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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
Exactly how are "mashups" a technology?
In the sense that some companies, Microsoft included are *desperate* for them to be a launch pad into future profits. Cut out the middle man, go direct to the customer. Its a dream that is unlikely to succeed.
I've lost count of how many times I hear that IT workers or programmers will be obsolete because of new technology. It just aint so. Even if the average user can knock something together to do a job they want, they first have to want to do that.
Same goes for network and system maintenance, many people could do the job themselves with a little training, but don't see why they should. After all, if your business is selling non computer related products, you don't want to be bothered spending time doing anything but that at work, or you lose money and customers.
IT people/web designers and programmers get hired because people do not want to do those jobs themselves.
Hell I've been a programmer for 8 years, and I don't like fixing my own pc when it breaks, that's not something I want to bother with. I have people who are paid to do that for me. That might make me a bit odd, but to be honest I'm an algorithm designer, hardware, so long as its fast and working, really doesn't interest me.
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.
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
So it's just like outsourcing then.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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 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.
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.
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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 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.
When I was getting my computer science grad degree many years ago, my father showed me an article he'd saved (because he saves everything). It was about a new computer language that was going to make computer programmers obsolete. The language? Fortran. The year? 1959. (Yeah, Fortran was around in 1957 but the article acted like it was big news and a real threat to programmers.)
Fortran did allow general scientists to join the programming population but they didn't put the assembly/machine code programmers out of work -- far from it.
People willing to do good work will always be valuable. Always.
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
Sounds to me like an opportunity! They mess it up, I charge em to fix it. Whereupon they mess it up again and I fix it again. It's human nature. Can't really change it.
If they wont hire you up front to keep their stuff working right so be it. It'll break.
Charge them to fix it and make it pay for you. Those who wont pay wont get their stuff fixed or it will be fix half@$$ed by some shyster.
Job security...
Next issue?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.