Labor Day Eve – Game Changer IT: Ushering the Next Industrial Revolution

Other than occasional few days and a gap to pursue higher education, I had been toiling non-stop in IT for the last 15 years. This has reached a feverish pitch in the last 8 years ever since I returned to India from U.S in 2017. The IT job had me occupied in this 8 year stretch from 2017 to 2025 and I had been performing with religious consistency to bring one ingredient to the table – hard work. More than anything, we need to modify our beliefs that IT is just for freshers in India with few middle-aged folks managing them. As I grew in age, I shouldn’t be forced out of this sector. Rather I carried a wave of workers along with me to say IT is a fruitful sector for the experienced as well. Today, people with 10, 15 and 20 years or more years of experience should be able work in IT without any inhibitions. Simply, we need to build careers in IT from freshmen induction to retirement and there has to be toil from one and all towards that end. I put my best foot forward and took along a wave of workers. While the employment and employee age group is just one product of toil, any end result or digital service we provide through IT is born out of labor as well. There is no digital product without the foundation of hard work. In the age of global digitalization where everyone is attached to digital screens, it is safe to say that IT ushered an industrial revolution of its own realm, swaying everyone in its wave. If there is increased hardworking coefficient in the world, one of the factors is the new age industrial revolution brought in by IT. Once again, the soft games we play alter the world in profound ways we can never imagine. Games of grown-ups, games of IT and games to alter the countries and world. 

Labor Day in America began as a tribute to the worker with soot on his face and calluses on his palms — the steelworker, the carpenter, the railway builder. It was a day carved out to honor the dignity of work, the sweat behind national prosperity. Yet as we step into the 21st century, labor no longer wears a helmet or wields a hammer alone. Today, labor also means glowing screens, humming servers, millions of lines of code, and restless minds solving problems at digital speed. 

The new industrial revolution is here, and it is powered not by coal or steam but by information technology (IT). On this Labor Day eve, it is time to recognize IT as the game changer — industrious in spirit, revolutionary in scale, and deeply human in its foundations of effort. 

The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries mechanized production. Workers toiled in textile mills, steel foundries, and locomotive plants. They worked long hours, often under dangerous conditions, but their labor reshaped societies. 

Today, IT is no less industrious. Behind the seamless convenience of a cashless payment, a video call across continents, or an AI chatbot answering queries is an invisible army of workers. Programmers debugging late into the night, cybersecurity teams defending systems from relentless attacks, data scientists training models on terabytes of raw information — this is labor of a different kind but with the same essence: discipline, persistence, and problem-solving. 

Just as the steelworker’s furnace needed constant tending, the digital economy requires relentless maintenance, updates, and oversight. IT may not burn coal, but it burns human midnight oil. 

It is easy to mistake IT for an industry of comfort — plush offices, flexible schedules, remote work. But beneath that surface lies sheer industriousness: 

24/7 Operations: IT work rarely sleeps. From Bengaluru to Boston, teams work round-the-clock to keep systems running. 

Relentless Deadlines: Product releases, security patches, and service uptime demand a discipline as exacting as any factory floor. 

Iterative Labor: Software evolves endlessly. Every bug fixed today spawns new tasks tomorrow. 

Global Interdependence: Unlike a steel plant producing for a town, IT infrastructure underpins global commerce — one slip can cause billions in losses. 

This is labor transformed — less visible, more cognitive, but rooted in the same ethic of diligence. 

The United States is both birthplace and battleground of the IT revolution. Silicon Valley’s garages birthed Apple, Google, and Intel. But today IT is more than an industry; it is the foundation of American economic resilience. Over 9 million Americans work in IT-related jobs, from developers to cybersecurity analysts. Tech accounts for nearly 10% of U.S. GDP and is among the fastest-growing segments.  

Yet the industriousness remains. For every Silicon Valley billionaire, there are hundreds of thousands of ordinary IT workers writing code in cubicles or homes, fixing glitches at 3 a.m., or ensuring the nation’s data stays secure. The U.S. IT workforce is the invisible backbone holding together modern industry, finance, healthcare, and government. 

If the U.S. gave birth to IT, India scaled it. Over 5 million people are directly employed in India’s IT and business process management sector, and another 10–12 million indirectly. The sector contributes more than 7.4% of India’s GDP and accounts for over 55% of global outsourcing in software services. For millions of Indian youth, IT is not just a career path but a ladder of mobility — a way to uplift families from rural poverty into the global middle class. The industriousness here is undeniable: 10–12 hour workdays, night shifts aligned with U.S. time zones, relentless upskilling to keep pace with new technologies. Far from the stereotype of cushy IT jobs, this is hard work with a digital face. 

Across the world, IT is reshaping labor: In Africa mobile fintech platforms like M-Pesa have brought financial inclusion to millions. Across Europe, nations lead in digital ethics, data protection, and AI regulation — industries in themselves. In East Asia, robotics and 5G manufacturing are blending IT with physical industries. In Latin America, emerging hubs for IT outsourcing and e-commerce are transforming economies. This is not a single nation’s revolution — it is a planetary shift in labor. And everywhere, it is grounded in human industriousness. 

In US, Maria, a cybersecurity analyst, recalls the night a ransomware attack targeted the hospital network she serves. While the city slept, she and her team stayed awake for 36 hours straight, tracing the breach, isolating servers, and restoring critical systems. She never thought of herself as “labor” in the traditional sense, but her industriousness was no less vital than a fireman pulling people from a burning house. “We saved lives,” she says quietly, “only our battlefield was digital.” 

In Hyderabad, Ravi, a young programmer from a farming family, still remembers the night he coded his first live banking application. His parents, who had worked the soil all their lives, watched in awe as he showed them how a rural customer could now transfer money by phone. “My father told me,” Ravi recalls, “Your code is like our plough — it feeds people.” For Ravi, IT is not glamour; it is sweat in digital form. 

In Nairobi, Amina runs a small team of developers building mobile apps for farmers to predict rainfall. She works long days, troubleshooting errors and testing with villagers who depend on the app. For her, IT is not a luxury but a survival tool. She says, “When our app works, a farmer plants on time. That’s food for a family.” 

As we stand on this Labor Day eve, we must broaden our lens of what it means to be a worker. The IT professional debugging a line of code is no less industrious than the steelworker of a century ago. The gig worker training AI systems, the cloud architect designing platforms, the cybersecurity team fending off attacks — these are today’s labor heroes. 

Being digital does indeed mean standing on the foundation of hard work—the accumulated effort of generations of workers who have chosen to dedicate their careers to the complex, demanding, and ultimately transformative work of building humanity's digital future. As we celebrate Labor Day, we celebrate not just traditional forms of industrial work, but the new forms of industrious effort that are ushering in the next industrial revolution. 

The IT revolution proves that human industriousness, channeled through new technologies and new forms of collaboration, continues to be the driving force behind economic progress and social advancement. The digital workers of today are the inheritors of the same spirit that built railroads, factories, and cities. Their legacy will be a fully connected, digitally empowered global society built on the enduring foundation of human effort and dedication to craft. 

The IT revolution is the fifth industrial revolution — one that fuses human creativity with digital power. But it rests on the same foundations as all revolutions before: hard work, resilience, sacrifice, and the pursuit of progress. As we enter this next industrial revolution, let us remember: the essence of labor remains unchanged, whether one is wielding a hammer or a keyboard – all are making men, careers and products out of sheer toil.