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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#111

Post by lmm »

AlanSE wrote: post #81
3pt14159 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another way to look at the trend - a lot of companies are moving to the cloud because they can't get the people to do it on their own.

Doing it on the cloud is now cheaper than doing it on their own. That could be because doing it on their own has got more expensive, but I suspect that the cloud becoming cheaper is a bigger factor.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#112

Post by TarpitCarnivore »

kypro wrote: post #90
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #32

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.

I don't know if you know any working class people, but a lot of them simply don't have the intellectual capacity for tech work - which is often why they flip burgers.

You're being rather reductive. Just because someone is in a 'working class job' doest diminish their intellect. I've encountered many working class folks with a lot of knowledge in the fields they were in (electricians, plumbers, mechanics, etc).

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#113

Post by diego_moita »

I object to the word "apocalypse", it is just business as usual.

Better automation has been "reducing the number of people required to deliver technical solutions" for ages.

Local Area Networks replaced many mainframe computers in the 80's. Optimized C compilers took the jobs of countless Assembly programmers. WordPress, Joomla and better web frameworks (Django, Rails) took the jobs of many Perl/Web developers. Python enabled a lot of people to do what FORTRAN/Java/C++ programmers were able to do before.

"Apocalypse" is just the normal state of affairs.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#115

Post by lsc »

lsc wrote: post #109

Eh, I've been a sysadmin/programmer since 1997 or so; I'd argue the slow automation of our profession has been going on forever. it used to be that sysadmin started as the kid who swaps the tapes and does the reboots, and went up to the person automating, and above that, the person troubleshooting your backtrace when the kernel panics. We were all sysadmins, just of different levels. But... the job, if you were a mid…

The other thing I point out here is that "the cloud" is suuuper expensive, and while that is still way cheaper than hiring a me or two to handle your hardware while you are small, there comes a point pretty quickly on amazon where buying hardware and hiring a few people like me becomes cheaper for base load in the long term.

I believe that companies are staying on amazon longer than it is in their interest to do so, and I further believe that this will change when people start looking for savings during the next downturn.

For that matter, I believe that people will overreact and move in the opposite direction; you will see a fad of people buying their own hardware before they really have enough load to justify the person with the requisite hardware abilities. That's just how these in-sourcing/outsourcing fads work.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#116

Post by TarpitCarnivore »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #76
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 ca…

> 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?

The author does touch on this though by highlighting that you will need less and less people. As more services move into 'cloud' solutions it can free up time for those and they'll step into those spaces.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#117

Post by someone454 »

itgoon wrote: post #30
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…

This. Check out my username, this is what I do, and I've been doing it for far longer than a decade. 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 menti…

I gave myself the title “IT Janitor” because for years all I did was clean up other people’s $4!7. I automated everything I touched, and told people it was so I would have more time to surf the Internet. Now I’m over 50, in the Innovation group, and dreading ever having to find a new job. But I’m having fun: blockchain, robotics, mobile app dev, and now NLP.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#118

Post by F_J_H »

A point that often gets missed with "low-code" tools, is that it's not so much that they enable "non-coders" to build applications, but that they enable experienced developers to go so much faster.

I've been using a fullstack low code development tool for several years now, and when it comes to developing CRUD apps or data reporting apps (with charts, interactive, drill down reports, etc. etc.), it's astonishing how quickly you can stand-up a secure, fully responsive web-app, complete with authentication, authorization schemes, report subscriptions, etc., without writing any code at all.

And, when you bump up against the limits of the declarative/low-code aspect of the framework, you can toggle over to java script, your own CSS, SQL, etc., so it's not like you paint yourself into a corner.

So, I agree, if Amazon creates something like this, and it is as good as some of the existing low-code tools out there, it's going to have a big impact over the long term.

edit: typo

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#119

Post by DebtDeflation »

20+ year technology consultant here. I have done work for dozens of clients across just about every major industry out there. The number of (relatively well paid) people I've seen at clients in this neverland between Business and IT whose jobs revolve around pulling data from one system, munging it offline, and then loading it into another system, or similar tasks that should have been automated with a script a decade or more ago, is absolutely staggering.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#120

Post by dleslie »

F_J_H wrote: post #118

A point that often gets missed with "low-code" tools, is that it's not so much that they enable "non-coders" to build applications, but that they enable experienced developers to go so much faster. I've been using a fullstack low code development tool for several years now, and when it comes to developing CRUD apps or data reporting apps (with charts, interactive, drill down reports, etc. etc.), it's astonishing how…

Which tool?
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