The creeping IT apocalypse

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #31

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…

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.

Post by nathan_long » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

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.

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

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.

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

jpatokal wrote: post #207

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 one entry level IT job that is not going away is tech support. Sure, some parts of it can be outsourced, but beyond a certain point you need a person on-site to figure out why the Internet is broken. The Cloud companies are also hiring armies of support people, and it's a great way to kickstart your career in any of these companies while getting company provided training in the tech.

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

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.