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> The same thing happens to programming positions.

I can't stress how important this is. Folks going to things like boot camps or other educational outlets that focus on one language will utterly kill their career if they aren't aware of how fast things move. If you don't learn the underlying abstractions and paradigms that take various forms in different languages, you will get left in the dust in a matter of a few years.

The best programmers I've ever worked with got excited about programming patterns and paradigms, not frameworks and syntactic sugar. Those are also the ones I paid the most attention to.

Bottom line for both software and IT engineers: you learn to learn, not just to do.

Sure, there's places to learn hip new tech that might not be around for a while and you'll have to continuously learn new languages/frameworks/etc. But there's also things like FORTRAN, COBOL, and C, which are all in-demand in their own little niches, aren't going away any time soon, and where you can till make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.

> can still make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.

I think this is (at least partially) a side effect of the pedagogy of computer science in schools changing throughout the decades. When I was in school, just about the entire program stressed OOP, with very little focus on imperative/procedural programming. Newly minted programmers fresh out of school don't have the exposure/mindset to jump straight into one of these (C maybe being an exception). The old guard that called these languages home are a dying breed, and the salaries paid to program in them these days bears that out the scarcity that results.

I would say the difficulty with these niches is that the number of experts and the demand follow different curves. For COBOL, it seems that you have the initial period where supply and demand are high, and you have the final period where the few experts remaining command high salaries. But between them you have a glut where demand is dropping and the experts are moving on or getting "reorganized". Surviving that middle period is not something to take for granted.

The key skill is knowing how to continuously acquire new skills.

There are hundreds of thousands of people or System Administrators that have made life long careers out of managing networks, server farms, windows and linux systems since the early 90s. It's not fancy as software development or drives business value but work that needs to be done.

The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work. The only thing left is actual software development.

If you've tried to hire a good sys admin in North America you'd be shocked at how high their salaries are getting. Amazon is hiring them by the boatload. Shopify is moving to all cloud because they're unable to staff.

The problem is that junior sys admins aren't as useful as before to most startups. I still think they'll figure it out, but the industry is changing.

This. Competence is reducing per capita. The market is saturated with IT people who dont know what they are doing

The average competence is NOT reducing. What is reducing is demand for mediocre (and low) competence.

This trend results in less competent people flooding the job market.

But if demand for low competence people goes down, those people aren't learning on the job, therefore decreasing the average competence of the workforce.

...said every generation ever about the next generation.

Sysadmins used to be able to compile a kernel and some could even hack a kernel module together.

Today ? Not happening.

Another way to look at the trend - a lot of companies are moving to the cloud because they can't get the people to do it on their own.

Doing it on the cloud is now cheaper than doing it on their own. That could be because doing it on their own has got more expensive, but I suspect that the cloud becoming cheaper is a bigger factor.

So AWS is really Amazon's play to corner the market on sysadmins? That sounds remarkably plausible.

But isn't Amazon hiring similar people as Google SREs? So they are not really looking for sys admins but more of a full fledged programmers / dev ops people who can write software, not just bash scripts.

The author is referring to traditional system administration - this is Windows - SCCM, SCOM, Exchange, SharePoint, VMware Virtualization, Citrix, Networking, etc.

SRE or "DevOps" roles new roles that are similar to system administration but the biggest difference is the use of cloud technologies, automation and most importantly those in need to be or at least understand software develop and code.

Not really. We now call systems administrators "devops engineers" now.

Just as webdevs are “full stack engineers” now

When my company puts out a rec for developers we get 300 applicants. When we try to get a devops, we get 3. It's tough.

"The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work."

It takes a hell of a lot of work to take a company's entire infrastructure and migrate it to Kubernetes and the Cloud, and then monitor and manage it. It's not trivial.

So the key is seeing your job as solving a business problem with computers, not "I administer Oracle version X.y.z running on Redhat Linux".

This. Check out my username, this is what I do, and I've been doing it for far longer than a decade.

The mid-range jobs have always been vanishing. Many times, I'm the guy automating them out of existence. It's always replaced by something else.

It depends on the circumstances, of course, but there is often more work after the automation than before. It's just different work. It requires reskilling.

The article mentions some new product AWS is coming out with. No matter how "simple" it makes things, someone is going to end up being an expert at using it, and will probably be paid well to do so.

Really, the toughest and most crucial part of this career has been keeping up. The work stays steady, though.

I gave myself the title “IT Janitor” because for years all I did was clean up other people’s $4!7. I automated everything I touched, and told people it was so I would have more time to surf the Internet. Now I’m over 50, in the Innovation group, and dreading ever having to find a new job. But I’m having fun: blockchain, robotics, mobile app dev, and now NLP.

The problem is most companies want someone with 3-5 years of experience in that new skill set. So, unless you jump on that particular band wagon early you're out of luck.

In my experience, companies say 3-5 years but this requirement is written by someone in HR translating what the hiring manager said. The hiring manager is more likely to hire someone who has less than 3-5 years of experience, or even hire someone with zero experience, as long as the candidate demonstrates aptitude.

The trick is to write your resume so it gets past HR's filter, but without putting bullshit on it. It's unfortunate but I consider this kind of thing a critical skill for anyone applying to technical jobs.

> The trick is to write your resume so it gets past HR's filter, but without putting bullshit on it. It's unfortunate but I consider this kind of thing a critical skill for anyone applying to technical jobs.

I'd argue that skill applies even after you get hired. Fudging details to get around wasteful trivialities without outright bullshitting the person asking for the requirement is truly an art, and it's very hard to navigate this field without that skill.

> The trick is to write your resume so it gets past HR's filter

Any tips on how to do that?

