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from the left-for-dead-when-InfoWorld-folded dept.
Bob Cringely is running a new prediction at https://www.cringely.com/2020/03/25/2020-brings-the-death-of-it/
2020 Brings the Death of IT
IT — Information Technology — grew out of something we called MIS — Management Information Systems — but both meant a kid in a white shirt who brought you a new keyboard when yours broke. Well, the kid is now gone, sent home with everyone else, and that kid isn't coming back... ever. IT is near death, fading by the day. But don't blame COVID-19 because the death of IT was inevitable. This novel coronavirus just made it happen a little quicker.
I mentioned the switch from MIS to IT because that name change presaged the events I am describing here. Management Information Systems was an artifact of big business, where corporate life was managed rather than lived. Information Technology happened when MIS escaped into the wild. MIS meant office buildings and Local Area Networks while IT includes home workers in their pajamas which, frankly, describes me at this precise moment.
To quote the immortal Al Mandel (why am I the only one who ever quotes the immortal Al?) "the step after ubiquity is invisibility." IT was the last visible vestige of MIS and now it, too, is gone.
Another recent post has an interesting view of venture capital: https://www.cringely.com/2020/03/25/prediction-covid-19-will-kill-a-ton-of-startups-or-so-it-will-seem-as-vcs-pull-back/
(Score: 5, Informative) by Snotnose on Monday March 30 2020, @01:57PM (8 children)
Cringely sold his name to someone else years ago. In fact, several someones. If memory serves this is the 3rd fake Cringely.
That said, the guy is full of shit. He's talking about a help desk, which is a far cry from IT. The kid fresh out of high school isn't gonna have a clue when your network goes toes up. Nor will TKFOOHS have a clue about network security. Nor deploying a major upgrade.
I've been a sysadmin in the past and trust me, the only time people notice you is when things go south. They don't notice the time spent ensuring things don't go south.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday March 30 2020, @02:03PM (4 children)
Very true - our heroes used to be sports personalities, movie stars or even politicians. Today, we have all learned of people - nurses, truck drivers, shopkeepers, volunteers ,... - who are far more important but just get their job done.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 30 2020, @02:21PM (3 children)
But none of us on the "new heroes" side are going to get jack or shit. We're on the front lines with no health insurance, no vacation, and subsistence wages if even that, risking our lives for wealthy hermits who can drop out and hide, and no matter what happens to us or how many of us die, it'll be business as usual or worse once this is all over, because fuck the poor.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 30 2020, @03:06PM
> because fuck the poor.
[sarc]
They deserve it, otherwise they wouldn't be poor
[/sarc]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @06:59PM (1 child)
Admittedly, for us that can afford to hide out as hermits, that is, effectively, doing our part.
The more hermetic we are, the less danger we put you and everyone else in.
(Score: 1) by r_a_trip on Tuesday March 31 2020, @09:54AM
***The more hermetic we are, the less danger we put you and everyone else in.***
True, but that kills the narative that only the grunts are doing their part, while all those in isolation are just useless fat cats who serve no purpose. Everyone is the savior in their own eyes and the rest fodder for Hades.
(Score: 4, Informative) by EvilSS on Monday March 30 2020, @03:19PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @07:12PM
I prefer Harry Q. Bovik [cmu.edu] and just a reminder for those of us hackers in need of a good laugh, SIGBOVIK 2020 [sigbovik.org] is instead an online event on April 1st (or perhabs it's a joke, you never know).
(Score: 2) by progo on Tuesday March 31 2020, @03:55PM
'I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts', he said. 'My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me.'
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday March 30 2020, @02:44PM (1 child)
and still writing idiocies, sadly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2020, @06:17PM
He tried to build a homebrew airplane, on live TV, once. He was foiled by having to layup fiberglass.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @03:17PM (1 child)
Oh baloney. This shit is even MORE complex to integrate in a mehdium to large organization than having dedicated datacenter. IT/MIS being a "lived" experience we can all have in our jammies is just an artifact of the massive continuous pain in the ass the IT teams are going through and the fact those teams being conveniently spread across the planet so you can pretend there aren't actual humans laboring to perpetuate your pointless B-Ark "Creative/Knowledge-Worker" job you can do anywhere there's WiFi until such time as we can blast your useless, resource-sucking ass into the sun.
