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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 22 2019, @10:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the We're-all-doomed dept.

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 If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup,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/


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:30AM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:30AM (#790400)

    It's amazing the number of non-technical people that are under the mistaken impression that once something is in "the cloud" that means that there's no physical machine involved anymore. I'm very curious how these people think any computation or storage happens in "the cloud" as a result.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by arslan on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:46AM (1 child)

    by arslan (3462) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:46AM (#790407)

    Blockchain! Duhh!!

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 23 2019, @04:47PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @04:47PM (#790669)

      Last week I was hanging out at a tech meetup, and one of the fun activities was to get people to stand up and make BS sales pitches. One guy got on stage and made precisely that pitch: "Blockchain! Whatever your problem is, blockchain will solve it!" I was grabbing a drink with him later, and after some back-and-forth we determined that really the future wasn't just blockchain, but Blockchain as a Service, and thus our fictional offering of "ProBS" was formed.

      Fun times.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.