[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.

[user5994461]

At 1/10th or 1/20th of the on premises costs you mean.

AWS works better and cheaper for almost everything that involve more than a rack of hardware.

[shiftpgdn]

The other way around. The cost to use Amazon never works out once hit more than a handful of high workload systems. I write out the proposal for our C levels every quarter and the increased cost of going to Amazon is enough to hire 2 full time level 1 sysadmins.

Edit: This obviously is super variable. If you have a low load worldwide need AWS will win. Or rapid bursts of traffic. Or hundreds of other scenarios where it makes sense. It is not a one size fits all solution though.

[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 :)