Posts by Erik4872

Amateur hour, makes all of IT look bad

I'm assuming this lovely specimen worked as a NOC guy or similar -- why didn't he pull a Terry Childs and hold the network configs hostage until he got whatever satisfaction he wanted? A real BOFH would have wiped out all the network documentation, _and_ the primary and backup config files on all the equipment before casually heading off to lunch.

The thing I worry about is stories like this getting around to the executive classes and prompting more of them to consider replacing the "scary unstable neckbeards" with polite-but-incompetent offshore Tata or Infosys employees. People like this guy make the entire IT profession, including those of us who actually do a professional job, look bad in front of the decision makers. I've worked with a few people like Lennon Ray Brown (in terms of their personality, not their actions thankfully.) Let's just say some of these folks might have come back with a weapon of some sort if their boss gave them a bad review, not just wiped some router configs. IT does attract some intriguing personalities.

I've often opined that it's time for the IT and software development professions to grow up and actually establish a standard of professional work. Doctors and professional engineers do this, and the reward is a much more stable work life. Why are we still married to the romantic notion of the cowboy admin or coder doing things with no regard to how they could affect others?

Would Brexit stop something like this?

Speaking as a 'Murican who grew up during the great offshoring-of-manufacturing -- wouldn't Brexit be something that could prevent things like this from happening? I thought a good portion of the argument was that having an economy less interconnected with the rest of the world would force the UK to become more vertically integrated, doing more jobs inside the country including manufacturing. Wasn't that basically what happened until Margaret Thatcher took over?

I guess I'm one of those people who looks around, sees no opportunity at all for people with a factory worker level intelligence and skillset, and wonders what we'll do with all of them. Once the only jobs producing reasonable incomes are Senior Cloud Engineer and Robotic Assembly Architect, you're going to have a lot of angry, less educated, less skilled people out there who have lots of time on their hands and an axe to grind. I'd rather keep some inefficiency in the system, just to give people something to do.

As much as Trump being President scares me, his proposal to remove the US from trade agreements and add tariffs on foreign-made goods would be a very interesting experiment. If every company, regardless of size or influence, woke up one morning and found the conditions favoring domestic work, wouldn't the work have to return? If nothing else, it would inject a little economic diversity back into the country and make it "OK" again to work in a factory.

Funny because Azure is the "legacy cloud"...

There are plenty of hipster Web startups on Azure, but Microsoft has been quite accommodating to legacy IT shops who want to use cloud technologies. Deprecating features is going to be a hard thing for all cloud providers as more businesses start relying on things being the way they were when their applications were first deployed. Azure Resource Manager has existed for a while, but they're just now getting around to building semi-automatic migration tools to move Classic resources to ARM in place without redeploying them.

What's been interesting as an Azure customer is watching the speed at which new things are developed and released. If you're an IT person at a very old school company, this is the most surprising change. It must be tough from a Microsoft standpoint too -- they're beating the rapid release drum, but they have to support things that they put out there potentially forever if customers keep paying for them, and migration institutes a breaking change (like an Azure AD cert rollover, for example.) I imagine there will be a few more iterations of "release, make it "classic", then migrate or retire" while Azure completes its buildout.

Aaaaand, welcome to Windows subscriptions!

I know all the accounting tricks say that OpEx is better than CapEx, but I still say it's totally retarded to pay a company for the same service, over and over again in small pieces, rather than buy it outright and use it forever. Look how long big companies stuck with Office 97 and Office 2003! They paid $xx once and used the software for 10+ years in some cases.

I did see this coming though - Microsoft is signing absolutely everyone up for Office 365 and is in the process of becoming every company's auxilliary (or sometimes primary) data center for a low low fee per month. The Home and Pro users get Windows 10 "free" but Enterprise users are going to have to pay, Creative Cloud style, until the end of time.

Gamification of the workplace!

I seriously doubt anyone who is a new hire at IBM will ever make any of those milestones. But for those who do, there's a totally awesome 25-year badge waiting for you on your IBM social page!

I work for a pretty staid company, so gamification of the workplace hasn't really hit here yet. But I've been reading the articles -- do Millennials really prefer badges and points to monetary awards? It seems to me that things like this would work only in companies like Google, Facebook, etc. that become your entire life. Even when I was younger I could never imagine wanting to work 16-hour days in return for "perks" that keep you there and working.

Although, this is a first for our company...they announced a few months ago that they were "harmonizing" the long service awards across countries...but they were still giving people money (just not as much.) Usually our HR is the ones slavishly copying IBM and GE...seriously, every single management fad that comes out of those places is implemented. I think it's because they have the same white shoe management consulting firm.

