The decade of the developer?

This article claims that we’re entering the decade of the developer.  I don’t know if that’s going to be true, but I’ve said before that changes to our industry, especially cloud computing, is making systems knowledge and Enterprise I.T. skills irrelevant.

During the boom in the early 2001, I knew people here in Austin, Texas that were making $100K/year and up without a college education and with no formal training - because they had manage to acquire IT skills, experience, and had negotiated well for salaries in the past.

Many of those people wondered after the boom why they couldn’t find jobs anymore.

I remember back when everyone who was serious about IT had to have a data center manager to handle the HVAC and the raised floor machine rooms.  I remember when people started talking about colocation facilities, and those data center managers were complaining about how with colos, you would lose control of where your data lived, so no one would ever do that.

Some of those data center managers managed to get work at the colo facilities or at some of the few big companies that still had their own machine rooms.  Some of them are managing fast food restaurants now.

I hear IT managers and Sysadmins talking now about how no one would ever move to the cloud because they wouldn’t want to lose control of their data.   I wonder how many of those people will end up in fast food soon.

And it may well be true that this coming decade will be the year of the developer - as between the App Stores and the App Engines, maybe the barriers between developers and consumers has become so low that the sky is the limit.  Being a developer myself, that would be cool.

But I wonder, if that happens, how long it might last…