Not Just 'The Death of IT'. Cringely Also Predicts Layoffs For Many IT Contractors (cringely.com) 78
Last week long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely predicted "the death of IT" in 2020 due to the widespread adoption of SD-WAN and SASE.
Now he's predicting "an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever," including IT consultants and contractors. My IT labor death scenario now extends to process experts (generally consultants) being replaced with automation. In a software-defined network, whether that's SD-WAN or SASE, so much of what used to be getting discreet boxes to talk with one another over the network becomes a simple database adjustment. The objective, in case anyone forgets (as IT, itself, often does) is the improvement of the end-user experience, in this case through an automated process. With SD-WAN, for example, there are over 3,000 available Quality of Service metrics. You can say that Office 365 is a critical metric as just one example. Write a script to that effect into the SD-WAN database, deploy it globally with a keyclick and you are done...
It's slowly dawning on IBM [and its competitors] that they have to get rid of all those process experts and replace them with a few subject matter experts. Here's the big lesson: with SD-WAN and SASE the process no longer matters, so knowing the process (beyond a few silverbacks kept on just in case the world really does end) isn't good for business.
Cringely predicts the downgrading of corporate bonds will also put pressure on IBM and its competitors, perhaps ultimately leading to a sale or spin-off at IBM. "Either they sell the parts that don't make money, which is to say everything except Red Hat and mainframes, or they sell the whole darned thing, which is what I expect to happen."
With that he predicts thousands of layoffs or furloughs — and while the bond market puts IBM in a bigger bind, "this could apply in varying degrees to any IBM competitors."
Now he's predicting "an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever," including IT consultants and contractors. My IT labor death scenario now extends to process experts (generally consultants) being replaced with automation. In a software-defined network, whether that's SD-WAN or SASE, so much of what used to be getting discreet boxes to talk with one another over the network becomes a simple database adjustment. The objective, in case anyone forgets (as IT, itself, often does) is the improvement of the end-user experience, in this case through an automated process. With SD-WAN, for example, there are over 3,000 available Quality of Service metrics. You can say that Office 365 is a critical metric as just one example. Write a script to that effect into the SD-WAN database, deploy it globally with a keyclick and you are done...
It's slowly dawning on IBM [and its competitors] that they have to get rid of all those process experts and replace them with a few subject matter experts. Here's the big lesson: with SD-WAN and SASE the process no longer matters, so knowing the process (beyond a few silverbacks kept on just in case the world really does end) isn't good for business.
Cringely predicts the downgrading of corporate bonds will also put pressure on IBM and its competitors, perhaps ultimately leading to a sale or spin-off at IBM. "Either they sell the parts that don't make money, which is to say everything except Red Hat and mainframes, or they sell the whole darned thing, which is what I expect to happen."
With that he predicts thousands of layoffs or furloughs — and while the bond market puts IBM in a bigger bind, "this could apply in varying degrees to any IBM competitors."
COUGH * BULLSHIT * COUGH (Score:3)
I should probably look into that cough, but really, we keep hearing this, and it's nonsense. Until something transformative happens in IT, the workers jobs aren't going away. If anything, all of this WFH stuff has reinforced the importance of maintaining a healthy IT department.
I remember this sort of talk 25 years ago.
I guess some people just start stabbing buttons when they want attention in the midst of a huge event like this pandemic. It's rather sad.
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This guy hasn't been in IT for decades, let along in front-line IT. The pundit factor, meaning someone trying to increase their hit count, is to blather such idiocy, then get lots of reactions. Don't get sucked in.
Nothing to see here, move along.
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They hate us but they need us.
Right there. Why do they hate us? Yeah, if you're some pompus jackass know-it-all that isn't a pleasure to work with... maybe you stand a chance to lose your job soon, dunno. But if you're helpful to your coworkers and help them understand IT in a way that's familiar to them, then your job is always going to exist. Today's IT
requires quick and experienced critical thinking, and not many people are willing to re-learn everything every few months.
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Everytime I hear someone say this they are gone within 1 to 6 months. You know what? The company still survives fine without them.
