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Is Web 2.0 A Bigger Threat Than Outsourcing?
An anonymous reader writes "According to InformationWeek, Web 2.0 is even worse than outsourcing for IT jobs. The article talks about corporations that have laid off IT staff and replaced them with technologies like mashups and wikis that can help people get things done without involving IT. Most IT people still think Web 2.0 is an overhyped buzzword, but that might not matter: So many Web 2.0 apps are sold (or given away for free) by software-as-a-service companies like Google that people can bypass IT altogether, and IT might not even know until it's too late."
I for one welcome our new Web 2.0 underlings
-1 not first post
No, it's not. Because the Web 2.0 jobs are also being outsourced.
It doesn't matter what the industry is. Automation is always a "threat" to jobs. But, people still work in the auto industry, and people still work in IT. You can look at automation two ways. You can view it as a threat to yourself, and you will be one of the poor-attitude IT workers that get laid off. Or, you can look at automation as a tool to let you get more done, and you will be one of the self-motivated go-getters that can be a VP of Technology since you don't have to bother yourself with peon work anymore.
Exactly how are "mashups" a technology?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Bottomline: this is about a CIO who recently got hired and wants to put his stamp on his new department.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
You mean other staff can start writing their own documents, wikis, etc and don't need me to re-install Microsoft Office three times a year? Thank God!
Most IT people still think Web 2.0 is an overhyped buzzword, but that might not matter:
Guilty as charged, sir.
This article is BS - someone needs to maintain the machines, network, reset passwords, update software, maintain databases, train clusers, etc. IT is changing? Hmmph, the sun is coming up tomorrow, too.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
At least the quality of code produced in Web 2.0 has the chance of being better quality. Some of the stuff I work with here as a contractor defies all basic programming logic and structure, which was developed by an Indian outsourcing company. SaaS and Web 2.0 may be a buzzwords, but they're good quality buzzwords.
ilovegeorgebush
Much-discussed here already. If IT does not respond to user requests, they'll get sidelined. Been happening even since they bought out the first minis, (yes - minis, not micros).
Smart IT bosses anticipate user needs. We need to be saying "hey, have you seen how you could do your job better with this new thing?"... But many don't. So we're seen as a cost centre, rather than a profit centre. A hinderance, rather than an enabler.
Then we get outsourced...or control passes to the users and third parties. The risk is that corporate IT becomes an unstructured mess.
With no central authority, who then looks after the basics, such as corporate standards for storing and sharing information? What about security? Sure, some smart user can download the latest mashup, but will it play well with everything else? What's the upgrade path?
Until a web 2.0 app can replace a burned out motherboard, I will not worry about it too much.
The sky is falling indeed Chicken Little....
You say you want a revolution....
So many Web 2.0 apps are sold (or given away for free) by software-as-a-service companies like Google that people can bypass IT altogether, and IT might not even know until it's too late."
The only thing that will happen is that all IT will be provided by such companies in a more controlled way. Similar to law firms (sorry, no car analogy here), instead of having a lone lawyer, you will contract a law firm which will provide you the service. Therefore, all the IT professionals will get to work at those companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The purpose of IT - indeed any technology - is to improve the efficiency of business process so that more things can be achieved, more accurately, by less people.
Throwing your hands up and saying that improvements in IT are costing IT jobs is about as pointless as complaining that tractors and combine harvesters mean there's a relative lack of shovelling jobs available in agriculture these days.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
In my experience, while there are IT departments (or individuals within IT departments) that give excellent service, there are also the control-freaks who think it is their job to decide what their users' requirements should be.
Anyone would think from the quotation above that the primary purpose of an IT department is its self-perpetuation.
As a recent IT grad and employee as a network admin, "The Obsolete Man" episode of the Twilight Zone comes to mind.
While many clients of mine are eager to embrace words like "wiki" or "CMS", they never actually want to have to use them. I don't doubt that in some cases, a "webmaster" role can be handed over to WordPress or Drupal now (it's what we often try to do where I work, seeing as we have so many clients), but my experience has been, with a few exceptions, that people love the idea of "Web 2.0", but once they figure out that they have to do it, be responsible for it, and learn a new technology (TinyMCE), then they want to back away.
It's fair enough in some respects; their job isn't to maintain websites, it's more mine. But there are some clients who e-mail me things to post to a CMS where they themselves can post.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
and that is until they see that delegating documents and sensitive information to a third party that they cant parley with is the most foolish thing a business can do.
Read radical news here
We will still develop software for companies that require customized applications, and they will need support for installation and configuration of hardware and software that runs the web 2.0, thats why i think we will still get our jobs imagination is more important than knowledge @ Albert Einstein
A story I remember about technology:
Two men are standing beside the road watching the new backhoe dig a hole. "Look at that. Think of how many men with shovels could be working if we didn't have that thing," says the older man. "Think of how many men with spoons could be working if we didn't have the shovel," said the other.
If a problem is simple enough that it can be replaced by an automated system, then solve it and give me a more interesting problem to work on.
When somebody has to maintain the damn thing. Seriously, how do you expect that deploying more complicated software is likely to remove the requirement of highly trained staff? It appears to me that while this might let you get away with fewer low-paid and moderately skilled people, it is going to make highly qualified system administrators even more crucial than before. Heck, in many cases the deployment of more advanced software means you are going to need more staff to deal with the ever increasing amount of data you generate. So rather than having some people maintain a small set of web-pages, you suddenly need a bunch of people making sure the web2.0 monster interface/backend/database is working smoothly, is not vulnerable to attacks, and that it gracefully interoperates with the rest of your system. Care to guess which of the two will require more qualified, and hence more expensive, staff ?
please stop attaching 2.0 to everything. it is hurting more than outsourcing or automation.
