

Ask HN: Automation in IT - jpd750

HN,
I&#x27;m a developer of some 8 years now.<p>I&#x27;m trying to think long term about a career 5, 10, 20 years+ from now.<p>I keep seeing endless articles about not just outsourcing, but moreso automation of IT jobs - everything from IT support to some development.<p>Any thoughts, comments, or experiences you can share are appreciated
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major_havoc
I'm an automation specialist, and have been trying to automate myself out of a
job for the last 10+ years now.

CAW is right - work has been shifting - geographically as well as
technologically. I have found that does not slow down my work at all.

Shifting globally will be replaced with a lot of automation. A lot of lower
tech jobs were temporarily shifted to countries with cheaper labor. I've got
news for you, if your job is simple enough to be performed by cheaper labor,
then it's simple enough for a shell script. After our company shifted 10k+ US
help desk jobs to India, a year later I created the automation that put the
15k Indians out of work (payback is a bi$%^).

Now, I work for a cloud based company. The technological shift now means that
automation I had to create from scratch to automate the build of a system has
become much more common place. AWS, for example, has API's to interact with
their services, build new servers, monitor, etc. There's Chef, Knife, Ansible
and a million other tools to perform tasks. You still need someone who
understands the underlying technology and principals, as there are gaps
between what the automation does, and what humans are capable of. There's also
gaps between pieces of automation.

There's talk of programmer jobs being automated. When I hear that, I think of
the contrast between developers that use WYSIWYG editors or IDE's, versus
developers that code from text editors or VIM.

Sure, in MS Visual Studio, you can drag and drop complex elements into a GUI
layout, and they'll work to a certain extent. The code underneath is
proprietary, fugly and filled with unnecessary bloat. They try to put
everything in, in case you need it later. And of course, as a developer, you
have to understand how to hook them all together and make it work. It's not
magic, and not even close to automation. At best, it's assembly line
production. There's less consideration over performance and efficiency of the
code - all they care about are the widgets.

A developer who uses text editors becomes much more proficient, writes leaner,
better code, and understands the processes behind the widget much better.

If you're a developer, you'll likely always be in demand. If you're worried
about automation taking your place, I'd advise becoming the automator. You
will never be short of work.

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Lorenz-Kraft
Hi,

there is a real chance that your job as a programmer will be "automated" in
the near future. This might happen because 1: due to globalization and
internet a 7 year old from wherever can do your job for like half the price OR
2: computer will become better in understanding problems.

I think the second option is around for about 20 or 30 years. It all starts
with AI (Artificial Intelligence). Actually, i don't see any major breaking
news in this sector despite its becoming "hip" again.

A real automation for our developer minds is probably out of near future (+50
years). Its a developers mind to get a problem from a customer, understand
what the customer wants, offer different solutions (future oriented, short
term, secure solutions etc.) and finally solve the problem.

Was my answer corresponding to your question or did you meant something else
with "automation of IT Jobs"?

Greets,

Chris

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jpd750
Great reply, thanks Chris

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caw
I've noticed in the IT industry is that while many things are being automated,
a lot of IT work is being shifted.

What do I mean by shifted? Besides the obvious "cloud" and on demand
resources, you also have the rise of "self service IT". This puts the burden
of providing IT support on the user. Amazon doesn't host your web servers,
they just let you push the button to make a server. Now the server is your
problem. With enterprise IT, they don't want to staff support so they make
FAQs and Knowledge Bases for people to search through. Nevermind that this
puts burden on the IT group to document all of this and keep it up to date.

So what I think is going to happen over the next 5-10 years is the continuing
growth of speciality providers for services, in an effort to shift from an
internal IT cost to an external IT cost. In some ways this will allow
technology to grow quickly, because these companies will be experts at their
problem domain and need innovative solutions for their problems.

Over the longer term (10+), you might see the pendulum swing the other way in
IT. Things will be brought in house again to maintain control and solve
business specific problems that the outside providers don't address because
they're generic providers.

Every year in IT, the IT people will be asked to do more with fewer resources.
So of course things are being automated and will need to be automated. If
you're in charge of creating this automation, make sure you don't have any
unnecessary human glue. I've seen "automated" processes that would absolutely
die without enough human input. These don't scale, as you have another 50%
more machines dumped on top of you without additional headcount.

At no point will the human element of automation go away -- you'll just need
the skills to maintain and improve the automation rather than the skills to do
what the automation is doing.

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porlw
This has been happening since the sixties.

As soon as you automate the current IT roles and responsibilities, a new layer
of possibilities, heretofore impractical, becomes available.

Like an onion, each successive layer covers a larger surface area of activity,
which actually INCREASES the amount of IT work available - plus there will
still be jobs maintaining the "automatic" systems in the layers down below.

My only fear is that maybe one day people will be satisfied with the systems
they have and declare "Enough!", halting any further enhancement.

Until that day the computer industry will continue to grow.

Fortunately human beings are rarely satisfied for long.

So maybe one day you won't be a programmer. You will be a technician who
spends their day translating user requirements into a language the the AI has
been trained to understand, dealing with ambiguities, resolving conflicting
requirements, indiciating what's important and what's incidental.

Which isn't really that different from what we do today.

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feralmoan
I think we'll see a lot more automation on the product development side before
it starts to cut into software jobs themselves. With so many automation
frameworks popping up and big movements towards open API's and IPaaS systems
which make a huge range of "cloud" components available out of the box,
attacking the taxonomies of product abstraction and sticking an AI layer ontop
of it seems fairly plausible if not natural. I'd love to see a time in the
industry where you just go 'hey computer build me an MVP which does X-Y-Z I
want to test some crazy market' or 'hey augment this existing product with
some new interaction' and then figure out if a product is worthy to live.
Until machines have real sophistication, we're going to need humans to keep
adding their creative 'secret sauce', anyhow, and software people to code
along the edges until whatever else can take over.

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ademsha
Automation is inevitable. We have now more tools that can automate different
(basic) IT tasks: App Deployment, Data migration between apps, Testing, etc. I
think next step is learning from data and doing more complex automations. This
would also allow systems to be more proactive in a way to recognize what is
important to users, discover a pattern and automate some kind of operation.
Considering that, I would recommend everyone, interested in this area, to
pursue data science path (data mining/machine learning). Today, seems
everybody is looking for that kind of workforce. I personally know companies
which listed ads for this position and haven't been filled since year ago.

