The creeping IT apocalypse • Hacker News Board

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#171

Post by 0xffff2 » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

Wohlf wrote: post #35

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advice about starting their careers, and I realize that the first jobs I had (system administrator, SOC worker) have been replaced by robots.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…

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've thought about doing this at work, but it's hard to figure out how to make it attractive to my company. If I ask to hire a junior dev for the primary purpose of training them, it seems likely that I could get them full time for 50% of my salary. They're going to be a little bit productive, but they're also going to take up a lot of my time. At best, I think you end up with 150% of the labor costs for the exact same amount of work being done. That's a really hard sell to the business side of the company.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#172

Post by wasdfff » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #126

arethuza wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by an "IT program"?

My community college has two different departments: CIS and CIT. CIS is more akin to "computer science", and heavily covers various programming languages and has a game development sub-program. CIT includes hardware troubleshooting and repair, certification classes for Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware, network administration, and has a subprogram in cybersecurity. Much like in the business world, academics now do treat d…

The community college also has an automotive repair program. You’d be hard pressed to find a decent school with an IT or any other of these vocational programs at their main campuses.

That’s because it trains for the job, not for the field. While you’d probably get up and running easier with an IT degree since you know the current tooling, you’d be worse off than someone with the conceptual knowledge that comes with a more general CS degree, and you’d therefore have a tougher time adapting to whatever new technology that didn’t exist in your IT program but was touched on conceptually in the CS coursework.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#173

Post by hobs » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

hadlock wrote: post #163

hobs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I see the biggest problem here when existing code which ran fine never got the maint it needed to scale up the team, so they throw more bodies at the issue instead of pay to fix the code.

Good work.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#174

Post by oarabbus_ » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

>No, the real trend to watch here is not that the cloud providers are making it easier for non-technical people to code (although they are), but that they are straight-up reducing the number of people required to deliver technical solutions.

Prehistoric era: Agriculture and domestication are straight-up reducing the number of hunter-gatherers

1800s: Cotton mills reducing the number of manual textile manufacturers

1908: Internal combustion engine straight-up reducing the number of horse stablehands

-Vacuum tubes reducing the number of human-computers

-Cell phone reducing the number of switchboard operators

Not seeing the problem here.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#175

Post by pradn » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:10 PM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #12

pjc50 wrote: post #11

> Repetition is a sure warning sign. If you’re building the same integrations, patching the same servers over and over again every day, congratulations – you’ve already become a robot. It’s only a matter of time before a small shell script makes it official. Absolutely - if something is repetitive, it's a candidate for automation. This is true across all disciplines. Only the as-yet unautomatable human judgement, ins…

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

What did the program do?

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#176

Post by greedo » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #123

sandworm101 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart. There are still people making nails in the US. Fertilizer. Food gets exported. Then there is all the stuff to too expensive to ship. Lumber, aluminum sheeting, cement ... lots of non-precision stuff is still made locally. Not every US factory makes munitions. And some stuff is made locally not because of 'better' manufacturing ability but for…

> And some stuff is made locally not because of 'better' manufacturing ability but for speed. The fashion industry has to react quickly, quicker than overseas shipping can manage. Almost everything in the fashion industry is made in Asia. And few consumer goods (if anything) are "too expensive to ship". > I just ordered a small electronics assembly from a Canadian manufacturer not because they are the most skilled or…

Clothing industry != fashion industry.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#177

Post by Buttons840 » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

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?

Well, to start with, you have to use ML to train the computer vision system to recognize green and red lights. After that you update your resume with the ML experience you gained. :)

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#178

Post by michaelbuckbee » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

Automation hits white collar professions as a massive productivity improvements for the top performers displacing everyone else working in the field (think the top 10% of people in your position doing 100% of the work).

In web development this is most apparent (to me) in SAAS application development, where many/most of the underlying pieces of building a CRUD application that can scale to thousands of users, and be really functional are now provided by other SAAS apps which provide a _better_ service than the average developer can scrape together themselves.