Let's say the job listing says "3+ years experience with JavaScript," among other requirements. You only used JavaScript for 6 months, so you roll JavaScript up as part of your web development skills. You say, "5 years writing web apps, using Java, .NET, C#, and JavaScript." This is true, the hiring manager understands that you have not necessarily spent all 5 years writing JavaScript, and it gets past HR's filter.

The hiring manager will then make sure that your skill set is a good addition to the team.

Keep in mind that the hiring manager may have asked for someone "with some JavaScript experience" and HR might have translated that into "3+ years". In some cases, when the hiring manager sees the job posting, they're surprised by the requirements and say, "So, this is why we haven't been getting any applicants!" This is, yes, somewhat dysfunctional but it is a common dysfunction. Yes, you are essentially second-guessing the job listing and this is not the way the world should work.

As a rule of thumb, if you are applying to a job and you meet all of the listed requirements as written, you are overqualified and should apply to a higher level position.

It's often easy to spot when there is a recruiter/manager disconnect. When the language is overly gregarious/buddy-buddy, or uses the stereotypical bad job offer language ("rockstar ninja programmer", "we have ping-pong tables and free snacks!", etc...), you know the requirements can be taken with a grain of salt.

Definitely brush up on the things listed, though. Walking into an interview without at least a cursory recognition of what a listed language/framework does sucks, as it wastes your time and the interviewers'.

Also, be wary of bad recruiters. If they drink their own kool-aid and actually enforce the arbitrary x # of years in foo language blurb, you might be screwed (as well as the manager that put out the request for a hire in the first place).

One idea I heard recently was to include a copy of the job description that the HR person wrote in your resume. You include it in such a way that it can’t be seen visibly. For example, make the font size really small and the colour the same as the background colour.

The theory here is that programs that automatically scan resumes for keywords will always find the ones they are looking for.

I can’t say I have tried this or know how well it would work in practise.

Then, instead of SEO, you can put REO (Resume Engine Optimization) on your resume as well.

This problem has existed at least since the 90s, probably longer than that. I remember the joke being job descriptions asking for 3-5 years Java experience in 1996.

Mainframe still rules many companies. Especially banks and insurance

And they are not going away.

Last year I witnessed the sad story of a general manager, that promised to migrate away from an as400 in six months.

This guy (and several others) doesnt fully understand that a system, that is software and hardware and infrastucture, has its life determined by the returns it gives to its mother organization. If the system works, the organization wont pay or dare to replace it. Core systems are the hardest, and thats where all those mainframes and c and fortram and nowadays java legacy sys are still alive and kicking.

Pd: I love those systems btw, if you have one that needs love and care, I'd like to hear about it :D.

Agreed.

"I’ve spent my career in tech, almost a decade at this point, running about a step-and-a-half ahead of the automation reaper."

I mean, yes, that is the entire job description. If you are in IT, your responsibility is to learn the best technologies, and be continually re-evaluating what to keep of your organization's current and what to improve or replace.

That is why I wouldn't want to do anything else. I love learning new things and no profession offers more opportunities to learn new things than computer technology.

IT skills have never had a long shelf life.

But this isn’t true, outside of webdev.

If your skill was “DB2” or “Oracle” or “Cisco” or “C++” you could have had a 30-40 year career in that, easily. There are plenty of others. Java has been around commercially since about 1995, there will definitely be plenty of Java jobs in 2025.

True, but on the other hand those technologies have evolved more or less drastically as well. E.g. the Java or C++ skills from 1995 won't get you that far today, both in terms of the language itself and the framework/library ecosystem.

Yep. I've done both FORTRAN and COBOL in the late 80s, and today's versions only have a vague similarity to what I recall.

Sure, but it’s a gradual, iterative process, and each new feature you learn builds on what you already know, there’s no sudden cliff of obsolescence. When Oracle 9i came out there was still plenty of work for Oracle 7 and 8i guys and they had time and an easy path to migrate on and a big community to help them. Same with Java. There will be guys retiring in 2035 who have done Java for their entire 40 year careers! Even today a C++98 guy could find work maintaining something while he or she got up to speed, many sites aren’t even fully on C++14 yet and won’t be for a few more years.

Whereas in webdev you’re basically starting from scratch every 2 years and competing with new entrants to the market because they literally have as much experience of the hot new framework as you do.

Thank God! The whole reason I have been working as a programmer for decades is because I always get to learn new things, and never get bored.

Another worry is recession and the popping of the tech bubble. Sooner or later the bubble has to popped and that's going to cause a lot of pain throughout the tech industry. Should be interesting to see how the industry rebounds and in what form. Will VR be the new "hot thing" like smartphones were after the 2008 recession.

But smartphones are useful because now you have a computer in your pocket (but just like a PC, it's mostly being used for social media), if I look around my train in the morning many people are staring into their phones. I doubt VR will ever reach that. But AR might, so having a heads-up-display that will, for example, show you the next step of a recipe, or which screw to undo next while fixing your car.

I'm no pollyanna but I doubt we'll ever see another tech bubble collapse in the likes of the post-2000 one ever again, unless society itself collapses. And believe me, 2002-03 were the most painful years of my working life.

Sure we'll see slowdowns and some dramatic shifts in skill sets. We just need to stay ahead of the curve.

> Will VR be the new "hot thing" like smartphones were after the 2008 recession

I don't think so. Mobile phones were already a significant thing before 2008 and the morph to smartphones was already in train (first iPhone was 2007).

VR still has to emerge from a relatively small set of niche use cases. Augmented / Mixed reality is more likely, given the ubiquity of good cameras on smartphones. Arguably AR/MR will let the phone manufacturers keep pushing device upgrades for longer, as the smartphone market saturates.