{ 2006 08 04 }

Automation and offshoring could spell endgame for many sysadmins.

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IT positions previously thought safe are now under threat due to advances that will allow servers to be based in the U.S. and the admin overseas.

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For a while there, working in IT was actually fun. The Golden Age started in the late 1980’s, when personal computers and local area networks started to work their way into corporations and extended through the internet boom of the late 1990’s. The Y2K scare and the bust of the speculative internet stock bubble was the death knell of this Golden Age.

During this Golden Age, IT had a craft aesthetic, with highly skilled, highly paid enthusiasts crafting and maintaining high-custom systems designed to produce significant competitive advantage for the host business.

This craft aesthetic is gone. IT has become industrialized. Anyone who has done a recent help-desk gig understands how Taylorism, the industrial engineering discipline that shaped the factory floor, is being applied in modern-day help-desk call centers.

Large data center aggregators and outsourcing companies are gobbling up IT jobs, especially in software design and engineering, but now in systems administration as well.

Will this outsourcing result in competitive advantage for the businesses that undertake it? I think the jury is out on that one. Service provided by tiered, regimented support systems doesn’t seem to work very well regardless of what continent the employees are located in or what they are being paid. See my post about Dell here. Ask anyone who has ever tried to get a problem solved using helpdesk support provided by EDS, Acxiom, Accenture, or any of the other outsourcing/aggregation companies. The experience is almost uniformly tedious, frustrating, and time-consuming. The original problem goes largely unsolved, and often new problems are introduced by the troubleshooting procedures themselves.

The only people who seem to be pleased with these outsourcing deals are the empty suits that set them up. It’s the customers and customer-facing employees stuck with shitty service and systems who suffer the consequences of these decisions. And of course, if you annoy customers enough, they will take the hint and go away.

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Posted by rswitzer on Friday, August 4th, 2006, at 11:56 am, and filed under Corporate Culture.

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