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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#31

Post by Ruxbin1986 »

klodolph wrote: post #15

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…

There are hundreds of thousands of people or System Administrators that have made life long careers out of managing networks, server farms, windows and linux systems since the early 90s. It's not fancy as software development or drives business value but work that needs to be done.

The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work. The only thing left is actual software development.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#32

Post by strikelaserclaw »

I think for most mid level guys the threat isn't AI doing their job. I think its the influx of people who will undoubtedly join the "coding" workforce once automation takes away many trivial jobs like driving trucks, cabs, or flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. All these people will be told to retrain themselves and go into the tech sector, and we'll get a huge influx of cheap tech people.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#34

Post by agentultra »

Is there another side to this story? I've spoken with friends running the engineering teams at big analytics companies and they've gone back to self-managed, bare-metal servers because they couldn't get the cost/performance they needed from "one size fits all" cloud solutions.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#35

Post by Wohlf »

munin wrote: post #5

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advice about starting their careers, and I realize that the first jobs I had (system administrator, SOC worker) have been replaced by robots.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…

Maybe we'll see a more apprenticeship type approach, where junior personnel are instead assigned to and trained by seniors. This would probably be a net good, but who knows how things will shake out.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#36

Post by Ruxbin1986 »

munin wrote: post #5

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…

"So I think the apocalypse is double-bladed: while automation kicks a bunch of current workers out by making them immediately redundant, it also freezes out the next generation by removing entry level jobs and not really replacing them with anything equivalent."

Agreed entirely. I would be surprised if we still have two-year technical degrees in a decade.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#37

Post by gaius »

klodolph wrote: post #15

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…

IT skills have never had a long shelf life.

But this isn’t true, outside of webdev.

If your skill was “DB2” or “Oracle” or “Cisco” or “C++” you could have had a 30-40 year career in that, easily. There are plenty of others. Java has been around commercially since about 1995, there will definitely be plenty of Java jobs in 2025.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#38

Post by arethuza »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #17
arethuza wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a decent understand of ERP systems and projects it might be easier and more productive to transfer those skills to more modern cloud-hosted ERP products than go back to more generic development skills?

Thx; Agree, though I find many "cloud-hosted ERP products" are actually very traditional ERP products, just hosted by vendor (I remember the "Lightbulb" moment when I realized the much-vaunted Oracle HCM Cloud is just Oracle Fusion tech stack underneath, that somebody else manages; in that case, I don't know if it's necessarily _fewer_ people that work on it, they just all work at Oracle datacentre instead of dispers…

Cloud based ERP/CRM do solve a lot of infrastructure issues - but they can also introduce a lot of issues (or opportunities depending on your perspective) - some integration tasks and data extract suddenly become a whole lot more difficult.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#39

Post by whorleater »

munin wrote: post #5

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…

How many solid universities still have IT programs? At UIUC as of 2016, the IT program was nonexistent.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#40

Post by 666lumberjack »

thrav wrote: post #23
mark_l_watson wrote: post #3

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…

Heroku and its parent company, Salesforce. Salesforce databases are code and no code manipulated and should already carry most of the business and customer data and offer several different off the shelf products for plugging other data sources in. For most companies, it could cover the majority of what their legacy IT department does, and for many companies in the Bay Area it handles everything, except their product…

My experience with Salesforce (mostly with Marketing Cloud) has been that the developer experience is truly awful. Mediocre documentation, no debugging tools to speak of and systems that never quite do everything you want. Maybe other parts of the ecosystem are better but I'd be very reluctant to take another job where I had to work with it.
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