CodeStar – Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Applications on AWS

Re:CodeStar – Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Application... by andrewstuart2 on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @02:18PM (#14150270)

Those future prospects have looked different for a while, though obviously prophecy is infamously not a strength for us time-bound creatures. Change is inevitable, and especially so in the accelerated, automated world of IT. There's going to be a long tail of people unwilling to make changes (and that tail may never reach zero), but Ops as it used to exist is going to have to change, just as it did when VM usage supplanted bare metal, or when we realized that mainframes couldn't offer the performance necessary for today's scale.

Really, if you're not okay with your job description evolving substantially every 5-10 years, then a career IT is going to be a source of a lot of stress for you.

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Re:CodeStar – Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Application... by AlexB138 on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @02:31PM (#14150401)

Oh, you're preaching to the choir, friend. I very intentionally try to stay with modern trends, and evangelize to my fellow Ops people to do the same in order to continue providing value. The job description changes almost year to year anymore, and I'm fine with that. The source of my concern, which is maybe the wrong word, is that tooling is becoming so great that it's starting to look like I may not be needed on the bleeding edge at all!

I love this stuff. I deeply enjoy watching technology develop and become more efficient. This feeling is something akin to watching your kid drive off to college: I'm probably not needed as much anymore, but I'm pretty excited to see how far it has all come. That doesn't mean there isn't a selfish pang of nostalgia for how things once were (and a little bit of existential fear for my future financial wellbeing).

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Re:CodeStar – Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Application... by andrewstuart2 on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @02:45PM (#14150551)

Yeah, I didn't necessarily mean you you; just general advice to anybody in IT. :-)

> it's starting to look like I may not be needed on the bleeding edge at all.

If it's any consolation I'm pretty sure this has been a theme of worry for hundreds of years, if not since the beginning of technology. Thankfully humans are extraordinarily adaptable (and bad at future prediction) so a combination of evolving our skills and failed promises means there's probably going to be a lot of work for us to do for a very long time.

> I'm probably not needed as much anymore.

I think this too is just part of successfully doing your job. And getting old. Hopefully you get to move on to new things as you hand off or automate the old. And then someday you realize that the twenty/thirty-somethings are really sharp and maybe woodworking ain't so bad after all. :-p

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Re:CodeStar – Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Application... by whack on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @02:39PM (#14150492)

Kudos for honestly acknowledging your insecurities, and not angrily lashing out at Amazon. If you really feel that DevOps is a dead-end career choice, I hope you consider a lateral move to a different ladder, such as the SW-Dev ladder. As someone who made a similar transition a few years ago, I know how scary and difficult it must seem, and how much it hurts to go from a senior role to a junior role. But speaking as someone who's now a few years into my new role, I cannot recommend it highly enough. The long term benefits easily outweigh any short term switching costs.

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