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Half of U.S. I.T. Operations Jobs to Vanish
Ant writes "A MacCentral article says Gartner, Inc. researchers believe that as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data center technologies. Donna Scott, a Gartner analyst, said IT workers face a situation similar to that in the manufacturing field, which has lost jobs over the past several decades as automation has improved. Similarly, standardization of IT infrastructure, applications and processes will lead to productivity improvements and a major shift in skill needs, she said."
Is that a new way of saying outsourced to India?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Gartner, whose wrong on so many other fronts, is going to get this right?
Windows 98 Server :)
Outsourcing aside, helpdesk is probably a IT-related job that can never be automated, no?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Don't panic - this in 10-20 years time. If we are still fucking around reinventing the wheel (scripts, repeated processes, crappy hardware, patching CRAP software, etc.. then I will be amazed, and dissappointed.
It just means we will be doing other IT related stuff.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Due to IT shrinkage, Gartner has no bullshit to sell and is closing shop. These are the same guys that predicted that OS/2 will clean Windows Clock.
If it's anything like the systems the UK government use then we'll be fine. We'll all become tech support staff!
I like muppets.
With Windows, you needed a whole staff to manage all your servers.
;)
With Linux, you can hire a bearded guru part-time to keep you up to date.
As long as there are users there will always be need for support staff. I can't imagine Judy from Accounting fixing using the microsoft tools to fix her Access. I can't imagine support staff being cut at all actually.
Think about trying to predict 2004 back in '84. PCs were just starting to take off, Al Gore was just starting to bury the first fiber connections that would become the internet, IBM was going to be the big power in personal computing...
Nobody could have foreseen that we'd all be selling the shit out of our basements on eBay, listening to huge music libraries on devices the size of a deck of cards and spending our work days trolling Slashdot?
C'mon, Garner, who are we trying to fool here?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Don't worry ... I'm busy adding countless bugs and security flaws....send more beer and I'll try harder.
Damn, I am going to be replaced by my own shell script.
You mean to tell me that the .COM boom is finished?
Contributing to "Judgement Day" one line of
the will all be replaced by shell scipts of varying length.
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
[laughing out loud]
In July 2003, Gartner predicted 10% of all IT jobs (at vendors) and 5% in enterprises would disappear by December 2004. When they show the data on how accurate THAT prediction was, I'll consider being worried about the new results from their dart board.
There's nothing (short of AI) that can make infrastructure set up and maintain itself, so I'll believe it when I see it. Or perhaps they have Windows Longhorn in mind, in which case I'd say they are rather optimistic predicting that it will be ready in 20 years.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Those blacksmith and buggy whip repair jobs are gone.
This is all Bush's fault.+5 Insightful
"I want to choose my words carefully here, so I'm not misunderstood," he said. "They're a bunch of fucking idiots."
IT Guy: I... I've been replaced by a worthless machine! Oh, the irony... I was the engineer of my own fate! WHY!!!
HAL: That really hurts, Dave.
because of improvements in data center technologies.
No. It's because business finds it much more convenient to unfairly require employees to compete constantly for their own jobs. The workplace is now a sour, hostile, toxic environment for everyone except management and shareholders.
Everyone else: customers, employees, vendors, neighborhoods, the community and government, have to pay double and triple in the form of higher prices, constant irritating advertising, shitty quality, poor service, dirty stores, empty shelves, lost tax revenue and rude employees.
Employers have responsibilities beyond their earnings. Few are meeting them.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
.. can I give up the crappy half?
Just create an AI-based answer service, and program it to provide useless or incorrect solutions, as well as blaming the callers for the errors and/or denying the issue exists. Make sure it has a thick Indian accent. Maybe even toss in a few randomly generated pseudo-words just in case it's too intelligible.
Although performance improvements will reduce the need for staff on a per computer basis, but the demand for computing resources will continue to increase resulting in what will probably be a net loss of zero.
It always interesting how a report can look at 1 contributing factor and ignore all the others when drawing a conclusion.
As a Data Center Operator (OS/390 mainframe), I have to chime in on this one. That big, black monolith always needs someone baby-sitting it. Major problems are rare, but there's enough little stuff happening around the clock to warrant attention. And if your organization is anything like mine, they are brainwashed by vendors *cough(Siemens)cough* and are migrating from those rock solid boxes from Big Blue to an array of Win2k servers running MS SQL. yes, it scares me too. But it's only for the main Clinical system for the region's leading hospital; what could go wrong. Anyone in the know, can tell you that will be more support-intensive.
worst sig ever. . .
Unless they plan on running that Datacenter with advanced AI, they have another thing coming. Not only can the servers and software screw up, but so can the machines running them.
An assembly line is one thing. But a datacenter is another thing altogether. Isn't heat and airflow an issue at datacenters? Wouldn't making things automated result in more heat because of all the machinery invovled?
"A MacCentral article says Gartner, Inc. researchers believe that as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data center technologies."
That's a bit of a strange report from a Mac site - I'd assume that a very small number of that 50% is Mac admin jobs. Moreover, I'd say that Mac sysadmins have some way to grow in the next 2 decades over their current numbers, given the reception of the Xserve and Xraid.
Conversely, what happens if the number of people requiring enterprise-level storage (SANs etc. cos that's where most consolidation is at atm) increases? Sure a bunch of people can manage more kit, but more kit of more companies is a whole other story...
If they're REALLY stopped, then they can't possibly be wrong ALL the time, can they?
to anyone here in the IT biz. Maybe it's something the IT people here have buried their heads in the sand about it, but anyone who sits on their laurels (knowledge) in the IT industry is bound to be finding their position slowly eroded away by the improvements in tech.
One upside to the new/improving tech eroding the need for IT jobs that springs to mind is the opportunity for someone to start a 'Personal Technologist' business. Anyone who can master Blackberrys, PDAs, iPods/mp3 players, etc would be in big demand from all the PHBs with the gadgets but without the time or inclination to RTFM. I think that'd be a natural progression for most IT people I know...
Two fish swim into a wall, one turns to the other and says, "Dam".
I bet they soon do a better job at forecasting things than Gartner, making all tech-industry-analyst jobs go away as well.
Hell, the Magic-8-ball already does better than Forrester. Gartner can't be too far behind.
And as for the Gartner Group predicting the future of IT two decades from now, who died and made them Hari Seldon? Predicting 2004 in 1984 probably sounded a whole lot like "IBM and AT&T dominate the personal computer market, PCs have reached almost 30% of people's homes, most PCs come with a 500 MHz RISC chip or higher, with over a megabyte of memory and a blazing fast 16K modem! The sales of software giants Borland, Ashton-Tate and Lotus exceed $2 billion annually." Etc. You just can't predict the future of technology with anything remotely like accuracy that far out.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I actually manage a small datacenter. One thing I have learned after 10 years in the Internet Server hosting and colocation game is SERVICE is what sets you apart from competitors. The big
So long as software is wriiten by flawed humans and small business clients need to have smart people on-call to assist them when they delete files, or bork their server again... datacenters will require support staff.
If you ever call our support number and get some guy in Bangalore answering the phone, you will know that I'm dead... 'cause until then, I'm hiring geeks - right here. Thank you.
Data center automation is removing the need for people.....I'll buy that.
However, the number of computer users in the country is drastically increasing each year. Jobs vanishing? I don't think so.
