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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#41

Post by hobs »

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

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.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#42

Post by debacle »

Most enterprise IT is change management. Migrating that database cluster takes 3-4 man hours. Planning the migration might take a half dozen meetings, vendor calls, dry runs, calculating transfer duration, etc. Enterprise IT isn't going anywhere. The cost of doing it right 100 times is greatly outweighed by the potential loss in doing it wrong once.

People who are already on the cloud aren't going to ditch their service providers so they can take time away from their actual business to manage something they don't understand to save a few hundred dollars a quarter.

Finally, programming hasn't changed substantially in the last 15 years for most people. I know that might sound shocking to people on HN, but most developers are working in dingy cubicles on archaic systems without continuous integration or release management. They're deploying to production and then jiggling the handle until things work. The systems they produce are just good enough to keep other business units crunching along, and their saving grace is two-fold: they don't cost enough to warrant real scrutiny, and the potential utility of an efficient IT department is non-obvious to most business managers.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#43

Post by expertentipp »

te_chris wrote: post #9

I'm advertising for 2 roles at the moment: a Senior Backend engineer and a Junior Frontend (in London, UK). Almost impossible to find someone for the backend role, but I've had to turn off the advertising as I've had 71 people apply for the junior frontend role. The mix is fascinating, a lot of ex-bootcampers, some CS grads, some self-taught people, but all of them are desperate for a shot to get into our industry. I…

Yes, the web front-end is perceived as low-effort entrance to the software development fields. Purely commercial bootcamps, people from unrelated fields, people without a clue about networks and browsers, people hanging on anything which will allow them to land a job - it makes it trivial for Google and Facebook to basically take an absolute control over the web with their technologies, solutions, and stacks.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#44

Post by RealDinosaur »

joelbluminator wrote: post #28
te_chris wrote: post #9

I'm advertising for 2 roles at the moment: a Senior Backend engineer and a Junior Frontend (in London, UK). Almost impossible to find someone for the backend role, but I've had to turn off the advertising as I've had 71 people apply for the junior frontend role. The mix is fascinating, a lot of ex-bootcampers, some CS grads, some self-taught people, but all of them are desperate for a shot to get into our industry. I…

Could be a lot of things, but my guess - maybe seniors don't find your offering compelling enough? Try avoiding "young teams" and "beers" and put more "healthy snacks", "work life balance" in the job offer and see what happens. Seniors generally have better options than juniors, you're gonna have to work hard to get and retain them.

I read an article regrading this recently... With junior engineers, they are selling themselves. With senior engineers, the company has to sell itself to them instead.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#45

Post by Zelmor »

whorleater wrote: post #39
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…

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

Europe does. ;)

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#46

Post by munin »

whorleater wrote: post #39
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…

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

Two points: first, even if "solid" universities are right to run away from this (and IMO they don't run away from it, they just move the IT program into the business school where you don't see it any more) there are still many other universities pumping out students into a dead career field, which should be concerning. Second, this is not just about IT programs. Computer science programs are impacted to. From the OP:

> But instead of five backend developers and three ops people and a DBA to keep the lights on for your line-of-business app, now you maybe need two people total.

All nine of those people would probably have been CS graduates, or at least many of the backend developers would be (and perhaps the DBA). Or they would be people that thought of themselves as "developers" and not "IT" for whatever that distinction is worth now.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#48

Post by 3pt14159 »

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.

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.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#49

Post by arethuza »

whorleater wrote: post #39
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…

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

What do you mean by an "IT program"?

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#50

Post by kamaal »

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.

That kind of work is easy to automate. Until you reach a situation when it has to be decided when a person has to click the button. And with what data they are supposed to click it.

Often it's not easy to make those decisions through code. That is because the person making those click decisions, has a lot of tribal knowledge of the business situation at hand, which triggers only when the situation presents itself.

But if human is basically a meat-robot doing programmable tasks that is not even a automation issue. Its really more management and planning problems. You are supposed to fire people running the business in those cases.

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