What an IT Career Will Look Like 5 Years Out 233
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Heltzel reports on the impact that IT's increasing reliance on the cloud for IT infrastructure will have on your career in the years ahead. "[O]ne fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who've pulled all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while co-workers slept, probably won't recognize their offices' IT architecture — or the lack thereof — in five years. This shift will have a broad impact on IT's role in the future — how departments are structured (or broken up), who sets the technical vision (or follows it), and which skills rise to prominence (or fall away almost entirely)."
Career Is But A Quait Concept Now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Career Is But A Quait Concept Now (Score:5, Informative)
This is an IT Management issue that I am hoping someone will realize is a huge drain on the budget.
1) New IT manager arrives with vision of how he is going to improve IT
2) Hires new staff to realize that vision
3) Trains new staff. ($$$)
4) Is promoted in 2 to 3 years into a new higher position.
5) New IT Manager arrives with new vision of how he is going to improve IT
6) Decides the company needs "New Blood" in IT and proceeds to lay off old IT staff.
7) Hires new staff to realize that vision (In most cases paying %10-%30 more to get new staff due to salary changes over the years)
8) Trains new staff. ($$$)
9) Is promoted in 2 to 3 years into a new higher position.
10) Rinse and Repeat.
Each round you loose the knowledge of what was tried, and failed, before and what worked for the business need. I have seen new managers come into a company and decide to revamp the whole system with no review of ROI, TCO, or even the understanding that completely retooling the environment will be cost prohibitive.
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10) Rinse and Repeat.
This is very similar to the in-house versus oursource issue. Our's was on a five year cycle. Engineers on one side, bean counters on the other.
A;ways came back to in house because of the control, then the bean counters show how much money can be saved by outsourcing, then all that money saved and more is wasted by reworks and travel, then it comes back in house for the control, then the bean counters show how much money can be saved......
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The obvious solution is to outsource the bean counters.
Hoopefully they will resume their reguar place Starting around 2000, they became commodities instead of normal employees. Then they ended up running the show. The place I was at went from a few accountants to maybe a hundred.
And despite that increase, there always seemed to be a "need" to hire several more.
I used to joke about "needing" a 150 K accountant to keep track of 2K of company pencils. Not certain that hasn't become reality in some places.
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If you want to be able to retire at some point before you die, you need to be constantly looking for other job opportunities. Move up, move down, move laterally; it doesn't matter. Just keep moving or you'll be under the chopping block.
This, this, this. I've been trying to preach this to any of my IT peers who will listen for years now. Always have a Plan B. Keep in touch with local recruiters, get your name out there, know what jobs are available, and use that info to your advantage.
Even here in the Midwest where cost of living is much lower, I can go out and get a six-figure job on about a week's notice but that's because I've already done the legwork. Don't wait until you need a job before you start looking; there are plenty of them ou
Career Development vs Job Security (Score:2)
Career Is But A Quait Concept Now
Using the word Career instead of Job is more important than ever, IMHO. In past decades career development was simply finding a good company and moving up the ranks. Having a career was basically just the same as having a job. In today's economy, managing your career is much more difficult. But because it is more difficult, it is far more rewarding for those who do it well (and more hazardous for those who do it poorly).
Move up, move down, move laterally; it doesn't matter. Just keep moving
This is very good advice for most people. The more you move, the more varied experiences
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He is actually spot on. The way it is setup, the HR procurement process would much rather hire someone working for another company or in the company over someone who recently became unemployed. Even promotions and raises go to those who show that they can easily leave to better pastures. HR seems to equate this to mean the company is undervaluing them presently. I have seen many examples where the guy who says "I have a job offer, match it or I am leaving" every two years advances by leaps compared to h
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No he isn't "spot on". No one wants to train new employees. It costs money to hire and retrain. Companies want to keep you at the cheapest amount possible. No one is going to hire anyone who jumps around every year.
So don't be one of the employees who has to be trained.
