[munin]

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advice about starting their careers, and I realize that the first jobs I had (system administrator, SOC worker) have been replaced by robots.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 This has been replaced by ML driven data processing systems.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.

[ukoki]

The pessimists' view is that automation will deprecate a heap of jobs in the tech industry that will never return. The optimists' view is that automation simply allows companies to do more stuff: things they couldn't afford to do before, and soon, things they have to do in order to stay competitive. For the optimists the number employed in the tech industry stays the same or increases, but the proportion of different roles changes (ie no more green light watchers).

[0xffff2]

New college grads today aren't prepared to do anything more complex than watch the green lights. If we automate out all of the entry-level work, that means we have to train workers to a higher level before they enter the work force, which is clearly untenable with today's college tuition (at least in the US).

[lordCarbonFiber]

That's demonstrably false. Hell you can just look to startups created by new grads and dropouts to confirm your view point is inane. Today's college grads are better equipped to do a wider breath of work than any other time in history precisely because of the efficiency gains of automation.

[HelloNurse]

A minority exits college ready to run a significant startup, but the majority exits college ready to struggle finding a mediocre job. In other words, the automators and the automated away.

[taude]

Sure, there's outliers. But Not all college grads are capable of operating at that level. Which is why companies have a lot of regimented hiring practices and tests to filter out all those not making the cut.

I've been on the college recruiting circuit to help my company hire, and I'm often severely disappointed by a good portion of those I meet. There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I think they're never going to want to stick around at my place. With this thought, I'm sort of in agreement with the commenter who said that we need college to train people at a higher level since there's almost not time on the job to ease into it.

[magduf]

>There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I think they're never going to want to stick around at my place.

Maybe companies need to stop thinking in terms of employees sticking around for a really long time, and get used to the idea of employees going from place to place when they get too bored or want to do something different. It seems insane to me, the idea of expecting an extremely intelligent, high-performing person to want to come to the same workplace day after day, for years or decades, doing mostly the same work.

[wyclif]

There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I think they're never going to want to stick around at my place

This is the paradox of hiring today, and why tech hiring is broken. In fact, there's a story right now titled "Hiring Is Broken" on the HN front page, not far below the OP. So it's getting harder to recruit people who do make the cut technically and communications-wise, while at the same time it's getting harder to retain them because let's face it—so many startups don't have a compelling value proposition or profit model.

[MRD85]

From your perspective, what is the issue with a lot of the current college graduates? I'm a college student studying computer science, and I feel like I'd be ready to start work really soon. I'm also the sort of CS student who reads Hackernews, participates in CTFs, maintains a perfect GPA, has side projects, etc.

[0xffff2]

To be a good developer, you have to understand how computers work. You have to understand data structures. When you interview and you're asked to write a breadth-first search, or what the big-O complexity of accessing a hash map is, it's not because the company is going to have you writing your own custom hash maps right out of school. It's because you have to be aware of the general characteristics of the tools you're using to be able to select the right tool for the job.

Most of the students I interview fail miserably at this. They can hack together a working application by copy/pasting from examples and SO posts and making small modifications, but they have no fundamental understanding at all of what the computer is actually doing with the code they write.

[taude]

It sounds like you're on the right path, combined with a decent personal passion project and some summer internships.

Some things I see that give me pause: 1) No project work. Lack of interest in building things on their own, researching frameworks, building out small apps, etc. I'd like to see even a small attempt at learning tooling and frameworks used on real world projects (it doesn't have to even be close to the toolings we're using, just anything).

2) Lack of reading the technology-centric, software engineering centric internet sites. Even attending a Meetup or two to start seeing what's going on outside academia (again, I live in a tech hub, so lots of opportunities).

3) Just general feeling of "hey, I got this CS degree, I'm ready to work", but not really showing much enthusiasm that they actually want to be software engineers as a career (it's a tough career that requires a lot of self-driven learning and curiosity to do it well). Believe it or not, I've seen students come through summer internships, and decide they actually don't like the real world day-to-day software development for a career.