IT is an expense, not an asset.
Re:COUGH * BULLSHIT * COUGH (Score:5, Funny)
There is a very simple and easy solution. Just give everyone admin rights on their machines.
Problem solved, once and for all.
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Linux. On desktops.
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A) Your lack of sarcasm detection is disturbing.
B) We make people who ask for admin rights to sign a form which outlines their responsibilities. Further, the email I send out confirming they have admin rights states they are not to install any software or make any changes without IT approval. Doing so may revoke those rights.
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Back a few decades they used to say:
"The only thing more dangerous than a programmer with a screwdriver is a hardware engineer with the root password."
As both, I used to shake my head at both the speakers' lack of trust in their people and the occasional irresponsible types who were the bad examples responsible for these stereotypes and the concerns of others.
Unfortunately, the PHBs took the stereotypes to heart. Especially the ones hired to herd the cats, who used it as an excuse to enforce their own powe
Re:COUGH * BULLSHIT * COUGH (Score:4, Interesting)
With an SD-WAN or SASE, your carefully designed network layouts, your finely tuned configurations and your intricate knowledge of spanning tree protocols becomes obsolete. All you need now is some people with the ability to screw in 19" boxes and a single person to administer the SD-WAN from some remote point. Your network is physically fully meshed anyway. A box that breaks down will be replaced by an identical box from the shelf, boots up and autoconfigures with whatever is the current SD-WAN configuration pushed onto all boxes that enter the network.
Network connectivity becomes a commodity, where you just plug in the next box, if you run out of available space, the same as if you just plug in a distributor bank if you run out of power outlets. And network architects are obsolete because there is only one network layout left.
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This is what sales engineers actually believe about SD-WAN deployments.
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which won't stop this.
back when we moved from expensive minis and terminals to cs, salesmen sold a wonder world of decentralized networks made from commodity components with immense savings and freedom from the outrageously costly maintenance slavery. actually, the costs skyrocketed as did the number of problems and the need for staff, responsibility for failure almost completely diluted into a myriad of small providers who could very conveniently blame each other, and meanwhile basic stuff like even basic
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With an SD-WAN or SASE, your carefully designed network layouts, your finely tuned configurations and your intricate knowledge of spanning tree protocols becomes obsolete. All you need now is some people with the ability to screw in 19" boxes and a single person to administer the SD-WAN from some remote point. Your network is physically fully meshed anyway.
I feel like you're going to have more difficulty with this approach than with a more traditional approach.
Specifically, it seems like you're going to have weird problems that no one knows how to debug. Also, mesh networking is just as complicated as regular networking, you still have bottlenecks and have to think about network topology.
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Actually, you also need some people with far more insight and experience as well, because if something does not work with SD-WAN/SD-LAN, issue diagnosis becomes orders of magnitude more difficult and critical. It would be utterly naive to think these systems are robust at this time and free from errors.
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Please be careful: Just because the very existance of one single highly qualified network engineer will not go away, you won't hundreds of them. 25 years ago, you neede
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I never said you need a lot of people. You need a few, highly qualified ones, but a lot of jobs below that _will_ go away, no argument about that.
While that is hard on anybody hit, I do not see it as a bad thing longer-term. IT in all its aspects is engineering. Not having engineers doing it is costing a _lot_ of money. Sure, you do not need a lot of engineers, but there are also not a lot available, so that works out nicely.
Re:COUGH * BULLSHIT * COUGH (Score:5, Interesting)
network architects are obsolete
Until you have a power outage and one of the boxes doesn't come back up. Or until you have a fiber cut and need to provision alternate links. Or until you get a minute amount of packet loss on a 4 layer 32-way ECMP network.
Nope. Ain't happening. It's the same thing as saying that doctors will soon be out of work because Google has this cool chatbot that will diagnose your illness.
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But no, it doesn't have to have the same qualifications you needed 25 years ago.
I'd imagine very few tech positions have the same qualifications as 25 years ago. And I don't think anyone should be called a soothsayer for predicting a bunch of layoffs in 2020, with entire work forces being disrupted by world-impacting external events.
