[dexwiz]

IT Support will replace factories in Middle America. These are jobs that are 1)Trained quickly 2) Geographically distributed 3) Cheap. IT Support needs to be onsite for hardware, but any Software can be distributed in smaller cities or work from home. Maybe Google will have a real help line one day?

It is also a great path into technology for those who did get CS degrees from a top school.

Side note: In the video, all the Google VPs and Leads were sitting in bright offices. The IT staff sat in dark rooms with little or no windows. @2min mark, the IT staff look to be in a dungeon at night.

[datguacdoh]

Disclosure: I am one of the instructors for this course and went through Google's IT Residency Program.

Tonyour side note, the help desks (we call them Techstops) are anything but a dungeon :) you can image search for "Google Techstop" and get a very representative view of what they tend to look like.

[w8rbt]

IT is not CS. Not even similar.

[xcryogenicx]

AS in CS working in IT here, can confirm.

My college classes were programming C++, physics, calculus, and hardware architectures. Barely anything to do with IT.

[datguacdoh]

We actually expect our support team (at least portions of them) to build internal apps that automate workflows for ops work or for users. It's not always as complex as a full soft eng role, but some of our IT staff do move on to those positions internally based on the work they do in IT. I think it really depends on the company you do IT for, and what they expect for the role. At Google, our IT staff are full time engineers.

Disclosure: I worked on this program and went through Google's IT Residency Program.

[dragonwriter]

> At Google, our IT staff are full time engineers.

If this course is based on this view of the IT Support role (which I heartily approve of, but which is not the baseline norm in the industry) it really should be called the IT Support Engineering Professional Certificate or something similar, because otherwise it won't communicate it's real focus either to applicants or, perhaps more critically, hiring officers.

[user5994461]

Are you talking about SRE? They're full time engineers with CS degrees, they have nothing to do with IT.

[datguacdoh]

SRE are different, I'm talking about IT staff. The job title is corporate operations engineer.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Depends on what level of IT you're working at. There are segments of the market where the various computer-related jobs that need to be done aren't neatly siloed.

[booleandilemma]

My college has a separate major for each.

A lot of people in my class dropped out of the CS program because they had confused the two.

I really think we should rename “computer science” to “computing science” or “computational science” - just please get the word “computer” out of there.

[influx]

More like Computational Mathematics

[gaius]

Discrete Mathematics is the actual term “integers, graphs and statements in logic” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_mathematics

[comstock]

But you generally can’t get a degree in it (I don’t believe I’ve seen one). But wow, a discrete mathematics undergrad degree sounds like a lot of fun.

[debt]

I disagree completely. IT is going the opposite way, much of the maintenance is becoming commodified so the more complex tasks almost always involved writing actual code.

It's become more of a SWE org everywhere.

It's funny because SWE peeps get really defensive about IT vs SWE roles; like they don't want to be associated with IT for some ego-related reason.

[ocdtrekkie]

I vehemently disagree. The whole SWE/DevOps trend isn't super popular once you leave Silicon Valley. At the end of the day, most businesses still use Windows, and most IT staff are telling people how to print correctly and resetting the passwords people forgot for the umteenth time this week. This isn't going to change in the near future, and I assume Google's IT Support certificate is either teaching the skills necessary for these things... or not going to be a useful certificate for anyone trying to get a job.

If anything, that's the weirdest thing, Google's doing an IT cert? Are they teaching Microsoft platforms and being useful, or are they trying to teach Google's Chrome management platform that nobody uses? If Google's willing to hire graduates, it presumably teaches Google's IT stack... which isn't remotely similar to the IT stack people will find in other companies.

[commandar]

> most businesses still use Windows

And Microsoft has been pushing businesses increasingly toward technologies like Powershell and products like SCCM in the past decade. The trend is slower in the Microsoft world, but it's definitely toward automation taking on the type of work you'd traditionally have support techs running around handling.

[sjellis]

"I vehemently disagree. The whole SWE/DevOps trend isn't super popular once you leave Silicon Valley. At the end of the day, most businesses still use Windows, and most IT staff are telling people how to print correctly and resetting the passwords people forgot for the umteenth time this week. "

Both are true: even ten years ago, there was a noticeable split between helpdesk and maintenance skills, and things that we might now call "DevOps". If you have hundreds or thousands of computers, you can end up with people who specialize in stuff like building packages and disk images for deployments, writing scripts for user account management, and other automation, and don't fix printers so much any more, even if they don't have a separate job title.

[Spooky23]

Those IT people are dinosaurs. Many of these folks are around, but the job openings are slim because they are attriting away.

80% of traditional IT hocus pocus can be automated or performed by an office manager or admin.

[mbesto]

> 80% of traditional IT hocus pocus can be automated or performed by an office manager or admin.

Then you clearly have never worked at a business where IT or technology isn't a core function of the business. Middle America wasn't and still isn't ready for understanding IT. I say this as someone who has worked with over 150 companies (mainly mid market, middle america) doing IT audits.

