
Ask HN: Is cloud computing decimating platform/infrastructure engineering jobs? - curiousgeek
Cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are providing more and more tools that allow companies to build applications with far fewer engineers to handle the backend.<p>Does this imply a gloomy long term outlook for engineers in other companies who do platform and infrastructure development? Are there any leading indicators of this trend?
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NetStrikeForce
I believe it's empowering more people to build applications without in-house
infrastructure support.

Once the applications grow big, the need for infrastructure people comes back.
The difference is now these people are not touching hardware but software.

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curiousgeek
The cloud providers are providing a lot of software as well: relational
databases, other kinds of data stores, load balancers and so on. They also
provide you an integrated ecosystem where these things work well together.

Correspondingly, you need far fewer engineers in your company to build and
maintain custom software for such things. I am wondering whether in medium
term - say the next 4 to 5 years - we are going to see an order of magnitude
decrease in the number of jobs in this sector.

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NetStrikeForce
Most of those pieces of software can be configured as well (load balancing
methods, DB parameters, etc).

I don't think we need less people, I think we need people to work differently.
Also, an application needing of X amount of infrastructure persons will now
need less than that, which frees resources to deploy more applications.

In a nutshell, I don't think we're going to lose jobs at all. I think the
cloud is a fundamental pillar of the startup system, which is creating so many
jobs that didn't exist before. Efficiency doesn't drive us to less jobs - it
drives us to more jobs.

