I’m an IT professional at the moment (my career aspirations really lie elsewhere, to be honest). Let me advise you one thing – if you’re thinking of going into the world of systems administration (in the widest sense), you’ll sooner or later run into a shabbos ceiling – that is, the point in your career where you become indespensible to your employer on shabbos in case of emergencies.
Personally I work in the ‘storage’ world (previously I worked in the general Windows administration field at several major American companies). Storage devices are on 24/7. (If you’re familiar with computers – I’m talking about SAN devices.) Now logically, most companies that have SANs are very large companies, and most very large companies work 24/7 or at least need 24/7 availability (including shabbos). So I just know that I can work as part of a team, but, I can never be the one ultimately responsible for the whole thing… because that requires 24/7 availibility in case of a crisis. Keep in mind that for modern companies *all* of their IT services reside on these SANs – their Exchange servers, their CRMs, their internal business processes, their file storage, tens or hundreds or thousands of virtual servers or even the employee’s virtual desktops… Any downtime on those systems, even of 10 seconds, can cause a major impact and cause the company to lose millions of $. And if it’s medical, it may cost people’s lives; if it’s military, it may affect national security. In short, these systems are important.
So well, again, it depends on what you want. But if you’re considering a career in the systems administration area, keep this in mind. You’ll either be limited to smaller companies (that don’t work on shabbos and don’t care about service availability over shabbos), or to a lower role (non-managerial).
If you’re looking at being a programmer, however, you don’t really have anything to worry about – I don’t know of any programmers who have to work 24/7 (though I’m sure there are – it’s just a lot less common).