If you are as old as me, you would have stood in line in front of a ‘Printer Room’ with your ID card to collect your print outs from Printer Admins aka people who thought they ruled the world.If you are slightly older, you would have traveled with Lift Operators who had a control over your life for those few minutes.
If you are as old as your father (hehehe) you might have thought a career as a Telegraph Operator would get you the fattest dowry and a gorgeous girl.
And if you have survived the medieval period, you might have come across wood cutters, armor smiths, hostlers, furriers, shoe polishers…
Simply, these jobs are extinct now. And jobs keep becoming extinct as I am typing this now. I am reading about Cloud Computing these days and I am beginning to think that my job - the IT Architect, would become extinct in another 5 years too.
For my non IT friends - IT Architects design how a group of machines and software can be put together to run a business. These are nerdy, un-proportionally obnoxious and talkative creatures. Some also possess god-like delusions. But they almost always have poor sex lives and pathetic pays.
Once my 8 year old Trisha tried to understand my job. To simplify the whole thing, I told her I help to sell IBM Software at the end. She elevated me to the level of the 'Ah Beng' who sits in shady places and sells (pirated)CDs. I said ‘elevated’ because I seriously suspect the Ah Beng makes more money than me.
Anyways….
Cloud Computing, yea. You might google it or YouTube it. You would find that industry is moving towards identifying architectural deployment patters and automating the provisioning of environments. Search the term PaaS, stands for Platform As a Service. In an elastic cloud environment, you don’t have to size your hardware for the load. Infinitely more hardware can be added on the fly as and when there is a demand. Its like building a bridge without an engineering need to calculate what kind of load it needs to handle. Any drunken monkey can do that, ain't it?
Hence I am saying, my cheese will be moved soon. The iron rice bowl of IT Architects are beginning to melt….
Why not join a SaaS or PaaS vendor. The key to building such a career would be to emerge yourself to both technical fluency combined with domain knowledge. We as a company and our CIO direction has been to move more to SaaS model because our CEO and Exec team does not value IT. Which I think is true in most companies. Running the business is more important that providing careers in IT. Lately I have been involved in integrating with such vendor APIs and reading about Cloud and SaaS etc.
ReplyDeleteRamesh, yea, even in this region, I am seeing SaaS being evaluated aggressively now. Very true - the business world doesnt value IT. And one becomes even more invisible and irrelevant if he doesn't speak the business lingo.
ReplyDeleteHence the IT roles are transforming - "X Solution Architect". X for the industry - Finance/Telecom/Energy etc. This year, i am into telcos, pushing IBM's IaaS/PaaS/SaaS. As technology keeps getting abstracted this way, whom the world need more would be business innovators and not pure IT technologists?
Some of this is just marketing - many of thes e thngs SaaS, Paas, and whatever the Gartner Acronymizer comes up with are all old wine poured into new bottles designed to sell marketings next big idea. Underneath it all, it is still the same old slog - someone still has to string the stuff together. Will there be fewer people doing it ? Possibly, and the roles will change.Is our rice bowl being taken away? Possibly, but look at Autocoder or Cobol from the 1960's for my view of that. Or 4th generation languages or more latterly component based development. All megatrends that have faded into obscurity.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that business does not value IT that much and that is the cross that IT industry has to bear - some of it is our fault for over promising and under delivering and we still really don't admit (unless to ourselves) that this stuff is hard and we are not always sure of what we are doing.
Interesting perspective, David. Reminds me of 'The Turk'. I agree that as of today, the cloud's auto provisioning still cant the deliver the magic the marketers are promising.
ReplyDeletePart of the reason is our complex n-tier distributed programming model. We ended up here to achieve scalability. Now that cloud will offer scalability, should we go back to monolithic or 2-tier programming models? That would make the cloud's job easier to privision also.
Bro, maybe extinct is such a hard word, better say it is transformed to a smarter architect :).
ReplyDeleteEven though the business people doesn't seem to value IT, but yet, they depends on it. running everything in a public cloud maybe not what the business want, so there we knows about private cloud. It's our 'next' job to decide what's best for the business.. do i sound ridiculous ? :P
Not at all Denny. I like the term you coined 'Smart Architecture'. I guess once we have done that, no one will need us anymore? hahha.
ReplyDeleteAnd i am also getting questions about the simplified programming models i mentioned above
In a cloud, no one will pay for the cpu based licenses. So I think, a smart architectue would just have 2 components. Back to basics - an appserver and a DB. Portal features would be default inside the app server. Beyond that, it will come in various flavours suiting the application nature - eg) workflow support. But its just one middleware.
Hence its rearchitecting all the middleware for this new operating system 'The Cloud OS'. So the cloud will be able to provision this environment easily. Something along those lines....