I'm trying to think long term about a career 5, 10, 20 years+ from now.
I keep seeing endless articles about not just outsourcing, but moreso automation of IT jobs - everything from IT support to some development.
Any thoughts, comments, or experiences you can share are appreciated
CAW is right - work has been shifting - geographically as well as technologically. I have found that does not slow down my work at all.
Shifting globally will be replaced with a lot of automation. A lot of lower tech jobs were temporarily shifted to countries with cheaper labor. I've got news for you, if your job is simple enough to be performed by cheaper labor, then it's simple enough for a shell script. After our company shifted 10k+ US help desk jobs to India, a year later I created the automation that put the 15k Indians out of work (payback is a bi$%^).
Now, I work for a cloud based company. The technological shift now means that automation I had to create from scratch to automate the build of a system has become much more common place. AWS, for example, has API's to interact with their services, build new servers, monitor, etc. There's Chef, Knife, Ansible and a million other tools to perform tasks. You still need someone who understands the underlying technology and principals, as there are gaps between what the automation does, and what humans are capable of. There's also gaps between pieces of automation.
There's talk of programmer jobs being automated. When I hear that, I think of the contrast between developers that use WYSIWYG editors or IDE's, versus developers that code from text editors or VIM.
Sure, in MS Visual Studio, you can drag and drop complex elements into a GUI layout, and they'll work to a certain extent. The code underneath is proprietary, fugly and filled with unnecessary bloat. They try to put everything in, in case you need it later. And of course, as a developer, you have to understand how to hook them all together and make it work. It's not magic, and not even close to automation. At best, it's assembly line production. There's less consideration over performance and efficiency of the code - all they care about are the widgets.
A developer who uses text editors becomes much more proficient, writes leaner, better code, and understands the processes behind the widget much better.
If you're a developer, you'll likely always be in demand. If you're worried about automation taking your place, I'd advise becoming the automator. You will never be short of work.
there is a real chance that your job as a programmer will be "automated" in the near future. This might happen because 1: due to globalization and internet a 7 year old from wherever can do your job for like half the price OR 2: computer will become better in understanding problems.
I think the second option is around for about 20 or 30 years. It all starts with AI (Artificial Intelligence). Actually, i don't see any major breaking news in this sector despite its becoming "hip" again.
A real automation for our developer minds is probably out of near future (+50 years). Its a developers mind to get a problem from a customer, understand what the customer wants, offer different solutions (future oriented, short term, secure solutions etc.) and finally solve the problem.
Was my answer corresponding to your question or did you meant something else with "automation of IT Jobs"?
Greets,
Chris
What do I mean by shifted? Besides the obvious "cloud" and on demand resources, you also have the rise of "self service IT". This puts the burden of providing IT support on the user. Amazon doesn't host your web servers, they just let you push the button to make a server. Now the server is your problem. With enterprise IT, they don't want to staff support so they make FAQs and Knowledge Bases for people to search through. Nevermind that this puts burden on the IT group to document all of this and keep it up to date.
So what I think is going to happen over the next 5-10 years is the continuing growth of speciality providers for services, in an effort to shift from an internal IT cost to an external IT cost. In some ways this will allow technology to grow quickly, because these companies will be experts at their problem domain and need innovative solutions for their problems.
Over the longer term (10+), you might see the pendulum swing the other way in IT. Things will be brought in house again to maintain control and solve business specific problems that the outside providers don't address because they're generic providers.
Every year in IT, the IT people will be asked to do more with fewer resources. So of course things are being automated and will need to be automated. If you're in charge of creating this automation, make sure you don't have any unnecessary human glue. I've seen "automated" processes that would absolutely die without enough human input. These don't scale, as you have another 50% more machines dumped on top of you without additional headcount.
At no point will the human element of automation go away -- you'll just need the skills to maintain and improve the automation rather than the skills to do what the automation is doing.
As soon as you automate the current IT roles and responsibilities, a new layer of possibilities, heretofore impractical, becomes available.
Like an onion, each successive layer covers a larger surface area of activity, which actually INCREASES the amount of IT work available - plus there will still be jobs maintaining the "automatic" systems in the layers down below.
My only fear is that maybe one day people will be satisfied with the systems they have and declare "Enough!", halting any further enhancement.
Until that day the computer industry will continue to grow.
Fortunately human beings are rarely satisfied for long.
So maybe one day you won't be a programmer. You will be a technician who spends their day translating user requirements into a language the the AI has been trained to understand, dealing with ambiguities, resolving conflicting requirements, indiciating what's important and what's incidental.
Which isn't really that different from what we do today.