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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
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.
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.
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'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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.