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Circles and Circles
There's so much to say on this subject. You can easily compare this current evolution of IT (the cloud thing) to the industrial revolution and it would be a very fair comparison. Not that I wish to come across as knowing it all as I certainly don't, but the following is hard to argue against: if CloudProviderA can hire 100 IT people and provide cloud services to 5,000 variably sized customes who themselves would on average have 10 IT staff but now only need 5 to do the needed on-premises work, then you have 100 people with jobs and 25,000 who have just lost their job. This of course is if all things were equal etc. Naturally some will transition to other roles, but will all 25,000 people suddenly "innovate" themselves? I thnk it's fair to say no.
Question: does Wal-Mart or the like have a net contribution that positively or negatively affects a local communities' economy and employement levels/standards. And when Wal-Mart comes into town, what happens to existing local, small shops?
We all know at least some of those 25,000 will not just be cut, they'll be re-positioned somehow to be an asset in another way. But what percentage? Doing that requires innovative thinking and usual re-education for either an individual who is "managing their career" or by their managers/CIO's. Such innovative thinking rarely exists in larger groups (the enterprise for the most part). When an enterprise company is performing poorly, or needs to adjust to circumstnaces, what do they do? Do they lay off 1,000's of workers or do they find innovative ways to retain them? Of course they lay them off. Nothing would be different in IT at least on larger scales I think.
So, multiply CloudProviderA by however many cloud providers you can think of that would replace existing in-house IT functinality and that's your job market impact. The door is wide open here for counter-arguments of course as I'm intentionally leaning to the negative impacts in this post.
So yes, if all things remained as they are now, cloud computing will cause massive job loss. You could always try to work at the cloud provider of course but they'll have their pick of the litter to be sure so you better be damn good at what you do.
That's one factor in the equation. Another is: what new jobs will come along as par tof the overall technology evolution and will that offset the level of loss of traditional IT jobs? How many unemployed will evolve to fit the new job market?. Again, some will, but many won't or just can't. IT is already quite the slave trade as it is. Just to stay relevant we have to spend huge percentages of time on training and learning, let alone "doing" the job. Find me another field where the level of learning is so highly necessary and yet poorly supported by the parent organization (the Employer). Factor in that IT pros with families, with personal problems resulting in motivational loss, etc. etc. will have a harder time transitioning than the typical young, single IT guy (or girl) who has nothing else to do but read Sybex all night and you can see another angle at where the job situation will move towards once you have legions of IT pros trying to find a place in the future.
Anyway, also consider this: there is only so much technology can do or evolve to before it sort of doesn't evolve much more. Though maybe that's 100 yars away, who knows. The tech job market over years and decades will probably shrink overall. As we slowly come to realzie the promisess of technology (to make life simplier, requiring less maintenance), I suppose in theory there will be less jobs. To take a simplistic example, what will all the companies and engineers and such that work on voice analysis do once we've perfected that? will they move onto say, other kinetic and perhaps neuro interfaces? What happens once we've perfected those too?
Take that idea to all current areas of tech: hmmmm say database analytics. Deep diving into databases to learn new things or predict something. Data mining with a twist? Or just more of the same. I'm sorry but "Big Data" is such a stupid phrase. It's just stamping a point in time label on a concept that has existed and evolved alongside everything else for years. And in typical fashion: What will they call it in 5 years? "Bigger Data", and then later, "Ultra Big Data"? Why oh why do we let marketing people run the lingo machine? My opinion is that this current push to focus on Big Data analytics is probably, and arguably, not going to "take off" the way people think. Don't forget, we have humans developing the algoritms and what not that govern how data is analyzed. I'm sorry but I've forgotten the specifics but I recall IBM Watson on Jeopardy answering "What is Toronto?" when asked what the largest airports in America were that were named after WWII people or something. If anything, that tells it all right there. People can program one heck of a relational database and search algorithms on a machine, but invariably it's a human in the end that needs to determine if the machine is spitting out nonsense or not. So hopefully we'll always need hyumans to keep things running but I don't think it'll stay status quo - I think you'll eventually have people that are so highly skilled that they border on MIT graduate level just to keep a job, because the "lower" level tech like say, systems maintenance, will not be such a big issue since either cloud will do it because the system is theirs (or they'll offer to do yours), or perhaps systems will eventually be made to do it themselves. So this Big Data thing has a lot of room to move, but perhaps this is a useless example since how many IT pros are going to get into Big Data anyway unless they're maybe a DBA specialist or advanced programmer.
So to the original point, and question, how many new markets or tech will create new jobs, vs. the level of job loss incurred by such automations as what cloud offers? In the end, who knows, so we all must try to adapt to whatever comes. It helps to be postive though - whether accurate or not, any distopian perspective won't amount to much for the individual unless he or she also attempts to create a new reality for themselves by adapting to this change.