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Sadly with quarterly layoffs over the past 3 years, regardless of the environment, we just had about 60 people laid off.
[John]
Re:COUGH * BULLSHIT * COUGH (Score:5, Interesting)
Specialists are needed, preferably GOOD specialists. And if you have multiple database servers that are remotely mission critical, you either need a good in-house DBA or need a good one contracted to monitor them. Or you need to not mind occasional irrecoverable data loss.
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A box that breaks down will be replaced by an identical box from the shelf, boots up and autoconfigures with whatever is the current SD-WAN configuration pushed onto all boxes that enter the network.
And here we have the first obvious glaring problem, tech evolves, sales goals need to be met, vendors need to have a unique selling point for why theirs is better.
One box will not be available forever and as soon as you have two versions of something shit starts breaking down and new specialists need to be hired, solve one problem creates another.
And network architects are obsolete because there is only one network layout left.
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
Good Job Cueball
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But no, it doesn't have to have the same qualifications you needed 25 years ago.
When has this ever not been true? Literally never, not one day in the history of IT has that day required the same qualifications as 25 years ago.
With an SD-WAN or SASE, your carefully designed network layouts, your finely tuned configurations and your intricate knowledge of spanning tree protocols becomes obsolete. All you need now is some people with the ability to screw in 19" boxes and a single person to administer the SD-WAN from some remote point. Your network is physically fully meshed anyway. A box that breaks down will be replaced by an identical box from the shelf, boots up and autoconfigures with whatever is the current SD-WAN configuration pushed onto all boxes that enter the network.
Lots of companies have been doing this for years (eg Meraki). The box is preconfigured before shipping and it's just plugged in at the remote site all managed via a cloud-based web console "single pane of glass." But even beyond this, "Managed WAN" (read: the carrier monitors your circuits and works outages) has been around forever, too, and yet the IT departme
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Sounds cute and catchy.
Until your users start complaining that tech support can't remote in 3 sites, random shared drives won't map at 1 location with Windows 10, Skye calls get dropped 1/4th of the time etc.
That is where you need a real network engineer and not some click menu button on a cloud based website to deploy a vlan change.
Re: COUGH * BULLSHIT * COUGH (Score:1)
Re:COUGH * BULLSHIT * COUGH (Score:5, Insightful)
And Computers will eliminate all paper...
And "Journalists will write headlines that provoke outrage / get attention"
When's the last time Cringly worked in IT... Oh wait he's a self declared journalist.
I call bullshit. Half of our helpdesk calls are about password resets (and yes we have a very easy to use simple reset site).
We tried pushing the reset site, as per management...
People want help, and when you don't help them the way they want they get pissed.
The backlash almost cost the CIO his job...
Basically when people get frustrated with their computer, at least half of what the IT support does is reassure, empathize and educate, and people will pay for that.
As long as that's the case IT help desk will continue to exist.
And as long as people respond to bullshit headlines and give them clicks Journallists like Cringly will write click bait.
This is not news and shouldn't be on Slashdot...
Was he ever knowledgeable? (Score:2)
We've moved many of our system to the cloud. Administration didn't go away it just moved to a web panel. Integrations are way up. Headcount is unaffected.
If you're a rack and stack guy, you're screwed, but that's not new.
Re: Was he ever knowledgeable? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Was he ever knowledgeable? (Score:4)
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Re: Was he ever knowledgeable? (Score:2)
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Whats great is when you have a internet outage and they ask why they can't still access their applications. That look of awful realization never gets old.
Is it still 2010 where you work?
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The last Internet outage that I remember was about six years ago when some fool misconfigured an internal router and caused a routing loop. You couldn't get at internal data either.
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The last Internet outage I remember was on Friday, when Sky suffered a failure to provide service for 20-30 of our home users.
The last Internet outage I remember before that was Tuesday, when BT had a regional failure that affected a few remote workers.
The last Internet outage I remember before that was last Thursday, when BT had a Fiber Cut that impacted service for many core cloud services around the country.
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'it's just a buzzword for "somebody else's datacenter."'
