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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.
The level of complexity in an IT worker's job has dramatically changed easily in the last 10 if not the last 5 years).
I think the definition of "the cloud" that has emerged is "servers managed by someone other than you, managed to the extent that you are not aware of or concerned with the actual hardware."
So the difference between having someone host your VM and having your VM hosted in "the cloud" is essentially just, "the way in which it's hosted makes it so I don't know, and it doesn't matter, which hardware it's running on." It's about the level of abstraction of management. If I have a couple of virtual hosts in my private datacenter where I'm manually spinning up VMs on particular hosts, that's just hosting VMs in my datacenter. If I have systems where I don't even specify where VMs are deployed or which resources they use, but just say, "Spin up a new VM" and the automated systems allocate appropriate resources on appropriate servers, then I have a "private cloud". It could be the same hardware in the same datacenter, but its "cloud"-iness is related to how abstract the hardware resource allocation has become for me.
I'm not saying that this is my preferred definition. I'm saying that I believe this seems to be, in my experience, what people intend when using the term.
And even those generic services will still need someone to provide them. Whether that person is directly employed by your company or is an employee of the "cloud" company you're contracting with.
Most definitely. Particularly when there is a problem with your company's Internet link and everything "in the cloud" is unavailable.
Or a problem with the "cloud" company's Internet link.
In either case, you will be dealing with someone who will view you as just-another-client. It doesn't matter if you're not happy. Or if your business suffers. Because your payments will not make-or-break THEIR company.
...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.
I am a Cloud Architect.
People ask me what Cloud is/means.
"In a nutshell, the Cloud means You Don't Own It."
If you outsource to IBM (and other physical plant providers as well) in a "traditional" datacenter, you the client actually own the hardware legally (in most cases). If you want, you can come lift and shift it out of the datacenter. In a cloud environment, you don't own it. Potentially not even the data you have stored in the cloud, as some people have found out.
During my long 25 years as a Sysadmin, the complexity of systems continues to grow, and I continue to make my living solving problems created by that complexity.
The difficulty I see is where will the next generation of BOFH's start out? The generalist is getting squeeze out of IT and replaced by more and more compartmentalized specialists.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.