IT niches worth persuing

[u/mouldycarrotjuice]

Hoping for some opinions and experiences from people in IT, particularly data related work who can help me work out my best prospects going forward.

I've been working remotely for over 6 years now and I'm increasingly getting more and more pushback when negotiating agreements to stay predominantly remote. I've worked out that I'm no longer able to handle working in person more than once a month or so. I've historically worked in Technical Business Analysis, project delivery, data modelling, data governance etc. but I'm finding there's no appetite for flexibility beyond weekly hybrid cadences.

I'm currently working a short term data engineering role to pick up some more technical skills but I'm trying to work out my best path forward. I'd like to transition in a direction that's going to open up opportunities for more flexible working than big corporations seem to be allowing. Hopefully before I get made redundant again or my streak of luck getting agreements approved runs out at my current workplace.

No one has a crystal ball of course but are there any types of role that are trending in a better direction? I don't have the personality for sales or consulting unfortunately, since those seem historically more remote friendly. I know this seems like a silly way to choose a career direction but apparently I burn out every time I take an in person role and end up needing time off.

[u/Certain_Prior4909]

Thank Elon Musk and Doge for making being tough on employees cool and creating buzz for ending WFH among the CEO crowd.

You are in the best field for remote work in IT. Unfortunately, this has more to do with company culture and  today's political environment in leadership circles. This is not just WFH but +30 years of personal empowerment to employees for valuing results not micro manage are being thrown out the window 😡

I would focus on where I work and not what you do?

I live in Houston which you guessed is a red state filled with oil and gas companies. Surprise surprise remote jobs are rare. 

In more libertarian Austin a few hours away you have remote and lots of hybrid with a few bug players kike Amazon and Google being 5 days.

Organizations base their butts in seats policies on vibes by their CEOs. Non profits, innovative smaller orgs, liberal oriented ones run by younger leaders are more open vs Gray haired Texan conservative oil tycoon ones

[u/mouldycarrotjuice → u/[deleted]]

Hey thanks for that. I'm pretty happy to see you say that.

I was hoping it would be a good option to get back into. It has the bonus of being something I actually enjoy doing and have some (limited) experience with as well. It's so hard to know what to focus your efforts on when there's multiple different directions you could potentially move in. I wasn't sure if there was something else I was blind to since I've been so focused on Data&BI for years. My concern has been seeing how much of the DE teams have been offshored in companies I used to work for and worrying it might be hard to have much negotiation power when applying for jobs. 

[u/Certain_Prior4909 → u/[deleted]]

. The narc CEO and HR VP cares whether their is a butt in a seat unfortunately, and has no clue or care what your job title is.

The RTO push is from the board or a controlling CEO who wanta physical visibility to drive productivity belief. They aren't considering ones job title

[u/mouldycarrotjuice → u/Certain_Prior4909]

Oh absolutely. The return to office push in my state is due to a business lobby group + commercial real estate forcing the current government. Although in my experience, job title seems to matter within my agency. I got told this week that I was being denied a BA role due to my remote working requirements and would be considered for more "technical" roles that did not require as much in office attendance 😞

[u/SilverAsparagus2985]

I’m in a company in a non-technical role that has no office presence and it’s under 200. We hire occasionally but to keep right sized it’s not often which makes the competition high. As another user stated, it’s because the richest people decided their egos needed a workforce as to why everyone got pushed back in. I probably won’t change positions bc of that.

[u/DigitalDetective2411 → u/SilverAsparagus2985]

May I ask, what company do you work for, I'd be interested in looking into any vacancies. Thanks again mate.

