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Cloud To Create 14 Million Jobs? Not So Much
jfruh writes "Did you hear about the study from Microsoft and IDC (PDF), declaring that adoption of cloud technologies would create 14 million jobs? Well, don't believe the hype. The study posts that, once small and medium business can use cloud products to just eliminate their IT department, they'll use those savings to hire people for their core business. It's a dubious proposition, and one that wouldn't be good news for IT workers even if things do play out that way."
The revolution of automotive transport put a lot of horse dung collectors out of work too. Society should advance. Period. That that means some jobs are erased is a good thing. Whenever jobs are erased, it represents a freeing of human minds to focus on even more productive tasks.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The IT monkeys will still be around and needed to keep your PC running, it's the actual skilled IT that will be losing work.
When are we going to accept that technology SHOULD be used to eliminate jobs and create more free time for more people? We need a SOCIAL change, urgently. Work shouldn't always be about moving wealth upwards while we scramble around in a "Hunger Games"-type society.
Isn't the point of the cloud to move all these services to central locations where they are managed by fewer people?
Once we automate the factories, we will hire more managers and executives.
Once we outsource the call centers we will hire more technicians.
Once we use all the oil we will invent something else.
I have prime swampland for sale in the Sahara too.
We have to get use to the fact that not all people will be producers in our society and that percentage of non producers will continue to increase. Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life? This is the future we wanted, where things are becoming more automated and peoples lives become easier. Is it really making anything easier. I would say no until we have a sea change in our socioeconomic views.
Silence is a state of mime.
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
The study posts that, once small and medium business can use cloud products to just eliminate their IT department, they'll use those savings to hire people for their core business.
Or they'll just put it towards profits and big bonuses for the CEO and senior staff, creating no jobs at all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
and it leads to increased efficiency. Those people can on to fulfill other functions. This is mainly the reason we're not all farmers anymore like in the stone age.
But they'll be in China and India.
Still need security, Still need a networking staff, what you wont need is the DBAs, the active directory guys, but networking, hardware etc... they will be needed. If the internet doesn't work your cloud isn't going to do you much good.
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Not really. If there were no benefits to moving to the cloud, because the same resources were needed, then these cloud service providers couldn't lower costs much.
The end result will be less IT employed and worse SLAs for companies. Instead of a single outage affecting one company, it will affect many.
Why wouldn't the actual skilled IT people go work for the cloud service providers, again?
You can't insert a profitable intermediary in between the same IT people and the old company without cutting jobs somehow. Supposedly centralization will result in fewer people doing more work, so less employees allow a layer of profitable intermediaries.
So you'll have 10 former IT guys and 3 jobs. The other 7, well there's always soylent green. Oh well.
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If the industry shifts and you no longer need as many IT staff, so be it. Throughout history, advances in technology have wiped out entire professions - when was the last time you met a fletcher, tanner or a pencil and paper draughtsman? This would be no different. Technology progress inevitably makes some people's professions redundant, but they also open new doors. It is for those at risk of obsolescence to spot the trend and make the transition to one of those shiny new doors before their existing one slams shut in their face.
I say bring it on.
I've very recently been doing some digging into "the cloud" as requested by my superiors. All marketing/tech literature that I find from Microsoft is aimed towards entities that cannot afford proper admins to run their infrastructure or entities that regularly encounter huge peak demand. It also gives the entity the flexibility to suddenly scale up if they need more resources for a corner case, without the large capital investment required for in-house infrastructure.
Everything that I was read, listened to, or watched from MS has been quite level-headed in which cases to use the cloud.
I haven't had time to RTFA as the end of the day nears and I'm working on something else, but I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT.
Today your boss doesn't see the sense of it, but he will one day - either that or he'll get fired when your business is no longer competitive in the marketplace.
There are no safe jobs. Only complacent workers.
it's the actual skilled IT that will be losing work.
Do you really believe that? Skilled IT will always be able to supply value to a business, regardless of whether the data or server is located.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Three strange financial assumptions:
1) Cloud can only make money as a new intermediary by efficiency, having less people employed. However, they could employ the same amount of people by selling data.