I have taken failing projects away from company lifers within a couple months at new companies on multiple occasions. While I will be more productive after a year or two than I am on the first day, my varied work experience makes me more valuable on day 20 than most employees with 10 years of company specific experience. I just keep 1 to 2 company lifers close so I can ask for advice so the company gets the best of both worlds. The coworkers I choose to
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No he isn't "spot on". No one wants to train new employees. It costs money to hire and retrain. Companies want to keep you at the cheapest amount possible. No one is going to hire anyone who jumps around every year.
Except for the very few who have internship programs, no one trains new employees anymore. Welcome to yesterday's news.
So when you hop, it is because you know your shit (or know how to figure things out) and land on your feet running. If you lack that skill, you are dead weight, plain simple.
Also, the OP never said jumping every year, but keep looking and keep moving. That can be 2-3 years intervals at least to no more than 5. 2-3 years is the norm. 4 is pushing it, and 5, either you lack the drive or
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In fact, I have noticed in this industry, if you don't hop, your pay stagnates, hopping gets you a 20% increase, staying gets you 0-3% increase. There is no reason to stay with a company long term if they don't value enough to give you raises. I am not an under performer either, it is just the way of companies.
Re:Career Is But A Quait Concept Now (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. That is possibly the dumbest thing I have read on here. Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly? I'm sure you will be modded to +5 Insightful though.
I've been interviewing candidates for a high-end generalist position for six months now. (We're cheap and no-name) One thing that has struck me is that few people stay at an IT job for more than 18 months to 2 years. I'm an exception, having been here for 7 years and at my previous job for 9. But what really surprises me is that I've started to consider those 18 month stints as normal. Now, when I look at a resume where someone has been at the same place for 3 or 4 years, I ask myself "What's wrong with this person that they couldn't find another job?" It never crosses my mind that they, like me, might simply have found a relaxed environment in which they're comfortable and not expected to hold down a desk for 9 hours before doing the real work after everyone else goes home. It's scary. I'm both the senior technical person at my organization and my IT department's hiring manager... and by my own standards, I'm practically unhirable.
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You are stupid.
If you think that people are more valuable when they show less commitment to staying at a place for any length of time, then as an extension of your logic, you are probably the least valuable employee to your company. After all, you've been there for nine years.
The reason you don't see people with 10 years in is because our industry doubles every three years, so 100% will have under a year of experience, 50% will have about 3 years of experience, 25% will have about six years of experience, and 12% will have about 9 years of experience.
If you are in that 12% odds are you have already jumped in and out of the less desirable jobs and have found a place where you are generally happy. For example, I worked for Cisco systems for 8 years and was rather happy there. My "move" from Cisco had a lot to do with layoffs and nothing to do with motivation to find a new team.
I am one of the really rare ones, I have over 15 years of experience. I assure you that I'm not unemployable. In fact, there is a high demand for people who really know their field, and in computers, it is still a field where you can command a high salary if you have the skill set to back it up.
Exactly. Layoffs. That it happened to you only on a rare occasion that allowed you to stay at Cisco for 8 years only means that you are an statistical outlier in this industry.
Nobody is motivated to jump ship just for shits and giggles, but because we know the vibe of things and known when a round of head chopping is around the block.
And you get laid off very often in this industry without having anything to do with performance. In my 20 years of experience, I've been laid off three times because fundi
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Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly? I'm sure you will be modded to +5 Insightful though.
You obviously haven't been keeping an eye on the job market. There are plenty of places who are looking for 6-12 month contracts to get some new site up and running, or to staff up for some new initiative that may last a couple years then who knows. I've never stayed at any IT job for longer than 3 years, and I have never once had a single hiring manager bring that up as a negative.
The ones you want to work for understand how the market is these days. And believe me, it's a seller's market. Companies are dy
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Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly?
While switching jobs every year will be a red flag (unless you were a consultant), switching jobs every three years or so will not be a red flag for any employer worth working for. As long as these are not consistently lateral moves, it shows the candidate is managing his career well and will probably bring more varied skills than someone who stayed at one employer for 10 years.
When I am asked where I see myself in 5 years during interviews, I am always open that I will either have moved to a more senior ro
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Oddly, people whine about government workers who get a 2% (or less) raise every year, claiming they're mooching off the taxpayer with their exorbitant salaries. I'll have to remind them of your comment.
