Personal services IT is still alive and well and a number of people I know have made a living out of helping older people manage passwords, upgrade their systems, move their phone plans or transfer their data when they get a new phone etc. But to be successful at that you also need to talk to people and be able to maintain a business relationship with them, not a skill that everyone has in addition to their deep knowledge of IT.
As tm2d mentions devops is still a hot job market. But it is not the small business 'tech' role so there are fewer actual slots for that role.
There was also a comment in the article about H1-B visas and employers wanting "younger and less expensive" workers. I try to remind my older friends that if someone can spend 6 months learning to do what you do and do it well enough to meet the needs of the job, then you are only "worth" what a company would pay that person they just hired. If you want to have a larger salary and better job security, then you need to be able to do things that can't be trained in 6 months. The days of 'too few programmers to go around' are long past, there is now a surplus and they are coming fast and furious out of college.
Some of your other points were insightful, but this assertion contradicts my experience and intuition, and -- I believe -- labor market statistics.
In 1999 when I was hiring programmers and offering above market starting salaries I wouldn't get any qualified resumes.
It is from that experience that would assert it is a 'pricing' issue rather than a 'selection' issue.
[1] After 10 qualified I had my first interview round, 3 were brought back for secondary interviews and one hired. I expect there were easily 20 - 30 engineers in there that could have done the job.
It seems that there might be plenty of churn overall.
We've gone through surplus years before, and they don't look like this.
But to management/high ups, they "can do the job" and are cheaper. It's like outsourcing. You save in costs but there are hidden downsides and risks.
I'd probably argue that very few engineer jobs can be done competently with a few months of training.
Coding is a cheap easy skill that 15-20 years old can do.
Executing and managing a project from start to finish is a rare skill that cannot be acquired in school or the internet.
Coding Monkey => Cheap and easy to find.
Coder who has successfully led and executed projects => Expensive and rare.
I think training is part of the problem. More importantly, workers need consulting help around how to take existing skills and use them to apply to upmarket jobs with higher pay.
Unless you are arguing that people never did large scale automation of processes around deploying systems and software until this term existed...
In my personal vocabulary - there were always 2 kinds of sysadmins:
- Real sysadmins- which is now the term 'DevOps'
- IT System Technicians - which is what sysadmin is being perverted into
The old-style breakdown typically depended on how systems/development minded the company was - with more forward looking companies seeing their sysadmins as the former category and people who "administered" e.g. 'tended to' the IT "system", and the reactive companies who viewed IT as some foreign expense to be managed viewing their sysadmins as advanced IT techs who were 'admins' (in the administrative assistant sense) for the various 'systems' (e.g. computers) that they purchased.
As someone who always operated in the mindset of the former category, but unfortunately has operated mostly in the latter type of company, it is difficult to make the transition into 'DevOps' roles since this term has been subsequently invented to describe the work that I always did, using tools that I would have written from scratch myself in the old days, or deployed myself in the current days, but unfortunately due to crappy management and backwards modes of thinking, don't have the proper 'current' job-title on my resume (e.g. sysadmin)
If you talk to someone about their day and it revolves around tickets, they are the techs that you're talking about. The real "sysadmins"/devops understand systems and own things.
It's ok to realign your title with function. Every company handles this sort of thing differently. I was a "Computer Systems Programmer 3" for two years. In that organization, that rank was roughly equivalent to a Staff Engineer. My resume says "Lead DBA", as that was my primary function... the formal title assigned was just whatever was available when I was promoted... the title description was written for mainframe people!
DevOps/infrastructure is knowing how to glue together off the shelf tools and understanding how everything works. Great that as a dev you can probably bolt these tools together with docs, but your lack of context with the underlying fundamentals will eventually bite you.
That's actually not that much removed from quite a few programming jobs. It's mostly different manuals and the occasional plug to fit into a socket but other than that the differences are smaller than the similarities and debugging skills are important for both of them.
And, thankfully, no architects.
Your comments convey a very narrow perspective of the job market that falls under "DevOps". That is to say, the sphere of roles looking to be filled by companies who believe they are filling a "DevOps" role is much larger than what you believe. It almost seems as if you are limiting yourself and projecting that onto the entire job market.
Now, I'm not sure you consider your current position as "limiting".. However, I can say that there are MANY roles being filled for "DevOps" candidates that extend beyond writing Ansible roles or Chef cookbooks. Speaking as someone 6 years into their engineering career and as the person who wrote the initial powershell(as a linux cloud engineer!) feature provider for Chef, I would not have taken a role such as you describe after year 1.
Now, you may be in a position where writing Ansible or Chef resources long term sounds swell. That's fare! But there are many, MANY roles that fall into the systems engineer/SRE bucket that are labeled at DevOps! Honestly, they are a matter of degree! The higher-end roles are senior, lead, unique, and require heavy development skills. If it's not the provisioning platform you are developing and supporting, it's the performance characteristics of the product itself.
> DevOps/infrastructure engineer is basically a programming position
sysadmin/network admin ==>> DevOps
IT manager => Manager or lead.
DevOps is not a programming position at all. It is usually cheap system administration (that replace the term sysadmin) and it does NOT require coding. Pay attention to the name and the place you joins, you're can easily be burnt by joining a team of operations monkeys while thinking they were the dev and system type persons.
Nah, it's an IQ issue. It's really not a (short-term) training issue, at least.
I think a great piece of advice for life is, "Never assume you are the smartest person in the room." Remember that everyone brings something to the table.
I eventually figured out there were very limited opportunities for someone with my skills and interests in that role so I studied and worked to build the skills to get a software engineering job.
I think that Helpdesk roles in general should be seen as stepping stones toward careers in more advanced roles. I actually think my experience doing that work has made me a better engineer and coworker.