Disruption in the IT Roles or just another development?

I had an argument a couple weeks ago when we talked about what the IT world looks like and if today startups or enterprise companies are actually so different. I believe that a startup company is just a new generation of companies that do things faster because of the ecosystem they were born in. Much like kids today are, so technologically evolved as opposed to their parents that had a harder time.

So today when I look at the different roles in a company it’s quit similar when you think of it. Today the the new “Hot Shots” are the DevOps guys which is according to research in the TOP10 most wanted roles in U.S and in Israel domestically TOP3.

I believe it’s just another IT role development and not actually inventing the wheel , or maybe we could agree on the IT Role on the R&D side so most of the crowd won’t eat me :)

In the early 80s-90s when companies started to work with computers they looked for people to manage their computer assets and day-to-day tasks like fixing printers, screens and keyboards. Usually they were very talented guys that had technical orientation and more and more jobs in this field were open. When the network started to be something MUST and that computers already need to be part of the same network there was already a new need. So then started the beginning of the roles we call today System Admins and they were in charge on the bigger picture of the company like fixing issues on systems like Unix systems and mainframes, while the previous roles still needed to be done. So the previous guy got prompted to doing new and exciting things and the new guys that were doing the more basic stuff are what we call today help desk. Because there are two different roles in the information technology department now it’s also a different type of people and skills you look for. As time went by the system admin also evolved and did some kind of horizontal development, Where it became DB admin , network admin and security admin.

Today or maybe in the last 2–3 years we started a new gen of development and we call it DevOps.
But Actually is this really a new role or just another development?

DevOps according to Wikipedia

“DevOps (a clipped compound of development and operations) is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.

In a free translation DevOps is a new way calling IT guys that are doing automation to improve their day-to-day tasks on premise infrastructure and in the new cloud platforms.

So in the past system-admins did lots of automation like that and wrote scripts and small software to automate their work. Today because of the new generation of infrastructure where it integrates with cloud computing their was more automation needed and less regular IT tasks therefore talented sysadmins were promoted to the new job role called “DevOps”. This promotion is a vertical promotion of the field of it like help desk to sysadmin, But the DevOps role will also be divided to more segmented roles inside.

So in conclusion, in my opinion the cloud was actually the disruptive part to the IT world which lead the new segmentation of the it job roles. I believe that as the help desk became sysadmins, the same sysadmins evolved to the DevOps (the talented one of course). And up to today even an more advanced role which is called Site reliability engineering (SRE)

Disruptive or not, there is a shift happening ,lets see what the future holds for us .