Future employment trends?

General Discussions
#1

I am seeing jobs offered where knowing a thing or two about BASH and working on cloud servers is very helpful. Usually this means AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, but the experience setting up on a Linode vm also counts! Probably there will only be more of this going forward, especially as more activities move to the cloud. And jobs pertaining to cloud work tend to lend themselves to working from home (a fast growing trend, for some of the wrong reasons).

I’m feeling lucky. I was upset when I tried to help @princec out with setting up JForum2 on a Linode and made a hash of it, last August. In October, I signed up for my own Linode, and got Jetty working as a secure web server and Postfix/Dovecot working for email. It only took a couple months. ::slight_smile:

But on the basis of being able to legitimately point to these accomplishments, I’ve been able to say I have intermediate bash/server-scripting skills, and was given credibility on that by the engineer-lead that interviewed me recently on a job. There’s still a lot to learn and understand, of course. But getting far enough to have secure cloud services up and running IS significant and worth the effort.

If you are one of the people who started taking this path, or is considering setting up a virtual server, maybe the thing to do is go for it! There’s only going to be more work on the cloud in the future.

#2

Indeed, getting in there and having to do it is a great way of genuinely learning about these things.

I think if there are two things that you ought to know going forward it’s Docker and AWS. Just see how all the online retail sites have collapsed under the sudden load to realise that everybody has a lot to learn about scaleability. I also hope that tech evangelists start to realise that slow-ass bullshit like PHP, Ruby, Node.js, etc. isn’t going to cut it when things get properly loaded. Java ftw!

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

I totally agree that Cloud know-how is becoming increasingly important. I have been with a customer (biggest German e-commerce company) for the last 1 and 1/2 years who has built their entire services architecture on AWS with an incredible degree of automation and templating to be able to quickly setup and integrate a new service including automating build/deployment via CI/CD and quickly recovering from a disaster (such as compromised AWS account).
You never SSH into a server or do things “manually” even on a web frontend there. Automation is a very big concern there and CloudFormation (AWS) or Terraform knowledge is important.
The learning curve to get acquainted with all that is incredible and it took the better part of the last year to understand and help develop inside one of the many feature teams I am part of.
There’s also a nice presentation of how Sage uses AWS to quickly innovate/build new services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD_uaqCu5Mc&t=1606
I am currently learning for my upcoming AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam after having more than a year worth of daily practice with various AWS services. And they are really not kidding when they say that a recommended prerequisite for this certification is at least one year of experience building solutions with AWS.

#4

Thanks for that video link KaiHH.

I couldn’t help thinking that if a smart dude like you with lots of experience in Java, GitHub, graphics, networking and all sorts of things takes one year to figure out Amazon Web Services (AWS), doesn’t that indicate that it’s bloated and overly complex?

#5

I would say that every service there has its valid use-cases. But no one on Earth would need all of them at the same time. But the use-cases are definitely there. It just depends on the particular requirements that you have. If you want resilience/fault-tolerance, high availability, cost effectiveness (having low operational and maintenance costs), elasticity/scaling, being able to quickly iterate and have multiple teams with multiple different technological and process-related requirements, then you are going to cover many AWS services. Also, there surely was other things to learn as well, like the services the company is building themselves. So it was not all learning AWS.