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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#161

Post by bradfa »

Rooster61 wrote: post #101
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 same thing happens to programming positions. I can't stress how important this is. Folks going to things like boot camps or other educational outlets that focus on one language will utterly kill their career if they aren't aware of how fast things move. If you don't learn the underlying abstractions and paradigms that take various forms in different languages, you will get left in the dust in a matter of a few…

Sure, there's places to learn hip new tech that might not be around for a while and you'll have to continuously learn new languages/frameworks/etc. But there's also things like FORTRAN, COBOL, and C, which are all in-demand in their own little niches, aren't going away any time soon, and where you can till make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#162

Post by kpennell »

sarcasmic wrote: post #78

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. Abs…

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#163

Post by hadlock »

hobs wrote: post #41
ReptileMan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have actually replaced a person with 40 lines c# program

I replaced a person with a one line code change (performance tuning) - they got her another job though. Literally had a business call to see if they could run another instance of $LOB_SOFTWARE because they had a person clicking a button for 40 hours a week.

We replaced our entire overnight testing and on-call operations department with SSD and a little bit of SQL optimization. Jobs that used to kick off at 5pm would run until close to noon the next day. When I stopped interfacing with that unit those jobs completed by 9pm. Went from a department of 25 operators to a team of 15 or so. We weren't able to reduce further due to vacations, on call, sick time etc.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#164

Post by mdpopescu »

catdog wrote: post #153
gaius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT skills have never had a long shelf life. But this isn’t true, outside of webdev. If your skill was “DB2” or “Oracle” or “Cisco” or “C++” you could have had a 30-40 year career in that, easily. There are plenty of others. Java has been around commercially since about 1995, there will definitely be plenty of Java jobs in 2025.

True, but on the other hand those technologies have evolved more or less drastically as well. E.g. the Java or C++ skills from 1995 won't get you that far today, both in terms of the language itself and the framework/library ecosystem.

Yep. I've done both FORTRAN and COBOL in the late 80s, and today's versions only have a vague similarity to what I recall.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#165

Post by ukoki »

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…

The pessimists' view is that automation will deprecate a heap of jobs in the tech industry that will never return. The optimists' view is that automation simply allows companies to do more stuff: things they couldn't afford to do before, and soon, things they have to do in order to stay competitive. For the optimists the number employed in the tech industry stays the same or increases, but the proportion of different roles changes (ie no more green light watchers).

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#166

Post by 0xffff2 »

ukoki wrote: post #165
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…

The pessimists' view is that automation will deprecate a heap of jobs in the tech industry that will never return. The optimists' view is that automation simply allows companies to do more stuff: things they couldn't afford to do before, and soon, things they have to do in order to stay competitive. For the optimists the number employed in the tech industry stays the same or increases, but the proportion of different…

New college grads today aren't prepared to do anything more complex than watch the green lights. If we automate out all of the entry-level work, that means we have to train workers to a higher level before they enter the work force, which is clearly untenable with today's college tuition (at least in the US).

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#167

Post by Rooster61 »

bradfa wrote: post #161
Rooster61 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing happens to programming positions. I can't stress how important this is. Folks going to things like boot camps or other educational outlets that focus on one language will utterly kill their career if they aren't aware of how fast things move. If you don't learn the underlying abstractions and paradigms that take various forms in different languages, you will get left in the dust in a matter of a few…

Sure, there's places to learn hip new tech that might not be around for a while and you'll have to continuously learn new languages/frameworks/etc. But there's also things like FORTRAN, COBOL, and C, which are all in-demand in their own little niches, aren't going away any time soon, and where you can till make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.

> can still make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.

I think this is (at least partially) a side effect of the pedagogy of computer science in schools changing throughout the decades. When I was in school, just about the entire program stressed OOP, with very little focus on imperative/procedural programming. Newly minted programmers fresh out of school don't have the exposure/mindset to jump straight into one of these (C maybe being an exception). The old guard that called these languages home are a dying breed, and the salaries paid to program in them these days bears that out the scarcity that results.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#168

Post by wasdfff »

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.

That’s shitty on the company then. Senior engineers work way more efficiently if they have a junior working under them to crank out busywork. The junior then knows exactly how to succeed in a senior level position from working intimately with the senior engineer.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#169

Post by ocdtrekkie »

TarpitCarnivore wrote: post #116
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see "less people" as an upcoming IT problem, as most places I look are getting more IT people, as more parts of their business become dependent on computers. I haven't seen any evidence of that changing, and believe it or not, the average business still has plenty of migration to digital means left ahead of them. (Where I work, manual punch card time clocks are still used.)
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