Instead of making $30/hr sitting in a NOC, go out and make $50/hr removing spyware. Duh.
Really, even if they are 100% right, this is not a bad thing. The less-capable half of sysadmins will have to find something more useful to do. I say "more useful" because, from the larger view, the view of the economy as a whole, IT people are mostly wasted. They don't produce anything (well, they do design and roll out networks, but most of their work is to keep our incredibly brittle systems from falling apart. It would be less wasteful to make less brittle systems.)
If the technology or cheaper labor exists, shouldn't businesses make use of them - just as the music industry should make use of new technology and not depend on legislation to save a dying business model?
and the ever elusive "they" were saying this way back then.
About coding (Joe user would just describe what he wanted done to the computer and wah-lah. It would program itself).
About Databases.
And about sys admin.
Eventually, if they keep yammering out this prediction, they'll may be right.
I'm not holding my breath though.
Everyone knows robots are cool
.. but all the same.. don't you ever wonder.. with all the productivity benefits the new technology brings why is it that we seem to be working harder for longer for less benefits, less pay and less holidays than we ever did before..
It's really about time we started to seriously question what it's all for people..
SHIT
"IT operations, which encompass areas such as systems administration, incident response and change management, today account for about 55 percent of an IT department's labor cost, said Scott, who spoke at the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm's annual data center conference here in Las Vegas."
Good thing I'm a web services programmer who specializes in working closely with small businesses to develop their IT infrastructures, web and data management systems, programming custom tools and database applications, designing web pages including concepting, layout and graphic design, and so on and so on.
I've been saying it for years: the concept of a generic "IT" job is dead. The concept of having a company webmaster, for example, who just makes page updates and other web duties is long dead. And I've always known that a lot of admin functionality that currently isn't was bound to be automated.
You've gotta have multiple skills and be able to work closely with business decision makers to assist them (and guide them) towards increased profitiblity, time savings, streamlined processes, etcetera. *Those* are the jobs that can't be shipped overseas, and won't ever be.
In which increased automation leads to 90% of the workforce being unemployed. In an ironic twist, industrialists are forced to push for huge welfare rises in order to give the few remaining workers and companies a market to sell to. The rest of the human race spends their time fucking, getting stoned and watching TV
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Windows vs. Linux or Mac on the desktop:
Don't use Window's and massively decrease workload and nessecarry staffing for IT.
Stick with M$ because saving the company money and incresing efficiency makes me and my department less important.
Choice of servers:
*nix: It Works®
Windows: Shitty performance = more servers and more problems = $$$
If I was a mechanic and I intentionally fsck'ed cars so I could get paid to fix them I could be arrested, and IT is bitching about job security? Fsck off!
The summary reveals this is a prediction by someone about what types of jobs will be available decades from now. To put this in context, consider what types of jobs were available 20 years ago.
Read the article and you learn these numbers are disputed by other experts.
What would be so wrong with this more realistic headline:
"Controversial Study Predicts Decline in US IT Operations by 50%"?
Sigh...
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I myself feel that a decent part of the implosion in the amount of IT jobs available is a direct result of too many fresh-faced kids putting "system administrator" on their resumes when really they only qualify as operators. And operators of fairly unsophisticated systems, at that -- sure, z/OS systems "run themselves" most of the time, but let's see you put a 21-year-old Linux geek in charge of a mainframe.
Breakfast served all day!
I've got the impression that Donna Scott has never worked in a factory or in manufacturing. Yes, automation has eliminated jobs, but that's not the reason manufacturing has been hit so hard over the years. It's cheaper labor overseas and being crushed in the quality game by other countries.
While automation can improve productivity, it's never the magic bullet or "paradigm-shifting" force people claim it to be. At best, it's good for dangerous or incredibly routine tasks. It's also good for high tolerance applications (ie, laser cutting sheet steel to within 0.0001").
But when it comes to assembling complex parts or performing tasks which can vary from product to product, you still need a human brain to do the work. I fail to see how the analogy holds for IT.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
In many of the data centers that I visit, people are working on the floor with the sole purpose of doing mundane tasks such as rebooting computers and reloading operating systems.
This can be automated. Items such as remote management hardware are only getting cheaper. Technologies such as IPMI will replace the need to even have secondary remote management networks.
As technology improves and gets less expensive, less people will be required to do these mundane tasks.
This makes complete sense that there will be a reduction in these types of jobs because of this. Hopefully, the affected folks are smart enough to learn new skills and move on.
Just out of curiosity, is this the first time in our history that a group of workers have put themselves out of business by collectively creating tools to put themselves out of business?
It seems like a fine line in definition between 1) being supplanted by new technology to automate things you were doing before and 2) putting yourself out of work by doing your job well.
This isn't like a loom being created by someone else to put knitters out of business, this is like a knitter knitting a loom that could, in turn, knit other sweaters or auto-generate looms or something along those lines.
sales of "No, my Realtime Data Infrastructure will not fix your computer" t-shirts have skyrocketed...
and now back to the fallout shelter...
Not until they're able to create the forecasting algorthims.
Greeaaatt. I'm a senior in college majoring in IT. Should I just keep my job as a fine dining waiter?
Am I the only one who thinks that this is a very pessimistic view of IT systems evolution? It should be 90% of the nitwit IT jobs that disappear if there's any reasonable amount of progress toward maturity of the IT industry and the tools it provides. How many of you would put up with having a roofer on staff of a small company just to keep nailing shingles back on every day? Do household refrigerators require frequent updates to their control systems? Sigh... It seems I've passed away and it's getting uncomfortably warm around here.
The IT market in Australia is dying already, and never recovered after 9/11 and the dot.com crash. My faculty at Monash university, are downsizing and may even sack senior staff.
So 50% of nothing ain't so bad. I can't even manage to get a job at a help desk. Wages here are dropping too - it looks like we'll be worse off than shop assisants and waiters soon.
I know graduates here with High Distinction averages who can't even get an interview for entry level positions. I don't know about America, but our government couldn't give a flying fuck about Science and Technology.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
They never vanish.
Using Gartner's own methodology, I'd rate this between 0.6 and 0.7:
0.7 "There is good reason to believe this will be true, but there is a decent chance it will not be true. We would be surprised, but not shocked, if it did not happen. Moreover, the timing is soft, and it may vary from our estimates. Clients should include this in their strategic plans."
0.6 "This is a general direction, better than a rumor or a guess, but not necessarily by a lot. Most likely, we do not have a firm idea of the timing."
Seriously, this is not a troll - can someone explain to me how open source software doesn't undermine programmers being able to earn a crust. I could be way off, but doesn't it undermine our industry?
I've heard people suggest donations and selling support etc, but are these really viable and warranted? Should someone have to plead for money when they have worked hard on a project? Seems to me like we're doing ourselves out of a job. Please someone, convince me that I'm wrong.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
No code comments = Job Security
" As long as there are users there will always be need for support staff. I can't imagine Judy from Accounting fixing using the microsoft tools to fix her Access. I can't imagine support staff being cut at all actually."
I however can imagine thin clients becoming more common, and hence, Judy not needing as much support as before.
I bet they soon do a better job at forecasting things than Gartner, making all tech-industry-analyst jobs go away as well.
At that point, Gartner will start charging their huge fees to interpret these fine reports for the rest of mere humans - and also CEOs.
Open source means that you can view the source code. (Free as in speech.) It does not mean that you have to give it away for free. (Free as in Beer).
