Half of U.S. I.T. Operations Jobs to Vanish 625
Ant writes "A MacCentral article says Gartner, Inc. researchers believe that as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data center technologies. Donna Scott, a Gartner analyst, said IT workers face a situation similar to that in the manufacturing field, which has lost jobs over the past several decades as automation has improved. Similarly, standardization of IT infrastructure, applications and processes will lead to productivity improvements and a major shift in skill needs, she said."
Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)
Helpdesk (Score:3, Insightful)
10 to 20 years (Score:5, Insightful)
It just means we will be doing other IT related stuff.
This is the Dark Side of Linux adoption. (Score:1, Insightful)
With Linux, you can hire a bearded guru part-time to keep you up to date.
Yeah, right. 2024 will be exactly like that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about trying to predict 2004 back in '84. PCs were just starting to take off, Al Gore was just starting to bury the first fiber connections that would become the internet, IBM was going to be the big power in personal computing...
Nobody could have foreseen that we'd all be selling the shit out of our basements on eBay, listening to huge music libraries on devices the size of a deck of cards and spending our work days trolling Slashdot?
C'mon, Garner, who are we trying to fool here?
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Robert
No (Score:3, Insightful)
No. It's because business finds it much more convenient to unfairly require employees to compete constantly for their own jobs. The workplace is now a sour, hostile, toxic environment for everyone except management and shareholders.
Everyone else: customers, employees, vendors, neighborhoods, the community and government, have to pay double and triple in the form of higher prices, constant irritating advertising, shitty quality, poor service, dirty stores, empty shelves, lost tax revenue and rude employees.
Employers have responsibilities beyond their earnings. Few are meeting them.
Re:Helpdesk (Score:1, Insightful)
Example:
Make sure the computer is plugged in. If the computer is not plugged in, please plug it in.
Does this solve your problem?
Yes | No
Jobs will probably balance out (Score:2, Insightful)
It always interesting how a report can look at 1 contributing factor and ignore all the others when drawing a conclusion.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Operators, sound off! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:10 to 20 years (Score:5, Insightful)
About the time current graduates start applying for home loans.
Re:Helpdesk (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pretty scary; since it's likely that in our lifetimes computers+robots will be better than Humans in _most_ jobs including
- all military jobs (fighter pilot, tank driver, battlefiled strategy
- most construction jobs (welding on bridges & highrises; home building, etc)
- all manufacturing jobs (cars, chips, etc)
- most desk-based service jobs (phone answering, 1st level customer support via voice recognition & support lookup tables)
- many retail jobs (self service checkouts are becommingn common; we have gas stations with zero attendants here, etc)
- drug design and testing -- computers can match gene databases, simulate protien folding, run stastics, analyze samples, etc better than we
and as soon as a computer becomes a better programmer than a person, the gap will speed up very quicklyI wouldn't be surprised if there are simply no jobs to go around.
Just like telephone operators... (Score:5, Insightful)
And as for the Gartner Group predicting the future of IT two decades from now, who died and made them Hari Seldon? Predicting 2004 in 1984 probably sounded a whole lot like "IBM and AT&T dominate the personal computer market, PCs have reached almost 30% of people's homes, most PCs come with a 500 MHz RISC chip or higher, with over a megabyte of memory and a blazing fast 16K modem! The sales of software giants Borland, Ashton-Tate and Lotus exceed $2 billion annually." Etc. You just can't predict the future of technology with anything remotely like accuracy that far out.
Give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)
However, the number of computer users in the country is drastically increasing each year. Jobs vanishing? I don't think so.
Instead of making $30/hr sitting in a NOC, go out and make $50/hr removing spyware. Duh.
Hypocritical IT Workers (Score:3, Insightful)
If the technology or cheaper labor exists, shouldn't businesses make use of them - just as the music industry should make use of new technology and not depend on legislation to save a dying business model?
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Helpdesk (Score:2, Insightful)
First, recognize that most work is at the first tier - people reading scripts, mostly ("Is it plugged in? Is the switch in the 'ON' position? Have you actually checked? Please check again now, sir."). We are seeing the start of real synthetic telehpone operation in other areas (seems every train and airline company has such a system for booking today). It's likely a matter of not too many years before it is used - and used fairly well - in preference to large callcenters.
Second, more and more of the "advanced" stuff will become so much easier to handle that it, too will gradually move down to the level at which it can be handled by scripts. Better diagnostic tools (not to mention real automated remote diagnostics), and steady, gradual improvements in the understanding of the problem areas are doing this.
