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The creeping IT apocalypse

• forrestbrazeal 8y ago
  Author here - I'm serious when I say that I'm happy to be a sounding board if you're at a career crossroads. Twitter DMs are open @forrestbrazeal.
  • NikolaNovak 8y ago
    I've been in IT (mostly the "Legacy" kind - Oracle/PeopleSoft ERP) for about 20 years now, and I fully empathize with the article. I've subconsciously, then consciously, had to keep "moving up" on the value scale, partially due to outsourcing and partially due to automation. From sysadmin type to infra architect, but then made a curious curve that still catches me by surprise into tech lead and now find myself in basically management. I struggle to understand what will give me better skills and career for future: developing people and org knowledge and experience, as I do in my current role, which just feels generic and not particularly useful to somebody who used to gobble technical manuals for fun (but apparently market finds value in technically knowledgeable people who can manage and communicate); or go back to my love of technical and get back hands-on... understanding it's an uphill battle at my age and may be a losing one with the amount of automation and "AI being around the corner (forever;)".
    • arethuza 8y ago
      If you have a decent understand of ERP systems and projects it might be easier and more productive to transfer those skills to more modern cloud-hosted ERP products than go back to more generic development skills?
      • NikolaNovak 8y ago
        Thx; Agree, though I find many "cloud-hosted ERP products" are actually very traditional ERP products, just hosted by vendor (I remember the "Lightbulb" moment when I realized the much-vaunted Oracle HCM Cloud is just Oracle Fusion tech stack underneath, that somebody else manages; in that case, I don't know if it's necessarily _fewer_ people that work on it, they just all work at Oracle datacentre instead of dispersed among the clients :) Haven't worked on Workday and the like yet to understand how "Cloudy" they trully are.
        • arethuza 8y ago
          Cloud based ERP/CRM do solve a lot of infrastructure issues - but they can also introduce a lot of issues (or opportunities depending on your perspective) - some integration tasks and data extract suddenly become a whole lot more difficult.
  • lunchables 8y ago
    This is exceptional writing. It's concise, clear and engaging with a really clear call to action but not defeatist like so much writing regarding this issue.
    • forrestbrazeal 8y ago
      Thank you, that's very kind!
  • finebalance 8y ago
    I've just started my career in ML, and I already sort of feel that a majority of the work that people around me are doing can be done by an automated pipeline (like Python's AutoML) and throwing enough compute power at the problem. It's quite worrying.
    • disgruntledphd2 8y ago
      Learn statistics and how to communicate them. That's going to be a long time being automated. For instance, if (for example) you model insurance data in the EU, you cannot use gender as a factor in pricing (even though it's effective). In general, the modelling/ML pipeline is the easy bit, the hard part is the data cleaning and figuring out how to translate a business problem into one that can be solved by data. tl;dr as many people have said about Comp Sci over the years, learn the fundamentals (statistics and experimental design) and you'll be in a much better position.
    • ivalm 8y ago
      automl is pretty horrible if you're doing anything that is complicated, even at Google-scale compute power SotA DNNs are hand crafted, not auto-found. Feature engineering is also quite important for a lot of data types and that has too large of a phase space to probe with automl. At the same time if your problems are mostly solved by logistic regression/random forest/etc with simple features (ie you have well defined categories and/or states or your task is well solved in literature) then ML is not your value proposition, it's more data/business analytics (and autoML should enable you to provide your value faster).
  • cfontes 8y ago
    I enjoyed reading it too, to the point and full of information. I really hate the current pattern of getting some interesting topic and nice data about and burring it into 20 pages of story telling journalism.
  • kyberias 8y ago
    Ok, question: What exactly do you mean by this: '“senior application developers” who munge JSON in C#' Why did you choose to JSON and C# in particular here?
    • forrestbrazeal 8y ago
      No particular reason, just trying to provide an example of low-value integration work that is likely to be subsumed by a service at some point.
    • mx24 8y ago
      Because it's quite trendy to hate on all things Microsoft, especially in Silicon Valley startup culture. I'm a C# developer and have had other developers cringe in my face when I tell them I'm a C#/.NET developer.
      • mdmnk 8y ago
        I use VSCode and develop exclusively on Windows 10. I also have mac and linux machines. I think its better to be agnostic when it comes to language and OS.
  • toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I don’t have twitter so I hope you don’t mind me engaging here. I would be very careful before dismissing AWS’ no code/low code project. Mulesoft, Microsoft Flow, and Zapier have a combined revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in serving a market for establishing business logic workflow without code. I am only surprised it took AWS so long to move into the space considering the cross marketing opportunity to existing customers and their compliance capabilities.
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  Nice blog, keep writing. I manage a machine learning team and I also think that at least partially automated data curation and modeling will reduce the number of people required in my field. It might take 5 or 10 years, but I think it will happen. I think you are spot on that IT and devops will take a hit. I look more at Heroku’s model that AWS and GCP as the future. That said AWS and GCP will keep getting more ‘Heroku like’.
  • thrav 8y ago
    Heroku and its parent company, Salesforce. Salesforce databases are code and no code manipulated and should already carry most of the business and customer data and offer several different off the shelf products for plugging other data sources in. For most companies, it could cover the majority of what their legacy IT department does, and for many companies in the Bay Area it handles everything, except their product and what’s in JIRA. For others, it is woven into the product. It’s a complete blind spot for most engineering minded people because they never realized how flexible the platform was, and with Bret Taylor running the show now, it’s miles away from just being a clunky Sales CRM. Couple of examples of recent developments: https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/12/introducing-lightning-web-components.html https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/12/introducing-l... https://lightningdesignsystem.com https://lightningdesignsystem.com https://developer.salesforce.com/platform/dx https://developer.salesforce.com/platform/dx
    • 666lumberjack 8y ago
      My experience with Salesforce (mostly with Marketing Cloud) has been that the developer experience is truly awful. Mediocre documentation, no debugging tools to speak of and systems that never quite do everything you want. Maybe other parts of the ecosystem are better but I'd be very reluctant to take another job where I had to work with it.
      • thrav 8y ago
        Yeah, Marketing Cloud is a collection of acquired products that is not really on the actual Salesforce platform. It’s very much its own thing, kinda like Heroku is its own thing.
