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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#71

Post by arminiusreturns »

geggam wrote: post #53

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

Exactly this. I've been a sysadmin since I got out of the Corps, with a recent break and now found a really exciting startup that is automating something else. This is the first time I've really forced myself to stop allowing technical debt and lack of staffing to dictate how I automate, so I am working very close with the devops/SRE team, and I am continually flabbergasted at how much they don't know of the underside of the systems they use, or just fundamentals of many things. (I even had one guy yesterday try to tell me I should stop using emacs and start using pycharm because "it's a real IDE" , yet this is one of the guys who's going to "automate all the things"!?) I'm having to learn to automate better, but they don't seem to be learning how to admin better, but I also consider that part of the sysadmins job... just as devops and SRE need to be "evangelists" in order to get C-suite buy in, I think the sysadmins need to make sure the lower level knowledge isn't being lost, or worse, discarded falsely as not relevant.

Having seen the inside of so many places though, it also continually surprises me how many companies are all struggling with the exact same issues, to the point I'm highly tempted to try to pitch a whole IT solution I've been thinking on for years at the next YC.

One thing I've noticed on HN is that too many people tend to think of all companies as SV software startups, when there is a huge swath of companies in-between coasts that don't have a single dev or programmer and are just doing their business. Much of the "devops is killing sysadmin" hysteria is overblown due to this filter bubble.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#72

Post by Ygg2 »

ilaksh wrote: post #54
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.

And if AWS becomes one of the few games in town, it's going to get more and more expensive.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#73

Post by adamc »

As a senior employee in an organization that has migrated much functionality to SaaS and the cloud... I'm doubtful. In my experience so far, what we do changes, but the need for IT employees hasn't gone down. Most of what we did was figure out how to solve business problems with IT, and that continues, cloud or no. SaaS offering are sophisticated, but hard to use out of the box when you have significant regulatory (and other) requirements.

If there are IT jobs developing for smaller organizations, maybe those will go away, but... I think a lot of that disappeared already.

I'm close to retiring (from this job, anyhow), so it's not a personal issue for me. I just haven't seen it happening as described.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#74

Post by munin »

zelon88 wrote: post #68

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…

> The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD.

This is probably going to change. People like you said the same thing about health data, and student data. The savings were so tantalizing that the regulators and stakeholders figured out how to make it work. What do you think GovCloud is for? C2S and "Secret cloud"?

Our university had a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team. When "Google Apps" came out, people wanted us to switch to that from our old mail server stuff. Go figure, why would you keep using pine and squirrelmail when you could use gmail? "It can't hold student data" the IT team said, "it isn't certified for FERPA or ITAR." Okay, true. Fast forward two years, now Google's "Apps for Education" can deal with both. The switch was sudden and brutal and the university no longer has a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team or an Exchange deployment of any kind.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#75

Post by ProAm »

zelon88 wrote: post #68

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…

> 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.

This a blanket statement and is wrong. Most cheap manufacturing is done over seas but the US still has a large manufacturing sector that makes all sorts of crap.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#76

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #24

As someone who's been in IT over a decade, I am concerned and so many IT folks are going to be blindly hit. 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 o…

I've always kept my coding skills up a bit as a hobby, but I don't realistically see this IT apocalypse coming. Everyone in Silicon Valley thinks they're going to automate away everyone's problems, but nobody there has managed to prevent people from needing the same type of support they needed two decades ago: Why doesn't my printer work, and how do I know if this email is real? (If you believe Gmail or Office 365 can do the last one, you're wrong, FYI.)

I don't think we're anywhere near an "IT apocalypse". I think we're more likely to put a ton of machine learning engineers out of work long before companies start needing less help desk technicians and sysadmins. I think a lot of people have moved to the cloud only to discover they needed just as many people to help manage their cloud presence as they needed to manage their on-prem hardware.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#77

Post by thrav »

666lumberjack wrote: post #40
thrav wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, Marketing Cloud is a collection of acquired products that is not really on the actual Salesforce platform. It’s very much its own thing, kinda like Heroku is its own thing.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#78

Post by sarcasmic »

I agree with the points raised in the writing, but it mixes automation, abstraction, and industry consolidation as if they weren't separate processes. As such, the transformation being described isn't an impending cliff, but an ever-present pressure of economic forces that affect all business all the time, and one is wise to watch for.

Automation replaces repetitive work with tooling and work that's more complex. Abstraction allows one to delegate to another for details, which may include choosing from a palette of pre-made options. Consolidation will come about as fewer independent players can sustain themselves in the market. Some will be out-competed by economies of scale, some will be starved by restrictions on intellectual property and lack of access to expertise.

This process has already played out for "small business websites", yet there's still lots and lots of web developers and web designers employed or freelancing. The current wave of WYSIWYG website generators is actually very good, and they have add-ons and integrations that make sense for their target market. But plenty of clients don't want to mess around in it, so they'd rather hire someone. This could be maker of the generator, or it could be an outside consultant. In either case, the person brings judgement, experience, and creativity, to tailor the deliverable to the needs of the client. These are skills resistant to automation, but not immune to abstraction and consolidation.

In the end, the antidote is the same as it always was: be adaptable, be personable, be resilient, and be resourceful. These are especially important in one is in a comfortable job shielded from most competitive pressure, because they will be the most surprised and unprepared if their current employment is made redundant.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#79

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jugg1es wrote: post #67

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…

At the same time, as a software engineering manager, I would have given my left eye for a highly competent AWS DevOps engineer. It took months to find someone with the skills we were looking for.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#80

Post by Frondo »

ProAm wrote: post #75
zelon88 wrote: post #68

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…

> 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. Thi…

We sure do, and our stuff is generally a little more expensive than the Chinese-made import but a lot higher quality. My go-to example is brooms and mops. Libman makes their brooms and mops in the US, and I'll never buy another brand. They break like any sort of cleaning product does, but a lot less often than the imported ones (IMO).

Sterilite boxes are also made in the US -- cost a bit more than imported, but again, much higher quality.

It's a shame there isn't a "made in the US, and slightly more expensive but a lot higher quality" option for everything I buy, cause I'd do that in a heartbeat. I hate buying shit that breaks; waste of my time to even have to think about that stuff.

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