(Score: 1) by r_a_trip on Tuesday March 31 2020, @10:13AM
Friendly reminder that the "A and C ark" people all died, because they failed to see what "B ark" people actually did. Most of the "B ark" people survived.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday March 30 2020, @03:24PM (7 children)
It used to be that businesses had piles of important data that needed customized processing, computerized communications to communicate that data between businesses, machines and hardware infrastructure to make that all work. The best way to keep it all up and running was to have experienced professionals on-site.
These needs are still out there, but all "normal" people think of these days when someone mentions "computers" are gay little cell phones, texting, Facefuck, Twatter, and teh cloud. "Old" people might also think of Word, Excel, and the web. They literally can't comprehend anything truly technological like IC circuits or databases with trillions of records. I was trying to talk to someone about computer/IT related work the other day and they kept thinking I was talking about clerical type work.
These days nobody is interested in keeping complex systems up and running. They are perfectly happy with half-assed buggy shit that doesn't even do what they need. So why keep in-house expense around when they can keep their ass covered by out sourcing it to some drooling piece of shit in India?
It used to be studying, learning, and practicing computer related science and technology was the next big thing that might help land people on another planet or some such. These days, it is literally a handicap. I've realized lately that I would be better off if I had my brain drilled out. There are no jobs for smart people any more. Obviously I should not have studied structured programming in school and taken courses in ass kissing and dick sucking instead.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DECbot on Monday March 30 2020, @03:37PM
I understand you would like to seek a MBA degree. In these difficult times, there are still many opportunities to pursue your MBA degree online! It is never too late to start. Click Now to begin!
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @03:45PM
Those last two at least can't be readily outsourced and have pretty inelastic demand curves, so in difficult times like these...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @04:17PM (1 child)
Be nice, now. Not every piece of shit in India drools.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday March 30 2020, @10:29PM
But they do all stink.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday March 30 2020, @04:21PM (2 children)
Then you're talking to the wrong people. Anybody who has any authority over IT staff will understand that there is a complex database behind the app that is used for "clerical type work". If they didn't, then the company wouldn't have IT staff.
Maybe your problem is that a lot of those complex databases have moved to cloud platforms. As an example, many enterprises aren't running their own Exchange servers anymore; Office 365 provides everything they needed to begin with, plus a liability contract that's way better for them when shit goes south than having the ability to go to IT and yell at people.
Naturally, though, this means that the number of enterprises with real IT is absolutely shrinking. Microsoft and Google, and to a lesser extent Amazon, have realistically swallowed all of those on-prem IT needs. The growth in computers is in companies that are delivering custom software to customers, not in companies that just need functional software for their own employees.
I seriously doubt you use much structured programming in your day-to-day life if you're not delivering software to customers. But yeah, you'll be doing less group policy management these days. But for the kind of guy that does group policy management all day, the growth potential has always been in ass kissing.
I can see you're upset, SomeGuy, but there's no reason to hurt innocent bystanders here. Unless what you really mean to insinuate is that gay people are primarily responsible for the billion dollar industry that is rapidly changing the world. Which maybe you are, if you hate change as much as you seem to hate gay people. Personally, I'd be proud to take credit for basically making the PADD from Star Trek happen.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @09:59PM (1 child)
In the orgs I have worked in IT is going nowhere.
In smaller orgs what you talk about oh yeah big time. But most of that was one off onetime guys anyway and anywhere from heroic to moronic. But the large orgs. IT is going nowhere. It is here to stay for a very long time. You only rent if you like burning money. Large orgs figured that years ago when then drop kicked IBM out of their datacenters and replaced them with cheap servers. IBM got back in by selling (you guessed it) cheap servers. I saw a story on hackernews yesterday. Some dude did one small click in a AWS and it cost 80k. That same mistake on hardware you own? 0.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday March 31 2020, @04:39PM
You don't use AWS to save money. Or you shouldn't. That's stupid, and hey, nobody ever accused procurement managers of being smart.
