Who is “we”? Always curious what remains of my field—I’ve worked in the storage and infrastructure industry for over 20 years. If you mean the industry as a whole, I simply disagree. The talent pipeline is not there anymore. You used to be able to get started without an Engineering degree by “getting in at the bottom.” Now somebody on this path will never get past power supply swaps because they’re just doing drudge work fed to them on a tablet (“replace disk 17 on row 23, rack 9, slot 4”—“oh, yup, there’s the yellow light”). If you do have the degree, there are a billion more profitable paths, and most take them.
We is engineers who work in datacenters. Colocation datacenters have existed for several decades and remote hands working there would probably not see much difference between getting a call/fax/email/app telling them to do a break fix order. Having worked in dozens of datacenters over the past two decades is that there will always be newer semi-technical workers there doing break fix. A lot of those people would consider those jobs dead ends too and so this cloud datacenter thing is nothing new, its just on a much larger scale. The datacenter operators don't have to keep working there to level up their careers but working in a datacenter gives familiarity and the confidence to try more technical roles later.