Billing -> stripe.com over writing against the gateways directly

Database/Hosting -> Heroku PostGres/Redis and compute

Email -> Sendgrid, Mandrill, ActiveCampaign

Or even just SAAS frameworks like BulletTrain (Rails) or Laravel Spark which dramatically cut down on the boilerplate and integration code you'd have to write.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#179

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

wasdfff wrote: post #172

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My community college has two different departments: CIS and CIT. CIS is more akin to "computer science", and heavily covers various programming languages and has a game development sub-program. CIT includes hardware troubleshooting and repair, certification classes for Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware, network administration, and has a subprogram in cybersecurity. Much like in the business world, academics now do treat d…

The community college also has an automotive repair program. You’d be hard pressed to find a decent school with an IT or any other of these vocational programs at their main campuses. That’s because it trains for the job, not for the field. While you’d probably get up and running easier with an IT degree since you know the current tooling, you’d be worse off than someone with the conceptual knowledge that comes with…

My community college is extremely "decent", thank you. In most cases, other than needing to check of the "have a bachelor's degree" box for job application purposes, most people will probably get more bang for their buck in a community college than they ever will in a fancier school. Depending on what your local community college offers, there's a good chance that for a fraction of the cost, you can pick up nearly anything you'd want to know (or just like to learn, at that price).

As someone whose taken a fair number of IT degree classes, I'd say there's a fair bit of conceptual knowledge involved. And in the case of networking, for example, most of the standards and protocols you're being taught how to work with have been around since the mid-80s, and aren't showing significant signs of going away any time soon.

I'd say the CS vs. IT split would probably surprise you. I have gone up to the bachelor's level in a game programming degree, and it was amazing how poorly people who were proficient in writing C++ couldn't handle basic PC troubleshooting, it's a different skill set entirely.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#180

Post by penglish1 » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

I really thought this would be about something else, given the title, but oh well.

As others have pointed out, this has been going on since.. the beginning of IT.

I got my start in the 90's, working for an employer that sold tech software on: AIX, Digital UNIX, Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris and IRIX. SunOS and Ultrix were on their way out, but still supported. Windows and Linux were relatively new additions. 64-bit was just starting to become a thing, so we needed to support both 32 and 64 bit versions.

Supporting dev, stage and prod environments for all this was a huge job, and took a fairly high level of technical skill as well as a huge amount of domain specific knowledge. Really - far more domain specific knowledge than technical skill, on the balance.

It did require building a lot of software, and autoconf was a (new) blessing for cross-platform builds.

My CS degree was helpful, but honestly there just wasn't much programming needed, outside of shell scripts.

At the time, every few years someone would say how all of this "IT management stuff" would be automated away. I distinctly recall Sun executives banging on about it in the media a bunch just as I was starting to work full time after graduation.

And I distinctly remember thinking - they are completely wrong. And they were.

Commoditization was a big shift - now all those UNIXes are gone and we're left with just Linux.

"The stuff" that cannot be automated was shifting then, has shifted a lot since then, and continues to shift.

At the time, lots of knowledge and skill was needed to build sendmail for every OS, configure and install it everywhere. Now we've basically just got Linux, and just about every package you can think of is available via apt and yum.

Configuration is done through a DSL like Ansible, Chef or Puppet.

And now we're shifting such that we'll just use SES or some other cloud service for sending, and we won't manage mail servers at all - or any other commoditizable service - SQL database, noSQL, NFS, block storage, etc etc.

Or we will, we just won't be tweaking many knobs and buttons on it - and we'll still be managing it primarily with a DSL rather than bash scripts.

And perhaps writing a fair bit more "real" code as well.

But - somebody's got to stitch all that together - as the article says, the key is providing value that is specific to the company/product/service. It always has been!!

Creeping - sure.

But is it an apocalypse if a bunch of DBAs and Windows Administrators have to learn some new skills, or retire, or lose their jobs? People who basically have had to be continually learning and adapting all along?

Was it an apocalypse when I "lost" the career value of all the skill and knowledge I had related to IRIX, Digital UNIX, Solaris, etc?

There is a REAL creeping apocalypse, but it isn't this. It is security. Software is eating the world, and for every line of code written, X new security bugs are introduced. In this, I'm including social engineering bugs.

That is creeping.

And the apocalypse will be when some combination of those bugs leads to something truly horrific. If it hasn't already - like the end of democracy.