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What an IT Career Will Look Like 5 Years Out
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Heltzel reports on the impact that IT's increasing reliance on the cloud for IT infrastructure will have on your career in the years ahead. "[O]ne fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who've pulled all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while co-workers slept, probably won't recognize their offices' IT architecture — or the lack thereof — in five years. This shift will have a broad impact on IT's role in the future — how departments are structured (or broken up), who sets the technical vision (or follows it), and which skills rise to prominence (or fall away almost entirely)."
Careers, at least as we used to know them, are mostly gone now. We won't see them again any time soon. Even the industry that the federal government so lovingly bailed out back in 2010 has been laying off plenty of IT workers in recent times, and they were amongst the most stable places for IT "careers" before now. If you want to be able to retire at some point before you die, you need to be constantly looking for other job opportunities. Move up, move down, move laterally; it doesn't matter. Just keep moving or you'll be under the chopping block.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Whole organizations will be reliant on whole other organizations, who may go out of business on the random, or get swallowed up by competitors of whole organizations(1).
In reality a hosted cloud is more expensive and less secure in almost all cases. When will people wake up and realize that cloud was created not to provide any particular service that can't be provided locally, but is just a way to turn something you used to pay for once into a monthly forever and ever payment. Cloud is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
People keep saying this to me. "Oh we won't need your type in a few years because cloud everything." Never mind the fact that around 99% of my work is software-based. I only rarely on occasion mess with hardware. Every 5 years for a hardware refresh, and the occasional drive swap from a vendor. Everything else I do is software-based. And it really doesn't matter whether it's "in the cloud", or "on premise". My job role stays the same. So I save a whole 15 minutes a year on not having to swap drives.
What you will see with "cloud", just like "virtualization", is a maturation of the technology's use inside a company. Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization, and not every workload will be appropriate nor cost effective in the cloud. The cloud is great for every "devops" guy who thinks they're going to write the next Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix--but yet again, for 99% of companies out there, workloads are entirely static. There's just little need for "SUPER HYPER SCALE AUTOSCALING UP AND DOWN CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE" for a vast majority of business workloads.
Specific applications are hugely appropriate for "cloud", particularly e-mail (and I say this as an Exchange Administrator). And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue. And never underestimate the value of management having someone that they can call to "look at the issue right away at 2:30AM". This need will keep a lot of folks employed.
Finally, you can't really depreciate cloud assets like you can capital expenses. So really, again, you're ultimately just comparing the cost of operating a datacenter versus the cloud technology. And you can already not worry about operating your own datacenter by simply using a colocated one.
So at the end of the day, no matter how much technology changes. No, the 'devops' revolution isn't actually going to happen, and being able to swap a drive or add some ram will still be a necessary skill.
At our school, here's the list of stuff we pushed into the cloud in the last few years:
Student information system (attendance, grades, IEPs, lesson plans - the lot). This eliminated an RDP server farm and a couple of SQL servers.
Email - this eliminated a couple of Exchange Servers.
Student data storage and applications - Google Apps eliminated most of our Windows and Mac student workstations. Chromebooks are cheap and easy.
Firewalls/VPN - management of these devices is now in the cloud - goodbye to local firmware updates and far more flexible provisioning of devices.
MDM - no longer in-house.
In each case we realized cost savings simply due to sharing someone else's infrastructure instead of home-brewing our own. Security concerns in the cloud are overblown by those trying to save their jobs. The fact is that most small to medium size businesses can not afford to have the security talent that most cloud companies have.
We don't make our own water or power - why should we try to build all of our IT?
Problem is, when a company's own infrastructure gets compromised, they get fsckd, but when a 'cloud' provider gets compromised, everyone they host get fsckd.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Wish I had points to mod this up. I sincerely wish you the best. You might be able to bridge the gaps by finding a consulting gig.
This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I've been in IT for nearly 20 years now... when I started out in the late 90s, it actually felt possible to "know everything" and flying by the seat of your pants was just how things got done. I don't even think I'd heard the term "best practice" until 2002. If you were good at what you did, you could run on instinct. It was, I daresay, fun back then. Now everything is so regimented and governed...
Over the years I've moved around a bit, and done everything from helpdesk to system admin to IT manager to consultant and again to sysadmin. I got very comfortable in my role as IT manager (at a construction company that didn't really understand the role or value of IT), since I was pretty much a one-man-show for almost 8 years... but when they allowed me to hire a junior admin to handle some of the day-to-day stuff, all they saw was a young kid enthusiastically doing the grunt work for less than half what they used to pay me to do it. Never mind all the complex project work I was doing, never mind the vendor and client relationships I'd built, forget that I'd essentially built the entire infrastructure from the ground up... I was suddenly "redundant" and got RIF'ed. Out on my ass and replaced by a kid who wasn't even old enough to drink. Hopefully he's been able to do well. He was a good kid and I bear him no grudges. Sucked for me though.
From there I went into consulting, thinking it would be a good place to pick up some of the skills that were growing in importance, and get my hands on some of the tech that passed me by because the company I'd been at for the last 8 years preferred the "bubblegum and paperclips" methodology to spending money on IT. I was hired into a senior role due to my years in the field, and did manage to learn a few new tricks, but I felt like a dinosaur next to these twenty-somethings who were genuinely excited about tech and were already schooled on stuff that I needed to try and catch up on. My many years of experience was less applicable than their months' worth.
Part of it is a passion problem... I'm 40, and have all the requisite grown-up worries that come with marriage, home ownership, kids, divorce, remarriage, home ownership take 2, etc., etc., etc... when I'm lucky enough to have a little spare time for myself, I sure as hell am not going to use it to read about anything IT-related or build labs in my basement. Information Technology is what I do, not what I am. However, many younger guys and gals who are starry-eyed and excited about their futures have genuine passion for filling their minds with tech, and are not burdened by years or decades of "deprecated" knowledge that seems to get in the way of learning new things. They're also not burned out by years of being the scapegoat when things break and being invisible when things work. And they're cheaper.
Tribal knowledge has some value in IT, but not as much as in other fields. Eventually that mainframe is going to die, be replaced with some shitty Wintel solution, and knowing your way around an AS/400 isn't really worth anything anymore. Age is a liability, and experience is like being a musician... you might be a maestro, but if you're playing an older style of music as opposed to keeping up with trends, your audience is going to dwindle until you can't find gigs anymore.
I'm hoping to have an epiphany one day soon and figure out what I want to do next... because I don't want to do this any longer than I have to.
"The Cloud" is a buzzword created to fool executives into paying for Other People's servers. Executives see it as some magical technology that is fool proof and infallible.
The term should be eradicated, preferably with fire.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.