Much Open Source software is both, but being Open Source in itself does not lessen your ability to charge for it.
I'm sure others will correct me if I am wrong about the above.
The hundresds of staff required to maintain 50 Windows and Unix servers will be replaced by 20 people running a mainframe that will do the work of those 50 servers. The past repeats itself.....
Where jobs are lost, new ones are created somewhere else, same thing happened with the manufacturing industry, the fall of that gave rise to the jobs to create the automation
There is no sig
I predict in 2024 that geeks will still be living out of their parents basement, with a bottle of hand lotion , and a towel by their side.
while(!dead)
{
IT worker gets a job, programs up a system that works so well the IT worker is no longer needed to be employed.
IT worker goes out into the job market and competes
}
God spoke to me
Sure I was only like 7 years old, but I knew video games rocked and they had a future.
Sadly in 1983 the Atari's president didn't and embezelled money which led to Nintendo dominating in 1985.
I predicted in 1993: Instant messaging, personal ads, MMORPGS, and an auction site would have monopolistic powers.
As for tech workers going out of a job, they automate a company then find a new job. They're inventors who invent themselves out of a job if they're good at what they do. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to do the math... Assuming theres a limited number of jobs which I am pretty sure there is.
God spoke to me
gartner and idc are retards.
... gee ... wow) then a few hair brained ones to grab headlines. such as this one.
they make a few predictions my grandmother could make (64 bit arch will be slow on adpotion
when they get shown to be wrong, they point to their "predictions" that are just stating the obvious and say they're right most of the time
"what can i say if you're right 52% of the time, you're wrong 48% of the time"
or perhaps more appropriately
"hook, line, sinker and copy of angling times"
In IT about 75% of the lifecycle costs of a unit of 'something' is labor. Automation will pushed harder and harder into these environments until that number comes down. WAY DOWN. WAY WAY DOWN.
In autmotive, only about 8-9% of the total vehicle cost is labor. What IS enormously expensive though is pension costs. Pension costs cost about $1400/unit, more than the cost of steel.
In Defense labor costs are plummeting and pension overhang is enormous. Take a look at the stock performance of Lockheed Martin. In this war economy LMT should be printing money, but it's not because of it's huge pension overhang liability.
You dudes are not unionized and with the stroke of a pen your pensions can be eliminated. So companies have zero incentive to worry about retaining you and every reason to slash headcount by any means necessary. Couple this with the FACT, not the impression that most server infrastructures are used, at best, 30-40% on a rolling average basis and you start to see an enormous rationale for companies to reaggregate all their servers into big mega clusters that look like th mainframes of yore. Today if your support ratio is 40 servers per headcount you can expect that to increase by a factor of 10 as more and more server farms are collapsed into larger and larger servers with a large number of LPARs on each.
And those jobs will be sent overseas to Bangalore, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and eventually China bolstered by yet more automation.
I think 50% reduction in operations staff is a conservative estimate. I think it will be more like 90% in two decades.
Well he may be an "operator", but what everyone forgets is that "operator" amoung many jobs is a stepping stone to greater things. So we can make all the fun we want of "operators" or "Software Engineers" like the other poster did. But we all started at one time or another at the bottom, and by the grace of God, had the opportunities to rise from those positions of denigration to were we are presently. Keep that in mind before you all get smug about yourselves.
More doom and gloom, no news that isn't bad news or strikes fear into the hearts of men(and woman) isn't worth reporting (or making up). We've been hearing this same broken record for years now and while it's true that some IT gets outsourced to other countries those same projects then find their way back here, broken and shattered by poor coders from a poor education being paid too little to not care and here at home we have to pick up the pieces and struggle to find halfway decent programmers who were nigh impossible to find in the first place
...buggy sales are again expected to wane against the sales of so called automobiles this year.
This is seriously the most depressing news ever, for a kid in high school aspiring to go into the IT field. However, there remains a glimmer of hope: the department of defense and it's contract companies. They will never be outsourced, for national security reasons. So, if I'm good enough, at least I could get a job programming missile systems.
Of course, if I'm that good, then I wouldn't have to worry about not getting a job elsewhere, would I?
- dshaw
Users will never get smarter. As long as their jobs exist, I'll have to keep fixing the things they get themselves into.
"Remember the glorious days of manual switchboards? Roughly 98% of those jobs disappared. "
Yes, young man. I do. I also remember they were primarily female. I also remember the culture was markedly different attitude wise when it came to women, and what was considered women's work. Guess what jobs those women took when switchboards disappeared? Hint: it wasn't markedly different than pre-manual switchboards days. What I also remember is that it took a couple decades for all pockets of manual switchboards to disappear.
But microsoft has spent so much time and money selling the whole MCSE thing to make windows part of every business. I know plenty of people who used to work in hosting facilities doing manual reboots. I kid you not, just go ask Exodus about how they manage windows servers. As windows gets more reliable, the need for retard MCSE types is less. Thank god, cuz they weren't worth a lick to begin with.
In truth, I find the idea that most software will become open source as highly improbable anyway, not based on idealogical grounds but economic ones.
It costs money to generate software, and companies have most of the money to invest. There are few times when they will want to give away (to their competitors, amongst others) what they spent so much money developing.
I'm not saying that the open source concept won't be successful - I think it will - but I suspect it will always pale in comparison to "closed" software.
We have mass production in manufacturing.
One person on modern systems can produce much more then they did just a generation ago.
This hasn't caused massive job loss and unemployment, we just demand more.
Our houses are larger, we have more stuff, more TV's mroe of everything. More computing capability hasn't satisfied me, now I want computer modelling of everything. My email has gone from text, to formatted text, to images, and now video.
We will keep growing our expectations.
Production gains in the automotive industry haven't resulted in lost jobs as much as a global increase in cars. Yes jobs are shifting locations globally, but they aren't disappearing. And the auto industry is a very competative manufacturing enviroment.
OK, This does seem probable within 20 years. Within 20 years I expect the server to be around as common as the mainframe is now...and for the same reason.
...
OTOH, robot maintenance tech will be one of the new jobs opening up as a result. And home network coordinator. And
So, yeah, Gartner probably got this one right. It just doesn't mean what it appears to mean.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Since half the people in the I.T. industry don't know what they're doing anyway, I say good riddance.
Should that not be Chosuk?
As more technologies appear including the field of automation won't there have to be a larger geek work force. Yes, IT jobs are most likely on the decline but what other job fields will appear in the not-so-far-future involving a IT workforce? Someone has to manage automate machines. What do you think?
[gloom]
[doom]
[FUD]
[pitiful attempt at a joke]
[signature]
Actually saw an interesting report in the UK about two years ago. It pointed out that in the UK, IT was growing at twice the rate of GDP. That meanst by 2010 the IT sector would form 100% of GDP.....
Obvious consequence - IT growth has got to slow. What does this mean long term? Less flashy jobs, less explosive growth based on new technologies and more growth through organic changes, restructures and mergers (of technology as well as businesses).
Doesn't mean that people are less mobile or there is less innovation, just that the 'market' is constricted so change comes from within and not from growth. Every gain has to be equalled by a loss somewhere else.
Looks like we're all factory workers now...
Don't look back the lemmings are gaining on you
This is like dentists figuring out why teeth decay, and replacing the components that do damage with better ones that don't.
Ready for your new mouthwash, full of friendly bacteria that will replace the ones that rot your teeth? They're bugs, but they're _better_ ones.
