4 ms·

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

9 points by ajhai 15y ago

WestCoastJustin 15y ago
It is VERY hard to believe that you are going to leave systems admin, security, performance tuning, on-call, etc to either consultants or developers. There will be a role for high level ops people in the future -- I hope ;) Many aspects of IT will become redundant but someone still needs to wrangle these VMs, manage the overall security picture, and fight fires.
zeteo 15y ago
>Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. The Bureau of Labor Statistics begs to differ: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos306.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos306.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos258.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos258.htm
kls 15y ago
This is really a poorly written article, I try to not be negative about articles but man this one misses a lot of key trends. I agree with the summation of the article companies are divesting themselves of full-time staffed IT personnel and that is not entirely a bad thing many of these people end up becoming consultants and find that they can actually earn more and control their destiny with finer detail. The article seems to wrap everything but developers into consultants which is really not a correct representation. It would better be reflected as 3rd party vendor provided services. Take for example ops they are still needed they have just been shuffled around. Either a company retains a company to do ops or they purchase a managed service that virtualizes and supports everything on 3rd party systems. The work still exists, it has not disappeared rather it has just been shuffled around. One can make an argument about the efficiencies of markets and that a company dedicated to server support can do it more efficiently and with higher quality but the reality remains that that work exist and either through a consultant or an employee it is going to get done. In the end there is still ops work for a dedicated ops person. My second gripe is wrapping project management up into a tech job at all. It is an administrative job plain and simple, it would be nice if project managers had some form of technical background but unfortunately the reality is that most don't. Most that I have met are lost and lean on developers to drag them through the process. To me it is a stretch to even call project managment a technical job. Most technical people don't want the job and most people that take it are not technical. Finally, wrapping everything that gets built under developer is just as broad as wrapping everything else under consultant. There are so many developers with so many specialties and some of them are consultants as well. That the category is almost meaningless, just go ahead and throw developer up under consultant and call it a day. There is really no need for a distinction with both categories being so broad.

9 points by ajhai 15y ago

It is VERY hard to believe that you are going to leave systems admin, security, performance tuning, on-call, etc to either consultants or developers. There will be a role for high level ops people in the future -- I hope ;) Many aspects of IT will become redundant but someone still needs to wrangle these VMs, manage the overall security picture, and fight fires.

zeteo 15y ago

>Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. The Bureau of Labor Statistics begs to differ: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos306.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos306.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos258.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos258.htm

kls 15y ago

This is really a poorly written article, I try to not be negative about articles but man this one misses a lot of key trends. I agree with the summation of the article companies are divesting themselves of full-time staffed IT personnel and that is not entirely a bad thing many of these people end up becoming consultants and find that they can actually earn more and control their destiny with finer detail. The article seems to wrap everything but developers into consultants which is really not a correct representation. It would better be reflected as 3rd party vendor provided services. Take for example ops they are still needed they have just been shuffled around. Either a company retains a company to do ops or they purchase a managed service that virtualizes and supports everything on 3rd party systems. The work still exists, it has not disappeared rather it has just been shuffled around. One can make an argument about the efficiencies of markets and that a company dedicated to server support can do it more efficiently and with higher quality but the reality remains that that work exist and either through a consultant or an employee it is going to get done. In the end there is still ops work for a dedicated ops person. My second gripe is wrapping project management up into a tech job at all. It is an administrative job plain and simple, it would be nice if project managers had some form of technical background but unfortunately the reality is that most don't. Most that I have met are lost and lean on developers to drag them through the process. To me it is a stretch to even call project managment a technical job. Most technical people don't want the job and most people that take it are not technical. Finally, wrapping everything that gets built under developer is just as broad as wrapping everything else under consultant. There are so many developers with so many specialties and some of them are consultants as well. That the category is almost meaningless, just go ahead and throw developer up under consultant and call it a day. There is really no need for a distinction with both categories being so broad.