[w8rbt]

This! A small dev team with an AWS account and a git repo will run circles around the IT team in terms of speed, compliance requirements and scalability. Traditional network infrastructure, virtualization, security, DBMS, etc. are all on the verge of extinction.

[shiftpgdn]

At 2-10x the cost of on prem systems, sure.

There are plenty of things AWS doesn't work for.

[technion]

You said it yourself - "a dev team".

Now take, for example, a legal firm. One of the major LOB vendors in this space has a product that only runs on Oracle on Windows, with an extremely snowflake-like build. You can call them a dinosaur, but since they are a legal firm that wants to be competitive they will use this product.

Supporting this product involves a somewhat constant string of repairs, involving things like "logon to a user desktop and reregister DLLs". It takes a helpdesk team to run these things. The new "cloud" edition is literally a Microsoft RDS server that you run on premises, and on which you run the client software. Thereby facilitating remote access, making it a "cloud" product.

Do we argue that legal firms don't matter because soon every company will soon just be a development team? I don't think that's feasible.

[ggg9990]

Good software can move that IT job to a cheaper admin job. If printers are easy to install, or passwords are easy to reset, then the admin can just say “the printer nearest to you is Floor3-South. Go into Printers and select it” leaving IT to just maintain the printer and not have to coach users.

[oblio]

Have you seen printer software? Those jobs are safe for the foreseeable future :)

[ForHackernews]

Software engineering isn't CS, either, but everyone acts like a CS degree is helpful for doing that job.

[kbwt]

It seems to be a common confusion in the EU. A lot of people refer to CS as IT where I live.

[ClassyJacket]

Here in Australia, most people just think "literally anything to do with computers = IT". So when I talked to course counselors they said if I wanted to be a programmer, I had to do an IT degree. Not even close.

Software engineering, or maybe CS, is what I wanted. I hadn't even heard the phrase "computer science" when I started university. The total incompetence of the course counselors at the core function of their job contributed to putting me on a path that eventually lead to the ruin of my life.

I did a degree that claimed to contain software development, but was in the IT category - I never learned of the concept of version control (at all), how to use makefiles, exception blocks, performance profiling, or a bunch of other practical stuff.

Now I'm wasting away in an IT support job. I can't blame everything on that, and most of the responsibility for where I am today is on me - especially for not turning it around better after I realised my mistakes, but I feel like the confusion between "IT", "CS", and "Software engineering" definitely kickstarted a path that wasted alot of my most valuable learning time.

Don't trust course counselors - or other people in general.

[jstarfish]

The school could have done you better, but don't externalize your problems. Most schools' CS degrees won't teach you version control, makefiles or any of that practical stuff. You learn it for fun, incidentally, or on the job.

I was once in your shoes. Same background, same regrettable life choices, same potential future.

If you want to develop, do it. Start by looking at the crap software your company likely pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for and think about how you could do it better. Start by actually trying to supplant it with something of your own creation.

I have a generic degree. All those "practical" things you lament missing out on, I learned by just doing it. But I never had cause to learn what big-o notation was or how to navigate a b-tree...you know, that non-practical knowledge a CS degree would have endowed me with. The lack of such has only stopped me from working at Google. Plenty of other shops are not in the business of recruiting only those who can write the freshest sorting algorithms.

Just don't spend the rest of your life in a job you hate, condemning yourself for being put upon. It takes little effort to invoke large changes.

[ams6110]

My CS degree didn't even teach any specific languages. Pretty much every course used a different language. I'll date myself here but I used PL/1, Pascal, Modula 2, C, Scheme, assembly, and maybe a couple of others. None were the explicit focus of the class. The programming language was incidental, students were expected to learn it on their own. And my first job used none of those languages. My next job didn't either. In fact I've never used any of the languages I used in school on the job.

[tyingq]

In the US, at least, outside of Silicon Valley, the type of degree isn't necessarily a barrier.

Some of the best developers, DBAs, system engineers, etc, I've hired had history degrees, math degrees, journalism, EE, etc. The degree itself, for me, is just proof that you finished something important. I care more about what you know, and how well you can learn something new.

I don't think I'm that unique in this respect. The tech shops I've worked in over my career were full of non-CS degreed people. Mostly my experience here, though, is with non tech companies. Things like the IT departments in Healthcare, Travel, Automotive, etc.

[lwf]

At my San Francisco employer, my org has several people without degrees, and one of the best managers in my team has a degree in one of the hard sciences, not CS.

[lsc]

>Don't trust course counselors - or other people in general.

I... think it's not so much a matter of 'trust' as you have to understand what people understand. My understanding is that their job is to help you navigate academia, and I'm sure they are competent at that. I can't imagine how they could be good at figuring out what you want to do. That's hard enough to do yourself.