Third, people are becoming more comfortable with remote assistance (we are becoming more comfortable with remote anything), and at the same time, tools for remote administration are becoming better and more sophisticated. Where you might have once needed ten people roaming around assisting people, you may now have three or four - two doing most of the previous work (no time needed to actually 'roam'), and two to go around doing the few things you really need to be there for.
It won't elliminate the job, of course, and noboy claims that it will. But just like in other areas mentioned (manufacturing and agriculture), you will gradually have a lot fewer people doing the work.
Reasons for the loss of IT jobs (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows vs. Linux or Mac on the desktop:
Don't use Window's and massively decrease workload and nessecarry staffing for IT.
Stick with M$ because saving the company money and incresing efficiency makes me and my department less important.
Choice of servers:
*nix: It Works®
Windows: Shitty performance = more servers and more problems = $$$
If I was a mechanic and I intentionally fsck'ed cars so I could get paid to fix them I could be arrested, and IT is bitching about job security? Fsck off!
Re:Ummm (Score:0, Insightful)
How exactly is a job stolen? You dont have a right to a damn job! A person who needs a task done has the right to use a robot or hire anyone anywhere or not hire anybody as he chooses fit.
Now yes, that person doesnt have the right to force anybody to do slave labor
Basically people are just pissed off that nobody wants to use their skills and they are too arrogant to work for cheap. Guess what McDonald's workers and janitors work damn hard and only get paid $6 to $7 an hour
If you bitch about having to work for $50k
Corporations dont want to pay you $200k to type code
This will probably get marked troll or whatever
Aren't we exaggerating a bit? (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary reveals this is a prediction by someone about what types of jobs will be available decades from now. To put this in context, consider what types of jobs were available 20 years ago.
Read the article and you learn these numbers are disputed by other experts.
What would be so wrong with this more realistic headline:
"Controversial Study Predicts Decline in US IT Operations by 50%"?
Sigh...
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:3, Insightful)
Kudos for calling yourself an "operator" (Score:3, Insightful)
Automation? Yeah, right. (Score:4, Insightful)
While automation can improve productivity, it's never the magic bullet or "paradigm-shifting" force people claim it to be. At best, it's good for dangerous or incredibly routine tasks. It's also good for high tolerance applications (ie, laser cutting sheet steel to within 0.0001").
But when it comes to assembling complex parts or performing tasks which can vary from product to product, you still need a human brain to do the work. I fail to see how the analogy holds for IT.
Re:Yeah, right. 2024 will be exactly like that. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Gartner analysis isn't preposterous; it's just trite.
Re:10 to 20 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Having almost got 20 years as a developer I can see no change in mind set amongst IT workers or Senior executives that would allow for any improvement in efficiency.
So in 20 years
I'll be using some new and improved language that is still no better than Smalltalk or C.
I'll be working on some hardware that can process everything faster but still get's nothing done.
My customers will still be customising rather than configuring software.
Re:Just like telephone operators... (Score:4, Insightful)
If we could predict technology that far out, it also implies we could predict the stock market that far out. Given that no one can generally predict a stock even for today, just one day, means this Gartner report exists only to make themselves feel important.
I hate to pee on analysts, but I don't listen to you at all. I look at stock estimates and think, "what do they know that I don't?" Generally, not much. It seems a person can be more successful simply following supply and demand trends than any other method. Doing better requires intimate insider knowledge, which no one has on any appreciable scale.
So, I conclude, Gartner are a bunch of analyst weenies.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about time we stopped letting Corporations milk the country dry, and give something back from all they take.
Re:10 to 20 years (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll give you the 1 million years ago scenario (give or take 1/2 a million). Note: Translated to modern english for comprehension.
Ugha: We're hunting.
Googa: Where?
Ugha: At the third hill.
Googa: Any luck?
Ugha: We haven't killed anything in the last 30 years.
Googa: How are you doing?
Ugha: Almost the whole tribe is wiped out, and we're really weak.
Googa: Why don't you guys try hunting elsewhere?
Ugha: But we've always hunted there...
Googa: Ok, well, good luck then!
Googa, walking away, thinking: I can come back in a while and get Ugha's stuff after he's dead. Dumbass...
Re:This is the Dark Side of Linux adoption. (Score:2, Insightful)
I couldn't help but laugh at that, but not with the meaning you intended.