Since 20 years in the future is basically what 20 year olds of today are looking at as the time period over which they are going to lose half of their jobs -- it doesn't seem significant compared to what just happened. In fact such worries about a long-term reduction seem like a red herring to distract from what just happened to career programmers who actually built the software industry from the origins of "C" and Unix to today.
Seastead this.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/01/2 321222
Which is why they didn't need me any more....
Previously, we were able to successfully fend off PHB led migration plans to MS Exchange, because it took two full-time administrators for Exchange, and only 1/2 FTE for GroupWise. I even heard that, had the migration to Exchange been viable, I'd have been indespensible (at least for a while).
Interestingly, with Exchange 2003, Microsoft has re-architected the product to be an almost exact copy of the GroupWise architecture. The back-end (servers) work exactly the same now. Which, if you are Microsoft, makes sense: "Hey, we cannot get our product into some of these GroupWise sites, because they are getting the same job done better; perhaps we should copy Novell's success?"
So, it does make sense to me that in a few more product cycles, MS Exchange will require far less maintenance than it does now.
Which means that legacy Exchange admins will be the first to get their pink slip, if the company wants to downsize.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Thanks to automation, my clients can do a heck of a lot more on their own without my help. Repetitive tasks like patching, virus definition updating, and user maintenance can be performed without my assistance.
So, I must be out of a job right? Wrong - new technologies don't install themselves. Take, for example, wireless networks - when the technologies became available, I got a call from every single client to install some sort of wireless network. Then I got calls to move from WEP to WPA.
One of my clients was deploying so many new technologies that they decided they needed to hire me full time.
Sure, repetitve stuff will get easer - everyone here should be thankful this is true.
-ted
Oh my god the sky is falling, lets outlaw improvements in IT technology since it takes jobs away and shifts them overseas (to where the hardware is manufactured).
Remember,democracy never lasts long.It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. John Adams (1814)
The Market Rate is determined by the Market, hence the name. If enough people are willing and able to do the job at minimum wage to fill all of the open positions, then minimum wage is the market rate for that job. If the worker wants more than that, the worker is desiring more than the market rate. He/She may have been paid more for the same job, and may feel that it isn't worth it to do the job at minimum wage, but that wouldn't change the market rate in this instance.
Of course, corporations do not want to pay more than necessary for a worker. Excess wages decrease profit, and lead to lower stock values.
People will be freed to work on other problems or do work in other areas. This is a very good thing.
This always happens with the advancement of technology. The invention of the plow allows people to do other things besides grow/hunt for food. Civilization advances.
This even happens when work is outsourced. It frees up labor to do something else.
Are there pains in transition? Of course. But people need to stop looking at economics as a zero-sum game.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I keep telling my wife I need experience at being a porn star. Nothing spells job security like adding porn star to your resume.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
As much as I like Gartner, this seems optimistic.
:)
Consider the fact that systems, despite standardization & centralization, seem to continue getting more *complex*. It's the exponentially incresing complexity curve that drives IT staffing. Stuff breaks more often. Upgrades happen more often. Patches are needed more often.
Who's going to maintain the systems that maintain the systems?
Yes, IT people will need to perform at a higher level - not just "fix my printer" but "improve our business process."
(hmm, I could write a book on this if I had time.
Why hasn't anyone predicted the downfall of preemptive journalism? We've pretty much predicted the end of everything else
I smell a rat.....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yea right. This sounds like it applies to less than 5% of the companies in the US. The company I am an IT contractor at is still running Windows 95 on half of the computers. Do you know how many tech support calls we get every day? New technologies cost money and not that many companies are willing to spend much now. The last 3-4 years have been hard, but it looks like things are going to get better this year.
I'm going to wait until Netcraft confirms this.
What always irks me whenever efficiency gains are made is that they almost never benefit the workers themselves. Instead of keeping the same amount of workers but reduce their load, give them more time off, etc., we fire half of them and the rest keep the old workload.
Efficiency gains almost never translate into quality of life gains, except perhaps for the CEOs, when they exercise their stock options after they are finished making things 'efficient'.
Seriously, folks, doesn't anyone remember the promises of the four-day work week because of the 'efficiency' of computers and automation? It never works that way. There is no reason for all of these job to 'vanish' except that it profits shareholders to lower the payroll costs rather than benefit their own staff. And sorry, but that's inherently unfair.
iopha
Well, this trend is well under way. I work for a FTTH provider, we initially estimated that we would need between 5 and 10 engineers for every 1000 customers we add to our network to perform adds moves changes for customers. I replaced those 35-70 engineers with a perl program and 5 engineers (our network has 7000 customers). All of our provisioning is completely automated, adding a new customer takes less than 2 minutes of engineer time as opposed to 30-45 minutes previously. changing or adding services generally requires no engineer time, as our customers can self provision over the web.
10-20 years from now, it will take 50% or less of the operations staff that it takes today to manage machines... I can buy that. I look at the history.
In the 50s-60s we had entire departments of large corporations supporting one machine (mainframe).
In the 70s-80s we had entire departments of large corporations supporting several machines (minis).
In the 90s-00s we have entire departments of large corporations supporting hundreds of machines (micros).
So, if we project forward, I certainly see what they're saying, but what happens when I can support 1000 machines at a time on my own the way I do about 1/10th of the support work for those thousand today, but my company needs 10s or even 100s of thousands of machines? Answer: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A lot of you are missing the point - by operations they mean people who don't know anything about the business side of things. They only know how to build a server and install vendor's or in-house software. Thanks to automation (scripted and imaged installed), companies don't need to have droves of installers, troubleshooters, tape swappers and hardware builders)
Need a server built? Pop a card into a blade system (HP) that can hold more than a dozen of them, plug into the network, image it and you are done. One of them is not behaving right because of corrupt software? Re-image it in 20 mins. HW problems? Send card back to manufacturer or throw it out.
Majority of IT people 20 years from now will need to understand company's processes, business logic and dataflow. Knowing what will be affected by the latest software upgrade will be more important than knowing how to install it. Does the new patch modify the database? Was its schema or stored procedured and functions affected? What's the bottom line? Are calculations now incorrect and will it impact your company's billing or payment cycle? Will you lose clients', patients' or customer's history records by changing the system? Future admins, (today's architects) will need to know all of this.
The best and most recent catastrophic example of failure that resulted (or helped) in a sale of the company is the Local Number Portability upgrade at AT&T Wireless. If you have time, look it up.
There are still stationary engineers. There are still millwrights. Not a lot of them, though. It's an skilled blue-collar job, often unionized, with a formal apprenticeship. There are exams and certificates.
Being a system administrator is, fundamentally, the same kind of thing, with technology a century newer.
They mean to render my A+ certification even more useless? NOOOOOOOO!
Isn't this just the natural order of things? If you're not "strong" enough to adapt and survive, well, you will die off. Sounds horrible, but if you look at it from the bigger picture of man kind, this is how man is evolving. Needing less physical strength and more mental strength.
Outsource and automate, downsize and automate, automate and automate, do as you will. We'll all be padding our retirement checks in 2036.
"Wow. You say that *nix/*sd box has been up since 2010 but you lost the manual. My grandkids thank you."
