The Sky is falling

Gardner has just released a study stating thathalf of US IT operations jobs will vanish.

This article and headline are misleading in several ways:

  1. Most people are just going to see IT and think that half of IT jobs will be gone. Really they’re talking about IT operations- that subset of IT which includes data center and network technicians. Skill and paywise these are going to be the lower end of the IT sector- the grunt work, if you will.
  2. What they fail to point out is that losing these jobs could be a good thing. This will free up a large group of skilled, trained, intelligent workers do better and cooler things.
  3. Automating these systems could provide better service.
  4. [UPDATE 2004-12-07]: It seems that there logic goes like this: since the task will be more automateable, we’ll need less people to do what we’re doing, so people will lose jobs. They have just made an assumption that the amount of work (or output) we’re doing now won’t change. Others have had beliefs along these lines. People have always thought that if we could just get some help from technology with what we’re doing now, we could just sit back and relax. But that’s not the case. It means that we’ll able to do more. Automating IT tasks means that companies will be more efficient and do more work. More business tasks will be come IT-centric. More work will be done. In the long run the IT business is going to be growing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004 at 3:39 am.

One Response to “The Sky is falling”

  1. Paul M. Jones Says:
    December 3rd, 2004 at 12:05 am

    “What they fail to point out is that losing these jobs could be a good thing. This will free up a large group of skilled, trained, intelligent workers do better and cooler things.”

    Preach the Word, man. Spoken like a true dynamist (or Hayekian, whatever). :-)