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Nah, IT as a career path is already gone. If you are still doing it, it is imperative to use the time you have left to study for a career change. In a way, IT is a victim of its own success in the 90's: the function got so important - and so expensive - that senior managements vowed if the opportunity ever came they were going to do anything possible to get out from under what they perceived, then and now, to be a massive pile of overhead with marginal benefits. Now their minds are set, and they will never be able see an IT department as anything but a hard-to-manage cost center, to be trimmed back at every opportunity.

But that's actually OK. The need for automation hasn't disappeared, just the desire to accomplish it with a dedicated IT department. As Nicholas Carr predicted some years back, IT is being absorbed back into the job functions that use it. Being good at it gives you a leg up - if you are also good at a business function the company values. If not, then you will eventually find yourself in an ugly place - competing with the other "dedicated" IT professionals like yourself, who are located in Bangalore and work for $9/hour.

I’ve actually been thinking of going back to school and finishing an effort to get legal degree I started years ago, and then specializing in IT compliance law and offering my services to corporate america in that arena - that is literally the only path I see forward for myself within IT. And we all know that Governments appetite for oversight will never be satiated. Otherwise, it’s time to start career #2 as you suggested.

IT is a victim of its own success in the 90's: the function got so important - and so expensive - that senior managements vowed if the opportunity ever came they were going to do anything possible to get out from under what they perceived, then and now, to be a massive pile of overhead with marginal benefits.

IT literally went from being a white collar profession (more of a management science) to a blue collar role right after Y2K. It was at that point that the transition you described so well above occured. And I don't disagree that some greed amongst some of the bigger consulting firms played a huge role in this. Billing out a Visual C++ developer at $200 an hour was not really in IT labor's long term best interest.