My Job Went to the Cloud

In my post Be the Automator I discussed the inevitability of automation in the software profession, and the need to embrace this automation lest you be automated.

I read a thought-provoking post by Forrest Brazeal recently called The Creeping IT Apocalypse that discusses the specter of The Cloud, in particular...

It’s not that these tools have democratized IT or software development, exactly. Rather, they’ve enabled technical work to be done by a vastly smaller absolute number of people.

Companies still need tech-savvy people, of course, just like factories need people on the floor. 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. Those two people make great money, they’re plenty busy, and they have lots of technical challenges to solve. But they’re not managing a database cluster or babysitting a build server or writing giant stored procedures to do some non-differentiated task, like OCR on insurance forms. The cloud provider can do that (and is adding more capabilities all the time).

As Forrest points out, this is not the “my job went to India” type of fear. Instead of someone cheaper doing your job in a foreign country, the job disappears from the human labor force, to be done by a server farm in rural Washington.

I can say in my experiences inside of big enterprise IT organizations, the number of people doing repetitive, mechanistic, tedious jobs—jobs that should not be done by anyone—is staggering.

The economy will take a small dip, or your department will get re-orged, and you will lose that job as an operations engineer on a legacy SaaS product. You’ll look around for a similar job in your area and discover that nobody is hiring people anymore whose skill set is delivering a worse version of what AWS’s engineers can do for a fraction of the cost

Even the big, slow companies that are dragging their feet on cloud adoption will eventually figure this stuff out, because all their competitors are figuring it out. Dark clouds are on the horizon.