IT Darwinism: IT Roles on a Extinction Path (EOL).

In today’s job market, hardly any of us can boast indispensability.  However, even then, there is old’ Darwinism at play.  Many technologies that have been EOL'd subsequently fold the jobs that depended upon them.  

For example, since the advent of the smartphone, demand for repairmen for cameras, radios, watches, and Video recorders have to be almost negligible.  

Jobs are not alone in their vulnerability. Entire businesses models are also at risk.  Just ask those who have invested in one hour photos, video rentals, or music stores, all have but disappeared in today's market.  Well, as it pains us to say, the IT community is not immune to this.  Wasabi Roll decided to flag the traditional roles that IT professionals have played that are either no more, or soon to be extinct.  So here we present the Eight with the ill Fate...

Adminasaurus

Back in the day, the System Administrator was the premier indispensible guru to keep your computing environment from falling apart. Performing the ever important troubleshooting, resource releases, patches, upgrades, and resource allocation, the system admin was the Mighty Mouse (Here he is, to save the day) of the ever confusing network environment.  However, today, you would be hard pressed to even find this role, let alone find someone that still has this title that hasn’t been in that role since 1990 and just hasn’t been noticed.   The reality is that Low-level administrator jobs will be tougher to come by, particularly at small and midsize firms, says Brian Finnegan, associate professor and faculty chair of IT at Peirce College in Philadelphia. While they won't disappear entirely, these tasks will migrate to cloud companies where the demands are higher and the competition stiffer.

Techiedactal

Remember the techie, the ever necessary guy that could fix almost anything from tape drives to graphics cards, well in today’s low priced, on line, hermetically sealed, solid state world, the techie is an endangered species.  Just ask Best Buy, who according to the Wall Street Journal reports that about 600 techies will be laid off in the retailer’s services division.  The days of the modular generic tower computer are slowly coming to a close.  People are less interested in how and more interested in that it works.  With features and abilities growing faster than form factor, the paradigm has shifted to usability rather than feasibility.

Data Center Man

Data Centers were almost an essential for every company that had to produce a sizeable payroll or had any formalized process to perform and in the center of it all was the Data Center Man.  The IT professional that made to company run smoothly, kept the disks spinning. However, with the advent of the cloud and virtualized servers, this role has appreciatively dropped in value. With deep knowledge of a particular type of hardware, coding language, or development methodology, these once-mighty creatures wore their expertise like a protective shell. Now they're being replaced in the evolutionary chain by flexible generalists with a broader skill set.

At Purdue University, IT people like this are called "server huggers," says CIO Gerry McCartney. "They've defined their job by the piece of equipment they maintain," he says. "That's a risky posture to have from a professional standpoint. I think there will be very little need to have local hardware-oriented technical knowledge."

Certificus Maximus

Remember those guys that were actually certified in a specific discipline   They would almost make sure everyone knew about it, short of wearing it on their forehead.  Certifications were product specific, such as Novell, NT, CheckPoint, Cisco, and Microsoft.  These professionals would Trail a long list of technical certifications behind them like a peacock tail.  However, justifiably so, for hours of toil would be spent on honing their skills on a given specific vendor offering.

However, when that vendor was bought out or just disappeared, all that effort drops faster than Facebook stock on opening day.  The credentialed professional still can be found in some obscure places that are still hiring for specifics, but it has been marginalized by IT pros with actual skills and experience, says Mike Meikle, CEO of the Hawkthorne Group.  Today’s success path has been defined by focusing your attention to creating your own intellectual property, such as learning a specific programming skill, or journal articles and presentations at industry conferences, advises Meikle.

Programmicus Freezedriedicus

Developers who cut their teeth on Cobol or Fortran are a dying breed, but they're not the only ones. IT pros who only hack code may quickly wind up on the wrong side of the evolutionary divide.  Many coders, like their cousins’ Certificus Maximus, have only stuck to one specific language; hence, live by the code, die by the code.  A good example is Flash programmers, or Visual Basic, the list is exhausting.

If you’re planning to be a coder in life, plan it a way that will afford some flexibility in what you code, i.e., follow the path of the software engineer.  This way, you understand the constructs of software development that are independent on the specific software vernacular you follow.  In addition, coders and script junkies need to also be integrators of business logic, cloud tools, and more, or they'll join the ranks of mainframers who are becoming extinct," he says.

CromagnoWAN

Even back in the day, the WAN guy was the go to for your telecommunications, broadband connectivity, or just access to the internet.  Today with blank-As a Service, almost all but the role itself has been outsourced, transplanted, colo’d, clouded, you name it, annnnnd it’s gone.  The need for this role has been subsumed by the carrier’s themselves.  Before, their responses were either a 800 number or a box of sand for you to pound, but today, the more progressive carriers have embraced the responsibility of 5 9s more seriously than a Marketing slogan.  These professionals have found respite in the security profession, for this is an area of exposure, i.e., where your corporate data ventures beyond the realm of the corporate nest.

Designasaur

As much to our surprise, the Web Designer has seen its day with all the automated templates out there.  No longer is it mandatory to have a black belt in Flash, just ask Apple (discontinued support for it last year).  HTML coding is not gone, but the need to code natively to get the effect you want is.  Thousands of companies have found not only do their websites not need to be their end all representation on the web, but some dispense with the web site all together with representations through other more nimble means, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc… This way, less skill is required to have a presence on the web and messages can be changed on the fly with little to no expense.

Projectus Ejecticus

Project Managers was a thriving career back in the day where behemoth project were on tap.  ERP, Y2K, Financials, Enterprise Networks, Active Directory (hah, yes, if you ever did one of these you know why we included this), et. al.  Now this is not saying that they are not needed, but that they are a casualty of economy.  The old adage, 

“For those you can’t do, Teach.  And those who can’t teach, Administrate” 

not only speaks truth, but inadvertently derived a pecking order of value to businesses.  And if Aerospace organizations have taught us anything, is that during layoffs, the first to go is the Project Manager.  So regardless whether there is a definite need for this role, it’s not there.  Many organizations look to their project leads to pick up this role.

Source(s):

http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/68348/the-9-most-endangered-species-in-it-204556#slide1

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 21 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

For more information, contact Rick at (800) 399-6085