Cloud Computing: The Making of the Next Dinosaurs

Most of the most practical programmers I know, have something in common - they’ve all worked in places, usually small shops or small University departments, where they’ve been responsible for both the software they were writing and the computers that software ran on.

Those people are more able to figure out what the real problems are, they don’t throw their hands up and say “must be a system problem”. They actually build things that work, and they can fix things that break.

But those skills, I believe, are about to be irrelevant. I’ve been reading many articles about how cloud computing is becoming the new norm.

I’m afraid it’s time to start focussing on those jobs that don’t involve a systems component, because I’m afraid that, like with COBOL, a small percentage of people will be able to stay in the few jobs that still need that skillset, and the rest of the people who have been doing that kind of work will have to find jobs doing something else.