• munin 8y ago
  This kind of change has also impacted me. It shows up when I'm trying to give students advice about starting their careers, and I realize that the first jobs I had (system administrator, SOC worker) have been replaced by robots. Especially in the SOC, I was a "Tier 1" analyst that would do monitoring (watching a bank of green lights waiting for one to turn red) and first level triage and analysis. This has been replaced by ML driven data processing systems. So I think the apocalypse is double-bladed: while automation kicks a bunch of current workers out by making them immediately redundant, it also freezes out the next generation by removing entry level jobs and not really replacing them with anything equivalent. Meanwhile, universities and vocational ed programs won't get this memo for another ten years so they will continue to happily propel waves of students onto a set of closed and locked doors.
  • bitL 8y ago
    I am worried about the latter aspect as well - in order to keep automation going, very advanced developers would have to be involved; if the whole "easy job" ecosystem disappears, there won't be any reasonable way to keep developers progressing, with best in a competition filling up the spots at "cognitive automators".
    • omgwtfbyobbq 8y ago
      A significant number of companies who can benefit from automation likely won't need to continue to automate indefinitely. I work in software development/automation and in my industry it's more about finding and configuring a framework that enables business users to configure software systems than about automating everything possible. Even relatively rote software development that involves embedding business logic into a software system is likely safe as long as the cost of continuing to develop that software is close to the cost of switching to some other framework. It's when the cost of development is much greater than the cost to try another framework out, or when a company wants to expand something and doing so on the development side would be cost prohibitive, that someone's job could be on the line.
    • gervase 8y ago
      In the absence of on-the-job experience/growth for less-experienced developers, it forces them back into more academic training programs. I personally think this is likely to lead to exacerbated "degree inflation", where MS degrees will be the new minimum expectation for these new "entry-level" (read, Tier 2+) jobs.
• vinceguidry 8y ago
  I'm waiting for it to happen to web dev so that companies can find something else to fixate on so I can go do that. Companies are always going to follow the latest trends and it's always going to take smart people to follow them. I'm not worried about my ability to make a living. I just can't wait to see what comes.
  • joelbluminator 8y ago
    don't hold your breath, this beast won't go to sleep soon.
• te_chris 8y ago
  I'm advertising for 2 roles at the moment: a Senior Backend engineer and a Junior Frontend (in London, UK). Almost impossible to find someone for the backend role, but I've had to turn off the advertising as I've had 71 people apply for the junior frontend role. The mix is fascinating, a lot of ex-bootcampers, some CS grads, some self-taught people, but all of them are desperate for a shot to get into our industry. I've found this quite worrying as a signal for what's happening in the wider economy.
  • joelbluminator 8y ago
    Could be a lot of things, but my guess - maybe seniors don't find your offering compelling enough? Try avoiding "young teams" and "beers" and put more "healthy snacks", "work life balance" in the job offer and see what happens. Seniors generally have better options than juniors, you're gonna have to work hard to get and retain them.
    • RealDinosaur 8y ago
      I read an article regrading this recently... With junior engineers, they are selling themselves. With senior engineers, the company has to sell itself to them instead.
    • te_chris 8y ago
      My comment was about comparing and contrasting the amount of cold interest(/desperation). I wasn't passing comment on how hard it was to recuit - of course it's harder to recruit experienced people.
  • expertentipp 8y ago
    Yes, the web front-end is perceived as low-effort entrance to the software development fields. Purely commercial bootcamps, people from unrelated fields, people without a clue about networks and browsers, people hanging on anything which will allow them to land a job - it makes it trivial for Google and Facebook to basically take an absolute control over the web with their technologies, solutions, and stacks.
• tjr225 8y ago
  It would be interesting to know the growth of employees at the cloud providers relative to the number of IT employees at non-cloud-provider companies over time. I wonder how much of this is simply a consolidation of talent and resources?
• pjc50 8y ago
  > Repetition is a sure warning sign. If you’re building the same integrations, patching the same servers over and over again every day, congratulations – you’ve already become a robot. It’s only a matter of time before a small shell script makes it official. Absolutely - if something is repetitive, it's a candidate for automation. This is true across all disciplines. Only the as-yet unautomatable human judgement, insight and communication is safely valuable. On the other hand, "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" has been a BOFH joke since the 90s.
  • ReptileMan 8y ago
    I have actually replaced a person with 40 lines c# program
    • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      His wife and kids don't even know.
      • chosenbreed37 8y ago
        > His wife and kids don't even know. :-)
    • hobs 8y ago
      I replaced a person with a one line code change (performance tuning) - they got her another job though. Literally had a business call to see if they could run another instance of $LOB_SOFTWARE because they had a person clicking a button for 40 hours a week.
      • kamaal 8y ago
        That kind of work is easy to automate. Until you reach a situation when it has to be decided when a person has to click the button. And with what data they are supposed to click it. Often it's not easy to make those decisions through code. That is because the person making those click decisions, has a lot of tribal knowledge of the business situation at hand, which triggers only when the situation presents itself. But if human is basically a meat-robot doing programmable tasks that is not even a automation issue. Its really more management and planning problems. You are supposed to fire people running the business in those cases.
• klodolph 8y ago
  This has been happening since the 1970s. Or earlier. I don’t really think of it as an apocalypse. IT skills have never had a long shelf life. Any time you are a technology expert at your company, in IT, the technology landscape will shift under you. This is the Red Queen Hypothesis in action. People who ran mainframes in the 1980s became trusted experts and then most of the jobs evaporated. Same thing happened to people running critical VAX or Unix systems. Your skills are only valuable as long as the related technology is. The same thing happens to programming positions. But I think the good news is missing from this article—IT jobs are, overall, sticking around or increasing in number. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs are growing “faster than average for all occupations”). You do have to keep updating your skill set, but it’s not like manufacturing, where efficiencies eliminate jobs altogether or move them to completely different sectors. And there is that ageism to worry about, and uncertainty. I’m personally more worried about some of the other remaining white-collar office jobs, like the accountants, paralegals, HR, various banking positions, etc.
  • itgoon 8y ago
    This. Check out my username, this is what I do, and I've been doing it for far longer than a decade. The mid-range jobs have always been vanishing. Many times, I'm the guy automating them out of existence. It's always replaced by something else. It depends on the circumstances, of course, but there is often more work after the automation than before. It's just different work. It requires reskilling. The article mentions some new product AWS is coming out with. No matter how "simple" it makes things, someone is going to end up being an expert at using it, and will probably be paid well to do so. Really, the toughest and most crucial part of this career has been keeping up. The work stays steady, though.
