Comment by coliveira
16 hours ago
The end result of all this is that the percentage of people who know how to implement systems without AWS/Azure will be a single digit. From that point on, this will be the only "economic" way, it doesn't matter what the prices are.
It already is like that, but not because of the cloud. Those of us who begun with computers in the era of the command line were forced to learn the internals of operating systems, and many ended up turning this hobby into a job.
Youngsters nowadays start with very polished interfaces and smartphones, so even if the cloud wasn't there it would take them a decade to learn systems design on-the-job, which means it wouldn't happen anyway for most. The cloud nowadays mostly exists because of that dearth of system internals knowledge.
While there still are around people who are able to design from scratch and operate outside a cloud, these people tend to be quite expensive and many (most?) tend to work for the cloud companies themselves or SaaS businesses, which means there's a great mismatch between demand and supply of experienced system engineers, at least for the salaries that lower tier companies are willing to pay. And this is only going to get worse. Every year, many more experienced engineers are retiring than the noobs starting on the path of systems engineering.
That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.
They actually are abundantly available and many are looking for work. The volume of "enterprise IT" sysadmin labor dwarfs that of the population of "big tech" employees and cloud architects.
I've worked with many "enterprise IT" sysadmins (in healthcare, specifically). Some are very proficient generalists, but most (in my experience) are fluent in only their specific platforms, no different than the typical AWS engineer.
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Yeah, anyone who has >10 years experience with servers/backend dev has almost certainly managed dedicated infra.
> and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.
Part of what clouds are selling is experience. A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer", but it takes some serious years of experience to become a talented on prem sre. So it becomes an ouroboros: moving towards clouds makes it easier to move to the clouds.
> A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer",
If by useful you mean "useful at generating revenue for AWS or GCP" then sure, I agree.
These certificates and bootcamps are roughly equivalent to the Cisco CCNA certificate and training courses back in the 90's. That certificate existed to sell more Cisco gear - and Cisco outright admitted this at the time.
> A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer"
That is not true. It takes a lot more than a bootcamp to be useful in this space, unless your definition is to copy-paste some CDK without knowing what it does.
Moving towards the brothel makes it easier to get away from the brothel.
> The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.
But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.
Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)
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