Since when is it bad that IT is more efficient? Why not go back to a time without computers, or to a time before monkeys invented tools? Why is it that 50% of the people always think that all progress has negative impact.
The article talks about corporations that have laid off IT staff and replaced them with technologies like mashups and wikis that can help people get things done without involving IT.
And who is going to set up and maintain these "mashups" and "wikis", philosophy graduates?
If your job could be replaced by a wiki, it wasnt *really* an IT job to begin with.
Sometimes I almost can't believe what is considered an "IT Job" these days. I've been in the IT industry for about 10 years. When I started if you were in the IT dept it meant that you knew the in's-and-out's of the most popular technologies, most importantly the workstation OS's that companies used.
These days so many of "IT Jobs" are just administrative positions which require more spreadsheet skills than they can find at the local temp agency.
Somebody's recently learnt a few buzzwords, bought a blender, put everything together and just 'mashed' it up to come up with this article!
Get a life!
i live on an alternate planet
I disagree because those so called Web 2.0 applications run on hardware and software that have to be maintained.
Though there might be some level of "hemorrhaging" of jobs in the "traditional" Web or Internet spheres, more jobs are created by this change alone.
As an example, Google alone has some pretty serious data centers across the African continent that are just as technologically advanced as in the UK or USA for example. This would not be the case if it were not for Web 2.0.
It has to do with the types of jobs the new economy provides. VP and management jobs, the types that aren't being outsourced (yet), require social skills. Ours don't. Technology may not be everyone's enemy, but it is, ironically enough, ours.
On a jobs front, since most of these positions are outsourced, there's no great loss (unless you're one of the estimated 3% of employees who work in a call centre).
As has already been said, if your job can be replaced by a computer program, it's probably not an IT job to start with.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I work on the internal web based applications of a major telecom company. How exactly is a mashup going to replace software that I build? Will a mashup handle online trades? Will a mashup replace the vast amounts of backend software that works behind the scenes of most companies?
As unix sysadmins like to say: "Please go away or I shall be forced to replace you with a simple shell script." It's funny but it's only true some of the time. If the replacement of people with Web 2.0 Mashups is truly in the same threat category as outsourcing, then we really have nothing to worry about. Just ask anyone who had a really bad experience with outsourcing and was forced to bring their workforce back on-shore. Like the software house who outsourced a credit card processing app and found all sorts of minor bugs that wouldn't have appeared if it were written by someone who understands credit cards instead of a third world programmer who has never even had a credit card. Now you're telling me that you're going to replace your technical staff with a web app written by a 17 year old in a coffee shop? Good luck with that.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Call IT when your "mashup" starts fucking up. It would be great if dumbasses like this columnist could maintain their own websites, but given that most probably can't even program their VCR (err excuse me, PVR), I'm not holding out a lot of hope. So long as people cling to the belief that technology alone will solve their problems, there will be work for people who actually know more than jack shit about technology - cleaning up after the problems technology causes.
Web 2.0 shot me, murdered my family and left me for dead in our burning home. I will never sleep until I have revenge on Web 2.0.
There's some things that you want to do in-house, other things you outsource. This isn't just about IT. Accounting typically uses a payroll company, even smaller companies will do that. Even if there are handymen on staff, cleaning is still likely to be given over to a janitorial service.
When all this web crap was shiny and new, there were no established procedures, technologies, business methodologies, people were making it up as they went. Just consider the corporate website. If there's one functionality that should be universal but generally wasn't, it was the store locator. Just tell me where your goddamn store is! Pretty much every site has it now but there was a time when you couldn't count on it. Also, consider the HR portion of the typical corporate site. Sure, back in the day companies tried to write the scripts in-house but these days it's just as easy to buy the software to do it, either hosted on your server or embedded in an iframe so it looks like your server but is handled by a third party. You'll see this on restaurant websites where they have gift card programs, the only thing the restaurant's web guy has to do is drop in the link for the iframe and he's done.
The very very first web job I ever had was at a dot.bomb where the CTO did not know what server-side scripting was and thought that ASP would bog down the website too much. What was the upshot of that? A site indexing travel videos, all built by hand, every page static. They didn't even use HTML templates to replicate design changes across the site, all edits were made manually, either in notepad or Frontpage 98. Yes, the sound you hear is heads thunking desks in disbelief.
That was all incredibly stupid busywork. But I've seen that same level of stupidity in departments other than IT, overstaffed due to inefficient business practices. I hate hate HATE layoffs but I also feel that one of the biggest steps to avoiding them is not hiring too many people in the first place. I'd rather be understaffed and working hard than overstaffed and waiting for the guillotine to fall.
Getting back to the web stuff, it's silly to have to contact a web designer every time you want to change something on a website. Yes, major design changes will have to be done by a professional. But if you're talking about information that can be templatized and handled through web forms like job postings, company news, etc, then you really can let the secretary edit the site. I've seen some horrible tools for this where an understanding of html for formatting was required. The newer WYSIWIG interfaces make formatting as easy as any word processor. IT guys can set it up and move on to better challenges, they don't have to dick around with this sort of thing any longer.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Are marketing jobs making a comeback or what?
Didn't they learn from the last bubble?
If you become a master of these meaningless terms, you will be the first to go when the emperors cloths stop selling.
someone has to work at the companies that give these things away, too...
Move sig!
