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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."
Gartner, whose wrong on so many other fronts, is going to get this right?
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
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.
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.
How has farming moved towards higher efficiency? Have they cut the administrations costs of the subsidies and corporate welfare?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
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
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.
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.
It means that instead of having 100 people pick potatos you have 3 drive massive machines that auto-pick the same spuds. 100 is more than 3. 3 is less than 100.
See?
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. . .
This is pretty scary; since it's likely that in our lifetimes computers+robots will be better than Humans in _most_ jobs including
- all military jobs (fighter pilot, tank driver, battlefiled strategy
- most construction jobs (welding on bridges & highrises; home building, etc)
- all manufacturing jobs (cars, chips, etc)
- most desk-based service jobs (phone answering, 1st level customer support via voice recognition & support lookup tables)
- many retail jobs (self service checkouts are becommingn common; we have gas stations with zero attendants here, etc)
- drug design and testing -- computers can match gene databases, simulate protien folding, run stastics, analyze samples, etc better than we
and as soon as a computer becomes a better programmer than a person, the gap will speed up very quicklyI wouldn't be surprised if there are simply no jobs to go around.
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/
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 $50/hr removing spyware. Duh.
If the technology or cheaper labor exists, shouldn't businesses make use of them - just as the music industry should make use of new technology and not depend on legislation to save a dying business model?
Windows vs. Linux or Mac on the desktop:
Don't use Window's and massively decrease workload and nessecarry staffing for IT.
Stick with M$ 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.
Yeah, but you'll still have to have someone to fix the massive auto-pickers, since it is inevitable that it will break down eventualy. Same thing in IT. Hard drives will fail, people will fail to understand that their computer won't turn on because the power cord isn't plugged in.
stuff
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
There might be something unhealthy in too much automation. Remember the old episodes of Jetsons when George comes home complaining of buttons he pressed all day? We think it's funny, and even longed after a dream job like that, farfetched as it may have been. Well guess what many of us are doing nowadays? I wouldn't exactly call myself healthy. I press buttons all day, and still become dead tired by the time I get home. If we're heading further down in that direction I shudder to think what might happen to our society.
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 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.
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
Maybe 97 people to maintain all the machines in Idaho...
Of course you have to have people that design, market, insure, sell/distribute, repair, etc. And after a few years your Spud Picker 1000 is obsolete and you need to get a Spud Picker 2000. That's the shift in the industrialized world. Moving from a large amount of unskilled labor to a small amount of skilled labor.
And it seems to work because of free markets and capitalism allows for those designers, marketers, insurers, etc to upgrade and expand their customer base quite frequently.
What I'm trying to lead to here is that if you have a bunch of marginally skilled IT people that you're replacing, it's with a handful of highly skilled people somewhere in the system. Someone has to build/design/market this new easier to maintain, scalable, reliable, and whatever equipment.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Good example. Instead of paying an employee, the company expects the customer to do the work for free.
Someone else pays for it, company pockets the difference, employee loses their job. Same shit, different day.
Hooray for business.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I don't really see this happening all that fast. I go through the checkout, and the put my groceries in the bag for me and everything. Why would I go do this myself, when someone else can do it for me?
Also, I but a lot of fresh items, like fruits, vegetables and breads, and I don't want to have to write down all the codes when someone else can do it for me.
Finally, I would rather hit on a cute checkout girl then a computer
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are simply no jobs to go around.
I don't know that jobs will be eliminated, but they may change. When I first got into IT in the late 1970s, you needed a shift of about 20 people just to run a mainframe. People to monitor the console, people to mount the tapes, people to run the printers, etc. Eventually most of those jobs were eliminated, i.e. automated tape libraries replaced tape handlers, online archival systems largely replaced the need to print massive reports, and automation software determined what jobs to run when and checked for error conditions. Everybody thought that was the end of having a career in IT.
But that was back in the '80s, before the tech boom of the '90s. True, there weren't as many jobs running mainframes, but plenty of new jobs opened up such as LAN and Unix admins, network techs, security specialists, etc. Instead of jobs being eliminated, suddenly there were more jobs than there were people to fill them.
If you're just going to sit on your ass and expect make a career out of what you're doing now, then you'll probably be out of a job eventually (ask any COBOL programmer or tape handler from the '80s). But if you keep learning new skills as technology evolves, you'll probably always have a job. When I first moved from mainframes to Unix in the early '90s, Unix systems were fairly primitive and required a lot of massaging. Now that they've evolved to the point where they've acquired nearly mainframe like reliability, they need less admins to support, but on the other hand you have new ancillary technologies like SAN's that also require specialized knowledge to manage. These days, I spend more time on SAN management than I do on Unix administration proper.
