[bluedino]

The cloud is killing all the low-level admins. Mail administrators? Backup operators?

Moving to BYOD will continue to reduce the numbers of administrators as well. Eventually you'll have two groups of IT staff, a very small group of high-level engineers who build and implement everything, and then a very large group of low-skill helpdesk type people who reset your accounts and fill in your login information on your device.

Amazon's Mayday support service shows this already. Soon, a form of this will be on every product you can think of. Office, Windows, every tablet and computer in your office.

[secstate]

I couldn't agree more. The most apt analogy to explain this to non-tech folks I can come up with is how the automobile went from a hobby toy for the mechanically inclined to a tool people use everyday.

There will always be a place in the world for engineers who understand how to get the most of out an internal combustion engine and ways to improve it, just like for database engineers. But we don't all need our car in the shop twice a month having parts tuned. Nor do the vast majority of databases hitting performance limits that would require full-time DBAs.

Consulting is a great business decision when you reach hundreds of GB in data. In-house when your tossing around Tera or Peta-btyes. By the way, I can whole-heartedly recommend http://www.pgexperts.com if your having Postgres issues. After speaking with a few of their core engineers at DjangoCon 2013 I would consult with them anytime I had PG performance issues.