Your local BOFH may seem like an obstructionist who likes to say no all the time, but this person may also be one of the few stewards in the department (or entire company) charged with protecting sensitive data in compliance with company policy and government regulations. If these gatekeepers start disappearing, the next story will be about managers whose heads are rolling because they entrusted their untrained staff to observe HIPAA, FERPA, and SOX regulations while creating mashups, wikis and blogs at free Web 2.0 services. It won't be long before a simple Google search for Excel spreadsheet markup or Word tables starts turning up payroll records and the like.
-Is Web 2.0 A Bigger Threat Than Outsourcing?
/pull cloak hood down and wave hand
Assuming outsourcing is even a threat, probably not. I still haven't met one IT person that lost their job to Indians in Bangalore or H1B workers. I'm a white software engineer born and raised in the US that's been in the business for 15 years. We've had 3 job reqs out at my company for more than 2 months and have gotten 2 calls on them.
The people that are losing their jobs are unskilled labor (call centers and factory workers). While this sucks ass that our government is letting this happen, it doesn't affect IT people.
The shortage of labor is worse now than it was 10 years ago, even with the outsourcing. If you can't find a job you need to move to DC/Virginia or silicon valley. We need ya.
Heres the thing with Web 2.0. Everyone, all business people, want to put their own brand on web interfaces, including web 2.0. They want them integrated with their CRM. You can't do that without a programmer.
In answer to your query, a fly landing on your windsheild is more threatening than outsourcing so yes, sort of.
These are not the excuses you are looking for.
-AC
Gee, all those Microsoft drones in the IT department will have to do something other than productivity reduction. Maybe they can go into government service. I'm sure they'd fit right in.
6F 9E A9 1E 96 9F 74 27 ED B8 81 6D 0C 4E 1E 78
My other Sig is a 229.
Playing with words does not equate making sense. I am sure the author of the Article is quite proud how they created something out of nothing. Of course the side effects may be undesired, they may be the only real thing here.
While the business always chooses the software, I/T get the blame. This will be no different.
... to evolve and replace the more mundane tasks of our lives with efficient and reliable solutions? I'm a firm believer that in this field, regardless of your specialty (sys admin, programmer, dba, etc...), it's always better to embrace new technology than to shun it. Learn something new. Find out how it can make your job easier, or if it even pertains to your job at all. With knowledge, comes power. Knowing these technologies, how to implement them, and their strengths and weaknesses will only make you more valuable not only in your current job, but in the market. It's not the technology's fault that you couldn't keep up with the field.
Having said that, this is just another case where buzzwords + major assumptions = the IT chicken littles running around screaming about the sky falling.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
My company has recently standardized on SharePoint (shudder) for doing the work we used to do with wikis- giving people a place to go for project status and project related documents. The official reason was better security for our sensitive information, which has worked - SharePoint has been such a pain in the ass that we stopped posting altogether. The grumbling is that the change was a way for some people in IT to preserve their employment. I await the rise of our AI overlords - hopefully they will be able to spot such waste and give us back our wikis.
What the hell is a mashup? Holy buzzword Batman
The "Web 2.0"(could we pimp calling it NextWeb or something catchy at least? meh) is mostly a threat to developers who are really serving as content managers-- i.e. the Web Master of .COM boom. The thing is, that title's been all but dead for some time, partly because businesses have realized that the learning curve for html isn't exactly that steep. A lot of that power can be put in the hands of BAs, etc...Wikis etc just lower the bar even further. Most businesses, however, have needs beyond the capabilities of content management sytems.
Every day I deal with people representing businesses who are so bad at their jobs of dealing with other people that they seem to want to be replaced by a machine. How many times do I have to tell one of these droids the equivalent of "wake up and pay attention", or "no, it's not in your script", when I discover they can barely even hear the words that aren't precisely what they were trained to hear in the transaction?
And it's not just me: I wait in long lines, an audience for the customer abuse or indifference that they serve to each customer indiscriminately.
These people don't care about their jobs. They don't have even the basic human social compassion with their customers to treat us differently than they treat the objects where they work. They're liable to treat the boxes of products better, because damaging those can dock their pay. Why should I care about them? To the degree that I do, I want them replaced by a machine that can do their job without bothering them. Even when the machines do a crappy job, at least they reduce the prices, and lower expectations.
Lots of people should be replaced by machines. Freeing them to work on their people skills, so they're worth paying more than the electric bill.
--
make install -not war
if television is a threat to radio
or if automobiles are a threat to the locomotive industry
well, duh
if it's a better way to do things, that's progress. get over it and move on
for a site which regularly bashes music, television, and movie execs for not seeing progress in digital content and fighting it with stupid legal maneuvers, this certainly is a case of utter hypocrisy here on slashdot
oh, and btw, what i just said applies to outsourcing too: if some guy can do what you do in india for half your salary, well then suck it up, shut up, and move on. and i say that as someone who works in IT
i hate people with a sense of entitlement. no, you are not entitled to absolute security in your job, sorry, not yours. life changes. deal with it, retrain, move on, get a better job. most of those who in fact do complain are dead weight who can't adapt to begin with. whining about entitlement is all they have for them, not real computer science skill. it's a suckers game in the end
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fist off, gmail does NOT guarantee that your emails are secure. Several laws demand that business keeps all emails. Try explaining to judge that, ooops sorry, HD crashed, all the emails are gone.
Proper email and file servers need quality hardware. No matrox IDE here. They also need backup's. That costs money. Lots of money. Money that is almost always impossible to get.
I seen this problem WAY to often before, IT's budget can afford the ever increasing demands on its services, so people start going around it, this creates problems that put an even bigger strain on IT until one day someone makes a mistake or leaves and vital data goes missing. IT gets the blaim, responds with even more drastic measures, but never actually gets the money to meet demands.
