Which IT career would best satisfy the following requirements?

Thanks for some really great suggestions. Sometimes it's good to look at career decisions from a perspective other than what you *think* you are passionate about. Frankly, I hate guys like you And by the way, I'm a woman. Women work in IT too.

Sysadmin stuff does sound up your alley. A slightly different take - how about learning IP-telephony? People who know how to do it well are still in demand for fairly good-paying jobs. It's an interesting skillset that not everyone has. There is creativity in designing systems, callflows, call centers. You get to play with interesting hardware and it's cool when a phone finally decides to register and makes and receives calls after hacking at the config files. And good VoIP-skilled Sales Engineers make some decent money without the pressure of sales quotas. Best job in the business, IMHO.

SpecialK is right: You're looking for a specific culture. There isn't enough here to suggest a specific IT job function. The criteria you've listed could fit a lawyer, a doctor, or an Olympic athlete. The most obvious thing I see is that if you don't want to be management, you'll have to specialize. But there are still tons of options for that. What specifically attracts you to IT to begin with? Designing web interfaces on paper or in theory? Writing or troubleshooting code? Making networks and systems work with each other on the back end? Installing/fixing/maintaining hardware or software? Figuring out possible solutions to problems and diagramming them? Making technology easy to use? Designing software from scratch? Responding to urgent problems? Making sure projects are completed successfully, on time, and at budget? Being an advocate for the user of the system/product? You need to do a little more investigating about *what* you'd like to do, not just *how* you'd like to do it.

The suggestions so far are reasonable, but what you are really looking for is a company where your job is only needed enough to hire one or two people. Could be any IT function, really. Sysadmin or netadmin might be typical, but you could also be the one software developer or the one DBA or some other role. Finding that role might be fun in the short term, and will certainly feed your ego. You should *not* stick with it for more than a few years because it will be very hard for you to grow professionally in an environment like that.

- ideally, there would be only one or two of me at the organization. - my organization would be highly dependant upon my work (ie. no long vacations) With you until here. Nobody deserves this kind of job security; and I worry that the kind of decisions that people already make unconsciously to build job security ("who the hell wrote this code? It's completely undocumented!") would be massively compounded by someone with an explicit goal of necessity and concentration of power. - I don't have to make "what's best for the business" decisions. Well, now you're just putting us on. Highly dependent and not accountable to owners? These are mutually exclusive! The closest I can imagine is legal defense for a lawsuit prone company. In general, system administation is close to what you want, but only the very worst organization would leave it a significant amount of IT in the hands of one or two people. It may take you a while to find a small shop that accomadates your allergy to the "suits"; at a small organization you may report directly to the owner, after all.

Games development for a small or independent company. Basically, become http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_carmack.

Nthing the sysadmin suggestions. Speaking as a sysadmin, we get to do just the fun bits of programming, in whatever language we like -- usually small (relatively) projects to accomplish discrete tasks -- we get to architect systems, we generally get to exercise a great deal of discretion in our environments (nobody really cares other than you if you set up sendmail or postfix or qmail or Joe Bob's MTA of the Month, so long as mail works), and "personality" flavors everything (even the names Unix and Linux are basically in-jokes). Plus you can specialize or generalize however suits you best, and -- if this is a plus :-) -- organizations depend on you a lot because you're "that one guy" that understands how the pieces all fit together and why your developer's well-intentioned idea is about to kill your DBA's soul. Not sure that not taking long vacations is a plus, but hey, if you want to feel wanted, your pager will make sure that happens. Find a startup or small, established company where you can work with someone else (if you're just learning, you need at least someone around to bounce ideas off of so you won't get stuck in bad, hacky habits) and build things and learn on the fly. Oh, and pick up a copy of Evi Nemeth's Unix System Administration Handbook, it's worth reading for the mockery alone.

Pretty much any IT-related job can meet your criteria if it's within the right company. So focus on finding companies with the right culture. I would never cope with a corporate environment, it would drive me crazy, so my entire career so far has consisted of freelance web development (mostly for smallish clients, or for large companies via other web/ad agencies) and one day job with a smallish firm. You don't have to become Dilbert.

2nd the DBA and sytem / network admin suggestions. Also, a SQL query optimization guru at a mid-large size company would probably fit your requirements. The DBA and SQL skills are somewhat common, but the reality is that few people are _very_ good at these jobs. If you are one of those people, you'll be able to find a job like you're describing.