Discussion on:

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

Jason,

While I see your point I think you may be casting to narrow a net. I am sure we are going to see reduced headcount in some sectors but there will be modest growth in others. For instance I think desk and sever side support requirements are going to continue to diminish over this next decade. They won't completely evaporate but they will change. I think you see these positions going to contract or consultant roles and are calling that our. I have seen a lot of this kind of activitiy over my career. I have to agree you it will happen.

Another thing I am noticing is the biforcation of corporate IT. It seems like many organizations are ready to outsource and cloud source thier middle tier systems but they don't have answers for first level support and for strategic design.

I hope a few folks see your article for what it is. A wake up call. We as professionals can't stick our heads in the sand and ignore the fact that our career landscape is changing. We need to embrace it and train ourselves for those next opportunities.

I look forward to your next article.

I disagree Jason. Security is not a one time exercise, but requires feet(brains) on the ground forever testing defenses, upgrading systems, and training personnel in personal risk management. The environment is changing rapidly, and needs people on-site to keep the business secure.

Outsourcing/contracting can do this, but in-house is better because you can keep IT people trained, whereas you do not know that your contractors are keeping up-to-date.

I totally agree about Security. I'm sick of trying to explain the dangers of the cloud to my larger size clients. But as a Security professional I guess the cloud is a godsend.

Only until the day before somebody in India or China penetrates your client's "cloud" environment, steals data and somebody finds out about it. And if it is critical or sensitive data, then you had better keep your Lawyer's business card in your wallet. You will be SUED. And rightfully so. I keep NONE of my client's data in the cloud, ZERO and manage all of their offsite data myself in my office on my computers that, for this purpose, are kept turned OFF 23 hours a day. Or longer. I keep a transitory hard drive with me in my bag. Hackers - try to hack this drive IN THE CLOUD when it is locked up and on a shelf.

This is exactly the way all private data should be handled.

Too bad it can't be -- at least for the most part.

Go and sit in a help desk sometime, the 'newer' generations such as the millenials need more support than their older colleagues. Why? Because knowing how to do a Facebook post or put an mp3 on an iPod doesn't make you tech savvy, but you've been told you're tech savvy most of your life. The result? More users who think they're a genius who meddle and wreak havoc, and don't know when to ask for help.

As for user choice of device, seriously. That just creates more IT work, not less.

supporting lecturers who are allegedly teaching IT courses (amongst others) and they still do all the daft things that users do. As for our students, well lets just say that I have seen final year IT students who do not know what a driver is!

The tech literate students of today often have no idea how anything works under the bonnet!

I've seen this on numerous occasions in the past too, n.gurr@. I had a series of interviews to do for a junior tech' role last year. To try and separate the wheat from the chaff I created a little test sheet (multiple choice; I didn't want to get too mad about it) with problems ranging from basic Windows O/S config changes, simple IP network questions, and a basic database problem concerning joins. I had one guy come in who professed to have an IT Degree, but lord knows how he spent his three years at university. He got one of the lowest scores out of all the candidates. In general the scores were very poor indeed. The best of them was the youngest applicant I interviewed, with two years of experience helping out at a firm where the boss, who had a PC at home; his only qualification, was the erstwhile PC fixer upper. In effect then he had no professional IT training of any sort, but his hands-on experience, and obvious enthusiasm for the role beat the other supposedly qualified candidates hands down.

I'm afraid I have to agree with some of Jason's thoughts. Most of the companies I have worked for the past are SME's with very small IT departments, and aside from the purely tech' roles - PC/Printer/Network fixers - the more senior roles have become far more project oriented as my career has progressed. Where I have worked for firms of similar sizes, my current rol is more about liaison with numerous contractors, evolving IT strategies, and general security maintenance then it is about doing any grunt coding work myself any more. In effect, the development side of our IT Department is largely outsourced to specialist companies who do the same thing for us, and dozens of other companies too.

at some of my interviews. At my last contract I mostly worked on projects outsourcing work to other contractors. The only work I did myself was building IDFs and MDFs. I could see very quicly that I needed to be canned, because I could also see that contractors were a more effecient way of doing IT business. When you work for a non-profit this reality can become obvious even more quickly. Not surprisingly I was laid off, never to work under contract again; but then I like independent work even more. I will take consulting to that world any day.

Is one thing that we are telling our students to get. Placement years and internship are the only real way to get a job straight from Uni in this market it seems. There are many fewer graduate jobs now....

