Thoughts in transferrable skills when a technology disappear: VMware(Example)

UnixGuy

I just want to pick your brains on this..

So IT evolves quickly and what's hot today can (and will) be obsolete in the next few years.


My question is, and allow me to use VMware an example, what would you do if you have been working with VMware technologies (doing support/implementation/administration) for say 5 yrs, and now the hot thing in the market is Cloud infrastructure like Amazon and Azure, and you see VMware slowly dying...How is your skills transferable in this case? Don't you need to learn AWS from the scratch again?


I'm not after the specifics of a certain technology, more like I want to know what's everyone thoughts on technologies dying and having to retrain (yet again) to learn something new from the scratch with possible pay cuts?

OctalDump

Hmmm... I think the big concepts will transfer. The idea that you can abstract some layer of hardware. That a 'computer' can exist in multiple places at the same time. The way you go about building, architecting, solutions with that flexibility.

There's things you do, that you'd do with any infrastructure, like monitoring and tuning. The tools you use might be different, but the skill of knowing what to monitor, how to tune, is going to carry over.

Maybe some of the nitty gritty transfers across, where it is tied to those fundamentals, eg preparing block storage, file systems, virtual disks, virtual networks - if it is done in a similar way across platforms. Usually those nitty gritty are inspired by some big thing previous - the linux/unix influence on VMware is pretty evident.

Then there's a lot of things in VMware (or whatever) that interface with other technologies. So VMware needs you to know a bit of networking and storage, and that's still true in other infrastructures. Or integrating into AD or other systems.

If you are really at the pointy end of things, architecting and managing, then those softer skills are also going to carry over.

I think that if you are in the business long enough, at least some of the things you become "expert" in are going to die. But at the same time, you develop softer skills, and you also get a breadth of experience so that you can get a sense of new techs faster: how many c-like languages are there? How many LDAP, or ldap inspired, directory systems?

It's funny. I've done a few different courses over the years, and the number of times that some student will mention that concept x was taken from technology y. Usually they're both taken from something much older. There might be more than one way to skin a cat, but there's only a few good ways to do it. So the same solutions come up again and again. Plus ça change

networker050184

I look at it this way. Know the fundamentals not the products. I'm not a Cisco CLI expert, I'm an expert in networks. Whether that is an ethernet switch in a data center, a VPC in AWS, MPLS routers spanning the globe, it doesn't matter. Those are all tools to get the job done. Tools may change, but as long as you know your fundamentals you can adapt. Ethernet is still ethernet no matter where it physically lies for example. You're still going to leverage storage, compute and networking concepts to build your applications.

Of course completely new technologies do come along now and then. It's much more likely you're to see improvements/changes to current technologies. Those are easy to learn for the most part.

alias454

I agree with this ^^^. Know the fundamentals and the high level stuff is easier to learn and re-learn. if a person knows how the technology works under the hood then no matter how the technology is leveraged it is all bound by the same rules, at least until you get into quantum computing.

UnixGuy

Things did seem a bit harder for my own personal experience. DevOps concepts emerged quickly and I didn't have enough aptitude to keep grinding with programming languages...and learning some like f5 WAFs (while the concept is easy) wasn't straightforward not because the technology is particularily hard but because I had to learn in an environment where everything was setup and all that was required is to monitor it and fix things when they break...not a great way to learn but I'll survive.

Just had an honest introspect about my career and my career choices, I'm probably getting ahead of myself and thinking a lot about the future

Mike7

It is always a bit harder when doing things outside of your comfort zone. Have an open curious mind and eventually you will get it. For example, it took me quite a while to get used to using Linux without a GUI. Now I am just comfortable and more productive doing everything from command line.