<story><title>The creeping IT apocalypse</title><url>https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/01/16/cloud-irregular-the-creeping-it-apocalypse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klodolph</author><text>This has been happening since the 1970s. Or earlier. I don’t really think of it as an apocalypse. IT skills have never had a long shelf life. Any time you are a technology expert at your company, in IT, the technology landscape will shift under you. This is the Red Queen Hypothesis in action. People who ran mainframes in the 1980s became trusted experts and then most of the jobs evaporated. Same thing happened to people running critical VAX or Unix systems. Your skills are only valuable as long as the related technology is.&lt;p&gt;The same thing happens to programming positions.&lt;p&gt;But I think the good news is missing from this article—IT jobs are, overall, sticking around or increasing in number. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs are growing “faster than average for all occupations”). You do have to keep updating your skill set, but it’s not like manufacturing, where efficiencies eliminate jobs altogether or move them to completely different sectors. And there is that ageism to worry about, and uncertainty.&lt;p&gt;I’m personally more worried about some of the other remaining white-collar office jobs, like the accountants, paralegals, HR, various banking positions, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Rooster61</author><text>&amp;gt; The same thing happens to programming positions.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t stress how important this is. Folks going to things like boot camps or other educational outlets that focus on one language will utterly kill their career if they aren&amp;#x27;t aware of how fast things move. If you don&amp;#x27;t learn the underlying abstractions and paradigms that take various forms in different languages, you will get left in the dust in a matter of a few years.&lt;p&gt;The best programmers I&amp;#x27;ve ever worked with got excited about programming patterns and paradigms, not frameworks and syntactic sugar. Those are also the ones I paid the most attention to.&lt;p&gt;Bottom line for both software and IT engineers: you learn to learn, not just to do.</text></comment>
<story><title>The creeping IT apocalypse</title><url>https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/01/16/cloud-irregular-the-creeping-it-apocalypse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klodolph</author><text>This has been happening since the 1970s. Or earlier. I don’t really think of it as an apocalypse. IT skills have never had a long shelf life. Any time you are a technology expert at your company, in IT, the technology landscape will shift under you. This is the Red Queen Hypothesis in action. People who ran mainframes in the 1980s became trusted experts and then most of the jobs evaporated. Same thing happened to people running critical VAX or Unix systems. Your skills are only valuable as long as the related technology is.&lt;p&gt;The same thing happens to programming positions.&lt;p&gt;But I think the good news is missing from this article—IT jobs are, overall, sticking around or increasing in number. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs are growing “faster than average for all occupations”). You do have to keep updating your skill set, but it’s not like manufacturing, where efficiencies eliminate jobs altogether or move them to completely different sectors. And there is that ageism to worry about, and uncertainty.&lt;p&gt;I’m personally more worried about some of the other remaining white-collar office jobs, like the accountants, paralegals, HR, various banking positions, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ruxbin1986</author><text>There are hundreds of thousands of people or System Administrators that have made life long careers out of managing networks, server farms, windows and linux systems since the early 90s. It&amp;#x27;s not fancy as software development or drives business value but work that needs to be done.&lt;p&gt;The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work. The only thing left is actual software development.</text></comment>