We had a contractor to full time opening come up where I work about a month ago. We got down to 4 people out of the hundred or so resumes we received. Out of the 4 people, one made it and he was the best of the bunch. He came in with 10 years experience and from a large, high paced, work environment.

The three other candidates honestly had no clue. One guy just did rollouts and nothing else. He never did any troubleshooting and knew nothing about support. The other two were 100% clueless, and I mean clueless. The first of these last two guys never, ever did this before. He had the enthusiasm and was going to school for the work. Fine I said, bring him in and we'll show him around.

I brought this kid upstairs to the sea of cubes. This sea extends over 5 floors where we support close to 700 employees, not counting the 100 or so that just moved next door. There are multiple projects going on in addition to the desktop support, and there are queues of tickets that need to be closed for each user.

The timing couldn't have been better when the interviewee came in. He saw the pages of ticket open on my monitor and my lunch sitting there getting cold. (I didn't tell him that I was interrupted by his visit). I then got six telephone calls in the middle of the interview, and let him listen in on two of them. As he sat there, his eyes got bigger than flying saucers! He didn't say too much and I then passed him on to my manager who went through the same process.

Last guy that came in had very little experience. Oh he built PCs for his dad's company, but never worked in a large organization before. He to was a bit overwhelmed by the workload, and didn't even pass the easy tech test we gave these guys. The questions were really, really, basic and he didn't know where to begin. He too left dazed.

The guy with the tech experienced that passed, ask me when he could start. He was not only used to supporting a lot of people, but had the skills as well. He didn't have just book knowledge, like these other kids had, he also had the critical thinking and troubleshooting skills to go a long with it.

In my opinion, I'd take anyone that not only has the working knowledge and the experience any day over someone fresh out of tech school.

Even being a tier up from the help desk I can verify that the "Millenials" are no more "tech savvy" than previous generations. And any company that allows an employee to supply their own device is taking on more than just support headaches. Employees using their own devices also bring legal and security issues. When company data is on an employee device who owns it, who controls it and how is it protected. When it is on a company device the answer to those questions is simple, on a personal device it becomes problematic.

If company data is on a personal device then the device becomes discoverable. Ask your employee if they are willing to give up their personal device for an unlimited amount of time due to a court proceeding and see if they are still willing to bring it in.

Bill

When company data is on an employee device without authorization, it is "stolen" data. I've worked places where connecting an employee-owned device to a corporate device, including networking equipment and USB ports, caused transfer of ownership of that device to the company, and everyone working there signed off agreeing to that. In order to bring in a laptop that had WiFi, you had to **demonstrate** to the security officer that you can and had turned off the wireless radio via the BIOS, not a switch on the case. Turning it back on was an intentional act they would discover during their random sweeps. They had very few issues with data ownership (and a higher class of employee, too).

How many times do professional system administators in charge of servers call "the help desk" for support? Not everything in IT is a nice little IPad or touch something. Even Apple's massive ICloud facility is stacked with a few hundred servers manufactured by ...not Apple, but HP! True.

Where I work even us tech support guys have to call the helpless desk which is located "overseas". This makes getting a lot of things done very difficult because we have to go through the slow process and queue for everything. To make matter worse, we'll get the calls back from the helpdesk at 3:00 am, stating that because no one responded to their messages (What messages!), that they're closing the ticket due to no response! Then we start the process all over. I'm lucky that my manager is the head of software support and has connections with the other group. He's made a few phone calls to get this issue resolved, but that doesn's seem to last and they're back to their old tricks again.

All users too are required to call or submit a ticket online before *ANY* support is provided. This has caused quite a bit of grumpling and grumping by the user community, but that's the way it is where I work.

Yeah I was recently amazed at stories of millenials working on a helpdesk downloading movies and unauthorised peer to peer file sharing software on to the network - both got fired. Its insane - these people worked in IT and yet still had no idea how it worked and what they were doing would get them sacked. Just because they grew up with technology doesn't mean they understand it. Does someone who grew up with the automobiles know about the thermodynamic cycle in an engine or how lubricants work at a micro level to prevent engine wear ? NO !!!

I was going to post pretty much this exact statement.

Your comment is both hilariously astute, with a taste of bitter. I agree-- daft adults have been showering millenials with meaningful praise that is overall hollow in the real world. Great job, little Timmy, you can set up an email account. ANY ONE can set up an email account.

By marking this as SPAM.

I'm betting that they are one of the New Breed of Self Stated technology Brilliants who know nothing.

