We’re at an interesting point in technology right now.  No longer do people need to worry about setting up a rack of servers, monitoring disk health, and keeping everything cool just to keep their main business running.  What might once have taken up that entire rack now fits comfortably on my laptop.  In seconds, I can turn on hundreds of servers spread over four continents.  I can reconfigure those servers in a few seconds as well.  No longer do we have Bessie and Mabel in side-by-side stalls, contentedly munching hay and waiting for milking time.  Instead we have i-6532a7b6 (apologies if these are actually your EC2 instances) and i-b961e321, one in Idaho and the other in Vermont, waiting for the milking machine to come by.  And though the change is kind of sad when referring to cows, servers don’t seem to mind.  We can have more servers than ever, and they’re easier than ever to manage.

What this allows for is increased specialization.  If a company were to tackle e-mail, for example, and concentrate on nothing but, they’d quickly become experts at it.  As more and more people decided not to run their own e-mail systems, the increased e-mail volume would make spam filtering better, and more people would make the switch.  The New York Times doesn’t handle its own e-mail.  Neither do Sony or American Airlines.  They’re in the business of putting out a newspaper or flying airplanes, not running mail servers.  Their businesses have become more tightly focused.  So has their e-mail vendor’s.

For computer employees, it’s a scary time: if you’re at Sony, you’re no longer going to manage mail servers.  You might not have your own datacenter any longer.  Someone else will be doing your job.  That same person may also be doing your coworker’s job, and the jobs of ten other people, too.

As organizations shift more and more of their IT services to outside vendors, they’ll need fewer and fewer experts in a particular technology.  Where you were once strictly a mail administrator, you might now also manage websites, DNS, and databases.  Because these services are all web-accessible, you need to know how their interfaces work, but not as much about the underlying technology.  Likewise, as more services migrate to off-premises vendors, network access becomes more crucial.  If your Internet connection goes down, you’d better know how to fix it–fast.  Lines will become increasingly blurred: no more network administrators and system administrators who sit glaring at each other from across the office!  These sorts of companies will the consumers of the IT world: their business model doesn’t depend on a specialized Internet service.  Your job title will likely morph from “System Administrator” into something like “Operations Engineer,” “Application Engineer,” or even just “Network Administrator.”

On the other side of the job spectrum, you can go work for one of the specialized mail, web, or DNS providers.  You’ll need to know the ins and outs of a particular Internet service, and you’ll need to know how to keep it running smoothly at a large scale.  You’ll probably need to know how to spin up/down hundreds of servers at a single time, plus keep current through working groups, RFCs, and mailing lists.  You’ll be doing more and more programming work.  You’re working for an IT producer.  You might be referred to as a “Site Reliability Engineer,” a “DevOps Engineer,” a “Systems Automation Specialist,” or “Infrastructure Engineer.”

Finally, you might work for a company whose core business model revolves around the Internet: they run databases to aggregate client information, they run a website that needs to be responsive even when it’s featured on CNN, and mobile users need to use their service quickly and easily.  Again, you might be a “DevOps Engineer,” an “Automation Engineer,” a “Systems Programmer,” or something else.

Of course, the difference won’t be quite so black-and-white.  Even dedicated e-mail providers need to run their own internal networks, provide workstations for their employees, and make sure people can do their jobs.  Likewise, a trucking company may shift more and more of its operations to Web and mobile apps, then need some web experts to keep things running.

The underlying fabric of the Internet won’t change that quickly–HTTP and DNS aren’t going anywhere any time soon, and I know of no efforts to ditch TCP or BGP.  Job titles are already shifting.  Job responsibilities are shifting.  Where you were once a Linux guru, configuring mail, web, dns, directory, and file servers at the drop of the hat, you’ll either be doing more of less, or less of more.