[flukus]

> has side projects

That's your biggest asset. The perfect GPA will help you get pass the useless HR gatekeepers, a demonstrated ability to build something will mean a lot more to the technical interviewers. Bonus points if those projects happen to use common industry things like an sql database and contains unit tests.

Most graduates, if you sat them down with some fairly simple requirements and said "build this with whatever tech stack you're familiar with" would have no idea where to start.

[dleslie]

What you're describing is _training_; and the act of training employees has long since gone out of vogue in western markets.

[org3432]

I've worked in IT type jobs for over two decades, in some sense training would help, but to be frank the code and systems IT folks have built are of such low quality that it's better for everyone if they're handed over to more competent teams that can cost effectively maintain them long term.

[wyclif]

One reason why training is out of fashion is because of poaching. Companies don't want to invest a lot of money in training their employees only to have their closest competitors become the beneficiaries. That is a myopic view, to be sure, but it's a common one.

[org3432]

I think they do train people, it's just not formal. And the other issue is the companies have no clue what their doing most of the time anyway, so you just end up with IT people on the market will all sorts of nonsense opinions.

[Sevii]

If you increase competition for jobs you can push the cost of training onto employees.

[mac01021]

Why train employees when you can pay just a little bit more and get pretrained ones?

[mecameron]

For when you can't find any more pretrained ones. Or to get someone for a lower salary and growing them that provides some loyalty and help solving the problem of not having enough pretrained ones in the first place.

[shdh]

There are internships

[JKCalhoun]

Was watching David Bull talk about historical Japanese wood carving. He described how the introduction of the printing press to Japan killed the entry-level, apprenticeship positions in printing.

[halbritt]

Hello fellow David Bull fan.

[bitL]

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".

[gervase]

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.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

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.

[Wohlf]

Maybe we'll see a more apprenticeship type approach, where junior personnel are instead assigned to and trained by seniors. This would probably be a net good, but who knows how things will shake out.

[0xffff2]

I've thought about doing this at work, but it's hard to figure out how to make it attractive to my company. If I ask to hire a junior dev for the primary purpose of training them, it seems likely that I could get them full time for 50% of my salary. They're going to be a little bit productive, but they're also going to take up a lot of my time. At best, I think you end up with 150% of the labor costs for the exact same amount of work being done. That's a really hard sell to the business side of the company.

[KineticLensman]

In the UK we have the 5% club [0], whose aim is to "to make at least 5% of its employees apprentices within a 5-year period". It does take commitment from the company, and it's perhaps not a surprise that its more common in companies that already invest in graduate recruitment. 280 companies have signed up so far.

(Disclaimer: I work for a company that has been in the 5% club since 2013)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_5%25_Club

[normal_man]

I mean this is already an acknowledged good approach. Companies don't want to make that investment though, hiring both a senior and a junior who won't be immediately productive, and keep chasing the mythical senior who will work for mid-level salary.

[AYBABTME]

A lot of companies hire interns and usually, the typical intern doesn't provide a ton of bottom line value. Aside from being good for the culture and mentorship practice for the more senior folks, they usually need a lot of handholding. They're basically doing paid apprenticeships, which tells me that companies _are_ okay with the concept of having apprentice type of training.

[moftz]

The whole internship thing for STEM careers is to onboard you early while you are still cheap. Even if you don't work for the company that you interned with, the progress is still there so on day 1 you aren't totally lost. No one wants to give a salary to someone or even spend the money on the hiring process that hasn't worked a day in their life because they have zero clue how well they get along in a work-environment vs. an academic one. From an HR and hiring manager viewpoint, even if you have a lot of experience with a certain tool or field but have no work experience, you are going to look a lot less desirable than someone that maybe has a little bit of experience in that field or with that tool but mostly has unrelated internships. There are lots of smart people out there that can't get along with anyone so they suffer in their career.

[paulie_a]

It's cute that companies think junior or seniors will be immediately productive. There is a ramp up period. Hell the first day is probably just paperwork. Then 3 months of getting integrated.

[halbritt]

I'm not sure how many companies really think this, not that I'm arguing the point. I do know that successful companies realize that developer ramp to productivity time is an important metric and attempt to optimize that metric.