Expect all enterprisey features to go Enterprise-only

Microsoft just got finished giving away their latest OS upgrade to Home and Pro customers. Since it's "free" from now on, I wouldn't expect any more of the enterprise features to be backported into Home or Pro.

It's definitely a shift from Win7/Win8, but not unexpected. At work we were previously able to get away with Windows 7 Professional OEM licenses because we didn't use the enterprise features. Windows 10 is forcing the company into Enterprise licensing because there's no other way to control the telemetry to a reasonable level or access certain features we need now.

So much is coming together all at once...

DevOps is smack in the middle of a bunch of huge changes happening in corporate IT. One of the biggest problems is that so many "new" things are all coming out at the same time. Public cloud replacing onsite systems, new cloud-enabled applications replacing traditional client/server applications, automation tools allowing fewer sysadmins managing more servers, microservices, containers -- and it's all happening at the same time. Now, like the article states, this new world needs more flexible IT staff which is what DevOps proposes to solve.

The problem is that DevOps is like Agile, a good idea on paper that is often horribly misapplied. DevOps can migrate to NoOps very quickly in a startup-style environment, especially with all the pushbutton deployment tools being developed. Same way an Agile project can morph from "fast feature driven development" to "no architecture, make up the design as we go."

Is DevOps a mindset, a magic dashboard sold to PHBs, or a religion peddled by DevOps consultants? Right now it's all of them -- I'm hoping it shakes out into a sane blend of these.

What would a private IBM be like, I wonder?

It would be very interesting to see something huge like a pension fund or investment house leverage-buyout IBM and take it private. You would need Sagan-esque "billions and billions" of dollars to do it, but the experiment would be fascinating. It seems to me that any company with so much in the way of resources, patents and intellectual capital could do incredibly well when removed from the yoke that is the public market. I've been watching the slow decline of IBM for quite a while from the outside, just as an observer and occasional customer.

That would be an MBA case study for the ages and any success would probably cause MBA's brains to self-destruct. They've been conditioned for so long to manage purely by spreadsheet, not own anything, focus on next quarter, get rid of as many talented expensive people as they can, and care only for the share price.

I'm old (just turned 40 last year,) but I still say that large employers owe some loyalty to their workers if that loyalty is returned. People work for large employers because they're not Silicon Valley entrepreneur types -- they're there to do a job. In previous times, a job well done was rewarded with promotions, competitive pay and no capricious layoffs. I do know a lot of older IBMers who echo the article's sentiments -- up until Gerstner showed up and shook things up, it was a great place to work. You could expect to be moved several times in a career and put in a lot of extra time for the company,but it was rewarded with a stable life for one's family. I think one of the problems is that employees are seeing even the IBMs, the GEs and the other huge companies treating their employees as disposable. Once that gets too far embedded in people's psyche, they're not willing to give any loyalty back which is why you see people leaving jobs after only a year for just a small salary increase or silly perk that the current company doesn't have.

Does that come with a guaranteed job?

The problem is not having enough smart people; the problem is having enough smart people who see a future in the IT world. Students aren't dumb, and there are very few dedicated (crazy?) people these days who study in fields that don't have an immediate ROI (at least here in the US.)

If you want to train the "next generation of cyberwarriors" or whatever, you need to provide enough entry level jobs that these students can graduate into. You then have to have a progression of roles, leading to higher salaries and more interesting work over time, to keep people in the field. Offshoring and outsourcing have destroyed entry-level IT and the informal apprenticeship system that people in my generation went through. (By this, I mean graduating from help desk to in-person support to data center monkey to junior sysadmin and so on.) Those entry level jobs in the US are most likely filled by close-to-minimum wage body shop employees or H-1B visa holders these days.

If I were a very smart student now, I'd be targeting professions that cannot be offshored such as medicine or high-end consulting. Doctors in the US have it made once they're licensed; they were smart and set up a system that prevents oversupply, lobbies against legislation that would lower their pay and regulates practice. We in IT-land could learn a lot from them.

I'll never get the marketing people's valuations...

I have absolutely no idea what real world metrics marketing people use to value the personal data for an individual. I'm a good example of an edge case in their world; I'm 100% unaffected (in a positive way) by any advertising. I have never bought a product or service based solely on an ad. Yet, there are apparently billions of drooling idiots out there who will buy whatever the advertisers tell them to.