I'm a college student, and I go to class four days a week. When I was in the undergrad program at a different university, most of my classes were half-empty on Friday at noon and two-thirds empty on Friday at 3pm; now my department doesn't even bother scheduling anything on Fridays. Sure, the library is open Friday-Saturday-Sunday and the computer-labs are open Friday-Saturday, but a full-time student could go to school just four days a week. He can telecommute (take web classes?), too.
5-day-a-week jobs are so 20th-century...
I have a question:
I'm a plain old software engineer. I work in product development, and I do a large variety of "hardcore" programming stuff: C++, SQL, TCP, embedded C, etc, etc.
So here's my question: Should I be worried when people talk about a "decline in IT"? Am I really in "IT" like the guy in our company who goes around and helps people with their Outlook problems, and the guy who does our network admin, and the guy who writes all those crystal reports for the people in marketing?
Or am I somehow in a special category because I truly know the guts of things?
because I can't stand the other half of our division.
If you played your cards right (didn't inhale, don't have a record with the judicial system, etc.), you can apply for the many jobs here at Washington, DC. With Bush getting a second term, defense spending is high, and homeland security spending is high, all areas needing IT personnel.
Linux at home
I've often thought that I would wind up being ousted from IT before I reach retirement age. The factory workers were getting decent pay after WW II through about the late 60s/early 70s. Then their jobs got killed off and their pay dropped off considerably. Believe it or not, there was a time when people actually WANTED to be factory workers in order to improve their lives. Same thing with IT. We're really data custodians.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"'Similarly, standardization of IT infrastructure, applications and processes will lead to productivity improvements and a major shift in skill needs', she said."
Uh, you want fries with that?
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those who forget the past are doomed
Well let's see. Service jobs. Vending machines.
"Or the reams and reams of paper used in what was supposed to be the "paperless office" of the future."
That wasn't because of the computer, but because printing technology got better.
Au contraire! I wasn't making fun of anything. When I see somebody who's willing to give an accurate description of their job, I say to myself there's somebody who has his proverbial shit together as far as his skills go, and would probably make a pretty good hire.
Breakfast served all day!
"Like most of the Gartner stuff, it's sort of an Utopian state -- we're certainly not there yet," said Stevan Lewis, director of enterprise planning for BMO Financial Group.
Yeah, what utopian state is that Stevan? When you won't have to deal with us pesky delta types who drive the economy? And by the way, try spelling your first name like a real Steve, asshole.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
1- See what everyone else has been seeing for years.
2- "Document" it in sesquepedalian style. Make up a few new 'techno' words while you're at it, to add cachet.
3- Publish through guerilla marketing by giving abstract style releases couched in tabloid journalism style: "Two Headed Babies to Steal all IT Jobs in US by 2010. President to mobilize Marines.."
4- Charge frightened IT wonks and PHBs tons of $$ to see the entire document, which can be summarized in two words: "Well, Duh !"
5- Profit !!!!
if you think that AI is going to be good enough to have computers acting as soldiers any time soon then you either have a really unrealistic view of AI develop or you have an incredibly disrespect for what it takes to be a soldier. Added to that no one is going to trust intelligent robots with guns for a very long time.
And within 100 minutes of that comment, we have this story: Military Robots Get Machine Guns. All right. Who's the wise guy?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Soon the machines will have all the jobs and humans will be starving to death. Hell, one day, even the /. trolling will be done by robots... By the way, I'd like to share a revelation that I've had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. Then, the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you're a plague, and we are the cure.
if we're discussing 20-year off absurd futuristic claims,
/. automate meta-moderation? and what kind of system would be capable of this?
in 2024 will
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
We have a chain of supermarkets called "Pak'n'Save", consistently the cheapest supermarket year after year. They suffer somewhat from the "5 cents off the one [flavour] they actually stock", and they're self-bagging too. :#), they pay their cashiers more than some of the 'classier' supermarkets.
But as far as I'm aware (having chatted with a few cute checkout girls over the years
GENERAL PUBLIC SIGNATURE (GPS) Any replies (derivatives) of this post must also use the GPS
as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades
Half the IT jobs in the US are already gone! Or are they saying half of what is left is going. Well, there goes my hope of a second dot.com bubble. Darn!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Who's going to create these new fangled technologies.
I've used them, and they came through for me, believe it or not. Sure, I could have gone out, spent a day doing research, coming up with points to back up my assertions, blah blah blah. I spent a half hour reading and hour talking to an analyst, and I was ready to roll. I had the top two products, relative pros and cons of each, and was able to assign my own weighting to them based on appropriateness to our environment.
Now, the REAL reason Gartner and their ilk exist. In big companies, NO ONE wants to take responsibility. The last thing you want is the finger of blame pointing at you for making The Wrong Choice. With Gartner, you have a ready-made excuse for management when shit meets fan. "We followed industry best practices in making our decision! Just look at the Gartner report!"
Now, as for stock analysts.. The GOOD ones, which not all are, are aware of industry trends, what's going on in a company, who their customers are, how those customers are doing, what this means to revenues, who their suppliers are, whether there are any problems there, etc. You don't have to be an analyst to say "Krispy Kreme is boned in the short term." Where analysts some in is figuring out how boned, for how long they're boned, and whether they'll recover from the boning.
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You say Linux is so efficient 1 box can handle the load of multiple Windows boxes. If that is truly the case Linux will mean fewer jobs in IT because there will be even less to manage.
Maybe it's time to push Windows ME for the datacenter. Let's create some jobs.
They call themselves "researchers". I doubt they know the meaning of this word. :0) One of those Gartner "researches" once came over presenting his "research". The slices on his pie charts showing market share distribution summed up to 108%, at which point he was laughed at and folks started leaving the conference room. I sometimes envy these fellas. They pull numbers out of their asses and sell them for big bucks to large corporations without even a trace of responsibility or accountability. They don't even specify the margin of error of their predictions. I guess that would be too much of a liability.
Since Gartner sells high level corporate consulting to the very IT companies that make up the IT industry that Gartner studies...doesn't that make Gartner a biased source?
Consider that Gartner says:
"Outsourcing is an unstoppoble fact"
and sells how to manuals on
"How to manage outsourcing"
hey, i just had a hellish 13 hour shift of recovering a failed hard drive. what would the robot who depended on that drive do about it? it would fail! yeah, IT may require less people as the technology improves, but never no people!
No one knows even what Gartner REALLY said! Yes, RTFA and get more mislead. After scouring Gartner.com, even finding the cited paper is impossible. What was Gartner's methodology? Who is doing the research?
HOW DID THEY GET TO THEIR CONCLUSION?
"45.3434% of all statistics are made up."
It really doesn't matter what Gartner said, its how they got there is important.
I work in A.I. creating expert systems to replace people that take more than .02 seconds to do such routine tasks as underwriting your mortgage application. The move over the last few years has been for clients to ask us to automate as much of the IT involvement as possible. It just takes them too long to get changes implemented as there aren't enough people to go do the work. Some of these applications need to change as rates fluctuate during the day, and IT response is typically not instant.
Our typical deployed system needs almost no IT interaction and lets the business users do almost everything that IT once considered sacred. Should have gotten an MBA...
Well the whole point of technology is to reduce the amount of work humans have to do. Either restrict technology or reduce jobs. Either/Or. It's such a simple piece of logic I don't know why people have debates about it.