The other thing about higher education is that it's usually not meant as vocational. Now, I'm in IT too, and for that matter, I didn't go to college, so maybe I don't know anything, but my impression is that a good school is about giving you a common intellectual and cultural background, not about actually teaching you how to do your job.

This is to say, after your undergrad, you should be prepared to learn how to do a job that requires a degree, and how to communicate with others who have gone through the same training.

(Personally, I am a little confused as to just what you learn in an "IT" degree; as far as I can tell, they don't give you much math, and on a personal level, the only people I've worked with who had 'IT' type degrees were management.)

[iamdave]

Here in Australia, most people just think "literally anything to do with computers = IT".

Stateside too. I used to get asked to fix printers by friends and associates and in general get treated like a help desk by people all the time because all they know is "Dave works with computers" even when I started working directly with managing software development teams later in my career.

Heck, about 16 years ago when I was working the help desk in a call center I had someone ask me "Hey IT Guy why isn't the water fountain working?" as I was walking out the door. I asked her to wait a moment, poked my head into the office of the facilities maintenance manager and asked him if he could help out.

For some reason that last bit was especially insulting, both being called "IT Guy" instead of being greeted at bare minimum by name, and for the assumption that I somehow knew how water fountains work. I was a frustrated and angry young man then, heh.

Feels good nowadays when people ask what I do "Security and Compliance". I don't get asked to fix printers anymore.

[lsc]

I always really enjoyed the "fix random broken mechanical thing" part of the "IT guy" job.

"Hi, I'm Luke, and I fix things."

[lsc]

Also, the borders between the higher levels of IT, what we call Systems Administration, and programming are somewhat porous. I've worked as a programmer before, and I've never worked anywhere (as a sysadmin) where they would hire a SysAdmin who didn't have basic programming skills.

[JauntyHatAngle]

Also Australian, I did an IT degree, chose electives to do with Software Development, and now work as a Software Developer.

Not sure why your experience was so different? Sounds like you got a raw deal though.

[willbw]

In Australia IT is also a broader term encompassing development of software.

[sattoshi]

In most places I see, CS includes SE. Pure CS isn't very useful.

[rb808]

Especially as I think many dev jobs will disappear.

More free, open source platforms that are powerful and free but just need some configuration, customization and support.

Developing getting simpler to becoming just config anyway. We're already seeing this, you dont need to know anything about pointers any more, just hooking up libraries.

[pm90]

At the risk of sounding utterly foolish in the future, I would say that there will always be jobs for the creative developer. The one thing that has made Software Engineering stand out from other professions is just how SE is essential/Integrated in fields outside of its immediate application. What I mean is: devs are required in Oil and Gas, Academia, Education, Manufacturing etc. apart from the regular jobs in the Computer world (i.e. Software-only companies like MS, Google).

IT support will ALWAYS be required though. Unless we build some kind of AI that can diagnose issues like humans do... after which they will all become obsolete. But I don't see that happening in the next 50 years.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Technically there are still jobs for horse carriage drivers, but that doesn't mean there's a bright future in that career.

[fenwick67]

I was amazed to find out last year that both my mom and dad both have a solid understanding of SQL queries - one is a nurse and the other is an insurance adjuster.

[copperx]

How/why did they learn that? On their own? Or do Hospital and Insurance enterprise systems allow them to run raw SQL on their DBs?

[dragonwriter]

> Or do Hospital and Insurance enterprise systems allow them to run raw SQL on their DBs?

There's no good reason not to, since if your security and auditing systems are correctly implemented, limited-permission DB users doing direct SQL have the same security and accountability as someone using a specialized app.

[bnjms]

Probably they have access to a reporting system that allows safe SQL reports.

[stctgion]

The languages move on but so do the expectations. Until we have star trek style computers there will always be more to it than just hooking up some libraries

[BjoernKW]

In a way we already have Star Trek-style computers today. Many of the commands heard in Next Generation era series can be represented as SQL SELECT commands. The voice recognition is an only slightly more sophisticated Siri / Ok Google / Alexa.

[rurp]

The fact that I can get a basic web app up in an hour rather than days does not mean that I only work an hour per week, it means that I can spend my time building much more complex applications.

[rb808]

Depends on who's paying, if the client only needs a basic web app - we just need the support guy.

[rurp]

That frees up the developer to work on projects that would have been infeasible a couple decades ago. To put it another way, has the growth of high level languages like Python led to more jobs or fewer? I strongly suspect the answer is more.

[rb808]

Yes we now have more higher level Python developers, but fewer C/C++/Assembly level developers.

If the trend continues there will be more configuration/customization roles in higher languages and fewer Python level devs too.

[bluthru]

>IT Support will replace factories in Middle America.

Hardware continues to be more reliable, more integrated, and cheaper. For most office jobs something like Chrome OS or iOS would be sufficient.

[dx034]

Not if you have to run Excel with 5 add-ins that regularly destroy each other.

[arbie]

How many of those add-ins can be replaced by SaaS providers with mobile gateways?