    • someone454 8y ago
      I gave myself the title “IT Janitor” because for years all I did was clean up other people’s $4!7. I automated everything I touched, and told people it was so I would have more time to surf the Internet. Now I’m over 50, in the Innovation group, and dreading ever having to find a new job. But I’m having fun: blockchain, robotics, mobile app dev, and now NLP.
• kamaal 8y ago
  Programmers have been predicted to be going out of jobs since the days of COBOL. There is a reason that is not happening(yet), or hardware companies would have been all shipping pluggable chips, we'd just config-connect them and be done. The reason is in the word itself `Software`. The real problem with these ready-made plumb-and-plug modules is sooner or later these are either too slow, or expensive, or just a pain to refactor/redo. Eventually you just come back and realize you need a more granular control over things, and anything you are likely to come up with resembles a programming language. I had this moment of realization myself while having to change a complicated graph in Pentaho Kettle a few months back. The graph looks bonkers hard and brittle, changing anything requires redoing all the dependent elements of the graph, and if you have a graph complicated enough you will be forced to rewrite it. The real trouble there is no functional/unit testing with these things. And then you realize, you are just better off with a full fledged ETL language/programming language. The second problem I faced was running into performance issues. Want to change the sort algorithm? Running into heap space issues? Want better logging? Want a better threading model? All the best. Nothing is possible. This is above and beyond the need for meta-programming facilities. At that point whatever GUI graph you draw is worse than any verbose code you will write. Regarding programmable tools, we already have those. Vim, Emacs, Microsoft Excel all give you a degree of meta control over the tool and what you want to do with it. But that's that, and it is often hard to bend this tools to your command. These are just a few reasons why there won't be an apocalypse soon.
  • droobles 8y ago
    I empathize with this sentiment, and will add that it may take fewer developers/IT folks to get a product out the door (MVP), but a company that depends on the product will have more specific business requirements and will eventually onboard more people to deliver solutions specific to those needs. The job market will close up a bit, but right now tech is looking like the California gold rush, where 4-5 years ago any bootcamp grad could jump right into a web dev job (at least in my job market in the Midwest). I think if you continuously learn and remain marketable as the times change, then as a worker you will be fine. I also like the comment that mentions that you may just end up working for the cloud provider rather than the business application company.
• Ruxbin1986 8y ago
  As someone who's been in IT over a decade, I am concerned and so many IT folks are going to be blindly hit. Sure, some of them will still have positions the same or similar roles but there will be a crunch. The large outsources will be hit overseas (WiPro, Infosys, etc.) but it will also impact administrators at medium-large sized businesses in typical American Cities as Forrest mentioned. The worst part out of all of this is too many colleges and especially technical colleges still teaching networking, linux or windows administration as if they'll be able to have life long career. That is no longer true. I don't want to imagine what it'll be like for those students who graduate, get good jobs (now), a mortgage and start to raise their family only to find themselves unemployed in the middle of their lives. I don't expect much sympathy from the largely meritocratic tech industry or anyone else. As for myself, I already work for one of the big three and apart of many "cloud" migrations. I should be okay but at the same time I am somewhat conflicted. Am I going to need to go back to school for Computer Science and become an fully-fledged actual software developer? I mean, it's fine, there's still enough time (I don't think we will really feel the burn for at least another 4-6 years) but is it reasonable or realistic that everyone needs to be rockstar developer?
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I've always kept my coding skills up a bit as a hobby, but I don't realistically see this IT apocalypse coming. Everyone in Silicon Valley thinks they're going to automate away everyone's problems, but nobody there has managed to prevent people from needing the same type of support they needed two decades ago: Why doesn't my printer work, and how do I know if this email is real? (If you believe Gmail or Office 365 can do the last one, you're wrong, FYI.) I don't think we're anywhere near an "IT apocalypse". I think we're more likely to put a ton of machine learning engineers out of work long before companies start needing less help desk technicians and sysadmins. I think a lot of people have moved to the cloud only to discover they needed just as many people to help manage their cloud presence as they needed to manage their on-prem hardware.
    • TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
      > but nobody there has managed to prevent people from needing the same type of support they needed two decades ago: Why doesn't my printer work, and how do I know if this email is real? The author does touch on this though by highlighting that you will need less and less people. As more services move into 'cloud' solutions it can free up time for those and they'll step into those spaces.
• sudofail 8y ago
  The author and I share nearly identical work histories. I've been in IT for about 10 years, starting with AWS and database administration, then turned more DevOps with a focus on CI/CD. Over the last few years, it's become very obvious that the DevOps role is requiring more and more development skills. Simple bash scripting is not going to cut it in the modern tech company. A couple years ago I made the switch to full time development. I now do most of the DevOps stuff for my teams, but from a developer role, instead of a sysadmin/cloudops role. I'm certain that's going to be the future. Look at Google's requirements for SREs. They are full-fledged software engineers.
  • ragona 8y ago
    I’ve gotten to a point where if we write a bash script for something I consider it somewhat of a failure. I want operational tooling to be easily maintainable by a large team of software engineers, and bash scripts just aren’t that. Services that run services is the way to go. Lose a box from the fleet? No problem, the operator service bounced it and got it running again. I’ll admit that timelines often mean you don’t get to build the grand vision out of the gate, but I absolutely agree with you that bash scripting isn’t how we should be running services these days.
• jamisteven 8y ago
  They use to say a jack of all trades is a master at none, now these days SME's feel like they are walking on quick sand. SME's in core competencies still useful but more and more are becoming jack of all trades by default of how quick the industry evolves. Survival of the agile-ist.
• redleggedfrog 8y ago
  While I think this essay has some good points, it ignores the problem that I always see with this idea - people. I really wish the business people I deal with on a daily basis could have their business requirements met by such automation, cause it's the least fun part of my job. But the don't because I don't care how awesome your cloud provider tools are, they always come to me with some weird requirement or platform and I'm back to "munging JSON in C#". The problem isn't the technology, it's the complexity of the customer's business requirements, and their nearly complete inability to transfer those requirements into software without complex implementations that they could never hope to implement themselves. I would love to see more tooling to help with this. I have been waiting for 25 years. It gets better, but not nearly what can be described as an apocalypse.
