IT Administrators will soon become the new blue collar workforce.  Like licensed plumbers of today, IT workers of the near future will primarily be called on to fix problems after they have occurred, the cubicle will become the new white van and the on call pager will finally be rewarded with time and a half instead of the salaried pat on the back.  This is not an attempt to belabor the tired “series of tubes” metaphor that former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens choked up during a Senate committee hearing; I am instead interested in the shifting perception of the personal computer as a piece of specialized work equipment to an information appliance.

I am not trying to say that IT won’t still be important in 10 or 20 years.  We’d be in deep shit if we didn’t have plumbers, and the same would be true if we didn’t have IT professionals.  “Indoor plumbing” as we know it today has only been in place for about a century, and the median income for an entry level plumber in and around Austin is about $37k a year.  That’s pretty good for a job that doesn’t require a degree – an equivalently skilled Geek Squad employee would be lucky to bring home $30k.  Ten or even twenty years ago, entry level computer skills were highly valued and hard to come by, and the pay was commensurate.  It is often joked that at least one kid in every family will be the computer nerd and take care of the family’s problems – how many families pop out a skilled plumber every generation?  This thought still prevails, but every generation of ‘techies’ seemingly knows less about how computers work, and more about what they do. Greybeards can dole out assembly code the way I can speak Unix the way kids today can communicate in 160 character bursts.

As an IT Administrator myself, I have come to a startling revelation.  When I was younger, everyone thought that young people knew more about computers than adults.  This thought still prevails, but with one very important caveat – young people today don’t know more about computers, they simply know more about websites and video games and video text messaging and how to make that happen.  If you asked the average 19 year old how to check their IP address and verify that they can ping yahoo.com, I would be happy to see a 40% success rate.  Ask the same 19 year old how to upload and tag Facebook photos from their friend’s new phone, a model they have never used, and I would be surprised to see less than 90% success.

Much of this is obviously due to the larger userbase of computers now versus 1999.  Computers and the internet in general are much more of a general audience experience than ever before.  Years of hard work by the geeks of generations past have led to unbelievably simple user interactions for very complex tasks.  Keeping a blog in 1999 meant having web server knowledge, HTML knowledge and FTP knowledge, or at least a good friend who knew all of those things and had the time to spare.  Keeping a blog in 2009 requires the ability to open a web browser, point it to one of the numerous blog providers online, and remember a password.  As we abstract the unpleasant from the experience, more and more participants will join the conversation. This is something that is astoundingly great for the collective consciousness of the cyberworld, but portends poorly for the prestige of the IT Administrator.  Don’t worry, I’m not bitter, I’m just gonna go to grad school .

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.