Tonyour side note, the help desks (we call them Techstops) are anything but a dungeon :) you can image search for "Google Techstop" and get a very representative view of what they tend to look like.

My college classes were programming C++, physics, calculus, and hardware architectures. Barely anything to do with IT.

Disclosure: I worked on this program and went through Google's IT Residency Program.

If this course is based on this view of the IT Support role (which I heartily approve of, but which is not the baseline norm in the industry) it really should be called the IT Support Engineering Professional Certificate or something similar, because otherwise it won't communicate it's real focus either to applicants or, perhaps more critically, hiring officers.

A lot of people in my class dropped out of the CS program because they had confused the two.

I really think we should rename “computer science” to “computing science” or “computational science” - just please get the word “computer” out of there.

It's become more of a SWE org everywhere.

It's funny because SWE peeps get really defensive about IT vs SWE roles; like they don't want to be associated with IT for some ego-related reason.

If anything, that's the weirdest thing, Google's doing an IT cert? Are they teaching Microsoft platforms and being useful, or are they trying to teach Google's Chrome management platform that nobody uses? If Google's willing to hire graduates, it presumably teaches Google's IT stack... which isn't remotely similar to the IT stack people will find in other companies.

And Microsoft has been pushing businesses increasingly toward technologies like Powershell and products like SCCM in the past decade. The trend is slower in the Microsoft world, but it's definitely toward automation taking on the type of work you'd traditionally have support techs running around handling.

Both are true: even ten years ago, there was a noticeable split between helpdesk and maintenance skills, and things that we might now call "DevOps". If you have hundreds or thousands of computers, you can end up with people who specialize in stuff like building packages and disk images for deployments, writing scripts for user account management, and other automation, and don't fix printers so much any more, even if they don't have a separate job title.

80% of traditional IT hocus pocus can be automated or performed by an office manager or admin.

Then you clearly have never worked at a business where IT or technology isn't a core function of the business. Middle America wasn't and still isn't ready for understanding IT. I say this as someone who has worked with over 150 companies (mainly mid market, middle america) doing IT audits.

There are plenty of things AWS doesn't work for.

AWS works better and cheaper for almost everything that involve more than a rack of hardware.

Edit: This obviously is super variable. If you have a low load worldwide need AWS will win. Or rapid bursts of traffic. Or hundreds of other scenarios where it makes sense. It is not a one size fits all solution though.

Yet it wasted about $2-2.5M in hardware value alone. That’s not free, especially when you wouldn’t be incurring cost on a pay by drink cloud model.

Now take, for example, a legal firm. One of the major LOB vendors in this space has a product that only runs on Oracle on Windows, with an extremely snowflake-like build. You can call them a dinosaur, but since they are a legal firm that wants to be competitive they will use this product.

Supporting this product involves a somewhat constant string of repairs, involving things like "logon to a user desktop and reregister DLLs". It takes a helpdesk team to run these things. The new "cloud" edition is literally a Microsoft RDS server that you run on premises, and on which you run the client software. Thereby facilitating remote access, making it a "cloud" product.

Do we argue that legal firms don't matter because soon every company will soon just be a development team? I don't think that's feasible.

Software engineering, or maybe CS, is what I wanted. I hadn't even heard the phrase "computer science" when I started university. The total incompetence of the course counselors at the core function of their job contributed to putting me on a path that eventually lead to the ruin of my life.

I did a degree that claimed to contain software development, but was in the IT category - I never learned of the concept of version control (at all), how to use makefiles, exception blocks, performance profiling, or a bunch of other practical stuff.

Now I'm wasting away in an IT support job. I can't blame everything on that, and most of the responsibility for where I am today is on me - especially for not turning it around better after I realised my mistakes, but I feel like the confusion between "IT", "CS", and "Software engineering" definitely kickstarted a path that wasted alot of my most valuable learning time.

Don't trust course counselors - or other people in general.

I was once in your shoes. Same background, same regrettable life choices, same potential future.

If you want to develop, do it. Start by looking at the crap software your company likely pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for and think about how you could do it better. Start by actually trying to supplant it with something of your own creation.

I have a generic degree. All those "practical" things you lament missing out on, I learned by just doing it. But I never had cause to learn what big-o notation was or how to navigate a b-tree...you know, that non-practical knowledge a CS degree would have endowed me with. The lack of such has only stopped me from working at Google. Plenty of other shops are not in the business of recruiting only those who can write the freshest sorting algorithms.

Just don't spend the rest of your life in a job you hate, condemning yourself for being put upon. It takes little effort to invoke large changes.

Some of the best developers, DBAs, system engineers, etc, I've hired had history degrees, math degrees, journalism, EE, etc. The degree itself, for me, is just proof that you finished something important. I care more about what you know, and how well you can learn something new.

I don't think I'm that unique in this respect. The tech shops I've worked in over my career were full of non-CS degreed people. Mostly my experience here, though, is with non tech companies. Things like the IT departments in Healthcare, Travel, Automotive, etc.

I... think it's not so much a matter of 'trust' as you have to understand what people understand. My understanding is that their job is to help you navigate academia, and I'm sure they are competent at that. I can't imagine how they could be good at figuring out what you want to do. That's hard enough to do yourself.

The other thing about higher education is that it's usually not meant as vocational. Now, I'm in IT too, and for that matter, I didn't go to college, so maybe I don't know anything, but my impression is that a good school is about giving you a common intellectual and cultural background, not about actually teaching you how to do your job.

This is to say, after your undergrad, you should be prepared to learn how to do a job that requires a degree, and how to communicate with others who have gone through the same training.

(Personally, I am a little confused as to just what you learn in an "IT" degree; as far as I can tell, they don't give you much math, and on a personal level, the only people I've worked with who had 'IT' type degrees were management.)

Stateside too. I used to get asked to fix printers by friends and associates and in general get treated like a help desk by people all the time because all they know is "Dave works with computers" even when I started working directly with managing software development teams later in my career.

Heck, about 16 years ago when I was working the help desk in a call center I had someone ask me "Hey IT Guy why isn't the water fountain working?" as I was walking out the door. I asked her to wait a moment, poked my head into the office of the facilities maintenance manager and asked him if he could help out.

For some reason that last bit was especially insulting, both being called "IT Guy" instead of being greeted at bare minimum by name, and for the assumption that I somehow knew how water fountains work. I was a frustrated and angry young man then, heh.

Feels good nowadays when people ask what I do "Security and Compliance". I don't get asked to fix printers anymore.

"Hi, I'm Luke, and I fix things."

Not sure why your experience was so different? Sounds like you got a raw deal though.

More free, open source platforms that are powerful and free but just need some configuration, customization and support.

Developing getting simpler to becoming just config anyway. We're already seeing this, you dont need to know anything about pointers any more, just hooking up libraries.

IT support will ALWAYS be required though. Unless we build some kind of AI that can diagnose issues like humans do... after which they will all become obsolete. But I don't see that happening in the next 50 years.

There's no good reason not to, since if your security and auditing systems are correctly implemented, limited-permission DB users doing direct SQL have the same security and accountability as someone using a specialized app.

If the trend continues there will be more configuration/customization roles in higher languages and fewer Python level devs too.

Hardware continues to be more reliable, more integrated, and cheaper. For most office jobs something like Chrome OS or iOS would be sufficient.