Gmail is a very nice and usefull service, but your corperate email HAS to be stored reliably and accurately so that when the officials come you can prove that you kept up with the law, the law does NOT make a distinction between joke emails, emails with extremely large attachements that choke the exchange server and emails of proper business nature. ALL emails got to be kept safe. How can they be sure that that email you send via gmail really wasn't important?
Same with installing your own software, in many places their are laws that forbid the transmition of information to the outside (hospitals, banks) the only way to be sure this doesn't happen accidently is by NOT allowing outside communication that isn't monitored. No, you can therefore not install IM software. No I don't care how much you need it. It is the law. Your IT department got better things to do with its money the police every user, but that is what they got to do, because if they do not, they are allowing the company to break the law.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Agreed.
There is no "natural economy" favoring the IT guys. I've worked as one, and I know full well the combination of poor social skills combined with high self-regard for their own intelligence/expertise that leads to an arrogant "priesthood" mentality. Additionally, because of their responsibilty for the critical data plumbing of a modern business, the fear of being responsible for failure of what are, frankly, often fragile systems causes a bunker mentality. Their customers, namely the rest of the organization, is viewed as a threat - because anything they do could trigger failure. I've often felt that in many IT groups, the preferred infrastructure for the non-IT personnel would be un unplugged PC in a locked room. In these types of groups, the organization will eventually seize any viable alternative to eliminate the IT group. After all, they are usually relatively expensive staff.
Successful IT organizations know that they are purely a service business. The most important attributes are responsiveness and reliability. If these are not present, they will not survive.
It's the attitude and the labor-intensive blockades that are pushing the true management of information out the door via whatever alternatives can be scraped together. Every single one of the workarounds has advantages over the traditional corporate IT approach. If I spend any more time shaking my head, my neck is going to hurt.
It's a pretty basic cycle:
a) A particular skill becomes a dominant part of mankind's livelihood (hunting, agriculture, tradework, computers.)
b) We teach all of our children the basic aspects of these skills in order to increase efficiency.
c) The children grow up and begin working on the major problems and issues within these skills.
d) Through technology and ingenuity, we slowly automate, simplify, and streamline those skills.
e) A new skill arises to replace the now-streamlined and unskilled skill.
f) Repeat.
And since all the kids coming out of high school and college now have a pretty thorough end-user understanding of computers (including the big 3: office suites, the Internet, and cell phones), a lot of IT tasks have just been rolled into the non-IT positions of a company. Remember when the CEO had to have his own IT guy just to work a spreadsheet or open a database? We've come a long way.
And ultimately part of mankind's ambition has to be to reach a point in our technology and civilization where machines and automata do most of our work - even complex things. And that's the way we like it, natch.
Exactly. It is most tiresome to see these lamentations, when things actually improve.
For hundreds of years business communications consisted of paper letters. I doubt, anybody — including Zonk — would prefer writing and mailing a paper letter to an e-mail, even if that means disappearance of several professions (ink- and quill-makers, typists, typewriter-engineers, etc.).
But somehow, he appears to view the availability of Wiki (which replaces circulating a document around) as a "threat" — to any one but, an IT-worker. Well, even that IT-worker is now relieved of the rather mundane responsibilities and can instead move on to a better paying job elsewhere.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
But at least they didn't call it 1.2 and then rename 1.2 to 2, and then later go on to call a subsequent version Web 2.0 Enterprise Edition.
:).
Anyway I personally think this is a good thing as long as your own company isn't buying into that bullshit
They should outsource many of those CEOs too, given that they all sound about the same. Seems what lot of them do is is to basically sound confident and say lot of optimistic nothings with a PR firm standing by just in case. If they actually say anything substantial it could get them in trouble with investors or the securities people or legal.
Sure a few CEOs make a big positive difference, but it's just a few unfortunately. Not an easy job to do right actually, so fine if those that do get paid a lot. But not fine for those screw ups. Maybe companies should start with a relatively moderate salary and decide on how big the "adjustment" is after considering financial results over say 3 years, not quarterly/yearly plus regular qualitative surveys from customers and employees taken over that same period. This should discourage slash n burn CEOs (HP anyone?).
It's only a matter of time, but if Google adds the ability to do Calendering and resource scheduling in Outlook to the Google Apps Enterprise service. They could effectively kill MS Exchange in the small to medium sized business market. Google Apps offers 25 gig mailboxes, Postini Spam Filtering, personalized start pages, email migration tool, single sign on, blackberry service, and more uptime than god. We have 250 users in my company. That would be $12,500 a year in email fees from Google Apps. How much does an Exchange Admin go for these days?
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
I posted this in Sept, 2006, although I floated the concept a year before at Defcon, and originally when I was an instructor at ITT in 1997.
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entry=evolution_of_the_it_market
"The IT Market can be considered, in gestalt, as being an S-curve market with the year 2000-2001 ( the Dot Com Crash ) as its inflection point...