  • yourapostasy 8y ago
    > ...their nearly complete inability to transfer those requirements into software without complex implementations that they could never hope to implement themselves. I wouldn't even mind if they even had "those requirements". That would be a huge step up. Oftentimes the requirements are not written down and stuck in tribal knowledge. And woe betide you if the tribe is an outsourcer or offshore team. About half the time, they're unintentionally leaving knowledge in the heads of their meat-robots, and getting the information transferred out of those heads is painful and time-consuming, because "set of procedures for meat-robots" is effectively what they're hired for. If the procedure is periodically performed, I often get pretty good results just asking for copies of the resultant emails reporting completion, and working backwards from there. Automation at this layer of staff work is considered exotic developer-realm, needs-a-budget-and-a-project-manager effort, even for what most HN readers would consider relatively trivial multi-hour or multi-day scripting work. The abruptness and agony of automation sweeping through these layers in the upcoming years as the tooling to discover, capture, distill, and maintain these requirements with tight synchronization to software teams maintaining the code behind the automation are going to be politically challenging, as a lot of these people have zero notion what they're doing can be automated away, even as they consume the results of ML in their daily lives. And I'm rather glum about teaching these people how to perform the automatation themselves. The reception I've gotten to my offers to help them get on the track to learning programming and automation have been very underwhelming. Even if someone doesn't "get it" about coding, just the exposure to the thinking patterns would help me enormously cut down on unnecessary meeting times, as there are still way too many people whose conception of automation is closer to "can't they/you just...[magic/mind-read]?"
• strikelaserclaw 8y ago
  I think for most mid level guys the threat isn't AI doing their job. I think its the influx of people who will undoubtedly join the "coding" workforce once automation takes away many trivial jobs like driving trucks, cabs, or flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. All these people will be told to retrain themselves and go into the tech sector, and we'll get a huge influx of cheap tech people.
  • kypro 8y ago
    I don't know if you know any working class people, but a lot of them simply don't have the intellectual capacity for tech work - which is often why they flip burgers.
    • TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
      You're being rather reductive. Just because someone is in a 'working class job' doest diminish their intellect. I've encountered many working class folks with a lot of knowledge in the fields they were in (electricians, plumbers, mechanics, etc).
      • ndiscussion 8y ago
        Those aren't working class, they're tradesmen. At least IMO. Working class to me means Walmart, Mcdonalds, and Jack Generic Construction LLC.
        • kamarg 8y ago
          Why they're hardly even Scotsmen at all! Less humorously I'd say your definition of working class differs from that of the public. If you ask those tradesmen if they're working class, I'd wager upwards of 90% of them will say yes. Working class to most people just means that they do manual labor. They work outside and in factories building and moving physical things be it burgers or buildings or balloon animals. The key seems to be that they don't generally sit at a desk with a computer on it for 8hrs a day.
    • 8y ago
• hartjer 8y ago
  What click bait
• agentultra 8y ago
  Is there another side to this story? I've spoken with friends running the engineering teams at big analytics companies and they've gone back to self-managed, bare-metal servers because they couldn't get the cost/performance they needed from "one size fits all" cloud solutions.
  • ilaksh 8y ago
    Well AWS is expensive.
    • Ygg2 8y ago
      And if AWS becomes one of the few games in town, it's going to get more and more expensive.
• debacle 8y ago
  Most enterprise IT is change management. Migrating that database cluster takes 3-4 man hours. Planning the migration might take a half dozen meetings, vendor calls, dry runs, calculating transfer duration, etc. Enterprise IT isn't going anywhere. The cost of doing it right 100 times is greatly outweighed by the potential loss in doing it wrong once. People who are already on the cloud aren't going to ditch their service providers so they can take time away from their actual business to manage something they don't understand to save a few hundred dollars a quarter. Finally, programming hasn't changed substantially in the last 15 years for most people. I know that might sound shocking to people on HN, but most developers are working in dingy cubicles on archaic systems without continuous integration or release management. They're deploying to production and then jiggling the handle until things work. The systems they produce are just good enough to keep other business units crunching along, and their saving grace is two-fold: they don't cost enough to warrant real scrutiny, and the potential utility of an efficient IT department is non-obvious to most business managers.
  • jpindar 8y ago
    Cubicles! Where do I apply?
• expertentipp 8y ago
  Pop the ad bubble and the IT apocalypse as in the article will not be a viable scenario.
• geggam 8y ago
  Completely agree with this. There is something to think about. The folks who are running things are plentiful right now but as this churns we will run out of folks who understand the lower layers well enough to manage it. As I interview people I run into this for things like SRE and DevOps already
  • arminiusreturns 8y ago
    Exactly this. I've been a sysadmin since I got out of the Corps, with a recent break and now found a really exciting startup that is automating something else. This is the first time I've really forced myself to stop allowing technical debt and lack of staffing to dictate how I automate, so I am working very close with the devops/SRE team, and I am continually flabbergasted at how much they don't know of the underside of the systems they use, or just fundamentals of many things. (I even had one guy yesterday try to tell me I should stop using emacs and start using pycharm because "it's a real IDE" , yet this is one of the guys who's going to "automate all the things"!?) I'm having to learn to automate better, but they don't seem to be learning how to admin better, but I also consider that part of the sysadmins job... just as devops and SRE need to be "evangelists" in order to get C-suite buy in, I think the sysadmins need to make sure the lower level knowledge isn't being lost, or worse, discarded falsely as not relevant. Having seen the inside of so many places though, it also continually surprises me how many companies are all struggling with the exact same issues, to the point I'm highly tempted to try to pitch a whole IT solution I've been thinking on for years at the next YC. One thing I've noticed on HN is that too many people tend to think of all companies as SV software startups, when there is a huge swath of companies in-between coasts that don't have a single dev or programmer and are just doing their business. Much of the "devops is killing sysadmin" hysteria is overblown due to this filter bubble.
