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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?
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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
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.
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
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
"I want to choose my words carefully here, so I'm not misunderstood," he said. "They're a bunch of fucking idiots."
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.
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. . .
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".
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 $50/hr removing spyware. Duh.
Really, even if they are 100% right, this is not a bad thing. The less-capable half of sysadmins will have to find something more useful to do. I say "more useful" because, from the larger view, the view of the economy as a whole, IT people are mostly wasted. They don't produce anything (well, they do design and roll out networks, but most of their work is to keep our incredibly brittle systems from falling apart. It would be less wasteful to make less brittle systems.)
If the technology or cheaper labor exists, shouldn't businesses make use of them - just as the music industry should make use of new technology and not depend on legislation to save a dying business model?
and the ever elusive "they" were saying this way back then.
About coding (Joe user would just describe what he wanted done to the computer and wah-lah. It would program itself).
About Databases.
And about sys admin.
Eventually, if they keep yammering out this prediction, they'll may be right.
I'm not holding my breath though.
Windows vs. Linux or Mac on the desktop:
Don't use Window's and massively decrease workload and nessecarry staffing for IT.
Stick with M$ 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
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.
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.
Bring in XP box, drop CD in drive, let scripts run, automated.
:)
I couldn't help but laugh at that, but not with the meaning you intended.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
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.
Users will never get smarter. As long as their jobs exist, I'll have to keep fixing the things they get themselves into.
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
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!
(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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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Right. It's gonna take some work, at least in my local Stop & Grope.
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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