Anything but Boring

I saw a blurb from US News that said college enrollment in IT related programs was down because prospective students assumed that IT jobs were "boring".

Boring?!

I initially entered IT as a programmer. I loved it because development is an act of creation, you can design and build something that solves real world problems. How can that be boring? I'll date myself and say that we wrote hospital ADT, collections, payments and billing systems in COBOL using ISAM files. And we had to compile our programs at night. The first time I used Filemaker on a Macintosh Plus I almost cried with joy. You could build databases with forms, instantly, right before your very eyes.

Next was Visual Basic with an Access database back end. I may actually have wept when I first got my hands on it. I pored through the manuals, absolutely amazed at the capabilities. Boring? Not on your life. Seeing your designs and solutions come to life before your eyes is nothing short of exhilarating.

From development to infrastructure to leadership, my path in IT has been anything but boring. Sure, there are some tasks in IT that can be boring, but I’ve not seen many in my career.

In the end, I’ve found that IT is really all about helping. It’s about helping a user with a laptop gone south with her presentation still on it. It’s about helping departments use technology to work better together. It’s about helping our organizations achieve important goals. And in HIT, it’s about helping our clinicians to provide the highest quality of care to our patients.

That, my friends, is anything but boring.