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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 If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup,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: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:08AM (10 children)
Assembly language is a good first step, because it lets you understand how the stuff works. But it doesn't need to be assembler for a modern CPU. MIXX or z80 would be sufficient. Ideally you'd bootstrap yourself though interpreter and compiler design, but that takes a few years. I've got a book called "The Anatomy of LISP" which takes you from IBM 7094 assembler code up through construction of a LISP interpreter. (Not a *good* interpreter, and not a full Common Lisp, but most of LISP 1.x.) And I once saw something similar for "C" (well, a subset of C, but not "small-C"). But getting a good compiler for z80 assembler code, much less IBSYS code, isn't going to happen, and you need a compiler rather than an interpreter because you aren't going to have access to the real hardware, so you need to cross-compile the assembler you write.
That's why MIXX was created, but Knuth seems to have given up on getting people to learn it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:24AM (4 children)
Or you can go with emulation, like my 6809 emulator [datapipe-blackbeltsystems.com], which has the assemblers and so forth that you need to write native 6809 code, a small c compiler, etc.
I have to tell you, coding for the 6809 is pretty much a joy compared to the Z80, the 8080, 6502, etc.
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I hate being bipolar... it's awesome!
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:56AM (3 children)
Well, MIXX is run in an emulator, so that's not unreasonable. OTOH, I don't know that the 6809 has a simple assembler. I didn't pick the i6502 because its assembler is too complex. The z80 was relatively simple. So was the i8080.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:22AM (2 children)
The 6809 has a lovely, easy to use assembler by TSC. There's a very clean syntax, and the processor is highly orthogonal for its day, which also helps make it easy to get started.
--
I had the house child-proofed. But they must
have done it wrong. Kids still get in somehow.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:21PM (1 child)
The M6800 was also a nice orthogonal assembler. But it wouldn't have been a good starting point. The IBM 7094 was better, if you ignored the peripheral controllers. But I wouldn't recommend that either. The z80 and i8080 were much simpler. Not, admittedly, as orthogonal as the M6800, but simpler to learn anyway.
But MIXX was even easier, and there were 3 famous volumes about how to use it. There were, if you can still find them, also lots of books on how to use the z80/i8080, but they're probably unfindable these days. And the 6809 (M6809?) never had as many books. Old copies of DDJ had lots of z80 code, but scant amounts of M6809 code. Etc.
You don't just need the emulator, you also need relevant associated materials, and it better be a lot more than just a list of opcodes. Which is one reason MIXX may be the best choice. The relevant books (by Knuth) are still available, even though I understand the most recent edition has switched to using C rather than MIXX.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 23 2019, @07:32PM
We'll agree to disagree on this one.
--
It's only when a mosquito lands on a man's testicles
that he realizes violence is not always the answer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday January 23 2019, @09:53AM (1 child)
/Au contraire, mon frère./
Z80 development tools (including assemblers, disassemblers, etc.): http://www.z80.info/z80sdt.htm
IBM 7090/7094 tools (including cross-assembler and linker): http://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ibm7090.html
I don't know much about IBSYS but z80 and x86 are mighty close. I started on z80 myself but I'm not sure there's any real advantage to doing that. There are obviously more tools available for x86 though - and you can test the results for real instead of just testing your emulation.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 23 2019, @05:25PM
The advantage of the i8080/z80 is that you don't need to worry as much about word length, register size, paging, etc. It limits what you can practically do, but for learning the basics that doesn't matter.
But thank's for listing the references. Anyone wanting to follow up on this may find them very useful.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 25 2019, @01:25PM (2 children)
Or it could be for a machine that's cheap and easily available nowadays -- such as a Raspberry Pi.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 25 2019, @06:00PM (1 child)
I don't know the Raspberry PI CPU, but it's my guess that it's assembler is quite complex compared to those of the 1960's. Certainly this is true of the assemblers for the workstation CPUs.
OTOH, the i6502 was still being used as embedded controllers less than 5 years ago, and may still be in use. And I still consider it more complex than ideal for a first learning platform. With complex chips you're better off going straight to C, even though you'll miss out on the underlying concepts. (Do you know what a "half-adder" is?)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:15PM
The Raspberry Pi uses an ARM processor.