There's a whole set of fairly basic tasks that can be done that can get a developer to the point of submitting a PR on their first day. Many, many companies screw that up.

[wasdfff]

That’s shitty on the company then. Senior engineers work way more efficiently if they have a junior working under them to crank out busywork. The junior then knows exactly how to succeed in a senior level position from working intimately with the senior engineer.

[normal_man]

Companies being shitty and prioritizing quarterly margins over long-term success is like the entire basis of the modern economy

[kdf83]

Why does watching a bank of green lights waiting for one to turn red and do first level triage and analysis require ML, isn't this just a bunch of rules?

[munin]

I was over-simplifying to communicate the repetitive and dull nature of a job I'm very happy to no longer be doing. Really the game was more about "anomaly detection" and the sensor indicators/measurements were far more continuous than categorical, and their outputs had to be weighed against past experience and context of the monitored components.

[Buttons840]

Well, to start with, you have to use ML to train the computer vision system to recognize green and red lights. After that you update your resume with the ML experience you gained. :)

[sgt101]

I want to ask a serious question about the ML, but your answer is great! My experience of anomaly detection, even with deep networks, is that recognition of the important anomalies can be done for some of them which means that you can raise a big flag for those - but someone still needs to sift through everything else.

[jpatokal]

The one entry level IT job that is not going away is tech support. Sure, some parts of it can be outsourced, but beyond a certain point you need a person on-site to figure out why the Internet is broken.

The Cloud companies are also hiring armies of support people, and it's a great way to kickstart your career in any of these companies while getting company provided training in the tech.

[TeMPOraL]

Turn your products into services, hardware ownership into leasing, and suddenly you don't need to offer tech support. SLAs will establish the new "laws of physics" for users, where failure is a binary state: either it works, or it doesn't. When it doesn't, someone will come in couple of hours/days, trash the broken black box, replace it with a working black box, and things will be back to normal.

Of course, the service provider may need some amount of people figuring the failures out, but that amount is smaller than if customers had to debug their own problems, and is more susceptible to centralization, and to "fixing by replacing".

[seanmmasters]

Not with AWS Outposts, and you can bet Google and Microsoft won't be far behind.

[Ruxbin1986]

"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."

Agreed entirely. I would be surprised if we still have two-year technical degrees in a decade.

[jac_no_k]

I can't find the article any more but I think Toyota has it's engineers build a handful of cars by hand as part of it's kaizen process. This would act as entry point for next the next generation of engineers.

[whorleater]

How many solid universities still have IT programs? At UIUC as of 2016, the IT program was nonexistent.

[munin]

Two points: first, even if "solid" universities are right to run away from this (and IMO they don't run away from it, they just move the IT program into the business school where you don't see it any more) there are still many other universities pumping out students into a dead career field, which should be concerning. Second, this is not just about IT programs. Computer science programs are impacted to. From the OP:

> But instead of five backend developers and three ops people and a DBA to keep the lights on for your line-of-business app, now you maybe need two people total.

All nine of those people would probably have been CS graduates, or at least many of the backend developers would be (and perhaps the DBA). Or they would be people that thought of themselves as "developers" and not "IT" for whatever that distinction is worth now.

[TheCoelacanth]

Except that there are more developers than ever developing more software than ever. Instead of one business app with five backend developers and three ops people and a DBA you have five business apps each with two developers.

[geggam]

Interviewing college graduates is depressing. No way the current education system will create people competent enough to keep this going

[eldavido]

Don't generalize. Are you interviewing graduates from the top 10-15 programs or lesser-tier?

I think this is a big error people make. Some colleges are great. Others are horrible. It's very hard to say, "College is a waste" or "college is great".

[nradov]

It's not even a matter of tiers. There are plenty of great candidates coming out of lower rated schools, although the hit rate is lower.

In general interviewers just have unrealistic expectations for entry level candidates. They forget how incompetent they were at the same age. Or they have ridiculous notions that everyone should know how to write a quicksort algorithm or whatever, when some students may have focused their studies on other (but equally challenging) topics.

[geggam]

I expect you to know fundamentals about things like TCP networking and how to install, configure and manage Linux Distributions.

I find many people who can install Ubuntu and run the canned commands or curl foo.sh | sudo bash or docker / k8s scripts they download, think they know what they are doing.

They dont.

Its getting to the point someone who can install windows is more technical than someone who can install linux

[geggam]

Did the interviews in Silicon Valley. MIT UCLA Stanford Berkley are some of the grads I interviewed.

[arethuza]

What do you mean by an "IT program"?

[ocdtrekkie]

My community college has two different departments: CIS and CIT. CIS is more akin to "computer science", and heavily covers various programming languages and has a game development sub-program. CIT includes hardware troubleshooting and repair, certification classes for Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware, network administration, and has a subprogram in cybersecurity. Much like in the business world, academics now do treat development and IT as two separate fields.

[wasdfff]

The community college also has an automotive repair program. You’d be hard pressed to find a decent school with an IT or any other of these vocational programs at their main campuses.

That’s because it trains for the job, not for the field. While you’d probably get up and running easier with an IT degree since you know the current tooling, you’d be worse off than someone with the conceptual knowledge that comes with a more general CS degree, and you’d therefore have a tougher time adapting to whatever new technology that didn’t exist in your IT program but was touched on conceptually in the CS coursework.

[ocdtrekkie]

My community college is extremely "decent", thank you. In most cases, other than needing to check of the "have a bachelor's degree" box for job application purposes, most people will probably get more bang for their buck in a community college than they ever will in a fancier school. Depending on what your local community college offers, there's a good chance that for a fraction of the cost, you can pick up nearly anything you'd want to know (or just like to learn, at that price).

As someone whose taken a fair number of IT degree classes, I'd say there's a fair bit of conceptual knowledge involved. And in the case of networking, for example, most of the standards and protocols you're being taught how to work with have been around since the mid-80s, and aren't showing significant signs of going away any time soon.

I'd say the CS vs. IT split would probably surprise you. I have gone up to the bachelor's level in a game programming degree, and it was amazing how poorly people who were proficient in writing C++ couldn't handle basic PC troubleshooting, it's a different skill set entirely.

[flukus]

I went through community college over a decade ago, I've spent a depressing amount of time since teaching people with CompSci degrees about CompSci concepts.

I've also run internships with CompSci graduates and have to say they're basically unemployable when they graduate, they might know some theory but they can't build anything. Community College teaches you to build things, so you come out with skills relevant to the workplace and you can fill in the CompSci stuff later.

[Zelmor]

Europe does. ;)

[whorleater]

My bad, I should've clarified "IT" in the NA sense.

[hourislate]

I have not found one yet.

My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed. His next two years will be filled with more useless courses and by the time it's all over will have cost 50k + (he lives at home and goes to a State School).

I feel like he could have taken a 6 week Java/Python/whatever and got more out of it. Add a CCNA/CCNP for the Networking knowledge, Linux Cert,Security Cert from SANS, and some self study and he would know more than a 4 year degree and be bettered prepared for the working world.

Universities in the US are all about making money, supporting football and athletics, tenure for the profs, and finally accreditation for 50k+?.

Meanwhile, 10's of 1000's of H1B's are needed because our kids know nothing and are being taught shit.

Two areas that need major change and disruption, Education and Healthcare, everything else can wait.

[anoonmoose]

I went to a state school. Their curriculum is easily and readily available online. It's nothing like what you describe. On top of that, you could have seen that and known it was the case before you sent him there. I'd really like to see the curriculum for the school you describe, I have a hard time believing it could be quite that different.

http://www.cse.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Selectio...

[NikolaNovak]

I understand some of your concerns, but at the same time, as you point out yourself, that's why there are choices available:

1. If you want a very specific skillset to do a very specific job, there are more opportunities and options today than ever before. Self-study, MOOC, bootcamps, certs, etc. Pros: fast, efficient, focused, practical, immediate. Cons: the specific/narrow focus may leave you with gaps you won't even be able to appreciate until too late.

2. If you want a more general education, Universities are there to provide. You'll get not just immediate hands-on-keyboard skills, but math and CS-theory background, and also also communication skills, discipline, diligence, social networking, perspective to be a team lead one day, etc.