I think the acquisition makes sense given the shift I'm seeing with Microsoft. They're going from selling software by the license to being the toll collector for everything. If they can collect a toll on the employment process, basically by doing nothing beyond making sure the platform stays up, then they win as soon as LinkedIn Premium subscription and recruiter revenue reaches the purchase price plus the running cost. It's the same mentality as Azure...Microsoft is increasingly making it very difficult to purchase one-off licenses or to sign enterprise agreements that don't involve Azure-hosted software. Our company, who was staunchly against putting source code for anything out in the cloud, caved and asked me to start designing a VSTS solution for our developers. New services and applications are cloud-hosted because everyone's convinced it's cheaper than buying hardware and software. It's a big shift, but Microsoft is pouring all that extra money into making sure it collects revenue at every exit point from a service.

If even a small percentage of LinkedIn users falls into the gullible-to-advertising category, then $60 per user is a bargain -- they'll be able to resell that data over and over again for multiple times that amount. LinkedIn isn't like Facebook; people use it to get jobs and post mostly factual, real content.

How about professional engineer status for coders?

In the 20 or so years I've been in the IT field, much of which has been doing systems integration work on really crappy software, I've often wondered why we don't have some sort of PE-style licensing arrangement. This would in my opinion get around "regulations" forcing people to code a certain way, by making individual practitioners responsible for the abominations they write. The second you try to regulate something like coding methodologies, it'll be obsolete overnight. Let's say you're able to replace the hodgepodge of educational backgrounds out there with a reasonable set of prerequisites. Make sure people actually understand what the stuff they're writing does when run on real-world systems.

I fall into the self-trained camp, but I would welcome the opportunity to make my education more formal. PEs require an engineering degree, experience and a licensing exam as a minimum barrier to entry. I'd say that beats coder bootcamp and stackoverflow reading any day of the week.

And, as much as malpractice lawsuits scare me, the idea of personal responsibility for bad work holds value for me. One thing about our field that drives me nuts is watching someone screw something up, entirely their fault, then get fired, then land another job a week later with a hefty raise. Mistakes shouldn't be able to be covered up by cleaning up your resume and applying somewhere else.

I wonder when Microsoft is finally going to pull the plug.

Intel isn't making low-end mobile chips anymore, handset manufacturers aren't interested in making phones, Microsoft is killing or selling off their own capacity to make new phones, _and_ no one is writing Windows Store apps to the extent they write Android or iOS apps.

I'd love to see them just drop the whole thing all at once, say "oops" and get back to focusing on Azure and Surface and software. But that won't happen -- they're just going to slowly let it bleed to death. At least HP had the guts to just shoot webOS in the head and get it over with...not the greatest decision IMO, but it was decisive.

Purpose-built systems are never secure

I work for a company that's similar to SWIFT and maintains a very critical set of systems worldwide that perform...a useful function, let's call it. To say I'm not shocked that SWIFT is vulnerable is an understatement.

Truth is, any vertical, "closed" purpose built system built before the late 2000s isn't secure, and I'll bet a lot after that aren't either. Computers connected to systems like this are considered unreachable even in cases where the machine also has Internet access, for example. Until a few years ago, that was a safe assumption. Systems in networks like these are trusted, their requests aren't validated because it's assumed that there's no way to generate the appropriate messages in a non-official manner.

It's very interesting that international wire transfer is such a trusting system. You send a wire request, and it's just like handing a bag of cash over to the other party with very few checks in place. Attacks on systems like this are going to gain in popularity, simply because they're easy lucrative targets.

Web 3.0 disruption bubble...

Uber, etc. are riding this disruption wave too -- basically, do an end run around regulations and build a business based on the fact that you can be cheaper than companies that need to follow the "old school rules." It reminds me of the dotcom boom where startup CEOs were saying the old rules no longer matter regarding profit & loss, sticky eyeballs were currency and they would make it up in volume.

I'm guessing, at least here in the US, that part of this love of disruption is the Libertarian leanings of many techies. Most people who call themselves libertarians think that any rule, regulation or government agency that sets rules is a roadblock to the free enterprise system and needs to be destroyed. I'm not a fan of regulation for the sake of regulation, but I do feel that a completely lawless "free market" will never work for everyone. It would be great for the business owners, but bad for consumers.

Question from a Murican...

What's a bank overdraft? It sounds like it's a little more than the "overdraft protection" we have on bank accounts. Indeed, it sounds like a massive line of credit.

Here, if you have overdraft protection, the bank either fronts you money for an enormous interest rate (but still less than bouncing a check) or transfers money from your savings if you have any. It's generally not a good thing to run your checking account in the negative for too long because the interest adds up. Is that not the case in the UK/Australia? When you get paid, do you just reduce the negative balance but forever owe to the bank?

