Three major revolutions in the IT industry
and the major new job roles they created
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Dotcom Boom
The dotcom boom started in the late 90s and early 2000s, triggered by the emergence of internet, that allowed anyone to reach anyone via email, access content, news or information on websites and allowed businesses to reach customers and conduct business virtually.
This revolution created new major job roles such as -
- Network engineers and administrators — manage and expand networks, over which the internet runs
- Web developers and UX/UI designers — create , design and maintain websites and web applications
- Server and database administrators — manage server hardwares and databases
- Software developers — creates and maintains softwares for businesses
- Game developers — creates video games
- Cybersecurity specialists — protect websites, systems, and customer information
Summary
The dotcom boom resulted in -
- establishment of the internet infrastructure and technologies,
- widespread adoption of the world wide web (WWW)
The new job roles created primarily focused on -
- helping businesses to create and maintain softwares, websites and web applications,
- to create and maintain servers, databases and server hardwares,
- build good cybersecurity measures.
Smartphone revolution
The smartphone revolution started in the late 2000s and benefitted from the progress made in World Wide Web (WWW) technology during the dotcom boom, as a smartphone was much cheaper than a personal computer, and it further eased the access to the vast services available on the internet through its very ease to use touch-screen interface, resulting a drastic increase in the internet penetration across the world.
The smartphone boom resulted in huge amount of job creation as the businesses saw the strategic importance in reaching the customers through their phone. Unlike personal computers, the smartphones are very close to a person, thus easier to grab their attention over the phone.
This revolution created new major job roles such as -
- Mobile app and UI/UX designer — creates and designs applications for smartphones and tablets.
- Mobile game developer — creates games for phones and tablets.
- Mobile security engineer — Mobile security, app security, mobile privacy, mobile threat/security engineering.
- Smartphone hardware engineer — Hardware design, sensors, displays, batteries, embedded systems.
- Cellular network engineer — designs and maintains mobile networks.
Summary
The smartphone boom enabled the people to access a vast amount of services at few taps on their smartphone screen.
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The new job roles created primarily focused on —
- enabling mobile-based networking and communication,
- creation and maintenance of mobile applications and mobile-based services, and
- designing the smartphone and related hardware accessories.
Artificial Intelligence revolution
As growth in internet and smartphone technology began to plateau, the IT industry turned to artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Though research and development in this field was active for decades, their development and adoption accelerated in the late 2010s. By 2026, AI had advanced to an astonishing — and frightening — level, becoming widely used for information gathering, coding assistance, and business workflows.
This revolution created new major job roles such as -
- Machine-learning engineer — builds and deploys systems that learn from data.
- AI engineer — develops applications using AI models and tools.
- Data scientist — analyzes data and creates predictive models.
- Data engineer — builds systems that collect, process, and organize data.
- AI research scientist — develops new algorithms and learning methods.
- Deep-learning engineer — works with neural networks for language, vision, or speech.
- Natural-language-processing engineer — builds systems that understand and generate human language.
- Computer-vision engineer — develops image and video recognition systems.
- Robotics engineer — combines AI, software, electronics, and mechanical systems.
- Prompt engineer — designs and tests instructions for generative-AI models.
- AI safety, ethics and governance specialist — addresses safety, fairness, accountability, and regulation.
- AI security engineer — protects AI models, data, and infrastructure.
- AI implementation consultant — helps organizations adopt AI in their operations.
Summary
The artificial intelligence (AI) technology generates responses to the user queries by predicting appropriate output based on learned patterns from the training data. The IT industry marketed the AI as —
- a context-aware assistant that can provide information and assist in content creation,
- a content generation tool,
- an object/pattern detection tool,
- a workflow automation agent,
- a decision and prediction assist, etc.
The major new jobs created in this revolution focused on -
- developing and training AI models,
- designing systems for data-labelling automation,
- implement safety, security and ethical safegaurds,
- build specialized hardware and infrastructure,
- help people and organisations to adopt AI in their workflows.
Final Thoughts
Although each of these revolutions created new job types and enormous number of jobs, the AI revolution is perceived as the killer of jobs, and it is for a good reason. Businesses are increasingly replacing humans with the AI tech and have laid-off hundreds of thousands of employees.
This dynamic in the IT industry left me wonder —
- what would be the next big revolution in the IT industry?
- What new job types would it bring? And how large would the job oppurtunity would be?
- Right now, should I be learning skills for these future job roles to stay relevant in that job market?
