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A comment on Ask HN: Is cloud computing decimating platform/infrastructure engineering jobs?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Is cloud computing decimating platform/infrastruc... by curiousgeek on Saturday April 23, 2016 @08:36PM (#11558038)
The cloud providers are providing a lot of software as well: relational databases, other kinds of data stores, load balancers and so on. They also provide you an integrated ecosystem where these things work well together.

Correspondingly, you need far fewer engineers in your company to build and maintain custom software for such things. I am wondering whether in medium term - say the next 4 to 5 years - we are going to see an order of magnitude decrease in the number of jobs in this sector.

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Re:Ask HN: Is cloud computing decimating platform/infrastruc... by NetStrikeForce on Sunday April 24, 2016 @10:59AM (#11559871)
Most of those pieces of software can be configured as well (load balancing methods, DB parameters, etc).

I don't think we need less people, I think we need people to work differently. Also, an application needing of X amount of infrastructure persons will now need less than that, which frees resources to deploy more applications.

In a nutshell, I don't think we're going to lose jobs at all. I think the cloud is a fundamental pillar of the startup system, which is creating so many jobs that didn't exist before. Efficiency doesn't drive us to less jobs - it drives us to more jobs.

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