    • eropple 8y ago
      There's definitely an issue in the devops/SRE world around understanding the totality of their stack. But I would submit that this is endemic to tech in general, not just devops/SRE folks. The combination of siloing and incuriosity isn't an SRE problem, at least not exclusively. Selfishly, it also makes things harder for me, as somebody who is a generalist's generalist, because people legitimately do not know what to do with somebody who's built and shipped mobile apps, can drop into a new piece of backend software and rapidly get up to speed, will architect, implement, and manage your cloud environment, and has hard-won opinions about rack cabling techniques. But I do OK regardless.
• SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Apocalypse, no. A great filter, yea I think so. Comparing to factories shutting down is hyperbolic. It think what we’re about to see is more in line with a a job market that rewards things other than specific application knowledge. However, I can’t say much in defense of the mid-level IT Pro because just this past month I went from considering a server running an OS and MySQL db somewhere that someone would have to maintaine into using AWS DynamoDB with API Gateway with automated calls to Lambda functions - I can completely get rid of our server and paying a mid level IT Pro to maintain it. For our usage it’ll be practically free now, where I feel like I would have been paying a lot of “enterprise IT” overhead before. That doesn’t mean that guy is going to starve, he will have to either adapt as factory workers have or be valuable in a different way than “I’m good at something people don’t really need anymore”. This is as old as time.
  • Ruxbin1986 8y ago
    Yes, this is old as time but it's just now we've starting eating into positions that with a moderate education investment you could have a decent technical career. Now that isn't the case. The traditional system admin will need to adapt, but adaption looks like going back to school for software development.
• ilaksh 8y ago
  This is a real thing for certain areas like packaging and deploying software or database and to a degree. But I think that since we continue to create more and more software, there will still be plenty of demand, until AI becomes a significant aspect of software development. That may not happen until at or near the time that we achieve truly general artificial intelligence. This is pure speculation but in my opinion the first "real" AGI systems are less than two years away. Within 5 to 10 years of that happening, I expect unaugmented human programmers to be obsolete.
• jugg1es 8y ago
  This article is very prescient. This is happening now and the pace is speeding up considerably. I work in healthcare and we hit a tipping point about a year ago where HIE's and hospitals are now comfortable with their vendors going to AWS instead of insisting on on-premises infrastructure. In the last year, my company is basically turned on a dime and we no longer use virtually any of our on-premises hardware. If you are in IT (non-developer), you should be concerned.
  • hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
    At the same time, as a software engineering manager, I would have given my left eye for a highly competent AWS DevOps engineer. It took months to find someone with the skills we were looking for.
    • eropple 8y ago
      You might be an exception, but food for thought: the number one reason why my clients, when I was running a consulting business, couldn't find in-house DevOps folks was an unwillingness to pay. At best, most places would pay line engineer rates--the same thing they'd pay for a Java or a Rails developer--for a skillset that's significantly broader than most (certainly not all, but most) line engineers at a given level of seniority and is significantly more in-demand. In the Boston area as an example, I regularly saw companies trying to get senior devops engineers at rates more appropriate for mid-level, and principals for hilariously under rate. (We're talking $140K offers for a senior devops engineer when the next place would offer $180K, and $160K for principals who could get $220K elsewhere.) To be fair, this is sometimes trickier because a lot of "devops engineers" are actually mouse-driven system administrators, so the means and medians often look odd. That somebody who does what I do, and somebody primarily doing things hand-o-matically, would have the same job title throws a wrench into one-to-one comparisons. But you can figure it out.
• zelon88 8y ago
  I keep seeing thse kinds of articles where the author has drank the Cloud kool-aid themselves, forgotten how to function without it, and insists that it's impossible to function without it. This guy even drags manufacturing into the mix, and obviously has no idea about manufacturing in the United States. Manufacturers in the USA don't make cheap coffee cups. We don't make underwear. We don't make car fenders. We make warheads. We make gyroscopes. We make electro-mechanical assemblies that China or Malaysia or Mexico would screw up. We specialize in quality over quantity, and we specialize in cutting edge tolerances and specifications. We make export controlled things for enterprise contracts and the government. Things that require certifications to produce, and govermnent regulatory compliance, and tight tolerances. Nobody here is making the 100,000,000 wrenches you can buy at Wal-Mart. We don't make 100,000 of anything either. We make 100 gyroscopes for General Dynamics, or 5 jet engines for General Electric. We make US military grade munitions and weapons for the government. The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD. All that great automation that helps AirBNB function with no infrastructure is meaningless when you have to protect your IP from nation state actors. To probably >50% of American manufacturing the Cloud is useless. It's a consolidated attack vector that WILL be compromised in the future and lead to liability. Sure you can put a NIST 800-171 or DFARS compliant business in the Cloud, but it costs extra and it's not worth the risk. You hear about misconfigured buckets leaking data almost daily. Nobody doing govermnet manufacturing work wants to deal with that headache. Infact, I've been in this industry for 10 years and I have NEVER seen a DFARS compliant supplier with outsourced IT infrastructure. I've visited hundreds of companies over the years. What you're describing doesn't interest American manufacturers one bit.
  • munin 8y ago
    > The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD. This is probably going to change. People like you said the same thing about health data, and student data. The savings were so tantalizing that the regulators and stakeholders figured out how to make it work. What do you think GovCloud is for? C2S and "Secret cloud"? Our university had a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team. When "Google Apps" came out, people wanted us to switch to that from our old mail server stuff. Go figure, why would you keep using pine and squirrelmail when you could use gmail? "It can't hold student data" the IT team said, "it isn't certified for FERPA or ITAR." Okay, true. Fast forward two years, now Google's "Apps for Education" can deal with both. The switch was sudden and brutal and the university no longer has a 3-4 person dedicated Exchange team or an Exchange deployment of any kind.
• adamc 8y ago
  As a senior employee in an organization that has migrated much functionality to SaaS and the cloud... I'm doubtful. In my experience so far, what we do changes, but the need for IT employees hasn't gone down. Most of what we did was figure out how to solve business problems with IT, and that continues, cloud or no. SaaS offering are sophisticated, but hard to use out of the box when you have significant regulatory (and other) requirements. If there are IT jobs developing for smaller organizations, maybe those will go away, but... I think a lot of that disappeared already. I'm close to retiring (from this job, anyhow), so it's not a personal issue for me. I just haven't seen it happening as described.
