Tech Segments Facing Turbulence In 2016 (dice.com)

Nerval's Lobster writes: David Foote, an analyst who accurately predicted the tech industry's job growth in 2015, is back with some new predictions about which segments will do well in 2016 (Dice link). At the top of his list: DevOps, cloud and software architects, and cybersecurity experts. Those that won't perform well? SAP specialists, storage 'gurus,' and network managers could all face some headwinds. 'Companies are continuing to outsource infrastructure and that will reduce the need for network specialists except for network security which will remain in-house,' he says. Whether or not he's right about which parts of the tech industry will do better than others, there are also increasing signs that things could get very tight from a funding perspective for startups, as even the so-called 'unicorns' risk seeing investor money (and customers) dry up.

Comments

In other words

[halivar]

Bullshit and buzzword titles rise to the top. It has always been thus.

Re:In other words

[blue9steel]

my goal is to eliminate operations personnel

There are two ways to accomplish this:

1) Call them something else, they're still operations but now they have a fancy new name

2) Actually get rid of them, at which point you find out that the people you pushed the responsibility to have other things to do with their time and then it goes badly

Now, automation can reduce the total number of operations folks you need by making the existing ones more productive and of course more expensive, but total elimination is impossible prior to strong AI.

Re:In other words

[drolli]

What you talk about is a solution by a thinking human, and not "big data - the massive cloud will solve it" pixie dust.

IMO: If your system dependencies and requirement links are so obfuscated that you can not make fall-back rules by hand, i would bet there is no AI which will save you.

So, in a nutshell

[Opportunist]

The experts in the flavor of the month technologies (i.e. the buzzwords of which have arrived at the C-Level table) are in demand, the experts in the flavor of last year technology not so.

That's really astonishing. Who would have thought? How insightful, how unexpected!

Re:Programmers will suffer

[Paradox]

This part of the thread is like some kinda racist time machine. It's nearly 2016, folks. This kind of garbage is called what it is now. Conflating trained software engineers with call center support is another great example of the kind of demeaning bullshit Americans do to anyone foreign: collapsing them into a demeaning caricature. You both should feel ashamed. Doubly so because you're comically wrong and outdated.

First of all, outsourcing as a primary source for software has been on a sharp decline for years. A far greater problem is that the vast majority of services simply aren't writing code at all. They're buying 5-10 year old whitelabel software with confusing adapters to modern patterns or simply outsourcing entire products and then letting daily batch processes weld things together. A great example of this is most small banks and credit card providers in the US.

Second of all, there's no reason people from India can't make great software. Go to any laudable US Compsci program and you'll find people from that country in every grade bracket of every division, if you "require proof" that humans are humans. The business model is the problem, not someone's skin color or language. Outsourcing firms (of which there area LOT in South America now, by the way, so maybe it's time to listen to Trump's rhetoric?) aren't effective because their model is making payroll, not delivering great software to their clients. Many companies are realizing this, and converting to a contracting supply model, which makes a lot more sense in an environment where good talent is hard to find.