Crossing the Chasm, or Career Paths in the Age of SaaS and the Cloud
I have what I think is an interesting observation going into what's hopefully the 2/3 part of my career...I'd be interested to hear people's experience or opinions on this.
In previous times, there was a pretty well-trodden path through the early careers of IT/sysadmin types...help desk, desktop support, some hybrid of support and sysadmin, then gradually responsible sysadmin duties. Along the way, you'd learn the fundamental skills required for the job and gain enough knowledge such that re-learning "new" stuff wasn't a huge pain. You'd also get more responsibility, better jobs and better pay as you got further away from direct support. I went through this route, and basically the only thing I had to do was volunteer to pick up extra duties, learn new stuff, maybe do a couple certification exams here and there, not be stupid, and be willing to learn.
Unfortunately, that was when everything was on-prem and companies had a full stack of software and hardware hosted in-house for employees to grow their careers on. What I'm seeing with SaaS, the cloud, and the outsourcing of everything to MSPs is a widening split between the people on the support side, and the super-high end DevOps type positions that a SaaS or cloud vendor would require. The chasm between basic support and higher-end systems engineering jobs seems to get bigger over time as more stuff ends up in a cloud, and some of the on-prem system admin work is also being pushed lower down the salary spectrum while the high end jobs stay the same or get even more lucrative. Making the leap over from one to the other has gotten much harder. If someone in house is just a support person, script-runner or portal-driver, they don't learn the basic sysadmin skills they would pick up on those transition jobs and can't cross the chasm.
My feeling is that losing that ability to just grow into higher-level roles is keeping people stuck in low-paying, high stress support jobs for way longer than they have to. I also feel that as on-prem sysadmin skills start to become less rewarded, a lot of people who have great skills and potential are being stranded at this lower end. For all the talk of cloud repatriation, that only works for companies that haven't closed their data centers and locked themselves into AWS or Azure yet. Convincing a company to stand up capacity in-house and hire qualified individuals to run it is a VERY hard sell now. Because of this chasm, we've lost a very large pipeline of individuals who have the skills to move up but don't have the opportunity. I see this a lot with mid-career individuals who don't have a software development mindset.
I'd love to know what people think about what we could do to fix it. My experience jumping from on-orem admin to a systems engineer type in a more DevOps focused organization was **not** fun at all, and I had experience with scripting, automation, and some programming. Getting involved in a cloud-focused dev project at a previous employer led to a lot of developers basically signalling they didn't want anyone from "the old guard" joining their little club. It also doesn't help that cloud (especially AWS) is 100% developer-focused and not welcoming to sysadmin types. I had to basically teach myself everything from a fundamental level on up because there are zero resources aimed at transitoning on-prem knowledge to cloud. The cloud vendors would prefer you just dump everything and buy PaaS from them.
What do you think? Is this skill gap overblown? Are there really not many companies moving to the cloud and I shouldn't care (I highly doubt this...)? I feel we've completely lost the plot on training on-prem sysadmins to work in a hybrid environment just because there are no good resources to train them. I think this is particularly timely after seeing Broadcom basically destroy VMWare for any on-prem hosting. Most places without any restrictions are just going to jump to cloud and leave a ton of people behind.