System administrators and IT operations pros might want to rethink their careers, because analyst firm IDC is predicting substantial drops in the number of people employed in such roles.
The firm this week published its first “Worldwide xOps Census and Forecast” – a study that predicts “a substantial shift in the responsibilities of IT professionals will occur over the next five years.”
“IT professionals in the most purely operational roles are facing a transition to a more technical or focused role that very often may involve some level of software development work,” the firm asserts.
What do we think? Is IDG full of it? Is the industry trending toward DevOps? I suppose there’s always the other options - hyper-specialize in a given technology, or move on to management. Or go start a goat farm or something.
Yes and no. The people that truly keep the lights on to critical systems I think are more insulated. I deal with active directory (and azure to an extent). I’m one of two engineers that are attuned to what is going on in AD in a 65k+ staffed company. I do other things than AD, but it needs care and feeding.
AD is going to stick around for a lot longer and may end up being in that cobol state where companies have it for critical things but there are few who truly understand how to work it.
Everyone else may end up in a DevOps-esque role. Then you have the scope of the industry too. I think this article overblows the premise it puts forth.