Col

Consultants (I am one) - Project Managers and Developers. I would argue too that consultants are very often Project Managers and a few can be developers, but mastery of all three is a brain killer. As it is, I also believe that outsourcing destroyed many American information tech positions and a general desire to enter the field. Why get a degree when, in a few years, management will call you an overpaid American worker, have you fired or at worse train your Indian replacement. (See IBM for example). Outsourcing has proven to be hell! Those invisible expenses are murderous, but management sees ONLY salary and benefits. Which is precisely the benefit of Consultants, whether on retainer or on-call hourly rate. WE have become the defacto replacement for many corporate IT departments and the curious thing is that by doing so we also master a great many more technologies than we EVER would have been exposed to in corp. Disclosure - I spent 7 years at Aon Group before outsourced out in 2005. Aon is a Notes shop, always was, always will be so I never would have had a crack at an Exchange Server! And also a wide variety of software packages used by my current clients as well.

As for India ... my goodness, I forgot to ask for an email survey.

since the abacus has resulted in a further proliferartion of specialities, and a broadening for those of us who sell our selves based on generalisation.
Your entire argument falls flat on it's arse, because you forgot a key factor in IT's environment, commerce...

Yes, specialization will only accelerate, but the specialists will be individual consultants, work for big consultants, or work for big enterprises. That way their time can be fully used to the best advantage. The best specialists and the ones in the most lucrative specialties (security, ERP) will see see their value and compensation increase. The mediocre ones won't be able to hide in bureaucratic company IT departments any more.

Business will work on not having to employ these expensive people. Someone will come out with a product on the lines of "Do ERP without knowing anything about it", it will take off, several more will join in, MS will build it into Windows 10.

SSDD..

Mediocre people will always find a place to hide, as consultants or as staffers, plenty of room nehind the non-technical types who command commerce.

I didn't vote you down by the way, must have been a couple of insecure types.

Ho hum...

Oddly enough I agree with both of you on certain points. Where their is a personal conflict with my opinion like this, I never vote on either side.

So many Specialists who deeply understood their small Section of the system and constantly applied Improvements to those Sections resulted in the destruction of the system because

No One understood any more how the base system worked.

They where only ever concerned with their own little area where one improvement broke 20 other base functions and all subsequent Improvements with out the understanding of what it was that they where doing.

OH I'm sure that is how business will want to go a few specialists and no generalists till they starting having so much Down Time that they only have a working system 20% of the time they will start asking just how this happened and want to return to the older ways.

Of course as by then there will be so few generalists there will be no one capable for fixing the mess that has been made by the Multitude of Specialists.

Just because Business wants something by no means, means that they even begin to understand exactly what it is that they have told the people to do. Over the Long Run Business has proved completely incapable of doing anything in a Long Term Manner. They are too worried about the Bottom Line next week and their Board's Bonuses to even begin to consider the Long Term Destruction that they are wreaking upon themselves and their eventual payments. Just look at the Mortgage Fiasco that is just the latest in a long lime of Business Failures where Short Term Profit is put above everything else.

Col

Earlier comments mentioned dysfunctional organizations, incompetence of management as well as short term thinking and plenty of that exists.

Since America has evolved from a nation of builders to a nation of peddlers, a Logan's Run deterioration is expected.

I think that corporate financial analysts are not on top of the IT Cost Center versus P&L because of the myriad of different metrics employed and how they really relate to profit. I think it is common to miss emerging problems because IT activities are poorly measured to how they effect and contribute to profit and value.

Again, when the non-IT staff is spending so much time on porn downloads, updating facebook, and tweeting their followers ("Hey look at me! Look what I'm doing!"). I reckon poorly led organizations will (obliviously) survive as long as the top executives' golden parachute looks better than "facing the music". By then, the company will be in trouble or the board of directors will have (finally) awakened and ask themselves "why did we hire those jerks, again?"
;^)

America is full of mediocre writers. Jason Hiner is not a bad writer and maybe that is his problem. He has been out of the front lines for too long. You could say he is out of touch but don't insult his prose.

Wasn't insulting his prose, just reflecting back his self-righteous/smug "I'm me and too bad you're not" attitude. Like many in a semi-public role, Jason's forgetting that these days, everyone is replaceable, including himself.

We should vote your comment down because you used "prose" (correctly) in a tech column. That word used to be reserved exclusively for use by English professors. What is happening to the caliber of geeks today?

There will always be demand for specialist. I've been watching this increase lately in certain fields where it is hard to get people with all 15 skills listed in the required section. Often their usefulness is short lived, such as transitioning to a new enterprise scale system, and they move on. And they are demanding get huge hourly rates.
Management would, of course, love not paying those rates, but realize that it would take months, if not years, to build up those skills internally, only to have no need for most of them after the transition (maintenance is a smaller staff than transition) and lay them off.