Oracle's buying an IoT Cloud

Seems like Oracle's trying to build out a cloud with all the applications pre-written. I guess this makes sense, because most enterprise IT people I know are avoiding Oracle as much as they can these days. That means that their cloud is going to only sell to the Oracle True Believers out there, of which there are fewer as of late.

It's a good strategy, in that they will become the toll bridge for the IoT in sectors that they cover. Smart meters are a perfect target, because power companies are most likely dependent on Oracle's enterprise software stack.

It is a big shift for many IT folks

Think about the traditional split between development and systems work. Both have their share of very deep specialist knowledge and siloing, but it usually breaks down like this:

- Developers write code on their own machine or VM, package it up and send it to the systems guys to implement, not knowing or caring how the code operates on real (virtual) production hardware.

- Ops guys are typically developers of automation tools, and that's pretty much it. They focus on keeping the tower of messy stuff developers write functioning.

Now that traditional hardware is being abstracted away, it seems to me that these groups need to meet somewhere in the middle. There's going to be either less work for hardware or data center experts, or it will move to service providers who will squeeze salaries to make their margins work. Similarly, developers will have to learn a little bit about the systems their stuff has to run on to remain useful in the world of offshoring and H-1B replacements of staff. The salary squeeze is definitely happening at both ends, and cloud seems to be the driver. Developers aren't commanding massive salaries anymore for knowledge of a small set of web frameworks (except in startup-land) but developers with a broad base of knowledge will always do well. Similarly, the "EMC guy" or "Cisco guy" or "Windows Server guy" is seeing less of a premium for extremely narrow sets of skills.

I definitely see less of a role for deep specialists on the systems side with software-defined everything coming down the line for most environments. The thing that has to calm down is the hype around DevOps. There are so many tools, frameworks, orchestration layers, ALM products, etc, and so much breathless chatter about it that the core message sometimes gets lost.

Neat, but how useful is this?

I know Unisys has a big niche in airlines and government systems, but that's just it - it's a niche. I think the interesting thing is that they're giving up the proprietary hardware. I think IBM's the only one left building their own stuff from scratch to run a proprietary OS:

- NonStop is migrating to Intel

- HP Itanium hardware is nearly done, being replaced with RAS-able x86 boxes

- HP-UX and OpenVMS are being ported to Intel x86

I wonder how many people are going to actually pick this up and run with it. (I'm checking it out as I'm an obscure OS geek.) It's not like anyone is writing new greenfield Unisys applications anymore.

Azure needs to be explained better for IT pros

I'm an "IT Pro" as far as Microsoft is concerned -- I'm a systems engineer/architect who basically designs infrastructure requirements for new projects, automates stuff, builds things, and fixes broken things. I wear lots of hats, but I'm definitely not a "software developer" in the traditional sense of the word. It's the classic struggle played out in a new environment -- developers want to deploy on command to inexhaustible magic hardware resources, and the systems guys want to maintain some sort of order. I'm the one trying to pull our development managers away from the huge vat of vendor Kool-Aid and explaining to them that "cloud" doesn't mean you can just abandon any sort of operational discipline. I'm doing a huge Azure-based project design now, and it's a big learning curve to design a real-world, secure cloud system, but the developers are being told everything is push-button easy.

Microsoft specifically, and cloud vendors in general, need to do the following to bring "IT Pros" on board:

- Make systems-focused documentation available in parallel to developer-focused documentation. It's very frustrating having to find random blogs on how to do traditional infrastructure tasks like network plumbing, while the dev side is just told "all you need to do is push the Deploy to Azure button in Visual Studio."

- Describe in better terms how all the Azure services map to real world on-site systems. (I'm thinking of writing a book or at least a blog series on this, once I figure it all out, because no one has.)

- Start transitioning traditional sysadmins away from caring for servers to caring for millions of little pieces of code running "somewhere." That's a huge leap, and one some of my colleagues are having trouble making.

I think what Microsoft is doing is a good start. Especially in the crappy work environments that are commonplace, training is nonexistent, so you need at least reasonable free access to software and services if you expect people to come along for the ride.

Refreshingly honest

There is sometimes no getting around the fact that not all jobs are writing AI algorithms for Google self-driving cars, or designing the next iPhone. I've worked for a lot of organizations like that who maintain systems that simply need to _exist_ for critical things to continue working. It's boring, there's decades of legacy technology and software, and these jobs require people who can tune out the buzzwords and just keep the ship running.