2) If scalability always worked, we'd only have one car company, one paper printing company, one taxi company, one book store, one food store... For their own sake I hope cloud stuff scales up that well, or we'll end up back where we started (at the usual great expense both monetary and human costs)
3) Big companies always insource when its cheaper overall than paying the outsourcer. Ideal minimum cost would seem to be keep enough work and servers inhouse to keep a precise integer number of employees busy and outsource any fractional FTE to outsourcer. But can a company make money of outsourcing fraction FTE worth of cloud computing from each corporation? My guess is, in the long run, no.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
I think you forgot to include that one or two of them will come back to the company as contractors when the cloud doesn't prove to be as amazing as first described in the sales pitch. Once the bugs start comng out and problems arise, a few of them will be hired back (probably at much higher rates than they originally worked) to solve the issues that are coming up so that the company can continue to operate "business as usual".
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
...you might as well walk away. What follows is always bullshit.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"The cloud" doesn't get rid of the need for computers at the office, or networks, or people to support it. It also doesn't elimiante the need for people who understand how all this "cloud" pixie dust works, and most importantly someone who knows what to do when "the cloud" goes down randomly like last week and your website suddenly doesn't work.
Less people running small data centers? Probably, if the hype can be believed. But a lot of people aren't sold on this.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The replacement of in-house IT by storage and apps in the cloud has been predictable and predicted for about 15 years now. Enough time to have gotten some retraining.
I used to say that the conventional wisdom that your data was safest on a disk or tape in your basement would be inverted when it was realized that redundant internet server based storage run by specialists in IT would be superior in reliability. This was well before it was called the cloud. The kind of reliabilty Google was getting out of massive redundancy and some smarts in management s/w and hardware operations should have been enough of a clue over the last decade or so.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Honestly we fired the Exchange guy when we moved to Google mail for businesses for doing nasty things in the building, Think finding socks with.... DNA in them in the server room. and instead of replacing him management decided that "it's working, we dont need him" That worked for 60 days until Exchange imploded like it always does when left unattended.
I suggested that we move everyone to Google email for business until we can get things sorted. 90 days in, we have far less spam, zero downtime, zero problems, and all android and iphone people can sync everything perfectly everywhere. when that was discovered, management abolished all the crackberries, so now we dont have to run the damned crackberry server. Last department meeting they asked about any luck filling the position, we have had none as we have insane requirements for little to no pay. I mentioned we say screw it and eliminate the position and stay with Google.
Got a $1500 bonus out of that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Labor-saving technologies are only viable in the market if they ultimately eliminate more human labor than they create. New technologies, apart from entertainment applications, *always* eliminate jobs in the long run. Either that or they don't get adopted.
Eliminating jobs is their primary purpose. Promising that they will create jobs is a direct lie intended to win the hearts and minds of the very people who will be put out of work.
Eliminating jobs is a *good* purpose. If the machines do our work for us, then we don't have to. Of course, there are economic consequences, especial since traditional capitalistic values don't work well in an environment with a very high percentage of automated labor. However, these are secondary concerns to the advancement of humanity.
No, they won't.
You'll still need that skilled person around, and in fact, they'll have to possess more skills than the "skilled" person they'll be hired to replace (6 months after the person they're replacing was terminated).
Why?
Because this person will have to deal with all the bullshit and problems that comes with pushing things to the Cloud. Those problems may be fewer, but they will be significantly more complex not only due to the nature of the networking involved and the different architecture, but also due to the inability to actually get in there and fix the core problem. Surprisingly, not many "Senior Windows Administrators" are even able to understand virtualization, let alone the Cloud.
Augmenting SMB networks with Cloud services for resilience and redundancy? Absolutely! But replacing them outright is a good way for a company to deep-six itself. Why Microsoft would sell their clients down the river to this degree is beyond me...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Yes, unfortunately as time goes on we're going to have more and more people permanently out of work. It's a hurdle that we're going to have to get over as humans, and it will be a very, very high hurdle.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I work as a systems and solution architect at a company that has been offering "cloud" services for 9 years - well, we only started calling it "cloud" a year and a half ago, but the product didn't change, just the marketing pitch. Sure, I may be a bit biased because "cloud" is providing an excellent lifestyle for my family and myself, but the reality of how it affects our customers on a larger economic scale is much different than "the sky is falling" opinions I'm seeing in here.
Our customers are primarily enterprise software developers and vendors, so our experience is going to be somewhat different than what the average mom & pop IT shop will see, but maybe not.
What we provide our customers is specialized knowledge and capabilities in one specific area of the IT sphere. Our infrastructure is located "in the cloud" as far as our customers are concerned, with iron racked in 6 different locations in a total of 4 different countries. We take a HUGE design, provisioning, and maintenance burden off our customers.
And we have cost the jobs of not one single person in the IT departments or Development teams of our customers.