No, the "the cloud" is a buzzword for a datacenter, regardless of who owns it. For example, AWS is not magically different when Amazon itself is using it.
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You probably owe it to your career to actually investigate modern cloud computing. It's a lot more than just big piles of VMs hosted in "someone else's datacenter" now. It sounds like you've been deliberately ignoring the industry, the changes might surprise you.
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I'm so old... (Score:4, Funny)
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No surprise, but that's the last time Cringely was relevant, too.
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That along with KVM and DRM. Why does the kernel care about my keyboard and mouse switch? Oh its for virtualization now. Guess the new group of coders forgot about those devices.
Well, IBM (Score:4, Insightful)
Focusing on IBM hardly seems indicative. IBM is now a lot of managerial overhead, and Watson and other so-called "AI" glue-ons of whatever vaguely related technology they have lying around.
Broadly speaking, coronavirus has made most of the entire economy a virtual economy, and that will only shift back to a limited degree after the pandemic is over.
And the virtual economy is what IT is.
Worry about the brick-and-mortar companies and their employees, not the Internet-based ones.
Re:Well, IBM (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM is now a lot of managerial overhead...
Seems like they've always had too much managerial overhead.
Two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, I hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"
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IBM still sells a lot of mainframe and iSeries (AS/400) hardware.
Seems off (Score:1)
I predict The Death of Cringely. (Score:2)
If the morons behind this troll name keep annoying people because they are too cowardly to put their name under their dumbest clickbaity ideas.
Hey, I have an idea: Let's *all* publish under this pseudonym. So much and so dimb while still believably being "him", that the name will be forever poisoned and cannot be used anymore.
-- Sir Robert Cringely (MS.) [youtu.be]
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Whatever happened to that John Katz guy whose stuff was always posted here?
Nice to know (Score:2)
IBM? (Score:2)
There is no long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely (Score:5, Funny)
There is no "long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely". There wasn't one a week ago and there isn't one now.
I think he's right (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been in IT/systems engineering for over 20 years. There are three tiers of IT contractors I've been exposed to:
- The management consulting firms that bring in "visionary thinkfluencers" as a part of their digital transformation kit they sell big companies -- their job is to sell the dream of agile DevOps clouds everywhere to management. Gartner magic quadrants figure prominently in their discussions.
- A smaller number of parachuted-in experts who bill exorbitant rates and are brought in to implement what the thinkfluencers sold the board. These are the folks who speak at every conference, travel 50 weeks out of the year and live in hotels. Their orbit also includes a bunch of highly-skilled help that parachutes in with them.
- A vast army of needfol-doers, hardware-swappers, developers, DBAs and sysadmins that are sent in when a company signs an offshoring/outsourcing deal for IT. These make up the low-paid, second-class workforce of most large company IT departments. The thinkfluencers sold the dream of getting rid of expensive FTEs and "letting the experts handle IT." Resonates great with the MBA crowd, results may vary.
Tier 1 will never go away...McKinsey is where half the Ivy League goes after graduating. Tier 2 still has some life left in it because most organizationa aren't totally in the cloud and don't have 100% off the shelf requirements. Tier 3....Cringely's right, they're in trouble as is any company whose business model is to provide cheap IT bodies.
Commodity-everything and SaaS are definitely having an impact on what companies need IT-wise, and forcing everyone to work at home over a web browser isn't decelerating that trend. On-site IT is going to be reduced to portal-drivers, script-runners and maybe a few people kept on because they actually have internal knowledge that the cloud providers can't cover in a standard offering. The way to do well in IT in the future is to be a good integration person, know how everything fits together, and being able to glue 10,000 "services" into something that works. Organizations are going to be complex, but we're already seeing small businesses just buying M365 because all they do is file-print-Office and they don't have a need for IT. Should be a very interesting next few years.