I do not have the figures available, but for your argument to be correct, you must claim that we have had 0% (or .5% or whatever you're trying to say) productivity increase. Everybody knows that we have dramatically increased our productivity over the last fifty years and especially the last fifteen years, which is why America is the richest country (has the highest purchasing power) in the world. Oh and by the way, the price of the average home is about 10% higher than it was last year. But that doesn't take into account inflation or America's increased purchasing power during the last year.
A 100-level college economics class would have saved you the embarrassment of your post, and me the time to correct it.
Real wage growth is an economic term, but it does not take into account the entire picture (i.e. purchasing power), only inflation. In addition, the original poster's information is innacurate. I apologize for the mistake in my post.
and/or we are going to need consumers for the output of all those robotic / nanotech assembly lines. Most automated assembly systems need a certain minimum output volume to work economically. Perhaps the people who aren't capable of acquiring academic skills will suffice.
and/or we run out of oil, we discover that the alternatives to oil never got funded to the usable point, and dumb or smart, we all go into the shitter together and someday, our bodies become the cheap fossil fuel oil for the next intelligent species a few megayears from now. A scenario for those who like happy endings.
Tech Public Policy stuff
There was talk of super-dooper computer languages that would put programmers out of work in the late 80's...and talk of self-repairing hardware...ald talk of management systems that would burp the baby.
Seems that there are more and more people in the data center these days, and the people are higher paid.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
Yeah, like this paragraph from TFA makes any sort of fucking sense what-so-ever!
I call BullShit-Bingo!!
Lets hear from at least a clueful source. The prediction must be spiced with a heavy amount of FUD based on a wetdream of a sudden switch of most of Business America to Apples. I am not saying IT in the USA has been all beer and giggles or will be improving soon, but Microsoft and Linux both require lots of care and feeding by the nerd class. Vested interests in both will keep the userbase filled with tech issues well into the next century.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
were already gone.
partly outsourced - partly frozen.
When will u guys stop listening to bullshit consultants such as Andersen Fags and this Gartner that only comes with crap.
Maybe its time to shoot financial consultants and see your economy move forward once again.
Many people comment how these things are good in the long run and for the economy are correct from a global perspective but not at the level of the individual.
It is the privilege of the young to be able to adapt. They start from scratch, have a high ability to learn and expect little at the beginning but to be able to leverage their skills in the middle to long term.
Few people realize that adapting often means starting from scratch again. When you have a home loan and a family this may not be an option *at all* or at least a very damaging one.
The vast majority of older but still active people have adapted to a new situation when they were younger and are now at the phase when they expect the leveraging to occur. If it doesn't it truly sucks because they are by nature slighly less able to learn than younger people and also far more commited down the path of life.
The only way to avoid this is to choose a path/career where adaptation to a new situation is the norm, but it is difficult to maintain as it is quite tiring, or to choose a career that is by nature pretty much unchanging irrespective of the field of application such as management or accountancy. Not everyone can be a manager though, especially a good one.
It looks like we'll be worse off than shop assistants and waiters soon.
In other words, people need shop assistants and waiters more than they need help desk people, and so they're willing to pay more for them.
If they need it more, they pay more for it and in the end they get more of it. That's economics.
Because there will always be Bob, that guy who works down the hall in marketing. You know, the one who always opens up all of the attachments even if you just told him 30 seconds ago not to, the guy who somehow manages to infect a box with dozens of viruses and spyware programs just by being in the same room as his computer, the guy who lets his kids stick crayons and brussel sprouts into every open slot and port in his computer. We hate him, and his legion of similarly-skilled friends, but he'll keep us gainfully employed for life.
I can't believe Piggly Wiggly is still around. I remember it as a kid. That's like Bob's Big Boy. I know of one Big Boy. Bismarck, North Dakota, and I've not been there in years.
-- No sig for you!
The more competition there is is for a
minimum wage McDees job. Scince the United
States requires you to pay for everything, except
breathe (well, in some cases that too), things
might turn very ugly-and bloody-if this
trend continues.
What are you comparing against?
Yesterday?
Lets have some historic vision here please, cast your mind back to 1900.
People (as always) had to compete to get their own jobs, the ones that got them did not have any rights, the ones that did not did not have a safety net of any kind.
I wish to know which rosy era of human history are you longing for during which the workplace was not a competitive environment (maybe Stalinist USSR, but I pretty much doubt it, for sure they bitched about influence and privileges since money was of no concern).
Your whining about prices is ludicrous, now more than ever basic goods are cheaps and disposable income is growing. People are not starving on the street in many countries (even some not too wealthy), people are living longer and healtier lifes in general (in spite of the masochistic urges or smokers and overeaters).
I frankly don't know in which planet you are living, I can attribute your posting to trolling, bad luck (hey, your world may look like what you are describing) or you live in Sudan, in which case I do apologize for my comments above.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Item: continuing advancement in technology eventually tends to make all jobs obsolete, with the actual work being focused on a smaller and smaller technological priesthood. Manufacturing, for example, is largely being automated with the remaining staff being caretakers for robotic production lines. Now, IT is gradually becoming more streamlined with the majority of work being able to be done by smaller and smaller teams.
WHY THIS IS BAD:
It's a social catastrophe. As we move towards a society in which only a few people are needed to work, those few people aren't going to want to support all the rest with their taxes. The result isn't going to be a techno-utopia in which everyone enjoys lives of education and leisure -- it'll be a hell in which the vast majority of people are dirt-poor and a few are very rich.
The result of this is predictable, because it's happened before, in France a couple of hundred years ago (though for different reasons, the overall effect was the same). If you recall, people like Marie Antoinette said (of her starving countrymen) "let them eat cake" -- and they cut off her head. Every situation in which all the wealth is in the hands of a few and the majority is unhappy results in rebellion and the removal of the few.
At some point in this (and every other) country, we're going to reach a point where we're going to have to make a choice. We will either deliberately introduce some inefficiency into the system to let everybody get a job and be happy, or we'll continue our current path and a violent, bloody revolution will do it for us.
Believe it.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
... are not hardware related.
And hardware is not troubleshooted, you just replace full units (i.e. disk, board or even the full computer). Tasks that with good hardware require very few people.
Where I work we have 2 guys on call OOO for hardware issues.
We have an army of people on call for software problems, distributed all around the wolrd, including Mumbai...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
note to self: must contact virus writers tell them to hurry up deployment.
signed,
commissioner for strategic exploitation of IT.
Have you worked with Sun's cluster software (v3.x)?
If you haven,t you should try.
A computer goes down? No problem, all the services move to another machine (the services are balanced accross as many machines as you want).
A network card died? No biggie, the traffic is re-routed using the redundant network cards.
A disk died? No problem, we swap it tomorrow, it is mirrored locally and replicated to a disaster facility in real time.
And that is only clusters. Sun's concept of domains and Virtual computers is that taken to the next level (pretty much like iBM machines running virutal Linux machines).
ANd then you have Google.
The era of the hardwar monkey is comming to an end, it will become a janotorial work where you only need to swap components flashing red without necessarily knowing what you are doing....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If IT does their job well, the monkey jobs in the IT industry will/should become obsolete.
However, this does not mean skilled IT jobs will decrease in number. Quite on the contrary. The new automated backoffices will need MORE IT staff to keep it running smoothly.
IE: Replace 3 monkeys by 1 IT professional.
(For example: Replace 3 monkeys running back and forth with CD's to install software with one IT professional that installs stuff remotely or creates new software that runs from the intranet.)
