

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs - ajhai
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/the-future-of-it-will-be-reduced-to-three-kinds-of-jobs/8717

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zeteo
>Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically
reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk
entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the
network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center
altogether.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics begs to differ:

<http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos306.htm>

<http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos258.htm>

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kls
This is really a poorly written article, I try to not be negative about
articles but man this one misses a lot of key trends. I agree with the
summation of the article companies are divesting themselves of full-time
staffed IT personnel and that is not entirely a bad thing many of these people
end up becoming consultants and find that they can actually earn more and
control their destiny with finer detail. The article seems to wrap everything
but developers into consultants which is really not a correct representation.

It would better be reflected as 3rd party vendor provided services. Take for
example ops they are still needed they have just been shuffled around. Either
a company retains a company to do ops or they purchase a managed service that
virtualizes and supports everything on 3rd party systems.

The work still exists, it has not disappeared rather it has just been shuffled
around. One can make an argument about the efficiencies of markets and that a
company dedicated to server support can do it more efficiently and with higher
quality but the reality remains that that work exist and either through a
consultant or an employee it is going to get done. In the end there is still
ops work for a dedicated ops person.

My second gripe is wrapping project management up into a tech job at all. It
is an administrative job plain and simple, it would be nice if project
managers had some form of technical background but unfortunately the reality
is that most don't. Most that I have met are lost and lean on developers to
drag them through the process. To me it is a stretch to even call project
managment a technical job. Most technical people don't want the job and most
people that take it are not technical.

Finally, wrapping everything that gets built under developer is just as broad
as wrapping everything else under consultant. There are so many developers
with so many specialties and some of them are consultants as well. That the
category is almost meaningless, just go ahead and throw developer up under
consultant and call it a day. There is really no need for a distinction with
both categories being so broad.

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WestCoastJustin
It is VERY hard to believe that you are going to leave systems admin,
security, performance tuning, on-call, etc to either consultants or
developers. There will be a role for high level ops people in the future -- I
hope ;) Many aspects of IT will become redundant but someone still needs to
wrangle these VMs, manage the overall security picture, and fight fires.