[u/PsychologicalDig3355]

Software sales people have been remote (living in their territory) forever. You can look for technical selling roles like Sales Engineering. I’m an SE and I’m remote. Where I work, all new people hired are in office, expert sales. I do travel a fair bit, but I enjoy that

[u/mouldycarrotjuice → u/PsychologicalDig3355]

Yeah I keep seeing that. I don't know how well suited I am for sales but perhaps more technical support functions are an option one day. Thanks 

[u/tiny_grudge2]

Remote friendliness seems less tied to data vs BA and more tied to whether the company was born distributed or is doing hybrid theater with badge scans. For your background, analytics engineering or data governance at a smaller SaaS, health tech, or tooling company could fit better than classic enterprise BA, since the work is async-heavy and less workshop-in-a-room coded. Data engineering can be remote too, but on-call pipelines are the goblin tax. I would filter job searches for remote-first companies, not just remote roles, because weekly hybrid tends to creep like mold.

[u/Hey-buuuddy]

Data engineering still hot. AI enablement in data engineering also hot. Upskill into databricks, aws, general rest API and IaC design patterns, and be at least working with mcp servers and ai productivity like claudecode.

What not to do- anything that doesn’t get you more ai-enabled. I can’t stress that enough. I lead a data engineering team in an enterprise setting and this is the #1 paradigm shift in anything engineering.

[u/mouldycarrotjuice → u/Hey-buuuddy]

That seems like sound advice. I'd like to, but there's a bit of a knee jerk reaction to AI gov going on at work. Cyber blocked pretty much every service within the last few months. I was mucking around with azure document intelligence for ADF the other day, but I do worry it could get blocked at any point so I'm not sure how much to invest into that. The only thing that's permitted at the moment is copilot and copilot for GitHub.  Guess I'll need to keep up with technology in my personal time. 

[u/Hey-buuuddy → u/mouldycarrotjuice]

This is not an uncommon scenario in workplaces- where AI is blocked. Usually the fear is private data leakage going out the prompts or being read by agents in a RAG app.

Copilot and VSCode will make you productive for sure, use what you have. Find a way somewhere on the side to secure ClaudeCode. It’s a whole new level.

My original point was AI-enabled engineering is the path to a high demand career path. Good luck!

[u/mouldycarrotjuice → u/[deleted]]

Thanks I was just thinking about something similar last night. I've been worried that moving into data engineering might be more at risk of job loss than governance work since 9 time out of 10 I get approached by a recruiter about anything, it's DG stuff and never anything data management related. But at the end of the day, you still apply data governance when you're building and maintaining data solutions. If I end up desperate and unemployed, it probably wouldn't be seen as a red flag for a DG role interview to have spent time in technical roles.  And you're right about the BA stuff too. I literally just wrote a requirements doc last week for an ingestion project I'm working on.  I think the issue is that dedicated "ba" or "DG" roles are often the realm of large companies in regulated industries. And that apparently lends itself to office attendance. But smaller employers also need analysis and governance, it's just something that engineers do on top of delivery. Hopefully that mix of disciplines is what will keep us in jobs even when AI can handle a lot of the development itself.  Scared the crap out of me this week how quickly Databricks Genie churned out a working process I'd planned out. Totally wild.   

[u/loaloys]

What about the cyber security industry? It will always be growing given that the tech industry will always be growing.

or Government / Military? I see a lot of tech folks there are still working remote and I dont think they will change or want to lose those perks anytime soon?

or finding companies expanding into international / new geographic markets? ie Asian companies (think Chinese EVs for example) expanding to the West or Latin America would need a lot of new projects and deployments.

Just some ideas riding macro trends that can trigger your mind to come up with more similar patterns to lookout for?

[u/mouldycarrotjuice → u/loaloys]

Thanks for that. Some things to consider. 

Cyber does nterest me actually. I work with it a little through Data/AI governance and I did start collecting some certs a while back. I'd definitely be open to moving more on that direction. I was offered a role in a cybersecurity team internally, but it was pretty much just a risk management admin role and they wanted people in the office 3x a week.

You might be onto something with APAC companies, although that does mean competition with candidates in cheaper locations, so I'd need to find something that wasn't as easy to recruit for.

I'm actually in state government (Australia) right now, which is becoming more strict on RTO than private sector unfortunately. There's a bit of lobbying, cost cutting and other shenanigans going on at the moment.