Prompt: Are there any polls or data about IT professionals that ask "Would you recommend starting a career in IT now?" for the last 20 years?

Yes. There are surprisingly good data points going back about 20 years, although I don't see a single survey that asked the exact same question every year from 2006–2026. The closest thing is a combination of recurring IT-worker surveys and several particularly useful surveys at different points in time.

And the results are actually pretty interesting: IT professionals were overwhelmingly willing to recommend IT as a career in the 2000s and early 2010s. The picture becomes much more mixed—and recently dramatically more negative—by the mid-2020s.

The strongest data points I've found

Year

Survey / source

Question

Would recommend

2005

Windows IT Pro survey

Recommend IT to young people?

75%

2006

Dice Tech Appeal Index

Recommend technology career

83%

2007

Dice Tech Appeal Index

Recommend technology career

86%

2008

IT Job Board/Barkers

Recommend IT career to a child

75%

2012

Computerworld

Individual IT professionals asked whether they'd recommend IT

Mostly yes

2013

TEKsystems

Recommend IT career to others

81%

2022

ThreatConnect cybersecurity survey

Recommend career in IT security

33%

2024

Data Center Knowledge

Recommend technology/IT to young person

76%

2025

Noam Segal/Lenny tech-worker survey

Recommend their role to someone starting today

Negative overall sentiment

2026

Noam Segal/Lenny tech-worker survey

Recommend career in their role to someone starting today

NPS −39

There are some important caveats because these aren't perfectly comparable surveys.

2005: 75% — very strong endorsement

A particularly useful old survey from Windows IT Pro asked IT professionals whether they would recommend IT as a profession to young people choosing a vocation.

75% said yes, while 17% said no. The survey explicitly described this as an indicator of job satisfaction and optimism about the profession. (IT Strategy)

That's probably one of the closest matches to your question.

2006–2007: 83% → 86%

The Dice Tech Appeal Index is even better because it was specifically designed to measure how attractive technology was to people already working in it.

In 2006, 83% of technology professionals said they would recommend a technology career to others. (Network World)

In 2007, that actually increased to 86%. Interestingly, the survey also found that 91% associated IT with stress, and concerns about outsourcing were increasing. (ERE)

So even though IT workers were already complaining about stress and outsourcing, they overwhelmingly still thought:

"Yes, I'd recommend this career."

2008: 75%

Another survey of 956 IT professionals conducted in the UK found that 75% would recommend a career in IT to their child. (Onrec)

This is particularly useful because it isn't simply asking whether people like their current employer—it asks about recommending the career itself.

2012: interestingly, the concerns already look familiar

Computerworld did something particularly interesting in 2012. It asked several experienced IT professionals:

Knowing what you know now, would you advise your son/daughter or a young person entering college to choose IT?

The answers were overwhelmingly positive. Multiple systems/network professionals explicitly said they would recommend IT, while emphasizing that newcomers would have to continually learn and adapt. (Computerworld)

What's fascinating, though, is that the reasons for concern sound remarkably modern.

The article predicted:

(Computerworld)

In other words, people were already predicting the death of traditional IT in 2012.

And yet the professionals actually working in IT were still saying they'd recommend it.

2013: 81%

The TEKsystems survey is another strong data point.

81% of IT professionals said they would recommend an IT career to others. (InfoWorld)

But there was already a substantial warning sign underneath that number:

(InfoWorld)

So even then there was a distinction between:

"I don't like my current IT job"

and

"IT was a bad career choice."

Most still chose the latter answer: IT was a good career.

Then something changes

The really interesting part is what happens after roughly 2015–2020.

I haven't found a continuous annual series comparable to Dice's old Tech Appeal Index. That's a significant limitation.

But there are some very striking individual observations.

2022: cybersecurity professionals were already much more pessimistic

ThreatConnect surveyed security leaders and found:

33% would recommend a career in IT security, while another 33% would discourage someone from pursuing it. (Dataminr)

That's an enormous change from the 75–86% recommendation rates in the 2005–2013 period.