I actually find this a refreshing change from ads that tout any or all of:

"fast paced" (80 hour weeks minimum)

"cutting edge" (developers dumping barely-working software to production, Framework Of the Month Club)

"collaborative environment" (anyone over 30 need not apply)

The DevOps fad...lots of fun!

It follows that DevOps is going to be the new fad technology to chase. We've spent the last 10 years building up the Social Mobile Agile 2.0 Bubble and have millions of apps whose back-ends need to be looked after. I think the concept is great - sysadmins should know a little about development, and developers should know way more than they do about how their products work in real world systems. What's going to cause people to lose the plot is the millions of tools, frameworks and "single panes of glass" cooked up by these new ops "innovators." I think a lot of this stuff is going to end up shelfware after the hangover wears off.

Question is what they will get...

It's probably the cynic in me talking again, but my experience with "infosec experts" has been pretty mixed. I assume they're looking for actual talent. My experiences have been that some security people are simply there for security theatre -- PowerPoint jockeys from consulting firms, PCI auditor box-tickers, and so on. I don't blame them, security is a very lucrative IT subspecialty that's very easy to ride along on without doing too much.

If they (and GCHQ and the CIA/NSA) are looking for real experts, that's going to be the tricky part. The real experts aren't cheap, and most of them don't want to work for a telecom company or government agency. Especially the CIA/NSA -- someone would really have to love their country to accept the low pay and invasive background checks required. Then again, government positions may be the only stable jobs left 10 years from now, who knows?

Not surprising

These aren't technical certifications per se, they're sales and marketing competencies. As in, this partner has been fed enough sales content and has enough experience to effectively sell Technology X. I think they're just not bothering to continue actively supporting non-Azure deployments of various technologies. After all, if a technology is available in Azure as a purchasable service, there's no reason for Microsoft to help channel partners sell it when they can collect the money directly.

The next few years are going to be interesting for Microsoft. It's very obvious that they're done selling one off software licenses by default. They definitely prefer the lock-in of permanent revenue streams renting capacity in Azure. Some companies will never fully migrate to the cloud, but the resistance is getting less and less each year. That's going to mean interesting times for hardware vendors as well, who will end up mostly selling to cloud providers.

It's the public version of the Ivy League ticket

Here in the US, we have an equivalent setup with the Ivy League universities. Thousands and thousands of students (and their parents) go to extreme lengths to get into these schools for one simple reason -- getting into and graduating from one is almost a guaranteed ticket to success. Either you will make connections with kids of some of the richest people in the country, and/or you will be recruited for incredibly lucrative positions in law, medicine, investment banking or management consulting. In particular, all the banks and white shoe consulting firms recruit exclusively from the Ivy League for the best positions. Wealthier parents will pay private school tuition fees from preschool on with the implicit promise that their kid will be qualified to get into the Ivy League later.

We also have a public higher education system (which I went through.) If you go to a good state university with good programs, and have a little bit of motivation, you'll do OK. The experience is a little different - I'd liken it to dealing with a state agency in many respects, but that teaches you something too. My private school graduate colleagues have told me that once you're in an elite institution, they basically make it very difficult to fail after that; you get tons of support. At the big state U. I went to, no one really cared if you passed or failed as they were dealing in volume.

The indian example of the IITs is a preview for what could happen in the near future as good jobs become more scarce. In India's case, the income inequality there means that getting into an IIT is like winning the lottery in terms of success; the alternative is a life of grinding poverty.

Proof that most companies have no clue about security

This is interesting because I assumed that law firms handling extremely sensitive offshore tax haven creations for the richest people in the world would be super-paranoid about security. But, it's not surprising -- every industry I've encountered that I've assumed is at least security-aware actually isn't.

It's a good lesson though -- never put anything Internet-facing anywhere near your internal network. These days, it's easy to host the public stuff in a public cloud so you can control the entry points more closely. Also, relying on third-party plugins and frameworks for core development can be dangerous if your admins aren't being diligent about patching every component as soon as the patches appear. Just last week we saw the issue with the left_pad JavaScript function being pulled -- it goes to show you how many developers are relying directly on third parties for core functionality, and in some cases not even bothering to take a local copy of the dependencies!

Time for a modern IT professional organization.

The root problem isn't the visa program itself - it's the loopholes that Infosys, Cognizant, IBM, HP, Accenture, Xerox and all the other outsourcers use. The company is sold an outsourcing contract where the outsourcer promises to take over the entire IT operation. All the "expensive" IT workers are sent to the outsourcer, who then swaps in replacement H-1B staff, and fires the former company IT guys after the replacements are trained. As part of the deal, the company gets to pull a "Pontias Pilate" and wash their hands of the workers with no direct involvement. The company can point to the outsourcer and say "We have no idea how they provide services to us, nor are we in a position to tell them how."

