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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)."
I can see the writing on the wall, from the perspective of having my first IT job in 1983... It's over.
No one should really seek to enter a non development position in IT. Because it is being snuffed out by "big computing cloud services" and the "appliancezation" of IT infrastructure. There will always be some high end jobs around. But the numbers (and the pay) are shrinking- fast.
So pack it up kiddies. Almost 30 years of booming industry will be evaporating in 5 to 7 years.
It is truly time to find something else to do.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Got laid off yesterday from an IT job I'd had for almost 15 years. Small company so I did a lot of things, from hardware to software to physical security, to sweeping the floors to to taking boxes of mail to the post office at midnight. If it needed to be done, I was the guy to get,
So now this middle-aged man is suddenly out of work and looking at an IT field that is already vastly different than it was even five years ago much less fifteen. I don't have a clue what I am going to do. What I know how to do is of rapidly decreasing value and/or there are kids who will do it cheaper.
I have no idea what I am going to do. Savings and severance will carry for a while but I've got to make a pivot to do something entirely different which pays well. My job may be gone but naturally the bills aren't.
Sig for hire.
Wow. That is possibly the dumbest thing I have read on here. Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly? I'm sure you will be modded to +5 Insightful though.
I've been interviewing candidates for a high-end generalist position for six months now. (We're cheap and no-name) One thing that has struck me is that few people stay at an IT job for more than 18 months to 2 years. I'm an exception, having been here for 7 years and at my previous job for 9. But what really surprises me is that I've started to consider those 18 month stints as normal. Now, when I look at a resume where someone has been at the same place for 3 or 4 years, I ask myself "What's wrong with this person that they couldn't find another job?" It never crosses my mind that they, like me, might simply have found a relaxed environment in which they're comfortable and not expected to hold down a desk for 9 hours before doing the real work after everyone else goes home. It's scary. I'm both the senior technical person at my organization and my IT department's hiring manager... and by my own standards, I'm practically unhirable.