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ummm ... 20 years?? (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH, robot maintenance tech will be one of the new jobs opening up as a result. And home network coordinator. And
So, yeah, Gartner probably got this one right. It just doesn't mean what it appears to mean.
Re:10 to 20 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Peering into the future is looking into a cloudy glass. There could easily be advances in nano-tech that completely change the nature of construction. (Or advances somewhere else, that we aren't looking at. Or something as totally off the way as X-rays were in the late 1800's.)
It's much safer to expect things to change than to expect them to remain the same for 20 years. I count myself to have been quite lucky that programming lasted as long as it has...but even so it's been dramatically transformed during my working life-span. At the moment it looks that 3 years ahead parallel processor programming will be the big thing...that almost nobody knows how to do. (Maybe Prograf and dataflow programming will spring back to life.)
Red Herring (Score:3, Insightful)
Since 20 years in the future is basically what 20 year olds of today are looking at as the time period over which they are going to lose half of their jobs -- it doesn't seem significant compared to what just happened. In fact such worries about a long-term reduction seem like a red herring to distract from what just happened to career programmers who actually built the software industry from the origins of "C" and Unix to today.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course you have to have people that design, market, insure, sell/distribute, repair, etc. And after a few years your Spud Picker 1000 is obsolete and you need to get a Spud Picker 2000. That's the shift in the industrialized world. Moving from a large amount of unskilled labor to a small amount of skilled labor.
And it seems to work because of free markets and capitalism allows for those designers, marketers, insurers, etc to upgrade and expand their customer base quite frequently.
What I'm trying to lead to here is that if you have a bunch of marginally skilled IT people that you're replacing, it's with a handful of highly skilled people somewhere in the system. Someone has to build/design/market this new easier to maintain, scalable, reliable, and whatever equipment.
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone else pays for it, company pockets the difference, employee loses their job. Same shit, different day.
Hooray for business.
Re:10 to 20 years (Score:4, Insightful)
That's unfortunate, but what do you want to do about it, forbid technological advancement so they can keep their jobs at the expense of everyone else? Economic progress hurts some people, but society as a whole benefits.
A large number of you are gonna be screwed when automation and outsourcing leaves you in your 40s and 50s without a job. You'd better pray social security's still around then, but that's kind of a slim hope.
If I actually need a job by the time I'm in my 50s, I'll have screwed up royally somewhere. Compound interest and dollar cost averaging are your friends. You really can take responsibility for your own life.
Of course, it doesn't matter to me, I moved out of the IT field into something that can't be outsourced so easily. But I just don't like what's going to happen to all my old friends and coworkers when the industry bottoms out.
If your doomsday scenario occurs, they can do the same thing you did. This is not the first time the job market has shifted. Most Americans were farmers not that many generations ago. Millions and millions "lost" those jobs due to industrialization, and we're far better off for it.
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, I but a lot of fresh items, like fruits, vegetables and breads, and I don't want to have to write down all the codes when someone else can do it for me.
Finally, I would rather hit on a cute checkout girl then a computer
They are close, but wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 50s-60s we had entire departments of large corporations supporting one machine (mainframe).
In the 70s-80s we had entire departments of large corporations supporting several machines (minis).
In the 90s-00s we have entire departments of large corporations supporting hundreds of machines (micros).
So, if we project forward, I certainly see what they're saying, but what happens when I can support 1000 machines at a time on my own the way I do about 1/10th of the support work for those thousand today, but my company needs 10s or even 100s of thousands of machines? Answer: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that jobs will be eliminated, but they may change. When I first got into IT in the late 1970s, you needed a shift of about 20 people just to run a mainframe. People to monitor the console, people to mount the tapes, people to run the printers, etc. Eventually most of those jobs were eliminated, i.e. automated tape libraries replaced tape handlers, online archival systems largely replaced the need to print massive reports, and automation software determined what jobs to run when and checked for error conditions. Everybody thought that was the end of having a career in IT.
But that was back in the '80s, before the tech boom of the '90s. True, there weren't as many jobs running mainframes, but plenty of new jobs opened up such as LAN and Unix admins, network techs, security specialists, etc. Instead of jobs being eliminated, suddenly there were more jobs than there were people to fill them.