• sarcasmic 8y ago
  I agree with the points raised in the writing, but it mixes automation, abstraction, and industry consolidation as if they weren't separate processes. As such, the transformation being described isn't an impending cliff, but an ever-present pressure of economic forces that affect all business all the time, and one is wise to watch for. Automation replaces repetitive work with tooling and work that's more complex. Abstraction allows one to delegate to another for details, which may include choosing from a palette of pre-made options. Consolidation will come about as fewer independent players can sustain themselves in the market. Some will be out-competed by economies of scale, some will be starved by restrictions on intellectual property and lack of access to expertise. This process has already played out for "small business websites", yet there's still lots and lots of web developers and web designers employed or freelancing. The current wave of WYSIWYG website generators is actually very good, and they have add-ons and integrations that make sense for their target market. But plenty of clients don't want to mess around in it, so they'd rather hire someone. This could be maker of the generator, or it could be an outside consultant. In either case, the person brings judgement, experience, and creativity, to tailor the deliverable to the needs of the client. These are skills resistant to automation, but not immune to abstraction and consolidation. In the end, the antidote is the same as it always was: be adaptable, be personable, be resilient, and be resourceful. These are especially important in one is in a comfortable job shielded from most competitive pressure, because they will be the most surprised and unprepared if their current employment is made redundant.
  • kpennell 8y ago
    saving this comment...
• jtchang 8y ago
  I am seeing this happen with game developers as well. Unity has made it super easy to release a game which is fantastic. However a lot of newer game developers don't necessarily know as many fundamentals.
• dgudkov 8y ago
  >Repetition is a sure warning sign. If you’re building the same integrations, patching the same servers over and over again every day, congratulations – you’ve already become a robot. This is absolute spot on. It's our company's bread and butter to automate repetitive human operations. I can tell that many companies are looking for solutions that would automate as much human work as possible. Repetitive routines are the typical candidates to replace with software or less skilled personnel.
• MrL567 8y ago
  The flipside of this is, in a hypothetical world where Amazon / Google is trust busted, this problem is delayed somewhat because only Google / Amazon have the necessary scale to create the IT apocalypse. I mean there is Salesforce and Heroku but the major IT automation stuff is from the FAANGs really.
• erikb 8y ago
  Until now the destruction of jobs through progress has never reduced the amount of work we needed altogether. For instance think about how the development of transportation created dozens of new jobs actually, and brought us in many regards onto new levels that wouldn't have been even imaginable before. I wouldn't worry too much about something that might not be just-bad and instead try to figure out what can be done with the changes that we already see. E.g. all this nice virtualization and automation means it's so much easier to share code and changes and ideas, and helps us communicate over borders, language barriers, etc.
• CodeSheikh 8y ago
  Conspiracy aside, AWS is most likely profiling all of its customers code bases and coming up with patterns as in what domain their applications are being used for etc. In order to capture that low-code/no-code type of market they don;t have to do any market research when the research is already sitting with them. It is pretty genius from a business point of view but yes can become very concerning for mid-tire programmers as the article states.
• shusson 8y ago
  > but that they(cloud providers) are straight-up reducing the number of people required to deliver technical solutions. I would like to see some evidence for this. Has anyone had such an experience?
• shusson 8y ago
  > Forrest Brazeal is a cloud architect, writer, speaker, and cartoonist, currently based in Forest, Virginia. He is also an AWS Serverless Hero The authors bio indicates extreme bias :p
• chiffre01 8y ago
  Most people working closely with any sort of computer realted technology should already know they've singed up for continuous change. If you want to learn a good paying skill for the next 20-30 years try these: Plumber, Electrician, Auto mechanic, Janitor, Police officer ...
• driverdan 8y ago
  The site is broken if you have JS disabled. The top banner covers the entire first page of content.
• lsc 8y ago
  Eh, I've been a sysadmin/programmer since 1997 or so; I'd argue the slow automation of our profession has been going on forever. it used to be that sysadmin started as the kid who swaps the tapes and does the reboots, and went up to the person automating, and above that, the person troubleshooting your backtrace when the kernel panics. We were all sysadmins, just of different levels. But... the job, if you were a mid to senor sysadmin, was always to automate away your job. There was always this race against yourself and the other sysadmins to keep your skills ahead of the scripts, and there were always people who fell behind during the crashes and couldn't get back in. Really, I think the radical change that cloud brought us sysadmins was that employers care so much less now about your ability to go from a kernel backtrace to bad hardware. Knowledge of hardware in general has lost most of it's value; that's a lot of my knowledge and experience that isn't worth much anymore, and a lot of people who will have to find new roles. in my early 20s, I paid expenses while trying to start a company being on-call datacenter guy for a few small companies. I mean, I'd charge a minimum number of hours, they'd call me up or depending on the customer, my systems would page me when something needed fiddling with at the datacenter. - this job... almost doesn't exist anymore, because most of the customers are on AWS. (I mean, the job does exist; prgmr.com still even has co-lo customers, though I don't think they are accepting more... but it's super rare.) Now, it seems like we want to split the sysadmin role into different titles; SRE - production sysadmins; you have a high bar for programming skill and Linux internals knowledge, but a very weak requirement to have experience with standard configuration management tools (often SRE implies you will be using custom configuration management tools) - then you have the devops title for smaller scale cloud sysadmins with a low bar for Linux knowledge, a medium bar for programming knowledge and a high bar for knowledge of standardized configuration management tools. The sysadmin title remains for people who hit SRE standards for linux knowledge but don't meet the programming bar of SRE or necessarily have the experience with the standard configuration tools of the devops. Generally, both in terms of pay and in terms of the number of machines you manage, SRE > DevOps > Sysadmin - of course, that's modified by level, location and company; (Note, both SRE and DevOps involve systems design in ways that I don't understand well enough to speak about. I mean, I can pass SRE interviews at 3rd tier companies no problem, but at the first tier, I'm not even sure why I'm failing, which means I'm a long ways from passing. I mean, I also need to level up my programming to be a SRE at a first-tier company, but I have a solid idea of where that bar is and what I need to do to get there. I don't understand the systems design questions well enough to even really know what I have to learn.) Also note, I personally think that SRE is probably a more solid career path than DevOps going forward, if you are in an operations career. Programming basics has been the thing that has changed the least during my career; the skill that is most portable. You don't want to marry a particular tool any more than you have to, 'cause that tool... might be out of favor next year.