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Where have you been in the last 15-20 years? (Score:2)
Wow. That is possibly the dumbest thing I have read on here. Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly? I'm sure you will be modded to +5 Insightful though.
Where have you been in the last 15-20 years? The IT/software industry moved towards a contractor-base system years ago, where layoffs are a common occurrence every 2-5 years, with up/down cycles lasting 5 to 10. Outside of SV, it is rare to find a perm opening, let alone a place where you can spend 10 years on the job uninterrupted.
Nowadays, it is just contracting jobs. Even the health and DoD sectors (sectors I've worked with in addition to others) have been moving towards that modus operandi.
That you
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The medical system didn't receive a bailout,
You're right. The bailout was to the insurance industry, which was living high on the hog and wanted a return on their investment (in the federal government). The government responded by giving them the greatest corporate handout in the history of government.
Bonus Impact (Score:5, Insightful)
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But think of the short term savings!
And in most cases it is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
In reality a hosted cloud is more expensive and less secure in almost all cases. When will people wake up and realize that cloud was created not to provide any particular service that can't be provided locally, but is just a way to turn something you used to pay for once into a monthly forever and ever payment. Cloud is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
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Not necessarily, no. If I buy my own kit, I need to care about support contracts for that kit, end of life status for that kit, upgrades, system design for (infrastructure-level) uptime etc.. If I use a cloud service (I hate the word, but it's stuck so there we go) then I don't need to do that.
It's trade-off. Cloud is not all good, but it's not all bad either. A lot of gardening-style detail of looking after kit
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It is a tradeoff that often works in favor of the cloud for smaller companies. Here, we did the math and discovered that at $5 an email, the yearly cost was higher than my new mail cluster+ 9 TB san we already deployed and that math was still working against the cloud when we applied the resulting proposed discount.
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Note that one of two things happen:
1) You are paying someone else the expense of caring about that stuff (on top of their margin)
or
2) They are not caring about many of those things, and you may not have to care as much either.
Note that a *lot* of #2 is happening is these providers. They are doing things that a business wouldn't dare do to themselves (sometimes for not particularly good reasons). A lot of the savings for these customers is getting to close their eyes and not see the stuff they wouldn't do
Re:And in most cases it is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
From a business point of view, using the cloud means you get to put your monthly costs into your "op-ex" as opposed to buying a load of stuff up front (with cash) and writing it off over a couple of years on your "cap-ex". That can help your accounts look good because you get to maintain cash flow (particularly in the early days) and don't have lots of assets on the books. Not one single accountant that looks at your accounts will know if you're getting a good deal from your cloud or not, so it's works very well at impressing those sorts of people. Those sorts of people are quite probably your backers and bankers, who are increasingly risk adverse. They don't want to give you loads of cash today which all gets spent immediately (on the promise of success) and so would much rather drip-feed out their investment in you over a couple of years as they see success actually happening.
Going to the cloud means you don't need start-up capital to get started. In that sense it's very good and a great enabler of small business. However, as you say, once you've started up, you're better off taking the initial hit (from your cash reserve) to buy it all and run it in house. If you've got any sort of reputation to maintain, then moving stuff in-house is pretty much your duty of care (well, it is as soon as you lose your data and your customers complain about it). The question is... when are you no longer a "small business" that can be forgiven minor transgressions and "big enough" that you should know better? It seems to me that lots of really big corps. are trying to pretend they're "small" (ie. lean start-ups) when they absolutely should know better. We'll probably have to ride this out until the next 'fad' comes along.
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'The cloud' is also a backup facility. For those not-so-small companies.
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Find one single company that's using the cloud that has performed a single disaster recovered exercise with it.
Netflix, they continuously test their DR practices with chaos monkey [netflix.com].
Cloud Shmoud (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Cloud" is a buzzword created to fool executives into paying for Other People's servers. Executives see it as some magical technology that is fool proof and infallible.
The term should be eradicated, preferably with fire.
