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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 If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup,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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:32AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:32AM (#790446)

    Please. Stop. Making. AI. Predictions!

    Writers and academics have proven terrible at predicting the future. While they sometimes got specific things mostly right, the timing is quite often off. For example, in the 1950's it appears academics considered a chess-playing bot harder than a dish-washing bot, largely because regular people learn to wash dishes while only a few master chess. The opposite proved true.

    I do agree that if wars, terrorism, or industrial accidents don't knock us back a few centuries, then within 1,000 we will probably have human-comparable AI. But whether it will take another 10 years or 1,000 is really hard to guess right. So don't.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:36PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:36PM (#790633) Journal

    I will make a prediction.

    Once everyone has become redundant and automated out of existence, all of the hardware that makes up the cloud will be virtualized and put somewhere in the cloud. Then there will be no more need even for hardware maintenance.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.