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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#61

Post by ragona »

sudofail wrote: post #26

The author and I share nearly identical work histories. I've been in IT for about 10 years, starting with AWS and database administration, then turned more DevOps with a focus on CI/CD. Over the last few years, it's become very obvious that the DevOps role is requiring more and more development skills. Simple bash scripting is not going to cut it in the modern tech company. A couple years ago I made the switch to ful…

I’ve gotten to a point where if we write a bash script for something I consider it somewhat of a failure. I want operational tooling to be easily maintainable by a large team of software engineers, and bash scripts just aren’t that.

Services that run services is the way to go. Lose a box from the fleet? No problem, the operator service bounced it and got it running again. I’ll admit that timelines often mean you don’t get to build the grand vision out of the gate, but I absolutely agree with you that bash scripting isn’t how we should be running services these days.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#62

Post by geggam »

3pt14159 wrote: post #48
Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you've tried to hire a good sys admin in North America you'd be shocked at how high their salaries are getting. Amazon is hiring them by the boatload. Shopify is moving to all cloud because they're unable to staff. The problem is that junior sys admins aren't as useful as before to most startups. I still think they'll figure it out, but the industry is changing.

This. Competence is reducing per capita. The market is saturated with IT people who dont know what they are doing

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#63

Post by kdf83 »

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…

Why does watching a bank of green lights waiting for one to turn red and do first level triage and analysis require ML, isn't this just a bunch of rules?

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#64

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

Was watching David Bull talk about historical Japanese wood carving. He described how the introduction of the printing press to Japan killed the entry-level, apprenticeship positions in printing.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#65

Post by munin »

kdf83 wrote: post #63
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…

Why does watching a bank of green lights waiting for one to turn red and do first level triage and analysis require ML, isn't this just a bunch of rules?

I was over-simplifying to communicate the repetitive and dull nature of a job I'm very happy to no longer be doing. Really the game was more about "anomaly detection" and the sensor indicators/measurements were far more continuous than categorical, and their outputs had to be weighed against past experience and context of the monitored components.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#66

Post by scirocco »

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…

Mainframe still rules many companies. Especially banks and insurance

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#67

Post by jugg1es »

This article is very prescient. This is happening now and the pace is speeding up considerably. I work in healthcare and we hit a tipping point about a year ago where HIE's and hospitals are now comfortable with their vendors going to AWS instead of insisting on on-premises infrastructure. In the last year, my company is basically turned on a dime and we no longer use virtually any of our on-premises hardware. If you are in IT (non-developer), you should be concerned.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#68

Post by zelon88 »

I keep seeing thse kinds of articles where the author has drank the Cloud kool-aid themselves, forgotten how to function without it, and insists that it's impossible to function without it. This guy even drags manufacturing into the mix, and obviously has no idea about manufacturing in the United States.

Manufacturers in the USA don't make cheap coffee cups. We don't make underwear. We don't make car fenders. We make warheads. We make gyroscopes. We make electro-mechanical assemblies that China or Malaysia or Mexico would screw up. We specialize in quality over quantity, and we specialize in cutting edge tolerances and specifications. We make export controlled things for enterprise contracts and the government. Things that require certifications to produce, and govermnent regulatory compliance, and tight tolerances. Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart.

We don't make 100,000 of anything either. We make 100 gyroscopes for General Dynamics, or 5 jet engines for General Electric. We make US military grade munitions and weapons for the government. The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD. All that great automation that helps AirBNB function with no infrastructure is meaningless when you have to protect your IP from nation state actors. To probably >50% of American manufacturing the Cloud is useless. It's a consolidated attack vector that WILL be compromised in the future and lead to liability. Sure you can put a NIST 800-171 or DFARS compliant business in the Cloud, but it costs extra and it's not worth the risk. You hear about misconfigured buckets leaking data almost daily. Nobody doing govermnet manufacturing work wants to deal with that headache. Infact, I've been in this industry for 10 years and I have NEVER seen a DFARS compliant supplier with outsourced IT infrastructure. I've visited hundreds of companies over the years. What you're describing doesn't interest American manufacturers one bit.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#69

Post by AYBABTME »

normal_man wrote: post #59
Wohlf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of companies hire interns and usually, the typical intern doesn't provide a ton of bottom line value. Aside from being good for the culture and mentorship practice for the more senior folks, they usually need a lot of handholding. They're basically doing paid apprenticeships, which tells me that companies _are_ okay with the concept of having apprentice type of training.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#70

Post by sharemywin »

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…

The problem is most companies want someone with 3-5 years of experience in that new skill set. So, unless you jump on that particular band wagon early you're out of luck.
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