the ryan king

Blaise Pascal: “‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.'”

(Via Quotes of the Day.)

here are some pictures I took on the trip. this one is my favorite and I think you’ll like it too.

I’m back. I should have been home 3 hours ago. Could have been worse, I got to have some good conversation with a fellow passenger.

By the way, my mother’s having some surgery later today (7 Dec). Its nothing major and she should be out of the hospital within two days, but we all know that surgery itself is a risk, so please pray or do whatever it is you do for her. Thanks.

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.

I just listened to a great speech from PopTech. Check it out.