Ask Slashdot: What Will IT Look Like In 10 Years? 444
An anonymous reader writes "The IT industry is a lot different than it was 10 years ago; it underwent a huge boom in terms of labor and services required to keep up with the times. Now, we are entering a consolidation phase. The cloud makes it easier for companies to host e-mail, so now instead of organizations having their own Exchange guy, they will outsource it to the cloud. Instead of having a bunch of network engineers, they will deploy wireless and no longer need cabling or current levels of network engineering services. What do you think the long-term consequences of this will be? What skills do you think will be useful in 10 years? Is IT going to put its own out of work, like we did with the post office and libraries?"
Wireless = less network engineers? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've yet to see a corporate wi-fi deployment that required less work on behalf of the network guy/gal(s) than a similar wired user base.. maybe I'm just naive?
Flawed premise (Score:2, Insightful)
The rumors of the death of "in house mail" is greatly exaggerated!
Though I agree the "Exchange guy" may become a dinosaur with the continue rise of the "Linux guy".
Re:Wireless = less network engineers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Going to all wireless will require at least as many engineers as now, but they'll have to be even better at it. They'll trade in their cat-5 testers for radio analysers to help them track down leaky ovens, malfunctioning wifi cards, and rogue devices. They'll enter new depths of hell trying to explain to an administrative assistant that the new potted plant in the foil wrapped pot is blocking her network connectivity.
Meanwhile, IT will end up buying a golf cart to help hunt down freeloaders in the parking lot.
IT has always been cyclic; no surprises coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost every company depends on networked computers to perform critical daily tasks. IT's function is to provide and maintain the computing infrastructure.
Unfortunately, there's MBA types counting beans and looking for places to save money. They look at IT and see a cost center; IT adds nothing to the bottom line.
So let's start with a company with a healthy IT department; since they do their jobs, all the computing resources are up and running, problems are few and far between and quickly resolved.
The bean counters look at the situation and how much they're paying IT - and see that everything is working fine. What are we paying these folks for? Lay them off to save money.
Things keep running for months but start to fall apart around the edges; the users fix some of their PC problems and work around others. At about 18 months or so something critical goes down; the Exchange server takes a crap or something similar. Now they're in a panic; we need qualified IT staff, pronto. So they start hiring again (at a higher pay scale) and the cycle repeats.
Try not to confuse this cycle with the longer cycle that moves computing power from the server to the desktop, then back to the server, back to the desktop and now back to the server. "Cloud" is just BS talk; it's dumb terminals on the desk and everything on the servers (again).
Working in IT is like being in a big game of musical chairs. The pay is good when you're getting paid, but there are gaps between the jobs. Right now isn't good for IT people, but in a year or two...
Mostly Agile (Score:5, Insightful)
There will be a lot more agile shops, most of them implementing extreme programming, and making the developer feel even more like they're just part of a production line.
Don't get me wrong, I think parts of Agile are OK, but I've been to far too many interviews in the past where the interviewer thinks that Agile is the be all and end all of programming.
The anon is an idiot who eats buzzwords as if they (Score:5, Insightful)
The anon who wrote this question really should stop eating buzzwords like they are candy, they are rotting what little brain he had to begin with.
Wireless to replace the networking guy? Because wireless is just plug and play right? You just setup one of those magic boxes and voila, the entire office building has zero-config access. That is the level this guy is thinking at, it shows he just hasn't got a clue. Just because you used wireless on your home router doesn't mean you are a networking expert, wireless or otherwise. Setting up wireless access is in fact harder for a big building then wired. Wired is simple, you got a cable, you draw it, you test it, it works. Cable doesn't get interference from a microwave or a factory nearby that runs something every monday. It has no dark spots, no interference. And you know what cable you plugged into which PC. I worked in offices where the visitors wifi was only working in the offices, not in the reception or meeting areas. That is helpful.
He also proposes to move your email into the cloud. Clearly he never worked with regulators who would throw such a fit at handing all your confidential data over to a third party.
This is just another post by some kiddy who heard some buzzwords and thinks his massive experience setting up his mom's computer gives him an insight into what IT support for even a medium sized company is all about.
The future is always just the same. Why? Because things don't change all that much. Take flying cars, do you think they are going to solve grid-lock magically? Right, because the entire skies will be open to them right? Do you want flying cars buzzing over YOUR house? No? Then they will be confined to corridors, highways in the sky, just as congested as roads. Proof? Airliners are already having trouble fitting enough planes into busy areas. Now imagine every jumbojet replaced by 300 individuals in the skies.
IT hasn't changed all that much. Even if you go wireless and into the cloud it will STILL require an admin on the ground to deal with it all. Just look at how often Amazon's cloud has been down. If you been in IT a little bit longer then this baby anon, you will know that IT is always changing and changing back again. From mainframe to PC's to the network to the cloud... it is just the latest craze. So the cable puller now pulls a cable to the wireless box and spends his time not checking cable but reception. Big whoop.