"But in the post-Crash world, profit margins on mass-produced products have fallen. Niche markets with high profit margins are sought after, but many companies still upgrade legacy products for decreasing profit margins (Oracle, Microsoft come to mind). The IT market is still in a slow-motion shakeout period, but I suspect that few IT workers believe it"
outsourcing is a loser in the IT world for the most part, those that empty their IT staffs completely will be very sorry. someone has to keep track of the imbeciles you've just hired.
oh, and they spend your money much faster and get much less done. and they can't communicate to well, and the managers assigned to manage them are clueless.
and now your customer when having trouble, gets nowhere and hates you.
what do outsourcing and web 2.0 have in common?
nothing
The evolution of technology and society always results in older tech being dumped and jobs along with it. Especially employees who neglect to update their sills to stay ahead of the changing job markets. The real problem happens when certain industries have major lobby power and can get handouts from the government or sometimes even slow down or stop the change to newer better products or tech. Here in Canada we have the Alberta oil companies crying that if people drive more fuel efficient (or alternative fuel) vehicles then they will be out of jobs and/or the Alberta economy will suffer. We also have the government giving subsidies and tax breaks to tobacco farmers because, boo-hoo, people are buying less cigarettes. It's silly, the products we SHOULD be moving away from are putting up a stink and getting government response. But did the government give handouts to VHS manufacturers when the DVD became popular. I should think not. Anyway, if I was a 'webmaster' I'd be looking at how my career could evolve with the times. Similarly the oil companies should start investing in alternative energy sources / infrastructure. *bah* I didn't mean for this to become an enviro-rant. *shrug*
Unlike the auto industry, travel industry (expedia, travelocity), or the afore-mentioned manufacturing industry, the IT industry is guaranteed to have ups and downs. All major industries which require human involvement will require less and less human involvement over time. However, IT is guaranteed to be needed from now until the next great paradigm shift in socio-economics. The problem is, there will not be a uniform demand, and as such the need for IT professionals will be in an endless more/less loop. The .com bubble bust of the Stock Market at the turn of the century is an example of the "less" loop, whereas Google, Apple, and various services for a fee have since shown us another example of the "more" loop. Web 2.0, Cell Gen. 3 & 4, and continuously increasing automated services will for a time show yet another "less", but in the end, you still need people who know how to fix these things when they break. As long as the tech industry remains volatile, so will demand for the people who make it work.
The posting is an attempt to gather clicks for Information Week.
The article nonsensically claims that companies building web 2.0 apps are a threat to in-house developers. Their evidence: one company's newly-hired CTO who, upon taking charge, laid off 1 of 5 of his workers and contracted with a web 2.0 vendor to do some mashups.
Peter DeBono was right: news media have a horizon of less than 24 hours and will do anything, _anything_, to make life-as-usual look like news.
Your average, (less than competent) I.T. department structure their systems such that they need approximately linearly increasing numbers of people to support their systems and users. It's dumb, but there you go.
Those who understand the maths of support, structure their systems appropriately and can scale their support logarithmically. This means there are a shit load of I.T. jobs out there which are simply not required. Redundant... Think hand loom weavers.
Deleted
If producing a good or service requires less input--fewer man hours, less energy, less raw materials--that's a good thing; and our free market economy is supposed to achieve exactly that.
In a few years, many small and medium sized businesses will probably be able to get by without IT staff altogether; they'll be using mostly web-based services and outsourced remote management.
Of course, this means that a lot of IT people will need to find new jobs. So what? IT itself eliminated many jobs: typists, secretaries, customer service, filing clerks, mail handlers, etc. IT professionals really have even less business complaining about this than other professions.
Oh to find a Luddite article on the front page of Slashdot.
...
...
Lets explore some other tragic job stealing moments in history:
the invention of the wheel - stole jobs from the carriers
the invention of the computer - stole jobs from the abacus users
the invention of Web 2.0 - stole jobs from IT
Seriously, our job as technologists is to make things more efficient. Efficiency inevitably means less resources are used. Using less resources inevitably leads to less need for manpower.
Efficiency is not to be feared. If you think about it, your life is better because of efficiency, think of what your life would be like without job killing efficient technology.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
I'm sure Web 2.0 may be making certain things easier, but SOS will have a much greater impact on IT. Once you see SOS consolidate and wrap Web 2.0 packages into their service you'll see little need for in-house IT. However, it's obvious and everyone knew it was coming, so I'm not sure if it's a big deal or news.
I have worked at a Fortune 500 company for almost five years. A few things I have observed there:
1. Most businesses larger than, say, fifty employees are going to have very complex problems -- problems that only dedicated IT personnel can solve. I fail to see how any outsourced "mashup" (whatever that *really* is) could tailor itself adequately to these problems. It's just a restatement of the common problem of customizing third-party vertical software for a specific business. In my experience, that endeavor tends to faily miserably, draining productivity as users are forced by the software into a non-intuitive mode. Eventually, the offending system is removed and replaced with something else. You need IT personnel for all of this.
2. In a large IT group, there are a lot of people who don't contribute value. You have your sycophants, ass-kissers, hiring mistakes, misassigned resources, bumbling managers, etc. The problem is that the corporate culture can make it very hard to get rid of these people. They may have influence with the powers that be, or they may even *be* the powers. If you see some downsizing, you have to ask *who* got downsized. Perhaps it wasn't the people actually adding value.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Wasn't the personal computer going to create the paperless office environment? Yeah, right. For every 1 technically-savvy business resource (if they exist somewhere since they don't where I am employed), there are many other business resources who still insist on triple-clicking page links and think that the Internet is driving their cars. With this fact in mind, all of the other will want IT to build and deliver so-called Web 2.0 applications for them so that they can be confused even more. Like others have commented, keep up on things and your IT position will never be outsourced or replaced. Everyone likes a smart person who can adapt, learn and communicate. No one likes a nimble, rigid idiot. Watch out or I'll fire you myself. See you at the bar, JR.
The kind of "IT work" which can be replaced by a Wiki or other sorts of cooperative "note sharing" software is basically first line support. We're talking about answering questions like "How do i do this in application X?" (something which belongs in a User Manual, but in custom systems often nobody ever writes said User Manual) or helping the user with solving simple issues whose resolution is easily scriptable (User: "I have problem seeing X in screen Y"; Support-Monkey: "Can you please close that screen and open it again? Does it work now?"; User: "Everything looks alright now, thanks").
