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This kind of change has also impacted me. It shows up when I'm trying to give students advice about starting their careers, and I realize that the first jobs I

• bitL 8y ago
  I am worried about the latter aspect as well - in order to keep automation going, very advanced developers would have to be involved; if the whole "easy job" ecosystem disappears, there won't be any reasonable way to keep developers progressing, with best in a competition filling up the spots at "cognitive automators".
  • omgwtfbyobbq 8y ago
    A significant number of companies who can benefit from automation likely won't need to continue to automate indefinitely. I work in software development/automation and in my industry it's more about finding and configuring a framework that enables business users to configure software systems than about automating everything possible. Even relatively rote software development that involves embedding business logic into a software system is likely safe as long as the cost of continuing to develop that software is close to the cost of switching to some other framework. It's when the cost of development is much greater than the cost to try another framework out, or when a company wants to expand something and doing so on the development side would be cost prohibitive, that someone's job could be on the line.
  • gervase 8y ago
    In the absence of on-the-job experience/growth for less-experienced developers, it forces them back into more academic training programs. I personally think this is likely to lead to exacerbated "degree inflation", where MS degrees will be the new minimum expectation for these new "entry-level" (read, Tier 2+) jobs.
• Wohlf 8y ago
  Maybe we'll see a more apprenticeship type approach, where junior personnel are instead assigned to and trained by seniors. This would probably be a net good, but who knows how things will shake out.
  • normal_man 8y ago
    I mean this is already an acknowledged good approach. Companies don't want to make that investment though, hiring both a senior and a junior who won't be immediately productive, and keep chasing the mythical senior who will work for mid-level salary.
    • AYBABTME 8y ago
      A lot of companies hire interns and usually, the typical intern doesn't provide a ton of bottom line value. Aside from being good for the culture and mentorship practice for the more senior folks, they usually need a lot of handholding. They're basically doing paid apprenticeships, which tells me that companies _are_ okay with the concept of having apprentice type of training.
      • moftz 8y ago
        The whole internship thing for STEM careers is to onboard you early while you are still cheap. Even if you don't work for the company that you interned with, the progress is still there so on day 1 you aren't totally lost. No one wants to give a salary to someone or even spend the money on the hiring process that hasn't worked a day in their life because they have zero clue how well they get along in a work-environment vs. an academic one. From an HR and hiring manager viewpoint, even if you have a lot of experience with a certain tool or field but have no work experience, you are going to look a lot less desirable than someone that maybe has a little bit of experience in that field or with that tool but mostly has unrelated internships. There are lots of smart people out there that can't get along with anyone so they suffer in their career.
    • paulie_a 8y ago
      It's cute that companies think junior or seniors will be immediately productive. There is a ramp up period. Hell the first day is probably just paperwork. Then 3 months of getting integrated.
• Ruxbin1986 8y ago
  "So I think the apocalypse is double-bladed: while automation kicks a bunch of current workers out by making them immediately redundant, it also freezes out the next generation by removing entry level jobs and not really replacing them with anything equivalent." Agreed entirely. I would be surprised if we still have two-year technical degrees in a decade.
  • jac_no_k 8y ago
    I can't find the article any more but I think Toyota has it's engineers build a handful of cars by hand as part of it's kaizen process. This would act as entry point for next the next generation of engineers.
• whorleater 8y ago
  How many solid universities still have IT programs? At UIUC as of 2016, the IT program was nonexistent.
  • Zelmor 8y ago
    Europe does. ;)
    • whorleater 8y ago
      My bad, I should've clarified "IT" in the NA sense.
  • munin 8y ago
    Two points: first, even if "solid" universities are right to run away from this (and IMO they don't run away from it, they just move the IT program into the business school where you don't see it any more) there are still many other universities pumping out students into a dead career field, which should be concerning. Second, this is not just about IT programs. Computer science programs are impacted to. From the OP: > But instead of five backend developers and three ops people and a DBA to keep the lights on for your line-of-business app, now you maybe need two people total. All nine of those people would probably have been CS graduates, or at least many of the backend developers would be (and perhaps the DBA). Or they would be people that thought of themselves as "developers" and not "IT" for whatever that distinction is worth now.
    • geggam 8y ago
      Interviewing college graduates is depressing. No way the current education system will create people competent enough to keep this going
      • eldavido 8y ago
        Don't generalize. Are you interviewing graduates from the top 10-15 programs or lesser-tier? I think this is a big error people make. Some colleges are great. Others are horrible. It's very hard to say, "College is a waste" or "college is great".
• kdf83 8y ago
  Why does watching a bank of green lights waiting for one to turn red and do first level triage and analysis require ML, isn't this just a bunch of rules?
