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Author here - I'm serious when I say that I'm happy to be a sounding board if you're at a career crossroads. Twitter DMs are open @forrestbrazeal.
Ok, question: What exactly do you mean by this: '“senior application developers” who munge JSON in C#' Why did you choose to JSON and C# in particular here?
> Repetition is a sure warning sign. If you’re building the same integrations, patching the same servers over and over again every day, congratulations – you’ve already become a robot. It’s only a matter of time before a small shell script makes it official. Absolutely - if something is repetitive, it's a candidate for automation. This is true across all disciplines. Only the as-yet unautomatable human judgement, ins…
I have actually replaced a person with 40 lines c# program
Nice blog, keep writing. I manage a machine learning team and I also think that at least partially automated data curation and modeling will reduce the number of people required in my field. It might take 5 or 10 years, but I think it will happen. I think you are spot on that IT and devops will take a hit. I look more at Heroku’s model that AWS and GCP as the future. That said AWS and GCP will keep getting more ‘Hero…
It’s a complete blind spot for most engineering minded people because they never realized how flexible the platform was, and with Bret Taylor running the show now, it’s miles away from just being a clunky Sales CRM.
Couple of examples of recent developments:
https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/12/introducing-l...
Sure, some of them will still have positions the same or similar roles but there will be a crunch. The large outsources will be hit overseas (WiPro, Infosys, etc.) but it will also impact administrators at medium-large sized businesses in typical American Cities as Forrest mentioned. The worst part out of all of this is too many colleges and especially technical colleges still teaching networking, linux or windows administration as if they'll be able to have life long career. That is no longer true.
I don't want to imagine what it'll be like for those students who graduate, get good jobs (now), a mortgage and start to raise their family only to find themselves unemployed in the middle of their lives. I don't expect much sympathy from the largely meritocratic tech industry or anyone else.
As for myself, I already work for one of the big three and apart of many "cloud" migrations. I should be okay but at the same time I am somewhat conflicted. Am I going to need to go back to school for Computer Science and become an fully-fledged actual software developer? I mean, it's fine, there's still enough time (I don't think we will really feel the burn for at least another 4-6 years) but is it reasonable or realistic that everyone needs to be rockstar developer?
This kind of change has also impacted me. It shows up when I'm trying to give students advice about starting their careers, and I realize that the first jobs I had (system administrator, SOC worker) have been replaced by robots. Especially in the SOC, I was a "Tier 1" analyst that would do monitoring (watching a bank of green lights waiting for one to turn red) and first level triage and analysis. This has been repla…
A couple years ago I made the switch to full time development. I now do most of the DevOps stuff for my teams, but from a developer role, instead of a sysadmin/cloudops role.
I'm certain that's going to be the future. Look at Google's requirements for SREs. They are full-fledged software engineers.
I'm advertising for 2 roles at the moment: a Senior Backend engineer and a Junior Frontend (in London, UK). Almost impossible to find someone for the backend role, but I've had to turn off the advertising as I've had 71 people apply for the junior frontend role. The mix is fascinating, a lot of ex-bootcampers, some CS grads, some self-taught people, but all of them are desperate for a shot to get into our industry. I…
The problem isn't the technology, it's the complexity of the customer's business requirements, and their nearly complete inability to transfer those requirements into software without complex implementations that they could never hope to implement themselves. I would love to see more tooling to help with this. I have been waiting for 25 years. It gets better, but not nearly what can be described as an apocalypse.
This has been happening since the 1970s. Or earlier. I don’t really think of it as an apocalypse. IT skills have never had a long shelf life. Any time you are a technology expert at your company, in IT, the technology landscape will shift under you. This is the Red Queen Hypothesis in action. People who ran mainframes in the 1980s became trusted experts and then most of the jobs evaporated. Same thing happened to peo…
The mid-range jobs have always been vanishing. Many times, I'm the guy automating them out of existence. It's always replaced by something else.
It depends on the circumstances, of course, but there is often more work after the automation than before. It's just different work. It requires reskilling.
The article mentions some new product AWS is coming out with. No matter how "simple" it makes things, someone is going to end up being an expert at using it, and will probably be paid well to do so.
Really, the toughest and most crucial part of this career has been keeping up. The work stays steady, though.