This is the loophole that needs to be closed. As it is, you're taking, say, a DBA or developer making $100K and simply swapping them with a $30K version. This is why the offshore houses snap up all the visas available. Any tech company that tries to buck that trend is going to get killed in the cost department, so I see why they do it. But, this is an example of an obvious unintended consequence based on lawmakers not knowing what's involved in technical work.

I think the only long term fix is to come up with an IT professional organization (not union) with some teeth and a loose set of practice standards. They can then go and lobby (read: bribe) Congress and get the loophole closed for everybody at once, so that no tech company has an unfair advantage.

Long live the generalist?

I don't think it's just storage. Like the article mentions, the dedicated, deep-knowledge server admin is going away as well. Part of this is automation -- tools like Chef/Puppet on the Linux side and PowerShell DSC on the Windows side are making it incredibly easy to stand up environments. The other part for the hardware and infrastructure nerds (like me!) is the cloud. I'm currently working on a project that's 100% in Azure, and it's a huge leap going from physical hypervisor hosts to hardware you can't see or touch. It's just as complex, but in a different way -- now you have to design your system to stand up to an environment that you don't control the downtime on, plus wade through all the marketing hype and figure out how things are actually accomplished.

I think the long term answer is to do everything you can to stay a generalist. I've worked almost exclusively for big companies that had the storage silo, the network silo and the server silo. Colleagues of mine have invested years of their lives learning the ins and outs of, say, VMWare or EMC or Citrix to the exclusion of all else. It's very easy to get trapped, because once you're the expert on a particular system everyone wants your knowledge...until they don't need it anymore!! My plan has been to get involved with a little bit of everything, and that has landed me in a systems architecture role. I do end user stuff, servers, storage, enough networking to survive, you name it. My next move is basically to become a platform-agnostic automation guru, because that's definitely where things are headed. Sysadmins for the most part will be taking care of thousands of machines and aren't going to be able to do it with manual changes.

Not sure if HR is the best choice of confidant...

At least here in the US, where there are very few worker protections, HR is not tasked with making sure you're happy. Their primary goal outside of basic payroll/benefits functions is to reduce the company's liability caused by their employees. I'd liken it to having to call the police to resolve a problem -- once the police are involved, the situation is typically so bad that you can't recover from it easily. Police are just going to sort it out the best they can, and someone will (figuratively) "go to jail" to resolve it. I've never had anyone I know who went to HR for a problem not regret it later. This is especailly true for some friends I've known in long-service government jobs where they're basically stuck with the same manager they've had a dispute with for their entire tenure.

I'd say the best choice, if you can manage to do so, is to find a new workplace. That's not an easy thing always -- I have a family and am not about to move across the country for a job that may or may not be stable, for example. When you stay somewhere you're miserable, everyone has to deal with it.

There's no doubt that stress in IT is real, and it takes many forms. Some workplaces are constantly in layoff mode and threatening the staff with that blunt weapon. Some work you to death. Some are just so backwards and clueless that it drives the clueful crazy. My personal way of dealing with it has been to continuously remind myself that it's only a job. You'd be surprised how many people forget that and let it eat them up inside!

High salaries? Likely not...

DevOps is a culture shift, but it's also a role shift. It's a way to allow a company to not pay for operations staff, while simultaneously allowing their developers to pump out releases faster than the traditional ops cycles would allow. It's true that traditional badly run IT operations groups are an impediment to getting anything done. However, DevOps' promise is allowing developers to safely roll stuff out. The reality is that people who understand _both_ coding and the systems their code runs on are very hard to find in the same person. I know developers who can't even take care of their own PCs, and I know systems admins (not very good ones) who can't throw together scripts to automate tasks.

Do I think it's a buzzword or fad? Partially...no doubt there are lots of high-dollar consultancies, books authored and conferences based on it. I guarantee there are tons of magic wand wavers out there selling their services to CIOs for massive sums. But -- as companies start either moving their stuff to public clouds or making their traditional data centers look more like public clouds, I think there will be less of a line between the pure developer who throws code over the wall and the pure sysadmin who mounts the blobs provided by developers on the appropriate server. There has to be some crossover. I just wish I didn't have to call myself a "DevOps Specialist" or provide my skills "as-a-service" to be heard.