I've been through this before. Remember, even if they replace the administrator with management automation, someone has to admin the management automation too. Make sure that someone is you.
(If you identify yourself as "in the IT field" and take exception to that, go ahead and reply - I swear upon my life that I couldn't care.)
Fields like scientific computing (simulations, serious number crunching, clusters), control systems (missle guidance, HVAC systems (for complicated stuff, not your apartment building), flight controls, engine controls), anything biochem or bioinformatics, and PhD level stuff in software engineering (new UI paradigms (I opine that "paradigm" is the appropriate word when talking about software engineering), interface designs, ubiquitous computing, etc.) is NOT what is typically referred to as the "IT field".
It's roughly the line separating commercial software and corporate tech support from R&D science. If you want to do the IT field work, give my regards to your fellow 3rd shift factory workers. If you want to work in hard science, I expect you'll have a job in the U.S. so long as you're not a total klutz.
Take as much math as you can stomach - it won't help you write code, but it'll help you design a missle guidance system. Code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill in the future. Knowing how a missle guidance system works is always going to be an expensive skill. As long as you make that distinction when you're young, you should be fine.
Are you suggesting that 10 years of what is basically unskilled (or barely skilled) labor is somehow deserving of more than $15 an hour?
YES. In fact, it's probably worth $28 an hour, plus a full benefits package, flexible scheduling and a pension. $15 an hour is chickenshit. Most companies spend more than that on plastic plants for the lobby. Being a cashier is not unskilled labor. Working anywhere for ten years deserves respect.
Someone working a register for ten years is no more entitled to the job than someone working a register for 1 year.
Oh sure they are.
You know why you don't see people making $60K/year working a register? Because anybody can do it.
You know why fatass managers make ten times that? Anyone can run a fucking meeting and shove donuts in their face.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Every year, new technology eliminates millions of jobs. This has gone on for hundreds of years. Today, we don't have fewer jobs as a result. And we don't earn less. We can buy much more with our incomes than before. All because technology eliminated unnecessary jobs, allowing the creation of new jobs, with the result of producing more goods and services with the same limited amount of labor.
Hooray for a growing economy!
Today, we don't have fewer jobs as a result.
Half of working-age adults are not employed full-time.
And we don't earn less.
Real wage growth is 0.5% since the 70s.
We can buy much more with our incomes than before.
Housing costs have increased 170% in the last two years.
All because technology eliminated unnecessary jobs, allowing the creation of new jobs, with the result of producing more goods and services with the same limited amount of labor.
In another country.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
With the exception of M$, most companies in business today make their money on support, not software licenses. For those companies, open source only changes a minor detail. No Fortune 500 company would say "gee, OS/400 is now opensource, we don't need IBM anymore". Moreso, opensource makes customization a concievable option even for small businesses... thereby opening up even more opportunity for people and companies to sell support. Practically all fud to the contrary traces back to a single, Redmond-based corporation, and it ain't Nintendo eithter.
a system where the state provides equal access to resources for all whether you are employed or not,
I agree, such a world would be a better place. A veritable human utopia, in fact. Unfortunately, I fear that human thought is presently too limited to allow such a utopia to come into existence.
Humans are not greedy by culture so much as by instinct (hoarding was necessary in our evolutionary history). It is no surprise that we have organized ourselves in such a way that the most greedy remain the most powerful. This alone is sufficient to prevent your utopia from lasting (let alone being properly formed), though creative thought will reveal other ways in which human instincts (and intellectual limitations) will defeat this goal.
*sigh*
I guess we can still dream though...
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.
Sounds like the UK and the dole. I know they arn't as easy going now, but I knew an english family about 10 years back, who lived here in South Africa while recieving the dole from the UK goverment. What with the low cost of living, and the strength of the pound, they lived quite well, and never worked.
;)
Unfortunately, it turns out that isn't a good thing. In England, the people on the dole more often than not spend it at the local pub rather than studying and improving themselves. As it turns out, in a system like that, the people who would use it to better themselves are the people you find working anyway. The rest just destroy their lives with alchohol and mcdonalds.
So yea, a MAJOR cultural change, one where the vast majority of the lower classes change their outlook on life. I just don't see 90% of the population rotting in front of the TV/bar as a good thing.
East Coast Brewers
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
Someone who has been working grocery store checkout for 10 years...has made a SERIOUS vocational error.
C'mon, do you think anything above minimum wage is warrented by someone scanning stuff all day? This is not a job for a grown adult to be doing to support themselves, much less a family. This is a job for HS kids and college students. $15/hr for an unskilled job like this is ridiculous....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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