If you're just going to sit on your ass and expect make a career out of what you're doing now, then you'll probably be out of a job eventually (ask any COBOL programmer or tape handler from the '80s). But if you keep learning new skills as technology evolves, you'll probably always have a job. When I first moved from mainframes to Unix in the early '90s, Unix systems were fairly primitive and required a lot of massaging. Now that they've evolved to the point where they've acquired nearly mainframe like reliability, they need less admins to support, but on the other hand you have new ancillary technologies like SAN's that also require specialized knowledge to manage. These days, I spend more time on SAN management than I do on Unix administration proper.
I've been through this before. Remember, even if they replace the administrator with management automation, someone has to admin the management automation too. Make sure that someone is you.
Re:Most Depressing News Ever (Score:4, Insightful)
(If you identify yourself as "in the IT field" and take exception to that, go ahead and reply - I swear upon my life that I couldn't care.)
Fields like scientific computing (simulations, serious number crunching, clusters), control systems (missle guidance, HVAC systems (for complicated stuff, not your apartment building), flight controls, engine controls), anything biochem or bioinformatics, and PhD level stuff in software engineering (new UI paradigms (I opine that "paradigm" is the appropriate word when talking about software engineering), interface designs, ubiquitous computing, etc.) is NOT what is typically referred to as the "IT field".
It's roughly the line separating commercial software and corporate tech support from R&D science. If you want to do the IT field work, give my regards to your fellow 3rd shift factory workers. If you want to work in hard science, I expect you'll have a job in the U.S. so long as you're not a total klutz.
Take as much math as you can stomach - it won't help you write code, but it'll help you design a missle guidance system. Code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill in the future. Knowing how a missle guidance system works is always going to be an expensive skill. As long as you make that distinction when you're young, you should be fine.
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:3, Insightful)
YES. In fact, it's probably worth $28 an hour, plus a full benefits package, flexible scheduling and a pension. $15 an hour is chickenshit. Most companies spend more than that on plastic plants for the lobby. Being a cashier is not unskilled labor. Working anywhere for ten years deserves respect.
Someone working a register for ten years is no more entitled to the job than someone working a register for 1 year.
Oh sure they are.
You know why you don't see people making $60K/year working a register? Because anybody can do it.
You know why fatass managers make ten times that? Anyone can run a fucking meeting and shove donuts in their face.
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hooray for a growing economy!
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:3, Insightful)
Half of working-age adults are not employed full-time.
And we don't earn less.
Real wage growth is 0.5% since the 70s.
We can buy much more with our incomes than before.
Housing costs have increased 170% in the last two years.
All because technology eliminated unnecessary jobs, allowing the creation of new jobs, with the result of producing more goods and services with the same limited amount of labor.
In another country.
Re:10 to 20 years (Score:5, Insightful)
That was such an outrageous thing to say, I decided to actually do the math.
Assuming that:
1) You started to save at 25. (Most people don't)
2) You expect to live until 85.
3) You want to retire at 55
4) A real growth rate of 5%, which is generous. (Real growth is growth after inflation. See http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/stock-market/ for historical examples)
You'd have to save and invest 26% of your income to retire and maintain your existing lifestyle. With a 4% real growth rate, which is very possible if our economy loses several high paying jobs, you're looking at needing to save 36% of your income.
Re:Open source - does it undermine our incomes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree, such a world would be a better place. A veritable human utopia, in fact. Unfortunately, I fear that human thought is presently too limited to allow such a utopia to come into existence.
Humans are not greedy by culture so much as by instinct (hoarding was necessary in our evolutionary history). It is no surprise that we have organized ourselves in such a way that the most greedy remain the most powerful. This alone is sufficient to prevent your utopia from lasting (let alone being properly formed), though creative thought will reveal other ways in which human instincts (and intellectual limitations) will defeat this goal.
*sigh*
I guess we can still dream though...
Everything you have written is innacurate. (Score:1, Insightful)
I do not have the figures available, but for your argument to be correct, you must claim that we have had 0% (or .5% or whatever you're trying to say) productivity increase. Everybody knows that we have dramatically increased our productivity over the last fifty years and especially the last fifteen years, which is why America is the richest country (has the highest purchasing power) in the world. Oh and by the way, the price of the average home is about 10% higher than it was last year [realestateabc.com]. But that doesn't take into account inflation or America's increased purchasing power during the last year.
A 100-level college economics class would have saved you the embarrassment of your post, and me the time to correct it.
