Rare and valuable in IT?
1. People who understand application stacks from top to bottom. Guys with deep understanding of hardware and software platforms (filesystems, operating systems, language runtimes (eg JVM), distributed computing), who can readily apply that knowledge to solve problems quickly and efficiently.
2. Excellent designers. For programming, there is substantial overlap with the first category. To be a good code designer you usually need deep understanding of the platforms. However there are other skills, too, like discipline, consistency, creativity, and efficiency. Often the term "architect" is used instead of "designer" in IT. UI/UX designers tend to be less IT and more towards the creative/marketing side; but still may be programmers using Javascript, JQuery and such.
3. People with domain knowledge and ability to recognize how technology can help solve important problems in specific fields.
4. People with effective IT leadership skills.
5. Extreme domain experts/gurus (eg "
Language Lawyer")
6. People willing to work cheap...
The first step, if you are starting from scratch and want to start down the path of #1, are to identify and learn the primary tools you will use to explore and learn about how the platforms work. For example:
An open source linux development platform (eg CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian.)
A text editor (vi or emacs)
A scripting language (Bash and
Python for linux)
A systems language and compiler (
C)
A UI platform (eg web browser + javascript, or Java/Objective-C for mobile devices)
The next step, and the hard part, is to dig in and start solving problems and learning how to use the various specialized tools, libraries, and advanced features available. None of those skills I list are rare or valuable on their own.
Not strictly necessary for exploration, but are more or less essential to get any real work done:
A source control management tool (git, mercurial, subversion)
A database system (MySQL, Postgresql, or one of various NoSQL engines)
A serious hardware platform (even if it's linode or amazon web services)