  • munin 8y ago
    I was over-simplifying to communicate the repetitive and dull nature of a job I'm very happy to no longer be doing. Really the game was more about "anomaly detection" and the sensor indicators/measurements were far more continuous than categorical, and their outputs had to be weighed against past experience and context of the monitored components.
  • Buttons840 8y ago
    Well, to start with, you have to use ML to train the computer vision system to recognize green and red lights. After that you update your resume with the ML experience you gained. :)
    • sgt101 8y ago
      I want to ask a serious question about the ML, but your answer is great! My experience of anomaly detection, even with deep networks, is that recognition of the important anomalies can be done for some of them which means that you can raise a big flag for those - but someone still needs to sift through everything else.
• JKCalhoun 8y ago
  Was watching David Bull talk about historical Japanese wood carving. He described how the introduction of the printing press to Japan killed the entry-level, apprenticeship positions in printing.
  • halbritt 8y ago
    Hello fellow David Bull fan.
• dleslie 8y ago
  What you're describing is _training_; and the act of training employees has long since gone out of vogue in western markets.
  • mac01021 8y ago
    Why train employees when you can pay just a little bit more and get pretrained ones?
    • mecameron 8y ago
      For when you can't find any more pretrained ones. Or to get someone for a lower salary and growing them that provides some loyalty and help solving the problem of not having enough pretrained ones in the first place.
  • org3432 8y ago
    I've worked in IT type jobs for over two decades, in some sense training would help, but to be frank the code and systems IT folks have built are of such low quality that it's better for everyone if they're handed over to more competent teams that can cost effectively maintain them long term.
    • wyclif 8y ago
      One reason why training is out of fashion is because of poaching. Companies don't want to invest a lot of money in training their employees only to have their closest competitors become the beneficiaries. That is a myopic view, to be sure, but it's a common one.
      • org3432 8y ago
        I think they do train people, it's just not formal. And the other issue is the companies have no clue what their doing most of the time anyway, so you just end up with IT people on the market will all sorts of nonsense opinions.
  • 8y ago
• ukoki 8y ago
  The pessimists' view is that automation will deprecate a heap of jobs in the tech industry that will never return. The optimists' view is that automation simply allows companies to do more stuff: things they couldn't afford to do before, and soon, things they have to do in order to stay competitive. For the optimists the number employed in the tech industry stays the same or increases, but the proportion of different roles changes (ie no more green light watchers).
  • 0xffff2 8y ago
    New college grads today aren't prepared to do anything more complex than watch the green lights. If we automate out all of the entry-level work, that means we have to train workers to a higher level before they enter the work force, which is clearly untenable with today's college tuition (at least in the US).
    • lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
      That's demonstrably false. Hell you can just look to startups created by new grads and dropouts to confirm your view point is inane. Today's college grads are better equipped to do a wider breath of work than any other time in history precisely because of the efficiency gains of automation.
      • HelloNurse 8y ago
        A minority exits college ready to run a significant startup, but the majority exits college ready to struggle finding a mediocre job. In other words, the automators and the automated away.
      • taude 8y ago
        Sure, there's outliers. But Not all college grads are capable of operating at that level. Which is why companies have a lot of regimented hiring practices and tests to filter out all those not making the cut. I've been on the college recruiting circuit to help my company hire, and I'm often severely disappointed by a good portion of those I meet. There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I think they're never going to want to stick around at my place. With this thought, I'm sort of in agreement with the commenter who said that we need college to train people at a higher level since there's almost not time on the job to ease into it.
• jpatokal 8y ago
  The one entry level IT job that is not going away is tech support. Sure, some parts of it can be outsourced, but beyond a certain point you need a person on-site to figure out why the Internet is broken. The Cloud companies are also hiring armies of support people, and it's a great way to kickstart your career in any of these companies while getting company provided training in the tech.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Turn your products into services, hardware ownership into leasing, and suddenly you don't need to offer tech support. SLAs will establish the new "laws of physics" for users, where failure is a binary state: either it works, or it doesn't. When it doesn't, someone will come in couple of hours/days, trash the broken black box, replace it with a working black box, and things will be back to normal. Of course, the service provider may need some amount of people figuring the failures out, but that amount is smaller than if customers had to debug their own problems, and is more susceptible to centralization, and to "fixing by replacing".
  • seanmmasters 8y ago
    Not with AWS Outposts, and you can bet Google and Microsoft won't be far behind.
• dfischer 8y ago
  Education innovation is definitely a massive problem to solve. Especially because of a weird mix of control and influence Universities have between dictating k-12, expected job fulfillment vs skill, and their government sanctioned student debt vehicle unavoidable by bankruptcy. We need a more decentralized education system top-down that isn't tightly coupled to the gov.
  • Ruxbin1986 8y ago
    Absolutely not. Look at colleges like Devry or University of Phoenix. Little to no regulation in curriculum, incredibly expensive, etc.