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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.
"I want to choose my words carefully here, so I'm not misunderstood," he said. "They're a bunch of fucking idiots."
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. . .
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.)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
(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.
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.
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Right. It's gonna take some work, at least in my local Stop & Grope.