Cloud To Create 14 Million Jobs? Not So Much 264
jfruh writes "Did you hear about the study from Microsoft and IDC (PDF), declaring that adoption of cloud technologies would create 14 million jobs? Well, don't believe the hype. The study posts that, once small and medium business can use cloud products to just eliminate their IT department, they'll use those savings to hire people for their core business. It's a dubious proposition, and one that wouldn't be good news for IT workers even if things do play out that way."
horse manure gatherers out of jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
The revolution of automotive transport put a lot of horse dung collectors out of work too. Society should advance. Period. That that means some jobs are erased is a good thing. Whenever jobs are erased, it represents a freeing of human minds to focus on even more productive tasks.
Re:Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
The IT monkeys will still be around and needed to keep your PC running, it's the actual skilled IT that will be losing work.
Oh brother (Score:4, Insightful)
When are we going to accept that technology SHOULD be used to eliminate jobs and create more free time for more people? We need a SOCIAL change, urgently. Work shouldn't always be about moving wealth upwards while we scramble around in a "Hunger Games"-type society.
Isn't that the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the point of the cloud to move all these services to central locations where they are managed by fewer people?
Sure.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once we outsource the call centers we will hire more technicians.
Once we use all the oil we will invent something else.
I have prime swampland for sale in the Sahara too.
We have to get use to the fact that not all people will be producers in our society and that percentage of non producers will continue to increase. Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life? This is the future we wanted, where things are becoming more automated and peoples lives become easier. Is it really making anything easier. I would say no until we have a sea change in our socioeconomic views.
Re:Sounds good (Score:0, Insightful)
Why wouldn't the actual skilled IT people go work for the cloud service providers, again?
I'd much rather work for Google in one of their data centers than for a company being the "windows is broke, tell the customer to reboot," guy.
Re:Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
More likely to go into bonuses than hiring (Score:5, Insightful)
The study posts that, once small and medium business can use cloud products to just eliminate their IT department, they'll use those savings to hire people for their core business.
Or they'll just put it towards profits and big bonuses for the CEO and senior staff, creating no jobs at all.
Re:Oh brother (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that we still use jobs, income, and money as a means for distributing food, health care, and other things necessary for life. It'd be great if technology meant more free time, but still enough income to support an average quality of life, but that's not yet the case.
Re:Sure.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life?
Yes, the folks in charge want the 3rd world model, or the roman empire right before the fall model, where a couple people own everything, and everyone else is in extreme poverty.
It is called progress (Score:4, Insightful)
It will create 14 million jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
But they'll be in China and India.
Still need services (Score:3, Insightful)
Still need security, Still need a networking staff, what you wont need is the DBAs, the active directory guys, but networking, hardware etc... they will be needed. If the internet doesn't work your cloud isn't going to do you much good.
Re:Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
Re:Reallocation (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. If there were no benefits to moving to the cloud, because the same resources were needed, then these cloud service providers couldn't lower costs much.
The end result will be less IT employed and worse SLAs for companies. Instead of a single outage affecting one company, it will affect many.
Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I saw a bunch of freed people in front of the unemployment office just the other day. Thought about stopping to tell them how lucky they are, but they looked kind of angry.
Re:Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Why wouldn't the actual skilled IT people go work for the cloud service providers, again?
You can't insert a profitable intermediary in between the same IT people and the old company without cutting jobs somehow. Supposedly centralization will result in fewer people doing more work, so less employees allow a layer of profitable intermediaries.
So you'll have 10 former IT guys and 3 jobs. The other 7, well there's always soylent green. Oh well.
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
The revolution of automotive transport put a lot of horse dung collectors out of work too. Society should advance. Period. That that means some jobs are erased is a good thing.
I don't know if anyone (except RIAA) is arguing against that. But I am sick and tired of them claiming that this is done to improve economy and that they are gonna save lots of money and hire lots of people. That part is bullshit -- they are going to sit on the money and maybe hand out small dividents. If they needed "core" hires, they would have already made these hires. Few companies are making hiring decisions based on whether they currently have any cash available.
Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
In fairness, pumping gas *is* moderately more pleasant than shoveling horse manure.
Adapt or Die (Score:5, Insightful)
I say bring it on.
The cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
I've very recently been doing some digging into "the cloud" as requested by my superiors. All marketing/tech literature that I find from Microsoft is aimed towards entities that cannot afford proper admins to run their infrastructure or entities that regularly encounter huge peak demand. It also gives the entity the flexibility to suddenly scale up if they need more resources for a corner case, without the large capital investment required for in-house infrastructure.
Everything that I was read, listened to, or watched from MS has been quite level-headed in which cases to use the cloud.
I haven't had time to RTFA as the end of the day nears and I'm working on something else, but I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT.