Will there be high salaries? Not likely. Whether you're a "rockstar" dev or a "guru" systems guy, the long term trend is downward. There's offshoring, outsourcing, commoditization, the shift to public cloud, and all sorts of other factors. I don't think it's going to turn into a minimum wage job, but it's sure going to look different. People in the US and Europe who work for big companies are just going to be driving a team of thousands of random offshore people or brokering requests between cloud providers. People who work for small companies are just going to wear all the hats, all the time, for less money. That said, the short term payoff for being a PowerPoint jockey at one of the DevOps consultancies or writing yet another wrapper tool will be high until the dust settles down and business as usual commences.

"IT Security" firms are interesting

Every audit I've ever seen from one of these "IT Security" firms reads like it came from a protection racket. "Nice infrastructure you have there, it'd be a shame if something happened to it..." Speaking as someone in the trenches, I have been asked to review their "reports" after they preyed on the clueless CIO and made him pay ungodly sums for their services. The truth is that security on an open set of systems is complex. Execs and standards bodies love their little checklists, but you'll never be safe from the idiot employee who clicks the link in their email for a cat video and gets malware.

I would be quite happy replacing the security snake oil salesmen (and other snake oil salesmen) with a professional licensure environment for IT. Security breaches would be punishable by something other than losing your job, then doctoring your resume and moving on. Companies who refuse to listen to security advice would face more than just a year of free "credit monitoring" for every customer. Of course, this will never happen but I can dream...

That's pretty sad

The cynic in me wonders if the guy's lawyer is trying to gain a little anti-Uber publicity to distract people from the core issue. That said, mental illness is really sad. It must really suck to lose control of your brain.

One thing I'm hoping will start swinging the other direction is the removal of state support for the mentally ill in the US. It seems to me like the second it was no longer imperative that dangerous mentally ill people be locked up, and could be controlled by drugs, the reaction was to close down all the mental hospitals. I'm just not sure why a smaller mental health system with some inpatient components couldn't be put in place to be an alternative to cycling in and out of prison or homelessness. True, there was patient abuse back in the bad old days when anyone could be permanently committed for any abnormal behavior, but why not treat it like a disease?

PCs aren't dead in their niche

Traditional PC makers are in a bad spot. Most people are fine with tablets and phones for content consumption now, and PCs are lasting longer and longer these days because there's just so much processing power and speed with SSDs, etc.

That doesn't mean there is not a strong market for PCs within their segment. If manufacturers would stop focusing on trying to wring out margin on $300 garbage consumer PCs sold at Best Buy, they'd find there's money to be made at the high end. I'm personally considering replacing my home workstation after a long stretch, and I'm certainly willing to spend money on quality systems. Lenovo makes a nice line of workstations, along with capable midrange corporate PCs, but they also make a line of consumer junk.

These manufacturers would be fine if they abandoned the consumer market and aimed a little higher.

When in MBA school do they teach them this saves money?

It amazes me that outsourcers can continue pulling this same set of tricks over and over again. You would think businesses and government agencies would have caught on by now.

It's always more expensive in the long run, it usually results in lower levels of service, and people still continue to think it's the magic cure for all IT ills.

Is it already April 1?

Very funny guys, and it even uses the social media bubble meme of dropping the "e" from the end of the product name ("cleaner" becomes "cleanr", instant marketing genius; here's a $150K salary!) So if the cloud service powering this real time reality distortion field goes down, is there a local backup to at least filter out the "yuck" category? :-)

I never thought anything would top the dotcom bubble for sheer ridiculousness of startup executive personalities. I'm wrong! 24 year old CEOs with way too much money make for very entertaining stories.

I'm more worried about stability of society than displacement.

I'm a little concerned about what's going to happen if pretty much every middle class job gets eliminated. Mechanization of agriculture pushed people into industrial jobs. Automation of industry pushed people into corporate jobs. Automation and offshoring of corporate jobs is pushing the lower-end people into crappy service jobs. Unless the next step is for all of us to become international YouTube celebrities or something, the entire model is going to have to change. There just isn't another place to go this time around.

I've worked for big companies doing IT for almost 20 years now. Big companies used to have thousands of people paid middle class salaries to do things like answer correspondence, type memos, etc. when those things couldn't be automated. There are still a good number of jobs that involve taking an input stack of paperwork, performing some sort of process on it, and sending it to the next person in line. And people are paid decent money for that. People buy houses, cars, other toys, and have children based on the idea that they will have some way to support them. Your average megacorporation has a headquarters that can span multiple full size office buildings, and you can bet that not everyone is an IT wizard or executive.

