IT Careers – Page 2 – Righteous IT

Recently my pal Bill Schell and I were gassing on about the current and future state of IT employment, and he brought up the topic of IT jobs being “lost to the Cloud”. In other words, if we’re to believe in the marketing hype of the Cloud Computing revolution, a great deal of processing is going to move out of the direct control of the individual organizations where it is currently being done. One would expect IT jobs within those organizations that had previously been supporting that processing to disappear, or at least migrate over to the providers of the Cloud Computing resources.

I commented that the whole Cloud Computing story felt just like another turn in the epic cycle between centralized and decentralized computing. He and I had both lived through the end of the mainframe era, into “Open Systems” on user desktops, back into centralized computing with X terminals and other “thin clients”, back out onto the desktops again with the rise of extremely powerful, extremely low cost commodity hardware, and now we’re harnessing that commodity hardware into giant centralized clusters that we’re calling “Clouds”. It’s amazingly painful for the people whose jobs and lives are dislocated by these geologic shifts in computing practice, but the wheel keeps turning.

Bill brought up an economic argument for centralized computing that seems to crop up every time we’re heading back into the shift towards centralized computing. Essentially the argument is summarized as follows:

As the capital cost of computing power declines, support costs tend to predominate.
Centralized support costs less then decentralized support.
Therefore centralized computing models will ultimately win out.

If you believe this argument, by now we should have all embraced a centralized computing model. Yet instead we’ve seen this cycle between centralized and decentralized computing. What’s driving the cycle? It seems to me that there are other factors that work in opposition and keep the wheel turning.

First, it’s generally been a truism that centralized computing power costs more than decentralized computing. In other words, it’s more expensive to hook 64 processors and 128GB of RAM onto the same backplane than it is to purchase 64 uniprocessor machines each with 2GB of RAM. The Cloud Computing enthusiasts are promising to crack that problem by “loosely coupling” racks of inexpensive machines into a massive computing array. Though when “loose” is defined as Infiniband switch fabrics and the like, you’ll forgive me if I suspect they may be playing a little Three Card Monte with the numbers on the cost spreadsheets. The other issue to point out here is that if your “centralized” computing model is really just a rack of “decentralized” servers, you’re giving up some of the savings in support costs that the centralized computing model was supposed to provide.

Another issue that rises to the fore when you move to a centralized computing model is the cost to the organization to maintain their access to the centralized computing resource. One obvious cost area is basic “plumbing” like network access– how much is it going to cost you to get all the bandwidth you need (in both directions) at appropriately low latency? Similarly, when your compute power is decentralized it’s easier to hide environmental costs like power and cooling, as opposed to when all of those machines are racked up together in the same room. However, a less obvious cost is the cost of keeping the centralized computing resource up and available all the time, because now with all of your “eggs in one basket” as it were your entire business can be impacted by the same outage. “Five-nines” uptime is really, really expensive. Back when your eggs were spread out across multiple baskets, you didn’t necessarily care as much about the uptime of any single basket and the aggregate cost of keeping all the baskets available when needed was lower.

The centralized vs. decentralized cycle keeps turning because in any given computing epoch the costs of all of the above factors rise and fall. This leads IT folks to optimize one factor over another, which promotes shifts in computing strategy, and the wheel turns again.

Despite what the marketeers would have you believe, I don’t think the Cloud Computing model has proven itself to the point where there is a massive impact on the way mainstream business is doing IT. This may happen, but then again it may not. The IT job loss we’re seeing now has a lot more to do with the general problems in the world-wide economy than jobs being “lost to the Cloud”. But it’s worth remembering that massive changes in computing practice do happen on a regular basis, and IT workers need to be able to read the cycles and position themselves appropriately in the job market.

