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The author postulates that the cloud will automate away low-level IT jobs, comparing the situation to automation in manufacturing.
I've been saying for awhile now that we're getting close to a crisis point in the IT world. The mid-tier IT worker is in imminent danger of being automated out of existence, and just like with the vanished factory jobs of the last 30 years, nobody wants to admit it's happening until it's too late.
[...] So how do you know if your job is going to disappear into the cloud? You don't really need me to tell you. You already feel it in your bones. 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.
The solution is simple, but not easy: you simply must keep moving. If you don't know how to code, learn - like planting a tree, the best time to start was ten years ago, but the second best time is now. If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup, something. Anything. At the end of the day, we're all self-taught engineers.
Otherwise, I'll tell you what will happen. The economy will take a small dip, or your department will get re-orged, and you will lose that job as an operations engineer on a legacy SaaS product. You'll look around for a similar job in your area and discover that nobody is hiring people anymore whose skill set is delivering a worse version of what AWS's engineers can do for a fraction of the cost. And by then you won't have the luxury of time to level up your skills.
I'm wondering how I craft an exit from this industry in the next handful of years.
https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/01/16/cloud-irregular-the-creeping-it-apocalypse/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:16AM
Up front it has a nice advantage of you can spin some serious hardware up very quickly. To build something like a 10 machine cluster system locally could involve 6 months of purchasing and site work to 'do right'. But with AWS you can spin something like that faster. AWS has its use. But people need to understand that you probably will outgrow it if you stick around. Both on cost and security. Remember you do not own it. You are renting it. That makes sense in some cases. In others it makes 0 sense.
What I see these days is businesses doubling up the job of a dev into a sysadmin job. One dude I know just jumped jobs. Wicked good coder. He has spent the past 6 months configuring docker. A waste of talent. But these companies do not see that. They see the hardware has become code and need a dedicated dev to do it instead of 2-3 grunts. It is something where the low level is being eliminated but you need someone decently competent to manage it. Eventually they realize it when the 'good coder' walks because he is board out of his skull plugging together yml scripts.