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<p>Nobody is saying that IT workers don’t experience problems. </p>
<p>The difference is that those problems are more controllable. Your personal development is largely in your hands. If you want to learn a new skill, you (usually) can build a home lab and pick it up yourself. Software is largely costless either as freeware or as trial lab software, and much IT hardware is not particularly expensive. Like I said, you can build a quite reasonable home hardware lab for less than $10k through used gear on Ebay - and then when you’re finished, you can sell it right back onto Ebay and recover most of your money back. Hence, if your employer isn’t providing you with marketable IT learning opportunities, you can create your own opportunities. </p>
<p>Now, certainly I agree that there are plenty of IT workers who lack personal initiative and do not try to learn new skills. It is precisely those workers who tend to encounter the most career turbulence. </p>
<p>{Incidentally, one of the best ways to tell who is a promising IT worker or not is to ask them what they are running in their home lab. Interestingly, I’ve found the relationship to be curvilinear. If the answer is “they don’t even have a home lab”, that’s a strong indication that the person lacks true interest in IT. But if the answer is “Only the newest, most expensive gear”, that indicates that although the person clearly wants to learn, he may not really know what he’s doing. But if the answer is: “Hardware that is relatively old, but which I’ve customized to run the most advanced configurations”, then that’s the mark of somebody with a truly impressive skillset and dedication to the craft. For example, I was far less impressed by somebody who said that they had a Cisco PIX firewall in their homelab than somebody who actually *built their own PIX<a href=“the%20so-called” title=“FrankenPIX”>/i</a> from individual used components. } </p>
<p>But, like I said, you can’t really do that in (non-CS) engineering. You can’t reasonably build a homelab with which you can actually develop marketable engineering skills. Hence, you’re stuck with whatever learning opportunities your employer decides to provide you, and if he sticks you with scraps, then you’re forced to eat scraps.</p>