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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#181

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

0xffff2 wrote: post #166
ukoki wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's demonstrably false. Hell you can just look to startups created by new grads and dropouts to confirm your view point is inane. Today's college grads are better equipped to do a wider breath of work than any other time in history precisely because of the efficiency gains of automation.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#182

Post by klodolph »

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.

I would say the difficulty with these niches is that the number of experts and the demand follow different curves. For COBOL, it seems that you have the initial period where supply and demand are high, and you have the final period where the few experts remaining command high salaries. But between them you have a glut where demand is dropping and the experts are moving on or getting "reorganized". Surviving that middle period is not something to take for granted.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#183

Post by pnathan »

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…

As someone who straddles SRE and SWE (with a classic CS background), I would agree with this analysis - the market is changing, and prioritizing programming skills heavily.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#185

Post by HelloNurse »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #181
0xffff2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's demonstrably false. Hell you can just look to startups created by new grads and dropouts to confirm your view point is inane. Today's college grads are better equipped to do a wider breath of work than any other time in history precisely because of the efficiency gains of automation.

A minority exits college ready to run a significant startup, but the majority exits college ready to struggle finding a mediocre job. In other words, the automators and the automated away.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#186

Post by raphar »

scirocco wrote: post #66
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…

Mainframe still rules many companies. Especially banks and insurance

And they are not going away.

Last year I witnessed the sad story of a general manager, that promised to migrate away from an as400 in six months.

This guy (and several others) doesnt fully understand that a system, that is software and hardware and infrastucture, has its life determined by the returns it gives to its mother organization. If the system works, the organization wont pay or dare to replace it. Core systems are the hardest, and thats where all those mainframes and c and fortram and nowadays java legacy sys are still alive and kicking.

Pd: I love those systems btw, if you have one that needs love and care, I'd like to hear about it :D.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#187

Post by sgt101 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #177
kdf83 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

I want to ask a serious question about the ML, but your answer is great! My experience of anomaly detection, even with deep networks, is that recognition of the important anomalies can be done for some of them which means that you can raise a big flag for those - but someone still needs to sift through everything else.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#188

Post by peterwwillis »

If IT were going to become obsolete, technology wouldn't suck. But it does. Virtually all technology that either has or uses a microprocessor sucks. And it probably always will, as long as humans are creating technology.

In fact, the steady increase in both the use and the diversity of technology means we'll need more people than ever in IT. The job title might change, but there will always be a department dedicated to fixing shitty technology and help users use it.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#189

Post by wiz21c »

FTA:

>> But they’re less expensive than a bunch of humans with health benefits

Whenever someone opposes health, fatigue of human against robots, he basically makes human less human and more robot. Hence, justifying the superiority of robots. It also makes it almost logical that human are PITA to work with and therefore, are overrated, that is too expensive.

The only way out is to reaffirm the value of human, instead of underlying their weakness.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#190

Post by czbond »

wiz21c wrote: post #189

FTA: >> But they’re less expensive than a bunch of humans with health benefits Whenever someone opposes health, fatigue of human against robots, he basically makes human less human and more robot. Hence, justifying the superiority of robots. It also makes it almost logical that human are PITA to work with and therefore, are overrated, that is too expensive. The only way out is to reaffirm the value of human, instead…

Ok. While idealistic, this isn't what businesses do.

Businesses are required to sell, to pay salaries. Prices come down over time. Competition mounts, it gets bloody. Consolidation and then suppression of margins.

Humans ARE machines, just a different type; it doesn't "Feel right" to call us that, but we are meat machines.

There is no way to expect the trend of automation, removal of human tasks for a "better, faster, cheaper" environment. it won't happen.

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