Re:And in most cases it is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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In reality a hosted cloud is more expensive and less secure in almost all cases. When will people wake up and realize that cloud was created not to provide any particular service that can't be provided locally, but is just a way to turn something you used to pay for once into a monthly forever and ever payment. Cloud is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
Are you including labor costs of non-cloud support in that calculation...?
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In reality a hosted cloud is more expensive and less secure in almost all cases. When will people wake up and realize that cloud was created not to provide any particular service that can't be provided locally, but is just a way to turn something you used to pay for once into a monthly forever and ever payment. Cloud is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
Are you including labor costs of non-cloud support in that calculation...?
Are you including depreciation of capital equipment?
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Are you including depreciation of capital equipment?
Sorry what's your point?
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Are you including depreciation of capital equipment?
Sorry what's your point?
The point is that somehow, someway cloud eliminates all your problems. When I had a part time business, my capital equipment was depreciated over time, giving me tax benefits. Which was in answer to including the labor costs of non-cloud operations, s a fatal indictment of non-cloud operations.
Because it doesn't eliminate all your problems, it isn't all blue sky, puppydogs and unicorns.
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I work for an IT consultancy and we've seen a surprising number of cloud adopters move back on premise because the costs of cloud were too high (primarily), along with the usual raft of support complaints and inflexibility. Cost is a particular problem because cloud vendor pricing is really opaque and even when it's transparent-ish, you need a degree in accounting to sort out the costs.
About the only place we haven't seen as much reverting back to on-premise is email which is probably driven by the belief
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In reality a hosted cloud is more expensive and less secure in almost all cases. When will people wake up and realize that cloud was created not to provide any particular service that can't be provided locally, but is just a way to turn something you used to pay for once into a monthly forever and ever payment. Cloud is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
In reality a motorised carriage is more expensive and less safe in almost all cases. When will people wake up and realize that engines were created not to provide transport that can't be provided by horse, but is just a way to turn something you used to feed with hay into a machine that guzzles oil. Motorised carriages are cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
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you used to pay for once into a monthly forever and ever payment. Cloud is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
Pay for once? Support contracts, software licensing, and qualified staff to run and maintain it all for you are neither inexpensive nor one-time costs.
We're still trusting the cloud? (Score:4)
Seriously?
Wonder how many more times we're going to hear of cloud architectures being compromised before that idiotic mentality changes.
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Seriously?
Wonder how many more times we're going to hear of cloud architectures being compromised before that idiotic mentality changes.
You have to keep in mind that most CEOs aren't going to give a shit if it's really secure as all they care about is the bottom line - which means cutting labor costs - which means going to a cloud service.
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Seriously?
Wonder how many more times we're going to hear of cloud architectures being compromised before that idiotic mentality changes.
You have to keep in mind that most CEOs aren't going to give a shit if it's really secure as all they care about is the bottom line - which means cutting labor costs - which means going to a cloud service.
Perhaps we should ask Noel Biderman what he thinks about not giving a shit about anything but the bottom lin...oh wait, that's right. He'll soon not have a bottom line to worry about anymore.
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Take a look at the hacks over the last few years and tell me how many were due to compromised public clouds. Home Depot? Nope. Target? Nope. Heartland? Nope.
Re:We're still trusting the cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's not a problem, that's somebody else's fault, which is the first thing and CIO looks for in any solution.
Though, really, have we ever seen the clouds from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft get compromised?
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Though, really, have we ever seen the clouds from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft get compromised?
Yes, the NSA has ALL of them infiltrated. Google and MS have been trying to lock them out through more internal encryption but you can bet anything that they then just receive a national security letter that tells them to turn over their encryption keys, even for servers outside the US.
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The NSA has everything compromised, though, so that doesn't differentiate cloud from non-cloud. That's very different from, say, the Sony hack, where everything becomes public.
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I'm guessing the GP's point was that people keep saying the cloud should be more secure and reliable for most organisations, but the evidence to support that is looking more sketchy almost by the day and the critics are starting to say "I told you so".