What we need to do is put our heads together and make programs that replace middle/upper management jobs. Imagine how much money a company can save without all the Management positions with there High paying salary and with these programs there wont be Ego trying to advanced they just work to do there job well. just imagine iCEO for Mac, with its wonderful interface managing you company that is completely automated, combined with iMarketing. Heck there wont be any jobs left. Hmmm, If no one has a job do we all starve to death because we have no money to buy food and services that we need to live at the same time it is being products more cheaply and efficiently then ever before.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They don't have a trace of responsibility or accountability, yet people walked out of the room when a "researcher" did something stupid?
Hrm. People vote with their dollars too you know.
I worked in the analyst business for 5 years. No need to be envious; it's not as easy as it looks. I avoided the "market share" research game mostly for the reasons you mention and focused on underlying technology and product developments, but now as a consumer trying to build a software asset and a business that's going to be around 15+ years, market share is probably the figure I'm more curious about than some of the more easily objectively-defined criteria that have higher degrees of certainty.
Only a fool thinks he could predict the future but only a fool tries not to.
Paying for help in figuring out "what's going on out there?" is not necessarily stupid. I'm a bit stingy and the value-add is still too low for my current corporate scenario, but having watched the sausage being made, I can still conceive of eating it at some point.
--LP
I don't mean to "split hairs" but I think your analysis misses something that is quite real to me based on my experience and I think it leads you to a false conclusion that "code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill in the [10-40 year] future.". (I say 10-40 since that's the context in which you are giving advice.)
Have you ever developed new software products or services for a young and growing company whose business depends on those products? I don't think you possibly could have, and still say that code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill. If writing code is so easy, why do you think Microsoft, arguably such a huge success, places such a premium on hiring the smartest people it can find?
Your argument about the value of science and math skills I totally agree with. But in the classic world there is a realm of expertise in between science and cheap, cheap construction... it's called "engineering". And while there's debate about the appropriateness of the term software engineering, I'd argue that there's a pretty big gap between "IT field work" and PhD-level coding for which there is going to be a willingness to pay for non-cheap labor for the discernable future.
--LP
It's reverting back to the time before the net boom and bust. I think in 90's we had an explosion of half-skilled IT workers with no real training or abilities. Before the boom (adn the rise of the PC) most IT workers were a small select few of proffesionals. I think the shift is a good one- it keeps idiots out of my work place.
Last job I had I had been working with two kids out of college. Neither had a lick of programming knowledge, nor of any hardware knowledge. How they passed the classes is beyound me. They wanted to work on web design. They hadn't any graphical design skills, nor taking any courses in graphical design. It seems like they wanted the easy way out to get a "cool high paying job". They were fired within a month. They thought they could just ask everyone else how to code such and such a thing, or if they asked nicely someone else would do it for them. Digusting.
Call me bitter, but I got into this job because I love it. I don't understand the people that do it for any other reason. And working with people who don't love it is just frustrating. So, I see this as being a good shift- one that will move things back in the *proper* direction of IT. We are not just PC mechinics. We are designers, coders, engineers, mathmaticians and scientists.
click me
Too many people,
TOO MUCH
TOO MANY
It will all end in tears and BLOOD !!!
As the above poster has guessed, the real reason that 50% of IT jobs will go away over the next decade is US policy that allows (and encourages) abuse of H1-B workers. Since I wasn't able to complete with slave labor, I am now selling insurance for a living. Among my hottest-selling items is a simplified inexpensive health policy for H1-B workers who arrive in this country and find that the shop charges very high rates for health insurance -- if it is offered at all.
I think that 50% is a low estimate. Programming will be a minimum-wage McJob by the end of this decade.
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Unfortunately, something not considered is the cumulative affect of new technologies on the workforce. In the larger scheme of things, while a robot can do the work of 10 men it requires 2 men to maintain it and 20 men to build it.
Thus, *more* jobs are created as a result of technology.
In the area of IT specifically, new technologies will require new workforces to imagine and build them. Another new segment will include those who train customers on how to use them, and yet another new segment will be the workers who embrace them.
While the US certainly has economic issues, I'm not convinced in the long haul that jobs are going to be the crux of the problem. Unemployment has remained fairly steady, and wages have actually kept pace with inflation fairly well. The value of our dollar is the ultimate deciding factor, if we fall signficantly more in relation to other currency there will need to be a resurgance in the American manufacturing industry.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Maybe thats why I am an ex-Systems Admin. I now make insulated wire in the local wire factory. Kinda funny as an extrusion operator working overtime I make more than I did as a systems admin, have fewer headaches and make more money. I even make more money than most of the managers.
Stupid me I want to go back to running computers.
The key to not being unemployed would be to actually learn how to do real stuff rather than stagnate. Somebody that's actively into what they do is going to be fine as always, further trimming of the wankers, frauds and recent converts to Linux from Windows is Ok with me.
I think this is very relevant to the discussions over a question asked yesterday. The original question was whether status of your school was important, but quickly got off topic to whether or not you need a degree.
THIS is why you need a degree. Computer scientists are at no risk of losing their jobs... the people with monkey jobs are at risk.
It's because business finds it much more convenient to unfairly require employees to compete constantly for their own jobs.
They will be increasingly required to compete with H1-B workers who will put up with illegal working conditions because they have no recourse. The H1-B's come in because businesses lobby (and bribe) their congresscritters to provide more workers because "there aren't enough programmers", and the domestic programmer pool shrinks because domestic workers don't want to work 18-hour days for $36k a year. I still occasionally teach programming classes (but I now sell insurance for a living; I'd rather write software, but I can't afford to), and I advise all of my students to find something else for a career, because programming will be a minimum-wage pursuit by the end of this decade.
Times change, and we will simply have to find something to do for a living that can't (or won't) be outsourced.
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That said, you need new people to do new things in addition to the things you were expected to be doing 10 year ago.
What the analysts cannot account for (name a model) is how many new services and applications will need to be cared for in the future.
Did anyone 10 years ago see instant messaging as something that might be a corporate requirement today? Blogs? Web services? NAS? VoIP? BGP? DR/BC? IDS? Firewalls? etc...
Eventually, these applications might make it to the point where you can treat them like an appliance you plug in, configure and forget. Yeah, right. If only...
What this analyst assumes for the future of losing all these IT workers to improvements in technology is that there won't be new applications and services that require painful hand holding... until the market forces (if large enough) warrant a new appliance approach.
http://fudge.org
When Gartner predicts that one half of the IT jobs will disappear, how reliable can they be? They are reasoning with incomplete data, IMHO. Four years ago, they predicted massive losses due to the Y2K problem. Countries like Italy and Japan without benefit of the predicition came through without harm, even though they did low-magnitude preparations for Y2k. (Come to think of it, did Gartner get the start of the millenium correct?) So, instead of debating the consequences, let's figure out whether the premises are right first.
...at least where I've worked. An admin who can recreate a lost device file, write efficent awk/perl/korn scripts, hack some C on occasion, and properly utilize/capitalize on network connectivity is something that I've never seen except in myself.
I hate to sound pretentious, but I've seen/removed an awful lot of ugly hacks (but yes, I've been guilty of a few myself in retrospect).
But maybe hiring practices are just bad.
...is for western civilization to guarantee food, clothing, and shelter (and possibly health care) to all of our citizens/residents.
