The creeping IT apocalypse • Hacker News Board

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#151

Post by ivalm » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

finebalance wrote: post #13

forrestbrazeal wrote: post #2

Author here - I'm serious when I say that I'm happy to be a sounding board if you're at a career crossroads. Twitter DMs are open @forrestbrazeal.

I've just started my career in ML, and I already sort of feel that a majority of the work that people around me are doing can be done by an automated pipeline (like Python's AutoML) and throwing enough compute power at the problem. It's quite worrying.

automl is pretty horrible if you're doing anything that is complicated, even at Google-scale compute power SotA DNNs are hand crafted, not auto-found. Feature engineering is also quite important for a lot of data types and that has too large of a phase space to probe with automl. At the same time if your problems are mostly solved by logistic regression/random forest/etc with simple features (ie you have well defined categories and/or states or your task is well solved in literature) then ML is not your value proposition, it's more data/business analytics (and autoML should enable you to provide your value faster).

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#152

Post by gaius » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #108

Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #31

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.

Not really. We now call systems administrators "devops engineers" now.

Just as webdevs are “full stack engineers” now

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#153

Post by catdog » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#154

Post by wrs » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

666lumberjack wrote: post #40

thrav wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My experience with Salesforce (mostly with Marketing Cloud) has been that the developer experience is truly awful. Mediocre documentation, no debugging tools to speak of and systems that never quite do everything you want. Maybe other parts of the ecosystem are better but I'd be very reluctant to take another job where I had to work with it.

Actual Salesforce is just expensive, complicated, cumbersome, opaque, legacy-encumbered, and programmed in a unique language and UI framework. Marketing Cloud is all that, plus what you said.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#155

Post by dennisgorelik » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

geggam wrote: post #62

3pt14159 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This. Competence is reducing per capita. The market is saturated with IT people who dont know what they are doing

The average competence is NOT reducing. What is reducing is demand for mediocre (and low) competence.

This trend results in less competent people flooding the job market.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#156

Post by mecameron » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

mac01021 wrote: post #130

dleslie wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is _training_; and the act of training employees has long since gone out of vogue in western markets.

Why train employees when you can pay just a little bit more and get pretrained ones?

For when you can't find any more pretrained ones. Or to get someone for a lower salary and growing them that provides some loyalty and help solving the problem of not having enough pretrained ones in the first place.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#157

Post by gaius » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:41 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.

a lot of them simply don't have the intellectual capacity for tech work

Well, neither do most tech workers. Why’s there another high profile breach seemingly every week? Why is software generally full of bugs? Because the devs lack basic competence at their jobs. Maybe they should have been flipping burgers instead. But RoR, Node.JS et al dumbed things down so much we got brogrammers...

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#158

Post by gotorazor » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

hourislate wrote: post #144

whorleater wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many solid universities still have IT programs? At UIUC as of 2016, the IT program was nonexistent.

I have not found one yet. My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed. His next two years will be filled with more useless courses and by the time it's all over will have cost 50k + (he lives at home and goes to a State School). I feel like he could have taken a 6 week Java/Python/whatever and…

I think that is precisely the opposite of what the original article was talking about.

@forrestbrazeal is implying that many of those certs are going to be obsolete really soon. At least, that is what I took from the article.

I agree that American Universities are kind of insane. We, Canadians, are looking in and shaking our heads.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#159

Post by Loughla » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:43 PM UTC

hourislate wrote: post #144

whorleater wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many solid universities still have IT programs? At UIUC as of 2016, the IT program was nonexistent.

I have not found one yet. My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed. His next two years will be filled with more useless courses and by the time it's all over will have cost 50k + (he lives at home and goes to a State School). I feel like he could have taken a 6 week Java/Python/whatever and…

>humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed

Full transparency, I hear this from nearly every 1st year college student every fall semester - either the CS, CHEM, or Engineering students exclusively. "Why do I have to take English, I'm just going to work with [chemicals] [computers] [software] [roads] [whatever else]"

Not sure how this opinion will fly on this site, but I'm not sure what you expected. It sounds like you have an ax to grind with a specific institution and you needed to do more research about the system of universities overall. They were and are designed to make a modern version of a renaissance wo/man - good or knowledgeable about everything being the idea. Making citizens who are more than just 1 skill cogs. Teaching critical thinking and higher order thought processing. They were not, and are not job placement agencies.

If you were looking for nothing but the certs and technical skills, you should've sent him to a technical/trade school or community college. That's why those exist.

There is a massive difference between being job task ready - like just finishing the certs would make you. And being life ready - like a liberal education makes you in theory. Giving a student a liberal education is literally why universities were designed. Why was that a surprise?

I genuinely don't understand why being good at things that are outside of your expertise, or at least knowing enough about them to sound like an educated person in conversation, is 'irrelevant'. I don't get it and never have.

>Meanwhile, 10's of 1000's of H1B's are needed because our kids know nothing and are being taught shit.

My experience has taught me that whenever an employer says "we can't find the workers" and use H1B's, what they really mean is "we can't find the workers at the wage we're willing to pay". Those are two different things.

THAT BEING SAID, the costs of education are out of hand. Living inside the beast, I can tell you that many administrators are just flat blind to the storm coming.

In the 90's, the message was go to college, go to college, go to college - relying on the past 40 years of if you went to college, everything else just sort of fell into place.

Well, now we have so many 'extra' services students expect, so many expenses, and less state/federal dollars. So students pay for it.

NOW the message is that you need to go to college only if it furthers your career goals. They're working in kindergarten with my child on that. It's frightening, honestly.

I think the pendulum will swing the other direction and we'll see a glut of skilled trades-people in the next 10 years.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#160

Post by gervase » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:44 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #25

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…

I am worried about the latter aspect as well - in order to keep automation going, very advanced developers would have to be involved; if the whole "easy job" ecosystem disappears, there won't be any reasonable way to keep developers progressing, with best in a competition filling up the spots at "cognitive automators".

In the absence of on-the-job experience/growth for less-experienced developers, it forces them back into more academic training programs. I personally think this is likely to lead to exacerbated "degree inflation", where MS degrees will be the new minimum expectation for these new "entry-level" (read, Tier 2+) jobs.