Why Work in Information Technology is doomed to failure

I have been developping software for a few years now. Both in small and big companies. And in both cases, there are more and more needs with regards to software functionalities. But what I have noticed is that over the last few years there is a shift currently taking place. 

It is a shift similar in nature to the transformation from craftmanship to industrialized era over the course of a decade. A few years ago, writing something from scratch leveraging on generic libraries was quite often a good choice. Now, most of the time, it is not. Today you will often find code right for the specific functionnality you need. 

The work in Infomation technology has shifted from building to customizing. Sure you can customize a lot faster than you can build and therefore are a lot more productive in the economic sense. But it is a profound change like going from leader to follower, or from active to passive. 

But we are not over yet, it is all about scaling. And in computer science, it is often an exponential scaling. But user needs, at least the monetizable ones, don't scale as fast. And that where it's getting bad for the IT man. One man and a few dollars can serve millions of users. And what's even worse is that one man and a few more dollars can serve tens of millions of users. Systems are build to scale by adding money in it rather than by adding people.

So how as an IT man, can you get advantage of this. I see a few options.

Either be among the few best, to get a chance to work on the few remaining jobs building new useful stuff used by many. You can also choose to join an open source project. These two first options are quite good for the philantropic mind, others you will be forced to pass your way.

An other option is to start it up. Create a business, where you can use your I.T. skills. You will also need a lot of other more useful skills. The probability of failure is high, but a small chance is better than no chance right ?

The last option, is to work somewhere else, nobody is forced to be a programmer right ?