Pretty much all the major cloud infrastructure providers have had major outages. Plenty of business-critical software-as-a-service providers have had major outages, privacy leaks, data loss, and so on. Some services have been discontinued. Some prices have bee
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At this point, I don't think it's credible any more to argue that in-house systems will fail due to lack of expertise but that complicated cloud-hosted deployments will magically work when set up by the same level of staff.
Do you think it is easier or more difficult to configure a cloud deployment than to host it yourself?
IT Careers will look much the same (Score:2)
There will be less of them. Already most corp IT is not IT but vendor management the cloud move is going from outside vendors taking care of your inhouse IT shop to outside vendors taking care of your cloud IT shop.
Overall this is a good thing boil down the IT staff to the real people and boil off the fluff. Give it a decade and watch core business functions go back in house as companies figure out a one size fits all is to ridged.
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I laughed when a client was looking for a cloud solution to store their pb's of cad and high res imaging data, they had a blazing fast 10mbs internet BTW. Napkin math showed that even a 10ge internet link would not give him acceptable access speeds since latency matters.
If your talking about office productivity sure grab a google or o365 account and pray they don't start charging more or drop a feature you need. Sure they are great at sucking data in getting it back out can be a pita. Just look at MSSQL
Not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
What you will see with "cloud", just like "virtualization", is a maturation of the technology's use inside a company. Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization, and not every workload will be appropriate nor cost effective in the cloud. The cloud is great for every "devops" guy who thinks they're going to write the next Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix--but yet again, for 99% of companies out there, workloads are entirely static. There's just little need for "SUPER HYPER SCALE AUTOSCALING UP AND DOWN CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE" for a vast majority of business workloads.
Specific applications are hugely appropriate for "cloud", particularly e-mail (and I say this as an Exchange Administrator). And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue. And never underestimate the value of management having someone that they can call to "look at the issue right away at 2:30AM". This need will keep a lot of folks employed.
Finally, you can't really depreciate cloud assets like you can capital expenses. So really, again, you're ultimately just comparing the cost of operating a datacenter versus the cloud technology. And you can already not worry about operating your own datacenter by simply using a colocated one.
So at the end of the day, no matter how much technology changes. No, the 'devops' revolution isn't actually going to happen, and being able to swap a drive or add some ram will still be a necessary skill.
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Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization
People still think this? There's no performance downside to virtualization any more, unless you overload the host, and you get the ability to make snapshots if nothing else.
And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue
Always read your SLA. Many cloud-provided services are well supported, with people oncall 24/7 if the service itself goes down. Amazon is infamous for putting all its devs on pager duty, and the cloudy parts of MS as well (haven't heard about Google - anyone know who gets the pager duty there?). But you can't assume anything, and if
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Specific applications are hugely appropriate for "cloud", particularly e-mail (and I say this as an Exchange Administrator).
Have fun migrating to (cough...)Office 365(cough...)!
And there will be no mainframes or COBOL either (Score:3)
"The cloud" is not a magic carpet, and there are a lot of organizations who will get burned by falling for all the hype. I personally know a cloud based service provider that actually believed the marketing crap on reliability. When their cloud provider (one of the big two) crashed they had no backup and no recovery plan either. They were flat on their back for a week, and were still picking up the pieces a month after that. One more of those and they might just shut their doors.
So here is another fad, and the inevitable backlash will come when it fails to deliver. So how dumb do you have to be to announce the start of a brand new shiny paradigm shift that will make everything really different in a blink of an eye. Grow up.
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So here is another fad, and the inevitable backlash will come when it fails to deliver. So how dumb do you have to be to announce the start of a brand new shiny paradigm shift that will make everything really different in a blink of an eye. Grow up.
There is no paradigm shift. "The Cloud" is just another way of saying distributed computing which was available in the 1960s and became popular in the 70s. It then started a slow decline because it was shit. Mostly it was shit because of network speed, but on the other hand it was shit because you relied on a remote location. It's still shit and I really hope this "Cloud" evaporates sooner rather than later.