So, the more things chnage the more they stay the same. Or so it seems. I would enjoy a conversation about how this current perception of the changing world truly differs from the changing world of any point in time in the past. With an ever-expanding population, are we going to need more technies to fix stuff like the Google self-driving car, or will we need more security consultants than ever since we now have acknowledgement that cyberwarfare is not for the movies? Or whate other job types should we expect that aren't here yet?
Question: does Wal-Mart or the like have a net contribution that positively or negatively affects a local communities' economy and employement levels/standards. And when Wal-Mart comes into town, what happens to existing local, small shops?
We all know at least some of those 25,000 will not just be cut, they'll be re-positioned somehow to be an asset in another way. But what percentage? Doing that requires innovative thinking and usual re-education for either an individual who is "managing their career" or by their managers/CIO's. Such innovative thinking rarely exists in larger groups (the enterprise for the most part). When an enterprise company is performing poorly, or needs to adjust to circumstnaces, what do they do? Do they lay off 1,000's of workers or do they find innovative ways to retain them? Of course they lay them off. Nothing would be different in IT at least on larger scales I think.
So, multiply CloudProviderA by however many cloud providers you can think of that would replace existing in-house IT functinality and that's your job market impact. The door is wide open here for counter-arguments of course as I'm intentionally leaning to the negative impacts in this post.
So yes, if all things remained as they are now, cloud computing will cause massive job loss. You could always try to work at the cloud provider of course but they'll have their pick of the litter to be sure so you better be damn good at what you do.
That's one factor in the equation. Another is: what new jobs will come along as par tof the overall technology evolution and will that offset the level of loss of traditional IT jobs? How many unemployed will evolve to fit the new job market?. Again, some will, but many won't or just can't. IT is already quite the slave trade as it is. Just to stay relevant we have to spend huge percentages of time on training and learning, let alone "doing" the job. Find me another field where the level of learning is so highly necessary and yet poorly supported by the parent organization (the Employer). Factor in that IT pros with families, with personal problems resulting in motivational loss, etc. etc. will have a harder time transitioning than the typical young, single IT guy (or girl) who has nothing else to do but read Sybex all night and you can see another angle at where the job situation will move towards once you have legions of IT pros trying to find a place in the future.
Anyway, also consider this: there is only so much technology can do or evolve to before it sort of doesn't evolve much more. Though maybe that's 100 yars away, who knows. The tech job market over years and decades will probably shrink overall. As we slowly come to realzie the promisess of technology (to make life simplier, requiring less maintenance), I suppose in theory there will be less jobs. To take a simplistic example, what will all the companies and engineers and such that work on voice analysis do once we've perfected that? will they move onto say, other kinetic and perhaps neuro interfaces? What happens once we've perfected those too?
Take that idea to all current areas of tech: hmmmm say database analytics. Deep diving into databases to learn new things or predict something. Data mining with a twist? Or just more of the same. I'm sorry but "Big Data" is such a stupid phrase. It's just stamping a point in time label on a concept that has existed and evolved alongside everything else for years. And in typical fashion: What will they call it in 5 years? "Bigger Data", and then later, "Ultra Big Data"? Why oh why do we let marketing people run the lingo machine? My opinion is that this current push to focus on Big Data analytics is probably, and arguably, not going to "take off" the way people think. Don't forget, we have humans developing the algoritms and what not that govern how data is analyzed. I'm sorry but I've forgotten the specifics but I recall IBM Watson on Jeopardy answering "What is Toronto?" when asked what the largest airports in America were that were named after WWII people or something. If anything, that tells it all right there. People can program one heck of a relational database and search algorithms on a machine, but invariably it's a human in the end that needs to determine if the machine is spitting out nonsense or not. So hopefully we'll always need hyumans to keep things running but I don't think it'll stay status quo - I think you'll eventually have people that are so highly skilled that they border on MIT graduate level just to keep a job, because the "lower" level tech like say, systems maintenance, will not be such a big issue since either cloud will do it because the system is theirs (or they'll offer to do yours), or perhaps systems will eventually be made to do it themselves. So this Big Data thing has a lot of room to move, but perhaps this is a useless example since how many IT pros are going to get into Big Data anyway unless they're maybe a DBA specialist or advanced programmer.
So to the original point, and question, how many new markets or tech will create new jobs, vs. the level of job loss incurred by such automations as what cloud offers? In the end, who knows, so we all must try to adapt to whatever comes. It helps to be postive though - whether accurate or not, any distopian perspective won't amount to much for the individual unless he or she also attempts to create a new reality for themselves by adapting to this change.
So, the more things chnage the more they stay the same. Or so it seems. I would enjoy a conversation about how this current perception of the changing world truly differs from the changing world of any point in time in the past. With an ever-expanding population, are we going to need more technies to fix stuff like the Google self-driving car, or will we need more security consultants than ever since we now have acknowledgement that cyberwarfare is not for the movies? Or whate other job types should we expect that aren't here yet?
Posted by viProCon
9th Aug