• diego_moita 8y ago
  I object to the word "apocalypse", it is just business as usual. Better automation has been "reducing the number of people required to deliver technical solutions" for ages. Local Area Networks replaced many mainframe computers in the 80's. Optimized C compilers took the jobs of countless Assembly programmers. WordPress, Joomla and better web frameworks (Django, Rails) took the jobs of many Perl/Web developers. Python enabled a lot of people to do what FORTRAN/Java/C++ programmers were able to do before. "Apocalypse" is just the normal state of affairs.
• ec2 8y ago
  His thing about the 'fox' at the bottom makes me hope any job he attempts is immediately automated, what a dunce
• F_J_H 8y ago
  A point that often gets missed with "low-code" tools, is that it's not so much that they enable "non-coders" to build applications, but that they enable experienced developers to go so much faster. I've been using a fullstack low code development tool for several years now, and when it comes to developing CRUD apps or data reporting apps (with charts, interactive, drill down reports, etc. etc.), it's astonishing how quickly you can stand-up a secure, fully responsive web-app, complete with authentication, authorization schemes, report subscriptions, etc., without writing any code at all. And, when you bump up against the limits of the declarative/low-code aspect of the framework, you can toggle over to java script, your own CSS, SQL, etc., so it's not like you paint yourself into a corner. So, I agree, if Amazon creates something like this, and it is as good as some of the existing low-code tools out there, it's going to have a big impact over the long term. edit: typo
  • dleslie 8y ago
    Which tool?
    • F_J_H 8y ago
      I hesitate to say it on HN as everyone seems to hate Oracle (and for good reason), but the tool is Oracle Application Express. (https://apex.oracle.com/en/ https://apex.oracle.com/en/) In my earlier consulting role, and now as a CDO, it's my go-to tool for CRUD and data presentation apps. (I don't work for Oracle.)
      • empthought 8y ago
        I used that for small internal LOB apps at a huge bank when it was still called HTMLDB. It saved a huge amount of time, despite its architecture making experienced developers wince. I wish I had the time to spare to build a PostgreSQL/Python clone of it. Though SQL is certainly a form of code; it's just nice restricted domain-specific code that people without the title "engineer" or "developer" often know.
  • wvenable 8y ago
    I'm doing amazingly more involved things much faster now than 20 years ago. However, user demands and expectations are higher than ever.
• DebtDeflation 8y ago
  20+ year technology consultant here. I have done work for dozens of clients across just about every major industry out there. The number of (relatively well paid) people I've seen at clients in this neverland between Business and IT whose jobs revolve around pulling data from one system, munging it offline, and then loading it into another system, or similar tasks that should have been automated with a script a decade or more ago, is absolutely staggering.
• Spooky23 8y ago
  We've been through this before. It was called Windows NT. The democratized tools were Access and Lotus Notes. Amazon is doing this for the same reason Microsoft did -- it's revenue by a thousand cuts. People spent $5,000 in 1995 to give diesel mechanics PCs so they could update work orders -- they will do the same for little apps. The reality is, you're going to have a million monkeys hitting a million keyboards, and very few will be producing Shakespeare. All of that crap will be consuming lots and lots of AWS/Azure/etc bill. You'll need way more IT people to rationalize it. There are tens of thousands of people in the United States whose purpose for the last decade has been re-implementing the 90s version of this in formal IT systems. You will have churn as we purge the legacy staff, especially windows click to admin types.
• BenjaminBlair 8y ago
  The problem extends outside IT field, as you mentioned factory workers. I think the main problem is that there's no coordinated effort to control inevitable shifts. Workers unions tried protecting workers rights but capitalism clearly won and if there's no profit, you have no securities. IMHO pieces of advice in this article are very good: do not put all eggs in one basket. Don't be afraid to let go of outdated knowledge. And prepare for the change that is going to happen. I'll just add that this is as much a political issue since unemployment is and will be a huge problem, I can only hope our public sector will become productive instead of reactive.
  • Ruxbin1986 8y ago
    Capitalism won and in return we got Trump. That doesn't sound like winning.
• shoguning 8y ago
  The same thing is happening in data science, just at an earlier stage. There are software/service providers like H2O and RapidMiner that automate the whole model selection/optimization/productionization process. It will take some time, but I think these providers will basically displace advanced ML knowledge workers, especially at large fortune 500 companies. IMO to stay ahead of the curve, data scientists need to pick up more business knowledge and move into a business/financial analyst role.
• sebringj 8y ago
  I feel this is a very late article and that it has already happened but not in the crisis way. Meaning, this has allowed a shift in work to focus on programming tasks rather than infrastructure as much and hence there is more competition to get features out the door quicker which helps in more IT work etc. for programmers. I haven't seen a shortage of work in other words, rather more of it. In terms of code-automation for non-programmers, these will always fail unless they become AI integrated with some agency and can figure out the minutia of demands real world apps actually need.
• oarabbus_ 8y ago
  >No, the real trend to watch here is not that the cloud providers are making it easier for non-technical people to code (although they are), but that they are straight-up reducing the number of people required to deliver technical solutions. Prehistoric era: Agriculture and domestication are straight-up reducing the number of hunter-gatherers 1800s: Cotton mills reducing the number of manual textile manufacturers 1908: Internal combustion engine straight-up reducing the number of horse stablehands -Vacuum tubes reducing the number of human-computers -Cell phone reducing the number of switchboard operators Not seeing the problem here.
• preordained 8y ago
  I thought this was going to be about how our shoestring, bubblegum, and tape made cloud applications become self aware and kill themselves out of shame and disgust...
• michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  Automation hits white collar professions as a massive productivity improvements for the top performers displacing everyone else working in the field (think the top 10% of people in your position doing 100% of the work). In web development this is most apparent (to me) in SAAS application development, where many/most of the underlying pieces of building a CRUD application that can scale to thousands of users, and be really functional are now provided by other SAAS apps which provide a _better_ service than the average developer can scrape together themselves. Billing -> stripe.com over writing against the gateways directly Database/Hosting -> Heroku PostGres/Redis and compute Email -> Sendgrid, Mandrill, ActiveCampaign Or even just SAAS frameworks like BulletTrain (Rails) or Laravel Spark which dramatically cut down on the boilerplate and integration code you'd have to write.