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In 5 years it will look at lot like now (Score:2)
The cloud is a new service, for some it will be economical and for others it won't be. If the cloud was really changing IT companies like IBM, HP and Microsoft etc would be tanking. They're not so these clowns are just trying to convince you to part with your cash. Yes the cloud will mean the mum and dad companies can run their IT services in the Interwebs however bigger companies will still see the break even point for running their own infrastructure with maybe their backup web presence in the cloud when
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Yeah, I guess the idiots in the suits want to offload infrastructure and employees to third parties. But most of all they probably do a SWOT analysis and decide that they can offload the risk to the third party. It's just a pity that this risk mitigation is impotent because cloud providers (well, every that I've seen) pretty much make sure that their liability is as close to 0% as possible. "Cloud services" are just something that's old, proven crap, and wrapped up in cotton wool to make it all cutesy, fluf
Re:IT as a utility - we're already there. (Score:5, Insightful)
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In most cases if your internet connection is out work stops anyways. My work we us google for mail, and Skype for IM but otherwise have everything in house. Still if we have a glitch work slows down to a crawl. Every time you try to do something and need to look up a manual page or something, oh crap can't access the site. Huh, okay maybe I can do something else ... oh crap that bug has a link to a website, can't work on that ... It quickly becomes "lunch time" for everyone in the office for that 30min or w
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Yep. The other servers are likely to have source code and such (bug/feature ticketing, Stash repos, TFS etc). Why GMail: not sure. We build collaboration software so our products do need to interact with google, Office 365, SharePoint etc etc not sure if they just figured we all need a business account for G Drive anyways to test our software we might as well get the email service too or what.
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And then your Internet connection goes out.
Parent is talking about a school, not a bank.If their internet goes out, then so what. The students can still get to learning. Most places really don't need the uptime they say they do.
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Security concerns in the cloud are overblown by those trying to save their jobs.
Wow, really?
Your post was interesting until I read this.
Depending on what you are putting on someone elses servers/infrastructure I guess security isn't a priority.
And yes, I support and configure systems that run on "cloud" infrastructure.
To make such a blanket statement about offsite resources(as I like to call it) is naive.
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Yes, but the share price will go up, and the managers who outsourced all that stuff will exercise their stock options and move on before the inevitable disasters happen.
In most business, reward systems encourage managers to make short-term savings with no concern about the long term. So they do exactly that.
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We get control through solid contracts, with limits of liability and indemnification and insurance. I'm sure there is some cost cutting, but the really cost
It's over.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can see the writing on the wall, from the perspective of having my first IT job in 1983... It's over.
No one should really seek to enter a non development position in IT. Because it is being snuffed out by "big computing cloud services" and the "appliancezation" of IT infrastructure. There will always be some high end jobs around. But the numbers (and the pay) are shrinking- fast.
So pack it up kiddies. Almost 30 years of booming industry will be evaporating in 5 to 7 years.
It is truly time to find something else to do.
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The push to centralize is usually driven by analysts who expect cost savings. But there's two other things that follow. The first is, if it becomes, even for a little bit, "expected" to run to a cloud, then you'll see a bunch of clouds forming to run to, each with some angle on why you should use THEM... and those clouds will themselves want IT ppl. The second is, there's downsides to centralization, and those downsides will always be there. Centralized places are a security risk because you can stack d
more like software IMO (Score:2)
More geographically concentrated. At least it has been my experience for the jobs I look for in software development about 80-90% of jobs are in major cities. You can find a job pretty much everywhere but the big companies hiring dozens of developers at a time overwhelm the one or two positions smaller companies in smaller communities are hiring. You switch jobs you either find another job in the big city you are in or you move 1hr + away (I'm from Canada: huge country, vastly distributed major cities). I t
End of line (Score:5, Interesting)
Got laid off yesterday from an IT job I'd had for almost 15 years. Small company so I did a lot of things, from hardware to software to physical security, to sweeping the floors to to taking boxes of mail to the post office at midnight. If it needed to be done, I was the guy to get,
So now this middle-aged man is suddenly out of work and looking at an IT field that is already vastly different than it was even five years ago much less fifteen. I don't have a clue what I am going to do. What I know how to do is of rapidly decreasing value and/or there are kids who will do it cheaper.
