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.
I’m a long-time university sysadmin, an area where people traditionally are responsible for a long list of unrelated technologies and piles of projects because of perennial understaffing. Automation in recent years has meant that a small number of us can manage a lot more by getting rid of recurring tasks, but at the same time, my department has been almost constantly hiring for the last couple years, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing. I think articles like this tend to overgeneralize by treating all industries as the same. There are obviously changes underway, and sysadmin roles may look different over time, but they’ve been talking in conferences about this transition for a fair number of years now. In education at least, the outcome thus far of a more DevOps way of looking at things is that we just get handed more to do, but can maybe actually handle it instead of just adding it to the pile.