...
Not only is this kind of work not really IT (anybody that can read and write, knows which side of the keyboard to type in and does not have Tourette syndrome can be trained to do it), but this kind of thing can, and often is, already outsourced to low cost countries.
Personally, i can't understand how some big companies *cough* investment banks *cough* actually pay highly expensive software developers to spend half their time doing this kind of cra^H^H^Hwork
No company is going to use a gmail address for their legitimate business practices. The only services that really are offsetting some of the needs of IT are YouTube and Google Earth/different mapping mashups. Any company that trusts its data entirely to a 3rd party deserves its fleecing after someone sells their data, charges them a boatload after they become dependent and their data all of a sudden disappears. In addition I have not yet seen a 3rd party RDB store that is free, are databases going to be gone? I haven't seen a 3rd party gremlin network cabling service thats free. Is the entire network infrastructure going to disappear? Cisco is going to start shipping free routers? Intel is going to give out free computers? All computer companies are going to offer free rollout services? Account and identity management is going to be trusted to a 3rd party? I could go on, this article is worth the $0.05 for the bits of storage it uses.
As an IT guy, I always see this junk coming. I'm not the one that doesn't know until it's too late - it's the frickin' management. They implement these systems with very little understanding about how they actually work (versus how they've been sold on it working) and very little understanding about how these new systems will integrate with existing systems. Then crap starts breaking, they've wasted a ton of money on some garbage that doesn't even do what we want it to, but we have to keep it so that manager X can save face.
The real problem is management failing to understand that they really know nothing about IT and they need to be relying on a trustworthy IT person to tell them whether something is good for their business. Don't get me wrong, if you're IT, and you work like crap and treat people like crap, by all means, you should get canned and replaced with another guy. However, businesses need to realize that IT isn't just overhead. If you don't believe me... think back to the last time your network went down, or your production system crashed, and tell me how much work got done! Alternatively, think about the latest and greatest time-saving scheme IT came up with, maybe they installed a better printer, gave you a faster computer, gave you a bigger monitor, wrote a script for you, etc etc. Good internal IT will always be leaps and bounds better than outsourced IT.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Well, first, I completely switched from IT to programming, but that's a bit beside the point.
The company I work for did hire me, in part, because of my Linux skills (and my promise to not be a zealot). We have a NAS device on-site -- basically a hard drive with a Samba server in it. Our ISP gives us fiber and a router/wireless. That's it -- everything just works.
Or rather, everything else has been outsourced. We pay one site to host our SVN repository and Trac bugs/wiki, we pay Google to host our email, and we pay Amazon to host our website -- that's S3 and EC2.
However, it does mean there's a new niche: Amazon EC2 is basically cheap Linux/Xen virtual machines, on demand. But that's it. No automatic Beowulf cluster, no load balancing, nothing of the sort. As no one has actually put together a really good package for this, I can still be useful writing scripts to spawn new instances (VMs) when load gets to high, drop them when load is acceptable, I can set up a load balancer, update the DNS to a new one if the old load balancer goes down, I can find ways to replicate data between them, and so on.
Basically, although admin is a much smaller part of my job, it's gone from admining one machine at a time (a fileserver here, webserver there, panic when the firewall dies and steal a desktop to build a new one, etc) to admining a cluster.
And if you were ever good with tools like cfengine, etc, you can probably adapt and find a similar job. Maybe even a job hacking on MySQL cluster, or (pretty please?) making Postgres able to operate as a cluster...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
IT is a service industry. That being said, it is under no threat from this new technology that provides information.
Compare the situation to the medical field and all you really have is WebMD.com. I don't see any Doctors that were disenfranchised due to patients being more knowledgeable. Sure, it can be argued that there are fewer patients who come in not knowing at all what is wrong, but they are still sitting in the office. I mean really, knowing that your hard drive died due to the heads crashing against the platter just helps you relate the information to your IT personal; it doesn't put them out of a job.
The last point I would like to make is that the availability of information by no means guarantees that people will care to read it. I suppose I could go pick up a "Car Care for Idiots" book to change my oil, but of course I have no interest in that subject and I'll pay to have it done.
The term "Luddite" comes from Ned's 1811 riot against textile factories.
Once it is outside the IT system, they don't know. Your word ISN'T good enough.
Hell, for certain information (financial, medical) just getting it onto googles servers is illegal. Especially if you consider that google READS the emails.
Certain info is NOT allowed out of the corperate network and you need to prove that it didn't.
Once you export it to gmail, that can no longer be done.
I realize how frustrating it is, but I have been in that position to often to not know that sometimes the IT guy just doesn't have a choice. If the boss doesn't want to pay for more storage I can't create it out of thin air.
It is one of the main reasons I stopped doing admin work because you are always the one who gets blaimed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
People, especially geeks, are once again going to be whipped into a fervor, and once again they'll get their asses handing to them after ineffectively bitching to government to "regulate", or "control" or somehow subdue their competition. This is what happens when you're a ONE TRICK PONY!
If you want to continue participating in "production" of wealth, you can, just not necessarily by price fighting in the IT quadrant, in fact, USE the wikis yourself and cut your labor to where you can produce other things FOR YOURSELF... (yes, to those socialytes (not necessarily socialists, mind you) who can't *get it*, I'm talking about self sufficiency or even MILD self sufficiency).
