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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 If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup,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 arslan on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:43AM
Your use case is not all the use case of AWS though. AWS also provides rent-an-ops not just rent-a-computer. For example AWS is starting to release managed mongodb and kafka services where you arent' t just renting infra and operating it yourself, you are also off-loading operational work to them (i.e. backups, archiving, patching, upgrades, sharding, capacity management, monitoring/alerting, etc.).
Depending on where you're located and how big your organization is, hiring operational smes to manage that could more expensive than off-loading it to AWS who has economies of scale.
Also, if you're starting to venture into these areas where you don't have the expertise, it provides a quick path to entry; at least from the operational side, you'd still need to invest in the development/functional side.