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How Will IT Workers' Roles Change in the Next Five Years? (Video)
We asked Sarah Lahav this question. She's founder and CEO of service management and help desk software company SysAid, and a staunch supporter of Sysadmin Appreciation Day, so keeping an eye on the future of IT is essential for her company, her clients, and the friends she's made in her years as an IT person and -- later -- IT service company executive. As she says in the interview, "[Some] people say that the IT person will not exist because everything will go to the cloud. And the other half claims that people from the IT [department] will have new skills. It wouldn’t be the same IT person as we know him now, there will be focus more on firewalls than on fixing computers and stuff like that." Is she right? Is she wrong? Or will changes in IT people's roles be so different from company to company that there is no one right answer?
If (H1B == true) then great
else bad
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
There are many definitions of "the cloud". My personal favorites:
cloud = server(s) managed by someone other than you in another location
Other than some common generic services you still have to engineer solutions to fit your business needs. Anything you want to have you have to specify and pay for. The cloud does not magically/automatically provide backup/fail-over. You have to set these up and pay extra for them.
IT can succeed or fail in the cloud just the same as it can in your own private data center. People who "know how it works", or IT people will still be needed regardless.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Dredging deep here, Dice. But I guess she's female, so it's perfectly in keeping with your new tradition of a Friday fedora-tip to the SJW menace.
Most software development is moving to cloud-centric. Look to see less application development and more add-o/plug-in roles. The days of inhouse apps are dwindling as pressure is being put on companies to run leaner. There will always be support roles, hardware issues to address and servers or networks to maintain though diminished. "Remember the good ole nineteen eighties" ELO.
The level of complexity in an IT worker's job has dramatically changed easily in the last 10 if not the last 5 years).
Having about 20 years of experience in IT, it hasn't changed much. Sure, there's the World Wide Web, but before that we had FTP, Gopher, Telnet, and LANs. Cloud storage isn't really any different than network home drives. The tech will change (cheaper, faster, slightly easier for the end user), but at the end of the day, you're still installing software, answering end-user questions, adding servers to the network, maybe repairing hardware, etc.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
...that the company will buy IT as a service from the most cost-effective supplier, most current IT personnel will be laid off (a few will be repurposed), and then users will discover shortly after cutover that calling the (now overseas) helpdesk has suddenly become an exercise in frustration, because of the language barrier and because the helpdesk person often knows less about computers and about the environment than the customer, because the business model dictates that you can pull people off the street, hand them a stack of procedures, and they become IT personnel. (This works as well as you imagine.)
Management and team leaders will beg the remaining IT management not to make their users call the helpdesk, in vain.
Due to lack of effective IT services and the necessity to actually get work done, little pools of IT start to pop up around the company. It starts as a file share on someone's PC, and then an off-the-books PC becoming a dedicated resource (there's a rogue EXSi server not three feet from me) and developers start to remember old admin and dba skills. After awhile, the company IT infrastructure is still used for no-brainer stuff like mail and large storage appliances and relatively static work like billing is still done on big, enterprise-class machines, but more and more anything that needs to be flexible, or resources that need to respond rapidly to user needs, are done surreptitiously, under the table, with the funds being disguised as other thing.
Then, when development itself is outsourced, it's left to the "development managers" and "offshore interface personnel" to maintain the still-used local resources, plus, usually, additional personnel to try to find some use for the code produced by those offshore resources, who have no real context of what the code is being used for.
(Parenthetically, the problem is not confined to IT. A company of which I have experience who has outsourced their accounting, still doesn't realize that after three years the offshore accountants still don't know the difference between California and Canada, and think the transaction must be correct if they don't get an error when they hit "return". The remaining 10% of retained accountants are kept busy correcting mistakes and doing the work over again.)
Anyway, the point being, some IT people don't choose to fade away, they go underground. They find that users can be very thankful of a helpful person who can communicate well and has knowledge of the company and what the user is trying to accomplish. Who isn't following a script but genuinely trying to help, with the expertise to do so. I have a title that sounds like a different job, but I'm still doing admin and customer support. When I'm not at my regular job, I have a side business providing home support for people who are tired of "I am being here for helping you turn it off and back on again".
So yeah, I guess IT has changed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
How many people have used the "cloud" and then moved away from it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Can't you just refuckulate the transglobiflier?
