of some kind of elitism, but out of the nature of their jobs.  I want you to be a computer scientist so that you can solve more problems and find more job security than you ever thought possible.

Medicine used to be a very slowly evolving science.  It was more of an art, actually, than a science: discoveries such as penicillin were usually made by accident and progress was very slow.  Slow, that is, until the human genome was mapped.  Suddenly, medicine entered the realm of computer science and information technology.  We could leverage the power of hundreds of thousands of processing units on the problems of disease and short life.  Even now, bioinformatics is growing exponentially.  The number of human genomes mapped today is in the dozens but will probably be in the hundreds or thousands this year.  Computer science in the realm of biology is a career move that will serve you well in the long run, and your contributions will serve the rest of humanity.

Robot technology is finally starting to deliver on the promises it made in the 1970s.  Fewer and fewer of our products are assembled or sorted by hand.  There are robot services available in the home now, such as the roomba and the neato.  You can bet that there will be robots soon that can clean your walls, and a few years later, wash your clothes (if that will even be necessary), and do your dishes.  Once these technologies start working in the home, you can expect that automated processes will start to make more sense in the grocery store and even in the service sector (but better than the ones that already serve there).  Computer science is behind all of these technologies and roboticists will need to be fluent in computer languages as well as electronics and physics.  The beginning of all of these marvels is the internet which is making it possible to communicate between human and machine.  If you are looking for a place to start, may I (in a biased way) recommend web development?

Then again, you don't have to quit what you're already good at.  Enhance it with a degree in computer science.  Learn how to make your job obsolete, and you will have the most job security in the world.  The economy depends on you (and 6 billion others like you) to learn this skill and teach it to others.