The working dead: IT jobs bound for extinction

Rapid shifts in technologies—and evolving business needs—make career reinvention a matter of survival in the IT industry

The IT industry has seen many such waves where the "next big thing" turned out to be smaller and shorter-lived than anyone expected, thanks to rapid shifts in technology. Back then, the internet was the big game changer. Today, automation, artificial intelligence, and as a service are causing some jobs to disappear and others to radically change form.

Here’s a look at the kinds of tech jobs even some of today’s hottest, like developers and data scientists that could one day find themselves on the digital scrap heap and how you can avoid that dead end...

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They're not wrong. IT is blue collar now, and stagnating your skillsets once you're comfortable isn't good for job security

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I'm a computer operator for $Company. :sob:

It is true, there are very few of us.

Listen to me now.

Cloud will be an unprecedented disaster in privacy and centralization & control of information.

Also, my goodness this writer is repetetive.

"X Things that Y" Headlines over and over. I'm beginning to think he's pushing an agenda/is paid very well to write such things.

This is true. It comes across as more of anecdotal opinions than anything else. The tech industry changes with changes in technology is nothing new, but I fail to see any IT job go "extinct" for any reason mentions in that piece. Admin jobs for example will not shift to the cloud, they will take on some aspects of cloud computing and will remain primarily on premises. It doesnt even change the nature of the job except your not dealing with physical equipment. At Catsay points out its disaster central for information control, and no organisation will move to the cloud for anything remotely important. ( the smart ones anyway)

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Businesses have no concern pn user privacy, jisg security. We are doing research on going full aws instead of spending 1.5 million on a new San and esxi cluster. Our documentation for auditors doesn't ask about user privacy concerns, only if the data is secure and what our disaster recovery plans are. Many other things too, but you get the idea.

This is a very subjective and your opinion on this will vary depending on the sector you work in. I've worked in IT for over 17 years, the past 4 have mostly been with companies in the fortune 500. In that regard the statement is mostly true and they are all pushing into Cloud hard. This is a current trend because at the moment no company can build their own data-centre cheaper than AWS, Azure, IBM, Google or Oracle will host it for them*

Some systems will of course remain on-prem but few start-ups these days will have anything on-prem apart from their laptops etc.

*I am not yet convinced any of the big cloud players are actually making any profit from the cloud as they massage their figures, in which case once they have a sizable chunk of an enterprise and the current agreements expire I anticpate price-rises which may see a drift back to on-prem.

Companies like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are basically betting that in 10 years if they are not successful in the cloud they will disapear or become small niche players. Hence the attractive pricing and big discounts to large corps as they compete with each other.

I don't see IT jobs going extinct, but they will definitely die off.

I also kind of wonder if it will be a generational thing. A lot of the IT departments I have seen are largely flawed because the people at the top of the company have no idea what a computer is, let alone how to use one. So the funding is always screwed up and the staff is not much better off.

As the older people retire, and the younger (more computer savvy) people take over, I wonder if we will see some sort of rebirth of the IT industry.

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