All the so called "progressives" and "liberals" talk about having a lighter foot print, but what do they do? Hit MacDonalds (or, enter favorite burger joint) at the end of the day, eat like a total pig, and then hit the sack, and a month later bitch that they were fed fatty foods, cooked in some oil they disapprove of, and charged too much!!
What do they do about it? Either nothing, or they ask big monolithical government to step in and crush the business in question, instead of learning how to cook a nice quiet meal or maybe even hold a "fast" and clear some of that cholesterol out of those hardened arteries at 20 years of age. (Which for those sexually challenged geeks, know that being able to set up the entire process of "dinner" is also a remarkable aphrodisiac for quite a few women, and it isn't just the candle light. A self assured man that is confident AND competent in many things (the DaVincian principle of "uomo universalis") is a lot more interesting than a neurotic freak who is a one trick pony.)
The only logical choice would've been to stop patronizing that business, THEN get upset and complain, and then proceed to develop one's own alternative. That is, however, your choice.
My comment brings me to this. You people will bitch about the wikis, and about the Indians, and now the Romanians and Ukrainians as being "job stealers". In the end, what have you done to stop it, or to mitigate the change?
This is a world ruled by the laws of nature, regardless of how you see your relationship to those rules, manipulator or slave or passer-by, you are still charged with MITIGATING the constant state of change that the world is in... asking others to do it FOR you, presents us with only one concept. Intellectual laziness.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Raid protects against complete sudden failure of a disk, NOT slow corruption.
If you think an IDE disk is suitable for a heavy use mail server, you are dreaming. There is a reason they still make scsi disk and this is it.
Google is NOT a good example. Google is under no legal obligation to protect its data and ensure it stays that way for years. If one of googles servers dies and takes a ton of data with it, so what. Read the EULA of your gmail account, they make no guarantees.
Yes you can make servers with IDE and for some tasks they even make sense, email is not one of them. You might have some luck with Sata but even then you still will have to spring for quality disks, not the cheapo ones you get for your desktop.
I agree that sometimes money is wasted, scsi on webserver with enough memory to keep the entire site loaded in memory is a bit of a waste but on the whole things are done the way they are because they work.
Frankly if you are responsible for the servers in a large company you just can't say "ooops, lost some data, oh well, it was a year old, who cares right". You need to make sure that data is kept intact, this means using hardware that doesn't loose random bits.
I would very much like a look at googles serverroom. I am willing to bet a fair amount of money that its payroll systems and adsense accounting does NOT run on IDE disks or whitebox equipment.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Imagine the web2.0 companies folding or getting traded on the market and closing down services.
Imagine just how pleased your boss will be with you that you taught him, way back in 2007, that inhouse resource were not susceptible to marketplace whims.
It sure seems like it to me.
What company is most threatened by google and "web 2.0"? And isn't infoworld a ziff-davis publication i.e. a msft mouthpiece?
At most companies the web department isn't under the IT umbrella (at least at the ones I've worked at) but regardless of the dept. content management systems and the likes do take away work that regular web workers could be doing. Most WYSIWYG editor suck really really bad and still aren't worth using for the kind of code they produce.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Look, I feel for the people who lost jobs they were so sure of being stable. I've been laid off before and I know it sucks. There's just one thing that needs to be understood here. If you complain about evolving technologies obsoleting jobs, you are no different than the RIAA complaining about evolving technologies rendering their aged business model impotent. We can't just sit around and complain like a big group of whine-asses, we need to adapt as well. If your job becomes obsolete, adapt to that and make yourself worth hiring. People who just sit around crying about how the world does not accomodate them are the enemies of our own evolution and growth. These people should not be accommodated. They need to be slapped upside the head and told to just frakking deal with it.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
you'd better be bracing youself in preparation to Web 2.0 code developed by an Indian outsourcing companies, with even more defiance of logic thanks to lower entry barrier for new programming languages.
How much does he produce? Bugger all.
How much does he cost? Shedloads.
He's a cost centre.
We've already seen this before. I used to think that with better tools, ordinary people could build their own stuff without the need to hire and pay pros. What I've actually seen over the years is the pros using the improved tools to build what ordinary people want. Even if so called Web 2.0 tools do gain prominence in the general population, someone will still have to maintain the things that are built. Anyone who wants to see what happens when the general populace gets a hold of Web 2.0 tools, needs look no farther than MySpace and Facebook. My eyes hurt just thinking about it, not to mention the stomach turning security holes underneath it all.
Web 2.0 tools may only allow outsourcing to spread to even cheaper and less skilled labor, but still paid labor. So, as usual, prepare for more highly exploitable crap!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
"the basic human side of me knows that improved productivity means fewer jobs, and that means a buyers market for labour with all that entails ; lower employment, lower wages, lower standard of living."
I'm so tired of hearing this. There was this thing...It was called "the industrial revolution". At this point in our species development, we started making machines to do simple work. Since that time productivity, numbers of jobs, standard of living, everything, has gone through the fricking roof.
Not only has it not been a bad thing for most people, but its been an amazing thing! People live longer, with better health, and more stuff. Their labor produces unimaginably more goods than the labor of their forefathers, and far from making everyone poor, by the standards of time before the industrial revolution, it's made everyone fabulously rich.
And by everyone, I mean the ~900 million people who were around before the industrial revolution, as well as the extra ~5,100 million people who came along after it.
Blows my fricking mind.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/2007/07/the-last-one-pe.html
Excellent insight into the excellent and insightful television show.