So I'm not fearful of change; I'll adapt if I have to. I am worried that there will be no way to adapt and still have a comfortable life.

Contractor rates are insane, so this isn't surprising

Because of the way the accounting works out, companies happily spend multiples of a permanent employees' fully loaded cost on contractors. I work with people doing the exact same kind of work I am for 150 USD/hour -- or at least that's what their "consulting" company bills them out at. The big difference is that the company can just tell the contractor to disappear that day if they decide to. Firing permanent people in the US is very easy too, but it is still difficult and companies love to reduce difficulties like severance, etc.

It seems like contractors, at least the technical ones, get work on a lot more things, but the downside is the instability. Those $150/hr rates are nice, but you have to be constantly chasing them. Also, it's not family- or life-outside-of-work-friendly. Unless someone gets really lucky, getting top rates as a contractor requires travelling around the country constantly; again, I know someone who bills at crazy rates, but the downside is 40+ weeks of business travel a year.

I also wonder if this includes the PowerPoint jockeys from the various management consulting firms. The compensation system in that realm is another parallel reality compared to straight technical resources.

It cuts at both ends of the spectrum

As has been mentioned, bad sysadmins don't do anything differently from the way they did 20 years ago, and don't automate things as a general rule. That's the low end of the spectrum. At the other end are the wizards and greybeards of systems -- the "specialists." Both are being squeezed in this brave new world. Specialists have extreme domain-specific knowledge on a narrow range of products -- SANs, Cisco network gear, VMWare, management tools -- and contribute to the silos in enterprise IT. Vendors don't help either, making their products specifically hard to work with unless you invest time to gain that extreme level of knowledge.

I still think there's room for qualified generalists in the middle who would more easily be able to make the leap. I know a few bad sysadmins who are very worried. I also know a few wizards. For example, the Citrix wizard is getting a little worried now that Terminal Services is getting better and more client apps are HTML5 based. The Cisco savant is starting to see SDN encroaching on his world. I've always been kind of an end-to-end guy when it comes to sysadmin work, so hopefully I'll be able to make the move when and if it does come around. Who knows, it could all be a fad, but in this world of cost cutting and offshoring, I'm assuming it isn't.

It's relabelling but with a twist

Think of all the work required to get an older enterprisey three-tier application up and running in a big company on physical infrastructure:

- Architecture and design phase, all following billions of pages of "best practice" bought from some consulting firm (weeks)

- Hardware specification and procurement (often takes weeks/months)

- Data center planning (usually a couple weeks to secure a few U of rack space)

- Network planning (switches, switchports, VLAN assignments, IP address assignments, firewalls)

- Storage planning (LUNs required, backup strategy, fibre channel cards and zoning if you're real oldschool)

- DBA planning (sizing, backups, selection of software)

- OS and software licensing and procurement

- Hardware reception, rack and stack

- Network team configurations

- Storage configurations

- Bickering back and forth between network, storage, DBA and infrastructure teams during integration

- OS install

- DBA wizardry

- And finally, the enterprisey app install

The difference between this and virtualization is the ability to cut out the procurement phase assuming capacity exists. This is the VMWare virtual infrastructure phase, making server deployments less painful.

The next leap for older-school enterprises is rebuilding their apps to be more cloudy, using web services and the like. This is going to be the bigger leap that makes it easier to decouple from some of the siloed IT departments. Of course, the complexity doesn't go away, but it does get abstracted.

Interesting

Looking back on the Cold War era, it's pretty amazing to see facilities like this. The assumption that anyone important could get to them in time seems quite absurd. You would need to start moving everyone at the first sign of a potential launch. That, and it would have to be maintained 24/7 to be fully ready. I can't imagine how much that cost.

There was a very famous bunker in West Virginia that was decommissioned after the location was leaked, but it was built into the basement of a luxury mountain hotel. Getting even a few key people out of Washington DC and all the way across Virginia in the middle of a panic, even in military helicopters wouldn't seem to be possible to me.

Interesting times

Everyone loves to talk about US government corporate welfare, but China kind of takes it to a new level. We'll see how long it takes to go from "we want a chip fab and semiconductor manufacturer" to "People's Semiconductor buys Intel _and_ AMD on same day in $10 trillion mega-merger!" That would get around that "change of control" clause in AMD's x86 license.

The big difference seems to be that Chinese industry is much more aligned with state policy, which makes sense in their system. From an outsider looking in, it's pretty amazing how quickly resources are diverted to projects deemed critical. Very different from the US federal government being unable to channel highway refurbishment funds to avoid the occasional collapsing bridge...