Interesting. Didn't know you were in sales.

I'm in a technical/management/sales support niche. It's pretty amazing what some salespeople can make in the right company or with the right spiff programs. 

Hey, Les, why don't we just call each other assholes and get it over with. - Somebody on the old Southknoxbubba.net (if that was you, claim your quote and win net.fame!)

Andy, you're definitely right about some people leaving IT support and infrastructure roles for more lucrative sales jobs. However, I can't think of any developers I know who have done that. The coders I know who've left the field have typically pursued management jobs or have left the IT industry completely. Most developers (me included) don't have the personality type necessary to be a successful salesperson (the host of this site notwithstanding); the stereotype of the pocket-protected, caffeine-fueled nerd writing code for hours at a stretch is a stereotype grounded in reality.

You said some organizations believe "IT can pretty much do its own thing unattended." To me, that is the most compelling reason to stay on the developer side of the fence. The old saw that says "supervising developers is like trying to herd cats" just carries the ring of truth to me, and I enjoy being one of the cats.

Of course, the shortage of experienced developers has caused my salary to go way up over the last few years, so I'm not complaining too much.

Quite a few organizations in the Knoxville area have begun ramping up IT spending over the last three years though, and I consistently hear from several contacts that they're having a hard time finding the right people to fill those roles.

You're absolutely right about the expectation that IT should be able to do a lot more with a lot less. With Microsoft (as one example) marketing .NET as the be-all end-all of development, supposedly requiring nothing more than a few mouse clicks to create a usable application, non-technical managers of technical staff have begun to swallow the hype. They believe the hype that "ClickOnce" and its ilk will really deploy a usable application with essentially no work on the part of the developer. 

Some of the hype isn't really hype. I can indeed develop faster with .NET and SQL Server than with any other platform I've ever used. And don't get me started on the SQL Server vs. Oracle thing -- there's no comparison. These improvements in productivity get exaggerated when they're explained to non-technical manager types, who tend to hear the previous sentences as "He doesn't need more than 30 minutes to create this application." Of course, that's hooey.

So, the hype eventually bites organizational managers in the butt when they realize that .NET (or any other platform) still requires a lot of brainwork, design, testing, and debugging to make anything groovy, secure, stable, and usable. That's where the labor shortage hits -- the previous scaling back of IT spending is now colliding with an ever greater emphasis on automating everything we possibly can. Once the FTE requirements become clear to the decision-makers (even with our sexy new development tools), they begin to realize that the warm bodies needed to fill those slots are more scarce than they were a few years ago.

--Socialist With A Gold Card