I always appreciate (and am in search of) tips for how to be a better sysadmin. I’ve never had the opportunity … to be in a large IT org. I think I miss out on a lot of learning opportunities by not being a part of a large IT org.

from a comment by “Joe” to “Queue Inversion Week“

This comment reflects an industry trend that I’ve been worrying about for a while now. Back in the 80’s when I was first learning to do IT Operations, it seemed like there were more opportunities to come up as a junior member of a larger IT organization and be mentored by the more senior members of the team. It’s not overstating the case to say that I wouldn’t appear to be the “expert” that I seem to be today without liberal application of the “clue bat” by those former co-workers (and thanks to all of you– some of you don’t even know how much you helped me).

These days, however, it seems like there are a lot more “one person shops” in the IT world. And a lot of IT workers are learning in a less structured way on their own– either on the job, or by fooling around with systems at home. When they get stuck, their only fallback may be Google. This has to lead to some less-than-optimal solutions and a lot of frustration and burn-out.

So if you’re a one person shop and you’re feeling the lack of mentoring, let me give you some suggestions for finding a support network.

Local User Groups

See if you can find a user group in your area. Aside from the fact that most local groups sponsor informative talks, they’re also a good way to “network” with other IT folks in your area. These are people you can call on when you get stuck on a problem. There’s also the pure “group therapy” aspect of being able to be in a room with people who are living with the same day-to-day problems that you are and understand your language without need of Star Trek technology translation devices.

Google can help you find groups in your area. Both SAGE and LOPSA also track local IT groups that are affiliated with those organizations.

If you can’t find an existing local group in your area, you might consider starting one. I’ve found LinkedIn to be helpful for finding other IT people in my geographic area and contacting them.

Mailing Lists and Internet Forums

I subscribe to several IT-related mailing lists with world-wide memberships. Some of the most active and useful mailing lists for getting questions answered seem to be the SAGE, LOPSA, and GIAC mailing lists, though there are membership costs and/or conference fees associated with getting access to these lists. Also, there’s nothing that says you can’t subscribe to the mailing lists for various local user groups, even if you’re not actually close enough to attend their meetings.

There are of course different Internet forums where you can post questions and where you might actually get questions answered occasionally. I haven’t done an exhaustive survey here, but I have found good Linux advice at the Ubuntu Forums and LinuxQuestions.org. If you have favorites, you might mention them in the comments section.

Live Mentoring

This one is scary for most people, but you might consider contacting somebody who you think is an “expert” and asking them out to coffee/beer/lunch/dinner. If they’re too busy, they’ll tell you. But if you don’t ask you’ll never know, and you might be missing out on a great opportunity.

You must understand that my expectation is that if somebody helps you in this way, you are morally obligated to help someone else in a similar fashion in the future. This is why I think you’ll find that most “experts” worth their salt are more than willing to extend this courtesy to you– somebody in their past provided them with guidance, and they’re just “paying back” by helping you.

Teaching Others

If my last idea was scary, this one will probably make you want to hide under a rock. But teaching others is a great way to motivate yourself to learn. I find that I don’t really master a subject until I have to organize my thoughts well enough to convey it to others.

Can’t locate anybody nearby to teach at? Start a blog and write down your expertise for others to read. Answer questions for some of the users on the Internet forums mentioned above. Submit articles to technical journals (as the former Technical Editor for Sys Admin Magazine, I can attest that most of these publications are absolutely desperate for content)– some of them even pay money for articles.

If you’ve taken a SANS course and obtained your GIAC certification, you may be eligible to become a SANS mentor. This can be an entre into becoming a SANS Instructor, and is therefore well worth pursuing.

In Conclusion

It’s unfortunate that there are so many folks out there without the built-in support network of working in a large IT organization. But if you search diligently, I think you may be able to find some other people in your area to network with and get guidance from. Remember that we all have different levels of expertise in different areas, so sometimes you’re the apprentice and sometimes you’re the “expert” (I’m constantly learning things from my students– yet another reason to teach others).

For the Senior IT folks who are reading this blog, I ask you to please make it a priority to reach out to the more junior members of our profession and help bring them along. Somebody did it for you, and now it’s your turn.