I have no idea what I am going to do. Savings and severance will carry for a while but I've got to make a pivot to do something entirely different which pays well. My job may be gone but naturally the bills aren't.
Re:End of line (Score:5, Informative)
Having been in the job market myself recently, here's a few pointers...
Skills are good, accomplishments are better. The skills are usually just there to get you past the filter - once your resume is being read (not skimmed) by a human, the accomplishments are what will matter.
In the current market, integration and automation are the kings. If you think it can be done in the cloud, then assume it is being done in the cloud - and forget doing that as a job. The very best case will be that you integrate with it.
If you work in Windows environments, you need to brush up on PowerShell. If you work in *NIX, then you'd think bash/python/perl should be your focus - but I'd suggest you get familiar with puppet/chef etc., because I didn't see a single job that required *NIX skills that didn't also require or express an interest in using a puppet-like system to automate configurations.
There are some migration jobs out there - migrating users to O365 etc. Those jobs will pay bills for the next couple of years, but will dry up for obvious reasons. Feel free to take one in the short term, but keep looking for something else in the background if you do.
Otherwise, throw your skills into some search engines and see what happens.
Oh, and good luck. I hope you find a decent job...
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Feel for you. If you were doing lots of office admin stuff anyway, have you considered if you could get into an office manager role? There is always demand for versatile people who can act as the glue to keep an office running, and if you can also bring IT skills that just makes you more employable. I think tech people can sometimes become so fixated on hard skill roles that they don't value the soft skills they might have developed along the way.
One thing I have learnt from all my BA friends who now work i
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Wish I had points to mod this up. I sincerely wish you the best. You might be able to bridge the gaps by finding a consulting gig.
This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I've been in IT for nearly 20 years now... when I started out in the late 90s, it actually felt possible to "know everything" and flying by the seat of your pants was just how things got done. I don't even think I'd heard the term "best practice" until 2002. If you were good at what you did, you could run on instinct. It was, I dare
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IT != SA (Score:3)
Information Technology covers an incredibly wide range of careers, only a small portion of which are system/network administration related. Yes, in some organizations, the "cloud" may reduce the need for traditional SAs, but it is simply the latest in a long-term trend of reduction in force for that sector.
Automation has already decimated the SA workforce. Long gone are the days when companies needed armies of SAs to maintain datacenters of servers. The datacenters are still there, but are being maintained by much smaller teams of SAs using automation rather than manpower. Many large corporations who haven't (and won't) embrace the cloud, have already gotten rid of their SA staff, relying instead on vendors like HP to provide both hardware and SA level support as a bundled package. There are still SAs, of course, but they increasingly work for one of the main vendors, rather than being distributed throughout many corporations.
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Yours is the best post in here.
I'm a SA, and I agree totally with your analysis.
IT careers will evolve, not die off completely. (Score:2)
Although lots of IT services lend themselves well to cloud solutions, not all do.
The job will evolve to take advantage of the new developments in tech, like it always has. Like how to this day, most companies that I worked for still have phone systems, because frankly it's cheaper than having a phone line for each and every employee.
Also going cloud still requires you to have a local LAN and somebody to manage it. And firewall. And ISP. This requirement is going nowhere anytime soon.
What will vanish is (and
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How am I wrong? You say it in your own words "At the mutlinational I work for, the local switch .....".
All I said is that infrastructure does not go away, I said nothing about it being managed in-house or outsourced. The point was that even in an all-cloud environment, you still need to keep a good chunk of infrastructure in place, and pay somebody to manage it.
In my experience, when the environment is small (50 computers and less), it is best to outsource as that kind of environment is nothing complicated
So who does it in the "cloud" (Score:3)
Someone has to assemble these computers and repair them, replace the hard drives etc.
With cloud you're paying overhead and profits on all of the things your IT guy has to do anyway. Your virtual host still needs hard drives and expansions and software updates. Swapping a hard drive once in a while is not a big deal.
Cloud is great if you only need very small quantities of something, perhaps for testing or a resource you only use once in a while. If your core business is dependent on it, unless you have a small company that can't afford a full time IT guy, you pretty much can host, colocate or rent your own stuff cheaper than an entire cloud stack.