It's been this way for almost 20 years. In grad school, my operating system's class professor used to say there hasn't been any true development since 1955 (virtual memory), everything else is either has been refinement and/or marketing. I've thought for a while now that once you know a sufficient amount about a sufficient amount of subjects, it all starts to look very similar.
what's a printer?
Good point. Locals are still going to be necessary.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What would change?, hopefully there wouldn't be a video for asking stupid questions.
I wonder if we will see a swing from cloud computing back to a central managed system, similar to the mainframe concept (first go around), XStations (second go around), JavaSations (third go around), except using VDI and a remote desktop protocol, where the computer on the desk mainly is there to run remote apps, and instead of the apps being on the cloud, they would be moved back to the central datacenter for security reasons.
I have a feeling we will be seeing some major breaches, perhaps a cloud provider getting nailed, divulging a lot of personal and private info. Because of this, I wouldn't be surprised to see a return to having a core data center and all assets going behind the glass walls, especially if insurance companies start dropping coverage if a company doesn't toe the line on regulations, or regulators start doing more than slap-on-the-wrist fines.
Will a move back to keeping the data in one place, and using the next generation of terminals be a mainstay in IT? Not 100%, but a possibility.
I've been doing systems work for quite a while, and The Cloud isn't making things easier for IT workers -- it's making them more complex as there are now more moving parts you don't control to consider. Our company is still mainly an on-premises shop because we deploy stuff in areas where The Cloud can't be accessed at a reasonable speed for a reasonable price. But, I would say that virtualization in general has made things a lot more...fluid...than before. What's needed now is more people who know integration and the end-to-end nature of a system. I'm not talking about master black belt CCIE MCSE RHCE whatever savant experts...just people who have the ability to break a problem up into parts, troubleshoot what they can, and know who can help with what they can't.
In previous days, you had the Storage Guys (or Girls) that would do the magical incantations to convince a SAN to provision a LUN to your machine, the Server Guys who would manage the operating system, the Application Guys who would manage the program running on the server, the Network Guys who did all the connectivity magic, and the Data Center Guys who would install and fix physical equipment. Each one of those was a specialty, and still is to some extent. But, as more and more small VMs can be squeezed onto fewer and fewer boxes, there's less of a need for an infrastructure guy. As storage gets more virtual and easier to self-provision, the storage guys become more of a commodity. And if your company goes AWS, Azure or similar, all those Guys get replaced with a web interface and it becomes someone else's problem. I'm still totally amazed how many machines fit on a single HP DL380p physical server compared to what was possible even 5 years ago. And the public cloud services are even more interesting -- multi-football field size isolated rural data centers with thousands of machines and 4 employees to swap parts/install more nodes.
I think the future in IT is going to be less on the front lines and more cross-specialty, regardless of whether your data is onsite or offsite. In house coders are probably going to have problems because every single company is being sold the cloudy Salesforce or other ERP system as the cure for all its ills, so dev jobs are going to shift more towards software companies. Infrastructure guys will still be needed, but they'll be working at a higher level doing design/architecture rather than physical server management. There will still be analyst and project manager jobs, but I think those will be even less technical than they are now. Analysts will solely be an interface between "the business" and "the cloud guys". PMs will be secretaries who beg people to get things done. Add in the constant threat of offshoring, and salaries are definitely going to drop. I think they're probably going to go bimodal -- even lower pay for basic tasks, but similar or maybe even more pay for engineers/designers/architects who can successfully make the transition.
No one is capable of stopping The Cloud. The vendors will continue to sell companies on how wonderful it is, and the companies will find out after a while that it costs too much to get their data back and rebuild their own capacity on-site. I'm just hoping that good people will be allowed to work remotely so there won't be some massive migration that IT guys need to do to survive.
We asked Sarah Lahav this question. She's founder and CEO of service management and help desk software company SysAid
If you're not asking Gartner Group, I'm not interested - the answers simply won't have as much comedic value. ;)
I absolutely HATE the way you can't adjust the volume on the opening advertisement. It was enough to make me click away before the show started. Now I remember why I never watch these things.
Once we've really gotten to the future, there will be speech to text - or at least editors that know how to type up an interview - so that we don't have to site through video interviews.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My boss threw me under the bus by assigning me to a special project to manually create 1,000 printer queues because the server team blotched the printer migration from WS2003 to WS2012. What a PITA!