Re:Sounds good (Score:2, Insightful)
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
I view your assumption that the cloud would be progress with amusement. I'm making popcorn.
Re:Sounds good (Score:4, Insightful)
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
I think you forgot to include that one or two of them will come back to the company as contractors when the cloud doesn't prove to be as amazing as first described in the sales pitch. Once the bugs start comng out and problems arise, a few of them will be hired back (probably at much higher rates than they originally worked) to solve the issues that are coming up so that the company can continue to operate "business as usual".
As soon as you hear the phrase "create jobs"... (Score:5, Insightful)
...you might as well walk away. What follows is always bullshit.
Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
That is only true if society is allowed to adjust to the new conditions.
Yes, being more efficient means, we should be able to use that human capital to engage in new industries or reduce the work in current industries.
For example, lets say the cloud is amazing and we end up with huge numbers of unemployed IT workers. Theoretically, we should be able to take these workers and do one of two things
1. We reduce the work load in existing jobs. So for example, we end up with more teachers, lawyers, nurses, accountants... and the workload in those industries drops. We might end up with people working only 20 hours a week in such cases as the current jobs are redistributed. Wonderful stuff. That is how we've been able to achieve more leisure time.
2. The new labor is allocated to new fields. So maybe these unemployed IT workers become solar panel designers or something.
Things are always the same... until they're different
.
I believe 2 is much less likely to be a driver of mass jobs. While we will most certainly have more inventions and new fields, they will likely not be mass employers. Most likely, they will employ a few highly skilled designers. Anything else will be highly automated. I don't for example think the green revolution will generate the kinds of jobs we used to see in the old industrial age.
So we're left with 1. The problem is our society will not let this happen. For one, everyone is scared of deflation... and well... reduced work hours might very well mean less money in each person's pocket... so deflation. Special interests also hate egalitarianism. How would lawyers or doctors or public sector workers feel, if they earned no more than the average person? They are used to earning more than the average person. So they are unlikely to want to give up their position of privilege.
So while theoretically, society is always better off via efficiency, I wouldn't be so quick to simply dismiss concerns.
We do not live in any kind of a free market where such things can self-adjust.
More than likely, we'll see the special interests continue to try and hold onto their positions of privilege and refuse to redistribute the workload to their fellow citizens. This results in mass unemployment while the special interests cling to power. They also won't accept levels of taxation that would allow the government to redistribute work to everyone.
Hey, isn't this happening in Europe as we speak?
Not to mention the huge unemployment in the US.
It's great to talk about the benefits of the free market. But you should realize we don't live in one... and the results can be catastrophic if you simply apply free market ideas to systems which have little to do with a free market.
While you dismiss everything and say society should advance... I certainly don't see it as a positive thing if society starts having mass unemployment or plunging into mass deficits collapsing economies and social unrest.
Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Labor-saving technologies are only viable in the market if they ultimately eliminate more human labor than they create. New technologies, apart from entertainment applications, *always* eliminate jobs in the long run. Either that or they don't get adopted.
Eliminating jobs is their primary purpose. Promising that they will create jobs is a direct lie intended to win the hearts and minds of the very people who will be put out of work.
Eliminating jobs is a *good* purpose. If the machines do our work for us, then we don't have to. Of course, there are economic consequences, especial since traditional capitalistic values don't work well in an environment with a very high percentage of automated labor. However, these are secondary concerns to the advancement of humanity.
Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
In fairness, pumping gas *is* moderately more pleasant than shoveling horse manure.
No it's not. Pumping gas involves cars, fumes, customers, gas pumps, managers, bad hours, scraping windshields, and weather (possibly even snow shovelling). Scooping manure is considerably simpler. Some people even prefer the aroma of manure to that of petroleum distillates (count me in there).
On the other hand, fresh cow pies are disgusting.
Re:Sounds good (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they won't.
You'll still need that skilled person around, and in fact, they'll have to possess more skills than the "skilled" person they'll be hired to replace (6 months after the person they're replacing was terminated).
Why?
Because this person will have to deal with all the bullshit and problems that comes with pushing things to the Cloud. Those problems may be fewer, but they will be significantly more complex not only due to the nature of the networking involved and the different architecture, but also due to the inability to actually get in there and fix the core problem. Surprisingly, not many "Senior Windows Administrators" are even able to understand virtualization, let alone the Cloud.
Augmenting SMB networks with Cloud services for resilience and redundancy? Absolutely! But replacing them outright is a good way for a company to deep-six itself. Why Microsoft would sell their clients down the river to this degree is beyond me...
Re:Sounds good (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, unfortunately as time goes on we're going to have more and more people permanently out of work. It's a hurdle that we're going to have to get over as humans, and it will be a very, very high hurdle.
Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, trickle down economics. That's been working marvellously well, hasn't it?