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The creeping IT apocalypse

forrestbrazeal.com

131–140 of 279 posts

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, companies say 3-5 years but this requirement is written by someone in HR translating what the hiring manager said. The hiring manager is more likely to hire someone who has less than 3-5 years of experience, or even hire someone with zero experience, as long as the candidate demonstrates aptitude. The trick is to write your resume so it gets past HR's filter, but without putting bullshit on it. It's…

> The trick is to write your resume so it gets past HR's filter Any tips on how to do that?

Let's say the job listing says "3+ years experience with JavaScript," among other requirements. You only used JavaScript for 6 months, so you roll JavaScript up as part of your web development skills. You say, "5 years writing web apps, using Java, .NET, C#, and JavaScript." This is true, the hiring manager understands that you have not necessarily spent all 5 years writing JavaScript, and it gets past HR's filter.

The hiring manager will then make sure that your skill set is a good addition to the team.

Keep in mind that the hiring manager may have asked for someone "with some JavaScript experience" and HR might have translated that into "3+ years". In some cases, when the hiring manager sees the job posting, they're surprised by the requirements and say, "So, this is why we haven't been getting any applicants!" This is, yes, somewhat dysfunctional but it is a common dysfunction. Yes, you are essentially second-guessing the job listing and this is not the way the world should work.

As a rule of thumb, if you are applying to a job and you meet all of the listed requirements as written, you are overqualified and should apply to a higher level position.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#132
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…

May not be allowed to use cloud today but that will likely change in the near future. FWIW, I can imagine your post in my head as an argument in favor of horses over automobiles.

What you’ve seen in 10 years was reality during that time. That speake nothing little to the future.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#133
The problem extends outside IT field, as you mentioned factory workers. I think the main problem is that there's no coordinated effort to control inevitable shifts. Workers unions tried protecting workers rights but capitalism clearly won and if there's no profit, you have no securities. IMHO pieces of advice in this article are very good: do not put all eggs in one basket. Don't be afraid to let go of outdated knowledge. And prepare for the change that is going to happen. I'll just add that this is as much a political issue since unemployment is and will be a huge problem, I can only hope our public sector will become productive instead of reactive.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#134
The same thing is happening in data science, just at an earlier stage. There are software/service providers like H2O and RapidMiner that automate the whole model selection/optimization/productionization process.

It will take some time, but I think these providers will basically displace advanced ML knowledge workers, especially at large fortune 500 companies. IMO to stay ahead of the curve, data scientists need to pick up more business knowledge and move into a business/financial analyst role.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#135
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Those aren't working class, they're tradesmen. At least IMO.

Working class to me means Walmart, Mcdonalds, and Jack Generic Construction LLC.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#136
post #23

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…

I was a SQL/Tableau analyst and a SF Admin before I turn to software engineering. SF is truly a fantastic piece of shit to do any proper development for. I am so glad i've stepped away from it. It has been built with the idea to sell to managers that will not be handling the implementations, and with the idea that non-programming staff can configure it. The front end is decent and most people can make it do... something. But custom integrations are just a pain. Salesforce impose lots of fair usage policies on upserts for example.

I was at a Money Transfer company and we couldn't move our Transaction Monitoring staff over to SF without hitting limits

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#137
I feel this is a very late article and that it has already happened but not in the crisis way. Meaning, this has allowed a shift in work to focus on programming tasks rather than infrastructure as much and hence there is more competition to get features out the door quicker which helps in more IT work etc. for programmers. I haven't seen a shortage of work in other words, rather more of it. In terms of code-automation for non-programmers, these will always fail unless they become AI integrated with some agency and can figure out the minutia of demands real world apps actually need.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#138

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.

But isn't Amazon hiring similar people as Google SREs? So they are not really looking for sys admins but more of a full fledged programmers / dev ops people who can write software, not just bash scripts.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#139
post #74
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 de…

Fast forward two years and after Google promised they would not spy on the students like they do on the general population to get the contracts they did exactly that.

Lobbyist and fools can get past most logical objections and cloudify anything.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#140
post #42

Most enterprise IT is change management. Migrating that database cluster takes 3-4 man hours. Planning the migration might take a half dozen meetings, vendor calls, dry runs, calculating transfer duration, etc. Enterprise IT isn't going anywhere. The cost of doing it right 100 times is greatly outweighed by the potential loss in doing it wrong once. People who are already on the cloud aren't going to ditch their serv…

Cubicles! Where do I apply?
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