Emileidy
What do information technologists do on a day to day?
I'm interested in changing my major from Civil Engineering to Information Technology. #information-technology
5 answers
Blake Dunham
Blake’s Answer
So...IT peeps don't build physical roads, bridges, or communities on a day-to-day basis. At least not physical ones. My job as a Unified Communications Engineer is to provide those similar things in the virtual world - allowing people to communicate/congregate/collaborate more effectively and efficiently than before. There's some math in that, but it can be pretty basic once you get out of subnetting and capacity-planning. But if you want to hold onto math and bringing that into IT, there can be different avenues to run down depending on what type of math you prefer.
As to what we do day to day, it depends on the career and the environment in which you work. For the previous 6 years I was able to work from home 95% of the time, and could be almost anywhere in the world. As long as I was completing my tasks and able to communicate, there were not many issues. So it doesn't help answer your question - and I'm glad it didn't. IT is changing everyday...so it's difficult to give you one good answer. But if you are still stuck on math, these come to mind below. I hope this was more of a help than a waste of time.
Business Intelligence deals with math in many ways - by taking data and presenting it in an informational format for people to build knowledge from.
Enterprise Data Management also deals with math, because they have to construct the stores and warehouses where the data resides in the most efficient manner for people to use that data as they need for their information purposes.
Database Management/Administration also uses math, but in a different way. They don't solely use numbers. They take data and change it from one form to another, using many different functions that are similar to math. I think they are wizards at times honestly.
Wael Al-Rihawi
Wael’s Answer
Check the link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om8AygYdrto
You are welcome.
Roberto Fernandez
Roberto’s Answer
As you can see from the great answers above, Information Technology actually covers many different specialties. Practitioners of the different disciplines have a varied range of experiences based on the specialty and where they actually work. The good news is that majoring in IT will give you access to the whole range and even after picking a starting point you can move from one to the other with ease until you find what you really like. Maybe you will even find your calling in leadership. The following are just some of the specialties (please bear with me to the end):
1- Networking and telecommunications (well explained by @Blake above)
2- Information Security: Concerned with the different technologies that keep information accessible only to those for which is intended and deals with firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, authentication, encryption and other system hardening practices and solutions.
3- Database Architecture and Database Administration: Two related but distinct specialties, where there is generally less math than what you would think and deal with finding the most efficient way of storing information
4- Systems administration: In general about taking care of the systems (computers, operating systems and storage) where the actual applications and services reside
5- Application administration and Site Reliability Engineering: About deploying and maintaining the actual applications that interact with other applications and the users. Applications are the actual programs doing the work, the combination of interfaces and instructions that ultimately make computers work for us
6- Software Engineering: This is about designing and producing the code that makes up the applications. Very cool, I'm not a software engineer (I'm actually a Network and Telecommunications Engineer) but in my next life I'll go software engineering and development LOL
7- Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence: The coolest thing in the IT world and the future of the real world. Those are very advanced applications that can learn themselves while going over and over through predetermined tasks and improve the way those tasks are performed.
There are some others, the mix and match of those and multiple variations within each one. If you love making things happen, working with your brain and not really depending of a physical attachment to place. IT definitely a close second to being a famous writer LOL. If like for me, writing novels does not come easy to you, IT is definitely the path to follow.
Ken Simmons
Ken’s Answer
Hi!
Here is an interesting link to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8bvnTvAY4Y
This site will also help:
http://inside.edison.com/content/inside/2012/05-12/mj-itspecialist.html
Gerard James
Gerard’s Answer
Managing IT budgets
Planning and coordinating team projects
Motivating team members
Evaluating projects from completion to end
Updating management on project process
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