[virvar]

I think there has been a steady reduction in the required IT personal needed to do a lot of things. Need a web-page/web-store? You buy a standard product for almost no money, and you don’t really need anyone to run it for you. 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support.

At the same time we’ve come up with a bunch of new stuff which gave those engineers new jobs.

I do see some reduction in office workers by automation. We still haven’t succeeded with getting non coders to do RPA development for their repetitive tasks, but the tools are getting better and better and our workers are getting more and more tech savvy. In a decade every new hire will have had programming in school, like they have had math today. They may not be experts, but they’ll be able to do a lot of the things we still need developers to do, while primary being there to do whatever business logic they do.

But I’m not too worried, we moved all of our service to virtual a decade ago and are now moving more and more into places like Azure, and it hasn’t reduced the need for sysops engineers. If anything it’s only increased the requirements for them. In the late 90ies you could hire any computer nerdy kid to operate your servers, and you’d probably be alright, today you’ll want someone who really knows what they are doing within whatever complex setup you have.

The same will be true for developers to some extend, but I do think we’ll continue the trend where you’ll need to be actually specialised at something to be really useful. If virtual reality becomes the new smartphone, you’ll have two decades of gold rush there, and that’s not likely to be the last thing that changes our lives with entirely new tech.

[rsynnott]

> 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support.

25 years ago, yes, but white-label hosted web store things were around in the early noughties. I think there were even a few in the late 90s, but those weren't very good.