And here's why:
What our provisioning of cloud services has allowed these companies to do is scale in a way that would have been too expensive otherwise. Over the long haul, this means that the existing IT/Dev staff within these companies get to have a 50 to 100 fold greater impact with the work that they do. In turn, this creates more income for the companies that employ them. The companies that employ them see greater profits and margins from the areas that employ our services, and do what is a very rational thing for corporations to due: they INCREASE the size of these highly effective departments. They take IT staff and resources from failing projects, and pump them into the projects that are effective and profitable. They hire extra staff to increase the size of the departments with this extra revenue and margin.
That's how big business makes money. They kill the week departments and shift resources to the strong ones.
The net effect of our services to our customer staffing levels is invariably an increase. Without exception.
I don't know about standard corporate IT. I've never worked in that space. But if you are working for a development house that isn't already leveraging cloud services, or at least looking seriously at doing it, then it's time to fire your employer, before they get run over by their competition and leave you holding the bag when your paycheques stop coming on a regular basis.
Manager: Well, with this new cloud technology, we're saving $100K/year on hardware maintenance and replacement. Now, with that saving I propose we put the money toward some new IT projects..."
CEO: My pocket.
Manager: What?
CEO: That's money in my pocket. We can keep the status quo and still make me richer.
Manager: Really. We could put that money towards web development -- purchasing has been crying for a decent inventory application.
CEO: My pocket.
Manager: Or we could use it to hire someone else and give our current IT staff time for vacation and not working 80 hours per week.
CEO: Overtime exempt?
Manager: Well, yes.
CEO: My pocket.
I can't imagine how anything could be worse than my IT department.
Imagine a hardware failure, and instead of waiting 30 minutes for your on site IT staff to replace a hard disk drive, you have to wait for a local independent contractor to arrive, and because they can't be fully trusted as a normal employee it takes them a day or more to get your workstation back online -- For every configuration option and administration access the contractor needs to call the remote IT help desk for the info, thus there's a severe shortage of anyone willing to work in such a frustrating environment, and instead of a day, it takes a week with multiple contractor visits to get everything working properly again.
Yep, I really miss our IT department. Strict as they may have been, at least they could actually fix things in a timely manner.
It's only meaningful progress if the benefits accrue to the average American worker. Otherwise, it's just further lining the pockets of the wealthy.
When productivity gains stop being broadly shared, Luddism starts to make sense. This is why massive concentration of wealth is a bad thing: it pits workers against innovation.
Washer women are also out of work for the most part. Buggy whip makers still survive, but they've moved On line as well. Things change over time, especially in a relatively new technology. We can't run out and legislate change away.
Your argument, in one form or another, has been raised about every work saving device ever made since the dawn of civilization. It was wrong then, and it hasn't improved in the thousand years since.
Doing the same amount of work cheaper is, by definition, a benefit that accrues to the average worker. Indeed to society as a whole.
We plant with plows, not dibble sticks. We harvest grain with machines, not fifty guys with scythes taking three weeks to cut 100 acres. Less guys. Less time. Cheaper bread.
Why should a small business have to maintain an IT department (even if it is only two guys) if web based services are all they really need?
Yeah, some of that money saved will be concentrated in the hands of the cloud owners. But not nearly as much as maintaining your own data center and IT staff. Money will be saved by the business.
The business will be healthier without that huge outlay of money. They can plow the savings int product development. They can lower their prices. The remaining workers can get a raise. The owner can buy a yacht. An extra few days of vacation can be granted. Christmas bonuses can be declared.
Even that part that (I suspect) you will hate the most, the owner buying a Yacht, will keep the yacht builder afloat (bad pun), and they will employ all sorts of folks, carpenters, engine mechanics, riggers, welders, probably even IT guys installing all the fancy systems on the boat.
Rich people spend their money.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But it already demonstrably is progress. The thought of being able to run hundreds of virtual machines for pennies each an hour was unthinkable 10 years ago. Not to mention practically-unlimited storage for next to nothing, with edge locations around the world. The cloud has clearly changed the way many businesses and people use computers and the internet in general. I find it strange you've not noticed that.
For Cloud crap, most of them forget the single biggest factor: their internet connection.
You're not going to be doing much Cloud work on a 10Mbit connection, or even a 50Mbit connection with 5+ users. That will be quickly choked with concurrent MAPI connections, web browsing, and whatever else they've got going on. File transfers would damn the thing quickly...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers