| 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. |