Communications of the ACM
Four Classic IT Jobs That Are Moving to the Back Burner
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While the overall IT employment picture may be relatively healthy, new technologies and trends are influencing the IT requirements of businesses and eroding the popularity of the following positions: mainframe programmers, systems administrators, help desk technicians, and SMB IT managers. Experts cite the volatility of IT job requirements, which can shift almost on a monthly basis, making it difficult to understand where trends are headed. These four positions aren't going extinct any time soon, and there are still lucrative careers to be found in some of these areas, but the overall trends are for fewer job openings.
Before there was web development, before there was a lot of custom software development, mainframe programming was really the primary programming job. With the advent of web-based software, and more client server software, mainframe applications are not used so much. Fewer people are learning COBOL and looking for careers in mainframe programming. This is not to say the job role is extinct — governments and large financial institutions still use mainframes and will continue to do so. And mainframes still run 60 percent of business applications worldwide. Systems administrator is another area in which bigger trends like the cloud, virtualization, and even outsourcing and large consultancies are affecting the demand for these roles. Some roles — to those administering servers, systems, and computer hardware — are less important at organizations that have moved to cloud computing or virtual computing environments.
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