It's also particularly interesting because cybersecurity was supposed to be one of the hot, high-growth areas of IT.

So by this point we have:

2006: ~83% recommend technology
2013: ~81% recommend IT
2022: only ~33% recommend cybersecurity

That's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the directional change is pretty dramatic.

2024: 76% — an important counterexample

There's also evidence that the situation isn't universally bleak.

Data Center Knowledge surveyed 316 full-time U.S. IT professionals in February 2024 and asked:

"I'd recommend a career in technology or IT to a relative or other young adult starting their career."

The responses were:

So 76% were positive. (TABPI)

That's actually remarkably close to the 75–86% numbers from the 2000s.

And this is why I wouldn't conclude from the recent negative tech-worker surveys that IT as a whole has suddenly become a terrible career.

But 2025–2026 is really different

This is where I think your question gets particularly interesting.

Noam Segal and Lenny Rachitsky conducted large tech-worker sentiment surveys in 2025 and 2026.

The 2026 survey covered roughly 5,300–6,000 tech workers, depending on the particular reporting of the survey.

Instead of asking simply whether someone likes technology, they asked something much closer to your proposed question:

"How likely are you to recommend a career in your role to a friend starting out today?"

The overall NPS-like score came out to approximately −39.

More than half of tech workers would actively steer someone away from their career path. (EmailShot)

And this wasn't simply juniors complaining.

The negativity was particularly strong among experienced individual contributors. Senior/staff engineers were around −49. (EmailShot)

The researchers found that no major tech function had a positive recommendation score. Even founders were approximately neutral/negative, while engineering, operations, design and research were substantially negative. (PodScripts)

That's an extraordinary contrast with:

2006: +83% recommend
2013: +81% recommend
2024: +76% recommend
2026: −39 NPS

Again, these aren't directly comparable statistical measures, but the change in sentiment is huge.

I think there's an important distinction here

I would actually separate your question into three different questions:

1. "Would you recommend IT as a career?"

Historically:

Very strongly yes.

The data from roughly 2005–2013 is remarkably consistent around 75–86%.

2. "Would you recommend IT as a career to someone starting today?"

This appears to have become much more complicated.

That's where the 2022 cybersecurity data and especially the 2025–26 tech-worker surveys become important.

3. "Would you recommend your specific IT job/function to someone starting today?"

This is where the 2026 data becomes extremely negative.

And I think that's potentially the most important distinction.

A senior infrastructure engineer might say:

"IT was an excellent career for me."

while simultaneously saying:

"I wouldn't tell a 20-year-old to start where I started in 2005."

Those aren't contradictory.

There is also a fascinating historical pattern

If we put the surveys into rough chronological context:

2005–2008

"IT is a great career. I'd recommend it."

2008–2013

"IT is stressful and outsourcing is a problem, but I'd still recommend it."

2012

"Traditional IT jobs are disappearing, so learn cloud/virtualization/business skills."

2020–2022

"Some IT specialties are becoming exhausting and difficult to enter."

2024

"Most IT professionals still recommend the field."

2025–2026

"I benefited from being in IT, but I'm not sure I'd recommend someone start now."

That last transition is particularly interesting because AI may be producing a different kind of concern than outsourcing/cloud did.

Outsourcing threatened particular jobs.

Cloud threatened particular skills.

AI potentially threatens the entry-level career ladder itself.

That's a much more consequential problem.

If you're interested, I can go one step further

I can try to construct a 2005–2026 "Would IT professionals recommend IT?" timeline, digging through old Dice, Computerworld, InformationWeek, TEKsystems, Spiceworks, Stack Overflow, ISACA, CompTIA, Gartner, etc., and assign each survey a comparable "recommendation %" where possible.

That would let us see whether there really has been a 20-year collapse in IT-worker enthusiasm, or whether the apparent collapse is mostly an artifact of the surveys changing their questions and the recent surveys focusing disproportionately on software/tech workers rather than traditional IT infrastructure.

ChatGPT - September 2, 2026