Its what you use to construct firearms, and occasionally table top miniatures.
even more useless than I thought
Yes. Outsourced IT services is a double edged sword. On the one hand, a botched assignment can provide business possibilities for people who can do a better job. (Or, at very least, communicate better.) On the other hand, the botched work can instead be handed off to already snowed-under local personnel.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You mean Kannad, Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, Marathi, Hindi.
Hindi and English are the official languages but in cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai, Hindi actually doesn't come on top.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Actually, the blotched work was local. The person on the server team responsible for the printer migration waited until the deadline to run the migration script. After the script blew up and he sent an email out, he went on vacation. Waiting until he gets back in two weeks wasn't an option.
What would it be like if IT geeks went on strike?
Business and consumer technologies are usually hidden under SEP field generators. And without us geeks to unplug the AC adapter from your router, or to read the instructions on your screen and click the corresponding icon for you, the vast majority of idiot morons on computers would be fucked. Unless the general public decides that they need to actually understand the tools they use on a daily basis, and educate themselves accordingly, IT work will ALWAYS exist in some form.
Hm. That sounds like grounds to find a new server team.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What would it be like if (choose occupation here) went on strike?
Don't feel so special, the world falls apart when the garbage men go on strike.
Probably from an Outsourced IT outfit from India.
the hackers aren't going to try an hack a firewall, they are going to send an email that makes you feel warm and fuzzy to open up that attachment.
if they have any kind of security, they won't be able to download the attachment unless you've hacked their router first
They just want to see things as less permanent, which means more easily managed people. In turn, that means people are worse off overall for lack of access to opportunities that go a more conventional route.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...which will be worse than the local team.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Cool. Global garbage service disruption depending on the IT union.
Greetings Sarah Lahav,
Seriously though, whenever addressing a techie crowd, never use the ' cloud ' word. What people unskilled in the art don't realize is that a virtual machine in 'the cloud' is virtually (sic) the same as a rack mounted PC. You still need someone to install and configure your business systems and no one is going to do that for free, certainly not your cloud provider. As for the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the firewall, someone else more advanced in the arts once put it better. The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. For instance RPC over HTTP, specifically designed to bypass the firewall. ref
Duh I've seen that kind of comment years ago
lucm, indeed.
The botched work is also often blamed on the previous engineer, who may have been presented by policy or resource management or "there's not a business case for it" from doing a more effective, more thorough job.
I don't think he smokes crack, I think he's a SJW injecting the SJW acronym as often as possible in SJW off-topic comments so SJW becomes a cliche.
lucm, indeed.
Most of it is self-inflicted. In fact, most of it is eagerly, self-congratulatorily self-inflicted.
It doesn't matter if a webserver is hosted in a private data centre or 'the cloud' a company still requires someone to configure and tweak it. Most IT work isn't fixing faulty servers as it is tweaking them to complete business workloads. Cloud isn't going to change any of that. Outsourcing on the otherhand means goodbye to entry level positions. But can't touch high complex positions
The company where I work has gone the Outsourcing route for their data centers.
When I started at the Company, ten years ago, Data Center employees were FTEs (Full Time Employees) that worked for the Company.
Then there was a change of CTO, and during that CTOs reign the Company FTE Data Center staff were aggressively and mostly eliminated, then replaced with Outsource IBM service staff. Additionally many IT EDI staff became Outsourced.
Ten years ago, I worked with none (maybe one?) Outsourced IT staffer. Many of the IT staff I now work with are Outsourced staff. There remains a core of Company staff in IT, that act as team leads to the Outsourced staff (for now?).
A specific example. A Lead in EDI that I work with, now works with a staff of six Outsourced staff (international names, strong accents).
Of course, that CTO then got promoted to SVP. But is service better than ten years ago? Nope. Are there communication challenges for work orders and non-cookie cutter problem solving when collaborating with Outsourced personnel? Yep. Do all the Outsourced staff have full medical/dental/retirement benefits? (we're not allowed to ask) Did the Company save millions of dollars? I will assume so.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
So then, having a company say their stuff "is in The Cloud", really means they Outsourced it, right?
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I keep looking for greener grass. It's hard find US$100+k/year jobs that are not in the pit.
For those who've climbed out, what was the greener grass that you found and now live in?
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
New jobs for US IT workers as greeters for Walmart. "Yes, what you are looking for is in Aisle 32."
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!