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it turns out that isn't a good thing. In England, the people on the dole more often than not spend it at the local pub rather than studying and improving themselves. As it turns out, in a system like that, the people who would use it to better themselves are the people you find working anyway. The rest just destroy their lives with alchohol and mcdonalds.
So yea, a MAJOR cultural change, one where the vast majority of the lower classes change their outlook on life. I just don't see 90% of the population rotting in front of the TV/bar as a good thing.
Youngsters think it is easy to adapt (Score:4, Insightful)
It is the privilege of the young to be able to adapt. They start from scratch, have a high ability to learn and expect little at the beginning but to be able to leverage their skills in the middle to long term.
Few people realize that adapting often means starting from scratch again. When you have a home loan and a family this may not be an option *at all* or at least a very damaging one.
The vast majority of older but still active people have adapted to a new situation when they were younger and are now at the phase when they expect the leveraging to occur. If it doesn't it truly sucks because they are by nature slighly less able to learn than younger people and also far more commited down the path of life.
The only way to avoid this is to choose a path/career where adaptation to a new situation is the norm, but it is difficult to maintain as it is quite tiring, or to choose a career that is by nature pretty much unchanging irrespective of the field of application such as management or accountancy. Not everyone can be a manager though, especially a good one.
Don't worry folks... (Score:3, Insightful)
The PROBLEM with all this is... (Score:3, Insightful)
WHY THIS IS BAD:
It's a social catastrophe. As we move towards a society in which only a few people are needed to work, those few people aren't going to want to support all the rest with their taxes. The result isn't going to be a techno-utopia in which everyone enjoys lives of education and leisure -- it'll be a hell in which the vast majority of people are dirt-poor and a few are very rich.
The result of this is predictable, because it's happened before, in France a couple of hundred years ago (though for different reasons, the overall effect was the same). If you recall, people like Marie Antoinette said (of her starving countrymen) "let them eat cake" -- and they cut off her head. Every situation in which all the wealth is in the hands of a few and the majority is unhappy results in rebellion and the removal of the few.
At some point in this (and every other) country, we're going to reach a point where we're going to have to make a choice. We will either deliberately introduce some inefficiency into the system to let everybody get a job and be happy, or we'll continue our current path and a violent, bloody revolution will do it for us.
Believe it.
Basically (Score:2, Insightful)
Last job I had I had been working with two kids out of college. Neither had a lick of programming knowledge, nor of any hardware knowledge. How they passed the classes is beyound me. They wanted to work on web design. They hadn't any graphical design skills, nor taking any courses in graphical design. It seems like they wanted the easy way out to get a "cool high paying job". They were fired within a month. They thought they could just ask everyone else how to code such and such a thing, or if they asked nicely someone else would do it for them. Digusting.
Call me bitter, but I got into this job because I love it. I don't understand the people that do it for any other reason. And working with people who don't love it is just frustrating. So, I see this as being a good shift- one that will move things back in the *proper* direction of IT. We are not just PC mechinics. We are designers, coders, engineers, mathmaticians and scientists.
Is this really a bombshell? (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, you need new people to do new things in addition to the things you were expected to be doing 10 year ago.
What the analysts cannot account for (name a model) is how many new services and applications will need to be cared for in the future.
Did anyone 10 years ago see instant messaging as something that might be a corporate requirement today? Blogs? Web services? NAS? VoIP? BGP? DR/BC? IDS? Firewalls? etc...
Eventually, these applications might make it to the point where you can treat them like an appliance you plug in, configure and forget. Yeah, right. If only...
What this analyst assumes for the future of losing all these IT workers to improvements in technology is that there won't be new applications and services that require painful hand holding... until the market forces (if large enough) warrant a new appliance approach.
Ultimately, how reliable is Gartner's predicition? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Improvements in data center technologies? (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone who has been working grocery store checkout for 10 years...has made a SERIOUS vocational error.
C'mon, do you think anything above minimum wage is warrented by someone scanning stuff all day? This is not a job for a grown adult to be doing to support themselves, much less a family. This is a job for HS kids and college students. $15/hr for an unskilled job like this is ridiculous....
De-Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's animals. Raw, basic natural selection is what you are describing. And in any case, it is not always true that descent through modification selects through greatest competition - there are many examples of symbiosis and altruism proving beneficial.
But classic natural selection does not apply to homo sapiens, and has not for a long time. You see, we invented Culture, and the fact that successful human societies care for their sick, their old, their enfeebled, and their disadvantages is why we have risen to the top of the food chain.