Life in the IT fun house

For IT professionals, working in IT during the past few years has been a frightening whiplash tour through a carnival fun house. In the foyer of this (not so fun) fun house -- known as the 2001 Room -- the gag is simple: A rug is pulled out from under those fortunate enough to be standing, while others tumble down a dark chute, passing flashing neon signs that read “layoffs” and “consolidation.” In the background, the cacophony of late-night conference calls to Bangalore blares over loudspeakers.

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As the new year approaches, expect the wild ride to continue, but also look forward to a little light mixed in with the darkness. Within a single 24-hour period, two pieces of news about the future of careers in IT crossed my desk. The first came from Gartner, stating that as many as 50 percent of IT operations jobs in the United States could disappear during the next twenty years as automation of IT functions progresses. Then, just as I was considering a return to my brief career in pizza delivery, I got a press release from Foote Partners -- an IT workforce research company -- announcing a new study noting that certain tech skills are in higher demand than ever and that pay is rising, primarily because of staff retention concerns, disappointments with offshoring, and stiffer competition for IT consulting talent.

What to make of these two apparently contradictory reports? The ultimate message, I think, is that you can still do a lot worse than a career in IT. The challenges may change, but demand for IT talent never ends.

As new technologies eliminate the need for human intervention, emerging technologies quickly take up the operational slack. In the earliest days of the Web, no load balancers were available, so network administrators improvised with solutions such as round-robin DNS that required lots of manual attention. When load-balancing solutions emerged, that issue disappeared, but then along came the demand to secure e-commerce and rich media. As industry analysts endlessly chant, SOA (service-oriented architecture) might be the ultimate solution, but someone still has to build the pieces of the puzzle and make it all work. When (or if) IT reaches SOA nirvana, I’m sure new challenges will spring up like hydras. I don’t know exactly what they will be -- I just know they will be there.

I think about how the lean-and-mean IT team operates at InfoWorld. As have many IT organizations, we went through a period of difficult downsizing, but the transition to leanness forced our team to focus with greater intensity on our most important initiatives and functions. We ultimately outsourced help desk, messaging, and SFA functions, but plenty of hard stuff was left to keep everyone fully occupied. Whenever our base operations become streamlined, new business opportunities emerge and we architect new solutions on top of the existing, stable infrastructure.

In a larger sense, two very specific trends point to the continuing need for skilled IT professionals. First, the continuing elevation of open source components in the enterprise is a subtle but important acknowledgement of the need for architectural skill in assembling custom solutions from parts. The success of methodologies, such as extreme programming, that pit together business and IT -- versus disappointing, disjointed offshoring arrangements -- suggests that in-house, on-site IT work will always be essential to core business activities. Whatever the analysts are saying this week, IT is here to stay.