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The creeping IT apocalypse

forrestbrazeal.com

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#51

Post by droobles »

kamaal wrote: post #19

Programmers have been predicted to be going out of jobs since the days of COBOL. There is a reason that is not happening(yet), or hardware companies would have been all shipping pluggable chips, we'd just config-connect them and be done. The reason is in the word itself `Software`. The real problem with these ready-made plumb-and-plug modules is sooner or later these are either too slow, or expensive, or just a pain…

I empathize with this sentiment, and will add that it may take fewer developers/IT folks to get a product out the door (MVP), but a company that depends on the product will have more specific business requirements and will eventually onboard more people to deliver solutions specific to those needs.

The job market will close up a bit, but right now tech is looking like the California gold rush, where 4-5 years ago any bootcamp grad could jump right into a web dev job (at least in my job market in the Midwest). I think if you continuously learn and remain marketable as the times change, then as a worker you will be fine. I also like the comment that mentions that you may just end up working for the cloud provider rather than the business application company.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#53

Post by geggam »

Completely agree with this.

There is something to think about. The folks who are running things are plentiful right now but as this churns we will run out of folks who understand the lower layers well enough to manage it.

As I interview people I run into this for things like SRE and DevOps already

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#54

Post by ilaksh »

agentultra wrote: post #34

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.

Well AWS is expensive.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#55

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

Apocalypse, no. A great filter, yea I think so.

Comparing to factories shutting down is hyperbolic. It think what we’re about to see is more in line with a a job market that rewards things other than specific application knowledge.

However, I can’t say much in defense of the mid-level IT Pro because just this past month I went from considering a server running an OS and MySQL db somewhere that someone would have to maintaine into using AWS DynamoDB with API Gateway with automated calls to Lambda functions - I can completely get rid of our server and paying a mid level IT Pro to maintain it. For our usage it’ll be practically free now, where I feel like I would have been paying a lot of “enterprise IT” overhead before.

That doesn’t mean that guy is going to starve, he will have to either adapt as factory workers have or be valuable in a different way than “I’m good at something people don’t really need anymore”. This is as old as time.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#56

Post by geggam »

munin wrote: post #46
whorleater wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Two points: first, even if "solid" universities are right to run away from this (and IMO they don't run away from it, they just move the IT program into the business school where you don't see it any more) there are still many other universities pumping out students into a dead career field, which should be concerning. Second, this is not just about IT programs. Computer science programs are impacted to. From the OP:…

Interviewing college graduates is depressing. No way the current education system will create people competent enough to keep this going

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#57

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

finebalance wrote: post #13
forrestbrazeal wrote: post #2

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.

I've just started my career in ML, and I already sort of feel that a majority of the work that people around me are doing can be done by an automated pipeline (like Python's AutoML) and throwing enough compute power at the problem. It's quite worrying.

Learn statistics and how to communicate them.

That's going to be a long time being automated.

For instance, if (for example) you model insurance data in the EU, you cannot use gender as a factor in pricing (even though it's effective).

In general, the modelling/ML pipeline is the easy bit, the hard part is the data cleaning and figuring out how to translate a business problem into one that can be solved by data.

tl;dr as many people have said about Comp Sci over the years, learn the fundamentals (statistics and experimental design) and you'll be in a much better position.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#58

Post by te_chris »

joelbluminator wrote: post #28
te_chris wrote: post #9

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…

Could be a lot of things, but my guess - maybe seniors don't find your offering compelling enough? Try avoiding "young teams" and "beers" and put more "healthy snacks", "work life balance" in the job offer and see what happens. Seniors generally have better options than juniors, you're gonna have to work hard to get and retain them.

My comment was about comparing and contrasting the amount of cold interest(/desperation). I wasn't passing comment on how hard it was to recuit - of course it's harder to recruit experienced people.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#59

Post by normal_man »

Wohlf wrote: post #35
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.

I mean this is already an acknowledged good approach. Companies don't want to make that investment though, hiring both a senior and a junior who won't be immediately productive, and keep chasing the mythical senior who will work for mid-level salary.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#60

Post by ilaksh »

This is a real thing for certain areas like packaging and deploying software or database and to a degree. But I think that since we continue to create more and more software, there will still be plenty of demand, until AI becomes a significant aspect of software development. That may not happen until at or near the time that we achieve truly general artificial intelligence. This is pure speculation but in my opinion the first "real" AGI systems are less than two years away. Within 5 to 10 years of that happening, I expect unaugmented human programmers to be obsolete.
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