• penglish1 8y ago
  I really thought this would be about something else, given the title, but oh well. As others have pointed out, this has been going on since.. the beginning of IT. I got my start in the 90's, working for an employer that sold tech software on: AIX, Digital UNIX, Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris and IRIX. SunOS and Ultrix were on their way out, but still supported. Windows and Linux were relatively new additions. 64-bit was just starting to become a thing, so we needed to support both 32 and 64 bit versions. Supporting dev, stage and prod environments for all this was a huge job, and took a fairly high level of technical skill as well as a huge amount of domain specific knowledge. Really - far more domain specific knowledge than technical skill, on the balance. It did require building a lot of software, and autoconf was a (new) blessing for cross-platform builds. My CS degree was helpful, but honestly there just wasn't much programming needed, outside of shell scripts. At the time, every few years someone would say how all of this "IT management stuff" would be automated away. I distinctly recall Sun executives banging on about it in the media a bunch just as I was starting to work full time after graduation. And I distinctly remember thinking - they are completely wrong. And they were. Commoditization was a big shift - now all those UNIXes are gone and we're left with just Linux. "The stuff" that cannot be automated was shifting then, has shifted a lot since then, and continues to shift. At the time, lots of knowledge and skill was needed to build sendmail for every OS, configure and install it everywhere. Now we've basically just got Linux, and just about every package you can think of is available via apt and yum. Configuration is done through a DSL like Ansible, Chef or Puppet. And now we're shifting such that we'll just use SES or some other cloud service for sending, and we won't manage mail servers at all - or any other commoditizable service - SQL database, noSQL, NFS, block storage, etc etc. Or we will, we just won't be tweaking many knobs and buttons on it - and we'll still be managing it primarily with a DSL rather than bash scripts. And perhaps writing a fair bit more "real" code as well. But - somebody's got to stitch all that together - as the article says, the key is providing value that is specific to the company/product/service. It always has been!! Creeping - sure. But is it an apocalypse if a bunch of DBAs and Windows Administrators have to learn some new skills, or retire, or lose their jobs? People who basically have had to be continually learning and adapting all along? Was it an apocalypse when I "lost" the career value of all the skill and knowledge I had related to IRIX, Digital UNIX, Solaris, etc? There is a REAL creeping apocalypse, but it isn't this. It is security. Software is eating the world, and for every line of code written, X new security bugs are introduced. In this, I'm including social engineering bugs. That is creeping. And the apocalypse will be when some combination of those bugs leads to something truly horrific. If it hasn't already - like the end of democracy.
• robertcorey 8y ago
  Read my response to this article here: https://medium.com/@robertcorey1/hey-moron-you-better-start-studying-aws-or-youll-lose-your-job-and-end-up-on-the-street-dd381c300119 https://medium.com/@robertcorey1/hey-moron-you-better-start-...
  • lenova 8y ago
    How do I downvote this comment into oblivion?
• peterwwillis 8y ago
  If IT were going to become obsolete, technology wouldn't suck. But it does. Virtually all technology that either has or uses a microprocessor sucks. And it probably always will, as long as humans are creating technology. In fact, the steady increase in both the use and the diversity of technology means we'll need more people than ever in IT. The job title might change, but there will always be a department dedicated to fixing shitty technology and help users use it.
• wiz21c 8y ago
  FTA: >> But they’re less expensive than a bunch of humans with health benefits Whenever someone opposes health, fatigue of human against robots, he basically makes human less human and more robot. Hence, justifying the superiority of robots. It also makes it almost logical that human are PITA to work with and therefore, are overrated, that is too expensive. The only way out is to reaffirm the value of human, instead of underlying their weakness.
  • czbond 8y ago
    Ok. While idealistic, this isn't what businesses do. Businesses are required to sell, to pay salaries. Prices come down over time. Competition mounts, it gets bloody. Consolidation and then suppression of margins. Humans ARE machines, just a different type; it doesn't "Feel right" to call us that, but we are meat machines. There is no way to expect the trend of automation, removal of human tasks for a "better, faster, cheaper" environment. it won't happen.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• czbond 8y ago
  I submit - that engineers should NOT be working on anything technical except at the highest abstraction layers. We should NOT be coding, or scaling servers. Technically minded, astute engineers are great at solving problems. In an ideal world, we'd be using our ability to solve complex real world problems. I'd much rather the Golang engineer equivalent 20 years from now solve critical watersupply issues to a village, than writing API's with flame graphs. Full disclosure: CS engineer by love and training.
• fred_is_fred 8y ago
  If you are a point-an-click DBA you should be worried about your job even without this or any future products from any vendor.
• hi41 8y ago
  I am a developer on HP/Nonstop. Can someone please explain what automation means with respect to software. Is it bash scripts? I can see bash scripts doing routine tasks but not complicated business logic which I think can only be done by writing programs. I lost my job due to outsourcing not automation.
  • pmoriarty 8y ago
    "I can see bash scripts doing routine tasks but not complicated business logic which I think can only be done by writing programs." Bash scripts are programs.
    • hi41 8y ago
      Bash scripts have existed since 1970s when Unix was used. That did not result in loss of jobs though.
• juddlyon 8y ago
  The use of the word "apocalypse" seems hyperbolic. How are these changes any different than previous technological advances?
• megaman8 8y ago
  It's kinda tough figuring out a whole new direction if you're in IT. But, if you're looking to get into web development, it's a pretty good time. Start off with HTML, CSS, Javascript and AJAX. that's the foundation and from there you can learn VUE/basic HTML/css from my tutorials: https://codeorc.com https://codeorc.com
• gameface 8y ago
  On the other hand, as an individual working in IT I can achieve so much more than I could before... team sizes seem like they’re a lot smaller now as a result. That’s the upside, surely?
• nunez 8y ago
  None of this is new. "Learn to code, or become irrelevant" has been a massive talking point for at least 10 years, maybe more, and this is only becoming more true by the day.
• beerlord 8y ago
  If this article is accurate then we should end the H1B program immediately, or at least increase the minimum income required on it to $100,000.
• seanmmasters 8y ago
  Give it 50 years and we'll all be "tech priests" from Warhammer 40k, praying to the "machine god" Alexa in hopes she stops telling us to take our meds and instead just turns the darn TV back on.