Slogging Hardware is 10% (Score:2)
The rest of the time you are configuring applications, setting permissions and troubleshooting. Is your cloud provider going to be doing all this for you?
Timesharing (Score:2)
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Back in the day (60s,70s,80s) "The Cloud" was called "Timesharing" on Mainframes. "The cloud" does not eliminate infrastructure, it just moves it to another company that you pay fees to. There will always be IT pros "pulling all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems", but they will be working for the cloud hosting companies (and probably be offshore). Also, chances are that companies with stable infrastructure needs that don't expand and contract all that much (which is most companies) would of saved money overall if they owned their own equipment instead of renting capacity from a cloud company. After all, the cloud company has to pay for all the same things *and* make a profit (often a very substantial profit), which will be reflected in their fees.
Maybe one day the pendulum will swing back to hardware ownership but change is a slow rolling boulder. Cloud computing has been set in motion for some time now and I'm seeing more and more job descriptions that are asking for experience with Azure, AWS, and others. The IT pros pulling all nighters are now likely to work in a data center and there are going to be far fewer staffing needs.
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Cloud and Jobs (Score:2)
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BTW, most cloud providers do not actually manage the windows/linux/etc. server.
They just make sure the vm is running, their network is up, their internet is up and it ends there.
It's extra if you want them to manage servers, manage accounts etc.....
So server admins are not necessarily dying off.....They are being consolidated into the data centers in most cases (the ones who offer the service). Or the job is outsourced to India.
Most new software that is coming is adopting the SaaS model, so you do not need
Everything old is new again (Score:2)
The cloud as it is today is just a much more flexible version of colocation. The problems don't disappear, they're just moved around. Hardware management is just one piece of the puzzle -- the rest is getting the jumble of stuff working and keeping it running. The bigger challenges are getting the provider to care when something does go awry, and controlling costs which can balloon unexpectedly. Unfortunately, the MBAs are in control, and the cloud vendors are currently promising that all these problems dis
This thread is a feast for "cloud to butt" users! (Score:2)
As most of you are aware, there are important cloud based extensions in the popular web browsers. I'm speaking, of course, of the "Cloud To Butt" extensions, which replace all instances of the word "cloud" with the word "butt". This replacement is truly revolutionary, and it discriminates not- even the text "clout to butt" becomes "butt to butt"!
There is a version for Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]
And the functionality is also on Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
So here are some highlig
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Follow the herd. Store your data in somebody else's box. Trust encryption that you don't understand, and that is guaranteed to obsolete with the next big jump in computing technology.
What could possibly go wrong?
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I dont know about that, I worked at a cloud provider that was outsourcing there cloud to another cloud provider in India.
It looked good on paper which is all that the upper management cared about.
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Re:Disturbing (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that we are denying it. It's that we have seen it before.
Windows NT was going to eliminate the need for corporate IT. It is so simple that the secretary can manage the system. (Yes, Microsoft sales used that as a selling point)
Central server management was going to eliminate corporate IT. It would be so simple you just have to hire a person to push a button and the problem is fixed.
Self Healing systems are going to eliminate the need for Corporate IT. The systems will detect an issue and heal without the need for IT personnel.
Outsourcing to India will eliminate the need for Corporate IT. You outsource all your systems and management to a data center and share the cost of the infrastructure while getting the best of the best to work on it.
Now, Clouds are going to eliminate the need for Corporate IT.
History shows that each has been wrong. Dont misunderstand, each did some small part of what they claimed but over time it all becomes more expensive and less productive.
Clouds are no different!
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From a technical aspect, the cloud is simply incapable of delivering much of what traditional IT infrastructure delivers in house. [...] but people aren't presenting a cogent argument against it
You just did. And we keep pointing this out to non-IT folk, but they don't understand the cogent argument.
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so far their "broken" method is working and there's not much I can argue about that
It's only working in the same way that a cartoon bridge built out of haphazard boards and nails works. The rug may be halfway out from under my feet, but they've already walked off the cliff. They'll be fine until they look down and notice the bridge has collapsed.
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