We must continue to encourage upward mobility, while limiting the extent that people can fail. While an individual may not be useful to society in the present, the same person could be invaluable 20 years in the future. A truly conservative view is to protect human capital when possible.
Again and Again
Someone SHOOT the Gartners
they are the crappiest set of baffoons ever to be given a voice.
"An intelectual - a person who has been educated beyond their intelligence."
Slow, booming female voice: "Place your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) on the belt."
Slow, booming female voice: "Please place your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) on the belt."
Slow, booming female voice: "Please make sure that your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) is on the belt."
Slow, booming female voice: "Please call the attendant to clear your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) from the scanning area."
Right. It's gonna take some work, at least in my local Stop & Grope.
I think that's because if you're truly good at problem solving and have the learned the tricks of managing technical operations, you're probably not content to stay an admin. "Promoted to the point of incompentence", and all that. Me, I got sick of users and management, and started a business. So now, I'm attempting to become competent at sales, finance and sleep management. Ah, folly. Looked at sideways, it is more fun.
I forget what 8 was for.
The claim is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Geeks fed up with low staffing levels and obscene workloads will bring about the innovative improvements which will result in their layoffs. I say we remain content with our misery, in order that our happiness may perdure. ;-)
I don't know about 50% of it jobs being lost, but I do think that the type of IT jobs will shift.
In many arenas, but not all, software sales will plumit. We have already seen this. How many people do you know with a pirated copy of windows or any other applications? Open source has become somewhat of a revelotion. Linux is the only "distribution" which is increasing its market share percentage. Companies will continue to find that open source software will help them develop their applications quicker, efficiently, and cheaper.
With all of this software sales plumitting, there will be an increasing need to support these software solutions and using the software to develop projects. Services such as animation, security, system administrators, on call administrators, repairmen, developers and many other IT service professions will Thrive and increase in need.
databases and reference websites will NEVER replace the need for service professions. They will definitely increase the prodeuctivity, but they cannot replace the profession.
There's no place like ~/
what happens when I can support 1000 machines at a time on my own
Those 1000 machines will be in your shoe.
Da Blog
Isn't this just the natural order of things? If you're not "strong" enough to adapt and survive, well, you will die off. Sounds horrible, but if you look at it from the bigger picture of man kind, this is how man is evolving.
No, that's animals. Raw, basic natural selection is what you are describing. And in any case, it is not always true that descent through modification selects through greatest competition - there are many examples of symbiosis and altruism proving beneficial.
But classic natural selection does not apply to homo sapiens, and has not for a long time. You see, we invented Culture, and the fact that successful human societies care for their sick, their old, their enfeebled, and their disadvantages is why we have risen to the top of the food chain.
Da Blog
Anyone who is even a bit familiar with old-school sci-fi is aware of the old dreams of robots doing human's work for them, humans resting and living at ease with their robot servants.
Of course, with corporations generally kicking humanities collective ass, we can now see that the real way it is tending to go is that robots will do humanity's work for the few people who can claim ownership of the robots while the rest of the world suffers grinding poverty.
Robots will certainly do our work for us - more and more as time passes. The question then is how to distribute the wealth _they_ produce.
One answer is to mandate that any time a human is fired and replaced with a robot that the human be given a pension in return. While it's a nice dream, I don't see this being implementable.
Another is that human ingenuity will produce new job types from the ether. This would eventually result in everyone being in a service industry to the super-super rich.
Perhaps as progress marches forward everyone will become invested in the stock market, and every company will pay dividends. As robots take over labor the only 'job' will be investment/money management. Of course, it would seem in the future that expert systems would eventually take over even that...
Capitalism transitions to Communism, and the government just gives people stuff. To keep people occupied all endevors will begin to take on an Open-Source flavor.
Or... Mystery Option 'C'!
Whadya think? Will we come to wealth distribution before the vanishing middle class drives violent revolution?
From "She", by H. Rider Haggard
Tech Public Policy stuff
Right on! I feel the same way at my work. I work at a small company and you can definitely tell who is pulling their weight and who isn't. Ever since reading Ayn Rand I have to agree with what she says about the "moochers". There are too many people in this world that only do the bare minimum amount of work in order to keep from being fired. If you're one of those people you can expect to always be one inch away from losing your job. I figure the best approach is to distance myself from all the losers by excelling at what I do and let everyone else try to catch up. If you take this type of attitude and try to do your job to the best of your ability, others will notice and I predict that you'll be more likely to keep your job. Not only that, you will keep your skillset top notch and even if you end up getting laid off for some unpredictable reason (company goes out of business, etc), you'll be able to find another job easier.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
"learn a trade" was the harsh but true 'department' this headline came through. That's what I did at the dot com bust. I became a cop. I'd venture that most IT professionals alwasy wanted to be a cop, so there you go. Be a cop.
OJ
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
At some point, people will say, screw all this "adapt and change and run around around on your hands with one of your legs up your rear to beg for work", and instead, they will become terrorists. If you are an unemployed engineer, why not try and design some uber weapon of mass destruction. They fired YOU from your cushy job in the Sears Tower and sent you packing off to India? Knock the thing down!
This is my sig.
And I'm not a man, though I may be honest. ;-)
I wanted to be a brick layer, but went with IT instead. Sometimes I wonder.......
Farming has moved to migrant (foreign workers), because the Mississipi Valley can't be uploaded to Mexico. Manufacturing has moved to China because marketing-approved CAD/CAM designs *can* be uploaded to China. There are still plenty of people in these loops, all working the kind of "overtime", for puny fractions of the retail price that would make EA, Scrooge, and Czar Nicholas green with envy.
--
make install -not war
What could possibly more horrible than FORCING people to work to live, when it's not necessary? I'd rather 95% of the population rot in front of a TV than force them to do busy-work that a robot could do better. When you force people to choose between labour and certain death, that's slavery. When a society requires that labour to function (as ours still does), it's an acceptable evil. When the society no longer requires labour, it's utterly abominable to still compell it.
"I'd venture that most IT professionals alwasy wanted to be a cop, so there you go. Be a cop." sorry, no.
With remarkable perspicacity for Slashodot, you pointed out:
...
"Wake up. Jobs don't magically appear when needed. A large number of you are gonna be screwed when automation and outsourcing leaves you in your 40s and 50s without a job. You'd better pray social security's still around then, but that's kind of a slim hope.
Oh no, you're saying, if you're smart you'll find a way to adapt. Not necessarily. When 100,000 jobs become 10,000, maybe 10,000 people are going to manage to get by, but what about the other 90,000? "Finding a niche" doesn't always work, and a lot of very smart people can lose out just through chance."
You're addressing a bunch of people on Slashdot, and this is the thing I find most tiresome about this place. It's like an expensive university. You have a bunch of reasonably bright, incredibly priveleged, sheltered people in one place, and they're convinced that because they're OK, the world is just, and that anyone who isn't happy doesn't really deserve it.
It's the same illusion that sells a lot of religion & low-grade self-help. Here's the gist: Don't worry that you don't deserve what you've got. Everyone deserves what they get. Don't trouble yourself about those people who don't want to be happy (or eat, or have clean drinking water, or a place to live.)
Hilariously, lots of the people you're talking to still think they're gonna be IPO millionaires. If they know it isn't happening right away, it'll happen soon because prosperity is just around the corner. Wired magazine is a good example of this sort of viewpoint. They still proclaim the "new economy" which reminds me exactly how seriously to take them.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.