Now, I do believe universities have a LOT of optimizations to make; a student's life tends to be sucky in many ways it doesn't need to. I've repeatedly found and heard of the difference in attitude between a college/bootcamp of "You're the paying customer, we'll provide knowledge", and university attitude of "you are irrelevant, be grateful, and jump through the hoops jump for the privilege" - whether from the ever-increasing admin/bureaucracy cohort (sometimes helpful, often power-blinded), the obscure rules and difficult processes, or some of the tenured professors. But again, the information is out there, the choices are available - and overall there's never ever been a better and easier time to acquire knowledge.

[Loughla]

>humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed

Full transparency, I hear this from nearly every 1st year college student every fall semester - either the CS, CHEM, or Engineering students exclusively. "Why do I have to take English, I'm just going to work with [chemicals] [computers] [software] [roads] [whatever else]"

Not sure how this opinion will fly on this site, but I'm not sure what you expected. It sounds like you have an ax to grind with a specific institution and you needed to do more research about the system of universities overall. They were and are designed to make a modern version of a renaissance wo/man - good or knowledgeable about everything being the idea. Making citizens who are more than just 1 skill cogs. Teaching critical thinking and higher order thought processing. They were not, and are not job placement agencies.

If you were looking for nothing but the certs and technical skills, you should've sent him to a technical/trade school or community college. That's why those exist.

There is a massive difference between being job task ready - like just finishing the certs would make you. And being life ready - like a liberal education makes you in theory. Giving a student a liberal education is literally why universities were designed. Why was that a surprise?

I genuinely don't understand why being good at things that are outside of your expertise, or at least knowing enough about them to sound like an educated person in conversation, is 'irrelevant'. I don't get it and never have.

>Meanwhile, 10's of 1000's of H1B's are needed because our kids know nothing and are being taught shit.

My experience has taught me that whenever an employer says "we can't find the workers" and use H1B's, what they really mean is "we can't find the workers at the wage we're willing to pay". Those are two different things.

THAT BEING SAID, the costs of education are out of hand. Living inside the beast, I can tell you that many administrators are just flat blind to the storm coming.

In the 90's, the message was go to college, go to college, go to college - relying on the past 40 years of if you went to college, everything else just sort of fell into place.

Well, now we have so many 'extra' services students expect, so many expenses, and less state/federal dollars. So students pay for it.

NOW the message is that you need to go to college only if it furthers your career goals. They're working in kindergarten with my child on that. It's frightening, honestly.

I think the pendulum will swing the other direction and we'll see a glut of skilled trades-people in the next 10 years.

[dragonwriter]

> My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed.

I suspect, if you aren't just being hyperbolic, you mean, “because he chose to a seek a degree from a liberal arts institution rather than an engineering one (which would have some, but less, general ed) or a vocational certificate program or career-focussed bootcamp.”

[gotorazor]

I think that is precisely the opposite of what the original article was talking about.

@forrestbrazeal is implying that many of those certs are going to be obsolete really soon. At least, that is what I took from the article.

I agree that American Universities are kind of insane. We, Canadians, are looking in and shaking our heads.

[normal_man]

> My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses

Yeah god forbid he enrich his mind and develop lateral thinking skills, empathy, perspective and wisdom instead of focusing exclusively on how he can best serve capital.

[zozbot123]

Who says he shouldn't be doing these things? That's what secondary education is for, in most of the developed world. Apparently, college is the new high school - in a quite literal sense!

[normal_man]

OP, the guy I'm replying to, seems to be saying that? That's why I replied to him?

[dfischer]

Education innovation is definitely a massive problem to solve. Especially because of a weird mix of control and influence Universities have between dictating k-12, expected job fulfillment vs skill, and their government sanctioned student debt vehicle unavoidable by bankruptcy.

We need a more decentralized education system top-down that isn't tightly coupled to the gov.

[Ruxbin1986]

Absolutely not. Look at colleges like Devry or University of Phoenix. Little to no regulation in curriculum, incredibly expensive, etc.