That cost center mindset is such a huge chasm to jump. As an individual employee there's almost no reason to take a job at a company that isn't making money of

That cost center mindset is such a huge chasm to jump. As an individual employee there's almost no reason to take a job at a company that isn't making money off of your contributions. Even if you're lucky enough to be in an IT-enabled skunkworks or innovation center at a large not-high-tech company, your department exists at the continued pleasure of the non-IT people who control the real revenue streams. There won't be many internal job transfer opportunities for you either unless you fancy moving out of technology and becoming an 'X who programs', someone in a non-dev role who uses coding as a sort of personal competitive advantage. [1] [2] I agree that technology is going to enable the business advances of the future even for companies that aren't high tech now, but at the individual contributor level it's a Sisyphean task to try to drive that change unless you're an executive yourself. [1] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html [2] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/xwp-vs-jap/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/xwp-vs-jap/