You use AWS because it is geographically diverse and it provides a superior product to snowflake on-prem servers.
If you're as big as Facebook, you can build your own data centers. You'll still want to run some kind of cloud infrastructure management on them, though. Something like OpenStack. Gone are the days when it's a good idea to ask Bob in IT to set up a new server with the standard runtimes and sidecars. Now you use API calls to provision more VMs for your Kubernetes cluster as needed (and release them when not needed), and instead of keeping the infrastructure topology in Bob's head you keep it in authoritative statefiles that you can use more API calls to get definitive answers about.
And when you need to plan that big expansion into Europe, gone are the days of sending code over there and making modifications to the infrastructure plan to accomodate the different loadout. The application is made to scale in a multi-agent platform. Just scale it down to fit the capabilities, and use the same cloud infrastructure management tools to provision a smaller carbon copy. Then use those same tools to manage routing to take advantage of the geographic diversity.
AWS will let you rent their infrastructure that already does all that. And they'll try to sell you their proprietary managed systems like DynamoDB, Kinesis, and Lambda. Don't do it. Build your stuff to fit in Docker containers and put them in AWS (or GCP, or Azure...or all of the above) as long as the rent is cheaper than the overhead of managing your own data centers. Then when you get big enough that your overhead would be cheaper than Amazon's inflated rent, build your own data centers and deploy the same Docker containers there.
---
But all of that is about software development and customer-facing services. Unless your business model relies on gatekeeping some amazing in-house software, anything your employees use in their day-to-day (like emails, scheduling, and word processing) would actually be cheaper on somebody else's platform.
I was going to include inventory management, but those are probably all in-house developed anyway; I'm talking about things already provided by vendors where you go from deploying their software on your servers to just using their servers. Personal use notwithstanding.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @03:54PM
Because,
Why would you ask the very question, that you just answered? Oh - it was a trick question? You wanted to see who was paying attention?
BTW, WTF is Al?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @05:38PM
It’s not just startups getting a shakedown , covid19 killed Oneweb
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/oneweb-goes-bankrupt-wont-challenge-spacex-in-satellite-broadband-race/ [arstechnica.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SemperOSS on Monday March 30 2020, @06:06PM (3 children)
So, what is Information Technology? CPUs, GPUs and storage devices? Keyboards and mice? PCs and laptops? Apps and applications? Servers? Local Area Networks, wired and wireless? Wide Area Networks? Virtual Private Networks? The Internet? Cloud services? Cloud servers? Software as a Service? Platforms as a Service? …
… or all of the above?
Can somebody please stop this raving madness and just accept it (i.e. IT) is almost any combination of the above? And thus not dead!
Working form home right now, like so many others, I do appreciate the VPN access to my customer's “internal” systems, some of which are in-house and some outsourced. To me (and to most other people, I believe), whether it is in-house or not, it is still IT, making the statement an oxymoron, rather. And putting all your eggs in one basket may also be rather foolish in case of a major outage … we are long overdue a solar storm like the one in 1859, a storm that might fry most satellites and plenty of ground infrastructure, crippling or outright disabling the Internet as we know it. Then what?
This is actually another good argument for always carrying cash, come to think of it.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @07:56PM (2 children)
> ...another good argument for always carrying cash,
And having a land line(?)
[I'm guessing that copper and old central offices have a better chance than newer technologies.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @10:47PM
Good luck with that. AT&T and others have literally pulled the copper out of the ground when installing fiber so that there would be no going back.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday April 01 2020, @01:43AM
Copper will develop large DC currents in a serious proton storm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2020, @05:57AM
On a related note: https://twitter.com/issamchleuh/status/1244608722846076930/photo/1 [twitter.com]