I think this is mainly a side effect of the kind of work being performed at companies has leaned over the decades towards an increasingly bimodal skills distribution, and the entry level work's sophistication is eroding from advances in automation and continuous improvement feedback loops.
For example, I see at all of my clients entry level help desk positions to do things like help with provisioning a new employee's Wintel laptop, answer internal software packaging problems, intake VPN trouble reports, that sort of activity. But not nearly as much as when I entered the industry, because so much has been automated away or folded into centralized management systems, and the trend continues with advances in desktop engineering. On the other hand, I see an explosion of demand for the desktop engineering team positions.
This is being reflected in many other IT areas as far as I can tell. There is a constant push these days at all my clients to automate all repetitive work, and a much bigger appetite from leadership to automate entry level work even when the ROI payoff is longer than 1-4 fiscal quarters than when I started. The push isn't due to direct labor savings though: it is to drive down variance of configurations exposed to the more senior and expensive roles, so the real high-payoff automation can really shine, and they can reduce business-as-usual work hours remediating the impact from those variances.
For example, I see at all of my clients entry level help desk positions to do things like help with provisioning a new employee's Wintel laptop, answer internal software packaging problems, intake VPN trouble reports, that sort of activity. But not nearly as much as when I entered the industry, because so much has been automated away or folded into centralized management systems, and the trend continues with advances in desktop engineering. On the other hand, I see an explosion of demand for the desktop engineering team positions.
This is being reflected in many other IT areas as far as I can tell. There is a constant push these days at all my clients to automate all repetitive work, and a much bigger appetite from leadership to automate entry level work even when the ROI payoff is longer than 1-4 fiscal quarters than when I started. The push isn't due to direct labor savings though: it is to drive down variance of configurations exposed to the more senior and expensive roles, so the real high-payoff automation can really shine, and they can reduce business-as-usual work hours remediating the impact from those variances.