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I work for an MSP. We have outsourced some work to India. They do busy work and after-hours stuff. You know, the easy stuff that requires no interaction with the clients. Windows Updates troubleshooting, software patch installs, backup troubleshooting. The stuff 'real' techs are wasted on but can't be automated for one reason or another. We've been through several outsourcing agencies and none of them have what we would call 'skilled' staff available. Finally, we found an agency that assigned their tec
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The MBA types are the ones who tend to stick around. Businesses don't care about iT and they don't care who does it as long as they don't have to care about it. MBAs resonate more with this view of the world in the execs' mind. This is why you have companies handing he keys of the IT department to a rotating trainee staff halfway around the world...not because they're getting better service.
I wish the competent people would get rewarded...not seeing that happen anytime soon. :-(
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That would be unbelievably excellent. Retain all that actually have a clue, and get some more, because SD-anything will not be robust and really reliable for a long time yet. Sure, when it woks it makes things much easier, but if it breaks, issue diagnosis suddenly is orders of magnitude more complex. The whole thing is a gigantic KISS violation, after all. That said, a small, kick-ass team is all you need for that and well worth the money.
Stop (Score:2)
He's wrong. Won't happen. (Score:3)
The need for me to code is dimishing, that is true. Ever growing is the need for me to explain basic simplicities to my customers who expect me to read their minds and code them happy with a few weeks and couldn't plan an application beyond a simple formview.
Developing applications always was 80% planning - that doesn't change. What has come to life are preconfectioned systems that enable me to click my fundamental objects together which moves an application quickly into the test & redo cycle. Faster than it used to be. Other than that, my job is just as important than ever.
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Developing applications always was 80% planning - that doesn't change. What has come to life are preconfectioned systems that enable me to click my fundamental objects together which moves an application quickly into the test & redo cycle.
This is exactly the way things are.
I had a guy custom develop an application for me. It's a really simple one - make a form to get some relevant information, then use it to generate the relevant keys and use it to configure a Ubiquiti Edgemax router. It's just a 'let the user define variables and put them into the right places to execute some CLI commands, right?' Well, that's what I thought. Getting the exact behavior of defaults, order of things as they appear on the form, actively working to avoid 'scope
We've got the milk, now let's eat steak! (Score:1)
Sure, sure, sure. All this sort of thinking works so long as nothing breaks anywhere in the world-wide network. Then, *shocker*, you need people who actually know what the hell they're doing, people with *shocker* experience and knowledge, not just some paper-pusher in a suit with a manual in his hand, trying to figure it all out.
Of course this is why I got away from any sort of IT work myself: you're expendable. There's little permanence unless you're closer to the top of the
Not this shit again (Score:2)
Every year or so we hear that "IT is dead" or some such bullshit. Or that "Anyone will be able to write the programs they need!"
It never turns out to be true and IMHO, it never will. The fact is you need people to do stuff- figure things out, troubleshoot, reconfigure, etc etc etc.
Until we have a fully-trained AI system that has the smarts to do all of that AND handle the weird, unexpected shit that pops up out of nowhere, it's not going to happen.
"You can say that Office 365 is a critical metric as just on
Even simple things need professionals (Score:3)
No matter how easy these products are to procure and configure, there will always be non-savvy people who need someone knowledgeable to help them.
While it's a somewhat different product, WordPress promised DIY website management, yet a significant portion of my job is to log into people's websites and update content for them, or press the button to "install updates".
IT roles may evolve, and perhaps even be reduced, but I don't believe they will go away completely any time soon.
My clients would say "what is SD-WAN and SASE" (Score:1)
Never gonna happen (Score:2)
I have worked with high-end Cisco gear before and there will always be times when the only solution is a guy plugged into a bit of kit via a console cable.
Everybody is missing the point (Score:2)
Software and Infrastructure as a service isn't going to wipe out IT departments, but they will go into a long demoralizing decline.
It's time to embrace the growth part of the industry or be cast into the heap of obsolete misfit toys.
He's not entirely wrong... (Score:1)
As an automation engineer, it is my job to do, essentially, what Cringley is stating. We are trying to reduce staffing due to overlap of duties and automation of mundane and tedious processes. There are, however, a few roadblocks with even this small goal:
1. Management has no clue what they are actually asking for with automation
2. There exists no solid definition of what those processes entail that require automation
The first point is addressable but not without a great deal of politics and empathy where m