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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 If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup,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 sjames on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:13AM (7 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:13AM (#790416) Journal

    In all of this discussion of "the cloud", there's a big missing piece. Sure, you've moved to someone else's servers, so you don't need the guy who can change out a hard drive anymore, but you still need someone to admin your VMs in the cloud. That someone needs to make sure all your software and data is backed up, and he has to be able to configure all that software in the cloud. Otherwise, it will all disappear one day and Amazon will just shrug. Not their data, not their problem.

    That admin will take place on a workstation that is not in the cloud. The data will be stored in storage that is not in the cloud (if you want to keep it, that is).

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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:29AM (6 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:29AM (#790521) Homepage

    Have you not heard of Kubernetes or SaaS? A single guy clicking buttons on a web interface can set up all of those things in an hour. That's exactly what TFS is talking about for fucks sake. All of the repetitive shit with setting up software and backups can be automated.

    >it will all disappear one day and Amazon will just shrug. Not their data, not their problem.

    You do realize that contracts are signed for these services, right? If Amazon loses the data that they're supposed to protect per the contract (but not own or look at!, per usual contracts), it very much is Amazon's problem.

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:54PM (5 children)

      by sjames (2882) on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:54PM (#790716) Journal

      Have you not heard of Kubernetes or SaaS?

      Sure. I've heard of them. Useful, but not magic bullets.

      Have you read a service contract? There's a zillion outs for them. For example, if you didn't configure your storage securely enough and someone out there in the cloud deletes the storage (or if they might have). Kinda reminds me of when Lucy gave Charlie Brown a signed document...

      Consider, yesterday you were a thriving business. Today you don't even know who your customers were. Your payroll database is gone and soon the people in it will be since you can't generate the paychecks. The company no more than a zombie. Suing your former provider won't fix that even if you can stay together long enough to get your suit to trial. Trial against a defendant that is 1000 times larger than you and still has active revenue streams.

      Certainly, there will be a squeeze, and it's a good time to acquire new skills in order to not be among those who get squeezed out, but it's not really an apocalypse.

      There will be casualties on both sides. There will be IT workers let go, and there will be companies that go poof because they fired too many and then their cloud evaporates.

      • (Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:28AM

        by arslan (3462) on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:28AM (#790941)

        Only fools do it the way you describe, that doesn't void the fact that cloud with the right prudence does really work and deliver on the promise. Regulators like the one in Oz is clear that material workload will require an exit strategy as a minimum, folks doing it right are going multi-cloud so they can fail over quickly. Data should be replicated so you don't lose it, etc, etc. As someone else mentioned kubernetes is making it a lot easier to go multi-cloud, both the big ones are kubernetes compliant and provide managed control-planes, etc.

        Really, all the risk folks talk about with the cloud, like you lose everything blah blah blah are really naive. Folks like AWS does separate enterprise contracts, not the usual you sign-up with a credit card agreements. They did do it before, but pressure from enterprises have forced their hand, so they are liabilities on their part. Ditto with Google.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Thursday January 24 2019, @04:36AM (3 children)

        by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday January 24 2019, @04:36AM (#791040) Homepage

        Consider, the datacenter your servers are in gets raided, your machines get confiscated even though you aren't involved since the FBI is incompetent. Swap out the FBI with any natural disaster of your choice.

        Practically speaking, a company whose main competency isn't managing servers is not going to manage servers better than a company whose specializes in that. As people have mentioned, the cloud is just someone else's server. Any nightmare scenario (culminating in "no backups left") you can come up with 1. can also happen if you're managing your own servers and 2. are more likely to happen if you're managing your own servers since the assumption is that your company's expertise isn't managing servers. If Amazon replicating backups of data to multiple locations fucks up, chances are the average company IT department would already have fucked up multiple times.

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        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:16AM (2 children)

          by sjames (2882) on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:16AM (#791116) Journal

          You're assuming "instead of". I'm talking about "along with". That is, even if you move to the cloud, you'll still need competent IT staff to maintain backups, configure and monitor the cloud services, etc as well as maintain internet connectivity in the office and the workstations your employees are using.

          It wasn't THAT long ago that a large percentage of S3 buckets went away one fine morning and it took some time to get them back. For a while it seemed Amazon wasn't so sure they were all coming back.

          Although the setup I maintain isn't terribly complex, it's had less downtime in the last 5 years that Amazon has had.

          • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday January 24 2019, @09:19AM (1 child)

            by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday January 24 2019, @09:19AM (#791154) Homepage

            Again, the point is that now one competent IT staff can manage millions of containers (plus some bus factor), rather than a dozen or so staff managing a dozen or so physical machines, including any extra hands that may be needed at remote sites. Even if we assume reliability is as bad as your anecdotal experience and that it hasn't or won't improve, eliminating headcount saves a lot of money, enough that the tradeoff is worth it.

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            • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 27 2019, @06:42AM

              by sjames (2882) on Sunday January 27 2019, @06:42AM (#792567) Journal

              At least in the Unix world, you have NEVER needed one admin per box!

              The automation does cut down on the number needed, but people are acting as if it ELIMINATED IT support. It does not.