Most of the specialism within IT is deliberately tools based. That's not 15 skills on the requirement, it's 15 tools. Pay the fellow who learnt them first big bucks and a load of people will see that, rush out read a book, take a cert, lie their arse off etc and make you a not a special specialist in short order.

Specialise in admin or development or systems integration, migration, an area that requires technical ability and soft skills and experience, then you have them by the nuts when they need you and you can always earn your corn with a subset of the required skills and tools

They hate that, because it does take years to do....

Current and previous role I got because of of my skills, tools this role I was two to five years without using them, one before that six....

Play your game not theirs..

Best to keep all of your tools sharp as possible. Don't assume the rules of a game you 'wrote" will not be changed by new blood. They can change overnight, or they can change so slowly you don't notice until it's too late.

I would stay abreast of *everything* remotely related to my specialty and some that seem too remote. Imagine if some young know-it-all tries to upstage you and he finds out you've got the full script in your head.

I don't generally apply my dba, network and sstem admin and hardware skills anymore. I'm seriously out of date tools wise, knowing the fundamentals has come in handy a time or two though when there was a need for more than just a developer.

The tools argument says that if I went off and did a course on the latest version, that would make me more valuable than some one who knew and used the the last 10 versions.

I disagree, vehemently. Anyone looking at my resume, and picking me out just because I've just added some tool is going to prefer a newer and cheaper person who did the same course.
I can't compete in that market, nor can I think of single eason for doing so.

I can certainly recommend it.

I'm in there with you. With close to 30 years in technical support, starting as a hardware technician at the component level and ending up later in IT and desktop support, my skills too are becoming "old" by the current standards.

Yet, and probably like you, we can fix anything because we have the knowledge and criticle thinking skills to be able to resolve the problems. The problem is a lot of HR departments are sold the certification garb by the training schools. As we know HR reps have no clue when it comes to IT stuff and suck this garbage up as the holy grail.

Well, I needed a good laugh this morning. This article gave me one. C'mon, Jason, are you really that short sighted?

This article reflects a very myopic view that current bean counters have. These are the three categories of jobs. In any SDLC, the methodologies - waterfall, scrum, agile, and anything else out there, discusses a level of granularity. And of course there is the QA and the PMO.
Even better, why not just call it two roles? Paid and sweat equity? this should cover it!

You know where this is going. Users are so focused on deadlines and getting something done, that QA is a great myth... at least in some places. Funny thing is, a lot of my users don't want to test it themselves and expect the developers to be able to regression test it. A lot of our developers are thrust into QA. You know what that gets translated to IRL

This is definitely talking about "moving the cheese." People hate that.

IT management is responsible for shooting itself in the foot, and if you want really horrific examples - google CITYTIME, SAIC and TECHNODYNE. While this project from hell falls under larger consulting firms, it is management and time billing gone just insane. Corporate IT has the same issues to a lesser degree and corporate IT is mostly dismantled. Developers have been hardest hit by outsourcing to India. Programmers are literally a dime-a-dozen over there. Pay of $2 an hour is a real number folks. OH, and if American management can get somebody at THAT rate??? Wow, beats the Minimum Wage by a mile doesn't it.

Jason, you are spot on. Most people that hate this kind of talk are in positions that are at risk, it's job justification and self-preservation, I don't blame them. The reality is this isn't new and has been going in this direction for a couple of years and now that the economy has tanked, it will just get more prominent. Someone commented on your G+ account that you should follow the money and that's the impetus of all of this change. In a tight economy every budget is scrutinized as is the need for every employee. The reality is, bloat in every department is going to be removed, including IT and technical positions. Although some people in these roles feel they are untouchable because the company will fail without them, the reality is everyone is replaceable and in a tough economy, they are often replaceable for a much more qualified and cheaper person. This is also when companies re-evaluate their tech strategy and often realize the cost savings of relying on your three positions, or something close to it. No matter how important you think your security or technology is, does it matter if the business can???t afford to keep the doors open?

... down-voted you, so I upped you back to 0.

I think Jason's uncomfortable truth is correct. I also think it's for the best. Back in the day, companies whose business model had nothing to do with IT were writing their own applications (go further back and they were writing their own compilers). That's not being business-savvy. Specialization makes sense, and specialization is what will take these skills out of the corporate structure and make them outside services instead.