At that point, the cycle will continue. IT will point out that the person who relied on the technology without informing them is an idiot. The idiot will blame IT for not supporting their department in the manner that they believe they need to be supported. IT will fire back that if they had more money and resources available to them, they could support everyone in the manner they want to be supported in. Finance will tell IT to shut the hell up and do more with less. IT manager will finally flip out, go through "They're really going to miss ME when I'm gone." syndrome, and quit. He will be replaced. Wash, rinse, repeat.
people will miss the Mom and Pop facism that only an in-house admin can provide.
Techs will always have jobs and work just as long as they adapt to their industry, its no different then in any other job that as advances in technology are made one must adapt. Is it any different since the invention of the car, tractor, forklift, airplane, or television? Human interaction will always be needed for their inventions in human evolution.
I'm sorry.
www.blueapples.org
The question to ask always, always, is Why isn't this automated?
We're simply in a world moving back to the mainframe. In a mainframe world, redundancy is eliminated.
Read Manna.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Meh. If your job can be replaced by a program, then it probably should be. If something that takes an IT group a month to set up and ongoing man-hours to maintain can be transparently replaced by a program downloaded by Fred in accounting, then that's GREAT! Use IT for something better! Replacing people with robots in factory jobs is a much more difficult task in many ways, so it's a small miracle that this hasn't happened earlier.
I have a coffee mug on my desk (copyright 1980) covered in computer sayings. In my mind, the most insightful one on it has always been, "Computers work. People should think." The fact that we're spending less time sitting around, grinding out custom one-off applications is a GOOD thing, just like it's a good thing banks don't have departments of people adding columns of numbers anymore.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Those who will prefer quality will not go with the automated web 2 ran by users. And even if they do you will have work fixing what they do.
.....
..... there is a lot of programming there that needs to be done along with networking and telephony. I really do not think IT is going to vanish because of that.
... definitely javascript and html/dhtml, but then again I do not think C Java or other heavier languages will disappear just because everyone is going to use web tools.
,and there is the like of SKype, grat service, closed protocol, so good luck integrating it into your PBX (yeah there is chanskype, it works sometimes too , great to run X on your PBX too , and then there is email - like 2000 of them daily, of which 1950 is spam, and the rest has 5 meg .doc attachments, and 5megapixel images, because users do not know how to resize ,
,damn even technical personnel would not read the docs and break stuff left and right , now you fear that a cloud expression "web 2" will wipe IT out ,
....I heard "point and click firewalls and storage devices will take your job" .... hmm like 8 years ago. Since then I have seen them on shelves unplugged, on shelves blinking but unplugged otherwise, and got paid a lot to configure them for the companies who wanted a little bit more than let tcp 80 out, and close tcp 25 down.
..... I personally secretly hope that computers disappear, and I can go and work as a divemaster or a car mechanic, or do something other than looking at multiple monitors for a living .........
I do not even want to get into the Web 2 discussion and that wikis, blogs and sandboxes will write the web (or whatever crap).
Why ?
Easy: today's advanced word processors and html editors generate such a mess from a simple text, that I simply do not believe that all the web crap will do better with the user generated content.
I do consulting for several people and companies, and the thrash that comes out from their advanced tools need constant fixing.
If you think I am talking about something very complicated and parsing errors slow down for a second.
Give a simple input box with e.g. tinymce (good tool if you can use it) to the regular user, and see how many double lines, special characters, and tings like table into table into table and b b b b b b b b strong strong like text is going to come out of it. Sure it will be readable, and only slightly ugly, and fill 100000 pages with it, then see how nice your parsers work on it and how indexing software throws up seeing it
But then again, give open office to your wife, ask her to create a 1 page text with simple formatting, then look at the source and decide if you would put it on your company website.
WEB 2 on the other hand is about social networking, and intercommunication
I think a good direction to go is to learn networking with some web-able language
But then again Web 2 is like cloud for me. There is no specification, there is not a strict definition either. What I see makes me think that finally instead of 20 different plugins we will have something standard compliant, but still there is flash, java applets, silverlight, and 20 other things, and still ou cannot make a page to look the same in Moz IE Opera and safari without pissing blood. I am hoping standard communication channels, and some companies are on the right track. Gizmo using SIP and Jabber, but then again, I need a Pidgin (gaim) to connect to MSN Gtalk, Ytalk, AIM, instead of just using a yabber client and an aggregator
What do I think ? I think IT will be needed even more. A different IT maybe for many.
hmm.... people cannot use their telephones and remote controls
I heard the same BS about linux and all the devices which are pouring out with it installed
But then again, we will see
I personally have no fear of empowering my customers/users to do more for themselves, automation, etc - I will still be a person that is needed to create new things. All these do is give me a wider range of reach. It's like having employees. Just because I have employees doesn't mean I'm no longer needed. I simply break up my workflow by handing some of it off to my employees. Likewise I can hand it off to machines in some cases or to users themselves in some cases.
That is not the same as offshoring of jobs though. While offshoring is unlikely to hurt me directly it does hurt me because it is bad for the economy as a whole. I certainly don't mind it when those we're hiring have to stick to the same level of standards we do - using lead free paint, not using slave labor, etc - but when we're not doing business with true peers it undermines the ability of US companies and our peers to compete fairly. There are reasons we have laws that guarentee the quality of products and the quality of life of workers and we should not buy from countries that do not have a similar set of laws.
I think if companies really expect for technology such as a wiki to really cut the number of employees they need then either they're kidding themselves or they have a lot of employees that don't have any real function. No real IT people are much at risk and will just be reassigned to areas they can be more useful in. The only people that may have trouble is those that work in data entry and even among those any smart company should know that those that do a good job are valuable. For the most part, community technologies just enable companies to do more with the resources they already have.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Flamebait my ass! Mod this up, it sure as shit aint flamebait.