Re:IT has always been cyclic; no surprises coming (Score:5, Insightful)
The bean counters look at the situation and how much they're paying IT - and see that everything is working fine. What are we paying these folks for? Lay them off to save money.
It sucks to be the "Maytag man". I don't understand why it is so hard to convince people the success of NT in organizations over Unix was due to the fact Unix didn't need constant attention but talented (more expensive) administration. When they are paying a Unix administrator $150k and see him/her sitting on their ass 90% of the time they decide to keep the "hard working" $65k person on staff because they are constantly doing "technology stuff". Oh. And the 65k person knows Excel short cuts.
Wireless? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your network engineers are there for ensuring cross-node connectivity and security. When I set up your routes, manage your IPSEC tunnels, and design your firewall rules, I don't give two shits about what you are using for physical connectivity. You could have some cups attached together with strings and it wouldn't change my network design.
In fact, wireless gives me more work to do. Wireless setup, while easy, takes more configuration than plugging a wire into a port. And if your building is of any size and thick construction, I'm going to require a lot more networking nodes to service the whole thing adequately than I need when I can run 300 feet in any direction with a cable. Which means if your douchebag veeps want to be able to walk around the building with their iThingies, I have to make sure the pieces of junk can connect to any wifi hotspot in the building, which is its own set of headaches.
And then there's security. Wireless is an external attack vendor. Yes, it's cute that you think that encrypting your radio signals makes it impossible to eavesdrop. It's even more awesome when somebody somewhere demands that I reduce encryption levels because some older device they have can't even handle WPA2/AES. But here's the thing: bad guys can now sit out in the parking lot and collect your encrypted traffic undetectably. If they use some directional antennas and some feed horns, they might even be able to get farther away. After that, they can sit back and try to brute force your wireless key using their GPUs from the comfort of their homes. After that, they could perform corporate espionage from the cafe next door and if they play their cards right, there is not a damn thing you can do to even tell they are doing it.
I have never set up wireless that was directly attached to somebody's corporate network. When I set up a wifi hotspot at somebody's business, it gives them access to the internet and the internet only. They can securely VPN after that if they want to get to company data.
Does this all still sound like you can just plug in some Linksys routers you got from Fry's and fire your networking guy?
Re:Better technology = less work (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, pushing the 'start' or 'stop' button is effectively make-work, since it could be automated as well. The rising tide of skill displacement will inevitably force a choice upon us: Either create millions of make-work 'jobs', for which people are paid ridiculous sums for doing essentially nothing, or simply pay everyone a base stipend, simply for living, so that they can continue to purchase things from the automated factories, making the factory owners ever more disproportionately wealthy.
I can't predict the future, but .... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been in I.T. long enough to have a few guesses.
IMHO, the "cloud" push will largely turn out to be little more than a fad or phase. I'm not saying it will go away; rather, businesses will go through initiatives to move as much as possible into the cloud, only to discover some serious disadvantages over time which cause most of them to pull back. Eventually, I think you'll see it stabilize into a situation where many people have at least ONE application (Exchange being a really good candidate) in the cloud, while still maintaining local I.T. infrastructure and servers for other things.
I know where I work now, for example, one of our issues is limited bandwidth. We can't get cable Internet without paying close to $15,000 in expenses to roll the cable out to our location first, and high speed DSL isn't an option either. We're stuck with T1 circuits, and currently, a 3mbit bonded T1 pair is around $700 per month (even higher if I didn't really shop around for the lowest price). Given that, it makes no sense to put our mission critical apps out in the cloud, where everyone would vie for that 3mbit of bandwidth to run them, AND still need it for regular Internet downloads and surfing.
But even if you HAVE cheap broadband, there are always questions like data security. (Say your cloud provider goes out of business. What guarantee do you have they'll really wipe all the hard drives and backups holding your data when they liquidate all their equipment?) Furthermore, as the cloud gets more popular, I think you'll see more instances of outages/downtime to go with it. Whether it's really warranted or not, businesses are going to get nervous when the execs read about the latest outage someplace, and start asking what their I.T. departments are doing to ensure it doesn't impact them. The most cost-effective and practical answer is going to involve replication and running some local hardware, IMO -- again ensuring your I.T. staff has to be retained.
But ultimately, I think the BIGGEST reasons most companies need to retain some I.T. staff is the user training and support/hand-holding that's expected. The vast majority of employees are NOT that computer-savvy, yet they're asked to spend a lot of time using a computer in their workplace. That demand comes with a hidden cost. Either they pay a premium up-front to only hire people with a high level of computer skills, or they pay by way of retaining I.T. "help desk" and "support specialist" staffers who come running when Lisa in accounting jams up the laser printer trying to run checks, or Joe needs to know how to sum several columns in an Excel spreadsheet. None of that is going to change if the apps are hosted off-site instead of on-site.